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Matt stood at the long board table, across from Roberta and Marion. “It seems we aren't content with pillorying Allison MacKenzie because she had the courage to hold up a mirror and make us look at ourselves, we have to attack her through her stepfather and punish an innocent man because
he
has the courage to stand by his child.”

Doc Swain put his hands in his pockets, bent his body forward and looked down at the table. “It's a sad day for all of us,” he said in a low voice. “We've come a long way from our early days in this land when our grandparents, those misguided fools, thought that courage was a virtue.” He raised his voice. “I ask you this, ladies. I ask you this. Will we now reward cowardice? Since courage has become a punishable offense in your eyes, I propose we set up statues to the men who beat their wives and abandon their children.”

Roberta stirred restlessly in her chair, her mouth drawn to a tight line. It was as if she thought that by keeping her mouth closed tight she would not be able to hear Matt's words.

“Years ago,” Matt continued, “years ago I was afraid that Peyton Place was too much isolated from the world. Now I have the opposite fear. I'm afraid we have come all too close to the foolishness—and worse than foolishness—that's raging through our land today. Radio and television is a mixed blessing. It looks to me like we're trying to get into the act—and in the worst possible way.”

Roberta cleared her throat, and Marion tried to catch Charles Partridge's eye, but Doc Swain would not wait for them.

“We've joined the rest of the country with a vengeance. We're setting back the clocks and imitating the witch hunters who are a shame on the pages of our history. We who prided ourselves above all else on our individualism are now demanding that everyone conform. Be like us, think like us—or into exile you go.”

He turned to Charles and in a tired voice said, “I think that's about it, Charlie. The only hope I have left is that one day—and I trust it will be sooner rather than later—we'll look back on what we have done and have the decency to feel ashamed of ourselves. I thank you, ladies, for your kind indulgence.”

And he turned and walked out of the room, leaving Roberta and Marion speechless.

“Do I hear a motion for adjournment?” Charles asked.

Marion and Roberta were not the only women in Peyton Place who stopped shopping at Constance's Thrifty Corner Apparel Shoppe. Dozens of women who had bought exclusively from her now made shopping expeditions to Concord and Manchester and they saw to it that their daughters did the same. Occasionally a husband, with all the furtiveness of an amateur about to hold up a bank, sneaked into the store to buy a pair of socks, but for the most part the men too kept away.

“It'll blow over,” said Constance, determined to keep her shop open. “In a little while they'll have something else to stew about and they'll be back. To give me the newest gossip if nothing else.”

Matthew Swain roared his outrage to anyone who would listen to him. Those who would not listen voluntarily had an arm gripped in the doctor's firm grasp and were forced to stand still while Matthew talked, and he pulled no punches in his words.

“What the hell are you looking so outraged for?” he demanded of several of his patients. “Maybe you can fool the town, but you can't fool me.”

And then the doctor was liable to drag up some bit of scandal or gossip about the patient himself, and when the patient left Matt's office he was apt to keep his mouth shut about
Samuel's Castle
in the future.

Seth Buswell, as had always been his policy in the Peyton Place
Times,
took neither side. But he reprinted only favorable reviews of
Samuel's Castle
and only the favorable letters which came to him for doing so. He kept it up in the face of diminishing advertising and canceled subscriptions, and Allison would never have known of this if Norman Page had not told her.

“Fifteen people canceled yesterday,” he told Allison. “I don't know how much longer he'll be able to keep going.”

Allison went at once to Seth. “I appreciate everything you've done, Seth,” she said, “but please don't hurt yourself like this any more. Print the bad reviews. Heaven knows there are plenty of them. And as for unfavorable letters, I can bring them down to you by the bushel basket.”

Seth smiled at her. “Remember, Allison,” he said, “what you said to me once, a long time ago, about men standing up to be counted?”

“Yes,” she said, “I remember.”

“Well, I'm standing up. Count me.” He picked up his jacket. “Now that's enough of the long faces and the noble talk. Come on over to Hyde's. I'll buy you a cup of coffee.”

“Thank you, Seth,” said Allison very humbly.

“Chin up, Allison. Summer's coming. There'll be plenty of things happening then, and plenty for people to talk about.”

“I hope so,” said Allison, and took Seth's arm as they crossed Elm Street.

And as the weeks went by, flowing as gently as melting butter from spring into summer, Seth's words of prophecy began to turn into words of truth.

O
N
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
, when he was six years old, Timothy Randlett did an impersonation of Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” This one performance had been enough to convince not only his mother, Peg Randlett, but also the assorted aunts, uncles and cousins who were relaxing in the Randlett living room, passively digesting a heavy dinner, that Timothy was born to be an actor.

“I always knew he was different,” said Peg Randlett to her husband Sam. “He was born with a gift.”

Sam Randlett was one of six brothers and four sisters and he was the first one of his family to “Make Good.” Sam was a foreman in a brewery in Newark, New Jersey, and he made what was described, in the idiom of his family, as a Good Week's Pay. But when Peg began to spend money in a fashion referred to by her sisters and brothers-inlaw as Hand Over Fist for dancing and elocution lessons for Timothy, Sam rebelled.

“Money don't come that easy, Peg,” he said. “I work plenty hard for my week's pay. Too hard for you to be throwing it away on foolishness.”

“Sam, I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself. A man in your position denying his son the advantages.”

“Suffering God! Is it an advantage to spend money so that you can dress the boy up in a velvet suit and make him show off in front of the family every Sunday? I don't mind telling you my sister Helene thinks there's something the matter with Tim. The way he's always off in a dream world some place and won't play with his cousins like all the other kids.”

“Helene has no soul,” said Peg. “She's got those three stupid children of hers and a husband that'll never amount to anything and she's just jealous of you and Tim.”

“Peg, that's enough!” roared Sam. “She's my sister and she's a good woman.”

“Then tell her to keep her nose out of our business,” retorted Peg. “If she's so good, she'll do that much.”

“I won't stand for any more,” said Sam. “You're turning the boy into a sissy and a pantywaist.”

“Timmy is going to be a great actor when he grows up,” said Peg, “and neither you nor any of your brothers and sisters are going to stand in his way. You wait and see, Sam Randlett. Someday you'll be sorry.”

By the time Tim was nine years old, Peg Randlett's plans had been a long time made. One day, after Sam had left for the brewery, she hauled her suitcases and her son into a waiting taxicab, made a stop at the bank where she withdrew all the money from a joint savings account she had shared with Sam, and she and Tim boarded a train for Hollywood, California.

Timmy Randlett had a mop of blue-black curly hair, enormous blue-green eyes and the pallor and mien of a choirboy. Although he was of only average intelligence, he had a remarkable amount of poise for a child his age and he had learned early in life to take orders and direction. Besides, as one Hollywood producer put it, Timmy could cry good. One of the major Hollywood studios cast him in a picture as a woebegone orphan who is taken in, befriended, taught and loved by an aging, crusty sea captain, only to have the welfare society step in and attempt to remove the child from this unconventional, unsanitary environment. But the social worker that the welfare society sends to investigate is young and pretty, and the sailor who helps the old sea captain around the lighthouse is young and handsome, and together the two of them unearth the fact that the sea captain is, in reality, the father of the orphan child's mother who ran away from home at the age of sixteen to marry a carnival barker. The smash ending of the film showed the orphan child sitting in the lap of the man he now knew to be his Grampy, with his little, thin arms encircling the social worker and the sailor, tears of gratitude running down his pale cheeks. The picture was called
The Littlest Sea Captain
and it made Timmy Randlett a star who shone brightly in the Hollywood firmament until he was fifteen years old. Then he was a has been, with stringy legs, a hollow chest and pimples.

Peg returned to the East with her son. She took an apartment in New York and saw to it that Timmy finished his education. But it wasn't easy. Twenty-room mansions with swimming pools and fifteen servants are expensive in Hollywood, to say nothing of chauffeured limousines and furs and jewelry and handmade suits. By the time Timmy, who was now called Tim, was sixteen years old there was very little money left. Producers and directors who had wooed Peg Randlett with money and attention and offers during Tim's short career now refused even to speak to her on the telephone, and people nagged her about things like the rent, the gas bill and the unpaid balances on her checking accounts. She died when Tim was nineteen, hating her son for giving her everything and then, when she had just begun to get used to it, snatching it all away with his awkwardness and his acne. Peg Randlett should have clung to life with a little more determination for by the time he was twenty, Tim Randlett had begun the long, laborious trip known as the comeback.

During the next fifteen years, Tim Randlett worked hard at every acting job he could get. He acted in soap operas and played VooDoo the Magician in a radio serial. He took small parts in Broadway productions and slightly larger ones with road companies. With the advent of television he found himself almost constantly employed, but he left New York every summer just the same to act with various stock companies. In barns, tents and old theaters made of broken clapboards, in small-town auditoriums and small-city music halls, Tim Randlett was a star.

He was thirty-six years old the summer he signed with the Barrows Company to play stock at the Barn Theater at Silver Lake, eight miles north of Peyton Place. He had been at the lake only three days when Seth Buswell drove up and asked to interview him.

“I'm with the Peyton Place
Times,
” Seth said. “We're not much of a paper, by big-city standards, but we get around. It'll be free advertising for your play, if nothing else.”

Tim had just finished with a late afternoon swim and was standing on the beach, drying himself with a white towel. He was a shade over six feet tall with a slender, wedge-shaped body that appealed to women and was the envy of older, paunchier men. His blue-black hair was dusted with white at the sides of his head, but his deeply tanned face was youthful and unlined. Seth Buswell patted his wide belly and sighed.

“Sure,” Tim was saying. “And I have heard of Peyton Place. I guess everyone has since
Samuel's Castle
came out. Do you know the girl who wrote it?”

“Known her since she was a baby,” said Seth.

“Wonderful!” said Tim. “I'd love to meet her. Think you could fix it?”

“Might,” said Seth. “Want to take a ride over to Peyton Place? We can talk on the way.”

“Give me ten minutes to dress,” said Tim.

Seth sat down on a tree stump and watched the actor run swiftly away from him, toward a building at the other end of the beach. Seth glanced at his watch and sighed again.

“Nothing like a man like that to make a man like me feel old, fat and foolish,” he thought woefully.

Later, on the same afternoon, Selena Cross locked the front door of the Thrifty Corner behind her and crossed the street to Hyde's Diner for a solitary dinner. On this particular evening, Joey was attending a class party and would not return home until nine-thirty. Selena did not like to eat alone in the Cross house.

“Evenin', Selena,” said Corey Hyde, as she sat down in a booth. “Joey out gallivantin'?”

“His class is having a clambake down at Meadow Pond,” said Selena.

“Oh. Things pretty slow over at the Thrifty Corner, ain't they?”

“We're getting along,” said Selena, a little edge of annoyance to her voice.

It had been a long, hot day, and in almost nine hours Selena had sold only one blouse, two pairs of socks and one pony-tail clip.

“Rotten shame, I say,” said Corey. “All that fuss over one little book. Mess of foolishness, I call it.”

“What's good for dinner, Mr. Hyde?” said Selena. “I'm starved.”

“Pot roast,” said Corey, a little put out at Selena's lack of sociability.

“Is that all?”

“Nope. Got some pork chops, if you want, but they're no good. Mostly fat. Summer folks'll eat 'em, though. Got some fish chowder, too, but that's canned.”

Selena sighed and lifted her heavy, dark hair away from her neck.

“Can you make me a salad?” she asked. “Something cold, with a lot of cucumbers in it.”

“Sure,” said Corey. “Put some crabmeat in it too, if you want. But that ain't no kind of meal for a girl's been workin' hard all day.”

Selena let the remark about working hard pass. “I'll have the salad, Mr. Hyde,” she said. “With crabmeat and a tall glass of iced tea.” She opened a book and began to read.

“Humph,” muttered Corey, heading for the kitchen. “Ain't like Selena to be so touchy.”