Return to Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  “Tell me about her, Ted,” Selena was saying in a soft voice. “What does she look like? Small, blond, with a pink and white skin and breasts like lemons?”

  “Selena!”

  “Oh, but be careful of that kind, Ted,” Selena continued, her voice too controlled, too soft. “Some of those rich-bitch Boston families are terribly inbred, you know. She's bound to be a delicate type. Peyton Place would kill her. That thin blue blood can't stand up to our winters.”

  “We won't be living in Peyton Place,” said Ted quietly. “When I finish at Harvard, her father is going to take me into his firm.”

  “And tell me, Attorney Carter, do the too-blue Burbanks know about us? You and me, I mean, and about Lucas? Or did they stop reading newspapers when Henry Adams died?”

  “They know that you and I were at school together.”

  “My, my,” said Selena, in mock surprise. “Listen to little Ted Carter. ‘At school.’ Did you ever notice that it's only people with a private school education who talk about having been ‘at school’? Have you noticed that, Ted? The rest of us poor slobs who went to public schools always say ‘in school.’ I'm so happy to see you're learning the language of your new family, Ted. I'd hate it if your inlaws had to think of you as a meatball.”

  “Selena, will you please not talk this way? Can't we talk to each other like old friends? This isn't you talking, Selena.”

  “Maybe it isn't the old Selena, Ted. Maybe you're right, maybe it isn't me. But it's going to be me, Ted. I don't want to be good old sweet little innocent Selena, everybody's friend. And most of all, Ted, I don't want to be your friend.” Her voice was no longer soft; it tore from her throat, tortured and coarsened.

  “Get your coat and get out of here,” she cried.

  Ted stood up and watched Selena pour herself another drink. He put on his coat and stood helplessly in front of her.

  “Will you kiss me good-by?” he asked.

  “Get out of here!” Selena screamed. “I never want to see you again. You make me sick, do you understand? I'd as soon kiss dirt as kiss you. Now get out!”

  When he had gone, she sat for a long time, holding the brandy snifter in both hands. Then she stood up slowly and walked into the kitchen and poured the drink down the sink, as if Ted's presence had tainted it.

  She was sitting in an armchair, knitting, when Joey came in.

  “What happened?” he asked at once.

  “He's going to be married,” answered Selena calmly. “To a girl named Jennifer Burbank from Boston, Massachusetts.”

  Joey looked at his sister and began to unbutton his coat.

  “Does it hurt, Selena?” he asked at last.

  She rolled up her knitting and put it away in a box.

  “Yes,” she said, and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  Joey's black king went click-click-click across the checkerboard and he removed three of Selena's red men.

  “That's eight games for me,” he said. “Who was going to beat the pants off who?”

  “Whom,” corrected Selena.

  The clock on the mantelpiece struck twice. “It's two o'clock in the morning,” said Selena. “To bed.”

  Joey stood up and stretched. “I think I'll just get a blanket and curl up here on the sofa,” he said casually. “I want to watch the fire.”

  “All right, Joey,” said Selena. She kissed his cheek. “Good night.”

  The wind had died down to almost nothing now, but, beyond the black squares of the front windows, Joey could see the endless flakes that would fall all night. He tried the lock on the front door again and put another log on the fire.

  Selena lay facing the window, watching for first light, praying for day and an end to night's menace. I wish I were a child, she thought. I wish I still believed that ghosts were real and houses truly haunted; it's my own memories that haunt this house. She cried noiselessly into her pillow. She thought of Ted, but it was not for him she cried. He was merely the symbol of all she had lost. All I have now, she said to herself, all I have now is loneliness. That's the prize I've won from life.

  It was daylight and the wind had started up again before Selena and Joey slept.

  5

  MAYBE IT WILL HAPPEN today, thought Allison MacKenzie as she awoke. It had been her waking thought every morning for two months.

  She jumped up and ran to close her bedroom window against the early morning cold and stood shivering with her hands against the sash, breathless at the beauty she saw outside. For a moment, she pressed her forehead against the cold windowpane, as if to shock herself awake and scatter the night dreams, to make way for those of the day. So much of her days were spent in reverie, dreaming of the phone call from her agent, Brad Holmes, that never came: dreaming of her novel, printed, bound, published, and of the fame and success that would follow.

  It was still snowing and the wind picked up huge handfuls of it and hurled them everywhere in gigantic plumes. Everything Allison saw was white and clean and soft looking, so that it appeared the whole world was new and pure and it was as if nothing bad or evil could ever have happened there.

  Allison went softly, on bare feet, to open her bedroom door and, as soon as she had done so, she felt the little tendrils of warmth from downstairs creep around her ankles. She jumped back into her bed and snuggled down under the blankets to wait for the room to warm up.

  The whole world is still asleep, she thought, remembering a childhood fancy, and I am the only one awake.

  At once, she felt warm and safe and sure of herself, much as she had felt when she had been a little girl and had gone to her secret place in the woods at Road's End. Except that it was better now, for she had learned not to be afraid when it was time to go back to the world of reality. Living in New York, she thought, has at least done that much for me. Her experience with Brad, that brief, intense interlude, made her feel old and wise. She knew she was neither of those things, but she wanted very much to think so. When you've given so much of yourself, she thought, it's necessary to salvage something from the ruins, no matter how small it is. Even a lie.

  It's going to snow all day, she thought. And I shall get up and eat an enormous breakfast and help my mother with the housework after my father has gone off to school. I'm not a famous author, I'm just my mother's daughter.

  She never called Michael Rossi “father.” Sometimes, jokingly, she said “Daddy-O,” and hoped he understood that she meant more than she could yet bring herself to say; but most often she called him Mike. It was just to herself that she said, “My father.” At first, she had done so as an experiment, to see if she would be overcome with guilt at her disloyalty to Allison MacKenzie, her own father who was dead, but she had felt nothing. It was as if Allison MacKenzie had never really been her father at all, but just a man with whom her mother had had a rather unfortunate love affair a long, long time ago.

  “I've never been sorry,” her mother had said. “I loved him and he was good to me. And I got you. That's a lot more than most women ever have.”

  At first, when Allison's bitterness against her mother had been at its peak, she had repeated the ugly word over and over to herself.

  Bastard.

  And she had thought that she would die of shame and horror. She guarded her secret as well as her mother had ever done. She hugged it tightly to her, carried it with her, waking and sleeping. Illegitimate, out of wedlock—words like these leaped off the pages of the books she read; they seemed to be printed in a heavier type. More than that, at her most sensitive period she had the feeling they had been used only to wound and hurt and insult her.

  She had never told anyone the facts of her birth, not even Stephanie Wallace, who had been her roommate in New York, nor Bradley Holmes, who had been her lover.

  During the weeks and months of self-pity and self-laceration that had followed when Allison first returned to Peyton Place, she had wondered often and bitterly about Bradley Holmes. She did not even know how to place him, how to identif
y him in the scheme of her life. Could he be called her lover, she wondered. But that implied love, and on his side there had been none. No, he was simply her first man, the one who had introduced her to sex, who had taken something from her. And given her something, too. For this reason he was important to her. A man she would never forget. For all the sophistication of her writing, Allison could not yet rid herself of the belief that you had to marry the man with whom you had made love.

  She had wasted a lot of time hating Brad, but in the end it was due to him that she had begun to understand her mother and to love her again. Knowing herself now to be human and capable of weakness, she no longer expected others to be supermen, not even her mother.

  Allison heard a stirring downstairs, and in a few minutes her mother's laugh drifted up the stairwell to Allison's room. Her mother and Mike never got up separately, just as they never did anything apart from one from the other. If she had ever needed anything to convince her that what she and Brad had was not love, she had only to look at Mike and Constance. Allison had heard them giggling together like school children more than once as they made coffee.

  “It's indecent,” Allison had laughed, for her mother always bathed while Mike was shaving.

  “I can't help it,” Mike said. “Your mother always has aroused the most shocking feelings in me. And, I suspect, she always will.”

  “Shocking my arse,” said Constance inelegantly. “The day that you're shocked by anything will be occasion for the declaration of a national holiday. School children will celebrate it with fireworks, parades, and essays.”

  When Allison went downstairs it was to the smell of coffee and bacon, and the first thing she saw was her mother, in a pale blue robe, her golden head outlined against a snow-covered windowpane. Allison's eyes stung with tears as they always did when she saw something beautiful.

  “Good morning, darling,” said Constance, and kissed Allison's cheek. “Isn't this a morning!”

  “This morning I am masquerading as a short-order cook,” said Mike, as Allison put her cheek up. “One egg or two?”

  “Two!” cried Allison, suddenly overwhelmed with love and a wonderful certainty that today was going to be a marvelous day.

  “It's going to happen today!” she cried, and almost danced over to the stove to pour herself a cup of coffee.

  “Oh, darling, I hope so,” said Constance. “Did you dream that it would?”

  “No, but I know it just the same,” said Allison, and sat down at the kitchen table. “Today Bradley Holmes is going to call me from New York. ‘Hello, Allison,’ he will say. And I'll say, ‘Hello, Brad.’ And then he'll say, ‘I have wonderful news for you. I've sold your book.’ Then if I don't faint I'll start to cry, and he'll tell me to whom he's sold it and you, Mother, will have to call Mike because I'll never be able to do it, and when Mike comes home he'll break down and get two bottles of that champagne he's been saving and we'll all celebrate.”

  Mike assumed a pose with his coffee cup raised and said, “And I'll stand like this and say, ‘Here's to Allison MacKenzie and her best seller Samuel's Castle.’ And then, ladies, we shall all proceed to tie one on.”

  “And then,” said Constance, “I'll have to get busy and call up everyone we know and say, ‘Please come over to our house because we are having a party for the celebrated authoress Allison MacKenzie,’ and then Mike will have to start serving beer because we don't have that much champagne in the cellar.”

  “Damn it,” cried Mike, “now the eggs are burning!” And all three of them laughed.

  Allison sighed. “Brought back to earth by burning eggs. How prosaic.” But she preferred the dream, and said, “Wouldn't it be wonderful if Brad did sell it?”

  “Yes, it would, darling,” said Constance. “It would make us all so happy, and you especially. You deserve it, darling. Not just because you have a wonderful talent, but because you've worked so hard.”

  “It'll happen,” said Mike. “One day soon, mark my words. Now come on, let's eat. I'll be late for school.”

  Worked so hard, Allison thought. It was an accurate description, yet it did not begin to express all that she had put into her novel. The years of writing and the drudgery of rewriting. What made it so hard was not, after all, the book itself, but doubt. Doubt haunted her, plucked at her nerves, kept her from sleep and rest. Would it be any good? Would it find a publisher? She could never trust her own judgment. The chapter that read so well at midnight would appear in the light of day as fit only for the wastebasket. It was a book she had cried over—as much, she sometimes thought, as any mother ever cried over an ungrateful child.

  Samuel's Castle was the culmination of over two years of work for Allison. When she had first returned home at the time of Selena Cross's trial, she had come in defeat as a writer; for, although she had managed to support herself with what she earned as a short story writer for the magazines, her novel had been a failure. Bradley Holmes had told her flatly that he could not sell her book, and that, even if he could, he would not do so. The publication of an inferior work would do her more harm than good in the long run, he had told her.

  “Try the novel again,” Brad said. “Wait until you're older, more experienced.”

  Well, Allison had thought ruefully when she got home, she was certainly more experienced if not much older.

  David Noyes, whom she had met in New York, was the only person to whom she had ever told the whole story of her brief affair with Bradley Holmes, and it was David who came to Peyton Place to help and comfort her.

  “I won't say it didn't hurt like hell, Allison,” David had said to her. “No man likes to hear from the woman he loves about her sex experiences with another man. Women think we do, but we don't. The single standard is something that women have accepted much more readily than men. I think they invented it.” He laughed, was silent for a moment, then said, “It's ended, Allison—you and Brad, that's all over and done with. And now is going to be the roughest time of all for you because you have to pick up the pieces of your life and try to assemble them into a pattern.”

  “Oh, David. How? It's always easy to give advice like that, high-sounding and vague. I want you to help me. Be specific. I don't want advice. I guess what I want is a prescription.”

  “Get to work,” David had told her. “It may sound trite but it's true. Work your damned head off. Work. To work at one's chosen task is one of the truly great satisfactions that life offers. It's a better healer than time.”

  In the end, Allison had said that she would try.

  “And about us, Allison?” he asked then, his eyes sad and imploring.

  “Nothing about us, David. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Perhaps when you think about it, you won't be so sure that you want secondhand goods.” She turned her head away from him; her lips tight, trying to hold back the tears. She did not know whether it was the memory of Brad or David's question that had caused something in her breast to break.

  “Shut up,” said David harshly. “I've never been a hold-out for virginity.”

  “I'll write to you, David. Maybe when I've gone back to work it'll be different. Maybe it's true. Perhaps time and work will accomplish what I haven't been able to.”

  So David Noyes had gone back to New York, and Allison had unpacked her manuscript and gone to work.

  Samuel's Castle was the story of Samuel Peyton, a rich Negro, who had married a white girl and had escaped from the ostracism of the world by building himself a castle on the hills outside of Peyton Place. This was the background, the counterpoint to the story of a town very much like Peyton Place and of the people who lived there. When Allison had finally finished writing the sixth draft and had sent it off to Brad, he called her the day after he had received it. It was not usual for an agent to give all his attention, and so quickly, to the work of a new, young, virtually unknown writer, Allison knew.

  “Allison, it's great!” Brad had said joyfully. “I'll sell it! I'm certain of that.”

  “At last
,” said Allison laconically, too tired and sick of the manuscript now to care what happened to it. She had done her best for it; now it was in the hands of others. It did not seem to belong to her any more.

  “Listen, is Peyton Place at all like the town in the book?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Except that it must be one hell of a snake pit.”

  “Peyton Place is no different from any other small town, Brad, and neither is the town in the book. They're all alike.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed, baby,” said Brad. “You'll be hearing from me!”

  And every day since, Allison had awakened with the same first thought: Maybe it will happen today.

  “I've got to get at that living room today,” said Constance when she and Allison had finished the breakfast dishes. “It looks like a pigpen.”

  The living room did not look like a pigpen, but Constance was a meticulous housekeeper and the least sign of dust was enough to send her scurrying for the vacuum cleaner.

  “You just went over that room with a fine-toothed comb the day before yesterday,” said Allison.

  “Nevertheless,” said Constance, “I can't go around giving champagne parties for authoresses in dirty rooms.”

  “I'm going out to shovel the front walk,” said Allison, “and get the cobwebs off my brain. It must be cobwebs that make me have such impossible ideas the first thing in the morning.”

  She bent to the task. Holding the shovel with its familiar, worn handle in her mittened hands, she hoped that work as mechanical as removing snow would deaden her too active mind, would stop the endless brooding on the novel and its fate. Allison had finally to admit to herself that the novel was more than a book, more than a job of work— her whole life depended on it. She could imagine herself only as the author of Samuel's Castle. If she was not that, she was not anything.

  It was eleven-thirty in the morning when Allison came in from outside. She was stamping snow from her boots when she heard the phone ring, and picked up the extension in the kitchen.

  “Hello, Allison?” It was Bradley Holmes.