Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  “The Ellsworths are suing Leslie Harrington,” Allison had said, “and everyone is saying that they'll never get a dime because the jury will be made up almost entirely of mill hands. What are we going to do?”

  Seth had looked at this girl, too tense and fine drawn for a child of sixteen, and had tried to explain to her why they were going to do nothing about the case of Ellsworth vs. Harrington.

  “I get riled up the same as you,” he had said. “In fact, I've often threatened to use the paper as an instrument of exposure. I threaten to do it every year, just before town meeting, when I know that I'm going to get beat on an issue that I don't want to get beat on, like zoning, or a new grade school. But I never do it. Why? Because I believe in tolerance, and one of the requirements of tolerance is not only that you will listen to the other fellow's viewpoint, but also that you won't try to cram yours down his throat. I'll say what I think to anyone who is willing to listen, but I won't force anyone to read about it in the pages of my paper.”

  “Even when you know that your viewpoint is the right one?” Allison had demanded, her voice rising in angry disbelief.

  “That isn't the point, is it? One's viewpoint and a man's right to defend himself against it are two different things. When I print something in the paper, and a man reads it later in his own home, I am not there for him to disagree with if his viewpoint is not in accordance with mine. The only recourse he has then is to sit down and write a ‘Letter to the Editor,’ and then he is being unfair to me because he is not here for me to argue with if I wanted to do so.”

  “I don't know,” Allison had said in a tightly controlled voice, “how you came to think the way you do, and I don't care. I have something here which I've written. I'm not asking you to print your own words in your paper. Print mine, with my name at the head of it. I'm not afraid to write what I think, and I don't care who reads it or who might disagree with me. I know when I am right.”

  “Let's see what you've written,” Seth had said, extending his hand.

  Allison had written a great deal, much of it to do with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and the individual's God-given right to a fair trial by jury. She had written also of the miser's desire to make money to a point where he grossly overlooked the means by which he made it. She charged Leslie Harrington with negligence and carelessness, and said that if he were any kind of man, he would never have waited to be sued. He would have put his money at the disposal of the Ellsworths, and he would carry the marks of what he had done to Kathy on his conscience for the rest of his life. It was time, Allison had written, for men of honor to stand up and be counted. When the time came that an individual in a free American town was forced to fear a prejudiced hearing, it was indeed a time to try men's souls. Altogether, Allison had written seventeen typewritten pages expressing her opinion of Leslie Harrington and the grip in which he held Peyton Place. When Seth had finished reading, he put the manuscript down carefully.

  “I cannot print this, Allison,” he had said.

  “Cannot!” the girl had cried, sweeping up the typewritten pages. “You mean will not!”

  “Allison, my dear–”

  Angry tears had rushed to the girl's eyes. “And I thought that you were my friend,” she said, and had run out of his office.

  Seth's cigarette burned his fingers and he sat up with a jerk. For a moment, his mind refused to comprehend his circumstances, but then his eyes fell on a bookcase at the opposite side of the room and he understood that he was sitting in a chair in his own living room.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered, and began to search the floor around his chair for the cigarette end which he had dropped. When he found it, he ground it into the carpet with the toe of his shoe, then he settled back and picked up his half-finished drink. From the kitchen, there came a low murmur of men's voices and the whisper of new playing cards.

  “Raise you.”

  “I'll pass.”

  “Call.”

  “Full up.”

  “Christ, and me sitting with three kings.”

  My friends, thought Seth, swallowing a nausea caused by too much to drink on an empty stomach, and caused, too, by unpleasant remembrances. My good, tried and true blue friends, thought Seth, and like a phantom a voice from the past struck him.

  “And I thought that you were my friend!”

  Seth finished his stale drink and poured himself another I was, you know, he thought, addressing an Allison MacKenzie' of long ago If you had listened to me, you would have been spared a lot of hurt. I was trying to teach you not to care too much. That business of caring too much was always obvious in you, my dear. It showed in your writing, and that, my dear, my too young, my sweet, my talented, my beautiful Allison, does not make for clear, coolheaded, analytical prose.

  “Straight, queen high and all black, by God! In spades!” came the enthusiastic voice of Charles Partridge.

  My friend, thought Seth drunkenly, my good friend Charlie Partridge. What excuses we have made to one another in our time, Charlie. What beautiful, noble, high-sounding excuses!

  And suddenly Seth was back in 1939. October, 1939. Indian summer, 1939, and a crowded courtroom, with his friend Charlie Partridge talking softly to his friend Allison MacKenzie.

  “Now, my dear, remember that you are sworn to tell the truth. I want you to tell the court exactly what happened on the evening of Labor Day of this year. Do not be afraid, my dear, you are among friends here.”

  “Friends?” The child's voice was not the voice of a child, not the same voice which had thanked Seth for a chance to write for the paper. For money. “Friends?” Such a tense, tightly controlled voice for a little girl of sixteen. “Kathy Ellsworth is my friend. She is the only friend I have in Peyton Place.”

  Seth had comforted himself later with the thought that he had only imagined that Allison MacKenzie's eyes had found his in that packed courtroom.

  “Now,” said the remembered voice of Charles Partridge, Leslie Harrington's attorney, “could it not be that your friend Kathy became dizzy as she looked down into the moving wheels of the machinery in that building at the carnival?”

  “Objection, your Honor!” It was the voice of Peter Drake, a young lawyer who had set up an office in Peyton Place, for God only knew what reason. He came from “away from here,” as the townspeople put it, and until the case of Ellsworth vs. Harrington, he had handled nothing but deeds and the petty problems of the mill hands. And here he was, daring to object to something that Charlie Partridge, who had been born in town, was saying.

  Honorable Anthony Aldridge, who stubbornly refused to live on Chestnut Street, although he was a judge and could afford it, upheld Peter Drake. The court was not interested in what Allison thought, but only in what she had seen. Seth looked surreptitiously at the jury to see what damage Charlie's question had done, for the jury was comprised of people who would surely favor Leslie Harrington. It would have been impossible to find twelve people in Peyton Place who neither worked at the mills nor owed money on mortgaged property at the Citizens’ National Bank where Leslie was chairman of the board of trustees, and Leslie had acted quickly, once legal proceedings had been instigated against him. He had fired John Ellsworth, Kathy's father, and had suddenly found a buyer for the house which the Ellsworths rented. No wonder the mill hands fastened so thankfully on a morsel of evidence in favor of Leslie Harrington, thought Seth, as he turned his eyes from the jury to Allison MacKenzie on the stand.

  The case continued for three days, and the only person to support Allison MacKenzie was Tomas Makris, who testified that when he had gone to the fun house operator to tell him to shut off the machinery which ran the place, the operator had stated that he did not know how to comply with this request. Lewis Welles's testimony, according to Peyton Place, did not count, for everyone knew that he and Kathy were “going together” and naturally he'd stick up for the girl, especially when it might mean thirty thousand dollars.

  Thirty thousand doll
ars! Peyton Place never grew weary of saying the words.

  “Thirty thousand dollars! Imagine it!”

  “Imagine suing Leslie Harrington for thirty thousand dollars!”

  “At thirty thousand dollars apiece, I'd let both my arms get ripped off!”

  “And who the hell does this Ellsworth think he is anyway? Where does he come from? He's behind it. The girl would never have done it on her own without her father pushing her!”

  After three days the jury deliberated, according to Seth's watch, exactly forty-two minutes. They assessed Leslie Harrington the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, the figure for which he had been heard to say that he would settle. Kathy Ellsworth, who did not appear in court, took the news more calmly than anyone else. Her right arm was gone, and that, as she said, was that. Neither thirty thousand, nor twenty-five hundred was going to alter the fact that she would have to learn to use her left hand.

  “Listen, baby,” said Lewis Welles, in his brisk, salesman's voice to which many people objected, “you don't need a right arm to hold a kid. I've seen lotsa women holding babies with their left arm.”

  That night, when the men of Chestnut Street, with the exception of Leslie Harrington, gathered at Seth's to play poker, Charles Partridge had been full of excuses.

  “Christ,” he had said, “I know it wasn't right. What could I do? I'm Leslie's lawyer. He pays me a yearly retainer for which I agree to take care of his affairs to the best of my ability. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money. I had to do what I did.”

  “It wasn't as if the sonofabitch couldn't afford it,” said Dexter Humphrey, the president of the bank.

  “Leslie has always been a cheap skate,” said Jared Clarke. “I don't think he's ever bought a single thing without trying to beat the price down.”

  “For a while,” said Matthew Swain, “I didn't think the girl would live.”

  “Someday,” said Seth, “that bastard will get his. In spades. He'll get his comeuppance so good that he'll never forget it. I just hope I'm around to see it.”

  All of us, every single, goddamned one of us, hating Leslie Harrington because we haven't the guts to stand up and tell him, and everyone else, where we stand, thought Seth, as he sat and drank in his house, in the fall of 1943. He raised his empty glass and threw it with all his remaining strength against the opposite wall. The glass did not even break. It rolled across the carpet and came to rest against the bookcase.

  “My friends!” said Seth thickly. “My good, true blue friends. Screw ’em all!”

  “What did you say, Seth?” asked Dr. Swain, coming into the room followed by the poker players who had finished with the cards.

  “’Septyou, Matt,” muttered Seth. “Screw ’em all, ’sheptyou, Matt,” he said, and fell asleep, leaning back in his chair, with his mouth open.

  ♦ 4 ♦

  The snow came early that year. By the middle of November the fields were white with it and before the first week of December had passed, the streets of Peyton Place were lined on either side with peaked, white piles of snow pushed there, out of the way of traffic and pedestrians, by the town's sharp-nosed plow.

  Tuttle's Grocery Store was always more crowded during the winter months, for the farmers who were hard pressed for a moment of rest in the summer found themselves with hours of free time to spend. The majority of them spent it in Tuttle's, talking. It was talk which mattered little, solved nothing and which, in the winter of 1943, was concerned mostly with the war. Yet, the war had changed the face of Peyton Place but little, and the group in Tuttle's not at all. There were very few young men left in town, but then, young men had never congregated around the stove in Tuttle's so that the talkers there were the ones who had been there for years. There were fewer products for sale in the store, but the old men around the stove had never had much money to buy things anyway, so the shortage of civilian goods did not affect them particularly. As for the farmers, food was no more of a problem now than it had ever been. War had not made the soil of northern New England less rocky, more yielding, or the weather more predictable. The wresting of life from the land had always been difficult, and the war made no difference one way or another. The old men in Tuttle's talked and talked, and the farmers did not feel cheated in having spent the hard-earned hours of leisure in these conversations. When local talk faded, there was always the fascinating, unending talk of war. Every battle on every front was refought with more finesse, more brilliant strategy, more courage and more daring, by the old men around the red-hot stove in Tuttle's. The men, including those with sons gone to battle, spoke the words of concern assiduously, for they felt this was expected of men whose country was at war. Yet, there was not one among them who believed even remotely in the possibility of an American defeat, although they discussed the possibilities with infinite care. The idea of an alien foot, whether German or Japanese, trodding the acres first settled by the grandfathers of the old men in Tuttle's was one so farfetched, so impossible to visualize, that it was spoken of—and listened to—with the hushed attitude in which the men might have held a discussion on extrasensory perception. It was all right to talk and to listen, but one simply did not believe it. A stranger, coming to Peyton Place for the first time from a place where the war had passed, might well have been dumfounded by the lack of concern in evidence in the town. The largest, single change which had taken place was in the Cumberland Mills, which had gone into war work more than a year before. The mills worked in three shifts now, operating twenty-four hours a day, and the fact that more people had more money to spend was not particularly obvious, for there was nothing to be bought with this newly acquired prosperity. To the old men in Tuttle's, the war was almost like a game, a conversational game, to be played when other subjects were exhausted. A stranger to Peyton Place might easily have mistaken disbelief of danger for courage, or faith for indifference.

  Selena Cross was one of the few in town to be emotionally involved with the war. Her stepbrother Paul was with the Army somewhere in the Pacific, while Gladys was working in an aircraft factory at Los Angeles, California. Selena fought a continual feeling of restlessness and a sense of frustration during the winter of 1943.

  “I wish I were a man,” she had told Tomas Makris. “Nothing would hold me back then. I'd join up in a minute.”

  Afterward, she was sorry that she had said this, for Tom, she had heard, had tried several times to enlist. None of the branches of the service were eager, it seemed, to accept Tom who was over forty, and who had had both knees fractured in the past.

  Restless and frustrated, Selena wrestled also with a sense of guilt. She should, she knew, be grateful that Ted Carter was safe at the state university, studying for his eventual legal career and being kept from active duty by virtue of his good grades and the R.O.T.C. But somehow she was not. She felt that Ted should be fighting side by side with Paul and all others like him, and it irritated her when Ted came home week ends, or wrote enthusiastic letters remarking on his good fortune in “managing to stay in college.”

  It was fine, Selena admitted, for a man to have his goal firmly fixed in his mind, and Ted, she knew, was not a coward. He was more than ready and willing to go to war, after his schooling was done.

  “If I can stay in for just one more year, including summers, I'll have my Bachelor's. That will leave only law school, and who knows? The war may be over before then,” Ted had told her.

  She had been furiously angry. “I should think that you'd want to go. After all, the United States is at war.”

  “It's not that I don't want to go,” he had replied, hurt at her unreasonableness. “It's just that this way, I won't be losing any time and we can be married that much sooner.”

  “Time!” Selena had scoffed. “Let the Germans or the Japs get over here, and see how valuable your time is then!”

  “But Selena, we've had this all planned for years—ever since we were kids. What's the matter?”

  “Nothing!”

  As a matter o
f fact, Selena could not have told Ted what the matter was. She knew that her feeling was a childish, unreasonable one, so senseless as to be unexplainable, yet it was there. She could not get over the idea that there was something not quite right in a strong, able-bodied man wanting to stay in a sleepy college town while a war raged over the rest of the world.

  Since Nellie's death and the advent of Paul and Gladys with its consequence of tidiness and its measure of security, the Carters had relented somewhat in their attitude toward Selena. After all, said the Carters, it took a real smart girl to manage a business all by herself with no help at all from the owner. Connie had scarcely set foot in the shop from the day she had married that Greek fellow. Selena did it alone, and a girl had to be real smart to be able to do that at the age of eighteen. Now that Selena was alone with Joey, Roberta sometimes invited the two of them to Sunday dinner, and she always insisted on sharing her letters from Ted with Selena, in the hope that Selena would reciprocate. Selena never did. She did not like Roberta and Harmon, nor could she bring herself to trust them. She accepted Roberta's invitations warily, for she could see no graceful way to avoid them, but she never spent a comfortable Sunday in the Carter house, and whenever one of these Sundays was over, she and Joey acted like a pair of children let out of school. They ran and laughed all the way to their own house, and when they reached it, Selena made hamburgers and Joey did imitations of Roberta's hyperladylike mannerisms while they ate, Selena's food growing cold while she laughed.

  I haven't a thing to kick about, thought Selena, as she walked home one cold December evening after closing the Thrifty Corner. If I had an ounce of gratitude in me, I'd know enough to be grateful for all I have.

  Just before she opened the door to enter the house, she paused and looked up at the heavy sky. It's going to snow, she thought, and hurried inside to warmth, where Joey had already started supper and where another letter from Ted awaited her. Joey had started a fire in the fireplace, too, for he knew that Selena loved to watch a fire while she ate. The fireplace had been a needless extravagance, installed with much labor and thought by Paul Cross after he had learned from Gladys that, to Selena, no home was complete without one.