By the Same Author
The Summer I Dared
Flirting with Pete
An Accidental Woman
The Woman Next Door
The Vineyard
Lake News
Coast Road
Three Wishes
A Woman’s Place
Shades of Grace
Together Alone
For My Daughters
Suddenly
More Than Friends
The Passions of Chelsea Kane
A Woman Betrayed
SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Delinsky
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2005047765
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7452-4
ISBN-10: 0-7432-7452-0
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To my family,
with thanks and love
Acknowledgments
Gathering information on Grace Metalious was a challenge. So long after her death, precious little about her is in print. Two books, in particular, were a help: The Girl From “Peyton Place,” by George Metalious and June O’Shea (Dell Publishing Company, 1965) and Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious, by Emily Toth (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981). I found additional insight on Grace and her times in Ardis Cameron’s introduction to the most recent edition of Peyton Place (Northeastern University Press, 1999). Finally, for information on Grace’s childhood years in Manchester, New Hampshire, I thank Robert Perrault.
Having absorbed what I could from these sources, I tried to imagine what Grace would think, feel, and say. If my imaginings differ from what those who knew her saw, the fault is mine and mine alone.
For information on the current state of mercury regulation, I thank Stephanie D’Agostino, Co-Chair of the Mercury Reduction Task Force, New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. For insight into what mercury poisoning actually feels like, I thank Claire Marino. At her behest, I advise readers that the treatment for mercury poisoning outlined in Looking for Peyton Place is still considered “alternative medicine.” Though individuals do swear by its success, there is, as yet, no scientific study to suggest that it be the treatment of choice.
Thanks to the entire tireless Scribner publishing team. And again, always, I thank my agent, Amy Berkower.
Prologue
I AM A WRITER. My third and most recent novel won critical acclaim and a lengthy stay on the best-seller lists, a fact that nearly a year later I’m still trying to grasp. Rarely does a day pass when I don’t feel deep gratitude. I’m only thirty-three. Not many writers attain the success I have in a lifetime, much less at my age, much less with the inauspicious start I had.
By rights, given how my earliest work was ridiculed, I should have given up. That I didn’t spoke either of an irrepressible creative drive or of stubbornness. I suspect it was a bit of both.
It was also Grace.
Let me explain.
I am from Middle River. Middle River is a small town in northern New Hampshire that, true to its name, sits on a river midway between two others, the Connecticut and the Androscoggin. I was born and raised there. That meant living not only in the shadow of the White Mountains, but in that of Grace Metalious.
Grace who? you ask.
Had I not been from Middle River, I probably wouldn’t have known who she was, either. I’m too young. Her provocative bestseller, Peyton Place, was published in 1956, sixteen years before I was born. Likewise, I missed the movie and the television show, both of which followed the book in close succession. By the time I arrived in 1972, the movie had been mothballed and the evening TV show canceled. An afternoon show was in the works, but by then Grace had been dead seven years, and her name was largely forgotten.
I am always amazed by how quickly her fame faded. To hear tell, when Peyton Place first came out, Grace Metalious made headlines all over the country. She was an unknown who penned an explosive novel, a New Hampshire schoolteacher’s wife who wrote about sex, a young woman in sneakers and blue jeans who dared tell the truth about small-town life and—even more unheard-of—about the yearnings of women. Though by today’s standards Peyton Place is tame, in 1956 the book was a shocker. It was banned in a handful of American counties, in many more libraries than that, and in Canada, Italy, and Australia; Grace was shunned by neighbors and received threatening mail; her husband lost his job, her children were harassed by classmates. And all the while millions of people, men and women alike, were reading Peyton Place on the sly. To this day, take any copy from a library shelf, and it falls open to the racy parts.
But memory is as fickle as the woman Grace claimed Indian summer to be in the opening lines of her book. Within a decade of its publication and her own consequent notoriety, people mentioning Peyton Place were more apt to think of Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal on TV, or of Betty Anderson teasing Rodney Harrington in the backseat of John Pillsbury’s car, or of Constance MacKenzie and Tomas Makris petting on the lakeshore at night, than of Grace Metalious. Peyton Place had taken on a life of its own, synonymous with small-town secrets, scandals, and sex. Grace had become irrelevant.
Grace was never irrelevant in Middle River, though. Long after Peyton Place was eclipsed by more graphic novels, she was alternately adored and reviled—because Middle River knew what the rest of the world did not, and whether the town was right didn’t matter. All that mattered was the depth of our conviction. We knew that Peyton Place wasn’t modeled after Gilmanton or Belmont, as was popularly believed. It’s us, Middle River said when the book first appeared, and that conviction never died.
This I knew firsthand. Even all those years after Peyton Place’s publication, when I was old enough to read, old enough to spend hours in the library, old enough to lock myself in the bathroom to write in my journal and to have the sense that I was following in a famous someone’s footsteps, the town talked. There were too many parallels between Peyton Place and Middle River to ignore, starting with the physical layout of the town, proceeding to characters like the wealthy owner of the newspaper, the feisty but good-hearted doctor, the adored spinster teacher and the town drunk, and ending, in a major way, with the paper mill. In Peyton Place, the mill was owned and, hence, the town controlled by Leslie Harrington; in Middle River, that family name was Meade. Benjamin Meade was the patriarch then, and he wielded the same arrogant power as Leslie Harrington. And like Leslie’s son Rodney, Benjamin’s son, Sandy, was cocksure and wild.
Naysayers called these parallels mere coincidence. After all, Middle River sat farther north than the towns in which Grace Metalious had lived. Moreover, we had no proof that Grace had ever actually driven down our Oak Street, seen the red brick of Benjamin Meade’s Northwood Mill, or eavesdropped on town gossip from a booth at Omie’s Diner.
Mere coincidence, those naysayers repeated.
But this much coincidence? Middle River asked.
There were other similarities between the fictitious Peyton Place and our very real Middle River—scandals, notably—some of which I’ll recount later. The only one I need to mention now is a personal on
e. Two major characters in Peyton Place were Constance MacKenzie and her daughter, Allison. With frightening accuracy, they corresponded to Middle River’s own Connie McCall and her daughter, Alyssa. Like their fictitious counterparts, Connie and Alyssa lived manless in Connie’s childhood home. Connie ran a dress shop, as did Constance MacKenzie. Likewise, Connie’s Alyssa was born in New York, returned to Middle River with her mother and no father, and grew up an introverted child who always felt different from her peers.
The personal part? Connie McCall was my grandmother, Alyssa my mother.
My name is Annie Barnes. Anne, actually. But Anne was too serious a name for a very serious child, which apparently I was from the start. My mother often said that within days of my birth, she would have named me Joy, Daisy, or Gaye, if she hadn’t already registered Anne with the state. Calling me Annie was her attempt to soften that up. It worked particularly well, since my middle initial was E. I was Anne E. Annie. The E was for Ellen—another serious name—but my sisters considered me lucky. They were named Phoebe and Sabina, after ancient goddesses, something they felt was pretentious, albeit characteristic of our mother, whose whimsy often gravitated toward myth. By the time I was born, though, our father was sick, finances were tight, and Mom was in a down-to-earth stage.
If that sounds critical, I don’t mean it to be. I respected my mother tremendously. She was a woman caught between generations, torn between wanting to make a name for herself and wanting to make a family. She had to choose. Middle River wouldn’t let her do both.
That’s one of the things I resent about the town. Another is the way my mother and grandmother were treated when Peyton Place first appeared. Prior to that time, Middle River had bought into the story that my grandmother was duly married and living in New York with her husband when my mother was conceived, but that the man died shortly thereafter. When Peyton Place suggested another scenario, people began snooping into birth and death records, and the truth emerged.
If you’re thinking that my grandmother might have sued Grace Metalious for libel, think again. Even if she could prove malicious intent on Grace’s part—which she surely couldn’t—people didn’t jump to litigate in the 1950s the way they do now. Besides, the last thing my grandmother would have wanted was to draw attention to herself. Grace’s fictional Constance MacKenzie had it easy; the only person to learn her secret was Tomas Makris, who loved her enough to accept what she had done. My real-life grandmother had no Tomas Makris. Outed to the entire town as an unmarried woman with a bastard child, she was the butt of sly whispers and scornful looks for years to come. This took its toll. No extrovert to begin with, she withdrew into herself all the more. If it hadn’t been for the dress shop, which she relied on as her only source of support and ran with quiet dignity—and skill enough to attract even reluctant customers—she would have become a recluse.
So I did hold a grudge against the town. I found Middle River stifling, stagnant, and cruel. I looked at my sisters, and saw intelligent women in their thirties whose lives were wasted in a town that discouraged free expression and honest thought. I looked at my mother, and saw a woman who had died at sixty-five—too young—following Middle River rules. I looked at myself and saw someone so hurt by her childhood experiences that she’d had to leave town.
I faulted Middle River for much of that.
Grace Metalious was to blame for the rest. Her book changed all of our lives—mine, perhaps, more than some. Since Middle River considered my mother and grandmother an intricate part of Peyton Place, when I took to writing myself, comparisons with Grace were inevitable. Aside from those by a local bookseller—analogous in support to Allison MacKenzie’s teacher in Peyton Place—the comparisons were always derogatory. I was a homely child with my nose in books, then a lonely teenager writing what I thought to be made-up stories about people in town, and I stepped on a number of toes. I had no idea that I was telling secrets, had no idea that what I said was true. I didn’t know what instinctive insight was, much less that I had it.
Too smart for her own good, huffed one peeved subject. There’s a bad seed in that child, declared another. If she isn’t careful, warned a third, she’ll end up in the same mess Grace did.
Intrigued, albeit perversely, I learned all I could about Grace. As I grew, I identified with her on many levels, from the isolation she felt as a child, to her appreciation of strong men, to her approach to being a novelist. She became part of my psyche, my alter ego at times. In my loneliness I talked with her, carried on actual conversations with her right up into my college years. More than once I dreamed we were related—and it wasn’t a bad thought at all, because I loved her spirit. She often said she wrote for the money, but my reading suggests it went deeper than that. She was driven to write. She wanted to do it well. And she wanted her work to be taken seriously.
So did I. In that sense alone, Grace was an inspiration to me, because Peyton Place was about far more than sex. Move past titillation, and you have the story of women coming into their own. This was what I wrote about, myself.
But I saw what had happened to Grace. Initial perceptions stick; once seen as a writer of backseat sex, always seen as a writer of backseat sex. So I avoided backseat sex. I chose my publisher with care. Rather than being manipulated by publicity as Grace had been, I manipulated the publicity myself. Image was crucial. My bio didn’t mention Middle River, but struck a more sophisticated pose. It helped that I lived in Washington, a hub of urbanity even with its political hot air—helped that Greg Steele, my roommate, was a national correspondent for network television and that I was his date at numerous events of state—helped that I had grown into a passably stylish adult who could wear Armani with an ease that made my dark hair, pale skin, and overly wide-set eyes look exotic.
Unfortunately, Middle River didn’t see any of this—because yes, initial perceptions stuck. The town was fixated on my being its own Grace. It didn’t matter that I had been gone for fifteen years, during which time I had built a national name for myself. When I showed up there last August, they were convinced I had returned to write about them.
The irony, of course, was that I didn’t seriously consider it until they started asking. They put the bug in my ear. But I didn’t deny it. I was angry enough to let them worry. My mother was dead. I wanted to know why. My sisters were content to say that she died after a fall down the stairs, in turn caused by a loss of balance. I agreed that the fall had killed her, but the balance part bothered me. I wanted to know why her balance had been so bad.
Something was going on in Middle River. It wasn’t documented—God help us if anything there was forthright—but the Middle River Times, which I received weekly, was always reporting about someone or other who was sick. Granted, I was a novelist; if I hadn’t been born with a vivid imagination, I would have developed one in the course of my work, which meant that I could dream up scenarios with ease. But wouldn’t you think something was fishy if people in a small town of five thousand, max, were increasingly, chronically ill?
As with any good plot, dreaming it up took a while. I was too numb to do much of anything at first. My sisters hadn’t painted a picture anywhere near as bleak as they might have, so my mother’s death came at me almost out of the blue. I’d like to say Phoebe and Sabina were sparing me worry—but we three knew better. There was an established protocol. What I didn’t ask, they didn’t tell. We weren’t very close.
The funeral was in June. I was in Middle River for three days, and left with no plans ever to return.
Then the numbness wore off, and a niggling began. It had to do with my sister Phoebe, who was so grief-stricken calling me about Mom’s death that she didn’t know my voice on the phone, so distracted when I reached Middle River that carrying on a conversation with her was difficult. It was only natural that Mom’s death would hit her the hardest, Sabina argued dismissively when I asked her about it. Not only had they lived and worked together, but Phoebe was the one who had found Mom at the foot of the
stairs.
Still, I had seen things in Phoebe during those three days in Middle River that, in hindsight and with a clearer mind myself now, were eerily reminiscent of Mom’s unsteadiness, and I was haunted. How to explain Mom being sick? How to explain Phoebe being sick? Naturally, my imagination kicked into high gear. I thought of recessive genes, of pharmacological complications, of medical incompetency. I thought of the TCE used to clean printing presses down the street from the store. I thought of poison, though had no idea why anyone would have cause to poison my mother and sister. Of all the scenarios I dreamed up, the one I liked best had to do with the release of toxicity into the air by Northwood Mill. I detested the Meades. They had been responsible for the greatest humiliation of my life. As villains went, they were ideal.
That said, I had been in enough discussions with Greg and his colleagues about the importance of impartiality to know not to point every finger at Northwood. During those warm July weeks, I divided my time between finishing the revisions of my new book and exploring those other possibilities.
Actually, I spent more time on the latter. It wasn’t an obsession. But the more I read, the more into it I was.
I ruled out TCE, because it caused cancer, not the Parkinsonian symptoms Mom had had. I ruled out pharmacologic complications, because neither Mom nor Phoebe took much beyond vitamins. Mercury poisoning would have been perfect, and the mill did produce mercury. Or it had. Unfortunately for me, state records showed that Northwood had stopped using mercury years before.
I finally came across lead. Mom’s store, Miss Lissy’s Closet, had been rehabbed four years ago, largely for decorating purposes, but also for the sake of scraping down and removing old layers of paint that contained lead. My research told me that lead poisoning could cause neurological disorders as well as memory lapses and concentration problems. If Mom and Phoebe had been in the store while the work was being done, and ventilation had been poor, they might have inhaled significant amounts of lead-laden dust. Mom was older, hence weakened sooner.
Looking for Peyton Place Page 1