Читать книгу Peyton Place - Grace Metalious - Страница 14

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Indian summer lingered on in Peyton Place for exactly six days and then she was gone as suddenly as she had come. The bright leaves on the trees, beaten loose by cold wind and rain, fell to the ground like tears wept for a remembered past. They lost their colors quickly on the sidewalks and roads. They lay wet and brown and dead, a depressing reminder that winter had come to stay.

Less and less frequently now, Allison walked up to Road’s End. Whenever she did she wrapped her raincoat tightly about her and stood, shivering, unable now to see the town clearly from the end of the road. Everything was blurred by a thin, gray mist and the hills, no longer a hot, beautiful purple, loomed black against the horizon. The trees in her woods no longer lifted their arms to shout, “Hello, Allison. Hello!” They hung their tired heads and sighed, “Go home, Allison. Go home.”

It was a sad time, thought Allison, a time of death and decay with everything waiting sorrowfully and subdued for the snows that would come to cover the exposed bones of a dead summer.

But it was not the season which weighed heaviest on Allison. She did not know what it was. She seemed to be filled with a restlessness, a vague unrest, which nothing was able to ease. She began to spend the hours after school in sitting before the fire in the living room, an open book in her hands, but sometimes she forgot to read the page before her eyes and sat idly gazing into the flames on the hearth. At other times, she devoured every word she read and was filled with an insatiable longing for more. She discovered a box of old books in the attic, among them two thin volumes of short stories by Guy de Maupassant. These she read over and over again, unable to understand many of them and weeping at others. She had no sympathy for “Miss Harriet,” but her heart broke for the two old people who worked so long and so hard to buy another “Diamond Necklace.” Allison’s reading had no pattern, and she went from De Maupassant to James Hilton without a quiver. She read Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and wept in the darkness of her room for an hour while the last line of the story lingered in her mind: “I said goodbye to Chips the night before he died.” Allison began to wonder about God and death.

Why was it that good people like Mr. Chips and the Little Match Girl and Allison’s father died as indiscriminately as bad people? Was God really the way Reverend Fitzgerald pictured him for her every Sunday from the pulpit of the Congregational church? Was he really all good, all compassionate, loving everyone and truly listening to prayer?

“God hears every word,” said the Reverend Fitzgerald. “Every prayer sent heavenward is heard.”

But, wondered Allison, if God was so good and powerful, why was it that He sometimes seemed not to hear?

For this question, too, the Reverend Fitzgerald had an answer, and like all his answers it held the ring of truth at first, but as soon as Allison paused to think, another question would occur to her, and sometimes the minister’s answers made no sense at all, but seemed empty and contradictory.

“He hears every single word,” assured the Reverend Fitzgerald, but Allison asked silently, If He really hears, why is it that He often does not answer?

“Sometimes,” said the minister, “The Almighty Father must refuse us. Like a loving father on earth, refusing a child for his own good, so must our Heavenly Father sometimes refuse us. But He always acts in our best interests.”

Well, then, thought Allison, why pray at all? If God was going to do what He thought was best anyway, why bother to ask for anything one wanted? If you prayed, and God thought that what you asked should be granted, He would grant it. If you did not pray, and it was true that God always acted in one’s best interests, you would receive whatever He wanted you to receive anyway. Prayer, thought Allison, was a dreadfully unfair, rather unsportsmanlike affair, with all the advantages on one side.

When she had been younger, she had prayed and prayed that her father might be returned to her, but nothing had come of that. It had seemed unreasonable to her then that a loving God who could perform miracles any time the urge struck Him should want to see a little girl go without a father. Now that she was twelve, this still seemed unreasonable, and unfair as well.

Allison looked up at the gray skies of October and wondered if it was possible that there was no God at all, just as there were no real fairy princesses, no magic elves.

She roamed the streets of the town with an air of searching, and it left her with a hollow feeling of loss when she pulled herself up short and asked herself what she was looking for. She dreamed vague, half-formed dreams that were easily broken, and every day she waited impatiently for tomorrow.

“I wish it would hurry and be June,” she told her mother. “Then I’d be ready to graduate from grade school.”

“Don’t wish time away, Allison,” said Constance. “It goes much too quickly as it is. In a little while, you’ll look back on these times as the best years of your life.”

But Allison did not believe her.

“No, don’t hurry time, Allison,” repeated Constance, and peered into the mirror on the living room wall, searching the corners of her eyes for small lines. “You’ll be thirteen next month,” she said, and wondered, Can it be possible? Thirteen? So soon? Fourteen, actually. I’d almost forgotten. “We’ll have a nice little party for you,” she said.

“Oh, please, Mother,” protested Allison, “birthday parties are so childish!”

A few days later Allison said, “Perhaps a party would be nice after all,” and Constance rolled her eyes heavenward, wondering if she had ever gone through this phase of never knowing what she wanted.

If I did, she thought sourly, it’s no wonder that my poor mother died young!

To Allison, she said, “All right, dear. You go ahead and invite your little friends and I’ll take care of everything else.”

Allison almost screamed that she did not want a party after all, if her mother was going to refer to her classmates as “her little friends.” Her mother did not seem to realize that Allison would be thirteen in two more weeks, and on the verge of entering something described in magazine articles as “adolescence.” Allison pronounced this word, which she had read but never heard spoken, as “a-dole-icents,” and to her it had all the mysterious connotations of hearing someone speak of “entering a nunnery.”

Allison was not unaware of the physical changes in herself, nor did she fail to notice many of these same changes in others. Size, she had decided, was something that one was stuck with, no more alterable than the slant of one’s cheekbones. Selena, she realized, had been different from younger girls for quite a while now, for she already wore a brassière all the time, while Allison was sure that she herself would have no need for such a garment for a long time. She locked herself in the bathroom and examined her figure critically. Her waist seemed slimmer, and she was definitely beginning to develop breasts in an unobtrusive way, but her legs were as long and skinny as ever.

Like a spider, she thought resentfully, and hurriedly put on her bathrobe.

Boys were different now, too, she had noticed. Rodney Harrington had a slight shadow above his upper lip and boasted that soon he would have to go to Clement’s Barbershop every day to be shaved, just like his father. Allison shivered. She hated the idea of hair growing anywhere on her body. Selena already had hair under her arms which she shaved off once a month.

“I get it over with all at once,” said Selena. “My period and my shave.”

Allison nodded approvingly. “Good idea,” she said sagely.

But as far as she was concerned, “periods” were something that happened to other girls. She decided that she would never tolerate such things in herself.

When Selena heard that, she laughed. “There’s not going to be much you can do about it,” she said. “You’ll get it the same as everyone else.”

But Allison did not believe her friend. She sent away to a company which advertised a free booklet entitled, How to Tell Your Daughter, offering to send it in a plain wrapper, and she read this carefully.

Phooey, she thought disdainfully when she had finished studying the pamphlet. I’ll be the only woman in the whole world who won’t, and I’ll be written up in all the medical books.

She thought of “It” as a large black bat, with wings outspread, and when she woke up on the morning of her thirteenth birthday to discover that “It” was nothing of the kind, she was disappointed, disgusted and more than a little frightened.

But the reason she wept was that she was not, after all, going to be as unique as she had wanted to be.