Free Peyton Place by Grace Metalious Page A

he saw Marion cut the doctor dead on the street, “you didn't want to be beloved by everyone did you?”
    “I wouldn't mind,” said the doctor. “Would anyone? Would you?”
    “No,” replied Seth.
♦ 11 ♦
    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