Peyton Place East

You’ve got to be careful about describing your beloved hometown in the same breath as Peyton Place, the fictional New England mill town that was plagued by a dark and hidden streak of hypocrisy and intolerance that all came rushing out one day to devastate many lives, some more painfully than others.

No such grand passions worthy of cinematic adaptation have ever erupted in my Bukidnon hometown that I am aware of. But we did have our generous share of shame and scandal that kept busybodies at full throttle and could not be kept out of the ears of minors and children. I grew up feeling that I lived in exciting and dangerous times that only acquired a name after one very disturbing film was shown in our town’s nipa-and-sawali movie house.

The term “Peyton Place” gained fame or notoriety after 1956 when an eponymously titled novel was published in New York and shortly turned into a blockbuster Hollywood movie starring Lana Turner, Arthur Kennedy and Hope Lange.

I saw this already-dated film in the early 1960s (it took some time for new films to reach Mindanao) when I was in high school. I remember being so shocked I was depressed for many days. I couldn’t believe people could be so mean and do such evil things to each other. My prolonged childhood innocence ended on that day.

Peyton Place was the first “adult” film I saw in my life. It touched on themes like suicide, sex, incest, rape and teenage pregnancy that were supposed to go over the head of teenagers like me. There was censorship in effect in those days, but such legal restrictions hardly applied in our remote town where, in the first place, war and action films, not tearjerkers and melodramas, appealed to the younger set.

“We don’t understand English,” said my gang mates in dismissive Visayan when they learned that it wasn’t Hopalong Cassidy or every other boy’s all-time favorite, Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back, that was being reshown that day.

Being the designated class nerd, I was always out to increase my command of spoken English so I wouldn’t talk funny with a Visayan accent like my friends. I also wanted to see famous places and countries I could only read about and that was only possible through the magic of films. Television won’t reach our town for 10 or 12 more years.

Peyton Place, the movie, introduced me to New England and its quaint little towns of picture-postcard prettiness set against pristine lakes and mountains that were ablaze with red and gold leaves in the autumn months. I would visit this breathtaking and civilized region many times during my long years of exile in the United States. Of particular interest was Camden, Maine where the film was mainly shot on location.

New England’s captivating scenery formed the background of Grace Metalious’s dark tale of small-town America. Although I was disturbed enough by what I saw, I read in later years that the film had watered down the book’s steamier contents and rawest dialogue to the point that the author dissociated herself from the film. Still, the film earned a number of Academy Award nominations, became the second highest grosser of 1958, and Metalious earned a hefty amount in royalties.

Unlike today when pornography and scandal are taken for granted, censorship in those days was strict and there was no nudity or overt immorality depicted onscreen; everything was by suggestion, meaning it was in your mind (the Devil’s workshop, we were warned) that sex, lust, hate or anything pertaining to baser instincts were conjured.

What I can say is that Peyton Place made me more aware of what was happening in my own hometown under the surface of politeness, neighborly concern and blind religiosity bordering on the pagan. It gave me some sort of sociological context to the gossip or idle talk that always swirled around us with gleeful, if poisonous abundance.

Malaybalay was no different from Peyton Place or, for that matter, many other small towns in the Philippines. The language or the locale may be different but the same moral conflicts and dilemmas applied to people. The same unbending kind of conservatism prevailed from the 1940s, when the film’s storyline was set, to the 1960s when a strong counter-culture of protest and freedom had begun to take shape.

In fact, it was during my teens that the idea of challenging old values and standing up to parents and elders gained currency. We were still largely cowed by authority but no longer in the absolutely terrified sense that kept our parents’ generation on a tight leash. By the 1970s, all hell would break loose and it was obvious that new rules of morality or conduct would have to be permitted or tolerated at the very least.

Meeting with old Malaybalay residents and former classmates over the years, I couldn’t help but be reminded that our common memory includes long-forgotten episodes that involved all of us in the sense that everything is shared in all hometowns. We’re all extended family to everybody else, blood relations or not. Everything from politics to personal affairs has a participative angle. Nothing is private or kept secret. Not for long, anyway.

Somebody gets raped or pregnant, the whole town instantly knows. Family and marital feuds are often fought out in public, with neighbors and relatives taking sides and complicating matters. Corruption in public office doesn’t take long to be exposed. But in my time, all these complications seldom meant anybody got a fair hearing or problems were ever resolved at all, much less equitably.

The only difference, if you could call it that, was that nothing got into print because there was no local paper and nobody has so far written intimately, warts and all, about our town. It was the “bamboo telegraph” or grapevine that kept everybody posted. But like all oral accounts, whatever news that came out of there was bound to disappear into the void forever. Like it never happened.

Perhaps the earliest scandal I became aware of involved our piano teacher, a pleasant-faced but strict disciplinarian. She came from a few towns away where her elderly husband ran a small sari-sari store along the highway. She came on weekends to teach about 10 children in our neighborhood, one after the other. She arrived in a battered jeep with her young driver, who patiently waited for her for hours on end until they had to head home into the night. 

There was no hanky-panky with this no-nonsense teacher. Our parents conspired to make us practice daily and she expected us to be always ready for the next lesson. It got to the point where I was the only boy left in our class, the other boys preferring to climb guava trees or swim in the Sawaga River. After a year, even I decided to quit and that broke my mother’s heart. She and Dad had bought a piano all the way from Manila, believing ours would become another Von Trapp family. I was the last child to give up music and that was the end of the dream.

One weekend, our teacher was absent and we kids rejoiced. She did not show up for three sessions in a row and that was worrisome. Rumors begun to fly and it didn’t take time for the awful truth to be headline news in town: she had run away with the driver.

Poor husband, we would all say, as we drove by the old man’s store. It was a pathetic sight and our hearts went out to him. Apparently, the couple had no children and he had been left all alone.

Years later when I came home to visit from college, I asked Mom whatever happened to our piano teacher. “She went back to her husband after the driver dumped her,” Mom said, adding with a most sympathetic smile, “and he forgave her.” It was a happy ending after all, but our teacher never again taught piano in our town or anywhere else.

Definitely tragic was the story of one of the most beautiful women in town. Bright and ambitious, she came from one of the original settler families and appeared headed for success and a happy life in the big city. I remember she had lovely long hair, a most disarming smile, spoke good English, and was always well-dressed like she was not from the province.

Not long after she left for Cebu, it was learned that she had married a handsome but irresponsible man from a well-known Spanish mestizo family. She had achieved her fondest dream of marrying well, but was said to be very unhappy. This was not surprising because in Mindanao everybody accepted that men would play around and break hearts, but the true love of a virtuous wife would triumph in the end. Her role was to suffer and wait and to forgive.

The biggest shock of all hit town when rumors spread fast that she had committed suicide. Everybody, even schoolchildren like me, turned out at her parents’ home for the wake. I cannot forget the heartbreaking scene. In her coffin, she looked like she was just asleep, a lovely woman dressed in her wedding gown, her long, black hair cascading beside the white veil. There was no visible trace that she had taken Endrin, a toxic insecticide, and must have endured great pain.

She had apparently scripted her wake and funeral down to the last detail. A long handwritten letter in chilling English that she made before she died was passed around and even I had my turn to read it.

What I can recall about what she wanted everybody to know was her obsessive but unrequited love for her man. She was swept off her feet and married him despite grave warnings from family and friends. She was marrying above her station, she was warned, and that meant wasting her life. She was bent on proving everybody wrong, that her great love for him would right all wrongs. But at some time her sense of total denial gave out and she had to concede that she was totally mistaken. In desperation, she felt she had to end her life. It was pride, I guessed later, that killed her.

Addressed to her husband, the letter began with a stern warning: “You must let everybody in my town read this letter or I’ll haunt you wherever you are for the rest of your life.”

The day of the funeral was worthy of a future Lino Brocka movie about the petty but destructive tyranny of small-town life. The whole town (even schoolchildren were excused from classes) marched to the cemetery where the waiting grave was dug outside sanctified ground, the deceased having taken her own life.

Just as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, there was a commotion. Her contrite-looking husband and his stylish mother and sister, all dressed in black, had come to say goodbye. He was tearful as he took a rose and threw it down to the grave. At this point, there was a loud and blood-curdling wail of reproach coming from an old aunt of the deceased.

“I kept telling you,” the lady cried out to her dead niece as she pointed accusing fingers at the uninvited intruders, “never to trust these rich but cruel people. They are the scum of the earth, look at them pretending to be sorry. They have no shame!”

One after another, the mother, sisters and female relatives of the bereaved family fainted, apparently in embarrassment. They had been stoic and unemotional all along, trying their best to give their loved one a dignified farewell. And then this spectacular outburst that seemed so tawdry and déclassé. What happened next was a blur with everybody rushing out of the emotionally explosive scene.

Not quite as tragic but sadly mean-spirited was the wild eruption of malice and innuendo that brought down our once-respected high school principal, a married man, and our unmarried lady librarian.

He was a debonair and learned man from Luzon, perhaps one of the best educators turned out by the public school system. She was not bad looking, rather buxom and well built, just a bit past her prime and very strict in the sense that a librarian guarded books like a hawk and compelled everybody to be silent.

I admired the two of them and they made me feel important in school. When rumors started that they were having an affair, I counted myself among their silent defenders. But I was pushed aside by many others who condemned them for immorality.

I wasn’t condoning what they supposedly did; I just saw no point in being part of the lynch mob that was out to drag them before public ridicule and to run them out of the school. I had just seen Peyton Place and I dreaded the consequences of the scandal.   

An official hearing was held to investigate the resulting case of immorality. It was held in the faculty room, where the main witness, the janitor, testified that he and a male teacher had watched the two accused having quickie sex through a peephole in the adjoining physics classroom. He was very graphic about the steamy scene he and his companion allegedly saw: the half-dressed librarian leaned on a table as the principal, his pants down and naked posterior showing, kept “pumping and pumping her.”

Throughout the hearing and in full view of a standing-room audience, the principal sat silently behind dark glasses; the librarian showed no emotion. They just vanished after the investigation concluded that day, like they never existed and had never been a part of our lives. I always wondered whatever happened to them, but never found out.

What struck me even at that time, long before I became a law student, was that they had committed no grave crime and that the punishment of being driven from their jobs was too harsh and cruel. The only real victim, if at all, was the principal’s wife who resided far away. We never met her and her voice was never heard. How would we know if she forgave him, if they resolved their problems and got back together again? Or if they separated and moved on?

As for the librarian, she was a lonely woman and I couldn’t blame her for falling for the charms of the distinguished-looking and virile principal. How do we know if they were really in love and not just playing games? Or if they somehow renewed their passionate affair in another time and place and lived happily ever after? For that matter, what’s so wrong about two lonely people stealing a few intimate moments together? Who really knows the secrets of the human heart?

But I do agree that their one fatal mistake was being too indiscreet and careless to act out their private feelings in a public place. Yes, behind closed doors, but where peeping toms could be lurking behind the wall — as, in fact, they were. And not to overlook the wrath of a sanctimonious faculty and an excitable public out there thrilled to the gills to bare the dirty little secrets of others.

At the very least, the principal was not a dirty old man preying on nymphets and she wasn’t a cougar staking out young boys. They were consenting adults, for goodness gracious, and that should have kept busybodies from making a mountain out of a molehill. But then again, if fairness and privacy had prevailed, our town would have stayed dull and boring. It would not have turned into yet another Peyton Place of bittersweet memories we still get excited about in our approaching sunset years.

* * *

E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com.