by Michael Malone
FICTION
Painting the Roses Red
Dingley Falls
The Delectable Mountains
Handling Sin
Foolscap
Uncivil Seasons
Time’s Witness
First Lady
Red Clay, Blue Cadillac
The Last Noel
NONFICTION
Psychetypes
Heroes of Eros
Copyright © 1976, 2002 by Michael Malone
Cover and internal design © 2002 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover photos © Getty Images
Cover map © by Rand McNally, R.L.04-S-48
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The characters and events portrayed in The Delectable Mountains are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malone, Michael.
The delectable mountains, or, Entertaining strangers / by Michael
Malone.
p. cm.
Originally published: The Delectable Mountains. New York: Random House, 1976
1. College graduates—Fiction. 2. Summer theater—Fiction. 3. Young
men—Fiction. 4. Colorado—Fiction. 5. Actors—Fiction. I. Title:
Delectable mountains. II. Title: Entertaining strangers. III. Title.
PS3563.A43244 D45 2002
813’.54—dc21
2002006927
CONTENTS
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Floren Park
The People
Preface
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
Back Cover
FOR
Virginia, Pat, Ric, Maureen, Sheila, Elaine, Pug, Kareen, Stephen, Joey, Shayna, Lisa, Tom, Kelly, Shannon, and for Margaret Elizabeth Malone
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My grateful thanks to Kelley Thornton, Jacquelyn Posek, Amy Baxter, and Megan Dempster for all their talented help in preparing this edition of The Delectable Mountains.
The People
Devin Donahue
The protagonist, twenty-two years old, just graduated from Harvard, and out of schedule
Verl Biddeford
Devin’s childhood friend and moral guide
The Players
Leila Dolores Beaumont Thurston Stark
Devin’s first love and the force behind the summer stock company, Red Lagoon Players
Mittie (Mitchell) Stark
Leila’s melancholy actor husband, founder of the Players
Maisie (Madeline) Stark
Leila’s four-year-old daughter, canny and sweet
David Stark
Leila’s two-year-old son, curious and playful
Amanda Sluford Beaumont Thurston
Leila’s indomitable and garrulous mother
Nathan Wolfstein
Lonely, aging and ailing guest director; once famous, now forgotten.
Joely Finn
Company stage manager, with fiery red hair and politics, Devin’s summer roommate, and his partner in many bizarre adventures
Sabby Norah
Shy but gifted actor with slavish devotion to the theater and to her fellow Players
Pete Barney
Plump piano player for the Red Lagoon Theatre
Margery Dosk
Talented actor, impregnated by fellow player Marlin Owen, soon to be a Canadian
Marlin Owen
Actor who gets Margery Dosk pregnant and flees the draft in Canada
Ashton Krinkle
Actor, gothic and pretentious
Seymour Mink
Actor with great voice who also runs the box office
Suzanne Steinitz
Snobbish actor who somewhat resembles Devin’s former girlfriend.
Jennifer Thatcher
Actor who wishes she’d been alive to play Scarlett O’Hara
Ronny Tiorino
Actor with a glass eye and a Brandoesque style
Buddy Smith
Actor who never showed up because he was sent to Vietnam
Floren Park Locals and Visitors
Spurgeon Debson
Crazed artist and activist
Bruno Stark (Boris Elijah Strovokov)
Mittie’s rich, unpleasant father
Calhoun Grange
Cowboy movie star who drops in and dazzles them all, and who may be Nathan Wolfstein’s long-lost son
Sheriff Gabe Booter
Entirely too full of himself
Mrs. Booter
The sheriff’s widowed sister-in-law, runs the boarding house
Deputy Jimmy Maddox
The sheriff’s officious and unmotivated assistant
Dr. Calvin Ferrell
Floren Park general practitioner
Bonnie Ferrell
Dr. Ferrell’s fifteen-year-old daughter, dating Ronny Tiorino
Lady Red Menelade
Adds a discotheque to the Red Lagoon Bar to liven things up
Tony Menelade
Red’s uxorious husband, manager of the Red Lagoon Bar
Kim
Sad, overweight dancer at the Red Lagoon Bar, wants to get to California someday
Cary
Kim’s son, helps pack up the theater
Rings Morelli
Runs the porno store, friend of Lady Red’s, dates Kim the doughy dancer
Dennis Reed
Verl’s shallow seductive friend with the pickup
Tanya (Carlotta Sirenos)
Runaway wife, dancer at the Red Lagoon Bar, sleeps with Devin
Al Sirenos
Tanya’s husband, slugs Devin
Vic Falz
Spurgeon Debson’s artistic backer, an affluent hippie
Saul Fletcher
Floren Park’s mortician, kept busy this summer
Eddie Hade
Wealthy car dealer eager to spend money and impress anyone, especially Leila
Professor Aubrey
Devin’s affected Harvard mentor
Mr. Bipple
Inspector from the Department of Safety Regulations, has a clipboard
Mr. Edgars
Mr. Stark’s employee
Mr. Edmunds
Mr. Stark’s employee
Back Home
Mama
Devin’s mother, mostly deaf, known as the Rock of Gibraltar by her five children
James Dexter “J.D.” Donahue
Devin’s older successful brother
Jardin
Devin’s old girlfriend, now about to marry his older brother, James Dexter.
Fitzgerald Donahue
Devin’s younger brother, a politician and a pack rat
Colum Donahue
Devin’s other brother, who with a broken leg is leading a “soft life”
Maeve
Devin’s sister who married Harnley II and is mother to Harnley III
Harnley II
Maeve’s husband, away at ROTC camp
Harnley III
Maeve’s son with boiled feet
Leila’s Family Tree
Arvid Andrew Sluford
Leila’s great-great-grandfather
Buford Sluford
Arvid Andrew Sluford’s son
Kurbee Sluford
Buford Sluford’s son
Leila Rickey Sluford
Married Kurbee Sluford, a vegetable heiress and a literalist
Esther Sluford
Leila’s aunt, gorgeous and slow
Gene (Genesis) Sluford
Leila’s uncle, found God in the most unusual way
Nadine Sluford Clyde
Leila’s aunt
Ethan Clyde
Leila’s maternal uncle who married Nadine then retreated to the basement with his rabbits and rye whiskey, very kind to Leila
Brian Beaumont
Amanda’s first husband, Leila’s father, irresponsible
Mr. Beaumont
Brian Beaumont’s father, loved Leila and tried to make a family for her
Jerry Thurston
Amanda Thurston’s second already-married husband
Perche non sali il dilettoso monte ch’e principio e cagion di tutta gioia?
“Why don’t you climb that delectable mountain which is the origin and the source of all delight?” said Virgil to Dante, just before he took him down to hell.
Preface
The Sequel of My Resolution
When summer started in 1968, I awakened to find that at twenty-two I had run out of scheduled program and the rest was going to be up to me.
Until then, I’d gone where I was expected to go—school, sports, clubs, dates, and political rallies.
My parents had named me Devin William Butler Donahue. Courtesy of my father, I could move in and out of Irish blarney with the grand imperturbability of a champion Chinese checkers player. Courtesy of my mother, I was accustomed to regarding this tendency as evidence of creative imagination rather than of moral turpitude. Thinking that way was what got her married to him in the first place. A cliché (as all southerners are), my mother was a lady teacher of English literature who played the piano in the evenings; she married him on Yeats’s birthday, eloping in a green Ford, which she had bought him with the money she had gotten for selling her piano.
Mama thought she was joining up with the Playboy of the Western World, which, considering his abrupt departure (in a later model Buick) some nine years later, may have been a testament to her perspicacity. Among the things he left behind him were his recordings by John McCormack, a sizable bill at a clothing store, and the five of us. We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a flourish even after he left us. (Maybe it was with a vengeance then, but if so, only Mama knew it.) She read us all about Cuchulain and the Easter Sunday Uprising, just as she’d named us all out of Irish poetry. Devin means poet, and W.B. is for William Butler Yeats, so I suppose I was baptised to tell my story: Poet Poet Donahue.
Modern novels are supposed to be about writing modern novels, they say, since all the stories have already been told—but not by all the storytellers.
Part One
The Land of the Leopard
Chapter 1
I Make Another Beginning
Like the country, I was really fouled up when summer started in 1968. The whole family was. When I say the whole family, I do not include (1) the father who had departed on a trial separation eighteen years before (the trial was ours), or (2) the eldest son, for reasons that will become apparent. Apart from them, there were five of us, and these five comprised the unit I refer to as the whole family. We were all fouled up. Mama was sick. My brother Colum had broken his leg by sliding it into a medical student in the semifinals of the softball intramurals. He had been lying on the living room couch for weeks now.
Our sister Maeve was home with her two-year-old son, Harnley III, while Harnley II was away at ROTC camp. She had been staying at his parents’ home in Richmond, until she found their cook, Thelma, boiling Harnley III’s feet in a pan of pot liquor (which is turnip-green juice) as a purgative or curative against his walking on his tiptoes, which after that he didn’t do for some time. Harnley’s parents asked Thelma to apologize, but she said she was not changing her ways for a child that was having children of her own, leastways out of books, when she (Thelma) had raised seven of her own, all of which was doing just fine, to the glory of the Lord. But Maeve couldn’t find pot liquor in Dr. Spock, so she strapped Harnley III in his car seat, his gauzed and taped feet sticking straight out in front of him, and headed home to us. It was the habit of Mama’s family to live in Earlsford, which is why she brought us back there from Clemson after the divorce. Her folks told her divorce’s what happened to people who moved away in the first place.
The youngest and tallest of us was Fitzgerald; Mama told everyone to stop accenting the first syllable, but no one remembered. He was the only one at home with any money. At sixteen, Fitzgerald wore a three-piece seersucker suit and carried his textbooks in an attaché case. Having gotten himself elected to whatever was available since he was six, he already held the governorship of the state gleaming before him like a Rotary Club Loving Cup. Meanwhile, he was after the presidency of Earlsford High School.
The oldest and shortest, James Dexter, lived in New York City, but managed, even from up there, to reach down into my life and louse things up. We did not really think of James Dexter as being in the family any more. He had his own life. J.D. was a grown-up. And successful. Apparently he’d been both since shortly after he was born. He was more grown up than Mama, who was capable of silliness. She’d talk to a hamster for half an hour. She’d drink too much wine and flip a spoonful of mashed potatoes onto the ceiling. She’d put a plastic banana in my lunch box. None of these things James Dexter would have done even if delirious. He had control of his life, seemed to understand what it was supposed to be about. He had directions, and achievements, and programs for success. This was more than the rest of us, even Fitzgerald, could always claim. Instead, life had a puzzling way of getting on top of us, and we often found the basic mechanics of manipulating it a mysterious skill beyond either our capacity, or our inclination, or our mastery. We made it only to the semifinals.
So we all admired James. We admired his cleverness and talents,
the image he had of himself. He wore beautiful clothes and won lots of awards. I suppose we even came to admire his being a little ashamed of us. His taste was very refined.
He went to Cornell. So I went to Harvard. I felt better for a while. Then at the end of my freshman year, Mama wrote me that James had won a Rhodes scholarship. That summer I carelessly stuck my hand into my friend Lampie Frederick’s power mower.
When he came back from Oxford, James Dexter went to work for an advertising agency in New York City. At home, Mama, Maeve, and Fitzgerald sat like robots in front of the television set, constantly switching the channels out of fear that they might miss one of J.D.’s three commercials one time. TV had been a real pleasure of mine. On St. Patrick’s Day, he flew from New York into Raleigh with shopping bags full of store-wrapped packages. “They charge a dollar to wrap them like that,” Fitzgerald told us. One visit he brought Mama a mink stole, which she wore to the airport when he left and then had stored at the cleaner’s. On three consecutive Christmases, he gave me the same set of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies.
Then, in my senior year, I fell in love. Her name was Jardin, and she was studying the violin. I took her to New York to meet my big brother the New York Advertiser. He treated us to dinner in French and took us to a special small showing of large paintings at the Guggenheim. In April, they got engaged. They even drove up to Cambridge in J.D.’s Alfa and took color slides of me in Harvard Yard “to show the family.” That was the end of May, 1968. They offered me a ride home, but I took a Trailways bus.
On the night of May 30th, I was thinking about whether to shoot myself before, after, or during their wedding. (J.D. hated a scene.) We were all sitting in the living room of the stucco house. Mama, Maeve, baby Harnley, Colum, and I. It was the eighteenth house we’d rented since I was born, for we were always being evicted because of our animals or loud records, or because the landlords thought Mama might be a communist. Or Mama would say we weren’t going to stay there any longer because of a conflict in principles, or because the plaster fell out of the bathroom ceiling on her head while she was in the tub reading, or because she had to kill a rat by throwing a can of Campbell’s soup at it (which Colum and I admired enormously, as we were then with the Little League). So we moved a lot.
We remembered each house by a system of architectural referents: the Ugly Green House, the Rat House, the House with a Basement, the Upstairs Apartment, or the Stucco House, which is where we were then. For a week, all of us had been pretty much living in the front room there because it had a little air conditioner that Mama’s brother Norwood had lent her. Winter is a much better time to be grief-stricken, so naturally now it was in the high nineties and so humid it was like breathing cotton fuzz. (What I mean is, you look sadder in a gray overcoat with a scarf around your neck than you can in tennis shorts and sneakers, with your skin gummy from the heat.)
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