The Delectable Mountains Read online

  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

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  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.

  Trademarks: All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

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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.)