Shenandoah Summer

by John Muncie

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jody Jaffe and John Muncie

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: August 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-446-53416-1

  Contents

  Also by John Jaffe

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  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

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Part 2

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Also by John Jaffe

  THIEF OF WORDS

  To Terry Miller and John Fuller,

  who prove home is where your friends are.

  We would like to thank the following people:

  Carla Golembe. She taught us not only how to draw, but how to see like an artist. Her beautiful paintings and passion for art inspired us.

  Natalie Wolf. Her exuberant love for teaching drama to kids was the foundation of this book. Thank you for letting us cannibalize parts of your life.

  Suny Monk and the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts. Limespring is an arts colony of our imagination. Our fellowship to the VCCA allowed us to imagine it.

  Don Schofield, for his expertise in Greek dance and for the long walks and even longer talks about love, life, and poetry.

  Laura Judkins, for sharing her accident experiences.

  Betsy Parker, for sharing her vast equine knowledge.

  Phyllis Richman, for, once again, reading as many drafts as we gave her.

  Dr. John Davidson, entomology professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, for his glowworm help.

  Ben and Sam Shepard, for being two great young men.

  Esther Newberg, whose support provides welcome comfort in the tough world of publishing. And her always helpful and cheerful assistants, Andrea Barzvi and Christine Bauch.

  Jamie Raab, for her terrific editing.

  Tina Adreadis, for her publicity help.

  The booksellers and readers who supported Thief of Words.

  “The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve:

  Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.”

  —A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  PROLOGUE

  (1991)

  There are four things Alyssa Brown knows for sure:

  She’d kill to protect her family. On the eighth day God created Shakespeare. No matter how little she ate, she’d never get below 131 pounds. And there is such a thing as love at first sight.

  She didn’t know the last one until an early July day in 1991 when she stood in an overgrown grassy field in Markham, Virginia.

  “This is it!” Alyssa spun around, startling the real estate agent as she flung her arms in a wide arc and declared her love. “No need to go any further, B.J. I’m going to make your job simple. I love it, I love it, I love it.”

  Darryl Brown, who hadn’t even gotten out of B.J. Goode’s Land Rover yet, looked at the clapboard tenant house with the faded yellow paint, four tiny windows, and cockeyed front steps. “Am I missing something here, Lissy? What exactly do you love about this dump?”

  Alyssa walked back to the car, opened the door, took his hand, and said, “Come here, you have to see the herb garden and the little barn out back and the creaky porch swing.”

  Darryl scanned the view in front of him. “Lissy, I don’t see anything but weeds, and this place doesn’t even have a porch, let alone a porch swing.”

  She tugged on his arm. “Oh come on, you sourpuss, where’s your imagination? We can make this place anything we want. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down,” Darryl said. “I think we should take a look around before we buy it, don’t you? B.J., what’s the story here?”

  B.J., a woman in her fifties who wore earthy tweeds and spoke with the chiseled diction of Katharine Hepburn, went into high sales-pitch gear.

  “It’s a lovely property, isn’t it? I showed it just yesterday to another young couple from Washington like yourselves.”

  Darryl rolled his eyes at Alyssa. She squeezed his hand and shot him a warning look. B.J. continued: “The house was built right after the Civil War. I’m certain you could list it on Virginia’s historic house registry. It might need a little updating, but that’s part of the charm, don’t you think? And that view—well, what can I say? This is simply the best-sited property I’ve seen in quite a while. You should see it in the fall. The foothills over there turn the most spectacular colors. It’s breathtaking, just breathtaking. You won’t find a more suitable property in your price range. I’ve been in this business for thirty years . . .”

  Alyssa left Darryl to the particulars as B.J. continued talking. She walked to the crooked front steps and sat down. She’d let her husband listen to the numbers; she knew what she saw. Stretching before her were miles of varying shades of green, all curving in and out of each other like Florentine paper. Blue-green fescue hayfields rolled up against deep green forests that gave way to bright green pasturelands. She counted three red barns of neighboring farms and nearly two dozen black dots that were cows or horses. At the very farthest reach of her view, the muted outlines of the Blue Ridge Mountains zigzagged against the horizon, making a smoky violet border against a cloudless sky.

  It was the kind of view she’d been imagining since she was a little girl looking out her bedroom window. Then, there’d only been the backs of red-brick row houses and an alley to see, but in her imagination there were hills and trees and mountains and horses.

  Always there were horses. Horses for horse-crazy Alyssa, who every Sunday became cowgirl, trick rider, and grand champion aboard the plodding horses that filed, nose to tail, along the cobblestone streets of West Philadelphia into Fairmount Park. She’d clean stalls all day Saturday at Mike’s Stables on Girard Avenue, just to get a chance to rid
e on Sunday.

  It wasn’t until ninth grade, when she stole the show singing “America” in the Beeber Junior High School production of West Side Story, that horse fever gave way to the stronger urge to perform. But even later, after college, during her brief New York fling with Off-Off, cafés, callbacks, and waitressing, she never completely lost her longing for the country.

  For a while, the possibilities of New York were enough. Then on a bad day, after a bad week, when a callback didn’t come and the tips were terrible at Eddie’s and the sky was so gray it blended into the buildings, she saw the yellow ponytail of a passing girl and it reminded her of the flaxen tails she used to brush at Mike’s. She was at the bottom of a chilly concrete canyon on West 36th Street. No place for a horse; no rolling pastureland; no big skies with long, clean views; no smell of green or sweat or speed.

  Two months later she left the City.

  A small black bird with yellow wings made a ruckus overhead. The air hummed with newly hatched summer bugs. A cow mooed in the distance. Alyssa leaned back on the step, took a deep breath, and exhaled. Her shoulders sank down, her spine rounded, her muscles softened. She felt wrapped in the strong arms of the surrounding hills.

  This was the place she’d always imagined.

  She looked over at her husband and B.J., who was motioning vividly with her hands, pointing here and there to various attributes of the property. Darryl had that expression, the same one he got when salespeople read labels to him.

  “Hey B.J.,” Alyssa called out, “what’s that tree you’re standing under with the crazy pink plumes? It looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.”

  B.J. glanced up. “It’s a mimosa,” she said.

  “Mim-mo-sah,” Alyssa repeated, as if it were an introduction. “Well, Ms. Mim-mo-sah, you’re so beautiful, I’d marry you if I were a tree.”

  That silenced the real estate agent for a moment. But only a moment. She smiled wide, forced a little laugh, and said to Darryl, “Marrying a tree, that’s a new one. Your wife has a wonderful imagination.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Darryl said, walking to Alyssa and putting an arm around her waist. “She’s an actress, if you haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Alyssa dipped her head against his shoulder. “Was an actress,” she said. “That was twenty pounds and ten years ago. Now I teach drama to high school kids.”

  B.J. clapped her hands. “So you’re in the arts. How perfect! You’ll never believe what’s just down the road—Limespring, the famous arts colony. It’s filled with people of your ilk.”

  As B.J. turned toward the house, Alyssa looked at Darryl, twisted her face into a goofy expression, and mouthed, “Ilk?”

  “Let’s go inside, shall we?” B.J. said, fumbling with the lockbox on the front door. “Now remember, it may need a little updating.”

  The house didn’t have central heat or kitchen cabinets; there was a hole in the bathroom floor; a colony of ladybugs blackened the back windows. “I’ve always wanted to learn how to plumb,” Alyssa said, after Darryl pushed down on the toilet lever and nothing happened. “Maybe I could get a pair of jeans that slide halfway down my butt.”

  B.J. pretended not to hear and directed the couple back to her car. “I think we should take a look from the top of the hill in back of the house. That way I can point out the property lines.”

  They drove up through the pasture and stopped where the forest began. From there they could see miles of Fauquier County, Virginia. “Right now we’re halfway up what locals call Mount Buck,” B.J. said.

  Alyssa looked down to the house below. A couple hundred yards to its left, a pond nudged up against two small hills. She pointed that way and said, “Is that part of this property?”

  “Yes, the owner put the pond in himself. Lowers the homeowner’s insurance, you know. It was stocked—”

  “No, I mean the hills next to it. Those are on the property, too?”

  B.J. nodded, and before she had a chance to talk about the virtues of hills, Alyssa announced, “Well then, if this is Mount Buck, then that’s Mount Roz and the—”

  Darryl took his wife’s arm and led her out of B.J.’s earshot. “Alyssa, let’s take it one step at a time, okay? You’re already naming the mountains and I’m not even sure I want to do this.”

  She shook her arm free. “Not sure? You’ve been promising for years we’d do this, now you’re not sure? We’re living in a city because that’s where you want to live. All I’m asking for is weekends and summers in the country. This place is a steal and you know it. I think we both deserve to be happy, don’t you?”

  Forty-five minutes later, B.J.’s Land Rover was headed back out the dirt road that had led them to the farm; Alyssa in the front seat, Darryl in the back. The only one talking was B.J.

  “Stop for a second, please, B.J.,” Alyssa said. It wasn’t clear whether she meant talking or driving, but B.J. did both. Alyssa rolled down the window and looked out at the small yellow house with the red tin roof nestled in the hills behind her.

  Quietly she said, “This is what I’ve wanted since I was four. It looks like home. Finally, a farm.”

  Part 1

  CHAPTER 1

  (June 1, 2003)

  One year at Limespring a packet of letters, stored for decades in a metal box, was turned into a novel. Another time, the winged seeds of a sugar maple became the feathers of a fantastical bird of prey. A father’s forgetfulness, originally fashioned into a cycle of poems, was later refashioned there, against all convention, into an exultant movie script.

  Some people say Limespring is a magical place. So do some of the participants. And if you search, you can find the word “magical” attached to it in several magazine articles. But magic is a lazy word for what happens there; it’s too easy, too abracadabra. People agonize at Limespring. They work all night on a single page and fall asleep as the rising sun warms the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains and touches the tops of the Shenandoahs beyond; they cry in frustration over the gap between imagination and the shape of clay.

  And yet—though no one can say for sure when or where or why it works—there is a force at Limespring, a transformational power. How does a corn beetle become an eye in a famous face? At what point do words of regret begin to dance? Maybe what happens at Limespring is alchemy. If so, it’s an alchemy that brews up its potions using the most commonplace of ingredients: hard work and hope; experience and inspiration; luck, liquor, laughter, passion; and love.

  In fact, love most of all.

  Alvin Dwight Palifax Jr. (mercifully nicknamed Tug since he was six years old) was thinking about none of these things as he turned onto Limespring Hollow Road and followed the signs to the Commonwealth of Virginia Shenandoah Center for Creativity at Limespring Farm (mercifully nicknamed Limespring) on a June first that just happened to be prettier and brighter than a new daffodil.

  He wasn’t thinking about creativity or love or inspiration or even the beauty of the Virginia countryside as his battered black station wagon rattled down the tree-lined road.

  Tug was thinking about basketball. In particular, about the Soft Palettes, a team of alums from the Pratt Institute and gym rats from the Prospect Park YMCA. The Palettes had come in second last season in Brooklyn’s Summer Y League, Division II. The buzz was that Stacey Deal, power forward for the Hot Wires—the division champs—had gotten a job in Arizona. Stacey had once played college ball at Seton Hall. If he were gone, and if Tug stayed for the summer, the Soft Palettes had a chance.

  Shooting around before the Palettes’ first practice, Tug broached this idea to Joel Feinblom—video artist, waiter, carpenter, best friend, and shooting guard.

  Joel looked at Tug as if he’d just announced he’d become a Republican. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said. “Turn down Limespring? Do you know how many of us would kill for a summer there? Don’t be an idiot. Besides, I’m tired of hearing about Leonardo and your midlife crisis. Go listen to the crickets for a while. Go smell t
he corn, or whatever it is people do in the country. This is your chance and you’re going there if I have to take you myself. Don’t worry about the Palettes—I’ll send you a picture of the trophy.”

  Tug passed the ball out to Joel, who nailed a fourth straight three-pointer.

  “Besides,” Joel said, “if I keep shooting like this, we won’t need you.”

  Tug grabbed the ball and held it. “Yeah, and who’s gonna get the ball to you? I’m the only point guard we’ve got—and don’t start talking to me about Ed, he’s never gone left in his life.”

  Joel put his thumbs in his armpits and started flapping his bent arms. “Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck!” he squawked. “Come on, man, we both know what this is all about. Stop being a chicken. It’s a hell of a lot easier worrying about being great than actually trying for it. You think Leonardo sat around and whined about whether he could be a great artist? Just go. Maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll give up art and become a lawyer.”

  Joel finished his little speech by swatting the ball out of Tug’s grasp and making a drive to the basket. But Tug, timing it perfectly, leaped up and knocked Joel’s layup attempt out of bounds.

  “Oh, yeah!!” Tug shouted. He chased down the ball and dribbled it back to midcourt. “So, you don’t think I’m completely crazy to go to Limespring?”

  Joel guarded him halfheartedly as Tug took a shot beyond the foul line. It clanked off the side of the rim. “I didn’t say that at all. I think you are completely crazy. You’re showing around here; you’re selling. You just got into that Houston gallery, for Christ sakes. It all seems pretty good from my perspective. But maybe when I’m your age, old man, and maybe if I ever sell anything, I’ll have time to worry about the ‘transcendence and validity’ of my work. Until then, I’ll just worry about whether anyone other than my mother ever sees it.”

  “Hey, punk, I may be old but I can take you any day of the week,” said Tug, who was exactly one month older than Joel. He turned, shot, and missed again.