Colony (74 page)

Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Chick-Lit, #Contemporary

BOOK: Colony

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Fancy, those children knowing that old song….

I rise and run lightly down the steps. The screen door bangs behind me. Mother Hannah will be furious; she hates it when I do that. There is laughter from the tennis court, and applause. The air is crystal blue and sweet with lilac. I hear the Potters’ screen door bang too, and Amy calls, “Maude. You there? Maude?”

The car stops at the foot of the driveway.

“Maude,” he calls. “Over here, Maude.”

The heavy door opens and he is there, smiling, his sleeves rolled up on his tanned forearms, the flaxen hair, as usual, in his eyes. Gray eyes, eyes like sea water. The sun burns on his face and hair. He is all light, all flame.

“Peter, my dearest heart. Peter. Hello, love. You see? I did wait….”

Author’s Note

T
here are still a few old summer colonies left in Maine, places where for generations the same families have come each summer, to leave the present-day world behind and immerse themselves in an older, simpler one. The present world, however, has other ideas and leans close around these enclaves now, in many cases literally knocking on their doors.

I have often felt that after this generation of elders is gone, there will be few left who remember what slow, sweet summers those in the old colonies were like. Families will still return, but the “real” world will come and go with them. This is inevitable, and on the whole, a substantial loss.

Retreat Colony does not exist, though in feeling it may perhaps come close to some of the older and more isolated ones Down East. Neither have I intended that any of the characters in this book have their counterparts in colony-goers anywhere, living or dead. The Chamblisses, the Potters, the Willises and their peers in Retreat exist only in my mind and heart, and now, I hope, in yours as well.

Cape Rosier does indeed exist, pretty much where I have set it, and is still, to my eyes, one of the wildest 611

and most beautiful parts of the Maine coast, though that, too, is changing as developers discover what natives and summer people have known for a long time. As novelists are wont to do, I have changed some of the geography of the cape and surrounding territory, and moved some of its landmarks around, and relocated some of its roads and harbors, and even added a few of my own. But I hope lovers of this wild and lovely place will recognize the spirit and substance of it.

I am grateful to many people who have touched
Colony
in its making, either directly or indirectly. Some of them are: Virginia Barber and Larry Ashmead, agent and editor, who cleared the jungle and laid the roadbed, as they always do…

Martha Gray, who processed these words and kept perfect track of many disparate threads…

Sunny Toulmin and Jane Hooper, who lovingly collected the memories of a score of members of our own Maine colony in one enchanting little book, from whose ambience I have borrowed liberally, if not its facts…

My friend Sue Dawson, beautiful in every way, whose memories of wartime colony summers I have appropriated and transmuted into Maude Chambliss’s…

Connie and Bill McCornick, gone now, who made Maine literally magical for me in so many ways…

My mother-in-law, Annalee Hagerman Siddons, who has loved being “at Maine” for sixty-five summers now, and passed that love along to me with both hands…and my husband Heyward, who took me there twenty-five summers ago and is, in that place as well as this, both anchor and wings.

Thanks and love to all of you.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Atlanta, Georgia

January 5, 1992

E-book Extra

Being and Otherness:

A Reading Group Guide

Colony
by Anne Rivers Siddons

“I have always written about women on their way from fragility into health, into some kind of strength.”

Topics for Discussion

1. How does Maude permeate the rigid status quo of Retreat?

Does she ever truly become an insider? Does her quintessential “otherness” ever help her in her journey?

2. Compare Maude’s intimate friendship with Micah Willis, with her father-in-law’s parallel relationship with Sarah Fowler. Do these platonic love affairs ultimately hurt or benefit their respective marriages? Do you agree with Christina Willis’ assessment that such relationships can “stand side by side, but they can’t mingle?” Does Maude succeed in keeping her loves unmingled?

3. Maude, who once hated Retreat and Liberty with all her heart, eventually finds herself being its only defender. What does Retreat, despite all its faults, offer Maude that no other person or place can? What does Maude sacrifice in order to keep Liberty?

4. Late in the novel, the novel’s narrator shifts from Maude to her granddaughter, Darcy. What effect does this device have on you as a reader? Does your perception of Maude change after seeing her through Darcy’s eyes?

5. What is the metaphoric significance of ospreys in the novel? How are osprey families similar to and different from their human counterparts in Retreat?

6. The colony of Retreat is much like a bee colony: the older women are the queen bees, and the younger women are the drones. How does a life of servitude affect the younger generation? Why is there such a high rate of madness among the young women of the colony: Happy, Darcy, and Elizabeth? Does this peculiar type of matriarchy truly confer power on its women? Who benefits from this system?

7. Micah Willis often tells Maude that she can never bridge the gap between being one of the “summer folk” and one of the “natives.” Does their relationship ever traverse this boundary? Is it possible for them to surmount their class differences?

About the Author

Anne Rivers Siddons
has written fifteen bestselling novels, including
Outer Banks, Colony
, and
Up Island
, which are available from PerfectBound e-books.

By Anne Rivers Siddons

Fiction

Heartbreak Hotel

The House Next Door

Fox’s Earth

Homeplace

Peachtree Road

King’s Oak

Outer Banks

Colony

Hill Towns

Downtown

Fault Lines

Up Island

Low Country

Nora, Nora

Islands

Nonfiction

John Chancellor Makes Me Cry

PRAISE FOR ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

AND

COLONY

“Anne Rivers Siddons’s novels…pull you into the internal landscape of her characters’ lives and hold you there.”

People magazine

“Siddons draws precise, unforgettable portraits…read this, get lost in it.”

Cosmopolitan

“Siddons has always written well, but she emerges here as an elegant stylist…Don’t miss it.”

Newsday

“No matter how high the emotional mercury rises in your own summer, there is a cool breeze Down East…a world of old wealth, damask and cashmere, young love to luxuriate in.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“
Colony
is a book to grab and not put down, to dream about and to savour. It’s highly recommended.”

Indianapolis Star

“Highly engaging…Excellent writing…a powerfully good read.”

Philadelphia Inquirer

“Anne Rivers Siddons at her best…Characters are memorably well-drawn and invite our involvement. Siddons has her readers feeling the salt spray, smelling low tide, hearing the applause after a successful regatta and seeing the aging matriarchs on their chairs at the Colony’s Yacht Club.”

Rocky Mountain News

“Written with a consummate grace.”

Detroit News

“Siddons again proves with
Colony
what a gifted storyteller she is.”

Oxford Review

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint: Excerpt from “Two Tramps In Mud Time” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1963 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost, Ballantine.

Copyright © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Excerpt from “Ash Wednesday” in
Collected Poems
1909-1962
by T.S. Eliot, Copyright © 1963 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1964, © 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

COLONY. Copyright © 1992 by Anne Rivers Siddons. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader October 2003 eISBN 0-06-059087-4

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

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Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

http://www.perfectbound.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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