Heartbreak Hotel - Hardcover

Anne Rivers Siddons

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671223151 ISBN 13: 9780671223151

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1976

Synopsis

A storm breaks across the campus when unexpected events cause Maggie to reject fraternity parties, homecoming queen contests, Elvis Presley records and the other aspects of Southern college life in the 1950s

About this title

About the Author

Anne River Siddons was born in 1936 in Fairburn, Georgia, a small railroad town just south of Atlanta, where her family has lived for six generations. The only child of a prestigious Atlanta lawyer and his wife, Siddons was raised to be a perfect Southern belle. Growing up, she did what was expected of her: getting straight A's, becoming head cheerleader, the homecoming queen, and then Centennial Queen of Fairburn. At Auburn University she studied illustration, joined the Tri-Delt sorority, and "did the things I thought I should. I dated the right guys. I did the right activities," and wound up voted "Loveliest of the Plains."

During her student years at Auburn, the Civil Rights Movement first gained national attention, with the bus boycott in Montgomery and the integration of the University of Alabama. Siddons was a columnist for the Auburn Plainsman at the time, and she wrote, "an innocuous, almost sophomoric column" welcoming integration. The school's administration requested she pull it, and when she refused, they ran it with a disclaimer stating that the university did not share her views. Because she was writing from the deep South, her column gained instant national attention and caused quite "a fracas." When she wrote a second, similarly-minded piece, she was fired. It was her first taste of the power of the written word.

After graduation, she worked in the advertising department of a large bank, doing layout and design. But she soon discovered her real talents lay in writing, as she was frequently required to write copy for the advertisements. "At Auburn, and before that when I wrote local columns for the Fairburn paper, writing came so naturally that I didn't value it. I never even thought that it might be a livelihood, or a source of great satisfaction. Southern girls, remember, were taught to look for security."

She soon left the bank to join the staff of the recently founded Atlanta magazine. Started by renowned mentor, Jim Townsend, the Atlanta came to life in the 1960's, just as the city Atlanta was experiencing a rebirth. As one of the magazine's first senior editors, Siddons remembers the job as being, "one of the most electrifying things I have ever done in terms of sheer joy." Her work at the magazine brought her in direct contact with the Civil Rights Movement, often sitting with Dr. King's people at the then-black restaurant Carrousel, listening to the best jazz the city had to offer. At age 30, she married Heyward Siddons, eleven years her senior, and the father of four sons from a previous marriage.

Her writing career took its next leap when Larry Ashmead, then an editor at Doubleday, noticed an article of hers and wrote to her asking if she would consider doing a book. She assumed the letter was a prank, and that some of her friends had stolen Doubleday stationary. When she didn't respond, Ashmead tracked her down, and Siddons ended up with a two book contract: a collection of essays which became John Chancellor Makes Me Cry, and a novel of her college days, which became Heartbreak Hotel, and was later turned into a film, Heart of Dixie, starring Ally Sheedy.

As Ashmead moved on, from Doubleday to Simon & Shuster, then to Harper & Row, Siddons followed, writing a horror story, The House Next Door, which Stephen King described as a prime example of "the new American Gothic," and then Fox's Earth and Homeplace, about the loss of a beloved home.

It was in 1988, with the publication of her fifth book, the best-selling Peachtree Road, that Siddons graduated to real commercial success. Described by her friend and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation." With almost a million copies in print, Peachtree Road ushered Siddons onto the literary fast track. Since then the novels have been coming steadily, about one each year, with her readership and writer's fees increasing commensurately. In 1992 she received $3.25 million from HarperCollins for a three book deal, and then, in 1994, HarperCollins gave Siddons $13 million for a four book deal.

Now, she and her Heyward shuttle between a sprawling home in Brookhaven, Atlanta, and their summer home in Brooklin, Maine. She finds Down East, "such a relief after the old dark morass of the South. It's like getting a gulp of clean air...I always feel in Maine like I'm walking on the surface of the earth. In the South, I always feel like I'm knee-deep." But she still remains tied to her home in the South, where she does most of her writing. Each morning, Siddons dresses, puts on her makeup and then heads out to the backyard cottage that serves as her office. And each night, she and her husband edit the day's work by reading it aloud over evening cocktails.

Siddons' success has naturally brought comparisons with another great Southern writer, Margaret Mitchell, but Siddons insists that the South she writes about is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her relationship with the South is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize it."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The making of Maggie Deloach was a process as indigenous to her part of the South as the making of cotton textiles in the fortress-bricked mills that crouched over the muddy, fast-moving rivers of the Georgia and Alabama plateau country. But it was a process far more narrowly applied. In the cities of the South -- in Atlanta and Birmingham and Charlotte and Mobile and Charleston -- there were perhaps a hundred Maggies flowering in any given year, girls planted, tended, and grown like prize roses, to be cut and massed and shown at debutant balls and cotillions in their eighteenth year. Unlike roses, they did not die after the showing; instead, they moved gently into colleges and universities and Junior League chapters, and were then pressed between the leaves of substantial marriages to be dried and preserved.

In the smaller towns, there were always perhaps three or four current Maggies. And in the smallest, like Lytton, there was only a Maggie. Nevertheless, the technique of creation varied only in small details and circumstances. It was a process of rules, subtle, shaded, iron bylaws that were tacitly drafted in burned and torn households sometime during the Reconstruction by frail, reeling gentlewomen throughout the exploded South, laws for the shaping of new women who would be, forever after, impervious to casual, impersonal chaos. The formula lasted, with only those modifications that were a nod to the times, through a world war and a depression and another world war, and its end product, the young women of a certain caste of the South, were, on the main, as uniformly bright, hard, shining, and true as bullets from identical molds. There was no reason to think that The Rules would fail to hold, certainly no omens of mechanical malfunction, when the life of Maggie Deloach began.

And so it was that Maggie's making began far earlier than the April night of her conception in the mahogany bed with pineapple finials that stood in a high-ceilinged bedroom of the house that had belonged to four generations of Deloaches. Comer Deloach, just out of the University of Georgia law school, had brought Frances Hamilton there as a bride of twenty, a tall, unworldly, drooping farm girl fresh from a north Georgia female academy. For the first four years of their marriage, Frances and Comer had shared the house with Comer's mother, a still-pretty woman of such relentless Christian charity that she had driven Comer's father, a stout, flushed dentist, to increasingly frequent all-night fox and possum hunts with what she called his Cronies, in Lytton's surrounding pine woods. On one of those nights of drinking sour mash and following the baying speckled hounds, Big Comer had stumbled into an abandoned well on the deserted old Macintosh homeplace, covered only by tangled kudzu vines, and had broken his neck. By the time the fuddled Cronies had summoned old Dr. Clayton and the Lytton constabulary, with flashlights and ropes, Comer was dead.

For two years after his death, Elvira Deloach had lived comfortably alone on insurance and the considerable rentals from Deloach properties, largely in the black section of Lytton called Lightning, and had dispensed her charity to the less fortunate of Lytton and its environs via the funnel of the First Methodist Church of Lytton. And when Comer and Frances moved into the old Deloach place on Coleman Street, she leveled it at the young couple; chiefly at Frances, since Comer's proud new association with an Atlanta law firm meant an hour's train ride to the city, nine hours in the firm's library, and another chuffing hour's ride home. Frances Hamilton Deloach, conventional and biddable from her curly crown to her long, narrow feet, soon learned to fear, loathe, and obey her mother-in-law, and to ferment with tightly capped resentment even while she sat smiling with Elvira's missionary circle in the cool afternoon cave of her living room, studying Elvira's endless tracts and sewing awkwardly for the newly-come-to-Jesus in darkest Africa. Always, when as the junior member of the circle she was dispatched to the cavernous kitchen to bring in the tray of coconut cake and iced tea, prepared by muttering Theopal, she would hear the bee-drone of conversation drop to the level of a sweetly malignant litany, and she knew Elvira was sighing to a breath-held circle of Christian ladies about her daughter-in-law's ineptitude at the kitchen range and the lacy iron Singer sewing machine, her lack of initiative in the Work of the Church, and her inferior Hamilton antecedents. ("She tries, I suppose, but everybody knows they sharecropped until the twenties, at least, and the Good Lord only knows where they got money enough to send that child to Brenau. Jess MacLaren told me for a fact that there's no Hamilton money in his bank. Blood tells.")

By the time Maggie was conceived, Frances Deloach was unalterably a cowed and silently angry woman, but a confirmed standard-bearer of The Rules. They had, after all, gotten her off a sharecropper's red acres and into a lawyer's house.

Maggie's conception was accomplished in dead silence under cover of a spring thunderstorm and with the barest possible minimum of bedspring squeaking. Sanctified joy under her own roof was something Elvira Deloach effectively discouraged by calling softly to her son, through their connecting bedroom doors, that she thought she'd heard an intruding animal in the chicken coop, or that she'd heard an odd noise, almost like a moan; was Comer or Frances feeling ill? Or that she was "feeling her bad old stomach again" and would he please bring her a glass of Sal Hepatica, as she'd left her glasses on the sun porch again, silly woman that she was. She varied the timing of her nocturnal requests; a mutely furious Frances and a resigned Comer could not predict them. She died of a stroke -- quite possibly an undissipated clot of Christian charity -- before Frances's pregnancy was obvious even to her stiletto-sharp, tilted, cola-brown eyes. Frances Deloach was shocked and frightened when Maggie's baby eyes lost their unfocused blue and those same eyes stared at her from Maggie's small face.

From that moment on, as if to exorcise the ghost of old Elvira that, from time to time, looked at her out of those eyes, Frances drilled Maggie, tended her, groomed her, cherished her. Toward what, she could not have said, specifically. The Best for Maggie, she and Comer agreed when they discussed their child. Marriage ultimately, of course, a good one, but that was only a part of The Best. Safety, Frances meant, absolute, insular safety from the pain of an Elvira and all other pains ethereal and corporeal. But she did not know that this was what she meant.

There was never any doubt in the minds of Frances and Comer Deloach that the love they lavished on Maggie was honest love, nor was there in Maggie's mind, and Maggie still does not doubt it. Fierce, fathomless love is seldom wise love, but as Maggie told her therapist only a year ago, it is infinitely better than no love or cool, constructed affection.

Maggie was taken early and often to doctors, dentists, piano and art and dancing teachers, the better children's ready-to-wear departments, always in Atlanta. Sunday school and church services never began without Maggie Deloach, in that year's blue or burgundy velvet coat, leggings and bonnet to match. Piano and dancing recitals were never without her plodding, competent small fingers and feet and her grave face. Maggie was, for all her cadet training, a quiet child whose reticence looked sometimes like an oddly lovely sullenness, and sometimes was.

Maggie had the only Shetland pony in Lytton, and the only professional permanent wave given to a child.

She went, with only a few minor lapses, from Gerber babyhood into winsome toddlerhood into exemplary prepuberty. She was a bright child, and an increasingly and disturbingly pretty one. "Storm cuttin' up behind them eyes," Carrie would say, and a small surf of unease would wash over Frances. Maggie read early, and this made Frances inexplicably uneasy, also. Comer was charmed and amused when his small daughter ignored the carefully chosen books from Lytton's branch of the Carnegie Library and buried herself in his leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Walt Whitman. De Maupassant was regularly taken away from her.

"Comer, I don't mind her reading when she's resting or the weather's bad, but she's always got her nose in a book. She reads under the covers with a flashlight. She told me the other night that Harry Hotspur plays in the sandbox with her and she talks to him, and I've seen her out there, right by herself, talking to nobody for hours. Comer, it's just not right for a child to lose touch with... with... real things like that." Frances Deloach talked mainly in italics; it was always one of her greatest charms for her husband, and kept her a girl to him always.

"Let her read," he said. "She's smart as a whip, and it isn't trash she's reading, Frannie."

And so reading remained one of Maggie's small and constant rebellions.

Maggie spelled impeccably, and wrote small poems about her dogs and her pony on Blue Horse school tablets. She drew with an early and mechanical facility, though little imagination, an endless succession of rearing horses with flowing manes. And she had playmates, the handful of children her age who lived in Lytton proper. Most of Lytton's young lived on outlying farms and helped with the chores at an age when Maggie was still not allowed to cross the street, and Maggie knew little of their existence, except to see them in overalls and bare feet, spilling out of pickup trucks and going into Lytton's feed and hardware and grocery stores with their parents on Saturday afternoons. It was not that Frances and Comer Deloach considered them inferior to Maggie; indeed, Frances was fond of saying that her own childhood on a farm had been healthful and happy in the extreme. It was only that they had so little in common with her. This was true. Maggie would have found little to say to ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1976
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671223151
• ISBN 13: 9780671223151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 252