Theron Montgomery may be the quintessential Alabama writer, raised in Jacksonville, a graduate of Birmingham Southern, and with a long career as professor at Troy University.
Over the years Montgomery has published a novel, a collection of stories, a play, and a charming little memoir of his encounter with Truman Capote and his partner while visiting Jacksonville, “Driving Truman Capote.”
This new novel is set in fictional Springs, Alabama, modeled on Jacksonville. “The Street of Yearning” is a deceptively sophisticated little novel. Three children, Lara, Teucer and Ambrose, play together through one mid-sixties Alabama summer: board games, the TV of the time. Lara listens to her little transistor radio. At the insistence of the wildly imaginative Ambrose, they put on heroic skits in which they create scenes from “Gunsmoke” or knights in armor.
Life for the children is quiet, even boring, innocent. They don’t yet know what serious, even life and death drama, is going on around them.They will find out, whether they like it or not. Lara lives with her mother and grandmother, Marmee, in Harbor House, which they operate as a home for unwed mothers, a perfect setting in which to explore the vicissitudes of love. Montgomery’s epigraph is from Oscar Wilde: “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself.”
The young women who stay at Harbor House have been deceived, sometimes cruelly. The common lament is: “He said he loved me.” This novel is finally about love and courtship, often thwarted, its many forms, complications, infidelities, disappointments, including violence, with examples all over this too-small town.
Each morning a local old fellow, Ser Joseph, rides up to their porch on a horse and delivers a handful of flowers to Marmee. She accepts each day, but never does say she loves him. She loves elsewhere and it cannot be spoken about.
Across the street, “Colonel” Halbrock, Teucer’s father, lives with young Janea. The Colonel had been married, semi-happily, conventionally, with two daughters, when Janea, kitchen help, decided she was not going to cut up any more onions, went to the colonel and guaranteed she would give him a son.
“He forgot everything” and became “drunk on a dream and an urge.” He lost his job, his stock at the town bank, his position on the school board, and was removed from the vestry at St. Thomas Church, denied communion, and voted out of the Springs Hunting Club, The Masonic Order, the bridge club and the dinner club.
Mama and Marmee speculate: why do so many people suffer so much from love; why do we do it? Marmee opines, “everyone yearns for a partner, to dance, led by desire.” “[T]he call for love is more powerful than anything else and we will follow it …until someone or something beats it out of us.”
