Publisher's Synopsis
Trinity Island, is a summer romance about young adults gathered on an Island in the Potomac River for advanced study of music, art, and theater. Charles Abell, president of the local college, joins them and gathers skills and experiences sacrificed to the rigors of administration and strives to regain the poetry in his soul: There, on the porch of a house in Chigger City, looking down the jetty at the crab boats and the birds wheeling around them, he was beginning to free himself from the responsibility of working with the tide. He did not miss the irony of his finding beauty and enjoyment in the crab boat, driven by necessity, like the college president, to repeat the process of catching and keeping. The human spirit burns brightly among the students on Trinity Island as they search for identity in passionate relationships, fueled by the fervor of creative expression and the demands of art. It is a place where life becomes a play within a dream and youthful passion overruns its cups in the exploration of art, sex, and spirituality. Pila, a student archeologist, unearths the legend of Santasay, the beautiful concubine of Captain Neale whose ghost is still be seen around island waterways. Leighanne, a virginal young actress of extraordinary talent, explores her budding freedom; Rose, her marriage on the rocks, struggles as a newborn writer and experiences a metamorphosis from dowdy minister's wife to Salome, the biblical seductress; and the exquisite Andora, a painter, searches for the courage to shed her past and embrace her freedom and the future with Luke, a young writer. Maestro, the mellow playwright in residence, writes in a letter to his wife, We make up our days and night with talk-of ideas, reality, and of things that never were and never shall be. We pretend to be philosophers: the young man, Luke, is wildly, poetically in love and will be a writer some day; Charles, our president in residence is cautious, yet inventive, a decent chap, driven by the needs of his college; and here am I, sagacious and outrageous enough in my opinions to frighten the young graduate students. We are time-we three-present, past, and future thrown into this bubbling milieu that is more art than living, more soul than mind, more freedom than duty. All of our work and study must come to a close within a few weeks, and I have a foreboding of how it will end. Other characters who spice this imaginative literary meal are Ward, a concert pianist, whose incidental love affair threatens to unbalance his drive for artistic success; Possum, a caricature of romantic lust and love, washes away his passion in a splash of Coca Cola; and Lester, a minister with a golden voice, yearns to be an astrologer but cannot see his own untimely destiny.
