A Bunch of Keys
Summary
A sun-bleached roadside hotel, half prairie palace and half mirage, becomes the stage for a carnival of masks when three cousins—Rose’s lace parasol propriety, May’s gilded sighs, and Teddy’s whip-crack laughter—learn that the only passport to their late uncle’s dusty empire is the verdict of a traveling drummer who must crown one of them the ugliest. Into this powder keg glides Snaggs, a lawyer whose smile arrives five minutes before his ethics, clutching a will that smells of mothballs and malice. He has already discarded the wealthy widow Matilda Jenkins like an out-of-fashion bustle; now he angles to marry into the Keys fortune by turning Teddy’s freckled impudence into a commodity of ugliness. But Teddy, all knees and elbows and reckless moonlight, counters by trading her petticoat for a drummer’s dusty coat, while her sisters cloak themselves in outlandish Parisian accents and veils thick enough to hide vendettas. Beneath the lobby’s sagging chandelier, anarchists—hired by rival suitors who would rather dynamite legality than court it—creep with a bomb timed to cough the safe’s secrets into the open. In the ensuing soot-black farce, every corset string snaps, every mustache unpeels, and the will finally confesses its gentlest clause: the girls may simply share. The explosion leaves no one unscathed, yet every face—stripped of powder, pretense, and patriarchal arithmetic—becomes, for the first time, truly beautiful.
Synopsis
Three Keys girls quarrel over a hotel left by their uncle, each claiming the property. Rose and May are very prim and put on all the airs of country belles, while Teddy is a harem-scarem tomboy, full of mischief and fun. Snaggs, a designing old lawyer, has the will of the uncle, and he has just jilted Matilda Jenkins, a wealthy widow, because she lost her fortune, and now plots to win the hand of one of the Keys girls, and get the hotel. He tells the girls their uncle has left all his property to the one who shall be declared the homeliest by the first drummer who stops at the hotel. They all refuse to enter the contest, Snaggs therefore makes love to Teddy, trying to get her to consent to pose as the ugliest of the daughters. Grimes, Teddy's suitor, suspects Snaggs and urges the girls to get hold of the will. Rose and May disguise themselves as foreign women and go to the hotel in the hopes of discovering it. The widow is already there in man's attire, hoping to get a chance to get revenge on Snaggs. Teddy dresses as a drummer and also takes a room at the hotel, in order to put one over on Snaggs. Snaggs falls into her trap and bribes her to pick out the homeliest. In the meantime the two suitors of Rose and May have hired anarchists to blow up the safe and get the will. They put a bomb under the safe just when all the principals are arguing in the lobby. They get the will but Teddy grabs it and reads a clause which says the sisters can divide the property if they wish. Then ensues a battle in which all are more or less damaged, disguises are torn off and the identities of all revealed.
