Summary
A single thud of skull against parquet—six-year-old Millicent Hawthorne, silk-sashed heiress to a dynasty of Astor-grade opulence, tumbles from gilded oblivion into the cracked palms of Mother Gumpf, a matriarchal Fagin bedecked in paste jewels and moral rust. The robbery is mere prologue; what follows is a vertiginous Bildungsroman stitched from sooty velvet and champagne lace. Memory, that mercury serpent, slips through the fissure in her cranium, leaving only nocturnal after-images—crystal chandeliers, governesses who smell of lavender water, a mother’s distant aria of disappointment. By daylight she is Gumpf’s nimblest shadow, fingers faster than guilt, lifting timepieces and innocence with equal aplomb. Puberty transmutes her into a cabaret nymph, all ostrich plumes and knees that could bruise the moon, yet every arabesque is haunted by a half-remembered lullaby in a language of pearls. Recognition arrives like a thrown knife: a family friend glimpses the signature Hawthorne dimple beneath the greasepaint and scurries to the repentant matriarch who has spent six years perfecting maternal anguish in a mansion gone sepulchral. The final reel is a rescue opera staged in nicotine fog—Kraft, the predatory impresario, becomes Minotaur; the Hawthornes, armored in privilege and surgical steel, slay him with courtroom rhetoric and a cranial operation that re-stitches identity itself. Millicent wakes to a mother’s perfume, the past flooding in like sunrise over a battlefield, and for one shimmering instant the audience must decide whether the dream she leaves behind was the gutter or the ballroom.
Synopsis
During a jewelry-store holdup, 6-year-old Millicent Hawthorne, the neglected daughter of a wealthy socialite, falls on her head and is carried home to be reared by Mother Gumpf, the leader of the thieves. The fall cost Millicent her memory, but at night she dreams of her former high-society existence, while during the day she works for Gumpf as a pickpocket and later becomes a cabaret dancer. A friend of the Hawthornes sees Millicent perform, recognizes her, and reports back to Mrs. Hawthorne, who has vowed to be a devoted mother should she ever find her daughter. Finally, after the Hawthornes rescue Millicent from Kraft, the lecherous cabaret manager, an operation restores her memory, and she delights in the love of her long-lost mother.
