Summary
A tremulous waltz on a gas-lit gymnasium floor becomes the prologue to perdition when Jennie Marsh—white-collar drudge by day, moth-silk dreamer by night—accepts the courteous arm of Dan Bolton, whose smile already carries the metallic tang of handcuffs yet to be snapped. In the hush between two heartbeats he spirits himself to the Sanford mansion, lifts a dowager’s jewels as casually as picking apples, and vanishes, leaving Jennie to be netted by the electric glare of suspicion. A reformatory of gray gables and graver silences swallows her girlhood; letters from her consumptive mother arrive like paper birds, then cease. The telegram announcing the woman’s death is the final rivet in the iron mask Jennie thereafter wears. Emancipation finds her not penitent but pyrophoric: she will scorch the world that scorched her, beginning with the frosty matriarch who signed the complaint. Guided by Silent McKay—a burglar whose vocal cords seem as atrophied as his conscience—she descends into a city whose alleys exhale opium and brass-band jazz in equal measure. Mother De Vere’s boardinghouse, a doll’s house of delinquents, offers her a cracked mirror in which to rehearse vengeance: she will seduce young Sanford, the heir, and knot the noose of circumstantial evidence around his pampered neck. Yet the heart, that incorrigible traitor, negotiates a sweeter treaty; affection blooms like moss on brickwork, softening her resolve. When Sanford stands accused of a murder committed in the coal-black fog down by Crooked Street, Jennie must choose between the cold arithmetic of retribution and the incandescent gamble of absolution.
Synopsis
Employed as a maid to support her mother, Jennie Marsh is escorted home from a dance by Dan Bolton. He robs the house of her employer, Mrs. Sanford, while she is making a call there, and unjustly accused of the theft, she is sent to a reformatory. When her mother dies, Jennie becomes embittered against the world and swears vengeance on the woman who treated her unjustly. Upon her release she goes to the city, where she is aided by "Silent" McKay, a burglar who takes her to Mother De Vere's boarding-house, a hangout for criminals. There she meets young Sanford and plans to frame him for a robbery as her revenge. Eventually, she falls in love with young Sanford, relents when he is falsely accused of murder, and forgives his mother.
Review Excerpt
"
Mary Young’s Jennie Marsh enters the frame as if she has already been bruised by the camera’s gaze—shoulders hinged forward, eyes flicking sideways like a sparrow that expects the net. It is 1922, and the close-up is still a confession booth; every freckle, every tremor of the lip, testifies. Young understands that in the vacuum of silence, the face must become a choir. Her first tableau in the reformatory chapel—where she refuses to kneel—registers less as defiance than as mortuary statuary: ..."
