Dangerous Curve Ahead

A flirtation blooms like oleander on the edge of a cliff: Phoebe Mabee, dewy-eyed yet restlessly antennaed to every male vibration, toys with Anson Newton while her engagement to Harley Jones—steady, industrious, the very blueprint of post-war American reliability—still glimmers on her finger. The engagement shatters; shards of promises skim across six months of silence, then miraculously reassemble into a marriage, a nursery, a semblance of domestic permanence. Harley’s firm dispatches him across an ocean just as summer’s heat unfurls; Phoebe, children in tow, retreats to a lake-side grand hotel where Newton re-materializes, sleek as a yacht’s prow. Letters cross wires, a child’s fever spikes, and Harley returns unannounced to find his wife powder-scented, glove-clad, on the verge of stepping into a candle-lit dining room under another man’s escort. One frantic carriage ride home, a bedside vigil, and the couple’s silhouettes fuse again—wiser, perhaps; scarred, certainly—against the nursery night-light.