Don't Get Personal

A glittering Broadway chorine, Patricia, is exiled by paternal decree to the hush of verdant nowhere, where Silas Wainwright—her father’s cigar-scented memory of a friend—presides over a crumbling estate like a faded satrap. She arrives with tap-shoes still humming city neon, only to find the household quietly at war: Emily, Silas’s porcelain daughter, is betrothed to the callow Horace, yet the local siren Maisie Morrison—half swamp-orchid, half-catamount—has her crimson nails hooked in his jugular. Patricia, equal parts flirt and firecracker, decides to launder Horace’s spine; in doing so she ignites John, Silas’s misanthropic heir, who wears his disdain for womankind like a mourning corsage. One moon-drunk evening Patricia yanks Horace out of Maisie’s mock-nuptial bacchanal; John, glimpsing silhouettes in flight, assumes elopement and slugs Horace into the lily pond. Silas, apoplectic, banishes Patricia back to the Great White Way, but John—suddenly thawed—overrules patriarchal thunder, reunites the rightful lovers, and claims Patricia for himself, while Silas finally uncorks a grin as brittle as old sherry.