Summary
A sepulchral bell tolls over a shuttered New England manse as three sisters—Jill, Marguerite, Jane—watch creditors strip their patrimony to the bone. Jill, whip-smart and furnace-hearted, trades mourning silks for a dime-store smock, hawking lingerie to gawkers under the gilt skylights of Hemingway’s emporium. George Hemingway, matrimonially shackled yet emotionally bankrupt, spies in her the spark of a life he never lived; she sees in him a gilded elevator out of subsistence. Their transaction is inked without vows: a townhouse dripping with damask, a monthly stipend heavy as lead, and the unspoken clause that her body will clock in nightly until the account is overdrawn by death. Years later, when the widower’s heart stalls on a Paris-bound liner, Jill emerges from storage like a rare coin polished for circulation, boarding transatlantic liners with trunks of nacreous gowns and a smile lacquered in self-contempt. Monte Carlo, Venice, Biarritz—each city a fresh coat of paint on a corroding chassis—deliver her into the orbit of Harry Adams, an American architect who sketches cathedrals but believes in neither heaven nor ledger books. Their betrothal should script the fade-out, yet George Jr.—carbon copy of the original sin—arrives bearing the family crest and the swagger of inevitability. Jill’s confession detonates the engagement; the lovers enact a year-long pas de deux of absence, returning only to negotiate a cohabitation stripped of ceremony. Harry’s proposal of a ‘happy way’—a euphemism for concubinage sanitized by affection—prompts Jill to walk into fog, pockets empty of illusions, carrying only the hard-won deed to herself.
Synopsis
Jill Cummings and her sisters Marguerite and Jane are left penniless when their father dies. To provide for the family, Jill accepts a sales position in a department store, where she attracts the attention of her unhappily-married boss, George Hemingway. Desperate to escape her difficult circumstances, Jill accepts Hemingway's proposal that she live as his mistress and subsequently is kept in high style in a large, beautiful house. Some years later, Hemingway dies, and with the fortune he leaves her, Jill tours Europe. There she becomes engaged to Harry Adams, but when George Hemingway, Jr. appears to act as best man in the wedding, Jill is forced to confess her past to Harry. The two separate for a year to think things over, and when Harry returns, he suggests to Jill that they live together "in a happy way." Jill leaves him and continues her life alone.
