Fine Feathers

Summary

On the lip of Staten Island’s indifferent shoreline, Jane Reynolds—married to Bob, shackled to a weekly twenty-five-dollar heartbeat of survival—watches Manhattan’s electric spires flicker like unreachable constellations. One dusk, a silk-tongued fixer glides from the shadows promising velvet escape: a single forged signature on a cement report, a dam built on sand, and in return the keys to a life where shopgirls no longer pinch pennies for rouge. Bob, dazzled by roulette lights and racetrack cheers, scribbles complicity; Jane drapes herself in the sudden rustle of couture. Yet the dam’s face splits open, a thunderclap of sludge erasing hamlets and reputations alike. Creditors swarm, the fixer swallows a pistol barrel, and the couple—stripped bare as the day they married—stand amid wreckage, choosing the radical austerity of starting over without masks.

Synopsis

Temptation to cheat comes in the way of a young couple in reward for which the wife can escape from the bitterness of life on $25 per week in a New York suburb, i.e., Staten Island. There are no "classy," well-dressed people in New York south of Thirty-Fourth Street. Jane Reynolds, the aspirant after Fifth Avenue fine feathers thought this way, when the tempter came along and persuaded her to induce her husband to pass on an inferior quality of cement for a great dam then in course of construction. "Bob" Reynolds fell for the bribe and Jane got her fine feathers. The gambling mania got "Bob" and he was financially ruined in double quick time. The bursting of the dam, due to the bad cement, completed the tragedy of "Fine Feathers." The chief culprit, the tempter, committed suicide, and the young couple resolved to commence life all over again and go straight.