Summary
A sybaritic Manhattan scribe, Hudson Newbrook, floats through bohemian parlors on a haze of champagne and sonnets until a ragged cough stitches itself into his lungs. One slate-soaked afternoon in a Bleecker-Street café, the pendulum of fate flings him toward Barbara Edwards—ink-stained dreamer with sea-salt eyes—igniting a conflagration of letters, glances, and clandestine rooftop kisses. Their idyll shatters when Polly Staire—velvet-voiced former flame—reappears, trailing shadows of unfinished duets. Hudson chases Barbara to her saltbox village, ring in pocket, only to be ambushed by a stethoscope’s verdict: his bloodline is a poisoned chalice, dooming any child. The revelation detonates his romantic architecture; learning that Polly carries the same chromosomal ghost, he renounces the luminous Barbara and trudges back to the city’s sodium glow, resigned to a shared twilight with the one woman whose destiny is already fused to his own decay.
Synopsis
Famed writer Hudson Newbrook indulges in the good life so heavily that he contracts a persistent cough. At a Greenwich Village café, Hudson meets aspiring writer Barbara Edwards, and the two fall in love, much to the chagrin of his former sweetheart, Polly Staire. After following Barbara to her New England hometown with the intention of proposing, Hudson visits his doctor, who informs him that the children of such a marriage would inherit his illness. Learning that Polly shares his disease, Hudson bids farewell to Barbara and returns to New York to face the future with the woman who truly loves him.
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