June Madness

A porcelain-bourgeois bride, Clytie Whitmore, poised at the altar like a wax figurine in a saccharine diorama, suddenly fractures—her veil a comet’s tail as she vaults down the nave and cannonballs into the passenger seat of a saxophone-slinging jazzman, Ken Pauling, whose roadster exhales gin-soaked exhaust. The nuptial fugue ricochets through moonlit streets to Pennetti’s boîte, a den of syncopated sweat where trumpets bleat like feral geese and chorus girls kick higher than the stock market. Clytie, swapping her heirloom lace for Sonora’s spangled chemise, pirouettes into the spotlight, thighs shimmering with electric expectation, while a venom-dipped gossip columnist, Hamilton Peeke, skulks in the shadows, scribbling headlines that hiss like serpents. A police raid detonates; the lovers flee through a kitchen door, past crates of contraband oysters and a sax case stuffed with marriage-license confetti. Dawn finds them on a riverbank, mud-caked but laughing, exchanging vows whose only witness is a heron too aloof to clap. Back home, the ancestral mansion—its portraits glaring like inquisitors—unexpectedly lowers its drawbridge of approval, and the runaway bride becomes a wife without ever surrendering her spark.