Summary
Beneath the footlights of a gilded Broadway palace, Jane Goring—serpent-coiffed, mercury-eyed—transmutes domestic oxygen into applause, discarding husband and infant like torn prompt-pages. While Robert McNaughton’s lungs corrode in an unheated flat, she storms the boards, mouth a crimson gash, voice a scalpel carving her name across the proscenium arch. Years calcify into legend; the same city later welcomes Gloria Cromwell, a comet of ingénue freshness whose blood carries the echo of lullabies she never received. On gala night, velvet drapes part: mother meets stranger-daughter beneath klieg suns, egos clash like mirrored daggers, and the ovation that once fed Jane now swallows her whole. A backstage mirror, cracked by her own heel, reflects two faces—one ferocious, one forgiving—until guilt floods the dressing-room like toxic gas, forcing the diva to inhale the stench of her own hollow triumph. A midnight return to an empty townhouse becomes a Stations of the Cross: each corridor bears the chalk-outline of a memory, each candelabrum drips waxen tears. Finally, the sanitarium door swings open; Colorado frost frames a triptych of reconciliation, but the curtain falls on damage that no applause can cauterize.
Synopsis
Jane Goring, a ruthlessly ambitious actress, forsakes her life as a wife and mother for the stage. Returning home from a performance one night, Jane is disgusted to find her husband Robert McNaughton victimized by a tubercular cough and so banishes him and her young daughter to a sanitarium in Colorado. Years pass, finding Jane still estranged from her family. On the opening night of her new play, Jane finds herself upstaged and outperformed by Gloria Cromwell, a rising young actress, who, unknown to Jane, is her abandoned daughter. Returning home, Jane is haunted by visions of her husband and child and begins to sob. Looking up from her pillow, she is startled to see her husband with Gloria. Discovering that the girl is actually her daughter, Jane realizes the error of her ways, and the family is reconciled.
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