Summary
Dora Tompkins, a woman whose marriage has curdled into nightly tempests of gin and recrimination, sheds her husband like a snake its skin and treks toward the electric dusk of the city, child in tow. Her daughter Marie, a wisp with eyes like wet ink, rewrites the cosmos of a bedtime story: the tenement fire escape becomes a trembling vine, the roofline sky a castle of clouds, and the hulking tenant above—ex-lover, pugilist, bruised saint—her personal Giant guarding a hoard not of gold but of second chances. What follows is a pas de trois of hope, pride, and blood: Jim Walton promises to hang up his gloves, Dora agrees to wear his ring, and the fragile new family sways like a poppy in a gale. When Marie plummets from her imaginary stalk, the surgeon’s fee rears its dragon-head; Jim slips on the satin trunks once more, trades bone for banknote, and wins the purse that will solder the child’s spine. Dora, left in the dark, believes herself betrayed; only the scalpel’s gleam and the whispered truth restore her to the arms of the battered man who has literally fought death for their tomorrow.
Synopsis
Dora Tompkins divorces her alcoholic husband and moves to the city to look for a job. Her little daughter Marie dreams one evening of the "Jack and the Beanstalk" tale, which prompts her to climb up the fire escape to the apartment above. There she meets prizefighter "Giant" Jim Walton, her mother's former suitor, and soon he finds Dora a job in a florist's shop. They resume their love affair, and upon his promise to quit the ring, she agrees to become his wife. When Marie, however, in trying once again to scramble up the "beanstalk," falls and is seriously injured, Jim breaks his promise and wins a fight in order to pay for the child's operation. Unaware of Jim's motives for entering the ring, Dora spurns him, but when she learns the truth, she gratefully returns to him.
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