Mrs. Balfame

Summary

In the gas-lit parlor of Elsinore—a town stitched together by gossip and whale-bone corsets—Mrs. Balfame glides like a swan across a cesspool. Her husband, David, the bibulous kingmaker, stomps through backrooms trailing whiskey fumes and threats; she has spent sixteen years smiling for photographers while imagining his slow disassembly. One autumn afternoon, Dr. Anna Steuer—a woman whose intellect crackles like Tesla coils—whispers to the town’s queen bee that certain wives toast their husbands’ deaths with champagne, then presses into her palm a vial of crystalline judgment: odorless, colorless, blameless. That same night, David humiliates her at the Country Club, pawing debutantes and bellowing slurred oaths; the next morning he telephones from Old Dutch’s sawdust inferno demanding a traveling tonic. Mrs. Balfame stirs lemonade, uncorks the vial, and sets the glass beneath a lace doily like a communion chalice. But fate—wearing the face of a spurned laborer—fires a pistol in the garden; David crumples, the tumbler shatters untasted, and the town’s immaculate matriarch is dragged to jail by her own diamond choker. At trial, lovestruck attorney Dwight Rush recasts her as Penelope, not Lucretia Borgia; Alys Crumley, paint under her nails and ache in her throat, sketches the proceedings while nursing a broken heart. The final revelation arrives on a deathbed: Dr. Steuer, fever-bright, confesses she squeezed the trigger to liberate her beloved friend from marital manacles. Acquitted but suddenly ancient, Mrs. Balfame releases Rush to the future—Alys’s easel, sunrise pigments, unchained possibility—and walks alone into an ambiguous dusk, the poison still crystallizing, unspent, in the folds of her silk purse.

Synopsis

Mrs. Balfame is the social leader of the small town of Elsinore, and David Balfame, her husband, is the political leader, a drunken loutish man his wife has hated during their sixteen years of married life. While attending a club meeting Mrs. Balfame listens to a speech by Dr. Anna Steuer, her friend, stating that many of the women on the other side are glad to be rid of their beasts of husbands who made war possible. Later in her home Dr. Steuer shows Mrs. Balfame an untraceable poison. With these two facts in her mind, and urged on by a disgraceful scene at the Country Club caused by Mr. Balfame's drunkenness, Mrs. Balfame decides to kill her husband. Meanwhile, Mr. Balfame has wandered into Old Dutch's saloon and insults the proprietor and his son, Conrad, and also arouses the ire of a tough young man who is dancing with a girl. Discovering that he must go to Albany on political business he phones Mrs. Balfame and asks her to fix him a bracer and pack his grip. She replies that a glass of lemonade and aromatic ammonia will be left on the table for him. Mr. Balfame, still drunk, then starts for home, followed by the young man from Old Dutch's. Mrs. Balfame make a glass of lemonade, putting in the poison, and places it on the table. Then, discovering a man lurking on the grounds, she takes a revolver and hurries out to scare him off. Frieda, the maid of all work, sees Mrs. Balfame leave the house. As Balfame nears the house there is a shot and he falls. Mrs. Balfame rushes in and, still watched by Frieda, pours out the lemonade and rinses out the glass. On the testimony of Frieda and Conrad Mrs. Balfame is arrested, charged with her husband's death. Dwight Rush, a young lawyer who has long been in love with Mrs. Balfame, represents her. Mrs. Balfame does not love Rush, but promises to marry him if he obtains her freedom. Alys Crumley, a young artist, is in love with Rush, and through her jealousy of Mrs. Balfame tells of the conversation she overheard in which Dr. Steuer told Mrs. Balfame of the poison. Dr. Steuer is called as a witness, but is sick in a hospital, and from her dying bed makes a confession that she shot and killed Mr. Balfame because she could no longer see her dear friend abused by the brute. Rush finds his love for Mrs. Balfame has been diminishing as his interest in Alys is strengthened, but goes to claim Mrs. Balfame after the acquittal. Realizing the disparity in their ages, she sends him to seek happiness with Alys Crumley.