Mrs. Temple's Telegram

A nickelodeon moon sours over the soda-fountain, where Jack Temple, uxorious yet chronically ogled, savors a vanilla scoop of temptation incarnate in the form of a crimson-lipped vamp who licks her spoon like a promise of perdition. Hours later, high above the city’s gas-lit arteries, the same siren ambushes him amid rooftop palms; their laughter ricochets off tin awnings until the iron gates clang shut, leaving them marooned on a neon island. Dawn finds Jack inventing an alibi stitched from desperation: a fictive sleepover at the apartment of one “John Brown.” His spouse, a connoisseur of marital paranoia, dispatches a telegram that yanks every hidden string: the real Brown, her adoring Neapolitan coiffeur, materializes with pomade and poetry, while the impostor Frank Fuller flounders in borrowed identity. Jealous wives orbit like demented satellites, until the vamp unfurls her true colors—cousin to Mrs. Temple, puppet-mistress of a therapeutic farce designed to cauterize the green-eyed infection.