Other Men's Daughters

Summary

Shirley Reynolds, porcelain-bright prodigal of a finishing school that never finished her, glides back into a household trembling on the fault-line of divorce. Her mother has finally unsheathed the legal blade against a serially unfaithful husband whose appetites ricochet from drawing-room to speakeasy like champagne corks. Intent on stitching the fractured marriage, Shirley seeks out her father’s bachelor aerie—only to crash headlong into a bacchanal thrown for Lola Wayne, the latest mistress, a jazz-age Circe swaddled in peacock feathers and scandal. When Lola’s apoplectic father barges in with murder in his eyes, it is Shirley who stays the hand; but the old man’s vengeance merely shape-shifts into subtler poison. He bankrolls the lubricious Trask—half satyr, half pimp—to seduce the girl and salt the family wound. One fog-laced night Wayne lures Shirley to Trask’s roadside den of inequity, promising a paternal rendezvous that is pure mirage. Richard Ormsby, her clean-cut Ithacan, shadows her through the murk; behind a locked door Trask’s talons close until father and sweetheart smash the hinge. The predator plummets from a window, a black silhouette swallowed by river reeds; Wayne drags his chastened daughter home while Shirley coaxes her mother toward a forgiveness as brittle as Belle-Epoque crystal.

Synopsis

Shirley Reynolds returns home from boarding school to find that her mother, weary of her husband's philandering, has filed for divorce. Hoping to effect a reconciliation, Shirley visits her father's apartment, where she interrupts a riotous party held in honor of his new mistress, Lola Wayne. Shirley prevents Lola's outraged father from killing her own father, but later, Wayne decides to wreak his revenge through Shirley and hires the lecherous Trask to lure her to ruin. On a particular evening, Wayne persuades Shirley to visit Trask's disreputable roadhouse, where Lola has arranged to meet with Reynolds. Suspicious, Shirley's sweetheart, Richard Ormsby, follows her to the inn. Reynolds hears Shirley struggling with Trask behind a locked door but is unable to assist her until Richard arrives. Trask, in his struggle to escape the two men, leaps from a window to his death, after which Wayne takes Lola home. Shirley then convinces her mother to forgive her remorseful husband.