Other Men's Daughters

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.