Patsy

A prairie-scented wind kicks up the dust of John Primmel’s anxieties: his sun-browned, trouser-clad daughter Patsy vaults fences instead of curtsies, so he exiles her eastward like a parcel marked ‘fragile femininity.’ The train vomits her into Manhattan’s electric labyrinth only to discover that the intended custodian—her father’s sage friend—has already turned to marble in a mausoleum. The dead man’s son, Dick Hewitt, a tousled bachelor whose tuxedo is as rumpled as his morals, offers the girl shelter in a townhouse that creaks with old money and older secrets. Together they assemble a micro-kingdom of domestics—maid, housekeeper, butler—each a cog in the comic clockwork that will soon strike thirteen. One gin-soaked midnight, adventuress Helene Arnold—equal parts siren and spider—slips a ring on Dick’s finger while he drifts in an alcoholic haze, binding him to a mirage of a marriage. Cue the entrance of Alice, Dick’s hawk-eyed sister, who swoops in demanding propriety and thrusts Patsy toward the altar as the rightful bride. Helene counters with blackmail—ten grand or disgrace—yet Dick’s spine stiffens into a gambling man’s defiance. At a chandeliered soirée, Helene climbs the staircase like Lady Macbeth in sequins, poised to unmask the sham union; instead she locks eyes with the butler, her long-lost legal husband, and the confession detonates in a gasp. Marriage annulled by bigamy, Helene flees to Europe to nurse her wounds—perhaps literally—while Dick, newly unshackled, claims Patsy under confetti of moral irony.