The Chorus Girl's Romance

In a moon-drenched New Haven courtyard, shimmy sorceress Marcia Meadows—flapper incarnate—slips past the Gothic stone like a jazz note through stained glass, barging into Horace Tarbox’s lamp-lit cloister of Latin verbs and first editions. One glitter-bomb of laughter detonates the boy’s cloistral certainty; he tails her to Manhattan’s sodium glare, weds her in a dawn-hour city-hall fever, and is promptly excommunicated by the paternal purse. While Marcia’s limbs spell out syncopated alphabets on midnight stages, Horace’s fountain-penned epics return hemorrhaging rejection slips; he ricochets from copy-desk to speakeasy till a backstage Romeo’s brass knuckles recalibrate his jaw. The beating flips the axis of his ambition: sinew supersedes syntax, trapeze replaces typewriter. Soon he’s chalk-handed, soaring above orchestra pits, a human comet in spangles. Meanwhile Marcia, heavy with child, amuses herself by lexicographing the vulgate of chorus lines and bootleggers; her slang dictionary—part crib-sheet, part Rosetta Stone—vaults onto best-seller lists, turning her into a household noun. The Tarbox dynasty, scenting profit in the air, extends its gilded olive branch; the prodigal aerialist, now blood-beaten but unbroken, pirouettes back into filial grace under the forgiving marquee lights.