The Glory of Youth
Summary
A marble stairwell creaks under the arthritic tread of Cyrus Cairns, Croesus of iron rails and obsolete ticker tape, whose gnarled cane conducts an orchestra of unfulfilled hungers inside a mausoleum of a mansion. He purchases Gay Raydon the way a collector bags a rare bird: not for the song but for the iridescence, her arabesques pirouetting across parquet floors like liquid mercury. In the same transaction he acquires Hal Crofton, sinewy collegian with shoulders engineered for Olympic pedestals, hired to knead the millionaire’s calcified joints yet fated to knead the girl’s heart. Cairns covets motion he can no longer generate; Gay embodies it, Hal magnifies it, and the house itself—vaulted ceilings ribbed like a cathedral—seems to inhale their triangulated pulse. Dolores, Cairns’s lifelong lieutenant in pearls and predation, engineers a union as cold as contract law, signing the ballerina over like chattel while Hal’s devotion curdles into exile. Eavesdropping Zarth, manservant and voyeur, becomes the cracked mirror in which obsession multiplies; his whispered intel detonates Cairns’s final spasm of possession: two lovers interned behind oak doors, left to gnaw on silence. When remorse finally slices through the fog of jealousy, the old king dispatches the law, then himself, surrendering his empire of dust to a struggle between footman and athlete for the prima’s mortal hand.
Synopsis
Elderly, crippled millionaire Cyrus Cairns, is a great admirer of dancers, brings Gay Raydon, a young ballerina, to live with him. Also in residence is Hal Crofton, an athlete hired by Cairns to be his physical therapist. Cairns soon falls in love with the beautiful Gay, who does not reciprocate his affections but loves Hal instead. Dolores, Gay's benefactress and a devoted friend of Cairns, forces her to marry Cairns, however, and Hal, devastated by the marriage, vows to leave the mansion. Gay announces her desire to go with him, but Zarth, the valet and another admirer of Gay, overhears her declarations and reports the news to Cairns, who, in a fit of jealous fury, locks the couple in a room to starve them to death. Cairns leaves for his townhouse but after a few days has a change of heart and notifies the police. The miserable old man kills himself, and the authorities overpower Zarth as he struggles with Hal for possession of Gay.
