Summary
Snow-veiled Wisconsin pines shiver like cathedral spires around a timber cloister where three generations of Manning women tend flickering embers of resentment; into this glacial sanctuary lurches Paul, a vagabond relic of patriarchal failure, his overcoat stiff with rail-yard soot, eyes cratered by eighteen winters of self-exile. Mary—part vestal, part caged lark—accepts the prodigal as penance for her mother’s dying breath, yet the covenant curdles when whiskey fumes reclaim the wanderer and the family name threatens to sink into the peat. A single spangled night in a back-road dancehall—neon gasping through bootleg gin—becomes a Stations-of-the-Cross for daughter and sire, ending under the cold gaslight of a rural courtroom where the law itself kneels to forge absolution.
Synopsis
Mary Manning lives in a cabin in the Wisconsin woods with her invalid mother, her uncle, and her stern grandfather; her own father, Paul, disappeared 18 years earlier. When Paul, who became a derelict, finally returns home, his father turns him away, but Mary retrieves the prodigal and leads him to his wife, who bids Mary take care of him and then dies of shock. Aware of the pain that Paul caused her mother and preoccupied with handsome Tom Gale, Mary neglects her father, and he soon resumes his drinking. When Paul visits a notorious dance hall, however, Mary remembers her promise to her mother and goes after him, but both are arrested in a raid. In court, she tries to assume the blame for Paul's presence in the dive, but Judge Michael Burke refuses to believe her. In his chambers, the judge effects a reconciliation of the family, after which Tom asks for Mary's hand in marriage.
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