Summary
In a marble mausoleum of a mansion off Fifth Avenue, cadaverous patriarch Mynderse Van Dyun—his blood as thin and bluish as Wedgwood—clutches a genealogical chart brittle with age, determined to splice two branches of the same poisoned tree by marrying glittering, recalcitrant granddaughter Catherine to her opium-ruined cousin Pell. Catherine, whose pulse quickens only for penniless engineer Paul La Farge, spurns the dynastic snare, watching in horror as Pell narcotizes servant Nora Duffy into his bed; a clandestine wedding, a fatal confinement, and a squalling bastard later, Nora expires in the servants’ corridor while Pell is hurled from a fourth-storey window by his valet in a cocaine-fuelled scuffle. The newborn—torn between bastardy and patrician entitlement—becomes a living indictment of the Van Dyun curse. Catherine flees the funereal salons with Paul and the child, the ancestral name left to rot like damask in a mausoleum. Half a decade on, a sun-browned boy in sailor suit strides back into the sepulchral house, forcing the skeletal relic of a grandfather to confront the only immortality that matters: not marble epitaphs but the stubborn, breathing future.
Synopsis
Mynderse Van Dyun, a wealthy old New York aristocrat, has one goal in life, to see his granddaughter Catherine and grandson Pell married; for, although they are cousins, the marriage would perpetuate the family name. Catherine, however, is in love with Paul La Farge and detests her drug-addicted cousin, who seduces and then secretly marries her maid, Nora Duffy. After a son is born to Nora, who dies in childbirth, the infant is taken to the Van Dyun house where, only a few days before, Pell, in a dispute involving drugs, had been thrown from a window by his valet and killed. When the old man refuses to acknowledge the child, Catherine and Paul adopt the baby, leave the Van Dyun house and are married. Five years later, Catherine comes to visit the old man with his great-grandson, and, seeing what a fine boy he is, the old aristocrat is forced to admit that the boy is worthy of bearing his name.
