The Sins of St. Anthony

A cerebral prodigy, Anthony Osgood, toils amid the sterile gleam of his laboratory while his fiancée, Persis Meade, drifts into a paper-thin romance with an absent war idol whose letters arrive via Red Cross envelopes. Enter Lorenzo Pascal, a card-sharp drifter who chances upon the hero’s suitcase and, like a fallen angel wearing borrowed plumage, materializes at Persis’s gabled doorstep to inhabit the legend she has already half-written in her imagination. One telephone call—its cord coiling like a serpent—delivers the blow: Anthony hears Persis laugh in another man’s embrace, and the word “pep” slices through the wire, branding him inadequate. Reeling, he seeks out Jeanette Adair, a jazz-age priestess whose every shimmy promises resurrection. Under her strobing chandeliers, Anthony’s veins are rewired; reticent neurons morph into syncopated swagger. Yet every metamorphosis demands its pound of flesh: Persis, having unmasked the counterfeit hero, scurries back—only to find the laboratory door locked, the scientist’s heart now incubating in Jeanette’s phosphorescent orbit.