The Unattainable

Summary

Bessie Gale—luminous mirage of Broadway marquees, champagne laughter, and footlights that halo her cheekbones—glides through speakeasy velvet as ‘the unattainable,’ a sobriquet both armor and curse. Henry Morton, platinum-playboy with a yacht for a heartbeat, pursues her silhouette across a continent rattling in Pullman brass, chasing the perfume of greasepaint and danger. When the Sierra Nevada flings its cathedral of granite and pine against an indigo dusk, Bessie steps onto a cinder platform for one lungful of wild sage; the train exhales and vanishes, leaving her marooned like a fallen star. Robert Goodman—sheep-ranch stoic whose calloused palms read like topographical maps—offers refuge in a clapboard house where kerosene light flickers across his mother’s quilt of calico memories. A telegram—razor-sharp, impersonal—severs Bessie from the troupe; the stage door slams shut, so she unpins her dreams and hangs them beside the cast-iron stove. Marriage to Robert unfolds in seasons of lambing, dust, and the lowing of cattle that sound like distant curtains, yet the footlights still pulse behind her irises. Fortune pivots: Robert’s serum against ovine pestilence becomes a vein of gold; Bessie, dazzled by neon prospects, returns to Manhattan clutching contracts thick as librettos. Morton resurfaces, all gardenia and predation; a supper-club tableau combusts into fists, gun-flash, and a bullet that burrows cowardly between shoulder blades. Blood—crimson résumé of guilt—spills; Morton’s ichor proves toxic, so Bessie coils rubber tubing into her own arm, transfusing remorse drop by drop until Robert’s chest rises again, and the curtain falls on a woman who finally learns that the brightest spotlight is the one you refuse.

Synopsis

Bessie Gale, known in New York night life as "the unattainable," is pursued by Henry Morton, wealthy clubman. Morton follows Bessie across the continent, traveling with the theatrical company of which she is a member. In crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains the girl is particularly impressed with the scenery, and at a way station where the train stops for a few moments Bessie alights and strolls so far away from the depot she is unable to return in time to board the train when it proceeds. She finds shelter for the night at Robert Goodman's home, intending to rejoin her company when the next train comes along the following day. The receipt of a telegram discharging her for missing her train changes her plans, and Bessie settles down at the Goodman home for a stay of indefinite duration. Robert Goodman's mother takes a great fancy to Bessie and Robert falls in love with her. Finally they are married, but the longing for her old life is never quite stifled within her and Bessie rejoices when she is sent to New York by her husband to negotiate the sale of his formula for preventing disease among sheep that is just then devastating the flocks throughout the country. Bessie collects an immense check and contracts for royalties that make Robert a millionaire, and is about to start home when she accidentally meets some of her former associates. The call of the stage is renewed with resistless vigor when Bessie is offered an engagement by her former manager. Morton hears of her presence in town and renews his efforts to attain "the unattainable." Bessie writes to her husband that she is going back to the stage. Robert senses trouble for her and comes to New York without notifying her. He finds her dining with Morton under conditions any husband would resent, and when Morton is unable to defend himself from the physical retribution Robert rains upon him Morton shoots the husband in the coward's target, his back. The tragedy restores Bessie to a realization of her perfidy and folly; Morton acquires a streak of unheard of manliness and when Robert is taken to the hospital the clubman offers his blood for transfusion to Robert's veins that the life of his victim may be saved. The blood test reveals that Morton's blood would poison the stricken Robert and then Bessie is accepted as a volunteer to give her blood to save her husband's life, an operation that is entirely successful.