Youth to Youth

A lambent corona of footlights halos the silhouette of a prairie ingenue who steps off the milk-train into Manhattan’s electric dusk, her valise stuffed with gingham dreams and a hummingbird heartbeat. Overnight, the city’s neon vines braid themselves around her throat; she blossoms into a phosphorescent marquee name, each letter a paper lantern floating above Times Square. Yet rumor—fork-tongued, mercury-quick—whispers that the glow is purchased by silk sheets and a benefactor’s platinum signature. Disgust, sharp as a broken compact mirror, propels her from the proscenium into the dusty arteries of a barn-storming rep company, where kerosene lamps hiss and the scent of sawdust is a sacrament. There, beneath the guise of a name not her own, she pirouettes through one-night stands until a sun-creased agrarian—calloused hands, eyes like rain on wheat—watches her counterfeit Juliet and falls, unwitting, for the woman inside the role. Betrothal rings are spoken over in a clapboard church whose bell still bears Civil War scars. But the velvet spider back in Gotham, purse-lipped and proprietorial, rattles his checkbook like a saber; he dispatches lackeys, scandal, and ultimately his own disavowed longing to reel his luminous asset back to the gilded cage. What follows is not mere chase but chiaroscuro: footlights versus starlight, ledger love versus loam-scented devotion, the city’s roar against the hush of loam.