Margarita’s Soul

Winfred Jerrolds, writing at fifty, sets down what he knew of his old friend Roger Bradley and the woman Bradley backed into one afternoon on Broadway. She called herself Margarita, and she grew up in a cottage by the sea with almost no one: a father days dead, a stern housekeeper, a servant boy who could not speak. Her ignorance of ordinary life is not decorative. Taken to a French restaurant, she hurls her ice into a waiter’s face and lifts her chair against the room, certain a man who serves frozen snow means to kill her. Bacon published in 1909 under the pen name Ingraham Lovell, and hid none of her borrowings: the housekeeper is Hester Prynne, the boy Caliban. The premise carries it, a Miranda loose in a New York with no idea what to do with her.