THEY BELIEVED THEY WERE SAFE

In this novel, a female graduate student becomes an object of desire.

The year is 1962. The young women who flock to the small New England town of North Chesterfield to attend Mt. Simmons College come mostly from well-to-do families—they live on monthly allowances, vacation in Europe, and date boys who go to Harvard and Yale. Mabel Gorne is everything they are not: Midwestern, mysterious, and shabby in a way that suggests disinterested old money. She’s come to Mt. Simmons to pursue graduate studies in anthropology, but she quickly acquires a collection of younger acolytes: “Mabel was ‘unique…special… singular,’ or ‘un symbole du raffinement’ to the Francophiles….Whether she understood the spell she cast or not, the fact remains that the spell was very real.” She boards in the grand Victorian home of respectable local couple Ruth and Henry Alston, who also swiftly grow enamored of her—particularly Henry, who spies on Mabel through a peephole in her bedroom wall. Mabel does have a few secrets, including those involving her nighttime trysts with local assistant constable Jim Flaherty. But it turns out that the unspoken desires of those around her may prove to have just as strong a pull on her destiny as anything in her past. Biddle’s stylish prose perfectly captures the mid-20th-century setting in all its repressed isolation: “Dressed in a nylon slip and nothing more, Mabel sat beside an open bedroom window in the Windsor Haven Hotel. A pair of sepia-patterned curtains shielded her from the road below and the passersby strolling Main Street….She experienced a sense of peril as compelling as any she’d known. It was like climbing the catwalk on a railroad bridge.” The sentences sing, and every creaky room of the Alston house becomes a stage for suspenseful encounters. It’s a compact story, leaping back and forth between a handful of rich interiorities, and readers will be delighted to journey with the characters into the darkness of their hidden lives.

A short, captivating tale of unwanted attention.