David Orsini's
The Price of Happiness

Book Description / Synopsis

In 1923, a young married couple (in their early thirties) accepts a dual commission from a wealthy widower. The wife will serve as teacher and confidante to the widower’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter, and the husband (a civil engineer and landscape architect) will oversee the renovation of the widower’s Newport, Rhode Island estate. When she lost her parents in a plane crash, the widower’s granddaughter suffered a breakdown. Now the young woman is struggling to find her way toward a life as useful as it is fulfilling. In this regard, her new teacher guides her into challenging intellectual pursuits and rewarding episodes of service to her community. She also guides her to enjoyable activities with the life-loving peers who have been her loyal friends.

It is the teacher’s plan, and that of her husband, to help the grieving younger woman develop a realistic sense of the world. They want her to recognize its dangers and its various depredations. They also want her to experience its beauty and its pleasure. At first an ancillary presence in the ongoing restoration of the troubled woman’s happiness, the civil engineer gradually joins her and his wife more frequently in their summer activities, including excursions away from Newport. Eventually, the young woman becomes attracted to the husband. Hers is the complicated affection a grief-stricken young woman might experience toward a successful man who appears as her rescuer.

World-weary and cynical because of their hard experience of war in France a few years earlier, the engineer and the teacher search for a temporary happiness through new assignments in their careers and through a further exploration of their sensuality. When the engineer begins a sexual relationship with the younger woman, his wife does not object. Together, in different ways, the husband and his wife will bring the receptive younger woman into the real world, because such an arrangement will quicken their interest in living and may appease their disarranged hearts.

When the engineer falls in love with the young woman, his obsession brings him into places even darker than the ones he experienced during the war. An additional complication occurs when the engineer’s wife, intent upon winning back her husband, draws the woman into a romantic relationship with a younger man. The girl falls in love with this younger man and turns away from the engineer. But the engineer cannot let go of his obsession. He devises a murderous plan that will keep him and the young woman together.