The Chaperone

It is June 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. Cora Carlisle, a 36-year-old married woman with teenage twin sons, is waiting out a rainstorm in her Model-T with a friend, Viola Hammond. Cora is involved in her community through suffrage marches and charitable endeavors. Viola mentions that a woman they both know, Myra Brooks, wouldn’t answer the door when she knocked. Myra is beautiful, cultured, and aloof. Viola tells Cora that Myra’s 15-year-old daughter, Louise Brooks, has been accepted to a dance school in New York City and that Myra wants a chaperone to accompany her there for six weeks over the summer.

The women reflect on the changing fashions in women’s clothing and hairstyles—most notably, shorter skirts and bob haircuts—and Viola recounts that, to her dismay, her own daughters want to adopt those fashions. Viola reveals her intention to the Ku Klux Klan, but Cora dissuades her, knowing that given her greater wealth, Viola will listen to her. The women finish their errand, and Cora goes to pick up her husband, Alan, a lawyer, at his office at the end of his workday. On the way home, she tells Alan that she has volunteered to take Louise to New York, even though she hasn’t talked to anyone in the Brooks family about doing so.