The Gilded Hour (90 page)

She said, “I never once saw him talking.”

Jack pushed out a deep sigh that ruffled the hair on her nape.

“Not a word,” she said. “Though the girls never gave up petting and hugging and whispering.” Tonino hadn’t resisted, but neither had he shown any particular response.

“Rosa came to me,” Jack said. “She doesn’t understand why he won’t talk to them. I wasn’t sure what to say except that he needed our patience and understanding.”

“I wonder if we’ll ever know where he was for those weeks.”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe. He might be able to tell us himself, once he starts to believe that he’s safe.”

Just after dinner Anna had gone to check on the children where they slept in a single broad bed, Tonino tucked in between his sisters. Rosa’s breath hitched a little, a serious child even in sleep, no doubt making plans that would put everything right. She dreamed of a world in which little brothers were whole and unscarred and full of stories that came tumbling out like a stream over rocks.
Time is a river.

“If he had come to us with broken bones I would know what to do for him. As it is I feel helpless, but I can’t let the girls see that.”

“Or Tonino,” Jack added.

“He’ll come back to us when he’s ready,” she said, mostly to herself, and kept back the logical next thought:
if that day ever comes.
She could be sure of Sophie coming home one day, but Tonino was another matter.

“We’ll do our best for him,” Jack said. And that had to be comfort enough, because it was true.

Anna said, “This has always been my favorite and least favorite time of year. On the cusp between the light and dark.
Dusk
always strikes me as the wrong word.”

Jack rubbed his cheek against her temple. “It’s funny that you should say that. When I was young I couldn’t understand how it could be that light
and color flooded the world even after the sun disappeared. Later when I understood the geometry of it, that the sun drops below the horizon by a few degrees—and still, it doesn’t seem like enough of an explanation. It’s more than light and color, and it lasts for such a short time. And here it is now, do you feel it?”

They sat in the trembling light, Anna cradled against Jack to feel the beat of his heart against her spine, separated by nothing more than a few inches of muscle and bone. Caught in the gloaming, suspended in the gilded hour, she saw herself in a landscape of years stretching into a horizon she had never dared imagine for herself.

When the light was gone and the first fireflies rose in the fields she said, “Thank you, Jack. Thank you for bringing me here to see this.”

The night came in gently, but even so the gooseflesh rose on her arms and she shivered in his arms.

“Time to go in,” he said.

Anna meant to agree, but instead she produced a great yawn.

With a laugh Jack lifted her to her feet, and then up into his arms. She relaxed against him, content to be carried in this time and place, watching his face as he brought her home, to the house where he had been raised and their family waited.

As ever, I am very thankful for the friends and colleagues who took the time to read drafts of this novel and provide feedback. They include my super-agent, Jill Grinberg; my original, home-again editor, Wendy McCurdy; Cheryl Pientka and Katelyn Detweiler at Grinberg Literary Management; and Penny Chambers, Jason Kovaks, Frances Howard-Snyder, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and Audrey Fraggalosch. Penny listened to me read the whole novel out loud, word by word, some parts more than once. Don’t know what I’d do without her.

Readers and friends active on Facebook and on my blog were instrumental in putting together a list of phrases in a whole army of Italian dialects. Thanks to every one of you.

Jason Kovaks rescued me from the quicksand of nineteenth-century legal documents, while Drs. Carl Heine, Janet Gilsdorf, and Margaret Jacobsen answered a lot of questions about medical matters in general.

Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine alone.

Finally, I am thankful to my husband for his support and patience in difficult times, and to my daughter Elisabeth. Who
is.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849,
The Wasps

(or in other words)

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, 1950,
Requiem for a Nun

T
WO
THINGS
:

The idea for this novel originated with my paternal grandmother, Rosina Russo Lippi, born in 1882, the first daughter and eldest of four children of immigrant Italians employed in the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. When she was about eight, her parents died or disappeared; there is some inconclusive indication that they were living in Brooklyn twenty years later with an additional six children. How the first set of children were separated from their parents is one of many mysteries.

I’ve never been able to track down where the four oldest Russo children were for the first years they were orphaned or abandoned or lost. I do know that the only boy was eventually sent west on the orphan trains and later died in a factory explosion in Kansas. My grandmother’s youngest sister, an infant, was adopted, while she and her sister May were eventually taken into the Mother Cabrini home for Italian orphans, where they grew up and lived until they married, both before age twenty.

My grandmother had ten children who survived into adulthood, and she died at age seventy-two in 1955, six months before my birth. In accordance with Italian custom, I was named for her. This rather mundane fact is actually more complicated than it might seem. Here’s the thing: No one was ever really sure of her name.

It is spelled phonetically on her baptismal record; on marriage, birth, and death certificates it appears as Rosa, Rose, Rosie, or Rosina, with a surname that varies just as widely: Russo, Russ, Ross, and Rose. Her children each had a different story about her name and origins. The first seed for this novel was planted when my aunt Kate told me her version:
Your grandmother’s name was Rose Rose, and you were named after her.

It was in researching my grandmother’s life that I first began to think about Manhattan in the 1880s, and to imagine a story. This is not my grandmother’s story, which is still to be discovered, but one of my own making.

Second: To really understand Manhattan in 1883 you have to forget the Manhattan you think you know. In 1883 there was no Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Flatiron Building, Times Square, or New York Public Library, to name just a few landmarks. Transportation was limited to walking, horse-drawn or steam-driven vehicles, elevated trains, and the growing railroad system. In 1883 gaslight still dominated; electric light had just begun to replace gas streetlights, and very few buildings had made the switch. The telephone was on the horizon, but in 1883 a telegram was the only way to move information quickly from place to place.

This novel was a research-intensive undertaking. Some information about that research that might be useful to those interested in the history or who are dedicated fact-checkers:

I will admit to a weakness for maps, and a particular weakness for the David Rumsey Map Collection (davidrumsey.com), which was especially useful in reconstructing Manhattan as it existed in 1883. Since that time streets have disappeared and morphed, while others have been renamed. The map of the city is further complicated because in a relatively short period of time public transportation went through multiple incarnations: elevated train lines went up and came down, dozens of railroads vied for street space and custom, and the first of them were dropped into tunnels to run underground, a precursor to the subway system. In a similar way real estate boomed as the city moved northward; Manhattanites didn’t hesitate to tear down elaborate structures less than fifty years old if there was a potential for profit in replacing them with something else.

What you find here are the original names and locations of buildings,
businesses, institutions, intersections, residences, elevated train routes and stations, restaurants, schools, and everything else, in as far as I was able to document them.

The exceptions are first, the residences of fictitious characters: I’m sorry to say that you shouldn’t bother to go looking for the Quinlan, Savard, Maroney, or Campbell homes or the Mezzanotte shop, greenhouses, or farm, because they never existed. Also, I should point out that I’ve appropriated a block on Waverly Place just east of the original building that housed NYU for my fictional purposes. In 1883 this block was mostly commercial in nature and home to merchants who specialized in all kinds of clothing.

The New Amsterdam Charity Hospital is also fiction, and was never to be found in Manhattan.

With very few exceptions, the names of real people have been changed to allow me more interpretive license. This is especially the case where the historical record is lacking. For example, Father John McKinnawae is a highly fictionalized version of Father John Drumgoole, who established the Mount Loretto Orphan Asylum on Staten Island and the Catholic home for orphaned boys at the intersection of Great Jones Street and Lafayette; conversely, the head of the Foundling Asylum (known still as just
the Foundling
) was in life (as she is in the novel) Sister Mary Irene, of the Sisters of Charity. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi was a real person, one who deserves to be widely known, married to another physician, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, whom some think of as the founder of modern pediatric medicine. All other physicians are fictional.

Anthony Comstock’s public actions and life history are drawn from newspaper accounts, contemporaneous tracts and books, and historical scholarship. However, the people he hounded and drove to suicide—something the Weeder in the Garden of the Lord (a title he gave himself) bragged about—have been fictionalized.

The Comstock Act is not fiction. All of the incidents mentioned in the story—including Anthony Comstock’s antics in and out of the courtroom—are based on the historical record, in particular on newspaper accounts.

I was especially careful about advances in medical science, because some of the most important discoveries—the nature of infection and the
importance of sterile techniques, for example—were not instantaneously accepted or practiced; just the opposite. The story of President Garfield’s death is not included here in any detail, but it is worth looking up, if only to get a sense of how slowly some things changed. Candice Millard’s
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
(2011) is an excellent place to start.

Young people today (finally, I’m old enough to use that cliché) seem to have no real conception of how bad things were for women and, more important, could be again. The problems women faced in 1883 are not exaggerated here. However, please note that I am not claiming that all women were unhappy. Far from it, but not quite far enough. Some things to remember:

1. There was a period of several decades where male physicians were free to experiment with new procedures, no matter how specious the theoretical underpinnings, with little or no oversight from their peers or the law.

2. Women who did not adhere to the ideals of the time, whose interests and behaviors were considered abnormal and unnatural, were sometimes committed to hospitals and asylums, and in extreme cases they were subjected to castration and female circumcision. This came about in part because the men who ruled their lives decided that the female reproductive organs were the source of insanity. The aspects of the story that touch on these subjects are based on medical texts and medical journal articles of the time, as well as on current academic research. Readers familiar with the time period and subject will wonder why there is no mention of Dr. J. Marion Sims, who for decades was considered the father of modern gynecology until historians looked more closely. His absence from this story has to do with his absence from New York during the novel’s time span; I am not and should not be construed as an apologist, nor would I rationalize his systematic violation of the rights of women, free or slave, white or black, in his care.

3. Women were just beginning to get access to higher education. In large cities there were women’s medical colleges, but it was a good while later that they were admitted to the traditional institutions. Research on the early history of women physicians and surgeons comes from a wide
variety of sources, most especially from Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez’s work on Mary Putnam Jacobi and Mary Amanda Dixon. Susan Wells’s
Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine
was tremendously useful. Other authors whose work in this area I found invaluable include Arleen Marcia Tuchman, William Leach, and Judith Walzer Leavitt. Sources differ on the numbers, but in 1883 about twenty African American female medical school graduates were practicing in the United States. Sophie’s history is inspired in part by the life stories of those indomitable women.

4. Nineteenth-century attitudes toward and understanding of sexuality and reproduction and the politics of birth control and abortion are hugely complex topics. Especially helpful in sorting through the murk were Timothy Gilfoyle’s
City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920
; Linda Gordon’s
The Moral Property of Women
; G. J. Barker-Benfield’s
The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America
; and George Chauncey’s
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940
. These are crucial works I went back to many times.

Legal aspects of birth control and abortion are based on modern historical research and nineteenth-century books, journal articles, and newspaper accounts. Especially useful were academic works by Andrea Tone, Leslie J. Reagan, James C. Mohr, and Timothy J. Gilfoyle. Andrea Tone’s “Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age” (
The Journal of American History
87.2:435–59) provides an excellent introduction to the topic.

Here I must clarify something: those who would be considered socially progressive by modern standards were not infallible. In fact, some beliefs shared by otherwise rational and educated people are distinctly shocking. For example, Malthusian theory was quite popular in the late nineteenth century. In this view of things, society is threatened when population growth outpaces economic stability; thus increase in population has to be restricted, if not by disease, famine, or warfare, then by moral restraint and intervention. This boiled down to a simple formula: the white middle and upper classes needed to reproduce more, and the immigrant poor—mostly Irish, German, and Italian at this time—had to reproduce less. In
some quarters the disabled and those seen as otherwise impure were added to the list of those who should be discouraged or prevented from reproducing.

This is a highly simplified characterization of the theory of eugenics, but something like it was adopted by many social progressives and liberals in the late nineteenth century, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw, Harry Laughlin, H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger.

This is one of the hardest things for a historical novelist to pull off: to tell a story based on facts that will be distasteful and off-putting to modern readers. Whether I have pulled this off is not for me to decide.

Regarding matters of law: the investigation of crime, the structure of the police department, the coroner system, and the conducting of inquests and court cases is based on contemporaneous works on the New York Police Department such as A. E. Costello’s 1885
Our Police Protectors: History of the New York Police from the Earliest Period to the Present Time
. More recent historical studies were also consulted, including popular nonfiction works on crimes of the period such as
The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid War
, by Paul Collins.

I researched poverty, the homeless (referred to in 1883 as
the outdoor poor
), and orphaned or abandoned children through newspaper articles, annual reports issued by charities both religious and secular, and contemporary academic research.

Volume five of
The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909
, a monumental six-volume work by Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes (1915), was a primary source, along with some of the more general publications, which include (in no particular order) the second edition of Kenneth T. Jackson’s
Encyclopedia of New York City
;
New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age
(1999) by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman; Thomas Beer’s
The Mauve Decade, Part II
(1926);
Lights and Shadows of New York Life
(1879) by James McCabe; Donna Acacia’s
From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930
; and
Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870–1900
by Julie Husband and Jim O’Loughlin.

A number of history blogs are run by people who are passionate about
the city and who are generous with their knowledge and research. Ones I consult regularly include
The Bowery Boys
,
Abandoned NYC
,
Daytonian in Manhattan
,
Ephemeral New York
,
Forgotten New York
,
Gothamist
, and
Untapped New York
. I look forward to seeing what these websites come up with, day by day.

Further information about the novel is available online at thegildedhour.com. My author blog can be found at rosinalippi.com.

Sara
Donati