The Gilded Hour: Excerpt

The setting is Manhattan on Monday evening, March 26, 1883 as guests arrive at the new home of Alva and William Vanderbilt, a manion on Fifth Avenue just across from St. Patrick’s cathedral (at the outer edge of the city in 1883). The Vanderbilts are giving a costume ball  as a house-warming, so elaborate that the city’s richest citizens jockeyed for invitations.  A crowd of people of all classes and backgrounds have turned out to watch guests arrive. A large police force, uniformed and plainclothed, is on hand for crowd control and to keep an eye on thieves and troublemakers.  Jack Mezzanotte and Oscar Maroney are  detective sergeants on duty.  Jack is single, the son of Italian immigrants. He lives with two unmarried sisters.  Earlier on the same day he met Anna Savard, a physician, in a very different setting.  

Excerpt (draft) from The Gilded Hour.

Sara Donati

All Rights Reserved.

Do not reproduce in any way without written consent of the author.

March 26, 1883

Manhattan

On any other March night at eleven o’clock the north end of Fifth Avenue might be mistaken for a row of mausoleums scaled for giants. The great bulk of the new cathedral on one side of the street with all the usual schools and rectories and orphan asylums gathered around it, like chicks to a sleeping hen. On the other side, one mansion after the other, ornate, looming, as sterile as they were imposing. A wide street without a single tree or even the suggestion of a garden, just high walls and hundreds and hundreds of windows sealed shut, the eyes of the dead.

But tonight the newest mansion — maybe the fourth or fifth the Vanderbilts had put up over the last ten years, Jack couldn’t remember exactly — was awake. It seemed to glow, marble and sandstone reflecting the electric light that poured from every window. With its turrets and balconies and galleries it shone like an unwieldy and ill begotten star set down among its dull red and brown-brick neighbors.

A double canopy had been constructed over the Fifth Avenue entrance to protect the party goers from both weather and the crowd of curious passersby. Footmen in pale blue livery and powdered wigs stood ready to help the guests from their carriages onto the deep red rug that ran from the huge double doors, down the steps and all the way to the curb.

Tomorrow the personality of the house would retreat like a turtle into its shell; the stained glass would go dark, blinds and draperies closing off all light and fresh air.

His sisters sometimes tried to calculate how many thousands of yards of velvet and brocade and satin had gone into the draperies of even one of the Vanderbilt mansions, but the numbers quickly grew so large and absurd that they simply gave up and they turned back to their own needlework. Their endless, precious, beautiful needlework.

Every evening they waited for him, sitting knee to knee facing each other over an embroidery frame. They would jump up to take his coat and offer him food and more food and again food until he accepted the plate they had ready for him. They wanted him to have the best chair by the fire, the day’s newspapers, to hear their family gossip, worries about the weather, observations on the comings and goings of the neighbors, dire predictions about the prospects of the butcher’s new clerk, admonitions about the dampness of his coat or shoes. His sisters ran his household and aspired to run him with the same painstaking and exhausting perfectionism.

From the corner of his eye Jack saw a familiar figure, a woman of at least sixty, carefully groomed and dressed to convey nothing more threatening than genteel poverty. Fewe would guess that a multitude of hidden pockets had been sewn into her wide skirts, ready to be filled with the fruits of the night’s labor. Jack had arrested her three or four times at least over the last year. Meggie, she called herself, but her true name was unknown, maybe even to her. He was about to step off the curbside to intercept her when a hand landed heavily on the woman’s artfully slumped shoulder. Michael Hone out of the twenty-third precinct, just two years on the force but he had the eye. She gave a heavy sigh and let herself be marched off.

“Meggie must be feeling her age,” Oscar said, coming up beside Jack. “Twenty years ago she was slippery as waterweed. She’d be half way to Brooklyn before you realized she was gone. O-ho, look now. Tell me, would that particular fat assed Roman Emperor there be an elected official who shall remain shameless?”

For a time they amused each other trying to put names to costumes: Cardinal Richelieu and the Count of Monte Cristo, a Capuchin Friar, Chinese merchants with eyes outlined in kohl, wizards, cowboys, Queen Elizabeth, the Goddess Diana with bow and arrow, a trio of young women with staffs and life-like lambs fixed somehow to their wide skirts.

“Money is wasted on some people,” sniffed a young woman whose clothes were thread bare but carefully mended. “I’d come up with a better costume than Bo Peep, you can be sure of that.”

A young man dressed as a Knight of Malta followed the trio out of the carriage. Covered head to foot in hauberk and chain mail and armor, he clanked his way up the walk, listing to one side and then the other like a ship in a storm.

“Look now,” a man’s voice called out loud enough to carry over the noise. “Won’t somebody get that poor mope an anchor?”

The appreciative roar of the crowd did not slow the Crusader in pursuit of his Bo Peeps, but every policeman within ear shot tensed. The draft riots were twenty years ago but it would be another twenty before they rested easy in the presence of any crowd; moods could shift from high spirits to violence without warning. Now shopkeepers and factory workers, clerks and charwomen, men with work bags and lunch buckets, they all cooed at the sight of a cape embroidered with pearls and rubies, but people just like this had burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum and hung innocent men from light posts to vent their rage.

There was only one reliable barometer of a group ready to go sour. Jack turned his attention to a half dozen children slinking through the crowd as easily and unobserved as cats. Six in this group, the youngest maybe seven, and if he had to guess he would identify them as part of the pack that slept in an alley alongside a German baker’s place of business on Franklin Street. The brick wall there was warmed by the ovens, which made the alley a coveted spot in the winter. It was one they had to fight to keep, and could lose at any time. If there was real trouble in the air the street urchins would disappear so quickly that they might have been an illusion.

“They’re settling down,” Maroney said. The crowd’s attention had turned to a modern day Shakespeare whose hat kept sliding down over his eyes, so that he tripped repeatedly over his shoes. The urchins laughed, wide mouthed, children still and in want of amusement.

Earlier today Jack had watched more fortunate orphans being taken into the austere custody of Sister Ignatia. In shock, overwhelmed, many of them had hung back, torn between the promise of food and the numbing familiarity of the filthy tenements where their parents had died. The woman doctor — Dr. Savard — had done a lot to calm them, her manner so matter-of-fact, without any trace of condescension or pity. Chances were a few of them would still try to slip away from the orphanage, but none of the children he had seen today would survive long on the city streets.

The Children’s Aid Society estimated that there were as many as thirty thousand orphaned or abandoned children in Manhattan, while the orphan asylums could take no more than twelve thousand at a time. The urchins who lived on the streets were underdressed, mostly shoeless, lice and worm-ridden, they ate only what they could steal or scrounge or beg, and had nothing so grand as a tenement to call home. Most of them refused to ask for shelter at any of the charities that were there to put them up, for the simple fear they would never be allowed to leave again, or would find themselves on a train headed west and a future even more uncertain than the bleak one before them. And so they slept huddled together in doorways or perched on fire escapes, and many of them died over the long winter, defeated by hunger and the violence borne of despair and bone-deep anger.

One by one the carriages pulled up and came to a stop, and footmen and coachmen lined up to open doors and assist ladies who could not see their feet over skirts and petticoats. Then they followed the walkway lined with potted trees and statues through the marquee and into the house where they would eat too much and drink even more.

The early high spirits had cooled a little. The crowd began to mill around, bored and eager for distraction.

Farther down the block the doors of a carriage opened suddenly. Two young men jumped down and then turned to help the ladies, all of them preferring to walk than to wait in a stuffy carriage. In response other carriage doors began to open, at first only one or two and then in a rush. Ladies in silver and buttercup yellow and blazing reds and deep purples let themselves be directed by their husbands and fathers and brothers, lifting skirts high to avoid puddles and manure and trash, giggling nervously and turning their faces away from the crowd, as if that would be enough to spare them the very attention their elaborate costumes were designed to engage.

As soon as the last party guests had disappeared into the house, the detectives could be away home. The uniforms and roundsmen would be here the rest of the night.

“Aren’t your nieces waiting for you in the kitchen, Maroney?” Jack nudged his partner just as the captain came around the corner, stopped dead, and pointed at them.

“And you were so close,” said Jack under his breath.

“I need youse inside.” Burns jerked his thumb over his shoulder as if there might be doubt about where. “Beaney’s in courtyard off the kitchen, he’ll point you in the right direction. There’s a rumor going around that some of Greenway’s boys have snuck in.”

“Dressed as priests, no doubt,” Oscar muttered. “Pranksters that they are.”

Burns gave a surprised and reluctant bark of laughter and then intensified his scowl to offset that small lapse.

“You’ll stay at your posts,” he said, “until I send word.” And he stomped off, cursing under his breath.

Jack said, “Greenway’s boys? That’s inventive, even for you, Maroney. Did you pass Burns another anonymous note?”

Oscar drew himself up and hooked thumbs in his suspenders, throwing out his chest. Easing into an imitation of Burns that would have got him booted off the force, he lowered his voice and took on a deep brogue.

“Touchin on and appertainin to dat matter, I’ve no idea as to what you may be inferin.”

Jack grinned. “To the kitchens, then?”

“And no sparin the horses.”

They crossed the street, passing a carriage that was well past its best days and in need of paint. Inside two very old ladies in powdered wigs sat waiting, their painted faces so somber that they might have been on their way to a funeral.

A couple had just stepped out of a far more elegant and fashionable carriage. The gentleman was older, his form narrow and posture brittle, and he leaned on a cane. His costume was simplicity itself: over one shoulder he had tossed a black cape with red silk lining. The red set off the tight black breeches and a short jacket, tailored to his form exactly.

“I think he’s supposed to be one of those Spanish grandees,” Oscar said. And as the man turned his face to the light he let out a soft grunt. “That’s Cap van Gilder,” he said. “Poor sod.”

Van Gilder’s eyes were a vivid bright blue and his complexion flushed. People sometimes called such extreme high color the red flag of the white death. Consumption was said to be gentle, a romantic death, but Jack could see nothing benign in the way it dragged the youngest and strongest and most promising out of the world.

“A damn good lawyer, and strange enough for one of his ilk, fair-minded. His mother was a Belmont.”

Oscar had an encyclopedic knowledge of the old knickerbocker families for a reason Jack had never been able to figure out. Now wasn’t the time to pursue that question, though, because van Gilder had stepped back to reveal the lady who stood beside him, one hand on his raised arm while with the other she tried to keep a shawl where it belonged. She let out a little cry of surprise and irritation as it slipped out of her grasp and fluttered away.

Above layers of silk gauze that moved with the breeze her shoulders and long neck were suddenly bared to the night air. In the light of the carriage lanterns her complexion took on the shifting iridescence of abalone: golds and pinks, ivories and smoky blues. The heavy dark hair twisted into a coronet and wrapped around her head set off the elegant curve of her throat. All these thoughts went through Jack’s head in the few seconds it took the footman to catch up her shawl and drop it over her shoulders. Half turned toward the footman to smile her thanks, he saw her face for the first time.

Oscar caught his jolt of surprise. “What? You acquainted?”

“No,” Jack said. “Don’t know van Guilder. It’s the woman I recognize.”

“Huh.” Oscar could fit more doubt into a single syllable than any man alive. “Where did you make the acquaintance of somebody like that?”

“On the Hoboken Ferry,” Jack said. “Surrounded by nuns and orphans.”

Oscar’s brow shot up high. “The lady doctor you told me about? What was her name–”

“Savard. Dr. Anna Savard.”

There was a small silence between them.

Maroney said, “A mystery, then. What good luck, they’ve got two detectives at the doorstep, just waiting to sort it all out.”

end excerpt