The Parting Glass

by Gina Marie Guadagnino

  I poured vinegar and lemon oil into the bucket of water, dipped a rag in the mixture, and began to wipe down the surface of the bar, the pleasant, lemony smell of the warm vinegar rising up from the damp cloth in my hand. Rubbing methodically, my head bent to my work, I did not look up as I heard the front door open.

  “We’re closed,” I said, focused on the concentric circles of the cloth against the wood.

  “Hello, Ballard,” she said.

  I snapped my head up. She stood in the doorway, a vision in cornflower and navy paisley silk.

  She smiled nervously. “It has been quite a long time.”

  I swallowed nervously. “It has, yes, Mrs. Dawson.”

  She smiled. “And you seem to have done well for yourself.” She gestured vaguely to the door as she moved into the room. “I saw the sign. ‘The Hibernian Queen: O’Farren and Lawrence, Proprietors.’ I thought . . . I’d hoped it might be you. You own this place, do you?”

  I wiped my hands on my apron. “I’m a partner, aye. The ownership is something of a collective, you might call it.”

  “My!” Her smile was growing fixed. I wondered if hearing me speak in my own accent was upsetting her. I felt naked, exposing myself so finally before her, and the sensation was unnerving. It had been the better part of a decade since I’d seen that crease between her brows, but I knew well enough it bespoke her discomfort. “So you have done well for yourself. I’d often wondered, you know.”

  “Did you, now? And yourself, Mrs. Dawson?” I asked.

  Her smile was a mask. She was pressing her lips together so tightly that they were growing white. I could see now the circles below her eyes. “I am well,” she said, smiling wider to bare her teeth. “Mr. Dawson is good to me. He is . . . a generous man.” There were crow’s-feet around her eyes. Her skin was so pale that she was luminous.

  I plucked a bottle of my best whiskey and two glasses down from the shelf and came out from behind the bar, doing my best to hide the permanent limp I’d acquired the last time I had seen her. I pulled out a stool and motioned for her to sit as I took a seat and poured out two generous glasses of amber liquid.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t,” she protested. “I never take spirits.”

  I regarded her carefully. “Well, Mrs. Dawson,” I said in a gentle tone. “It seems to me you’ve done a great many things in your life that you never imagined you’d do.” I held a glass out to her. “When we knew each other before, I held myself to the rules of your way of life. Sit with me a moment and try playing by the rules of mine.”

  Her eyes went wide, but she sat, her wide skirts bobbing and rustling as she wordlessly took the proffered glass. In my time as a publican, I’ve seen enough green lads choke on their first sip of whiskey to recognize when someone has a fair mouth for spirits, and it cut me deep to see, after all this time, how casually she’d lied.

  My heart was beating faster by the moment as I cast about, trying to recall the benign pleasantries ladies exchanged during morning calls. “And what brings you to Mulberry Street this morning, Mrs. Dawson?” I inquired, cringing inwardly as I spoke the words. It had once been my entire life to put her at ease, to smooth the way for her, and it struck me now how hollow I sounded.

  She colored. “I did more than wonder about you. I . . . that is . . . I looked for you, you know.”

  I inclined my head. “I wasn’t hiding. I’ve given up on hiding, you see.”

  “I know. I see, that is.”

  I looked down at her narrow hands, in which she played with a pair of kid gloves. Her fidgeting bothered me. Her nails had not been pared evenly, and I thought, with a pang, that it was no longer any of my concern whether her nails were pared well or pared ill. A dull ache curdled my stomach. She was waiting for me to speak. I wanted to ask if she still thought about my brother. To know if she looked at her husband every day and hated him for the way his man had shot Seanin dead. I wanted to ask her why, if she had looked for me, had she not come sooner. Was she ashamed, after everything? The silence lengthened. She took a nervous swallow of the contents of her glass, and went back to playing with her gloves.

  I realized then that none of my questions mattered. She was ill at ease because she wanted absolution and didn’t know how to ask for it. It made no difference what she thought or felt about that horrible night and all the nights that had led up to it because the answers wouldn’t change anything at all. After this moment had passed, she would go back to her mansion on Fifth Avenue, and I would go back to wiping down my bar, and I was suddenly filled with a great desire to hasten the end of our mutual disquiet.

  I took her hands into my own, meeting her eyes steadily. “It is good to see you, Mrs. Dawson, after so many years. It was a lifetime ago, I saw you last.” I took a deep breath. Once I said the next words, it would be over and there would be no way to cross the breach again.

  So I said them.

  “But I have another life now. It was good of you to stop by.”

  She let out a breath. “Yes. Of course. I . . . of course. Thank you, Ballard. For everything.” She made a small bow to me. “Good day to you.” She squeezed my hands and withdrew her fingers from my grasp. The door shut behind her with a solid click.

  And she was gone. Slipped through my hands, gone from my life, and the smell of her faded from the place where she had been standing and there was nothing left to remember her by. And my heart, which I had thought healed long ago, was a wordless ache, beating out her name, a silent tattoo she would never hear. And the void that she left still holds her shape, never to be filled. There are times when, entering a room, I catch something like her smell—a hint of lavender, a shade of verbena, and something more, something unnameable, unless that name be hers—and the memory of her, full and complete, comes rushing once more to the surface of my mind, the loss every bit as keen, my heart every bit as broken as it was the night I lost her, so many years ago. My mistress. My love. My Charlotte.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I first arrived on Washington Square, in 1999, it was to submit my application to New York University in person. I remember walking up the steps of the Federal-style town house and hoping that, as a future student, I would one day be able to explore more of these stately buildings. Twenty years later, I am privileged still to be a part of the NYU community, spending five days a week in the red—not ivory—tower of Bobst Library, overlooking the Square. I have been inside many of those town houses that I once longed to explore, and today, from my office window, I can look out over the fountain and the arch, right to the Waldens’ door at number 17 Washington Square North.

  Of course, it doesn’t exist anymore. Perhaps it never did. For the primary setting of The Parting Glass, I chose a building that had been demolished decades before I was born. As a writer of historical fiction, I strive to ensure that the world I have constructed on the page is as accurate as research can make it, embellished by the imagination only when sources fail. While the house in which Maire and Seanin fall in love with Charlotte Walden is as fictional as the characters who populate it, the structure I have described is an amalgamation of my favorite features of those Federal town houses still standing today. If it seems a little larger and a little grander than those still extant, blame it on that wide-eyed seventeen-year-old girl who was so excited to hand-deliver her college application.

  While my younger self was captivated by the Charlottes and Prudences who glided through the drawing rooms, silk and taffeta skirts swishing over thick-piled rugs, crystal chandeliers illuminating gilt-leaf furniture and flocked wallpaper, I’ve grown to have a greater appreciation and affinity for the domestics whose efforts made such lavish lifestyles possible. Prior to the twentieth century, the vast majority of women in the workforce were employed as servants. Besides various types of needlework, there were few other trades available to women. A household such as the Waldens’ would employ a small army to keep itself functioning: a housekeeper, a butler, a cook, two ladies’ maids, two footmen, three h
ousemaids, a stable master, a stableboy, and a scullion. All to serve two women of leisure. Presumably, had Mr. Walden lived, a valet and additional stable staff would have been employed as well. I have done my best to represent the diversity of the New York servant class in the microcosm of the Waldens’ household. Some, like Maire and Seanin, would have been immigrants. Others, like Mrs. Freedman, Young Frank, and Agnes, would have been former slaves, freed in New York in 1827, who remained in paid domestic positions after abolition. Many would be working-class descendants of the Dutch and Anglo immigrants who had lived in New York for generations, or who had come to the city from the surrounding countryside in search of economic opportunities. By the time the story ends, in 1845, the Great Hunger had begun in Ireland and thousands more immigrants were pouring into New York from there, from Germany, and from other parts of western Europe. Freed and escaped slaves began to make their way north during the antebellum period as well, further contributing to New York’s melting pot reputation.

  The city’s nineteenth-century population surge would correspond with an abundance of cheap labor. Average wages, particularly for women, fell as the labor pool grew. While Liddie and Maire’s repeated debate over the benefits and drawbacks of service over prostitution is of course imaginary, in the years before sex work was criminalized and routinely prosecuted, a small number of women were able to own their own brothels or be their own mistresses. It should, of course, be noted that most sex workers never attained Liddie’s autonomy or professional success. Few had any sort of protection at all, and those who did were beholden to procurers or brothel owners. However, for a short period in the early nineteenth century, it was possible for sex workers to achieve a level of affluence equal to or surpassing that of their high society counterparts, while enjoying a degree of liberty that other women rarely did.

  Although none of the on-page characters are modeled on historic figures, a few of the people they reference and the events they experience are based in fact. Liddie’s presumed father, Edmund Kean, was, indeed, the premiere Shakespearean actor of his day, known for many of the backstage antics described in this book. Madame Eliza Jumel, grande dame of the Saratoga spa scene, lived and is said to still haunt her mansion in Washington Heights. As I live within walking distance and am a regular visitor to her beautiful home, I would have been remiss not to include some small reference to a woman whose name was infamous in New York’s wealthiest drawing rooms during the period. The Jays and Astors, casually mentioned as the Waldens’ friends, have gone on to spawn dynasties whose names are now woven into New York’s landscape. The Tredwell family home is now the Merchant’s House Museum.

  This novel also takes place at a curious moment in the prehistory of the Fire Department of New York, when fire brigades, according to contemporary accounts, seemed to spend just as much time clashing with one another as they spent fighting fires. Massive street brawls over control of the water pumps would end only with the formation of a paid fire department, in 1865. Until that point, it was not uncommon for buildings to burn as fire companies and street gangs engaged in melees as violent as the blazes they’d come to quell.

  The attack on Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, after which Seanin becomes a prominent member of the Hibernians, is, sadly, all too true. The mid-1830s saw a number of riots as members of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party incited violence, attacking churches and Catholic-owned businesses. Indeed, the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment I have described here is well documented, only increasing as the century wore on. And while the Ancient Order of Hibernians did emerge as a powerful force to protect Irish interests in 1836, and certainly had ties to Irish Nationalist movements, I have taken some artistic license in embellishing those links. Many members of the AOH were anti-Unionists who were in favor of an independent Ireland, but the international conspiracy I have described, while based on many historic Irish secret societies, is my own creation.

  Likewise, the Hibernian, that stronghold of the Order, though similar in many ways to several of my favorite Manhattan drinking establishments, is an invention. The layout described is typical of the timber structures that made up a great deal of the area south of Houston, none of which remain standing today. It might be considered a hybrid of McSorley’s Old Ale House, Swift Hibernian Lounge, and the late, lamented Grassroots Tavern for all the reasons one might expect of an author who came of age in the East Village. Dermot’s position as publican and ward boss would have been a common one, for who else would have known the neighbors so well as the person serving their drinks?

  The research, therefore, that made this work of fiction possible was conducted in various university libraries (namely Bobst at NYU and Butler at Columbia), and on-site, in and around the myriad locations named in this book. For the reader who wishes to delve further into Maire’s world, I have provided a collection of source texts consulted in writing The Parting Glass. For those who wish to go further, well, I can recommend nothing so heartily as a walk through Washington Square Park.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing tends to be a rather solitary occupation, but bringing a book into the world is not. I am therefore indebted to a number of individuals without whom the volume in your hands would not exist. Foremost amongst them are my parents, Denise and John Guadagnino, who, upon discovering early my knack for making up stories, encouraged me to keep at it. I cannot honestly apologize to them for the amount of profanity used in this novel, for “You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse.” My thanks as well to my grandmother Gloria Pane, for her early cultivation of my grammatical pedantry.

  To the various teachers and professors with whom I’ve honed my writing over the years, particularly Keith Young, who stressed authenticity of voice; Nancy Bucklew, who encouraged my earliest efforts in historical fiction; Shelley Jackson, for her inspiration in nonlinear narrative; and Zia Jaffrey, for exhorting me to write something with “Sapphic overtones.”

  I am deeply grateful to an incredible group of readers for their assistance in researching and workshopping various drafts, including Michael Robertson, Gil Varod, Jennifer Jordan, Jennifer Lobasz, and Amanda Ripley. Most especially, I would like to thank Stephen Danay, my meander scout, who read multiple drafts, gave feedback over countless sessions, and patiently endured endless conversations on the subject of this book.

  Hands-on research for this novel was conducted with the assistance of the knowledgeable and informative curators and docents of the Merchant’s House Museum and Morris-Jumel Mansion. I would also like to thank the staff at 60 Morningside Drive for teaching me how to walk quietly on the servants’ stair.

  As it is a truth universally acknowledged that one cannot write without a room of her own, I wish to thank Teresa Davanzo for providing one, from which the bulk of the first draft was composed. Similarly, Evelyn and the rest of the team at Kopi Kopi kept me fueled with the positively criminal amounts of caffeine that allow my synapses to fire properly. My colleagues on the twelfth floor of Bobst Library were incredibly supportive of this endeavor, and, without their insistence that I actually leave my desk once in a while, the editorial process could not have been completed so swiftly.

  This book would have languished as a file on my laptop had not Alexandra Machinist, agent extraordinaire, plucked me from the obscurity of her slush pile. I am deeply indebted to her faith in my writing, and her commitment to this novel. Likewise, I am grateful that The Parting Glass found a home in Trish Todd’s capable and highly supportive editorial hands. She and the tremendous team at Atria Books have made my lifelong dream a reality.

  I would like to offer a tribute to the memory of the original Dermot John O’Brien: friend, mentor, pub trivia champion, professor, drinking companion, and relentless supporter of my writing, right up till the end. Not a day goes by when I don’t miss him, and I hope he will forgive me the sentimental gesture of having stolen his name for use in this volume.

  Finally, my deep and abiding gratitude to my husband, Aaro
n Zwintscher, for his support and encouragement, day after day, year after year. Sláinte to you and to our Finnegan.

  An Atria Reading Group Guide

  The Parting Glass

  Gina Marie Guadagnino

  This reading group guide for The Parting Glass includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Gina Marie Guadagnino. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  By day, Mary Ballard is lady’s maid to Charlotte Walden, wealthy and accomplished belle of New York City high society. Mary loves Charlotte with an obsessive passion that goes beyond a servant’s devotion, but Charlotte would never trust Mary again if she knew the truth about her devoted servant’s past. Because Mary’s fate is linked to that of her mistress, one of the most sought-after debutantes in New York, Mary’s future seems secure—if she can keep her own secrets…

  But on her nights off, Mary sheds her persona as prim and proper lady’s maid to reveal her true self—Irish exile Maire O’Farren—and finds release from her frustration in New York’s gritty underworld—in the arms of a prostitute and as drinking companion to a decidedly motley crew consisting of a barkeeper and members of a dangerous secret society.

  Meanwhile, Charlotte has a secret of her own—she’s having an affair with a stable groom, unaware that her lover is actually Mary’s own brother. When the truth of both women’s double lives begins to unravel, Mary is left to face the consequences. Forced to choose between loyalty to her brother and loyalty to Charlotte, between society’s respect and true freedom, Mary finally learns that her fate lies in her hands alone.