Masquerade

by Nancy Moser

  Dora marveled at the new Lottie, the soft, loving, giving Lottie who sat before her. It was as if she’d grown up in spite of all the hardships she’d endured.

  Or because of all the hardships she’d endured?

  And what about herself? Had Dora changed in such a dramatic manner? For the good, not the bad?

  Nanny rocked up and back, murmuring to herself, “Yes indeedy. ‘A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.’ That’s the way of it. The good way of it.”

  Yes indeedy.

  “There’s so much to tell you,” Lottie said.

  “There’s so much to tell you.”

  Lottie started first. “I really want you to meet the Scarpellis. They saved me when my money and jewels were stolen, when I had nothing and no place to go.”

  Dora slipped her hand through Edmund’s arm. “I met the mother and saw the little girl when Edmund and I were looking for you. How is the girl?”

  “Fully recovered.” Lottie glanced at Dr. Greenfield. “Thanks to you.” She continued. “You met Lea and Sofia. But there’s a daughter a bit younger than us named Lucia. You’d like her. And guess what? I even learned a little Italian.” Lottie cleared her throat and spoke with a wonderful attempt at an accent, “Grazie. Prego. Ciao.”

  Dora laughed and offered some applause. “And I want to show you the Tremaines’ department store. It has five stories and there’s a Frenchwoman named Madame Foulard who helped me and—”

  “I was there!”

  “When?”

  “I was trying to get to the Tremaines’, but the hack driver dropped me off on Broadway and—”

  “Did you see the window displays? Conrad did those and—”

  “I liked the one of the family taking a walk.”

  “Did you notice they’re facing Central Park?”

  “What’s Central Park?”

  “Oh, Lottie, it’s a glorious place that reminds me of home. We’ll have to go.”

  “And take Fitz.”

  “There’s a lake and boats and lots of grass where he could run.” Dora took a breath, enjoying the banter back and forth across the cozy room.

  Lottie’s mind had moved on. “And we simply must discuss that hideous dress you were wearing last night. It looked like you had two funeral wreaths on your hips. I thought you had better taste.”

  “I didn’t pick it out. Mrs. Tremaine had it made for me and … What are you going to tell your parents about all this?”

  Lottie gave a determined nod, as if the issue was clearly settled. “The truth. It will be a shock, but they’ll accept it—eventually. Mother will know why I did it … she’ll understand I wanted to marry for love. She’ll be happy that I’m happy and cared for.”

  “And your father?”

  “I hope he’ll learn to be happy for me.”

  “Will they be happy to know they have a grandson?”

  Lottie’s attention turned to her son, sitting in Sven’s lap, playing with his pocket watch. “The presence of Fitz will take some explaining, but in the end I predict Mother will want to dress him in a fancy suit.”

  “A suit with a sailor collar and—”

  Nanny interrupted the conversation by standing. “Well then. Coffee anyone? I know these two. It’s going to be awhile.”

  A long while. There was so much to tell Lottie, so much to hear from her. Yet before they continued, there was one thing Dora had to do.

  She relinquished Edmund’s arm, crossed the room, and took Lottie’s hands, urging her to stand. “I have missed you so much.”

  Dora looked into Lottie’s eyes and saw the girl she’d played with, the young woman she’d served, and the wiser woman Lottie had become in her absence. She saw a person who was on the threshold of finding her own strength, her own purpose, and her own place in the world.

  And Dora felt different too. She wasn’t Lottie’s maid anymore. Out on her own she’d become a lady, and with the help of all in the room— and God—she would continue to grow in that respect as Edmund’s wife.

  “Yes?” Lottie said.

  Dora smiled at Lottie’s impatience. Maybe she hadn’t changed that much.

  Without another word, Dora pulled Lottie into a full embrace. She relished the contact and within moments felt Lottie submit and hug her back. It was a contact Dora would never have initiated before.

  But now, such affection was acceptable. Now it was essential. Now it was a blessing.

  For no longer were they maid and mistress.

  A world away from where they had started, they were finally what God had intended all along.

  True sisters for all time.

  Dear Reader

  I have never had so much fun writing a book as I did writing Masquerade. The girls’ switch, the unimaginable wealth of the Gilded Age, the amazing fashion, and the inspiring tenacity of the immigrants coming to America for a new beginning … It was like combining The Prince and the Pauper, Titanic, The Age of Innocence, and Far and Away all in one. In fact, I openly admit that the dance scene on Mulberry Street was in honor of my favorite scene in Titanic when Rose goes belowdecks and has some real fun dancing to the immigrants’ music.

  This story also touched me because of my own immigrant roots. I stand in awe of the first English immigrant on my father’s side, who entered America in 1638 at what became Newport, Rhode Island, and the Swedish immigrants on my mother’s side who homesteaded in Minnesota in the late 1800s. Talk about taking a chance, moving forward in faith. I would not have the life I live now without their courage.

  Masquerade begs the question of who we are and who we are expected to be. It’s all about roles. A society girl and her maid. The rich and the poor. The good and the bad. Sometimes God takes us out of our comfort zones in order to make us see there is more to us than we imagine. The station in life that we happen to be born into does not form the boundaries of our purpose; it’s just a jumping-off point. The finish line can be reached via a myriad of roads. Life is not the process of discovering who we are but of discovering who we are supposed to be.

  Some thank-yous … I must thank Dr. MaryAnn Diorio for going through all my pitiful Italian and making it real. By the way, I purposely left a lot of Italian untranslated because I wanted you, the reader, to feel as befuddled as Lottie did. I hope you didn’t mind too much. I also want to thank my editor, Helen Motter, and readers Stephanie Whitson, Julie Klassen, and Crys Mach for helping me see the better book hidden within the chaos.

  Another reason this book was such a joy to write was that the characters completely took over. Fitz came out of nowhere, as did the handkerchief. And Dr. Greenfield? On the ship he wasn’t a doctor. But one day, as I was writing the scene where Charlotte is at the Tremaines’ with a headache, and a doctor comes into her room … the door opened and suddenly I thought, The doctor can be the man on the ship! They could truly fall in love! Honestly, until that point I had her marrying Conrad.

  And I never planned on having Lottie pose as a maid at the Tremaines’. She just ended up at the servants’ entrance of their house, the door opened, and suddenly a servant asked her if she wanted a job. Uh … sure. Again, up until that point I had not planned for her to truly trade places with Dora. I should have planned for such a thing, but didn’t. These characters can be troublemakers. But they can also be oh so wise. Two opened doors, two plot changes. I think I’ll keep that in mind in future books. If I’m ever stuck, I’ll just arrange to have someone be at the door.

  That’s what I love about writing novels. The unpredictability of it all. With one word, one glance, one knock on the door, everything can change.

  Sounds a bit like life, doesn’t it?

  So here’s to you, dear reader. Knock on some doors, risk new roles, and step out in faith to find your true purpose.

  Nancy Moser

  Fact or Fiction in Masquerade

  Lottie and Dora lived near Lacock, in Wiltshire, England. Lacock has been preserved by the National Trust and was
used to film the miniseries Cranford. The Abbey there, where William Fox Talbot lived (the inventor of the photographic negative), was used as a set for some of the Harry Potter movies.

  In Chapter 5, Lottie and Dora board the steamship Etruria. This was a real ship that traveled between Liverpool and New York. One of its passengers during my characters’ voyage was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Nine years after Masquerade takes place, twenty-year-old Winston Churchill took this ship to New York City, his first visit to the birthplace of his mother. He did not enjoy himself. “There are no nice people on board to speak of, certainly none to write of … There is to be a concert on board tonight at which all the stupid people among the passengers intend to perform and the stupider ones applaud.”

  The Statue of Liberty was unveiled and dedicated on October 28, 1886, by President Grover Cleveland, soon after Lottie and Dora sail past.

  Castle Garden: In the early 1800s, Castle Clinton, as it is now known, was created as a fortification to protect the city. In peacetime, during the 1820s, it assumed a resortlike purpose with a theater and restaurant. People would stroll around the walls of Battery Park, take warm seawater baths, read newspapers from around the world, and drink mint juleps. Many inventions were first demonstrated there: the submarine, the telegraph, and the steam-fired engine. In the mid-1800s, a huge domed roof was erected over the fort, and the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind gave her first U.S. concert there. In the 1840s, because of the Irish potato famine, hundreds of thousands of immigrants came to America. Castle Garden was appropriated to deal with the influx. Once Ellis Island opened to handle the immigrants in 1892, Castle Garden was turned into the New York Aquarium.

  The apple woman at Castle Garden in Chapter 8 was Jane Noonan. For decades she sold her apples, first at Castle Garden, and later at Ellis Island.

  The Tremaine home in Chapter 9 is based on the home of A. T. Stewart and his wife, Cornelia. It sat on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and West Thirty-fourth Street. It took five hundred workers five years to build, and cost $1.5 million (about $37.5 million today). It had 55 rooms, yet only two people lived in the house, and the Stewarts shunned society. They did have an extensive art collection in their home gallery. Across the street lived the Astors, in a far simpler brownstone. The house was demolished in 1901. The Empire State Building was built across the street on the site of the Astor home. Like the Tremaines, A. T. Stewart had a department store and got his start selling lace. His store was eventually bought by Wanamaker’s.

  Five Points, the area where the Scarpellis live, at one time was a neighborhood for the middle class. But when they had water problems because of an underground spring, the area was abandoned to the poor. It was the first American slum. In 1880 there were 37,000 tenements that housed nearly 1.1 million people. More than 100,000 lived in rear apartments unfit for human habitation. “In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor.” (How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, by Jacob August Riis). Most people worked more than twelve hours a day, and there were thousands of homeless children on the streets. In the summer months three to four babies would suffocate in the airless tenements every night. Mulberry Bend was one of the worst stretches in the slums, and in 1896 it was demolished to be turned into Columbus Park. Chinatown and Little Italy encroached, as did federal buildings to the south.

  The character of Anders Svensson is inspired by Jacob Riis, a photojournalist who used his talents to elicit social change in the slums. In his book mentioned in the previous paragraph, he said, “One half of the world has no idea how the other half lives.” In this book you can see his photographs of the dead horse and the children, the grandfather baby-sitting a child on the ground, and the back tenements as I describe in Masquerade.

  In Chapter 10, Lottie is upset when she gets horse dung on her shoes. She was used to having crossing sweepers in England, who kept the manure off the streets so women wouldn’t soil their gowns. Sounds like a good idea.

  In Chapter 10, Mrs. Tremaine mentions Thorley’s House of Flowers. This was a real store that catered to the rich. They were the first to use the long white box full of long-stemmed flowers packed in tissue. The exterior of their building was also an attraction, as it was decorated top to bottom with plants and flowers.

  The New York social season was divided into two main seasons: winter and summer. The winter season began November 15 with the opera season and included debutante coming-out receptions in December, and then balls and other society parties after Christmas. During Lent there were quieter get-togethers and charity functions. In spring there were a flurry of weddings before people went to their summer residences in Newport and the Adirondacks, which each had their own distinct social calendar of events.

  In Chapter 12, Lottie and the Scarpellis attend mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 263 Mulberry Street. This is not the massive St. Patrick’s (built in 1879) most people know about in New York City. The older church was called “St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral” or “Old St. Patrick’s.” Old St. Patrick’s was used in two Godfather movies. It was the setting for the baptism scene in The Godfather, and also a scene where Michael Corleone receives an honor in The Godfather, Part III.

  Marble Collegiate Church, where Lottie takes refuge in Chapter 11, still stands on the corner of Fifth Avenue at Twenty-ninth.The church bell has tolled at the death of every president since Martin Van Buren in 1862. Norman Vincent Peale was their pastor for fifty-two years.

  Appearing in Chapter 12, Ward McAllister was a social advisor to the elite of New York City during the Gilded Age. He created the phrase “the Four Hundred.” He declared this to be the number of people in NYC that mattered. He is quoted as saying, “If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” His patroness was Mrs. William Astor, and he helped her become queen of New York society. He was largely responsible for making Newport, Rhode Island, a vacation mecca for the rich. His downfall came when he published his memoirs: Society as I Have Found It. The old rich didn’t like their privacy invaded, and he died in disgrace while dining alone at the Union Club in 1895.

  The Ladies’ Mile stretched from Ninth to Twenty-third on Broadway and was the place to window-shop, and see and be seen. Men were not used to buying their clothes in a department store, so to entice them and allow them a quick job of shopping, many stores placed the men’s departments on the first floor. Stores also catered to women by offering customization of clothing and accessories, changing colors and trim to please the customer. The clothing Conrad purchased for Charlotte is outfits from an actual 1886 Bloomingdale’s catalog.

  Mentioned during Charlotte’s shopping spree, “Congo” and “Palestine” are colors that came into being in 1883 and have since been declared obsolete and even replaced by “a rich burnished coppery gold” and “a pink mauve” in the Dictionary of Colours issued by the British Colour Council. Who knew there was such a thing!

  Foundling Homes. The Children’s Society, started in the 1850s, took care of more than 300,000 homeless children in its lodging houses, and found homes for 70,000 children in the West. The scene where Lottie brings Fitz into the foundling home and is told about a crib in the foyer that used to be outside—until it would fill up too quickly—is true.

  The Fashion of Masquerade1

  Harper’s Bazar February 17, 1883

  Chapter 5: (left) “By her own right, Lottie looked stunning in her gown of sage green, and their chokers made of rhinestones still managed to glisten under the gaslights.”

  Chapter 5: (right) “ Dora’s was made of sky-blue satin and brocade, with an overlay of ecru lace ruffled at the bodice and floor. She had no idea how many yards of fabric were used to make the bustle, train, and drapery, or how many different beads or measures of trim decorated her dress, but the result was stunning. And heavy. Dora felt as if she were dragging seve
ral sacks of flour or grain behind her, or perhaps a goodsized child had become a stowaway on board her train, taking a ride.”

  Bloomingdale’s 1886 Catalog

  Chapter 8: (right) “Dora felt both tailored and feminine in her navy blue walking suit with its zouave-style cape and wood buttons. She appreciated Lottie’s taste in adding a red feather to her bonnet.”

  Chapter 9: (left) “Although Lottie’s clothing was a simple traveling suit, the jaunty bow and feather on her hat, the striped green fabric of her bodice, and the drape of the bustle in the back singled her out as a stranger.”

  Harper’s Bazar Cover, October 28, 1882

  Chapter 12: (left) “Before coming to the park, Charlotte had liked her own costume, but now she found its layers of black chantilly lace too mournful, the glimpses of burgundy decoration too few. She much preferred Beatrice’s ensemble [right], which combined a gray-blue cashmere with Turkey-red borders and bows. Even Beatrice’s parasol was adorned with a red bow. Charlotte’s was solid black.”

  Harper’s Bazar Cover, December 1, 1883

  Chapter 13: (left) “ Before the excursion was over Conrad had purchased … a forest green and ivory walking costume …”

  Chapter 14: (right) “The gown Mrs. Tremaine had ordered made for Charlotte’s party was a complicated affair in rose and green. Its lower skirt was layered with odd pointed flounces that hung like pink petals. Covering the hips and creating a bustle was silk drapery that was pleated in scarves and held in place with bows and loops of green velvet ribbon to which two huge bouquets of multicolored flowers were added—one for each hip. The dress had short puffed sleeves and a center bodice panel made from rows of lace and edged with a wide band of the velvet ribbon. It looked as though the seamstress had utilized every style, every trick in her book.”