The House of Velvet and Glass (59 page)

Eulah shook her head, smile widening. She leaned forward and took one of Helen’s hands in both of hers. “Come, Mother,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk on the balcony.”

“A walk?” Helen said, confused. “But . . .” She trailed off, looking around herself, uncertain. Outside, more shouts, and in the dining room the other passengers’ voices were rising, and several of them were hurrying to the stairs.

“A walk,” Eulah repeated, as smiling and serene as ever. She looked into her mother’s eyes. Deep within them Helen read an absolute certainty that somehow caused all of Helen’s anxiety to fall away. “Certainly. It’s a beautiful night. And you only live once. This moment, Mother. This is all there is. I don’t want to miss any of it.”

Helen returned Eulah’s smile, tentatively at first, and then with resolve. “Neither do I,” she said, getting to her feet.

Eulah stood, smoothing her skirts with both hands, and folding Helen’s hand under her arm. The two women exchanged a secret smile, and then moved arm in arm into the gathering darkness of the North Atlantic night.

Afterword

The Smoke Clears

On May 27,
1917
, a thirty-nine-year-old Bostonian dermatologist traveling by steamship across the Atlantic Ocean wrote a letter home to his wife. “The voyage has so far been very calm and pleasant,” he said. “Since the
Titanic
hit the ice the steamers run south of where they used to go when you went over. . . . I like it better for though it takes longer there are more warm pleasant days. I assure you you would love this voyage. We’ve only sighted three vessels since we left N.Y. . . . The wireless posts baseball scores, and I see that the Red Sox beat St. Louis. Life onboard is lazy but pleasant.”

The reason that they had only sighted three vessels since leaving New York was that the dermatologist, a restless man who had spent his twenties assisting teams in Arctic exploration, and who had never reconciled himself to the tedium of day-to-day medical practice, was not on a pleasure cruise. He was a first lieutenant medical officer with the Canadian Royal Fusiliers, traveling to the western front of the Great War. He was my great-great-uncle, and he would never see Boston again.

Reading his letters home in the Harvard University archives, a modern scholar can’t help but wonder what he’s doing there. Why would a middle-aged man, married, established in his career, however tedious, leave the sedate safety of the Back Bay to volunteer in a war that does not seem to touch him directly? And what does his world look like? We have a very specific imagination of the United States in the twenties: flappers, jazz, bathtub gin, captured in films and quoted endlessly in popular culture ever since. But the decade leading up to the twenties isn’t as firmly lodged in our imagination. What kind of world would our dermatologist have been turning away from?

Boston in the second decade of the twentieth century was a city in transition. In terms of technology and population, the city was beginning to resemble the Boston of 2011, but it was not entirely modern just yet. The country’s first subway, the Tremont Street line, had been in operation since 1897, but horses still crowded the cobble and brick streets. Waves of immigration from Ireland and Italy had transformed the city’s character, but its commercial life was still largely dominated by old English families. It was a city, and a time, in thrall to modernism, with its twin promises of technology and progress. But with change comes uncertainty.

Perhaps one of the largest, and most enduring, symbols of both the promise of modernism and its betrayal is the RMS
Titanic.
It haunts our culture even to this day, one hundred years after its abrupt and shocking loss. What was it about
Titanic
’s sinking that, even five years later, put it so thoroughly at the center of the fears of a man heading into the theater of war?

For one thing,
Titanic
’s loss was shocking because it revealed the real ramifications of a wealth disparity that is staggering even by today’s standards. The fact is, as first-class women passengers, Eulah and Helen Allston would almost certainly have made it into a lifeboat. Only four first-class women passengers did not. By comparison, the mortality rate for all third-class passengers, including children, was nearly 75 percent. A first-class parlor suite ticket in 1912 cost $4,350, which some estimate to be the equivalent of over $90,000 in modern dollars—more akin to purchasing a ticket to outer space on Virgin Galactic than traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. The concentration of wealth and fame on that one ship, including the richest man in the world at the time, John Jacob Astor IV, together with the real Harry Widener and his parents, George and Eleanor, was confounding. As was the clear relationship between wealth and the odds of survival.

But of course, no one expected that the largest passenger steamship in the world would sink, certainly not on its maiden voyage. The passengers and engineers trusted its technological superiority to brave any treachery that the North Atlantic might throw its way. Americans wanted to trust technology and reason to solve all of our problems during this time period. We see the echo of this false confidence three short years later, when RMS
Lusitania
—another lavishly appointed steamship—sailed for Britain despite the public threat levied against it by the German consulate.
Lusitania
was thought to be able to outrun German torpedoes, but beyond that, the modern historian can’t shake the sense that
Lusitania
, like
Titanic
before it, was considered too grand, too marvelous, too
modern
to be vulnerable to something as old-fashioned as horror and death. The shock of
Lusitania
’s weakness, coming so soon on the heels of
Titanic
’s sinking, helped to propel the United States from neutrality to engagement in the war that had convulsed Europe, much the way that the loss of the World Trade Center spurred our entry into war nearly a century later.

Death itself, and human consciousness more generally, was also subject to modernist inquiry. Professor Edwin Friend was a real Harvard psychologist, who perished on the
Lusitania
en route to a conference on psychical research in Britain. He was active in the American Society for Psychical Research, an organization of intellectuals founded in Boston in 1885, devoted to the scientific study of the possibilities of life after death and paranormal human ability. Spiritualism as a religion had been prevalent, particularly in New England and New York State, since the middle of the nineteenth century, and enjoyed a resurgence in the decades around the Great War. Helen and Sibyl would have found listings for séances and Spiritualist meetings in the Boston newspapers, right alongside listings for mainstream church services, temperance society meetings, and women’s suffrage lectures. Occult inquiry was a part of mainstream thought; in fact, the most notable member of the American Society for Psychical Research was none other than psychologist, philosopher, and father of American Pragmatism, William James. Also a Harvard professor, and brother of the famous novelist Henry James, William was so convinced of the reality of the human spirit’s persistence after death, so persuaded that such a fact was on the brink of being scientifically proven, that his widow Alice and brother Henry held several séances after his death in 1910, believing that the philosopher would do his utmost to contact them.

The first two decades of the twentieth century held out tantalizing promises of scientific advance in every avenue of human endeavor. While Benton Derby is a fictional character, his department at Harvard, the Department of Social Ethics, is not: it was the precursor to what we know today as sociology. “Social ethics” as a field sought to transform social ills like poverty and the care of the sick and the insane through rational principles of health and organization. Similarly, in 1909 Sigmund Freud gave his famous series of lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts, introducing the concept of psychoanalysis to the United States. The idea that social ills could be controlled by scientific principle applied not only to academia, however; this period also saw technocratic problem-solving at the government level, such as the passage of the Harrison Act in 1914, which brought opiates and cocaine under federal regulation for the first time, culminating in the better-known Volstead Act of 1919, which ushered in Prohibition. Before these interventions, opiates were a common ingredient in remedies for any ache or pain, from headache to nerves to infants’ teething. To obtain a prescription for an opiate, one had merely to demonstrate evidence of addiction to a doctor, creating a vicious cycle of legitimate, but no less crippling, dependence.

Of course, the optimism embodied by such grandiose technological hopes was swiftly undermined by reality. The Great War is widely thought to have been such a bloodbath in part because the tactics of warfare had not yet caught up to the technology in use in the field. Men who set out to fight with honor discovered that the twentieth century had more in store for them than they could have ever imagined. Cavalry was no match for a tank. Anonymous, mechanized death carried little glory. The unsinkable
Titanic
sank. The world as it had been, both for good and for ill, would never be the same.

On September 27, 1917, the dermatologist wrote a letter home to his father. “It seems likely that we move forward tonight,” he said. “There is a big attack on, as you doubtless know from the papers. So far we have gained ground and come out excellently for losses from all I can hear. Of course if you are not yourself in a show you know very little of what is going on, and even if you are you only know how it is near you. . . . We shall probably go in as holding troops and will probably get all that is coming to us. It will be my first chance at a real battle, and I must say I am rather looking forward to it.”

On September 28, 1917, he was killed by an exploding shell. And, in some respect, the twentieth century began.

—K
ATHERINE
H
OWE

Marblehead, Massachusetts

Acknowledgments

I count myself singularly privileged to have such a fantastic community of friends, family, colleagues, and readers who have helped me bring this book to fruition. I am indebted first and foremost to my incredible literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, whose insight, guidance, and friendship never cease to amaze me; to my publisher, Ellen Archer at Hyperion, whose unflagging confidence, along with her wit, elegance, and good humor, provided crucial support; to my editor, Leslie Wells, who patiently and beautifully shepherded this book from abstract concept to completed manuscript; and to Matthew Pearl, who knows exactly what he did. Without these people, this book would not exist.

I am incredibly fortunate to be able to collaborate with people in the publishing world who are both fantastic at their work and a pleasure to know. At William Morris Endeavor, I am grateful to Eve Attermann, Raffaella De Angelis, Caroline Donofrio, Tracy Fisher, Erin Malone, Pauline Post, Cathryn Summerhayes, Becky Thomas, and Lauren Whitney for all the work they have done to support me and my writing. At Hyperion and Voice, I would like to thank Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Laura Klynstra, Kiki Koroshetz, Claire McKean, Cassandra Pappas, Shelly Perron, and Shubhani Sarkar for creating a gorgeous book. I am also honored to work with Mari Evans and her team at Penguin UK.

A tremendous number of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues have generously provided their support, expertise, critical commentary, and guidance as I have worked on this project, and I am grateful to all of them. In particular I would like to thank the following people: Satnam Anderson, Brunonia Barry, Kevin Birmingham, Deborah Blum, Jack Butterworth, Christopher Capozzola, Julia Chang, Amy Cole, Laura Dandaneau, Heather Folsom, Eli Friedman, Connie Goodwin, Bradley Hague, Will Heinrich, Peter Howe, Eric Idsvoog, John Johnston, Emily Kennedy, Shawn Klomparens, Kelley Kreitz, Brendan McConville, Ginger Myhaver, Peter Ogren, Tobey Pearl, Brian Pellinen, Bill Rankin, Rohit Shah, Shannon Shaper, Tara Smith, Weston Smith, Raphaelle Steinzig, Anne Sturtevant, Michelle Syba, Robert Wilson, and the illustrious Menagerie.

Historical fiction depends mightily on the accuracy of its research, and so I am indebted to several archives and archivists for materials and support. I would particularly like to thank Jean Marie Procious and the Salem Athenaeum for congenial writing space; the American Society for Psychical Research for insight into early-twentieth-century séances and the paranormal; the National Archives in Washington, D.C., for primary sources pertaining both to opium addiction in the early twentieth century and life at the Plattsburgh civilian training camp; Mugar Library at Boston University for work space and resources; the Harvard University Archives for details on the life of early-twentieth-century Harvard men; and the Smithsonian Institution for holding the original 1912 sheet music lyrics of “My Melancholy Baby.” For those wishing to research further into questions of scrying, the Progressive era, Spiritualism, and other arcane matters of
The House of Velvet and Glass
, please visit my website at www.katherinehowe.com.