Gilded Dreams (Newport's Gilded Age Book 2)

Book summary

GILDED DREAMS by Donna Russo Morin tells the story of women's suffrage in America, focusing on the last eight years of the movement. Set in the affluent circles of Newport, Rhode Island, it highlights the significant yet often ignored contributions of wealthy suffragettes like Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. The story follows Pearl and Ginevra from "Gilded Summers" as they, despite being college-educated professionals, wives, and mothers, fiercely fight for the vote amidst major events like the Titanic disaster and World War I. Facing opposition from politics, societal norms, and even other women, their journey is a testament to the indomitable spirit of women who risked everything for the right to vote, redefining their place in history.

Excerpt from Gilded Dreams (Newport's Gilded Age Book 2) by Donna Russo Morin

We were to leave for Canada in the morning, or rather to Nova Scotia, to Halifax. It was where all the… the bodies were being taken, those they could find.

It had been nearly two weeks since I lost my family, two weeks of swimming underwater; every movement, every thought, a slow, painful undertaking. I had my darling husband and beautiful daughter, yes, but there was something untethering to lose the whole of the family you were born into. Suddenly, you became a marionette without any strings.

The message had been strangely curt, though I assumed it was because of the vast number of them that had to be sent. Come here and see if you can find them. Those weren’t the exact words of it but they might as well have been.

We learned more from the newspapers who fed greedily on so much tragedy, filling column after column, page after page, day after day.

It took four ships, ships chartered by the White Star Line, to bring back the bodies of those lost with the sinking of the Titanic. How kind of them; if not for their bungling my family might still be alive. I needed them, though, I needed a target; grief and anger made for a powerful weapon. White Star became the enemy… became my target. Only one ship of the four was a passenger ship. The others were supply ships or cable ships. How appropriate, the bodies became naught but cargo.

The newspapers couldn’t seem to agree as to how many bodies were recovered. One had said 316, another claimed it was 337. All seemed to agree, whatever the number, it accounted for only a quarter of those that had perished.

“A quarter, only a quarter,” someone mumbled – me. “That means… that means… more than a thousand—”

The newspaper disappeared from my hands. Snatched and crumpled by my husband.

“You don’t need to be reading these, my Pearl.” That he used the endearment my father had always used became ever dearer to me. He stomped away to toss the crumpled paper in the bin.

Peter tried to hide all this from me, for those whose graves would forever lay at the bottom of the ocean were there because there was little left of them, not enough for any family to identify them… not enough to put any family through looking upon them. Not enough for the greedy crane fingers to grab on to, to haul up. But no one would know who those lost souls were until we identified who they weren’t.

I stared up at him, I returned to this place and this time, swimming up from the bottom of the dark ocean where I sank to with every word I read. I nodded. He was right, I knew. I also knew I could not stop and would read them whenever I could.

“You look quite silly, Mother.”

I flinched, just slightly. I thought I heard my mother’s voice in my daughter’s words until Mary giggled.

I leaned down from my place on the settee to wiggle my nose in her face as she sat on the floor and played with her dolls. One of her dolls was a doctor; I had told her so when I gave it to her, another a ballet dancer, and one, like her, a musician. Oh, how beautifully she played the piano.

“And why do I look so silly?” I asked her. I stared at her; her golden, hazel eyes and her dark curls – a true mix of her parents’ features – gave me warmth in these spring days where I could find nothing but winter’s merciless, unrelenting cold.

“Well,” she began and I almost laughed at her matter-of-factness, “your hair is just a mess, it’s all…”

Mary waggled her hands above her head like seaweed moving with the tide.

I popped my eyes. “It is? Well, my goodness, and I just fixed it up.”

Mary gifted me with her giggles again.

“And just look at your lovely skirt. You’ve wrinkled it terribly.”

I looked down at my lap. Mary was right, it was wrinkled. I could see where my hands had crumpled it in my fists. I had to be more aware. She would be touched by this – how could she not? I wanted to do my best to make that touch as gentle as it could be.

“But… but that is the latest style,” I feigned a startled tone. “Aunt Ginny told me so.”

Mary collapsed on the floor, her small, high-topped boots thudding upon the floor; she rolled as she giggled. She acted for me.

Children always know so much more than we think they do; they discern truths unspoken. They see all we try to hide. Mary had cried herself to sleep for over a week after we told her. She’d wake in the night calling for her Pop-Pop. How my father loved that silly moniker. Like me, Mary grieved for him most of all.

Her gaze found mine. We both saw our truths glistening there.

I held out my arms. She came into them gladly and for a while I rocked her gently, caring not a whit that she was a seven-year-old. It was what we both needed.

Above our heads, footfalls moved here and there. Now and then a thump thundered. Peter and Sarah finished our packing.

“You are going away tomorrow, Mother.”

I didn’t know if it was a statement or a question. I simply nodded.

“Will you… will things..?” Mary twirled the ribbon of her drop-waist dress in both hands. She couldn’t finish, but I knew.

“Perhaps not right away, but it will help.” I held her tighter and as she did me.

The footsteps grew faster, the thuds more.

“Would you play for me, merry Mary?”

We had called her that from when she was still a babe for her giggles, her laughter, that which came long before her first word, were so infectious she made us all merry just listening to them.

Mary kissed my cheek and hopped off my lap. The piano – the Schoenhut with its colorful angels painted on the Fallboard – was still a good size for her. Her Pop-Pop had gifted it to her when she turned six, when she had climbed up the stool of the grand piano at The Beeches and started to peck at the keys, when the pecking started to sound like music. She stunned us all, even Felice who had been among us. Like a third grandfather, he had found her the best piano teacher in Newport, a teacher who told us she was a prodigy. It was a word we would never use again but hers was a talent we would foster, no matter the cost.

She snuck me a mischievous sidelong look, one tinged with the emotion of our embrace, and began playing. I almost laughed though tears were closer. The song Mary played was My Melancholy Baby.

***

It was so early in the morning, the day’s light still struggled to pull itself up over the horizon. Mary stood on the porch, still in her nightgown and robe, still with sleep heavy in her eyes. In one hand, she clutched the soft and fuzzy teddy bear, the only toy she ever brought to bed, one that had been born the same year as she. Her other hand sat tightly in Ginevra’s.

I knelt to her. “You will be the very best girl for Aunt Ginny, won’t you, Mary?”

With the teddy still in the crook of her arm, she knuckled a sleepy eye and nodded. The word precious can be just a word until one has a child.

I took her in my arms, squeezing tightly as if I could make her feel them until I returned.

“Let me come with you.”

Over Mary’s head, I saw the need in Ginevra’s eyes.

“Let me be by your side when…”

Whether she could not finish or would not finish in front of Mary, it didn’t matter. I knew.

We would be apart for longer than we ever had, save for our honeymoons which were joyous and rousing fun for us both.

Unlike that time, the stories told afterward would bring no joy. I had no idea what would cling to me when I returned, nor did she. Our fear pooled in the corners of her eyes, as deep and dark as the ocean bottom from where they had raised the bodies.

Through the whole of our adolescence, through the assault upon her and what came after, through the frightening years completely on our own in college, we were always by each other’s sides. I would have felt the same need as she were our roles reversed.

I rose, taking her in my arms.

“I need you here more, Ginny. Knowing she is with you will be the best thing you can give me.”

I felt her nod against my shoulder.

“Felix and Angelina will keep her merry,” Ginevra said with a smile as we separated. “They didn’t sleep a wink, knowing she was coming today.”

“Come here, my merry Mary. Give your Dada a big hug.”

Beside us, Peter launched Mary into his arms. With her head upon his shoulder, he whirled her slowly about.

“She need not go to school if she doesn’t want to.” I turned back to Ginevra. “Don’t push her but I would rather she did.”

“Of course. She will go. I bet Felix will take her by the hand and make sure.”

I stared at the face I knew almost as well as my own, had seen it change as mine had. There was a home for me there.

“Our children,” I whispered.

“We will show them the world is theirs…” Ginevra began, chin aquiver.

“No matter boy or girl, no matter rich or poor,” we finished together. It had been our pledge, made upon our engagements, a pledge we would never gainsay.

I kissed Ginevra’s cheek and turned for the carriage. There was no delaying the inevitable any longer.

I barely slept on the train, through the very long day-and and-a-half train ride. I knew I should, I knew I would need my strength, but the ghosts were too many and too loud through the whole journey. These relentless specters played me a picture show, each crackling frame a version of what might await me. From nothing to disfigurement and all that lay in between. At times they were nothing but bones, the sea having stripped them of their skin, just as what had happened to so many of them as I had read in the paper.

Perhaps Peter was right, I shouldn’t have read so much.

The thought walked the silent, slim corridor down the sleeping car of the train with me as I moved from one end of it to the other.

The worst of them were the ones who weren’t there at all. Their existence completely erased by the egotism of men, the greed of corporations, and the anger of Mother Nature.

We were in Dante’s nine circles of hell, only they weren’t circles, they were a mammoth complex of ice rinks, for curling, whatever that was. But it was the very size and low temperatures of the Mayflower Curling Rink which made it the most best suited to this function… to hold and embalm the hundreds of recovered bodies.

Like a field of misshapen, different-sized mounds, they stretched out before my eyes, to the very horizon… body after body, mound after mound. I no longer felt I existed in a world that was real, but rather a dream world, a nightmare. Nowhere in a sane world should such a sight exist, should I see such a sight. So many people, so little sound; the silence unnerved as much as the landscape.

Only muted sobs, like the gurgle of a distant stream, ebbed and flowed throughout the massive structure. Nurses in blue dresses and long white aprons moved from sob to sob, holding, rocking, consoling. For some came the rush of smelling salts. I thought the whole place smelled like those salts – that smell bit the inside of my nose as the ghosts chewed at my mind.

“I imagine the cries will be the same whether someone is found or not,” I thought aloud, expecting no answer, receiving none.

The far corner was closed off by framed draping, silhouettes and shadows wavered behind it. I had no idea what happened in there; I had no wish to know.

A hand clutched my arm.

“Are you sure, my Pearl?”

My gaze traveled from the hand to the face. Peter stared intently at me through a haze of worry.

“You are unsteady on your feet.”

“I am?” The notion surprised me. “But… yes, I am sure. We must try, no matter—”

“Pearl!” The wail tore through the silence, bouncing up to the high metal ceiling and back down, ever louder.

The opulently dressed wraith rushed toward me. I tripped against my husband, erratic steps moving backward, not knowing where they would land. His warm, strong hand braced my lower back. I pushed against it. The wraith came closer.

“Oh Pearl.”

The wraith was in my arms, the furs covering it tickling my nose. I held it; I knew not what else to do.

“It is Madeleine Astor,” Peter leaned down to whisper in my ear. His vision had not been twisted by the same nightmarish fearful distortion as mine.

My arms flinched. I wanted to leave go, to let her fall to the ground. The Astors had shown me little care throughout my life; they, who had deemed themselves worthy above all, had been a harsh judge and jury for as long as I could remember. But then I did remember, it was not this Astor. This Astor was but a nineteen-year-old girl, barely a woman, almost half my age. Some had called her a gold-digger; I believed no man could be dug unless he gave the woman a shovel. No, this poor child had been none of those Astors who had riddled my life with their harshness, their holier-than-thou judgments. She had been a wife for less than a year. This child carried a child in her womb.

I smoothed her dark raven curls even as she muttered into my shoulder.

“He was there, he was standing right there, next to the boat he put me in. I s-sat, I sat down and l-looked up, and he was gone… gone.”

A gaze of such devastation turned up to me. The horrors of the moment played in those dark and tear-reddened eyes. I closed my own to it.

“He should have…” She pulled slightly away from me, took me by the shoulders as if I could hear her better that way. I could see only her deathly pale skin, sunken cheeks, and dark circles that turned the aristocratic face into a death mask. “I should have waited for him. I should not have gotten on the boat without him. There was plenty of room for him, for him and more than-than at least a handful of others.” She shook me, tossing me forward and back as if we stood on the deck of the ship. My stomach churned. “So many others, I tell you!”

Her screams brought more than one nurse to us, brought my husband’s hands to hers as he released the clench they had upon me.

I heard Peter’s mumble, “So the stories are true.”

I had no time to ponder them, to acknowledge the devastating truth.

“Mrs. Astor, calm yourself,” the nurse’s voice had a strange lilt to it, an accent perhaps, and yet it only made the sweet calmness of it more so. “If not for yourself, for your wee babe.”

Another woman, uniformly dressed, handed Madeleine a glass of water.

“I think it best we help her find her husband as soon as is possible,” the first said… to us. Somehow we had become Madeleine Astor’s retainers. Peter would have none of it.

“We are not here with Mrs. Astor, we are merely acquaintances.” I had never seen my husband’s golden skin so blotched. “We are here to find my wife’s… entire… family.”

There were times I regretted having married a lawyer; this was not one of them.

“Oh. Oh my. I… we… we had no way of knowing. Please let me assist you, let Amelia and me assist you all.”

My husband’s splotches feathered away; he reached out a hand, “Thank you, Miss…”

Amelia still held the sobbing Madeleine Astor in her arms.

“Ruth will do.” The nurse accepted the kindly gesture, returned it. “How many are we… that is, how many members of your wife’s family are we looking for?”

To one side of me, the pregnant Madeleine Astor cried in a strange woman’s arms. On the other, my husband conversed with another stranger, speaking of me and my family. I stood in the nowhere in between.

Book Details

AUTHOR NAME: Donna Russo Morin

BOOK TITLE: Gilded Dreams (Newport's Gilded Age Book 2)

GENRE: Historical Fiction

SUBGENRE: American Historical Fiction

PAGE COUNT: 292