The Gallery (21 page)

I
f you're ever bored, go online and search a random year and a topic that interests you—say, “heiresses” or “bombings” or “poison.” You'll find yourself trawling old newspapers from around the world, with stories like this:

August 1, 1920:

For a week the people of Florence have been in a state of intense excitement over the mystery of Miss Anna Wright, a young American heiress, said to be worth $60,000,000, who was said to be kept prisoner in an upper apartment of the palatial Villa Bragiotti, on the plea of being afflicted with precocious madness. . . .

September 27, 1932:

The home of Judge Webster Thayer, 74-year-old jurist who sat during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, was destroyed early today by a dynamite bomb that injured his wife and a maid. . . .

June 22, 1919:

Heiress bride poison victim; husband taken; wife says mate gave her powders, then left her. In the case is a tangled tale of a jilted suitor, gold mines, property, and a short and speedy courtship. . . .

February 12, 1916:

The police are searching for Jean Crones, assistant chef of the University Club, because of a virulent poison which was found by chemists in soup which was served at the banquet in honor of Archbishop Mundelein Thursday night. A search of Crones's room revealed a quantity of a similar poison and anarchist literature. . . .

—

How could any fiction writer top this? I certainly couldn't; my only solution was to steal all the best bits and mash them up together.

The result is
The Gallery
.

Newspapers were just the beginning. My research took me through heiresses' biographies, maids' memoirs, society pages, police reports, floor plans, vaudeville lineups, Ellis Island, not to mention real-life museums and mansions.

Along the way, I was continuously surprised by how the realities of history were not exactly what I'd absorbed in school. (For example, did you know it's a myth that your great-grandfather/grandmother's name was “changed at Ellis Island”? No new documents were created at the great Registry Room; the name change would have occurred at the beginning of the journey, on the ship's manifest, or passenger list.)

I'm sure the reader will be surprised, too. Read on to discover what was history, what was fiction, and where one inspired the other.

Are the paintings in the book real?

Yes! Every one. I had fun “shopping” the world's
greatest museums, building my own collection of paintings, and then arranging them to tell Rose's story.

The Gallery
's stars, in order of appearance:

 

Proserpina,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1874)
—
T
HE
T
ATE
M
USEUM,
L
ONDON

Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate,
Gustave Courbet (1872)
—
T
HE
N
ATIONAL
G
ALLERY,
L
ON
DON

Still Life with Ewer, Vessels, and Pomegranate,
Willem Kalf (1646)
—
T
HE
G
ETTY
M
US
EUM,
L
OS
A
NGELES

The Pomegranate,
Pablo Picasso (1912)
—
T
HE
F
OGG
M
USEUM,
C
AMBRIDGE,
MA

Sophonisba
*
,
Rembrandt van Rijn (1634)
—
T
HE
P
RADO,
M
ADRID

Pierrot and Harlequin
,
Pablo Picasso (1920)—B
ALTIMORE
M
USEUM OF
A
RT

Bacchus,
Caravaggio (1595)
—
T
HE
U
FFIZI,
F
LORENCE

Judith and Her Maidservant,
Artemisia Gentileschi (1614)
—
P
ALAZZO
P
ITTI,
F
LORENCE

Gilded Age mansions didn't have their own underground train platforms, did they?

Mansions may not have, but a very famous hotel does. When the Waldorf-Astoria was built, just such a platform was added to give high-profile celebrities a discreet way in and out of the hotel. It was used most frequently and famously by wheelchair-bound Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (FDR's administration worked hard to hide the president's disability from photographers.)

The hotel platform still exists today, but has fallen into disrepair and is no longer in use.

1928–1929: Prohibition, the presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith, the murder of Al Rothstein, the run on the stock market. Did these things all really happen that year?

They sure did. I was particularly interested in the way the Smith–Hoover election mirrored themes in our own political landscape.

But the stock market crash of 1929 didn't happen until October! Why does the book have it taking place in March?

It was a different crash—a “run-up” crash, economists call it. After the Federal Reserve warned of
rampant stock speculation, interest rates started to rise. Investors got nervous and started dumping their stock. Things snowballed the week of March 18, with a market experiencing a mini-crash on Monday, March 25—the day Rose gets the drop on Mr. Sewell.

From reading her husband's newspaper, Rose could tell he was pumping certain stocks for his own gain and was likely overextended in the market. She knew a crash would wipe him out—and she guessed one was coming eventually. So when she heard the radio reports on March 25, she knew he was—at least momentarily—penniless. Just the time to put her plan in motion.

Rose is smart to get Mr. Sewell out of the country that very day. He's already at sea when some of his banker cronies bail out the market, artificially buoying it for another few months—before the Great Crash of October 29.

But how can Mr. Sewell just jump on a ship bound for Italy, with no passport, no visa, just a ticket in Alfonso Vanzetti's name? Wouldn't he have to show identification?

Nope. All of the documentation we take for granted these days—passports, visas, photographic
drivers' licenses—didn't exist at this time. At least, not to leave the country.

For some, visas were required to
enter
the country—especially for those immigrants from less “desirable” regions specified in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921. (Alfonso and his brother would have entered the country before that.) But passports and travel visas didn't become standard until World War II.

Not surprisingly, it was quite easy for people to change their identities at this time—as we see in Alfonso Vanzetti's use of the name Alphonse Dupont.

How could Alfonso get a job under a false name, Alphonse Dupont? Wouldn't somebody check his Social Security number or something?

Again: no. Social Security numbers and other forms of identity documentation didn't come about until the 1940s. At this time, most employees (and certainly servants) were paid in cash or by check, with no payroll taxes extracted. The most a job candidate needed to produce was a reference, which could be easily faked.

Did Vanzetti really have a brother?

If he did, it wasn't Alfonso (or Alphonse). The character of Alphonse is purely fictional, although
Sacco and Vanzetti were very real and very important figures of this time.

Who were Sacco and Vanzetti anyway?

Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who were tried and executed for shooting a security guard as part of a failed robbery.

But the case was a little more complicated than that.

Throughout the 1920s, the political movement known as anarchism was under deep suspicion—partly due to its commitment to change through violence, partly for its large following among immigrants, mostly Italians. Italian anarchists were the face of “terrorists” at this time; they were behind a number of high profile attacks: the bombing on Wall Street in 1920, an attack on a New York City subway train in 1927, the large-scale poisoning mentioned in the headlines earlier. Bombs were their preferred mode of attack: their leader, Luigi Galleani, published a pamphlet misleadingly titled
La Salute é in Voi!
(
Health Is in You!
), which detailed how anyone could build weapons of destruction from everyday items. (It's what appears in Alfonso's pocket the day the Sewell mansion burns to the ground.)

Sacco and Vanzetti had attended anarchist meetings, although their participation seems to have been minimal. They were not even necessarily at the location of the robbery in question. But their anarchist leanings made great headlines in the newspapers of magnates like William Randolph Hearst (a model for Mr. Sewell). Today most believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were scapegoated for their political beliefs, and even at the time their case caused public outcry around the world.

After Sacco's and Vanzetti's executions, a slew of revenge bombings followed, including a failed assassination attempt on Herbert Hoover in Argentina. As the publisher of a paper that had vilified the two men, Mr. Sewell would likely be concerned about revenge attacks as well. (And as it turns out, he even fakes one as a publicity stunt on the eve of the presidential election.)

Were you inspired by any real-life museums or collectors?

Oh, yes. In fact,
The Gallery
has its roots in one of my favorite places, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Isabella, very much a model for Rose, was your textbook eccentric Gilded Age heiress with the money and moxie to do as she pleased—
whether it was walking lion cubs on a leash, wearing a Red Sox headband to the opera, or curating a world-class art museum in her home.

Isabella left behind an airtight will leaving her home as a museum. She stipulated that if a single object were ever moved from where she'd placed it, the entire collection should be sold off and the museum shut down. For this reason, when you visit the museum, you will see it exactly as Isabella intended.

Or almost. In 1990, gunmen raided the museum and stole thirteen works of art—including works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet, and Degas. Thankfully the removal of these pieces didn't necessitate the liquidation of the museum. (Isabella's will provided a loophole for theft, cleaning, or lending.) But it did leave the collection diminished, and the museum has left the empty frames in their places as a reminder of what was lost.

(A free-willed heiress. A precise order of paintings. An elaborate heist. I told you I stole my best ideas from history.)

In recent years, leads around the Gardner theft have begun bubbling up to the surface, but there have been no grand revelations yet. I like to think of the paintings waiting somewhere, like Rose's at the
end of
The Gallery
. Are they stacked in the dark of a basement, or are they lighting up a living room for an audience of one? Maybe, like Rose's, they're in a cold, sealed tomb in some unsuspecting graveyard. Wherever they are, they're ready to be discovered and to tell their stories again.

Who knows who will find them? Maybe even
you.

LAURA MARX FITZGERALD studied Art History at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. Her first book for children,
Under the Egg,
was the winner of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Best Middle Grade Book of the Year award. Laura lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

 

Learn more at

www.lauramarxfitzgerald.com

and follow Laura on Twitter

@marxfitzy.

*
The subject of this Rembrandt painting is the source of debate: classical heroine Sophonisba or ancient Greek queen Artemisia? Because Sophonisba's story was a better fit to mine, I chose this interpretation.

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