• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It was distressing beyond words for the Cleveland family to read the account of suffering and panic on board. Mrs. Cleveland was said to be in a state of despair—a “stricken mother in her untold, unfathomable grief.” Perhaps the only solace for Grover and his family was the touching depiction of Cecil’s and Fred’s final moments. In the chaos and panic on board the Missouri, with the ship ablaze, Cecil and Fred were observed on deck assisting the terror-stricken passengers as the lifeboats were being lowered. “When the boats were filled, there was no room for them, and together they went down.” The Cleveland brothers died heroes.

3

MARIA

MARIA HALPIN COULD see that she was losing her husband. His symptoms were chillingly recognizable to any woman of the 19th century: flushed cheeks, pale skin, fever, and swollen red eyes sensitive to bright light. Most of all, there was the bloody cough. He had tuberculosis. In Maria’s time, it was called consumption. With a mortality rate approaching 80 percent, more often than not, it was a death sentence.

Consumption was a relentless fading-away of the patient. Perhaps because so many famous artists and poets died from it in the prime of their lives, in Maria’s time, the disease was romanticized; suffering from consumption had a hauntingly transcendent aura about it. The great composer Chopin died of tuberculosis at age thirty-nine, and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau succumbed at age forty-four. Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights, was dead at age thirty from consumption; her sister Charlotte Brontë followed her to the grave six years later, also from tuberculosis. In the final throes of the disease, women were said to be enchantingly alluring and men brilliantly lucid.

Maria found nothing romantic about consumption. Frederick Halpin was clearly dying of it, and he was dying slowly. When her husband succumbed, in 1870, Maria was thirty years old. Her son Freddie was seven, and her daughter Ada just five.

The Halpin family did what they could. For a time, Maria moved in with her in-laws, in Jersey City, New Jersey—never a perfect state of affairs for a young widow. The engraver Frederick Halpin was now seventy, and his wife, Elija, sixty-five. A widow like Maria was expected to remain in a period of deep mourning for a minimum of a year plus a day. Two of the best-known widows of the era, Queen Victoria and Mary Todd Lincoln, made a public spectacle of their deep mourning that went on for the rest of their lives. Of course Maria Halpin did not go to that extreme, but she did wear black, including a black crepe veil, and she followed the rituals and etiquette that were laid out in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the premier women’s magazine of the Gilded Age.

With two children to feed, Maria found it necessary to look for a job. A woman working outside the home was becoming progressively widespread, mainly because the Civil War produced thousands of widows who were forced to support themselves and their children for the first time.

Maria was hired by A. T. Stewart & Co. to work as a saleslady in the company’s flagship department store, the Iron Palace, on Broadway and 9th Street in New York City. Alexander Turney Stewart was an innovative Irish-born entrepreneur who had started in business as a bag boy. Later, assisted by a $5,000 inheritance from his grandfather, he became a wealthy merchant and, in 1862, opened the Iron Palace.

Stewart focused on pleasing the lady customer of the carriage-trade class. His formula for building a successful retail store and encouraging repeat business was paying attention to the smallest details, offering his customers great deals, and connecting with them on a personal level. Hiring the right saleswomen was fundamental, and Maria, with a background in dressmaking and her natural gifts as a conversationalist, was eminently qualified. That she also spoke fluent French made her eminently qualified and then some.

When Maria walked into the Iron