The Bayman’s Daughter
by Theresa Dodaro
Historical Time Slip Fiction
Have you ever had a yen to travel back in time to a different era? Say, 100 or so years ago, when telephones were made of wood and bolted to the wall (try carrying one of those around in your pocket), and factory girls were sent home to wash their faces if they wore makeup to work? In “The Bayman’s Daughter,” Theresa Dodaro takes readers back to such a time.
This is a historical time-slip novel (meaning characters slip back and forth in time periods) set in Sayville, Long Island, both 1912 and 2012.
Events like women’s suffrage and World War I anchor the novel in the past, while mention of Ralph’s Italian Ices, Thornhill’s Drug Store, and a Starbucks bring the reader back to Long Island’s present.
Hannah Trumball is the daughter of an oyster fisherman and a lady’s maid on the Meadow Croft summer Estate of John Ellis Roosevelt; Saville, in the 1900s, which was a playground for the rich and famous. When her mother dies suddenly, Hannah fills her job. A girl herself, she becomes a friend and confidant to the Roosevelt daughters, rankling the rest of the staff, who think Hannah should ‘know her place.’ This illustrates the book’s theme of class and social opposites.
At a time when men vote, and women don’t, suffrage and better working conditions for women (one girl loses a hand in a sewing accident at the lace mill) were a long time in coming. Hannah, a talented writer, becomes the “voice of the working girl” and heads up the Sayville Suffrage Club.
Philip Ferrara, Hannah’s love interest, also lives in Sayville, but in 2012—talk about long distance relationships. One minute he’s in the Student Union Building of Suffolk Community College, and before you can say Superstorm Sandy, he’s whisked back to Meadow Croft, 1912. Phillip may be shocked, “…the tiny hairs in back on his neck stood up,” but not his mother, Grace, back home in the present time. A tarot card reader, she’s known for decades that one day she would lose her son to another century.
Hannah is confused when she first encounters Phillip in the Meadow Croft woods, blown into her life by the hurricane, as it were. Never mind the jeans he’s wearing. “Even the way he spoke, the cadence of it was different from anything she had ever had hard.” A meet-cute if ever there was.
Phillip confides in her, and their relationship grows through his bout with influenza in 1918 and the stock market crash in 1929 (Philip knew it was coming, so he kept his cash safe in a safe). There are many historical events and scenes that readers will hold readers’ attention.
Written in straightforward, unadorned language, Dodaro uses paragraph-long dialog that sometimes sounds like history lessons and blocks of narrative to describe life on Long Island way back when.
Gas heat and home lighting were a revelation to this reviewer: A “mixer” next to a generator buried in the basement turns the gasoline into gas that lights the house, heats the water, and operates the kitchen stove. Then the air pump, Hannah explains to Phillip, “below a contraption of pulleys and cables,” springs into action next to a cast iron tub filled with rocks; all you do is “turn a crank that lifts the weights, and the machine makes gas.” All you have to do? I’ll take the auto setting of my thermostat. Thank you very much.
Phillip becomes a crackerjack photographer—he sells photos to Life magazine during WWI—and she, an ace reporter for the local newspaper, telling folks in words and pictures the goings on in the town, like the burning crosses of the KKK—yes, in idyllic Sayville, all those years ago.
If you’ve ever longed to meet relatives you heard about but died before you were born or wondered what your parents were like when they were young, you can live vicariously through Philip. He not only gets to know his long-lost family, he gets to live with them. And when he’s a grandfather with his own married children, he meets Grace and Tom way before they become his mom and dad. Talk about Throwback Thursday!
I’ll leave you with Philip and his folks as I return to 2024 and finish this review.
