Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “A conniver,” Mrs. Hackley muttered.

  “One of Barnum’s circus elephants ran amok once,” Hank said.

  “I remember that,” said Merry, brightening. “It trampled a few chaps, so it had to be killed.”

  “Charles bought the carcass, had it stuffed, and put it in his store window with a sign: ‘Killer elephant to be made into commemorative belts, fine wallets, ivory cuff links. Order yours while the finest parts last.’ It was a huge success.”

  “Bully for him!” Bernard said. “The King of Diamonds tops the Prince of Humbug.”

  “But there’s one more generation.” Hank peered at me. “I don’t know if you’re aware, Clara, that your employer has never finished a year in the black. It’s Charles and his Tiffany and Company, not Louis, that keeps your Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company afloat.”

  Then everyone, even Mrs. Hackley, looked at me. I swallowed the morsel of fish in my mouth without chewing. I was not working in a carefree land of fantasy flamingoes and jeweled peacocks. Now I understood the tension that made him smash vases.

  “I suppose the stakes for him in Chicago rest in part on your shoulders.” Bernard patted my arm. “No need to worry. Diamonds are made under pressure, and you’re our brilliant Claire.”

  CHAPTER 6

  DAFFODIL

  SPRING, AND GRAMERCY PARK WAS DRESSED THIS SUNDAY IN yellow daffodils, frilly-edged goblets on six-pointed saucers. They reminded me of Wordsworth’s poem about wild ones. How did it begin? Oh, yes. “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” And later, “What wealth the show to me had brought.” Fine for him. Only a poet or a woman in love could measure wealth by flowers. I wasn’t either one.

  Wandering too, and in a similar mood, I came to Madison Square Park. An organ-grinder had stationed himself and his monkey beneath a magnolia tree radiant with enormous creamy blossoms, each petal a cup of sunlight. He was surrounded by children, nannies, and white-veiled prams looking like mobile wedding cakes. Everyone in the park was with someone. Even the organ-grinder had a furry friend. Loneliness crept over me despite his cheerful tune.

  A bent woman was selling violets and daffodils. Francis had brought me daffodils every week when they were in season. Two springs’ worth of daffodils.

  “May I buy just two daffodils?” I asked.

  “They’re three for a dime.” Her voice was a rasp against metal.

  I put a dime in her deeply creased palm, thanked her, and walked away, watching the blooms bounce and flutter.

  A top-heavy omnibus pulled by two lathered Clydesdales stopped at the corner, headed uptown. I got on. The clop-clop of the heavy hooves sent up a languid rhythm as we passed the shops of Ladies’ Mile and then the mansions of Fifth Avenue. I descended at Fifty-seventh Street and walked to Alice Gouvy’s West Side flat close to the Art Students League, where she was studying. I hadn’t seen her since the service for Francis.

  As young girls in Tallmadge, Ohio, we had spent delicious days along a clear stream that emptied into the filthy Cuyahoga River. In one place on the bank, a spot we called “the theater,” we acted out Hiawatha, trading off reading it aloud and doing hand gestures. In summer, feeling daring and giddy, we lifted our skirts and stepped in. The sensuality of the cool water moving against our bare legs thrilled us. We liked best those places where the water rippled and light danced on the surface. In quiet moments we shared our curiosity about men and wondered whether we would be housewives like our mothers when we grew up, or something daring, modern, and mysterious—women of the professions.

  Alice answered my knock in her terry-cloth robe and slippers as she was towel-drying her hair.

  “Clara!” She wrapped me in her arms and pulled me inside. “I’ve been wanting to get over to Brooklyn to see you.”

  “That’s good of you, but I’m not there anymore. I live just south of Gramercy Park now.”

  I sank into the cushions of her wicker armchair. The familiar worn pink chenille bedspread, the potbellied oil lamp with parchment shade on the drop-leaf table that served for writing, eating, and drawing, and the woven rag rug like mine that we’d bought at a women’s craft center in Cleveland made me feel instant warmth, instant comfort.

  “I’ve gone back to work for Tiffany.”

  “Oh?”

  “Francis left me no money.”

  Her jaw dropped open.

  “Well, just enough to cover the burial and two months of living expenses. The rest, a substantial amount, went to a daughter I hadn’t known about. Apparently there was an earlier woman.”

  “No! I can’t believe it.”

  I hadn’t been able to either. Shocked, I had grabbed the will out of the attorney’s hands, and the edge of the paper, sharp as the realization of my worth in his eyes, had cut my skin—as if the contents of the will hadn’t cut enough.

  “The alleged daughter was one Sister Maria Theresa, so the inheritance went to a convent. And I, the stepdaughter of a Protestant minister, was out on the street.” The sarcasm gave me a moment’s release. I’d had no one I could tell it to.

  Alice slammed down her hairbrush onto the bare table. “That’s horrible. You’ve been wronged. I feel awful for you.”

  “Don’t feel too sorry for me, Alice. I wouldn’t want to stay married one more day to a man so deceptive.”

  “Aren’t you the least bit angry?”

  “In my low moments, of course I am.”

  She thrust forward her chin. “Could you sue?”

  “Who? The convent? The Holy Roman Church? And with what? When I moved out of the boardinghouse in Brooklyn I left all of his things for the daughter to collect, even his spare change. Maybe some poor, plain soul in black habit could use his mustache cup. What tickled me most was to imagine what use the nuns would have for his copy of Darwin.”

  Alice slapped her hand over her mouth. “Locked it up, I should guess, instead of burning it, so the Mother Superior could feed her curiosity on it between Compline and Matins. And when she was occupied during Mass, some wayward sister would be madly trying to filch the key.”

  I let out a smirky kind of chuckle.

  “I’m sorry, Clara. I shouldn’t make a joke of it. Do you have any idea why he did that?”

  “Yes, I do. His incapacity in bed. He didn’t look it, but he was sixty-two.”

  “Twice your age. I didn’t realize.”

  “He, we, tried and tried, but he couldn’t produce anything harder than a stern look. He ate oysters, hated the rubbery slipperiness of them but still downed them one after another with eyes squeezed shut like stitched wounds. He offered suggestions, whispered so the boardinghouse walls wouldn’t hear. Time after time in bed, after trying everything we knew, I saw hope go out of his eyes, and they filled with accusation.”

  Alice let out a low, wordless murmur. I picked up her hairbrush, lifted her damp hair, and began to brush.

  “He was unwilling to talk about it, though I could tell it was on his mind as we went walking, or as he methodically washed his face, came to bed, and then absently went back to the bathroom to wash it again.”

  Sentences came out slowly, with pauses in between for long, slow strokes of the hairbrush. I told her how Francis took out his frustration against me in subtle ways, for example, saying that a new hat made me look foolish when it was really his sense of failure that was speaking.

  “Whether he failed me or I failed him, I don’t know, but he may have had glorious memories of his earlier woman.”

  “Had he been married to her?”

  “I’ll never know, but that’s immaterial. His money went to commemorate his success, not his failure.”

  “Maybe it was remorse money for something.”

  I shrugged. “Leaving me without money isn’t what grieves me most. I would have gone back to work for Tiffany anyway. I don’t want to be a kept woman to a dead man. It’s that he left me without any sign of regard.”

  “Did you love him?”

  Instantly I saw the adorable crease
s around his lips, the way he stretched his face to shave, and heard his sweet murmured apologies in his sleep when I nudged him to stop snoring. Maybe it was just the intimacy of those things that I loved, and I would love them pasted on another man. Did all men stretch their faces to shave and murmur apologies for snoring?

  Alice’s hair got caught in the prongs of my wedding ring, and I had to work to free it. Ridiculous to keep wearing it. I should sell it and buy opera tickets. Francis and I did enjoy opera together, and our quiet walks in bucolic Fort Greene Park, and our thrilling ones on the Brooklyn Bridge. I had always held the notion that if two people love the same thing, they must love each other as well, but now the memories of that love had been tarnished by betrayal.

  “I miss him. Does one spiteful action kill love? If it can, then what sort of flimsy love was it?”

  I wound her hair in a figure eight and let it tumble down.

  “Yes, I did come to love him, though I wasn’t sure I did when I married him. You might call it a marriage of sacrifice. I still love him for many things he did, but now I wonder if he did those things for the first woman.

  “Listen, Clara, I might be all wrong, but maybe he did it to force you to go back to work for Tiffany. Maybe he knew that was the best way to provide a life for you.”

  That startled me. Could he have been that calculating?

  “You still like it there, don’t you?”

  “I love it. When I left to get married, I intended to work for another glass company that didn’t have a policy against hiring married women, but I found that no other company wanted a woman in a man’s job, married or not.”

  “It’s not a man’s job.”

  “I suppose some people would call it mannish work because of the tools we use. I’ve always loved hand tools—chisels, rasps, pliers, calipers. I got that from my own father, and was forever following him around as a child when he was making something.”

  “I remember the birdhouses he built.”

  “Once he was on his knees working on one, and I was handing him tools. I was playing at swinging a hammer like an ax, enjoying the lopsided weight of it, and it flew out of my hands and hit him in the forehead. I was horrified. I’ll never forget the bloody gash. Soon after that, his health started to fail, and in two years, he was dead. I blamed myself, but was too ashamed to tell you.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I can see that now, but nightmares of flying hammers tortured me for years afterward. Burdens of responsibility have hounded me ever since.”

  “That has nothing to do with Francis.”

  “Yes, it does. Put the pieces together, Alice. Girl feels responsible for father’s death. Uses family money to go to art school. Later, younger sister wants to go too. Crisis: Stepfather earns little as village minister. Family funds dwindle. Older gentleman comes along offering to pay younger sister’s tuition. A fatherly gesture. Complication: Proper mother thinks it unseemly to accept money unless he’s part of the family. Gentleman proposes marriage to elder daughter. Out of guilt for loss of father’s income, elder daughter gives up job in the arts to marry him. Younger sister goes to art school. Climax: Younger sister quits art school. Dénouement: Older sister becomes disenfranchised widow. I could have sold the plot to Ibsen.”

  My momentary glibness was a mask. The scars ran deeper than I let on. “Too much irony tastes bitter,” I murmured.

  I squeezed Alice’s hand. “Come to work for Tiffany. We need you. At the worst possible time, Edith Mitchill left to marry an artist and go with him to paint the West. You could take her place. We could be together every day.”

  “I have another year here.”

  “We need talented women now, to finish our projects for the Chicago World’s Fair on time.”

  “I’m sorry, but I want to complete my certificate. You’ll find others.”

  “Then come live at my boardinghouse. It’s full of interesting, creative people. In the evenings we have sing-alongs around the piano, or we read poetry aloud, or plays that are in the theaters, each of us taking parts. We’re a literary society, a theater critics circle, an artists’ group, a philosophical society. I’ve stumbled upon the perfect place to live.”

  “Sounds nice, but this room is so convenient to my classes.”

  “Then think about it for the future, and come to the park with me now. We’ll wrap ourselves in green grass and see what’s blooming and be part of the grand mix of people and the babble of languages.”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t.” Her cheeks became pink like the delicate petals of sweet peas. She was as pretty as a china doll. “A man from the league asked me to go to a concert with him.”

  The lightness I’d felt at the thought of a stroll in Central Park with Alice was snuffed out like a candle in a draft.

  “Well, some other time.”

  I kissed her cheek and took my walk alone and tried not to brood. Central Park was still Central Park, bathing New Yorkers with spring, each person adding joy to others. I gave myself over to its refreshment.

  WHEN I WENT HOME to my second-floor room, my door was ajar, and I heard whistling. I nudged it open cautiously.

  “George!”

  He was standing on my bed in his stockinged feet, paintbrush in one hand, palette in the other, an elfish grin on his face.

  “I took your comment as an invitation. A caprice must be”—he flicked his brush in the air—“capricious.”

  “Is it customary here to enter other people’s rooms, capriciously?”

  I kept the door open so anyone passing in the corridor could see what was, and wasn’t, going on. Mother’s handbook would have advised me so.

  “Customary for me and Dudley and Hank, but not the Hackleys. They’re premature fuddy-duddies. And not Mr. York, too quiet, or Dr. Griggs, too busy, or Bernard Booth, too English. Very proper—cheerio, jolly good, and all that.” George used his palette to doff an imaginary hat.

  “I’m not accustomed to it.”

  “Face it, Clara. You’ve moved into bohemia. Just down West Twenty-third is where the painters, artist models, poetry scribblers, actors, playwrights, set designers, costumers, wig makers, feather merchants, bird stuffers, wooden-toy painters, tarot card designers, fortunetellers, accordion players, and tambourine makers live.”

  I had to laugh. It was impossible not to like him. What I needed was a friend.

  “Continue, then.”

  “And the patron saint of Irving Place, Washington Irving, lived across the street once, so goes the legend, in a house now occupied by Elsie de Wolfe, actress, stage designer, and interior decorator, and her lover, Bessie Marbury, literary agent to Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, my heroes. Wags call the women ‘the bachelors,’ but what do they care? Elsie’s silk parlor cushions are embroidered with her motto, ‘Never complain. Never explain.’ Macy’s sells copies. I call that high bohemia. Oh, you’re on the slippery edge of it here.”

  He was a hopeless name-dropper, but I didn’t mind. It was fascinating, and for the present, I wasn’t alone.

  “As opposed to low bohemia?”

  “The Jewish immigrant quarter south of us. Dingy pockets of progressive politics, serious theater, social art, and violin virtuosos, the nursery for great contributions someday.”

  “If all that culture is going on there, how can you call it ‘low’?”

  “Only because it’s in the Lower East Side. My brother’s in the thick of it there. So is our comrade, Hank McBride. The horn-rims, remember? He teaches drawing from classical sculpture at the East Side Artist and Educational Alliance. His favorite is the Apollo Belvedere, a Greek god coveted by a pope and swiped by Napoléon. He calls it the epitome of male beauty.”

  “Interesting, but what I meant was to continue with your painting.”

  He had blocked in a meadow and a distant hill in a lavender haze, and on it, the ruins of a Greek temple. He set to work again, painting swiftly.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like an
Apollo just visible between the columns of this temple, my lady?” He waved his brush as though it were a magic wand. “Just a few touches and he would sweeten your fancies.”

  “You remind me of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “ ‘Thou speak’st aright. I am that merry wanderer of the night.’ ”

  “In your fairy palette, do you have any chrome yellow?”

  “Indeed, my lady. Puck splashes it about through all the kingdom.”

  “Do you think he has the magic to put a few daffodils in the meadow?”

  CHAPTER 7

  WHITE

  LATE ONE AFTERNOON I WAS SEWING A BAND OF LACE ONTO A collar to disguise its worn condition when George came in, pulled my curtains aside, and peered out into the early twilight.

  “It’s beginning to snow,” he said. “Tomorrow everything will be covered in white. White buildings. White streets. White omnibuses. White lampposts. An alabaster city.”

  “I get the idea, George. You don’t have to catalog every snowflake.”

  Snow meant three months left until the fair would open in May. With so much still left to do, I felt as nervous as a sparrow pecking at the frayed edge of resolve.

  George was bursting to tell me something, but he kept it in, nosing around, picking up my powder puff, rearranging the things on my dresser scarf, making it seem as though he was only going to reveal it if I asked. To tease him, I refused to, which sooner or later would force him to reveal it on his own. Over the last several months it had become our mutual cat-and-mouse game.

  He adjusted the curtain, he twirled the tassel on the curtain tieback, he played with my kaleidoscope, and he asked me what I did at work today.

  “The same things I did yesterday and the day before that. Chipped chunks of lime green, orange, and gold glass into jewels for the crown in the double-peacock mosaic. It’s still not finished because we’ve had to take over some of the windows from the men’s department so they could stay home, sleep late, talk, talk, talk, and create a work stoppage. You can’t choose a million unique pieces of glass in a week, you know. And none of these are tesserae—simple rectangles. They’re sectiliae, cut to conform to the shapes outlined on the cartoon. Much more work because they’re irregular. It’s going to be gorgeous, but it’s nerve-racking because I hear the clock ticking every time I lay down a piece.”