Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “Maybe nothing.”

  “Sad? Of course I’m sad. Deeper than that. Heartsick. That I may have caused him some catastrophe.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  “No. Nor how he is living. If I only knew that he was all right.” My throat constricted, and my voice was pinched and high. “I’m afraid, Alice.”

  She wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, no, sweet. He’s a man. He’ll be all right.”

  “I’m afraid for me too. I’m afraid I’ll never know what happened. I may have to live the rest of my life not knowing.”

  “Shh,” she crooned, rocking me.

  “I still have so much to sort out. My feelings, I mean.”

  I could not hold with the idea of his willfulness in hurting me. I could not believe in deceit. Instead, I could believe in mystery. Even in tragedy.

  “He may be dead, for all we know. His brother has diminishing hopes.”

  I had been furious at George for not warning me before I threw my life at someone who had the stability of a child’s top. I had screamed at him, which only made him clam up and pout in remorse. During those silent hours on the train with him I began to realize that for him to take that risk to ensure my presence in his life had not been an act of flippant mischief, like Puck’s, only reckless love. But what love doesn’t have something of the reckless in it? Both of us were guilty of that. My anger began to melt, and probably his too, in the new knowledge that in some crippled way, we did have each other in our lives. But that was too complicated to get into now with Alice.

  “Is his brother named George?” she asked. “The George that everyone talks about here?”

  “The same. He takes his meals here and lives in his studio next door. You’ll see him at dinner tonight.”

  “I knew him at Art Students League. A funny fellow.”

  “On the surface.”

  His funniness and frivolity had dissolved in those days at Lake Geneva. As we waited in the parlor during the storm that had made our worry excruciating, the man I saw allowed a depth of feeling to emerge. Before this, George was an innocent. The simplicity of his nature prevented him from knowing that people hurt even their loved ones by orchestrating their lives.

  “He’s a little … The men here, don’t you find them …?”

  “Alice, don’t be naïve. This building isn’t Greek Revival style by accident. Not all of them. Not Mr. Booth, the Englishman; and not Mr. Bainbridge, the actor; or Dr. Griggs; or Mr. York, an industrial designer, a quiet sort but a good fellow. He smokes sunflower leaves so as to keep the air fresh for the rest of us. And Dr. Griggs has helped everyone here with potions and pills and bandages at one time or another.”

  “Do I need to be concerned about the others?”

  “No. It’s safer here than in any other mixed boardinghouse that I know of. Dudley’s a cream puff, and Hank would do anything for me. Once when I was sick, I had to get a drawing to Mr. Tiffany right away. Hank delivered it himself. Of course, that got him into Tiffany’s studio, which he loved.”

  “I haven’t met any Englishman here, but the others are nice enough.”

  “Don’t try to figure out who’s matched with whom. It will drive you crazy trying to pick up on clues. Just think of it as fluid, interchangeable, communal, and let it be.”

  “Are you coming back to work?”

  “Of course, at whatever toll my embarrassment takes. I have struggled out of widow’s weeds to gather a wedding trousseau, and now I’ve packed it in some attic of my mind in order to wear again the garb of the working woman—shirtwaist, tie, and lace-up shoes.”

  Alice patted my hand.

  With the absorption of work and the love of a few good friends, I felt I could solder the brittle pieces together and take up my old life again.

  After brief, embarrassed condolences all around, dinner that night was awkward and tense. With dark circles under his eyes, George sat between Dudley and Hank, and I think he drew strength, if not peace, from being in their presence. It was sweet to see the way they made sure he ate. Dudley cut out the choicest morsel of his lamb chop and laid it on George’s plate. George and I stole mutual glances to check how the other one was bearing up, and I caught glimpses of Alice checking on us both.

  As George was preparing to go back to his studio, I followed him to the door.

  “What was that embroidery on your friend’s parlor cushions?”

  “ ‘Never complain. Never explain.’ ”

  “Never explain. It’s good advice. I’m going back to Tiffany’s tomorrow. What will you do?”

  “I have to tell them at the University Settlement. Then I’ll go to Connecticut to be with my parents for a while. The detectives know how to reach me there.”

  “Good.” Good for his parents, and good for me not to be with him for a while. I had myself to put together again.

  “Once I had three brothers,” he said. “One died as a baby, another as a schoolboy.”

  “How do you think your parents will take it?”

  “My mother will be tearful. She will have begun a regimen of prayers. My father will be distraught. He had pinned his hopes on Edwin. It was me he thought he would lose next.”

  That startled me. As he stepped out the door, I felt the thread that had connected us at Lake Geneva snap in two. I was awash with loss.

  I managed to get Dr. Griggs in a private moment on the stairs, and I spilled out everything that happened at the lake. “Do you think he could be alive, but just …” The only word that came to mind was lost.

  With his eyebrows pinched together, he said, “If there was some illness or disorder that made him lose his bearings, it’s not likely. In that state, similar to sleepwalking and caused by stress or anxiety or psychological factors, he might not have sense enough to nourish himself. And with cold, wet weather, if he has been sleeping out, chances are that he would succumb.”

  I choked on a gulp of air. “And if he left intentionally?”

  “In that case, he might have had a plan, so he’s probably all right. I’m sorry I can’t be more encouraging.”

  That left me to hope that his escape was intentional. What kind of wrong-hearted hope was that? A thought wormed its ugly way into my mind: Maybe I was the one who had escaped. I went into my bedroom shocked for having thought that, and lay down with my own betrayal.

  WITH TREPIDATION, I dressed for work the next morning, knowing I had to confront the man who could do without me, and reveal to him that another man could also do without me. Were it not that I loved Mr. Tiffany’s creative fire, and the warm praise he gave me when my work pleased him, I might have sought some other work, but hope that we might pick up where we left off made me take Alice’s arm and head up Irving Place. As we stepped around the perimeter of Gramercy Park, dry leaves crunched under our feet, the crackle of autumn’s sadness that summer had flown away. Bustling Fourth Avenue was oddly no different than when I had left, with its web of wires overhead pulsing with energy, moving people, making connections. Fervently I hoped for some connection.

  How good to feel Alice’s support for four blocks, three, two, one. She squeezed my arm and steered me into the showroom, not the usual workers’ entrance on Twenty-fifth Street but straight through the grander public entrance and up the Art Nouveau staircase as though we owned it, up to the second floor, where she patted my cheek, waited for the gilded doors of the elevator to open, stepped in, and left me there.

  Mr. Tiffany stood up the instant he saw me at his office doorway. His forehead lines contracted with confusion. I told him straight off, and he sat back down at his desk. “Oh, no, no, no,” he murmured, the same crooning sympathy I had heard from him twice before, the same points of light dancing in his opal ring as he drummed his fingernails on his desk.

  “I thought I had decided carefully,” I said. “He is, or was, a respectable man of high ideals but apparently low stability, possibly with a hidden streak of a mental disorder, or just plain cowardice. I may
never know which.”

  Hunched forward, his agitated gaze moving among the fabric samples on his desk, he seemed to be processing all I’d said.

  “Have you married him?”

  Heat rose up my throat to my cheeks. The truth would forfeit my respectability. A lie would forfeit my integrity. Being married to a missing person would put a strain on his policy against hiring married women.

  “No.”

  “Then you are single,” he said.

  I said yes, realizing that Edwin had given me back my art.

  “You are mine again?”

  I blushed to think he thought of me as his.

  “Yes. I am yours.”

  He raised both stubby arms in a hallelujah.

  “If my work has pleased you,” I added, a genial attempt to tease out of him a scrap of praise.

  “Shame on you for doubting.”

  “Who took my place while I was gone?”

  “No one. I hadn’t decided yet. Henry Belknap and Miss Stoney and Miss Northrop all filled in.”

  He smacked both palms down on his ebony desk and trotted over to his display table to show me four watercolors for a large conservatory bay window in two wide panels plus two narrow side windows. Vine leaves and gourds and nasturtiums cascaded down over clear glass.

  “A happy profusion of color and growth, eh?”

  All the cadmiums—yellow, orange, and red—together with yellow ocher against the fresh greens—emerald, Hooker’s green, and sap green—I drank them all in.

  “They’re cheerful colors,” I said.

  “Nature always heals. It’s proven that the light vibrations of color have a subjective power, and affect the mind and soul. Yellow lifts up, orange rouses, green comforts. You’re receptive to that, I know. So soak up what they’re offering you.”

  “I will. Thank you. You know, we would get better color harmonies if we worked on all the windows at once.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then I’ll need Agnes and Alice and Miss Judd to do the cartoons side by side. I’ll be the fourth. We’ll have to rearrange the sawhorse tables to have all the glass selected against the same exposure.”

  “Joe and Frank can move everything when the time comes. How long do you think you would need?”

  “If I can free up a dozen cutters, selectors, and assistants to work on it, three to four weeks. May I take the watercolors to the studio? It will help divert the discussion about why I’m back.”

  “Certainly.” He began rolling them up. “I’ll go up with you.”

  In the privacy of the elevator, he murmured, “He was a fool to let you go.”

  You should have never let me go either, I thought, but that didn’t matter now. We would be back together, taking exquisite pleasure in each other’s work.

  That bolstered me for the reunion with the girls. I knew how it would look to them—that I was jilted three steps from the altar. It wasn’t anyone’s business, anyway, though it would be a juicy topic for a while. If I could follow the cushion’s advice never to explain, it would be easier to keep my dignity.

  Mr. Tiffany tapped his cane just inside the women’s studio, the girls looked up, and he said blithely, “Look who we have back among us, with a big new project.” Immediately he began laying out the watercolors on the sawhorse worktables, doing his best to discourage questions and engaging them in discussion of the windows. Alice must have prepared the girls because just after he cast a supportive look at me and left, Minnie Henderson, the paragon of English reserve, burst out, “We’re ever so glad you’re back,” and in a giddy mob, thirty-three lambs all rushed to hug me, some whispering words of condolence. Agnes looked on from the rear with at least a pleasant expression.

  As the news got around, people from other departments stopped by to have a few words with me. Mr. Mitchell, the business manager, offered a casual, “Hello again.” Mr. Tiffany must have colored the story as merely “a change of plans” rather than “abandoned by a lunatic.” Bless him for that. Joe Briggs extended a halting expression of happiness that we could take up our mosaic work together again. Frank clung on to my second sleeve until I found something for him to do. Such a sweet boy. Despite the transparency of his emotions, I wished I could communicate with him in words instead of pantomime.

  Albert, the Irish sheet glass stockman, came up from the basement to welcome me back, sniffling through his red nose that hung down like a trumpet flower. He gave me a long harangue about the difficulty he’d been having of “gitten the coolers loike they’re wanting.” He digressed to speak of the virtues of Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Mitchell, hoping, no doubt, that I would repeat his obsequious opinion to them. From this he went smoothly and naturally into a graphic account of having had the “dyspeptic.” It was about the fiftieth time I’d heard his tale of woe, but I gave him my sympathy once again, knowing I would get special service in hunting glass as a consequence.

  Mr. Belknap offered a sincere condolence, hesitated, and added in his thin, reedy voice, “I hope, if and when you’re ready, we might resume our musical evenings. They gave me much pleasure.”

  “I would like that.”

  “I’ve become a member of the Egyptology Society, which permits me to bring a guest to their lectures, if that might interest you.”

  “It would. Thank you.”

  I realized I could look him in the face now, disregard his made-up eyebrows, his overly Brilliantined hair, and see beyond his fastidious appearance to his sincerity—not because of any change in him but in me.

  The rest of the day I found myself peacefully absorbed in making a list of what “coolers” and textures of glass I would need for the nasturtium windows and selecting the sheets in the basement. The real comfort came when I returned after lunch and found my red-handled diamond cutting wheel in my toolbox. I greeted it as I would an old friend.

  CHAPTER 16

  DAISY

  I SPREAD OUT MY ACCOUNTING PAPERS AND CHITS FOR EACH GIRL on the dining-room table after dinner one evening and slumped in a chair. It had been a hard day, and it was all due to Mr. Mitchell’s new scheme to squeeze more work out of us under the guise of rewarding fast workers. He had arbitrarily decreed that his brainchild of a contract system would be started next week, the first week of the new year. Time was running out for me to design a way to do the complicated bookkeeping. Every time I’d begun to draw an accounting chart that afternoon, I had been interrupted—rather, my thoughts of Edwin interrupted me, and now I couldn’t hear myself think.

  At the other table, Mr. Hackley and Mrs. Slater, who hears through an ear horn, were playing whist with Francie and Mr. Bainbridge, who snapped down a card and said, “Trump!” as loud as if he were onstage so Mrs. Slater could hear it. In the adjoining parlor Miss Lefevre was correcting Hank’s French pronunciation of a passage of dialog from his textbook, Miss Hettie and Alice were reading Cyrano de Bergerac aloud, Mrs. Hackley was teaching Dudley a new piece on the zither, and Merry was singing her Irish ballads in the kitchen.

  The only quiet one was Bernard Booth, whom I had privately dubbed Mr. Book Booth. He had been away several months and was catching up on reading his accumulated issues of The Century Magazine. When he had returned, I could tell he’d been glad to see me, though he did seem disconcerted or troubled by something. Being a gentleman, he didn’t ask about my situation. With Mother Hen Owens and the Lesser Furies, he probably didn’t have to, so what I had seen on his face might have been compassion.

  I didn’t see how he was able to keep a thought from one line to the next in this bedlam. I slapped my hands over my ears, but I still couldn’t concentrate. Apparently I let out a little wail because Bernard came through the wide arch into the dining room.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.

  “I’m at my wit’s end with this. His Lieutenantship, the business manager, is expecting me to come up with a bookkeeping system that allots pay bonuses to those glass selectors who finish their projects before deadline
.”

  “Sounds fair enough.”

  “Hear the whole thing before you judge. In the new plan, I’m supposed to determine a production cost—time and materials—and an estimated production time for each window before we begin. It’s an enticement to work faster because if the head selector on that project finishes sooner, she will receive the difference between my cost estimate and the actual cost accrued, which would be less.

  “But here’s the rub. Meeting a deadline isn’t solely dependent on the glass selector. To make it fair, I think any earned bonus ought to be divided among her helpers—the cartoonist, pattern maker, and cutter—but not necessarily equally. It should be commensurate to the amount of work they do on it as well as their base wages, which differ depending on their classification and longevity.”

  “That complicates things,” he murmured. “You’ll need to devise a formula, and will probably need two types of accounting records.”

  “It’s even more complicated, because the amount of time it takes isn’t just dependent on the speed of the one who selects the glass but on the speed of the cartoonist and cutter as well. There are going to be hard feelings.”

  “Maybe the cartoonists and cutters could be rotated,” Bernard suggested.

  “I have to assign the cartoonists by their skills and the nature of the project, but maybe the cutters could rotate.”

  “Just like Mr. Hackley,” Mrs. Hackley said. “You tell him your troubles and all he can do is solve them.” She let loose a salvo of strumming. “They’re both these manager types.”

  “And what is it that you manage, Mr. Booth, besides managing to read with all this going on?”

  “I manage the New York office of a London export firm.”

  “Fine qualifications, I’m sure. But do you manage thirty-some girls who are used to their partners and won’t take lightly to rotation?”

  “Excuse me, Clara,” Miss Hettie said from the parlor. “This would be so much more enjoyable if we had a man to play Cyrano. Mr. Booth, would you oblige us?”