Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “No,” she said. “I want to show you my favorite paintings.”

  A good ploy. Bless her. On the way to the European galleries he stopped for a long time in front of a Chinese scroll from the Ming Dynasty called Marsh Scene with Egrets. The pure white birds were feeding, bathing, grooming their feathers. One was airborne, preparing for a gentle landing among the reeds. Trancelike, George didn’t move, as if stillness were necessary to hear the birds speak, or the artist, reaching through centuries for the sole purpose of offering him a vision of harmony. Knowing something soulful was happening, we waited until he finally stepped away, his eyes slick as wet pond stones.

  With Alice pulling on one arm and I on the other, we dragged him through corridors of Greek vases, Roman sculpture, medieval tapestries and altarpieces. Passing an Italian altar with a wooden triptych of angels in flight hanging above it, George asked, “If God died, what would happen to the angels?”

  I braced myself against where he might take this, but I answered, “They’d have no deeds to carry out. No messages to deliver.”

  “Quite right. They’d be unemployed.”

  “They’d become bored,” Alice offered. “They would wither away.”

  “No. They would turn into artists,” George said, enormously pleased with himself.

  Relief! Joy! He was the Jester again.

  CHAPTER 18

  BUTTERFLY

  A WHEEL! A WHEEL! MY KINGDOM FOR A WHEEL. AT THE FIRST buds of spring I had enough left from the sale of the wedding ring Francis had given me to lay down the enormous sum of forty-five dollars for this mobile contraption and five dollars and twenty cents more at Wanamaker’s for my ready-made linen bicycling costume of a fitted jacket and gored skirt, daringly six inches above my ankles. Nobody said I couldn’t.

  Encouraged by Bernard shouting “Tallyho!” I wiggled up Irving Place one Saturday while he trotted alongside me, steadying me, the front wheel wagging like a metronome needle gone crazy. I didn’t trust myself to turn the thing while in the saddle, so I had to get off my mechanical stallion, wheel it around, and start again. Mounting the thing was treacherous, but propelling it forward was easier. Bernard let go little by little until I was truly riding by myself.

  Dudley and Hank came outdoors to be entertained, and I felt like a little urchin who makes a couple of feeble hops on one leg without falling down, and is filled with admiration at his dexterity, doubly so because there are onlookers. Wouldn’t I ever grow up?

  Suddenly, a fat man appeared out of nowhere. Instead of proceeding across the street, he froze in mortal fear, taking up the whole sidewalk like an idiot and waiting for me to pass between him and the mailbox, a space of a mere yard. Such a dainty maneuver demanded more agility than I could command. It was either the squishy fat man or the hard metal U.S. mailbox. Although the former would have been more comfortable for me, I heroically crashed into the federal government, landing on hip and elbow, the back wheel spinning on top of my leg.

  “Clara!” Bernard called, rushing to me along with Dudley and Hank.

  “Christ a-mighty, she’s down!” Dudley yelled.

  Bernard lifted off the bicycle. “Are you all right?”

  Dudley helped me up and steadied me. My left leg throbbed in several places, but Mother’s etiquette handbook surely admonished, “Do not lift your skirt to check for injuries after a fall.” My new skirt was torn near the hemline.

  The fat man whose life I had saved and who had no business taking up all that space muttered, “A lady’s place is in the home.”

  “And a gentleman’s place is to give way to a lady careening toward catastrophe!” I retorted.

  If I failed, it would be due to a wobbling wheel, not a wobbling will. To everyone’s astonishment, when my legs had stopped trembling I mounted my wheel again and rode the length of Irving Place once more before retiring my steed to the stable.

  My vanity forced me to wait for an opportune time that week when the men were gone in order to practice turning around. Not until I was proficient would they see me ride again. I donned my cycling skirt only to find the tear miraculously mended, hardly visible at all. Puzzled, I set out to practice lighting the wick on my oil lamp and found that it had been neatly trimmed. That I knew to be the work of Bernard, but could Dudley sew?

  I rode up to Gramercy Park, and with wavering forward movement, I executed successfully one right turn and four lefts around the little park. I dismounted, turned the bicycle in the opposite direction, and remounted to do four semi-elegant right turns. I worked on that for half an hour, until I had the courage to attempt tight, full turns on Irving Place.

  Lillian Palmié, one of the Prussian twins, had a wheel too, the Safety Model, like mine, with the two wheels the same size and a chain to make it go. Although she lived in Brooklyn, she offered to bring her bicycle on the train on Sunday, an unimaginable feat. We pedaled slowly down Fifth Avenue about a dozen blocks to Washington Square, rode under the Washington Arch, and came back. I could trail along behind her easily, but I ran into her if I tried to ride close beside her.

  “Doesn’t controlling a machine make you feel you can design your own destiny?” I called out to her. It was such a thrill to be teetering along with a gang of cyclists that we repeated the route until twilight.

  With that, I had gained enough confidence to ride with Bernard. By this time I sported a spring riding hat, a cheap boater with band the same buff color as my riding costume, secured by two hat pins and a ribbon under my chin. It made me feel jaunty. I had become a woman awheel.

  In high spirits, Bernard and I set off for Fifth Avenue, which entailed crossing four perilous raised electric and horsecar tracks on Fourth Avenue and two raised cable tracks on Broadway.

  “Take them perpendicular, with some speed,” Bernard called back to me.

  I had intended to walk across, but now I had to stay mounted. I tightened my grip on the handlebars and dashed out between cable cars. Safe on the other side, I breathed again to assure myself that I was still alive.

  “That was quite an initiation,” I called up to him.

  “You did fine,” he said, which made me inordinately happy.

  Past Madison Square Park we began the upgrade. Torturous. After Thirty-sixth, I coasted on a downgrade past the construction site for the new public library where the beautiful Egyptian reservoir used to be. I had loved promenading on the wide walls with Sunday crowds and was sad to see it go. A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead.

  Grand Army Plaza at Fifty-ninth Street was a maelstrom of movement—electric trams and motorcars and wagons and carriages and newsboys whizzing by on rolling skates and people darting out into the roadway. Although Bernard deftly swerved among them, I got off and walked my wheel to Scholars’ Gate, the southeast corner entrance to Central Park, and remounted to run the gauntlet between two rows of posts. A shame he didn’t look back to see how cleverly I executed that!

  The fresh fragrance of the flower beds and the little gaslights on the bicycles in the distance flickering like fireflies enchanted me. Mercifully, he’d had enough at Seventy-second Street, so we turned back and rested under the Wisteria Pergola. I thanked him effusively for the exhaustion he caused me.

  “You know, bicycling isn’t just a matter of balance,” I said. “It’s a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I’m going to call that the Bicyclist’s Philosophy of Life.”

  “You find marvelous significance in everything, don’t you?”

  BERNARD’S BROTHER ALISTAIR, very blond, very British, very athletic, an amateur naturalist visiting from England, was sharing Bernard’s room for the summer. One evening, he said with elocution that would please Queen Victoria, “Since we both appear to be free this evening, and Bernard is with his fiancée, would you care for a bit of company on a spin up Riverside Drive?”

  A jolt went up my spine. Fiancée? Fiancée? I felt disoriented,
as one feels the moment after a cataclysm, but it was devoid of any foundation. A couple of cycling outings did not signify any claim.

  I recovered my composure enough to say, “That would be lovely,” although what my baser nature wanted to say was, “How dare he keep that little tidbit of information a secret!”

  We rode uptown all the way to Grant’s Tomb, where thousands of New Yorkers on wheels were rolling along gaily, and the only thing that wobbled was my mind, jarred by the collapse of the illusion I had naïvely believed. The shimmering lights on the other shore reflected in the river like shards of golden glass tumbling in the minute turn of a kaleidoscope to reveal an entirely different picture.

  While we rested by the river, Alistair asked me if I would like to go with him on a specimen-gathering expedition in the country by bicycle. He collected moths and butterflies and wildflowers, he said.

  “Where would we go?”

  “Bronxville. A beautiful place near Yonkers. We can put our bicycles on the train, and ride once we get there.”

  A timid Victorian would say no, politely. I said yes, blithely.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, Alistair Booth, decked out in a sportsman’s brown shirt, knickerbockers, felt hat, and boots, oiled both of our bicycles and checked the tires. Bernard had not been at breakfast and was nowhere in sight. Two butterfly nets stuck out of Alistair’s knapsack, and collecting apparatus was strapped to his bicycle. We were off to Grand Central Depot, and forty minutes on the train brought us to the Bronxville station.

  Alistair knew every rock and rut in the track. Excruciating hills alternated with thrilling, breezy descents. The narrow path was a challenge for me, with high grass and daisies on both sides. Branches sprang back at me when Alistair passed them, the names of which he reeled off, inspired.

  Sunlight dappled the wild grapevine and laurel. Birds piped to each other in friendly jubilation. The woods and the frequent glimpses of the valley of the Hudson with the blue hills beyond lifted me to a state of grace, at least with nature.

  Across a high meadow, goldenrod grew in a beautiful yellow swath. At our approach, the blossoms took flight.

  “Butterflies!” I cried. “I thought they were flowers.”

  “This is what we came for. They’re taxiles skippers.”

  He leapt off his wheel, took out his collecting jars, and tossed me a butterfly net. “See what you can catch.”

  Never had I seen so many yellow butterflies all in one place. They flew in a dazzling yellow cloud, and I danced in its center. They circled around one another, touched in brief midair flirtations, and darted their separate ways only to repeat the happy ritual a few seconds later. We bounded this way and that, and I swung the net with abandon, not caring whether I caught one or not. If I did by chance, I flung the net upward to send it soaring.

  “Don’t do that. When you get one, bring it to me.”

  He captured dozens of them and released them into a large jar with airholes. One got away in the process, and I was glad. The rest flapped in a frenzy, beating themselves against the glass. I mourned their imminent death, singing to myself, “All too brief lasts earthly joy.” Stunned, they lay still a moment, and I could see their beauty—variegated yellow and gold with darker gold on the edges of their wings. Among them was a solitary powder-blue one with black speckles, miraculous and fragile.

  “That’s a summer azure,” he said.

  How did they know the right moment to emerge from their cocoons? I imagined the imperceptible din of the cracked cocoon, like a clap of thunder to them, the first threadlike leg feeling its way into a vast, airy world, a faceted eye bewildered by brightness, color, and incomprehensible shapes.

  “What will you do with them?”

  “Pin them onto a board and seal them with glass to preserve them.”

  “Impale them? You murder them to study them?”

  “How else?”

  It was criminal to catch these beauties aloft in their prime of life and suffocate them, and I hated him for it.

  He crept, he hunched, he pounced, and shouted, “I’ve got one! At last! A rare red admiral. Vanessa atalanta. I’ve lusted after one of these for years. This one alone would have been worth the trip!”

  “The trip today?”

  “From England.”

  Trapped in a jar by itself, it flaunted its exquisite beauty—dark brown to black velvet wings decorated with a bright vermilion band on each of the four wing sections, and dazzling white patches like dollops of paint, the left wing exactly matching the right. Such care God took to design so dramatic a creature, and yet so restrained He was, not to let humans see it often. Maybe He was offering a lesson about the value of the uncommon. In that moment, I glimpsed how the sheer power of loveliness and rarity could drive the craving to possess. I thought Mr. Tiffany would understand that too. Beauty lust.

  AT MY DESK the next day, the cloud of yellow butterflies rose off the goldenrod in my mind’s eye. How translucent they had looked with the light passing through their wings like it does through opalescent glass. I relegated Alistair, the killer, to the recesses of my mind, and began to draw the butterflies from memory, guessing their shapes. It was aimless, so I went about my other work, but the image of them persisted. I added more, thinking that butterflies might just be my first original motif.

  That evening, I asked Alistair if I could see them. They had all died in a heap in the bottom of the jar. Some were already pinned to a corkboard. Gently, he took one out of a humidifying box, where its wings had softened enough for him to get it to relax and stay open, but when he plunged a pin into its tiny head and I heard a soft pop, I couldn’t stand it and had to leave.

  In bed that night, an idea flew across my hazy consciousness. Once it landed, I pounced on it as surely as Mr. Butterfly Booth had captured the red admiral. It was the secret that Mr. Tiffany and I had agreed to keep until the right time.

  The lampshades of Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company were single pieces of blown or molded glass, but the dome covering the baptismal font for the chapel at the Chicago Fair had been made of hundreds of opaque glass pieces set with lead cames. A small dome constructed in that manner but using transparent and opalescent glass and placed over a light source would transmit a soft light. A lampshade could be a three-dimensional, wraparound leaded-glass window. A hundred yellow butterflies cut and placed as if in joyous flight over a sky-blue dome would revolutionize Tiffany lamp making. I could hardly wait for morning. The right moment for the emergence of our secret idea had come.

  No. Not quite. I had to work out the concept first so he could envision what I had in mind. When I had confronted him before I left with Edwin, Mr. Tiffany hadn’t thought I was indispensable because I only executed his or someone else’s paintings. Any good selector could do that. I needed to contribute something unique and expressive of me, of what excited me, in order to become invaluable. That meant designing from the very inception of a project something he would love as much as he loved his own work.

  I had to have a domelike form, wooden or plaster, to support the glass pieces. After some struggle behind my closed studio doors the next day, I fashioned a rough, shallow dome, wider than its height, in muslin stretched over wire.

  I looked up, and Frank was peeking in my studio, bucket and rag in hand, to clean my window even though he had already done it once this week. He pointed to the muslin-and-wire form and cocked his head in puzzlement. A longing to tell him came over me, knowing my secret would be safe with him. He raised his hands over his head as though he was putting on a wide hat. I shook my head no, pointed to the hanging lightbulb, and made motions of bringing it down onto the table. I raised the muslin form over it. He opened his mouth wide, and I thought a sound would come out, but he just nodded vigorously, grabbed a pencil from my desk, and wrote “lamp hat.” I nodded back at him, and he raised his shoulders in quick little jerks. I put my finger to my lips in a gesture indicating a secret, and he did the same. Delight spread all over his face that he
knew something others didn’t.

  That evening I entered the room that Alistair, Mr. Butterfly Booth, shared with Bernard, Mr. Book Booth, and asked Alistair if he could mount some yellow butterflies with wings closed and some in attitudes of flight, with wings at various angles.

  “It’s not the scientific way. The scientific way is fully open.”

  “I’m not asking you to be scientific. I’m asking you to be artistic.”

  “It will ruin some of the butterflies.”

  “Then go and get more! Please?”

  Alistair gave Bernard a quick, irritated look.

  “Do it for her,” Bernard said.

  “Can’t you use a book?”

  He showed me a beautiful book with color plates.

  “I’ll use the book and the butterflies. It’s best to work directly from nature. This is important. It just might open up a whole new art form. You wouldn’t want to be the one who halted the development of art, would you?”

  “Do it,” Bernard commanded.

  Grumbling, Alistair set to work.

  BACK IN THE STUDIO with Alistair’s collection before me, I wrapped stiff paper around the muslin-and-wire form, cut gussets, and stapled it to fit over the muslin shape. On the paper, I sectioned off what would be one-third of the shade, cut it away from the rest, and laid it flat. A fan shape resulted, much wider at the bottom than the top. Stretching out one threadlike appendage into the bigger world of designing, I drew thirty butterflies on the fan, soaring up and to the left as though a breeze were carrying them aloft. I drew lead lines around them and in the sky, which would be light blue at the bottom rim, becoming darker at the top, with a few blushes of pinkish white for clouds.

  I showed Alistair’s butterfly case to Lillian Palmié and Miss Stoney, and asked them to look in our bins for some beautiful yellow glass with markings suggestive of the subtle variation of color on the wings.