Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “You’re right, comrade!” cried George. “Bravo!”

  “How did you make it happen?” asked Dudley.

  “When I went to the settlement house to get Edwin’s things, I stopped in at Justus Schwab’s saloon, a place he frequented. Seedy and very Lower East Side. A bohemian enclave transported from the cafés of Eastern Europe. I talked to immigrant Jewish intellectuals, artists, labor sympathizers, socialists, journalists, and asked them all if they knew or had seen Edwin. Several people knew him, but no one had seen him. One man said that Edwin had made their lives his lifework.”

  Scorched dry I was, instantly, by emptiness and irony. His passion for helping others made him a rare human being, and I loved him for it enough to think I could give up the work I love, but as it happened, he was the one who forfeited his lifework, allowing me to keep mine. Was that fair? Was that right? Oh, to be at peace, whatever floated by.

  “Mostly I listened,” George went on. “I didn’t understand a lot of it. Quarrels flared up in Yiddish, Russian, German, all at once. Emma Goldman was haranguing. I went back several times to hear arguments about radical reform movements, anarchists, Yiddish theater, Gorky, Zola, Tolstoy, even Whitman. I began to understand why Edwin liked living there.”

  “If he could stand the smells,” Mrs. Hackley said.

  In defense of Edwin, I was annoyed at her for having to say that.

  “I noticed uptown gentlemen out for adventure in the slums,” George continued. “Social tourists, you might call them, at odds with their class. There are even self-styled guides, protectors, and interpreters to squire these fellows around to the cafés where things are happening. I made connections at Schwab’s with a few of the uptown interlopers. One of them invited me to the Century Club, where I happened to be introduced to a Monsieur Glaenzer, one of the decorators on the Vanderbilt estate operating out of a warehouse near here. He offered me a post, and I accepted it on the spot.”

  “Nimble, my boy,” Hank said, holding up his glass. “What a scoop! A new chapter in the tale of bohemia turning outsiders into insiders. It’s worth an article. ‘Products of a culture of bland material comforts seek intense experience with the nation’s fiery newcomers.’ ”

  “What was it called? Schwab’s? I want to go there,” I said. “I can take my wheel.”

  “Be reasonable, Clara. If George couldn’t find Edwin, you certainly can’t,” Bernard said.

  “That’s not why I want to go. I meant that I want to hear Emma Goldman.”

  “That anarchist?” Bernard scoffed. “Not without a protector.”

  Calm as a sea horse, I said, “Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud, Bernard. She’s a woman acting on her opinions. That’s why I want to hear her.”

  CHAPTER 21

  DRAGONFLY

  IT HAD SEEMED NO GREAT MATTER THAT EDWIN HADN’T SEEN THE dragonfly at Lake Geneva dazzle me with its gorgeous rainbow wings, but now I wished he had. He’d been tutoring me in concern for the less fortunate, and I had wanted to tutor him in matters of beauty. A person ought to have a counterbalance to downward thought. Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life. It would have done him some good.

  I set my clock aside and began to draw the dragonfly as I remembered it. The wings were long and narrow, two on a side. Mr. Nash’s iridescent glass would be perfect, glistening in emerald green, turquoise, cobalt, and purple.

  Like sea horses, dragonflies were remnants of an ancient epoch when pigs were dinosaurs without brains enough to step around tar pits. What a fecund, swampy world dragonflies saw below them, flashing their brief warnings at dinosaurs too dull to notice their call to escape while they could.

  In my drawing, I exaggerated the size of the eyes. I wanted them to glow red-orange like the sun descending on the lake that last happy evening we had together. Molten glass could be dripped into half-spherical molds, or the eyes could be beads. If I used beads, I could have the hole in the bead facing out so a pinpoint of light would shine through. Gracious, what a lark this was!

  Then I was stumped. I didn’t know what the body was like. I rushed downstairs to the library and bumped into Mr. Belknap coming through the doorway carrying ecclesiastical textile designs.

  “Why such a hurry?” he asked.

  “Ideas make me hurry.”

  He was too curious to go on his way. I found a book on insects, which had precise entomological drawings of different sorts of dragonflies. Libellula lydia. What a lovely name. Belle, French for beautiful. Lydia. Feminine. A good omen. Behind the roundish head, the body and tail consisted of seven tapered sections. Each one would have to be a separate piece of glass, with the end one no bigger than a pencil eraser.

  “The tails would be lovely in emerald, wouldn’t they? For a lamp.”

  “Ah. Indeed,” Mr. Belknap said.

  “Do you find them strange-looking, with a north-south axis and an east-west axis?” I asked.

  “No. They’re beautifully exotic. Dragonflies are often used as a motif in the Aesthetic Movement.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  “Why?”

  “I would rather it be seen as my own devising.”

  “Oh, you’ll do something original with them. I’m sure of that.”

  “How can I get the veins in the wings? I want the look of black lace.”

  “You wouldn’t want it painted on?”

  “Too time-consuming. Mr. Mitchell would have a mortal fit. He’s already complained about the labor cost on the butterfly lamp. I’m afraid if this one is that expensive again, he’ll kill it. Or Mr. Platt will, since he’s the moneybags. And if they kill this idea, what does that do to the next idea and the next? Until I get the lamps established as a vital part of the business, it’s important that each one is approved and goes into production.”

  “These lamps mean that much to you?”

  “They mean the world to me. I conceived them. They’re my own expression. I can go anywhere with them. Insects, flowers, fruit, vines, birds. Maybe even landscapes. The possibilities are endless.”

  “And too expensive. That’s not my opinion. It’s Mr. Platt’s.”

  “You mean Mr. Scrooge’s,” I whispered. “Miss Stoney told me his first name is Ebenezer. Is that true?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Anyone whose real name is Ebenezer would do well not to aspire to financial occupations.”

  “Out of kindness, we don’t use his first name.”

  “It still leaves me on edge. I have to make this dragonfly lamp more exquisite and more individual than any blown shade, more art than craft. It’s got to have a place in Mr. Tiffany’s heart so he’ll circumvent the tight fists of Platt, Mitchell, and Company.”

  Mr. Belknap fidgeted with his thumbnail. “I hate to be the one to tell you. At Mr. Mitchell’s suggestion, the men’s department has begun to develop leaded-glass shades in simpler geometric designs.”

  A cannonball landed on my chest.

  “No! The idea was mine! The process is mine! Mine even more than Mr. Tiffany’s.”

  My intention to be as unperturbed as a sea horse vanished.

  “There’s a danger in claiming sole ownership of an idea, Clara. Ideas can originate in more than one place and time. For example, Mr. Tiffany produced leaded-glass wall sconces with Thomas Edison for the Lyceum Theatre.”

  “Like my department does? With copper foil on small pieces?”

  “No. They just dribbled melted lead over a tray of chipped glass. It was all experimental in those days.”

  “Then it wasn’t like mine, but the men doing geometrics with flat glass is a clear usurpation of my process.”

  “You can’t restrict usage of a process, Clara.” Mr. Belknap raised his shoulders. “In any case, geometrics will be simpler and faster to produce, and that means they’ll be less expensive. Mr. Platt sees it as a moneymaker. That should at least give you some assurance of his belief in leaded-glas
s shades.”

  “At the same time as it robs me of my specialty.”

  “Not entirely. Since Mr. Tiffany believes that women have the more acute color sense, you may have to supervise their selectors closely.”

  “Won’t that be a feat of diplomacy!” A bit of Emma Goldman’s anarchy sparked in me. “What if I refuse?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that. Don’t worry. Theirs will be craft. Yours, art.”

  He gave me an understanding look and turned to the dragonflies. “Maybe the veins could be made in the glass.”

  “Threads of opaque black glass dripped over the iridescent? It’s too intricate to be left to chance. I’d have to be right there directing each trickle of glass.”

  “Mr. Nash wouldn’t allow a woman to work in the hot shop.”

  “Do you think the metal shop could make filigree overlays in these wing shapes if I designed them?”

  “They could. They could do it with acid etching. Do you want me to ask them?”

  In a surge of yearning, I said, “I do,” and it felt and sounded like a marriage vow.

  “I want this to work for you, Clara.”

  “And I want to matter here.”

  I WALKED AROUND the studio to advise on Mr. Tiffany’s Four Seasons windows. Spring had orange and purple tulips in the early morning when the sky was silvery, using clear glass drizzled with angular black threads to represent still-leafless twigs against sky. Summer showed lush Oriental poppies with a lake reflecting a cobalt-blue sky at midday. Autumn depicted the harvest of apples, Concord grapes, and golden corn, each kernel a separate piece of glass, with an early moon several layers behind the diaphanous sky. Winter presented an evening campfire burning below a pine bough covered in melting snow with sparkling drips of water.

  The panels were to be positioned two by two in an eight-by-ten-foot rectangle intended for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. The girls took to this project enthusiastically, identifying themselves as “summer girls” or “spring girls,” depending on their assignments, learning the French names for the seasons, and greeting one another with lilting bonjours. All this I encouraged because the project presented a challenge. Each panel had areas several layers thick, so progress was slow and I had to keep them from getting discouraged.

  The intricate decorative areas framing the four scenes had round, protruding, press-molded cabochons, and hammer-chipped chunks we liked to call jewels, of the type I had given to Wilhelmina. Miss Byrne was the best jewel chipper, so I assigned her to work on all the panels.

  “I like the sharp-edged chunks better than rounded cabochons, so may I use more of them?” she asked.

  A timid, older woman, she rarely gave her opinion, so I was curious to know what lay behind her request. “In order to give off more intense sparks of light?” I asked.

  “Well, they do, but it’s because they suggest that someone enjoyed creating them by hand.” She smiled at me sheepishly, revealing her delight in spite of herself.

  “Ah. Go ahead, then.”

  I came back to my drawing table and made cutouts of six open-winged dragonflies and placed them nose down around the bottom edge of a wide conical shape I’d made of stiff paper. It looked too regimented. Alice suggested to soften them by putting marsh flowers between them at the upper portion of the cone, but I thought that would compete with the dragonflies. Agnes thought the wings could overlap. I liked that idea, even though it would make it impossible to use the same filigree metal overlay patterns on each wing. Each one would have to be designed and made individually, which would be more expensive.

  I went ahead with that plan anyway, and took it to Giuseppe to have the plaster mold made. When he delivered it, I didn’t like it. It was too conical, too sharply geometric, especially now that I knew the men’s department was making geometric leaded shades. I went to work shaving off the bottom edge to curve it inward. Just that little adjustment made it more graceful. I gave my cartoon to Alice for her to trace it onto the mold and watercolor it according to my color scheme.

  When I worked out the cost, using the estimate from the metal shop for the wing overlays; the iridescent glass, which was more expensive; and the fittings and a simple squat vase for an oil canister, I worried. The base was a compromise. I really wanted to make a mosaic one suggesting a pond, but I needed to get the lamp approved, so I settled on the less-expensive blown form. I didn’t want to send Mr. Mitchell into a state of apoplexy.

  …

  BY WEEK’S END, I was pleased with it and took the painted plaster and some glass samples to the Divinities of the nether floors for approval.

  Mr. Mitchell’s voice rumbled in his throat before he said, “Original,” as if he felt called upon to praise it against his will. “How much, time and materials?”

  “Ninety-seven dollars if I use iridescent glass, eighty-seven dollars if I don’t.”

  “Ouff.”

  “That’s without a base, but it includes my design time, which wouldn’t be factored in on subsequent models.”

  He left and came back with the other Crowned Heads: Mr. William Thomas, assistant business manager; Mr. Henry Belknap, artistic director; and Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge Platt, treasurer.

  “Mr. Tiffany is feeling poorly, so we’ll decide,” Mr. Platt said.

  “I can wait,” I hastened to say. I needed Mr. Tiffany’s vote.

  Mr. Belknap turned the plaster model to show it off from all directions. “It’s exquisite,” he declared.

  Mr. Platt squinted at it with beady countinghouse eyes. “Impractical on account of the cost.” His prominent Adam’s apple bounced above his paper collar.

  “I agree,” said Mr. Thomas.

  I figured he was a mouse by his plain, Midwestern farmer looks, his mousy little mouth working as though nibbling on a hay seed, and his thinning, mouse-colored hair. At least Ebenezer Platt was distinguished-looking, with a high swoop of silver-gray hair.

  “But it would generate talk,” said Mr. Belknap. “It ought to be shown at the Paris Exposition. We have to speculate on extraordinary pieces once in a while despite their cost, for the sake of our reputation and to keep ahead of the competition. I think it’s a good investment. It’s a bravura piece, and its debut in Paris is bound to be greeted with enthusiasm.”

  Bless him.

  Mr. Tiffany came into the room looking pale except for dark circles under his eyes. His eyebrows popped up when he saw the painted mold. He sat in front of it and gestured for Mr. Belknap to turn it around. I held my breath.

  “It’s the most interesting lamp in the building. Try some simple foliage at the top. Long, narrow leaves to set off the detail of the dragonflies.”

  Alice’s idea exactly.

  “What kind of a base?”

  “I thought about a squat, blown form in the green-to-blue range to suggest water.”

  “Too subtle. We need a more obvious element to unify both parts. Model a socle, like a wreath of lily pads, around the bottom of the base, to be made of bronze. It’ll be a Japanese touch.”

  “That will raise the cost even more,” said Mr. Mitchell.

  Mr. Tiffany ignored him.

  The splotch on Mr. Mitchell’s cheek reddened. Tiffany’s word was law. I lifted the plaster cast and sailed out of the office feeling as mighty as the woman in the harbor with upraised arm.

  Mr. Farmer-John Thomas followed behind me.

  “You’re a dangerous influence here. Don’t overreach yourself, Mrs. Driscoll,” he said in a threatening voice.

  I’m sure he could not detect any unevenness in my stride as I walked between the gilt doors and into the elevator, thinking, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” With only the elevator boy to hear, I said, “I am an influence. I am an influence.”

  THE PROTOTYPE DRAGONFLY LAMP went into the showroom a month later, prominently placed on a table by itself. The next day, the Tiffany tap came down the hall at breakneck speed. Mr. Tiffany sat down close to my worktable and said, “A rich woman just p
urchased your dragonfly lamp.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “I told her she couldn’t have it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I want the first one to go to London for a show at the Grafton Galleries. I told her you would make her another. And I want three more on the condition that one will be done in a week for that customer.”

  “I can do it,” I blurted, though I wasn’t at all sure.

  Using my most urgent persuasion, I would have to build a fire under the men who had a part in it—the solderer, the metalworker who would make the burner base, and the bronze caster who would make the filigree on the wings according to my drawings and the socle of lily pads according to my wax model. I knew I could count on Mary McVickar to cut, and to come in an hour early until we finished. I wanted to do the selecting myself.

  “The second one will replace the prototype in the showroom,” Mr. Tiffany said, “and a third one will go to the Paris Exposition Universelle next year. That one has to be a stunning showpiece that will make La Farge wilt into his boots.”

  My chance!

  “For Paris, how about a squat mosaic base with low belly, no shoulder, and rectangular tesserae placed concentrically in colors of blue and green to represent a pond? It will show off your iridescent glass. And”—I grabbed a breath—“bronze overlays of dragonflies set diagonally as though they’re flying over the pond, and water plants growing from the bottom.”

  “Complicated, but possible. Very possible.” His artist’s eyes had a shimmery, far-off expression, as though they were seeing parallel to mine, exactly what I had described. He turned his gaze to me, and his minute, slow nod was contemplative, collegial, and—dare I think it?—loving.