Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  Yours truly,

  Harvey Youmans

  “Jammy for you,” Merry said. “New Yorkers are a fine lot after all.”

  After a half day of work on Saturday I went to the address, prepared to pay a reward, but the house seemed far too elegant for the pittance I could offer.

  Standing on the stoop, I heard piano music, a slow, measured waltz, vaguely familiar. No, it wasn’t “Sidewalks of New York,” but something similar in gentleness. Oh, Edwin. My heart heaved. Such a distance I’d come from the night I thrilled to his playing, when he transcended Edwin the Social Worker to become Edwin the Artist. Now what was he? Edwin the Wanderer? Wherever he was, if he was alive, would he ever play that waltz again and think of me and the magic of that night, the purity of our love like new fallen snow on the sidewalk stretching before us? More important than thinking of me, which might confuse him, was his playing of music, any music. That would do him good.

  Holding on to the railing for my equilibrium, I waited until the end of the piece, wringing unutterable sorrow from every note, before I composed myself and sounded the door knocker. A white-haired lady dressed in black opened the door. I explained why I had come, and she quickly invited me in and presented me with the hat.

  “Things that have been lost and then found are doubly precious, don’t you think?” she said cheerfully. “People too.”

  Shaken and reeling, I wondered: Would Edwin be doubly precious to me? Would I hold him in my arms and croon over him as if he were a lost lamb I had just found? Would he even want me to? If he had come back that morning at the lake, would I have had to be a watchful guardian, constantly wary of him straying again? The answer eluded me. I looked away, out her bay window, and at the ferns lined up in pots. Orderly. Contained. Cared for.

  “They’re lovely, aren’t they?” she said. “The bay window makes it humid there.” She went through the litany of their names and mentioned that the arrowhead was not a true fern. I managed to remark that I had never seen one. Where the leaf was attached to a thin black stem, it was shaped like the tall shoulders of a heart, and the point was stretched long and narrow.

  “Starts with a heart and ends with a dagger,” she quipped, bright-eyed and pleased with herself.

  I felt its puncture.

  “That sounds like an opera plot.”

  “Here, let me cut you some.” She clipped the arrowhead and its tiny white blossoms and some maidenhair with a small pair of silver scissors. “They’ll last for a week in water.”

  I accepted them, thanked her, remarked that New York was a city of small graces, and put on my hat, securing it with the hat pin that was still in it. Since it was George’s favorite hat, I went straight to his studio. We shared a few minutes of crazy jubilation, with him waving a peacock feather, touching my hat with it, and saying, “Precious, simply precious.” His Quirkiness George Waldo. Without knowing it, he lifted me from the grief I had just felt.

  Mrs. Hackley had said once that George was in love with himself, but I disagreed. It wasn’t overweening pride that was responsible for George’s nature. It was merely joy in life and in his own being, a joy so full that it spilled over into his attitude that everyone he encountered would naturally share in that joy. There was a kind of innocence in that.

  He had been drawing the figures and animals that would be carved as wall panels in Vanderbilt’s bedroom. I let him go back to work, and sat across from him. On the wall behind him hung the famous Aubrey Beardsley ink drawing The Peacock Skirt. How assured and daring, those thin dramatic lines flowing through space, black against stark white. One chance to get each line right, or the whole thing would be ruined.

  George was daring in his drawing too. He drew like he lived and moved—swiftly, almost recklessly. Although he used a book of animal anatomy to give him basic structure, he ignored some features and exaggerated others for humorous effect. An elephant had his trunk tied into a knot, and was looking cross-eyed at it, with one flap of an ear curled forward. If it could have a caption, it should have been “Now, how did that happen?”

  I took up a drawing pencil to render the arrowhead ferns in various orientations, elongating them. It would mean something to me if I used them on the mosaic pond base for the dragonfly lamp. The fern leaves and their small shy blossoms and bead-shaped buds would do well as bronze overlays against blue and green tesserae, the colors of Lake Geneva, with bronze dragonflies darting among the foliage. This lamp would be my farewell to Edwin just as George’s egret painting was his—each of them a prayer in beauty that Edwin would fare well.

  It was comfortable, both of us quietly working, absorbed in our drawings but aware of each other’s easy presence. After a while George’s pencil fell out of his hand. His head had sunk down and his eyes were closed. Poor fellow. I got him to stand up and walked him over to his bed. I took off his shoes, he curled onto his side, and I drew up the blanket and tucked it under him.

  I realized that I had never in my life tucked in anybody. Wasn’t the natural thing to kiss a person good night after you did the tucking? I gazed at him until I was sure he was sleeping peacefully. His fringe of black lashes, just like Edwin’s, lay without a flutter. I bent down slowly and found his cheek flushed, warmer than normal against my lingering lips. In some unexplainable healing way, I felt no disloyalty to Edwin in kissing George.

  EVER SINCE THE CONTRACT system started, the work had accelerated, and I had to design quickly to stay ahead of the girls. The selectors chose glass without dawdling over each piece, in order to make more money. It was a dangerous practice if nuanced choices were sacrificed, so it demanded more overseeing on my part. Meanwhile, the cutters wanted to be rated highly by the selectors. Bertie Hodgins could cut three hundred thirty in a day, and Miss Byrne three hundred fifty, astonishing speed. I loved all this activity, but I didn’t like being cast in the role of a sporting coach cheering them on: Rah! Rah! Whenever I passed Mr. Mitchell in the corridor, I looked the other way, pretending absorption in thought.

  The Princeton University mosaic wasn’t quite finished when Mr. Tiffany gave us a new mosaic commission. It was for a memorial chapel honoring Jeptha Wade, founder of the Western Union Telegraph company. The chief window designer under Mr. Tiffany, Frederick Wilson, made preliminary sketches showing a long procession of figures depicting the Old Law and the New Law, Jewish and Christian, in two twenty-five-foot panels. The academic nature of these mosaics didn’t appeal to me, but I liked the size of the project: three hundred square feet of small glass tesserae to be selected, cut, and affixed. Such a large project could tide us over for the rest of the year if there would be a slack period of window commissions.

  My department had shrunk. Cornelia quit, lamenting that the work was too hard for her, and I’d lost Louise Minnick when she married a printer. Recently two of the original six girls had left, Grace de Luze to become a ceramicist, and Ella Egbert with an engagement ring on her finger, each a severe loss. I was on the lookout for replacements, and the cutting for the new mosaic would be perfect for starting new girls, just one rectangular tessera after another.

  At dinner, I asked Hank if he had any promising young girls in the classes he taught at the East Side Artist and Educational Alliance.

  “Young? Yes. Olga Zofia Lipska, a Polish girl about fourteen. No formal schooling but extraordinarily talented. I’d like to hold on to her a little longer to see if her originality matures to match her drawing skill. If I turn her over to you, she’ll become a Tiffany imitator.”

  “That’s not so bad a thing, Hank.”

  “Still, I’d like to keep her as long as her family can get by without sending her to work.”

  “You’re going to make me wait, when I need someone now.”

  “It’s very satisfying to encourage and train artists from immigrant families so they’ll create from their own experiences. Eventually, the art of Lower East Side immigrants may become more American than that of artists trained in the conservatism at the Met and other art ac
ademies.”

  “You mean pictures of tenements and ash cans?” Mrs. Hackley charged.

  “Not exclusively. Beauty comes in many guises. It’s a matter of sensibility more than subject matter. I can’t help but think what this Polish girl might be capable of, given guidance. No, I can’t give her up yet.”

  “Is it really possible to detect talent in fourteen-year-old children?” Bernard asked.

  “Yes, but it’s rarely possible to predict whether the divine spark will keep burning with enough steadiness to survive the world,” Hank said.

  “What kind of a human being becomes an artist?” he asked.

  “For visual art, it takes a person who delights in looking long and deeply at something until he sees how its shape can be rendered in changes of hue, and who can re-create that on a flat surface,” Hank said.

  Bernard finished a mouthful and said, “Then it’s only a question of knowing technical tricks?”

  “Not so fast, there,” Dudley said. “It takes a person who wants to share his pleasure in seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, sorta like a show of color and line going on all the time. He reckons that what he re-creates from the world has the power to raise up a person’s thoughts or feelings.”

  “You mean seeing art can make a person moral?” Mrs. Hackley asked, peering at Dudley over her forkful of potatoes. A loaded question.

  “If he’s open to it, because it makes his soul better. More appreciative and sensitive and compassionate,” said Dudley.

  “A tall order,” Bernard said, “though I may know of someone who might fit the technical requirements. My office boy’s sister. Their father is a lithographer, and she draws quite well. She makes Christmas cards, and her father prints them. I’ll show you the one I received this year.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Younger than her brother, and he’s nineteen.”

  “If she’s already eighteen, that’s a problem. That old, and I only have them for a few years and then they leave to get married. Sometimes their joys are so paltry that if a man gives them half a look, it turns them into complete noodles. One kiss and they’re gone, and I have to train someone new.”

  Bernard pulled in his chin. “They can’t stay on?”

  “Tiffany policy. No married women in the studios.”

  His expression darkened to a scowl.

  “Well, send her on. I’ll try her out.”

  THERESA BAUR ARRIVED at the studio wearing a long cobalt-blue feather boa draped over her shirtwaist. Dark-haired, small of stature with furtive eyes, proud of the Christmas cards she brought to show me, she reeked of self-confidence cheaply bought at Woolworth’s five-and-dime.

  “I’m a quick study, and I aim to get ahead. I have ways to do it, and I’m not afraid to use them.” She gave a little flip of the feather boa.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Men of the old school would call her a brazen wench, but I found her to be ambitious and zestful. At least she didn’t lie. Unless those cards weren’t her work.

  “Can you draw from life?”

  “Yes.”

  I placed paper and a drawing pencil in front of her and pointed to Carrie McNicholl working at the closest table. “Show me.”

  She produced a remarkable likeness in a short time.

  “Have you had any art training?”

  “My father is teaching me.”

  “Do you have a job now?”

  “I do typewriting at my father’s print shop in Brooklyn.”

  “Does he pay you?”

  “No” issued from her mouth as a shamed murmur.

  “Drop the boa into the dustbin on your way out. Wear a tie like women wage earners on Monday. I’ll try you out for a week.”

  “With a week’s certain pay?”

  “Yes. Six-fifty, probationary. Seven as an apprentice.”

  WORD MUST HAVE GOTTEN around that I was hiring, because the next day a girl escorted by a young man I recognized from the Men’s Window Department stepped into the studio. He gave the girl a soft push in my direction and left. She came toward me slowly, hands clasped together under her breasts, shoulders hunched forward and wrapped in a shawl in the humble manner of poor women that I’d seen in Dutch and French paintings.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Nellie Warner, Miss, and I’m hoping as you might have some work for me. I know how to cut glass.”

  She was a wholesome-looking girl, with a scattering of cinnamon-colored freckles across her milky cheeks.

  “How is it that you know?”

  She blushed. “A friend taught me. I can show you if you’d like.”

  What a melodic voice she had, with a tinge of the Irish in it. I traced a curved pattern onto a piece of glass with grease pencil and handed her my diamond wheel. She grasped it correctly, scored the glass with a steady hand, and snapped it clean.

  “I need nippers to finish it off. To groze it, I mean.”

  She had the vocabulary too.

  I handed her a pair. With a minimum of snips, it was the exact replica of the pattern piece, which I laid over it.

  “Can you give it a convex curve?”

  “To be sure.”

  She showed me. It was a tricky task, but she managed admirably. She had certainly been well coached. I hated to put such a talent to work on cutting rectangles until the moon sprouted horns.

  “What’s his name, Nellie?” I asked in a whisper. She raised her head quickly, surprised and embarrassed, a bud of womanhood. I gestured to the doorway. “Your friend who taught you?”

  “Patrick Doyle, Miss.”

  “You’re not engaged, are you?”

  “Oh, no, Miss. I’m too young for that. I want to work on me own.”

  “Well, you can tell Mr. Doyle that he taught you very well, and that you will be starting on Monday at nine o’clock.”

  “Oh, thank you, Miss. Thank you.”

  She began to back out the door, hunched forward facing me, but with one more thank you, she turned to the doorway, threw her shoulders back, lifted her chin, and entered New York’s paid labor force.

  ON MONDAY, NELLIE WARNER arrived wearing a plain shirtwaist, crisply laundered. Her light red hair shone, done up tidily with a narrow white ribbon. Theresa Baur arrived in a party dress with puffy pink silk sleeves and a ruffled pink dickey with a wide bow.

  “Pink to make the boys wink,” Minnie whispered on the sly, sizing her up. “An English saying.”

  “An English sarcasm, in this case,” I murmured back.

  At least there was no boa to fling about. I’d have to see how long it would take for Theresa’s audacity to be based on high-quality work instead of on the accoutrements of frippery imitating uptown women.

  I started by showing them two cartoons for the Wade mosaic, each one four feet wide, explaining that cartoons were enlargements from the original painting and would be transferred by stylus onto large sheets of paper that would be mounted on boards inclined at a slight angle.

  I introduced them to the selectors, Marion Palmié and Mary McVickar.

  “Mary was born in Ireland, so I’m sure you’ll get on well with her, Nellie.”

  “Where in Ireland?” Nellie instantly asked.

  “Dunmore, County Waterford, where they make the glass.”

  Nellie pointed to herself. “Cobh, County Cork, where the immigrant ships leave from.”

  Their voices rang with love for the old country. I realized that I was creating a community. In this regard, I could matter here. It wasn’t just satisfying Mr. Tiffany or creating beauty that would make a person sensitive and compassionate. As Edwin had said, there were other kinds of beauty. I liked to think he would have been pleased with me.

  CHAPTER 24

  PINS

  FOUR OF US WHEELED UPTOWN PAST THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE château of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, crossed through Grand Army Plaza, and entered Central Park. We dismounted by the pond to rest and enjoy the calm a
fter the noisy streets.

  “How far do you think we’ve come?” Alice asked.

  Mr. York looked at his cyclometer. “About two and a half miles.”

  “Only that? I feel like I’ve pedaled to Boston.”

  After watching the ducks awhile, she stood and said, “All right. Up and at ’em. Next stop, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. For Clara’s sake.” She raised herself onto the seat and chirped out, “Just think of what has happened to you, Clara. To us. Because you could ride a wheel, Alistair invited you to go on that ride in the country. Because of that, you had the idea of butterflies on a lampshade. And because of that, we’re here today!”

  And off she went.

  We took the East Drive, passing the statue of Shakespeare, and went up Literary Walk to the wisteria pergola. The blooms were at their most glorious, spilling over themselves in profusion. With our necks craned back under an overhead lattice, we breathed in their fragrance. Dense clusters of two-lipped blossoms hung pendulous, lilac-blue and violet-blue and purple, depending on their position on the stems.

  “They’re darker where they hang lowest,” I observed.

  “They must open at the highest part of each cluster first, so those blossoms are the first to lose their color,” Alice said.

  “Eight inches long, those clusters,” I marveled.

  “Some longer,” she noted.

  “With blossoms only half an inch long.”

  “Some shorter.”

  “Some prettier,” Bernard chimed in.

  “Some uglier,” Mr. York countered.

  “Some smellier.” Bernard pinched his nose, looking at me playfully.

  “Some more pendulous,” Mr. York intoned in a deeper-than-usual voice, and the two men snickered.

  “All right, you two, just keep on riding as far as you want,” I said. “We’ll still be here when you come back.”

  Looking smug and perky, Alice pulled out our small sketchbooks from the satchel that I’d strapped on my bicycle. “Take your time,” she sang out as they rode off.