Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  It was Mr. Pinhead’s directive, only founded on principles of art, not commerce, and delivered with more grace. My breath leaked out of me in a long, troubled gush.

  “Because of the expense?”

  “Not necessarily, although we both work—”

  “For a company that needs to get out of the red and into the black. Isn’t that true?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Without those considerations, though, is my work too florid?”

  “In terms of the coming style, so that we can be ahead of fashion rather than behind, yes. But Louis would disagree.”

  My shoulders seemed too heavy for me to support, and disappointment toppled me like a wave. What Hank and Dudley had told me was right. I respected them all the more now. After an exaggerated sigh, I said, “I’ll just have to claw my way out of Victorian fussiness, if I can. It’s the dawning of a new, sleeker century, I suppose.”

  “Yes again. One which your fish plaque anticipates beautifully.”

  I HAD BEGUN a free finger-spelling class at Cooper Union, and after the second class I spelled out, awkwardly and laboriously, G-O-O-D M-O-R-N-I-N-G F-R-A-N-K.

  His face lit up, and he appeared to grow inches taller. He flashed back his excitement at me with fingers moving at lightning speed. I spelled back, S-L-O-W D-O-W-N. We laughed together. That is, he uttered a monosyllable of happiness and gave a little tug at my second sleeve. A warm sensation spread in my chest, and I knew it to be mother love.

  After that, not a day went by without Frank coming to finger-spell his weather observations slow enough for me to understand. S-N-O-W B-L-A-N-K-E-T, or S-I-L-V-E-R T-H-R-E-A-D R-A-I-N, or S-H-Y M-O-O-N S-L-I-V-E-R.

  The morning after the critique of my clock, he laid a jewel of chipped red glass by my hand as I was drawing, and spelled R-U-B-Y F-O-R Y-O-U. With gestures of hammering, he indicated that he had chipped it himself.

  For once, I was the one mute.

  We weren’t so different. His yearning for human connection was as strong as mine. I imagined him observing the world keenly each day and distilling it at night to its quintessence, simple enough that I could grasp it from his fingers the next morning.

  At that moment it dawned on me. Frank’s restrained simplicity was what would make my clock elegant.

  T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U.

  CHAPTER 26

  JASMINE

  “WHAT THAT BOY NEEDS IS COD-LIVER OIL,” MRS. HACKLEY declared with self-appointed authority, standing wide-legged on the porch, knuckles pressed into her pillowy hips. “A teaspoonful every three hours.”

  “It can’t hurt,” Dr. Griggs said diplomatically as he and I hurried next door.

  George lay on his narrow bed in a fit of coughing with Dudley bent over him holding a glass of water. George managed to drink a little, which helped for a few minutes, and then the coughing started again.

  “Get onto your stomach,” Dr. Griggs said. “Hang your head over the side. Cough it out.”

  A horrendous seizure of coughing followed, which left him so weak he couldn’t right himself. Dudley helped him onto his back, and George fell asleep immediately. Dr. Griggs said he would bring him some medicine in the morning and then left, but I stayed for a couple of hours, during which another episode happened. Dudley sent me home and said he would stay the night and sleep on some cushions on the model’s platform.

  After work the next day, I found a note from George waiting for me.

  Clara,

  I’m at Twenty-second Street and Lexington, southwest corner, apartment two. I’m being taken care of. Come only if you can.

  Pax vobiscum.

  Your popinjay

  It wasn’t far, only a block past Gramercy Park, but why the secrecy? Dudley not being home to ask, I went there immediately.

  The townhouse had a shiny red door. Inside, a marble floor, a potted palm, a stairway, and two doors on the ground floor, numbers one and two. I knocked at number two. The door opened.

  “Mr. Belknap!”

  Shock rippled through me.

  In his shirtsleeves. No eyebrows. No Brilliantine. He hadn’t been at work today.

  “I was given this address. Is there a George Waldo here?”

  He stepped back from the doorway. “Come in.” A solemn voice, and such a look. Worry swam in his eyes. Minute crow’s-feet formed, froze in position, and slowly dissolved in resignation. “He’s here.”

  In a bedroom of butter-yellow walls and mint-green curtains, George was dozing comfortably against a pile of pillows. Blooming jasmine plants in blue ceramic pots sat on tables on both sides of him.

  “His studio is no place for him now,” Mr. Belknap explained. “He’s too weak to take care of himself, and Dudley has an important portrait sitting to do this week.”

  “Then you know Dudley too?”

  “Yes, Clara. All that you see and all that you imagine is true. I would ask you never to mention it or allude to it in any way.”

  “Of course,” I murmured.

  Nothing prepared me for this connection, yet, once grasped, it didn’t seem unnatural.

  He pulled up the pale yellow quilt that had fallen awry, and brushed George’s hair back with a loving gesture. “He asked for you, and I couldn’t deny him.”

  Our voices woke him enough for him to say, “Clara, you came. To give me last rites?”

  “Being sick gives you no cause to be ridiculous.”

  “Au contraire, madame. It gives me every right.”

  Mr. Belknap spooned broth into George’s mouth, adeptly, comfortably, as a woman would feed a young child, resuming what he had apparently been doing earlier. What a marvel of caring he was. What a shame that he was forced to constrain it. I felt privileged to see the authentic Mr. Belknap.

  He was always meticulous about his appearance, but not today. Without his exact center part oiled in place, his silky blond hair falling forward in straight wisps over his forehead had a young boy’s innocence. I saw how fine-looking he was in his natural self, what well-suited features he had—narrow, straight nose, small mouth, and almost invisible blond eyebrows. I watched him take tender care of George, and it was beautiful. He was his own man, and there was something brave and noble and wholly mysterious in that.

  All this time that I’d known George and Hank and Dudley, I’d never pursued them in my imagination into their rooms, never thought beyond the joy they took in one another’s company as comrades, and the happiness they rendered to me. I’d kept myself from imagining them taking joy in touch, but now I wished it for them.

  Mr. Belknap insisted that I sit next to the bed. I remarked on the lovely jasmine.

  “A scent strong enough to make a prizefighter swoon,” George said.

  “I ran out this morning to the flower shop around the corner because my mother used to drink jasmine tea when she had a cough.” Mr. Belknap shrugged. “I thought smelling them might have the same effect.”

  “You’re missing your dinner hour, Clara,” George said.

  “Dudley is coming any minute to relieve me,” Mr. Belknap said. “Might I take you to dinner at the National Arts Club after he arrives?”

  “You’re a member? I’d love to. I’ve always wanted to see the inside.”

  WHEN DUDLEY ARRIVED he was carrying his zither, intending to strum some southern lullabies to help George sleep, and a letter from Hank, mailed in Paris.

  “Read it,” George said. “It might be entertaining.”

  APRIL 6, 1900

  “Dear Dud,

  “How I wish I’d followed your advice and had taken dancing lessons as part of my education. I’ve become terribly chummy with an English chap, Walter Radcliff, who snagged an invitation to a swellish dinner dance where I fell into conversation with a fascinating woman. My forwardness when one hasn’t been introduced was a faux pas in Continental manners, Rad said. Nevertheless, as the orchestra began a Viennese waltz, she asked me boldly, ‘Shall we dance?’ Quaking inside, I stumbled through, and afterward Rad sa
id, ‘You’ve just danced with Isadora Duncan. Not many a chap can say that.’

  “Rad’s an architectural scholar, so he’s forever reeling off his excitement about pediments and cornices. He’s quite a find in my program of self-education. His endless energy reminds me of our George. Try to get George to relax and take some time off after this Vanderbilt thing is finished.”

  “Very funny, Hank. I am, but not by choice.”

  “He’s always deep into whatever he is about, and he is incessantly ‘at’ something tooth and nail. He can’t live like that forever.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “The French have such a balanced way of life, taking time to enjoy the morning’s café and brioche, lingering over a hot lunch, enjoying the parks, just standing on a bridge instead of rushing pell-mell across it. Rad has adopted it, and has it right, I think. He drinks his morning café noir with cognac to celebrate the day, and he carries with him a small flask to have a nip in honor of some building or other.

  “We had a swallow to the Eiffel Tower the other evening at sunset, another one in front of the opera, and a quick, surreptitious one in the Louvre in homage to the Venus de Milo, Rad’s choice, though I prefer any kouros of the Classical Period. There’s an Athenian torso I especially admire in which the abdominal muscles are beautifully delineated and the right buttock is more contracted than the left, indicating that the model stood with his weight unevenly balanced—a more seductive pose than the kouros of Argos. I asked Rad to pass me the flask to drink to the right buttock while the guard’s back was turned.

  “The Grand Tour has its hardships. It breaks me up that I have to leave Paris in four days because I promised Rad I’d accompany him to some villages that Henry James mentioned in A Little Tour of France. Never fear, though, about Rad. I’ll probably never see him again.

  “Ever,

  your Hank”

  George closed his eyes and nestled deeper into the pillows. “There you have it, Clara. Our blithe comet trailing streaks of Continental grandeur.”

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Dr. Griggs checked on George every evening, and feared he was heading toward pneumonia. Henry, Dudley, and I took shifts and tried to make him comfortable. George wasn’t an easy patient. Once when Dudley and I were changing his bed with him in it, George said, “Don’t roll me like a log, Dud. You’re not a lumberjack.”

  “Certainly nurses can do this better,” I grumbled. “Maybe it’s time for you to be in the hospital.”

  “No! Hospitals smell like chemical plants. I’d rather die. People can’t come to see me there.”

  “What are you thinking, that you’ll be on exhibit like one of Barnum’s freaks?” Dudley said.

  We were all getting worn out. I went home one Friday night after the dinner hour, and Bernard offered to take me to the Oyster House on Fourth Avenue, but I said no and went straight to bed. In the morning, George seemed worse. I waited till nine o’clock for Henry to get up. Fatigue made him oversleep. He said he would get me some breakfast right away, but Dr. Griggs came and insisted on George being in a hospital. After much persuasion and pouting, George was willing to go, and Dr. Griggs left to make arrangements.

  I felt weak from hunger, having eaten only crackers and cheese and a glass of wine at George’s bedside the night before. Henry’s dainty preparations for breakfast made my anticipation sink. He laid out orange slices in a scalloped pattern on the plate, poured coffee from a silver coffeepot, and brought in the rolls that had been heating in the kitchen. Only one for each of us! I bit into mine without waiting for him. He set up a chafing dish at his end of the long dining room table, broke four eggs and scrambled them, and served me the larger half.

  His linen was crisp, his china flowery with a gilt edge. The stemware for water was Favrile glass in iridescent pink from one angle, pale gold from another, shaped like tulips.

  “The glasses are exquisite.”

  I knew from the showroom that similar goblets cost twenty-five dollars a dozen. Almost my week’s wage. I picked mine up and set it down with concentration.

  “Are they goblets or are they tulips?” Henry asked.

  “Tulips,” I said, knowing he wanted the other answer. I held my glass aloft. “I am drinking the nectar of a flower.”

  “You’re catching on to the scampishness of the new idiom, more than Louis has. I don’t believe he’s aware that the new sensibility of presenting one thing as another extends beyond Art Nouveau. It’s a duplicity more likely appreciated by those living a duplicity. There’s not a name for it yet, though I’m sure one will emerge that will suggest its playfulness.”

  “And you see it?”

  “I’m living it, the ambiguity of a double life. Because Louis is innocent of the wit in duplicity, his products are even more enjoyable to those who know that there’s more going on than meets the eye.”

  “In my lamps as well?”

  “Especially in your lamps.”

  I took a sip of water, pleased to be a participant in this new idiom.

  “Have you ever seen Loïe Fuller dance?” he asked. “Swinging yards of fabric so it looks like enormous petals or wings that dwarf her?”

  “Yes. She’s quite astonishing.”

  “Is she a hibiscus or a dancer? An exotic butterfly or a dancer? Will your wisteria lamp be a vine or an electrolier?”

  “This opens up an entirely new way of enjoying things.”

  “A less serious way. A sportive way.”

  “You are initiating me into an inner circle.”

  He raised his glass in acknowledgment that I was understanding.

  “These tulip goblets,” I said. “Do you know if Tom Manderson made them?”

  “He could have. The company line is that Tiffany made them.”

  “Like the windows and mosaics and wallpaper and vases and furniture and rugs and tapestries and fabric and clocks, even buttons, and now probably my lamps. Don’t you find that absurd, that people would think a single human being could design all those things, much less make them?”

  He pushed out his lips. “He had something to do with everything. They’re all his aesthetic.”

  “But not necessarily his design.”

  “Some of the window designs bear signatures other than his. Mr. Wilson and Miss Northrop sometimes get publicly recognized now.”

  “Why not a lamp designer?”

  He hesitated. “I suppose because the public thinks windows are a higher art than lamps.”

  “They’re flat! Lamps are sculptural, infinitely more difficult.”

  “Windows are more like paintings, and so they’re valued more. Using the Tiffany name on them strengthens his position in the marketplace, his bid for a place in the history of art. I’m not defending that, though. It also strengthens the sales of your lamps.”

  “Maybe true, but my lamps enhance his reputation. It’s still a masquerade.”

  “We all have masquerades of one sort or another.”

  Because of his stillness, with his fork poised in the air as though waiting for something, I realized he wasn’t talking about Mr. Tiffany any longer. He meant himself, and that meant that at least at the opera, I was a partner in his forced masquerade. By the troubled look in his eyes, he knew that I knew it.

  “Whatever you think,” he said softly, “I have enjoyed taking you to the opera. I hope we may continue to enjoy it together.”

  “We will. Nothing has changed, Mr. Belknap. I have always felt honored by your invitations, and have enjoyed your company. You’re a fine, honorable man.” We were suddenly stiff and formal. I paused for him to respond, but he was too tense. “I believe we all feel different in some individual way from others. That pain is a natural part of the bereftness of life.”

  “Do you feel it, Clara? The bereftness of life?”

  “Yes, I do. When I’m longing for intimacy with a man and am constrained.”

  “By what?”

  “By Mr. Tiffany’s policy against married women. It f
orces me to keep love at bay, if I want to stay on, and I do.”

  After a long moment’s thought, he said, “Then we understand something mutual about each other.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  He patted his mouth with his napkin. “After this, the formality of surnames is stuffy bourgeois. Please call me Henry.”

  I wanted to lighten the conversation. Henry didn’t deserve moroseness. I looked at my empty plate and said, “This is a beautiful plate, Henry, but it would be even more beautiful if it were doing what it was meant to be doing instead of masquerading as a flower garden. Do you have another roll?”

  “Certainly. Let me beat another egg for you too.”

  His ease and economy of motion made me think he would make a good wife.

  Getting stubborn George ready for the hospital and into a horsecab and wrapped in blankets was like ushering a mule into a cage. Dr. Griggs accompanied us, and gave George some whiskey and aromatic ammonia and felt his pulse every few minutes on the way. Fortified, George brightened and looked at the shop windows on Ladies’ Mile. At the hospital a nurse whisked him down a hallway in a rolling chair.

  We followed, carrying the pots of jasmine, and saw him settled in his narrow white bed. He looked around and lifted one side of his lip in a sneer. “I’ll die from sterility here.”

  “What were you expecting? Freddie Vanderbilt’s bedroom?” I said.

  When we were about to leave, Henry refrained from touching him since the nurse was right there, but I knew by the aborted movement of his arm that he wanted to, so I said, “Remember that many people love you, George.”

  CHAPTER 27

  POINT PLEASANT

  “GOOD MORNING!”

  A month of worry had passed—acute, prolonged, then diminished—and now Henry came into my studio and closed the double doors behind him. “I have some good news.” His lowered his voice. “George will be coming home soon.”