Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “Her parents came from Warsaw,” I told Olga. “Is that where your family came from?”

  “No. Kraków.”

  “She came to work these last three days.”

  “Too afraid not to.” Olga drew in her lips with a conflicted tremor.

  “Please, Olga. Come back to work. We need you. Your family needs you to work, don’t they?”

  “Yes.” A flat whisper.

  “All right, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  THE ENTRY TO THE YARD of Tiffany Furnaces in Corona was an iron door painted with the words POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON BUSINESS. I gave it a great heave, brushed the soot off my hands, and lifted my skirt over the rail at the bottom, feeling like part of some massive industry.

  I’d been concerned that the bronze filigrees for the poppy lamp wouldn’t be ready when we needed them, which meant I had to make the trip to Corona by ferry and train when I had better things to do. It irritated me that these progress checks couldn’t be done by telephone, but Mr. Gray, the foundry foreman, insisted he couldn’t hear the phone ring. If I didn’t make my presence felt, work for my little department was shunted to the rear and the men’s projects were done right away because some of their departments were housed in the factory compound. Being on-site, they could push their work along.

  At the foundry Mr. Gray said the two styles of bases and finials Mr. Tiffany had designed for the poppy lamp, oil and electric, were almost finished, but the filigrees for the leaves and stamens hadn’t been started. With my urging he agreed to do them next.

  Walking toward the glasshouse, I was overcome with love for the poppy lamp. I had even dreamed I engraved my name on a vermilion petal. The giddy pleasure transformed itself by degrees into a flaming horror of being found out. My audacity leaked to Mr. Tiffany, who angrily reprimanded me, and our pure artist love was burned to ashes. I had awakened in a cold sweat of shame, relieved that it was only a dream.

  In the glasshouse I stood a distance away from Tom Manderson’s shop, watching him shape a ten-inch vase. Mr. Nash came up alongside me.

  “He can do four of the simpler ones in an hour,” he said.

  “He’s a master.”

  “They all are. Last year we produced twenty thousand vases and bowls.”

  “That’s remarkable. Congratulations on your Paris awards for Favrile glass.”

  “The work itself is the reward.”

  “You aren’t upset that Mr. Tiffany didn’t name you in the press releases? He takes all the credit when it’s you who turns sand into jewels.”

  “I’d rather have the good opinion of the men here than the judgment of a few jurists on another continent.”

  “It’s not too much to want both,” I ventured.

  “I love glass. It’s a living thing. To see it pour out glowing and to swirl the colors on the marver, there’s nothing like it. That’s enough for me.”

  I looked across the factory to Tom Manderson’s workshop. He and the other gaffers and decorators made the vases and goblets Tiffany showed in Paris. Mr. Tiffany had probably never blown glass in a hot shop in his life.

  “Do you think it’s enough for Tom?”

  “Never asked him. We just do our work, feel good when it comes out right, go have a pint of ale together if it does, feel glum when it doesn’t, and go have a pint then too.”

  Maybe it was different for women. Maybe we were more complicated creatures.

  “There wouldn’t be a Tiffany of such fame without you and Tom,” I said.

  “But there wouldn’t be a Tom Manderson without Tiffany.”

  I had to accede to that. By the same token, there wouldn’t be a Clara Driscoll, designer of leaded-glass lampshades, without Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Nash.

  I asked him to point me to the enamel studio, walked across the yard, and peeked my head in the doorway. “Surprise!”

  “Clara! We didn’t expect you,” Lillian said. “Here, have some tea.”

  “Tea while you work?”

  She giggled at my astonishment. “A local maid-of-all-work brings it every morning. Lunch too.”

  “It’s just the two of us today,” Alice said. “Miss Lantrup is visiting a glaze supplier, and Patricia was feeling poorly so she went home.”

  Milkweed, wildflowers, seed pods, and a bittersweet vine with orange berries lay scattered on a table, and on another, jars of powdered glass enamels stood in a row, making a rainbow of colors. Watercolor studies of fiddlehead ferns, hollyhocks, and grapevines had been pinned to the walls. I thought how Olga would flourish here.

  Alice showed me an enameled plaque with the motif of oyster and mussel shells nestled amid ribbons of mottled olive-green seaweed with raised, cinnamon-colored kelp bulbs. The inside of the oysters had the same satiny nacre that real shells do.

  “Exquisite,” I said.

  “It’s called repoussé. We work the shapes with a little hammer and punches. Mr. Tiffany hasn’t seen it finished.” Her eyes gleamed with anticipation.

  “He comes here twice a week, always with some new idea,” Lillian said.

  “Twice a week!” The icy surprise of that shot through me to my toes. Four artisans could not be producing so much that he would need to advise them twice a week.

  I happened to see a card with a drawing of milkweed and some writing in Mr. Tiffany’s distinctive script. The crossbars of his t’s were formed with a squiggle to the right of the upright part of the t, not on it.

  Styles are merely the copying of what others have done, perhaps done better than we. God has given us our talents so as not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our own imagination to obtain the revelation of True Beauty.

  Although I knew Mr. Tiffany thought that, he had never written it out just for me.

  “That’s the way he suggests motifs to us,” Lillian said. “Sometimes he sketches something right in front of our eyes, but we don’t have to use his ideas if we like ours better.”

  Alice reached up to a shelf. “I designed this milkweed tray with one pod open to show the inside and the other closed to show the bumpy surface. He had the brilliant idea to make the cover on the closed pod swing open.”

  “He loves things with movable parts,” Lillian said.

  I felt the sting of a tiny insect in my heart. I hadn’t known that about him. A troubling sense of estrangement had been growing ever since he had come back from France last year. That they knew this and I didn’t intensified it.

  “He wants us to convey the thing as it is in nature,” Alice said, “even to give a hint of air or water surrounding it, like a breeze or a ripple.”

  Another thing I wasn’t aware of. Anticipating something else hurtful, I asked her the procedure here.

  “One of us does a watercolored cartoon. He says yes, and we make a model in wax. He says yes again, and we take the model to the foundry, and it comes back as copper in the shape we designed,” Alice explained. “Then we apply the enamel as powdered glass if the shape is horizontal, or we paint it with wet enamels if it’s vertical. That’s called limoges. Then it goes to be fired, and usually we repeat the process many times to give depth to the enamel.”

  “It’s like the Dutch Renaissance painters applying layers of glazes,” Lillian said. “Sometimes he brings gold or silver leaf to lay under the enamel to make it shimmer.”

  Under my skin burned the heat of coveting his two visits a week, but I couldn’t say a word. They were my friends. The creative collaboration I had let myself believe I alone had with him was intimate and passionate. Now it was cheapened by seeing his more attentive collaboration with them. I was still just one of his minions. He could give out design ideas in mosaics, furniture, wallpaper, textiles, leaded glass, and now enamels and ceramics to half a dozen people all in one day. I was a fool to be so naïve to think I was special to him.

  “Did you know that he’s been experimenting for several years with making iridescent enamel?” Alice asked.

  �
��No.” The word leaked out weakly.

  “He’s worked on that with a lady named Julia Munson at his studio in his home. Very big secret. Now she’s making jewelry.”

  “For Tiffany and Company?”

  “No. For our Mr. Tiffany, combining semiprecious stones like lapis lazuli with enamel,” Alice said. “ ‘Beauty before value,’ he says.”

  Lillian scooted her chair forward and leaned toward me. “Once he pulled out of his pocket a velvet bag of colored gemstones from Tiffany and Company. He just spilled them out, right onto this very table, as if they were beach pebbles. From another bag he drew out a necklace that he and Miss Munson had made with enamels of the same colors over gold. And do you know, the enamels in the necklace were just as rich and beautiful as the loose stones.”

  “Ah. That’s the son driven by the Tiffany Imperative to measure up to the father.” At least I was able to tell Lillian one thing she didn’t know about him.

  “He calls his jewelry ‘little missionaries of art,’ so I called what we do here ‘middle-sized missionaries of art,’ ” Lillian said. “He liked that.”

  She looked at Alice as though asking permission to reveal something she’d been dying to tell me all along.

  “He has arranged with his father that our pieces will be sold at Tiffany and Company.” Her voice rose to a high pitch and quivered on the edge of bragging.

  “That’s wonderful for you. Congratulations.”

  Awkward silence filled a moment or two, and I had to look away. I loved them both. I had to remind myself of that. Was my heart so puny that I couldn’t share?

  “So then you like it out here?”

  “It’s nice, I suppose,” Alice said guardedly, not wanting to hurt me. She knew me well enough to guess my feelings. “No contract system. No deadlines.”

  “No talk of the cost of a thing?”

  “No. We just study nature and make things.” Lillian’s elation was too full for her to notice its effect on me.

  “A perfect little Arcadia, this hideaway haven.”

  The instant I said that I regretted it. My tone was sharp. They hadn’t asked to leave me.

  Half sorry that I had come, I left to go back to the studio under storm clouds. Wind tossed the ferry in a sickening motion. So this was what lovers’ jealousy felt like—the searing sense that you aren’t precious and all-consuming to the one you love, the nausea at seeing attentions given to another, the gnawing reminders in the pit of your stomach, and then the waves of shame down to your bowels for succumbing to an ugly emotion shot through with self, possessiveness, and ill will. I felt sick with the knowledge that I was susceptible to all of that. I would have to take care to hide it. They were my dear friends. I had lost them, and Mr. Tiffany had won them over to him. Their little atelier was the private plaything of a wealthy man whose sole passions were nature and art, and now they were the recipients of that passion. To Alice and Lillian, the little jars of powdered glass might be enough, because of what he gave them. He had been mine alone, I had thought, and now he wasn’t. I would have to live with a bottomless craving for his attention. The pit would never be filled.

  A LETTER AWAITED ME at the boardinghouse that evening with the return address of J&R Lamb Studios, Mr. Tiffany’s rivals in glass.

  FEBRUARY 3, 1902

  Dear Mrs. Driscoll,

  Congratulations on winning a Bronze Medal for your exquisite dragonfly lamp which we had the pleasure of seeing at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Kindly forgive us for allowing more than a year to elapse before sending our congratulations. We had no way of knowing how to contact you privately.

  Since then, we’ve learned of your talents in design and management, and have been given this address by a Mr. Henry McBride. Please accept our invitation to have a look at our studio and allow us to take you to lunch afterward.

  Yours truly,

  Mr. Frederick Lamb, President

  J&R Lamb Studios

  since 1857

  I folded it small and didn’t show it to Alice.

  CHAPTER 30

  TIFFANY GIRLS AND A BOY

  MY CURIOSITY HELD SWAY OVER LOYALTY AFTER REALIZING that what I had with Mr. Tiffany wasn’t as unique as I had led myself to believe, so I took a day off to meet this Frederick Lamb. He and his art director treated me as though I was an honored artist, and were anxious to show me all their types of glass and the windows being produced.

  “We’re not making leaded-glass lampshades yet. That’s why we’ve invited you here. We recognize you to be the creative force behind this new art form,” Mr. Lamb said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Your friend. Mr. McBride. I happened to meet him at the Tiffany pavilion in Paris, then fell out of touch with him until recently when we ran into each other at a gallery.”

  Their intent was what I had expected—to spirit me away from Tiffany so I could set up a leaded-shade department for them, bringing with me everything I knew. It was underhanded of them, but this wasn’t sweet Arcadia. It was cold New York business.

  They took me to a grand lunch at Dorlin’s. Perhaps they intended to make me an offer while filling me with wine and pâté de foie gras. They’d have to make it fifty dollars a week, not a cent less. It would be a while before I got more than the thirty-five dollars I got now.

  “We noticed at the Paris Exposition and in Mr. Bing’s Salon de l’Art Nouveau that none of the Tiffany products carried the names of individual designers,” Mr. Lamb said, leaning forward, chin jutting out. “That is not the policy at Lamb Studios. We are proud of our design staff and recognize them by name in our brochures and on our products.”

  “We thought you’d like to know,” the art director added under hooded eyes.

  How canny of them to worm their way into my private grievance and use it for their own purposes. How did they know? Hank?

  “Thank you for mentioning that. Yes, it is important to me.”

  Could I trust that their public promotion of me would actually occur?

  By the end of lunch, the conversation took a leap.

  “We would be pleased if you would consider our studio as yours,” Mr. Lamb said.

  “Would I have total design freedom?”

  “Total.”

  “Would I be saddled with administration duties?”

  “No.”

  “Do you manufacture your own glass?”

  “No. We buy from several suppliers.”

  “Do you have women working for you?”

  “Not at this time.”

  Before leaving, I promised to consider their offer, and it came in the mail, properly, two days later. I opened it alone in my room. Forty-five dollars a week. With two weeks of unpaid vacation, that would be $2,250. By saving money and vacation time, I could travel to Europe! I could see the great museums, cathedrals, fountains. I could have a broader life! But, oh, how much more I liked our spacious studio and all my Tiffany Girls than the bleak, cramped workshop at Lamb’s, where I would be the only woman. How would the men there take to a woman coming in as their supervisor?

  My Women’s Department was a living entity I’d built up myself. Only Agnes and Miss Stoney were left from the original six. I had increased it to thirty-five at one time. We were thirty-two until Mr. Tiffany had sucked away four of my best, so we had only twenty-eight now. The department was mine more than anything else in the world was mine. I gazed around my bedroom at Merry’s furniture. I owned no home, no furniture, no jewelry, only a meager wardrobe and a bicycle, but I had that department. I felt pulled one way by sentiment and allegiances and another way by a salary increase and the promise of recognition.

  Temptation lay heavy on my mind. I imagined marching into Mr. Tiffany’s office, slapping down the offer, and demanding that he top it. I could say that Mr. Lamb is proud of his designers and acknowledges them publicly, but I had no evidence for that claim. Or I could leave without explanation. It would be the worst kind of betrayal. I didn’t think I was capable o
f that. I decided to wait out February, and then see how I felt.

  FEBRUARY 14. VALENTINE’S DAY. Passed without a card or a rose. Still undecided after a week. What if the glass available to me at Lamb Studios wasn’t as beautiful or unusual or varied as Mr. Nash’s glass? They didn’t know the secret of iridescence. That would be frustrating, because it would limit what I could produce.

  FEBRUARY 15. At the end of the day, as though it were an afterthought, a young woman carrying a satchel of books came to inquire for a job. Beatrix Hawthorne, twenty-five, was born in England to American parents and lived with them on the Upper West Side.

  After getting acquainted and enjoying her chattiness, I asked what books she was carrying.

  “A novel, some poetry, art books. I’ve studied art more as an observer than a practitioner,” she said, opening her satchel. “Here’s Vasari’s Lives of the Painters. I’m reading the chapter about Masaccio now, to uncover the goodness in his soul that allowed him to paint The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden with such empathy and heartbreak.”

  “Only the early painters?”

  “Oh, no. I’m wild about Winslow Homer. What that man sees! Do you know his work?”

  “A little.”

  “In his paintings of children, I see a certain melancholy about growing up, and in his seascapes, water gushes right off the canvas and onto your lap. But he said one puzzling thing—that if a man wishes to be an artist, he should never look at pictures.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Not a jot!”

  “Maybe he meant you should look at nature instead,” I said. She shrugged. “What’s the novel?”

  She glanced around the room as if looking for any listeners and said in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. It’s banned because of Carrie’s moral decline as an actress. That’s unconstitutional, you know.”