Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “How did you get it, then?”

  “From a friend in publishing. I’ll let you read it after I finish it, if you’d like to.”

  She spoke with a mixture of accents—British and Bostonian—so I hazarded a question.

  “Are you, by chance, distantly related to Nathaniel Hawthorne?”

  “He was my grandfather.”

  “Gracious! Do you remember him?”

  “Oh, no. He died before I was born.”

  “Did you ever get to see the scarlet letter?”

  “Oh, don’t be naïve. He made that up. Every last thread.”

  To have even this filament of connection to creative genius thrilled me. I hired her on the spot.

  FEBRUARY 19. All the papers carried it on the front page: Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Company, dead. The bulk of the vast fortune of the merchant prince passes to Louis Comfort Tiffany, founder of newly renamed Tiffany Studios, now vice president and artistic director of his father’s Tiffany & Company.

  An awkward quiet reigned in the corridors and in our women’s studio, as if our foundation had been shaken. Beatrix brought an editorial from the Times that commented that his death was reported around the world. Both companies shut down for the day of the funeral. Tiffany & Company was draped in black. Macy’s, B. Altman, W. & J. Sloane, Lord & Taylor, Wanamaker’s, and fourteen other stores closed their doors during the hours of the funeral.

  Alice and I went to the service together. Charles Tiffany was eulogized as an arbiter of taste, a gentleman whose illustrious career had been built by an iron hand within a velvet glove, and by honesty, propriety, high standards applied to products and service, and the appreciation of elegance. The atmosphere in the church was reverent while the organist concluded with Charles Tiffany’s favorite hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light.” We watched the parade of bejeweled women in black file past the marble casket which was smothered in chrysanthemums, lilies, and roses, all white, just as Wilhelmina’s pine coffin had been. The next week, his son made his Monday rounds as usual, and I gave him my condolences, such as I could offer in my open studio.

  FEBRUARY 27. Glowering sky, steady sleet, wind rattling the windows, and a studio full of girls bending over summer flowers. There was something magical in that. I looked out from my desk at the heads lowered earnestly to their work—six on two poppy lamps, with Mary and Miss Stoney as selectors; two wisteria lamps going, with Miss Precise and Particular Judd and Minnie Henderson selecting; two dragonflies, a deep sea, a butterfly, and the new peony, with Carrie McNicholl in charge, assuming the position Alice had left. At the moment, Nellie was singing softly about the wild mountain heather of Ireland, and Beatrix was squinting under her electric light. With her eyeglasses sans bows perched on her high, thin nose and a pencil balanced behind her ear, she had a capable and determined look.

  Julia Zevesky, the waif who had been rain-sodden when she asked for a job, arrived today with an umbrella. Lately Theresa sported a new floppy silk rose on her collar. Minnie wore a slim silver bracelet now, and Anna had a new tortoiseshell comb in her pompadour piled high like a pyramid of popovers. I had given these girls a chance at life in the arts, and they had thrived, and lived better lives. Did I really want to work my fingers to the bone to do that for men?

  Mr. Lamb had said I would be entirely unconstrained in my designs. With Mr. Mitchell gone, now was the time to test the limits of how sculptural, bold, individual, elaborate, and expensive my designs could be here. I dug out an unfinished design and began to draw.

  The shade was a panoply of connected webs made by a very ambitious spider, as overzealous as Mr. Tiffany, each web slightly different. The lead lines would be the filaments of the web. He would like that—the structural ribs of the shade deriving from the webs themselves. If I felt estranged from Mr. Tiffany and diminished by his attentions to Alice and Lillian, what I needed to do was to invite his collaboration more. I knew I wanted blossoms beneath the webs, but it would be better to elicit that from him. Still, it was hard to stop.

  I wanted it integrated with a tall mosaic base, all of a piece. What small flower grows on a tall stalk, small enough for there to be many crowded together on the base? One I hadn’t used already. With chagrin, I hit upon the perfect one: white narcissus, which shared its name with the Greek youth in love with himself who gazes into the pond at his own reflection, preoccupied with self, self, the self-admiring self, the insatiable self, the self yearning for recognition of its beauty.

  When did my need for recognition pulse most urgently? It was in the exhilaration of the act of creation, which made me want to shout to the city, Look! Look! See what I can do with mere glass to make you see wisteria in February. Let the colors touch you. Revel in the emotions they stimulate. Catch a whiff of the real bud in the brittle reproduction. Surrender to the illusion!

  That people would do so was ultimately more important than knowing who the illusionist was.

  Filaments of pain insinuated themselves behind my eyes and grew into shards, some sleek missiles determined in their destination, others jagged, wild, and unpredictable. I turned off my light, laid down my pencil, and gazed out at the girls at work. Frank came by and noticed me not working. He emptied all the trash containers in the workroom and washed the glass easels not in use, and all I did was watch him.

  Y-O-U S-A-D T-O-D-A-Y.

  I nodded.

  To unify base and shade, I could lead Mr. Tiffany to see a few narcissus blossoms on the shade too. Elaborate, yes. Expensive to make, yes. But if Mr. Tiffany felt it was his too, he wouldn’t resist. I knew how to work here, how to make things happen. The thought of starting over with someone else was wearisome. Maybe it didn’t matter who paid me. I was and would always be working for myself. What to do? Allow myself to be caught and bought, or stay within the web I knew?

  I showed Frank my sketch.

  C-O-B-W-E-B L-A-M-P, I spelled.

  Frank made frenzied gestures, flailing his arms, wiping off his face as if he had walked into a web. It was funny and dear, and I laughed, which made him grin back at what appeared to him only a gaping silent mouth.

  I W-A-N-T Y-O-U H-A-P-P-Y, he spelled, and put his hand over his heart.

  I did the same. Impulsively, I gave him the Lamb Studios letter to read. His eyes got big with alarm, and his head wagged furiously from side to side. I should have known he would react that way.

  Was the need for recognition so vital that I would give up love in order to get it? Had Mr. Tiffany injured me intentionally? No. I would not creep away just because he gave attention to others. I would not leave without a fight, and my weapons were design ideas.

  T-E-A-R I-T U-P, I spelled.

  He ripped vigorously and hurled the tiny pieces into his collecting trash can. One escaped and fluttered to the floor. He seized it, threw it in, and brushed his palms together as a sign of finishing the job.

  I A-M H-A-P-P-Y N-O-W.

  CHAPTER 31

  A BRONZE AND A GARDEN

  MR. FARMER-JOHN THOMAS, HE OF THE “DANGEROUS INFLUENCE” accusation, came into my studio and greeted me with a hearty “Good morning! I have some great news for you,” as though his cow had just calved. He had slid into Mr. Mitchell’s place as slick as oiled glass. “You’ll be pleased. In fact, I think you’ll be very pleased. This will be the highlight of your week.”

  “Enough preamble, Mr. Thomas. Tell me.” What a different approach.

  He laid down a sheet of paper. “An order for five more wisteria lamps. That makes twenty to date. Selling at three hundred fifty dollars apiece, that’s good business. Peacock, iris lantern, and trumpet creeper—two each.” He laid down another sheet. “Twenty peony shades. They’ve been a surprise good seller at one hundred seventy-five dollars. And”—he waved the third sheet with a flourish before he laid it down—“forty more dragonfly lamps priced at one hundred thirty dollars, two hundred dollars, and two hundred fifty dollars, depending on size and style.” His usually mousy voice rang out stron
gly.

  “Goodness! Who would have thought it?” I said with enough edge to my voice that he might catch my wicked innuendo.

  He pointed to a list. “You’ll see here the models and sizes and some customer requests for certain color schemes, preferred borders, oil or electric. There’s a giant one, a hanging electrolier twenty-eight inches wide. Do two of those so we’ll have one for our front showroom.”

  I felt myself breathing faster at the exciting possibilities, not just at the amount but at the variety.

  “These don’t add up to forty.”

  “The rest are your choice.” Mr. Thomas stepped back and grinned a none-too-mousy grin. “Enough for today?”

  “Quite! I’m overjoyed.”

  I knew now that I had made the right decision.

  After he left, I cleared off my desk to make a chart of assignments, and found a neglected piece of mail. It was a request that I give a talk on women’s work at Tiffany Studios before the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Albany and Boston. I was flattered and felt obligated to do my bit for women in the arts. Although I hardly needed one more thing to think about with all these orders, I dashed off an acceptance.

  Mr. Tiffany came in with his hands full, sat on the little kitchen chair, and asked how I was feeling.

  “Ecstatic.”

  “Thought so. Here’s something else that will make you happy.”

  From underneath his papers he pulled out a leather presentation folder tooled with the words EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, PARIS, FRANCE, 1900.

  “The French. They think we’re happy to wait two years before they get around to mailing out the awards,” he said.

  I opened it. The certificate, which was called a diplôme, gave my name, the name of the award, and the identification of Une lampe avec le motif d’un insecte en forme de dragon.

  I chuckled. “There’s a world of difference between a dragon and a dragonfly.”

  In the lower-right corner was an embossed bronze medallion. “It’s quite impressive,” I said, an octave above my normal voice.

  He pulled out of his pocket a hinged box and laid it in front of me to open. It was the bronze medal itself, nameless except for TIFFANY GLASS AND DECORATING COMPANY.

  “I wanted you to see it, but I’d like to use it in a display of all the medals in the showroom. Just for a while.”

  I closed the box to show it was all right with me, and immediately seized the opportunity to tell him my idea for the cobweb shade over a narcissus mosaic base. I showed him the preliminary drawings and spun out a few threads of description leading up to the coup de grâce which I’d learned from Alice at Corona: “They wouldn’t be geometrically circular. They’d be distorted to show that they were being blown by a breeze.”

  “I like it. I like it. The spontaneity and activity of nature.”

  The web was doing its work.

  “If you use the palest yellow ocher crackle glass with slight fissures below the surface, it would simulate the fine sections of the webs between the leading, as well as reflect ambient light.”

  “Then are you caught?”

  “Like the proverbial fly. You know that crackle glass would catch the early-morning light just like the spiderwebs do in my garden at the Briars. There are usually some on the lilacs. I’ll let you know when they’re in bloom. You must come see them.”

  He had invited me before, but for some reason, maybe the bronze medal, this time I thought he meant it.

  I WAS TURNING in a circle in my bedroom late that afternoon with the certificate in my hand, wondering where to put it, when Merry came down the hall carrying curtains. She peeked in.

  “Practicing a new waltz step?”

  I showed it to her. She looked properly impressed.

  “Do you want a nail?”

  “What for?”

  “Why, to frame the thing and hang it on the wall.”

  “I wouldn’t defile your wall. I’ll just keep it in a drawer, and when someone doesn’t think much of me, I’ll haul it out and brandish it. And when I’m old and need to convince myself that my being here mattered, I’ll take it out and wonder what it was for.”

  “Being here? In my boardinghouse? Of course it matters. I get fifty-five dollars a month from you.”

  “Being here on earth, Merry.”

  “Oh, Lordy. Don’t you go getting philosophical on me. You’ll be just like Francie if you don’t watch out. Married to Plato, she is. Be wide o’that, or you’ll be an old maid the likes of her.”

  We eyed each other head to toe and howled. We were all old maids.

  …

  MR. TIFFANY WAS GOOD for his word, and asked me to come to the Briars on Sunday. He didn’t ask anyone else. The visit would be with me alone. I put on my sky-blue poplin, which had been my wedding dress, lo, a dozen years ago, and was happy that it still fit my forty-year-old figure. It was spring at last, and I wanted to breathe spring, see and smell spring, and look like spring. Outside my window, the trees between the stoops were jubilant, dressed in the pigment called Permanent Green Light, but the oil-paint color charts had it all wrong. It wasn’t permanent. It was all too brief.

  It was pleasurable brushing my hair at my window and looking out on those violet morning shadows I loved. The sparrows of Irving Place were preening too, and gossiping pianissimo, and hopping about with an air of importance. Distant medleys of the city blended into a pleasant humming, punctuated at intervals by the Third Avenue elevated rumbling in a crescendo, grinding its brakes shrilly for the Eighteenth Street station, expelling its pfft of steam, then starting up again and fading away in a diminuendo.

  I parted my hair carefully, wound my chignon, fluffed up the bow on my straw boater, and set off on foot for the el train going across the Brooklyn Bridge, changed to the Long Island Rail Way there, and got off at the Oyster Bay station. Mr. Tiffany had sent his driver to pick me up in his Rambler Runabout. What a thrill to speed along the road on the high red leather seat, holding my hat against the breeze, hearing the motor purr like a tiger, and seeing the countryside whiz by.

  The house overlooked Oyster Bay and was surrounded by birches, chestnuts, and oaks, and behind them, hemlocks and pines. A white shingle neo-Colonial, the house itself wasn’t palatial or formidable like his Seventy-second Street mansion, though certainly comfortable. Naturally, for him, it had a tall clock tower, evidence of his preoccupation with height and his imperative punctuality. As I approached, it struck the quarter hour with a resounding peal. Woe be to the son or daughter who was not at the breakfast table before seven bells.

  A wide wooden porch wrapped around the house, irises edged a lily pond, and wisteria cascaded from a pergola. Mr. Tiffany was sitting on a driftwood chair on the lawn, painting his garden while wearing—unbelievably!—a white silk pongee suit with, yes, a gardenia in his buttonhole. Except for a big floppy-eared dog dozing at his feet, he was alone. He set down his brush as soon as he saw me, and was full of apologies that his wife was feeling poorly and wouldn’t be able to come out to welcome me, and the twins were visiting their aunt. Instead, his youngest daughter, Dorothy, “however small,” as she had said, came outside to take me on a tour of the garden.

  “Fog comes across the water,” Mr. Tiffany said, “so I like to have a palette of cool, dusky colors like those hollyhocks, foxgloves, hydrangeas, and lilacs against the gray air.”

  “Do you do any of the planting?”

  “A couple times a year I get on my hands and knees for an hour with the gardeners. Then I go wash. I never do the pruning. It hurts too much. I like the creepers to meander. They give a sense of unity to everything. Permitted disorder is intriguingly beautiful. In gardens, I mean, not in people.” He glanced down at his daughter affectionately.

  “Miss Dorothy, help me find a spiderweb in the lilacs,” I said.

  Before long, she cried out, “Here’s one!”

  We traced the filaments to see how they connected one bush to another.

  “How did he g
et from here to there if he doesn’t have wings?” she asked.

  “It’s a mystery, like the Brooklyn Bridge,” I said. “Maybe she launched herself on a breeze and hoped for the best.”

  “Maybe he tried and tried and fell to the ground but climbed back up and kept at it until he succeeded,” Mr. Tiffany said, delivering a lesson.

  I breathed the fragrance of lilac and watched the pendulous yellow blossoms of a laburnum tree move in the breeze. Dorothy skipped ahead to another pergola draped with white clematis. She picked one and came to her father’s side, plucking off the petals and saying, “He loves me. He loves me not.”

  “Dorothy! Never pick a flower. You know better than that. Picking a flower is like poking a hole in a painting.”

  “I was just playing.”

  “Never damage any living thing! Don’t ever let me see you doing that again.”

  I’d never known his voice to have that harshness.

  “It’s not a crime, Papa. It’s just a game.” She threw the flower to the ground and stomped on it. “You’re mean,” she cried, and ran away, swerving to topple his easel on her way into the house.

  “I apologize for her behavior. She’s sensitive and stubborn and rebellious, just like I was at her age. She’s not a happy child.”

  “That’s hard to imagine when she has everything.”

  “Everything but a good feeling about herself. Her nanny and her mother mention the charms of Annie, the child who died, way too much. Lou works so often at the women’s infirmary that I’m afraid Dorothy suffers from a lack of attention. She thinks she’s unloved.”

  “That’s common among girls of all ages.”

  He gave that a moment’s thought before he said, “We have some sweet times, though.”

  On our stroll through the garden, he commented on the shape of the trees, the hue of heliotrope blossoms vibrating against the viridian leaves, the brilliance of an iris petal shot through with sunlight, and the darkness of the edge of the same petal where it was in the shade. Lou must have tired easily in his presence. No wonder she wasn’t feeling well and had to rest. He was just too much for daily consumption.