Mr. Tiffany came in at three o’clock to look over our work. For the first time, the girls ignored the Supreme High Commander and kept working. His expression alternated between smiles of approval and knit brows of worry. He stood behind Fannie, who was working on the branches of the birch trees.
“Use crackle glass for the spaces between leaves and branches. It will make the air full of life.”
“Oh, yes!” she said.
“And do more of the leafy areas in spring green to show new growth.”
“All right.”
He pulled off half a dozen pieces around the pine boughs on Marion’s window. “Too dark. Let in more light there between the pine branches. Light suggests spirit.”
With quick nervous jerks of her head, she repeated, “More light.”
He looked up at the mountains and tugged at his beard. “This won’t do. Find one piece of glass for each mountain so you don’t have to have a lead line cross them.”
Miss Judd’s face and neck instantly became splotchy. Poor gal. She was older and was inordinately serious about her work, and chastised herself whenever I had to correct a glass selection she had made.
“I’ll go back to the basement and have a look,” I said.
“Plate with mottles behind to suggest trees on the lower hills but not on the distant mountains.”
He stepped back to get the effect of all six panels together. “Press on, ladies. You’re doing fine. And remember, infinite, meticulous labor makes the masterpiece.”
“But we don’t have infinite time, Mr. Tiffany,” Nellie said, mimicking his favorite maxim. “Mark my words, this will be finished at five o’clock on Saturday. You come then and shake our hands, and on Monday, you can tell the men what a spanking job we did.”
He turned to me. “A bit of a Wilhelmina, isn’t she?”
I nodded, awash with love for both girls.
After he left, Theresa said, “Makths the matherpieth. He has a lisp, doesn’t he?”
“Only when he’s excited about something. Or riled up.”
BY SIX O’CLOCK THURSDAY EVENING, it was clear that the schedule I’d written looked fine on paper but only on paper. There wasn’t always space for the full complement of girls to work on a panel at one time. I sent the girls home with a cheery “Good work. Get to bed early.”
Walking home alone, carrying my accounting papers and books, doubt and discouragement took over. A shaft of fear streaked like lightning across my mind: it would be infinitely worse for Mr. Tiffany to have promised his client the windows and have us fail to finish them on time than to have declined the commission at the outset. And I would be the cause of his mortification. I went cold at the thought.
When I entered the parlor, Alice, George, and Bernard exchanged worried looks. With a lingering touch on the back of my hand, Bernard took the accounting records. “I’ll have them by your breakfast plate in the morning.”
ON FRIDAY MORNING at five o’clock, there they were. Merry burst through the swinging doors from the kitchen like a barmaid, holding two big plates.
“Double rashers and boxty. That’s potato pancakes to you,” she announced, and then sang out, “ ‘Boxty on the griddle, boxty in the pan. If you can’t make boxty, you’ll never get a man.’ ” There was so much good cheer in her voice that one might have the impression she had wanted to be a boardinghouse cook all her life.
“Two plates! Isn’t that overdoing it?”
I heard footsteps behind me.
“No, it isn’t. I’m coming with you. Lillian will be there too.”
“Oh, Alie-girl,” the name I had called her when we were school chums. “Thank you!”
Except for Agnes, the girls started arriving at six, weary and red-eyed. After lunch Agnes finally came out of her studio to help. Either she had ambivalent feelings about wanting us to succeed, or she had work of her own to get out, or she thought it was already too crowded in front of the windows. It was impossible to read her motives.
We still had to do the lower birch trunks, the bottom frieze of irises in the right foreground, the clump of daffodils on the left riverbank, the six lilies and lily pads, and the surrounding water. The press of girls in front of each window made working difficult. Some sat on low stools to work the lower portions, while others stood behind them and stretched over their heads. They knocked each other’s elbows and stepped on each other’s skirts. Noticing this, Julia took on the self-assigned duty of holding hemlines out of the way. Alice, Lillian, Marion, Beatrix, and I stayed until the sun descended behind the building to the west, when lack of light forced us to stop. Alice and I linked arms on the way home to hold each other up.
This time, George, Hank, Dudley, Bernard, William, Merry, Francie, Dr. Griggs, Miss Lefevre, and the Hackleys all dropped their conversations and Mrs. Slater raised her ear horn when Alice and I came in and collapsed at the dinner table.
“Well? Are you going to make it?” Mrs. Hackley asked, the corners of her mouth lifting, apparently hoping for confirmation that we would. She had come a long way since her criticisms of women working when I moved in.
“Too soon to tell.”
“Too soon! Today’s Friday, girl!” Without realizing it, she made the funniest face, lips turned down and pinched together, forehead scowling. At that moment, she glimpsed what we were up against.
“It’s not just a question of getting it done on time. It has to be perfect. I have to superintend each step to make sure the colors represent those on the original painting, and to give nuances of shade, sunlight, movement of air, and the effect of one color on a neighboring one.”
“In many places we have to plate several layers of glass behind the surface glass to create the right color and depth,” Alice said. “That slows our progress.”
“And the edges of each window have to match up with the window next to it.”
Mrs. Hackley reached across the table and touched my wrist. “I’d lend a hand if I could.”
ON SATURDAY MORNING Alice and I went to work at five-thirty, feeling a little wobbly. In the studio, I wrote on the posted schedule:
Rest tomorrow. The following Sunday, we’ll all take the ferry to Coney Island and have our victory picture taken on the beach.
“That ought to cheer them on,” Alice said.
Until Miss Stoney arrived, I selected for the irises using a palette of mottled blue and white to deep purple and magenta. Alice cut, trimmed, wrapped, and stuck each piece on the glass easel until Nellie came to cut for me. That freed Alice to work on the daffodils, picking up where Miss Stoney left off, doing all the steps herself until Lillian came. By six-thirty all the girls were working except Agnes, who didn’t arrive until her usual nine o’clock, and she went directly into her studio, flaunting her privileged status. I almost expected it, but we certainly could have used her.
Carrie and Mary had the two central panels where the river widened and spilled over rocks in the foreground. Getting both panels to match up was critical, and necessitated some redoing.
“Work from the center to the banks, and choose from the same sheet of glass,” I said. “Where the sun is shining on the water, use fractured glass with gold and yellow confetti to make it shimmer, and begin to integrate ripple glass as you work downward so that the bottom foreground is completely ripple glass around the water lilies.
“Mary, find some opalescent rose madder for the lilies. Marion, find some emerald glass shading into blue-black for the creases in the upright water-lily leaves. If you can’t find any, we’ll have to plate in the creases from the rear.”
We weren’t going to take lunch, but at noon, two deliverymen came in with platters of sandwiches and potato salad and pickles and tea. It must have been Mr. Tiffany’s doing.
In the afternoon I directed Fannie Gober to find some dark brown glass to cut in curved slivers to double-pane parts of the birch trunks as the horizontal rings in peeling white bark. I saw that I needed to double-pane the second tier of hills to make it a deeper
blue-violet compared to the misty lavender of the more distant hills. We still had the empty space on the edge of panel three where the glass for the river zigzagging down from the distant hills was being made specially. Even if it had been made last Monday, it needed to stay in the annealer several days to cool slowly. Mr. Tiffany had promised it would be here on Friday, but it hadn’t come.
As each panel grew downward, I asked Miss Stoney, Mary, Alice, and Miss Judd to critique them and look for areas that could be improved with double or triple plating.
“I think the sky is too pale and simple,” Miss Stoney said. “There’s no movement or excitement to it.”
I hated to hear that, but I agreed. It didn’t balance with the activity at the base of the windows.
“Let’s try another streaky salmon glass behind it,” Mary suggested.
She found some and held it up behind the easel. A sunset was on the way. The second pane had to be applied to entire areas within the cut lines so as not to necessitate new lead lines crossing the sky. We searched our bins and didn’t find streaky pieces large enough. My spirit wilted.
“I’m going down,” Mary announced, and charged out the door.
I thought it would be a waste of time. Albert would surely have locked the basement tight this late on a Saturday afternoon.
An hour later, Mary came back, singing, “ ‘Down in Bottle Alley lived Timothy McNally.’ ” Behind her was Albert, with his leather gloves on, carrying the perfect large piece.
“Well, blow me down,” exclaimed Nellie.
Mary’s face radiated pure triumph. “I spied ’im at O’Flannery’s liftin’ his pint, and told him he had a beautiful brogue, so rich and sweet.”
“A man can’t have the full pint that’s owed him with a lass like Mary McVickar a-tugging at his sleeve.” He belched. “It did make the boys jealous, to be sure, a bonny lass pleading for me to come away with her. ‘Isn’t that a sight to behold,’ said they. ‘An Irishman leaving a pub before dark on a Saturday night.’ ” He held the glass up to the light. “There you be. A streaky vitreous pane of the decline of the sun over Galway Bay.”
“You’re our hero, sure,” said Nellie.
“We’ll settle up next Thursday. You can count on it,” he said to me, and swayed out the door.
AT FIVE O’CLOCK, Olga held up a small piece of blue-green ripple glass with her bandaged finger. “Who gets to stick on the last piece?” she asked.
“Clara!” came the thunderous answer.
I took it, gave it a little farewell kiss, and stuck it on.
“I’m getting the boss himself,” Nellie said, darted toward the door, and ran into him, chest to chest.
“Oh, begging your pardon, sir.”
“You didn’t think I’d miss your crowning moment, did you?”
Frank came in behind him, twitching to beat the band, his face strained with fright as he carried the zigzag river piece. We all clapped madly, and it was hard to believe that he couldn’t hear it. Only four pieces had to be changed, and the new large piece cut to size to create a perfect match. It had to be done without error. There would be no chance for a replacement. I gave that job to Miss Judd. “Everyone, stop talking!” she demanded. Never had I seen her be so authoritarian. I handed her my diamond cutting wheel. A piece that long and narrow with such sharply concave edges could easily break if mishandled. Everyone watched except Olga, who covered her eyes. With her lips puckered in concentration, Miss Judd measured three times before she made each cut. It was a perfect fit.
Mr. Tiffany examined the panels without a word. The younger girls froze, held their breaths, bit their lips, chewed on their fingernails, squeezed each other’s hands, nudged each other’s ribs. Beatrix shot him a look that said, “Don’t you dare find fault.” The Misses Byrne, Judd, and Stoney stood in a row at attention, elder soldiers of the studio. Though I dug my fingernails into my palms, it wasn’t from nervousness. It was from the conviction that we had created something sublime.
He crossed his arms and rocked on his heels and toes. “It conveys nature in her most seductive aspects,” he said, “with nuances that keep the viewer entranced and discovering little treasures. It’s a Tiffany window of the first water,” he said, using the diamond-cutting term. “I had my doubts Thursday, but—”
“But you shouldn’t have.” Nellie slapped her chest. “We in the Women’s Department keep our promises,” she crowed, thrusting out her hand for him to shake.
CHAPTER 35
WATER LILY
MISS JUDD, WHO CONSIDERED IT A PERSONAL PRINCIPLE NEVER to arrive one minute before nine, stood looking at the landscape windows one last time when I arrived at quarter to nine on Monday.
Sheepishly, she explained, “I had to see that they were real before the glaziers came to get them.”
Soon others arrived and Mary asked Nellie what Patrick had said.
“He was none too happy that we showed them up, but ’neath his mad, he was proud of me.”
“What did he say about the other men?” I asked.
“There was a big carryin’-on. Some were fiery mad, I guess, and want to squeeze us dry. Others were just middling.”
That could mean trouble down the road. I was surprised Mr. Tiffany hadn’t foreseen that this would pit us against one another. In my mind, it put a damper on our victory. Most of the girls didn’t hear what Nellie reported, so I kept my worries to myself.
A parade of glowering men, Patrick Doyle among them, arrived to carry out the windows to be soldered, four to a panel.
With no sense of self-restraint, Theresa blurted, “You said it couldn’t be done. Just take a good, hard look.” Nellie jabbed her in the ribs.
“Uppity women,” one man muttered.
Without the windows, we stood disoriented, momentarily wondering what to do. The twenty-eight-inch dragonfly shade was the first to be uncovered, and Miss Judd started working. Others followed. In a few minutes, it seemed from outward appearances that no monumental event had taken place in this room, but I knew otherwise.
…
THE LOBBY OF THE Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston was impressive with flags and banners. The walls were filled with large framed photographs of women leaders in the hat-, glove-, button-, and carpet-making industries. Broad-shouldered, big-bosomed women wearing neckties and often spectacles, they looked strong and confident. Alternating with them were framed newspaper articles of women’s victories in labor disputes.
I thought of Edwin. Had he stayed in Manhattan, had we not taken that trip to Lake Geneva, his photograph might be on the walls of Cooper Union by now. He might have been hailed as the leader who turned the tide in the tailors’ strike. He might even be in city or state politics, doing good on a larger scale, and my admiration would have deepened into abiding love.
The large main hall, full to capacity and noisy with hundreds of women’s voices, brought me back to the here and now. The air was charged with the energy and potential of future women workers.
I was introduced as “the force behind the expanded opportunity for women in leaded-glass work,” and began my talk by explaining how opportunities for women in craft workshops had come about through Mrs. Candace Wheeler’s Society of Decorative Art for Women in New York.
“The biggest step forward was to convince women that the work of their hands deserved payment and wasn’t just a pleasant domestic pastime. Mrs. Wheeler asserted that creative art was more than a matter of instinct, but of study, so she set up classes and included other art forms, such as enameling, china painting, knitting, small mosaics, and ceramics. She founded the Women’s Exchange, where women would not lose their social standing by engaging in a commercial craft enterprise.”
I explained that when Mr. Louis Tiffany observed these women working in needlework, he saw their dexterity and their fine sensitivity to color. I related his experiments to re-create the saturated colors of the stained-glass windows in France’s medieval cathedrals as well as the iridescen
t glass of ancient civilizations, both with an eye toward a new, American aesthetic.
I described our Women’s Department and explained that it fluctuated between twenty-five and thirty-five young women, and bragged a bit about our fine camaraderie during the recent rush order of six windows. When I explained our apprenticeship program, a brave, heavily accented voice asked about wages, and I answered that apprentice glass cutters start at seven dollars a week, and increase as they advance to become selectors, and perhaps apprentice designers, who might make twenty a week. That last amount caused a murmur through the hall.
“A girl can get free art training at Cooper Union and the YWCA in New York, or can come to Tiffany Studios with an innate artistic sense and be trained on the job, though she would probably advance more slowly.”
When someone asked how the lamps were made, I trotted out the wooden mold I had brought, and the samples of every stage, and explained the process.
“As yet, women are not permitted in the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union, but I have hopes that it will change. The prevailing thought today is that the decorative arts are more important to the nation than the fine arts of painting and sculpting, because more people see them in homes, churches, and public buildings. So if you direct yourself to this or other decorative arts, you have a chance to take your place as a contributor to American artistic culture.”
Hearty applause was followed by a storm of young women at the podium asking me questions and examining the things I had brought, and I felt I had won a victory for women in the decorative arts.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING I came home on the train still elated, and found Alice crying in her room.
“It’s all ruined. All our ceramics. Five months of work.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t even know enough to know.”
“Just the wheel-thrown pieces?”
“Coiled and modeled too.”
Clara and Mr. Tiffany Page 29
