Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “I’ll wallow in them if I damn well please. God knows I have enough of them.”

  He still wouldn’t look at me. He just pounded his fist against his chin and watched the flames.

  “Take a look on that table,” he said.

  On it was a check for three hundred thousand dollars, made out to the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.

  “That’s generous of you.”

  “Remorse money. She was on the board there.”

  “Does it make you feel any better?”

  He stared at the flames until a log shifted and sent out sparks. “Not a damn bit.”

  Slowly he lifted his chin, and tears threatened to spill.

  “I was too absorbed. I didn’t pay enough attention to her health, or her wishes.”

  “Berating yourself won’t help you.”

  “It was the same with May, my first wife. I was dead set on going to Algeria to paint exotica in the colors of Delacroix. Nothing was going to stop me, even when the baby died. So we went, but it was too soon after the birth. That was the beginning of the end for her.”

  What comfort could I offer? Syrupy sympathy laid on an open wound like dollops of honey would be counterproductive. He had dug himself a pit of misery so deep that easy clichés couldn’t pull him out.

  “You’re an extraordinary man, Louis. I know that out of the hellfires of regret, you can kindle something worthy of your best nature.”

  “I am. Laurelton Hall.”

  “I didn’t mean something material.”

  “You know what they call a fellow like me? An egoist.”

  He took a drink that dribbled out of the corner of his mouth and wiped it with the back of his hand.

  “It’s one of those academic psychology words that my daughter Julia called me. Different than an egotist, though I may be that too. It’s a person who can’t see beyond his own interests. A fellow who isn’t even aware of anything but himself. The opposite of egoism is altruism. I exemplified one. Lou the other. Egoism killed altruism.”

  “Therefore the check,” I said.

  “Therefore the bloody check.”

  “It’s still material.” And it wasn’t earned by him.

  He emptied his glass in two gulps.

  “The twins are coming in here any minute. We have an appointment at ten o’clock. If they miss it by so much as the first chime, they have to wait until the next night at ten o’clock. I’m training them in punctuality.”

  “Sometimes that’s hard for young girls. How old are they?”

  “Almost seventeen.”

  “How many nights have they had to wait?”

  “Three. I know what it’s about. We’ve been through it a dozen times.”

  “And they’ve seen you in this state for three nights running?”

  “I usually wait until after they’ve gone to bed, but they know.”

  He glanced at the enormous grandfather clock standing like a sentinel under the loggia. In the quietness between crackles of the fire, it ticked like a solemn, inexorable metronome.

  “Only two more minutes.”

  “Then I’ll leave now.”

  “Stay!” he ordered, as though I were a pet dog. “This won’t take long.” A low snort issued from his throat. “I might be more polite with someone else here.”

  He had sharp perceptions of his faults, but he seemed woefully content with them.

  We heard steps on the stairs. He hardly turned from the fire when he introduced the twins as Julia and Comfort. They were beautiful, younger renditions of their elegant mother, impeccably groomed, one in peacock blue, the other in emerald green. Canny choices.

  “Why aren’t you downstairs with the guests?” he asked, indifference flattening his voice.

  “It’s dreadful and awkward. They ogle everything, even us.”

  “All they can say is how grateful they are for being invited and how great Mr. Tiffany is.”

  “Maybe you ought to listen.”

  “We brought you our applications to Bryn Mawr. They’re all filled out,” Julia said evenly.

  “We need your signature,” Comfort said, as though it were something small.

  “And a check for each of us.”

  “Who told you that you could apply?”

  “Our teachers.”

  “I’m the head of this household. Not your teachers.”

  An angry lisp on the last word.

  “Please, Papa.”

  “Monday at five o’clock is the deadline,” Julia wailed.

  It seemed a continuation of earlier battles. Since he didn’t hold out his hand for the applications, Comfort put hers on his lap. Julia quickly followed. He looked down at the papers without touching them.

  “You still have microbiology listed as your field of study?”

  “Yes, Papa. I’m committed to it,” Julia said.

  “Foolishness! No daughter of mine will become a doctor, wiggling her fingers up people’s asses,” he said savagely and brushed the applications onto the floor.

  Shock crackled right through me.

  “Please, Papa. Mama thought girls should have educations as well as boys.”

  “I am not your mama.”

  Comfort picked them up, straightened the pages with trembling hands, and set them on the table next to him, right on top of the check to the infirmary.

  “Yours says what?”

  “Literature and art,” Comfort said.

  “You don’t need a college degree to become an artist. I never had a college degree. You can do your watercolors and write your little stories like you’ve always done right here under this roof.”

  “And they all turn out the same because I don’t know any more. I’ve reached the limit of what I can do on my own.”

  “I don’t believe in limits. Mrs. Driscoll here will tell you that.”

  “Then don’t limit us!” Julia shot back.

  What could he possibly be thinking? That with university educations, they would surpass him intellectually? What a reversal of the Tiffany Imperative. He hadn’t achieved that goal of outdoing his father, and now he was ensuring that his girls wouldn’t outdo him. What sickening perversity. But they were strong girls. Although growing from the mud, the lotus is unstained. I could only hope.

  “We don’t understand you,” Comfort said.

  “There’s nothing to understand. I give you everything you could want. You want a beach. I build a beach. Tennis court. Bowling alley. You want a sailboat. I give you a yacht. You want a Thoroughbred. I give you a stable full of them. I give you a beautiful house where you can have gala parties.”

  “We don’t want your house,” Julia said. “We never did. It’s cold. We wanted to stay at the Briars.”

  “Mama wanted to stay at the Briars. Who wants to live in a museum? You never listened. You didn’t care,” Comfort wailed.

  “You still don’t care about anybody but yourself.”

  “Don’t you dare say that in front of a guest. Or to my face!”

  He grabbed the papers and flung them into the fire.

  CHAPTER 42

  CHESTNUTS, LOTUS, AND DRAWING PENCILS

  ON SUNDAY AFTER THE TIFFANY BALL, ALICE WANTED TO TAKE our first subway ride. I didn’t have the inclination, but the first line had been open two months already, so I agreed for her sake. Expecting it to be cold underground, we put on our wool coats, hats, gloves, and overshoes, and headed through brown slush to the Union Square station three blocks south. A woman smoking a cigarette at the entrance was arrested by a policeman right before our eyes. It irritated me. She wasn’t hurting anyone. He wouldn’t have arrested a man smoking.

  “That’s enough to make me take up smoking just to support her right, if it weren’t that I detested the idea of breathing dirty smoke.”

  We paid our nickels and descended.

  “Don’t you feel like a miner burrowing into the earth?” Alice asked.

  The underground station was lit with electricity and line
d with green and white tiles. “It’s so bright and clean down here,” she said. “It’s like an expensive bathroom.”

  The platform fell off into a dark, scary trench of parallel rails, and we could hear the clank and screech of the arriving train. As the mechanical Cyclops with its single headlight roared toward us, it pushed a strong wind ahead of it and we had to hold on to our hats. Everything was engineered so well that the train came within inches of the platform and at the same height. We didn’t have to step up as we had to on other trains.

  It followed Fourth Avenue uptown. Joe Briggs had told me that Mr. Tiffany was angry that Twenty-third Street wasn’t one of the express stations, which he thought would bring more people to his showrooms.

  “We’re passing Tiffany Studios now,” Alice said in a voice like a bird chirping.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just feel it calling to me. Can’t you? It’s a happy feeling.”

  “Even though you can’t come back yet?”

  “I will someday. He promised.”

  “Don’t depend on it.”

  There was a seed of truth in what his daughter Julia had said—that he didn’t care about anybody but himself. Or he cared for them out of guilt after they were gone. It was clear to me that he was afraid his daughters would leave him. They would leave him eventually, college or not. His tyranny would only bring it on earlier. I wished I had the courage to tell him—it might save him from making an irreparable mistake—but it wasn’t my place.

  At Grand Central on Forty-second Street the train turned west with a screech until Broadway, where it turned again and sped uptown.

  “Don’t you feel that we’re careening into a modern world?” Alice asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “I read in the Times that Mayor McClellan started the subway with a silver controller handle made by Tiffany and Company,” she said.

  “Free publicity. Mr. Tiffany learned that from his father, who learned it from P. T. Barnum.”

  “Isn’t it exciting to think that we have some connection with the big doings in the city?”

  “I suppose. Not that it gives us any notoriety.”

  “Just think. Horsecars and subways exist side by side, just like oil lamps and electroliers. We’re in the middle of great changes.”

  We lost track of where we were until we saw the sign for Grand Circle station at the southwest corner of Central Park.

  “What a romp.” She patted her cheek and her face lit up with a new idea. “We could come here at lunchtime and eat on green grass next summer.”

  I tried to acknowledge all of her excited discoveries, but an inexorable heaviness bore down on me. I couldn’t shake off my revulsion at Mr. Tiffany’s behavior last night, nor could I tell her why he was on my mind.

  Way uptown we emerged onto a viaduct crossing a valley of paved streets of a city that hadn’t quite arrived yet. Scattered shacks, poultry farms, and quarries holding out against the uptown march of progress filled the spaces between new smallish mansions.

  “How quaint,” I said. “Some nouveau-riche matron serving chicken salad at her afternoon tea in her shiny new dining room might have the mood tarnished by the squawk of a chicken being slaughtered next door.”

  Beatrix lived in one of those grand new houses with her family until she would marry. She had confessed an engagement to a literary man, one Clifford Smythe, who was keen on starting a book review section in The New York Times, and she wanted to help. When I had told her she was talented with glass, she replied, “That may be, but I don’t want to make it my life.” My face must have shown offense, because she hastened to add, “I don’t mean it wouldn’t be a good life. It just wouldn’t be the right life for me.”

  I had to concede, which was another reason I was moody today, pondering the difference between a good life and a right life. Despite that, I did feel the tingling restlessness of the city growing north. We dove back into the earth and rode to the end of the line at 145th Street.

  “It took us only forty-five minutes,” Alice said. “We probably went eight miles. Isn’t that a marvel?”

  “I prefer my wheel. Now what do we do?” I asked.

  “We get out and take a look around.” Unperturbed by my sullen mood, she led the way.

  A woman tending a brazier just outside the subway exit was selling roasted chestnuts. I bought a paper cone of them, and their warmth felt good through my gloves. I passed the cone to Alice.

  “Better than a cigarette,” she said. “And we won’t get arrested.”

  We wrapped our scarves tighter and strolled aimlessly, eating the chestnuts. The first snow, which had been trampled to brown mush in lower Manhattan, still covered the ground here in pristine white smoothness in the fields and vacant lots. It was as though we had gone to another country.

  “Doesn’t the snow remind you of Ohio?”

  I shrugged.

  “Clara, make an effort! I thought of doing this to cheer you up, and you’ve resisted everything I’ve said. I know something happened upstairs in Mr. Tiffany’s house last night.”

  “It might break your heart to see him.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, but it’s weak of you to let it crush you, and it’s unfair to let it spoil our one and only first time on a subway. Just think of it—1904 will go down in history. The Times said that New York will be different from this moment on. Don’t you want to remember it with a little happiness? Where’s some of that spirit that led us up Fourth Avenue? It’s beautiful here. Let me hear you say it.”

  “I’m sorry. Yes, it is beautiful. Look at that snowman.”

  It had been planted in front of a wooden dwelling with sagging porch steps. Twigs for arms, a carrot for a nose, faceless otherwise, and a rag tied under its chin. Some family took joy in creating something out of nature, freely given to them, freely offered to the neighborhood. Its humility and its long tradition touched me. I wedged two chestnuts where the eyes should be, and a row of them beneath, curved to make a smile. I had just enough.

  “Perfect,” Alice said. “They’ll come home and discover it, a wonder of Christmas.”

  ON MONDAY I RETURNED to work on the lotus lamp with some misgivings. Either it would be a jumble of unrelated elements or it would be novel and stunning. I had left off with a fountain of three-dimensional blown buds. Now I worked on the part I knew best, the leaded-glass shade.

  Mr. Tiffany liked to show more than one stage in the maturity of a flower. I would give him the elements he liked—fully opened blooms in hues of deep pink, magenta, and red, passionate colors. But I was stumped. How could I suspend the shade around the buds? I drew armatures from the base to the band suggesting upright stems coming out of the water, but no matter how I did it, they were distracting, like a skeleton with redundant bones. Agitated, I tossed down my drawing pencil; paced around the studio, stifling with the radiator heat; and swept off my desk all the drawings of my failed attempts. I threw on my coat for some fresh air and walked around the block, seeing in my mind’s eye Mr. Tiffany sweeping off the failed vases in the take-out room. I walked to Fifth Avenue, bought a frankfurter from a street vendor, and kept walking all during the lunch hour. No solution came to mind, but that was just as well. Having a design conundrum for Mr. Tiffany to work on might help to solve more than one problem.

  AS SOON AS I RETURNED, Joe Briggs came in to plan the new studio for the company move to Forty-fifth and Madison. We agreed to insist on having hanging light fixtures with opalescent white glass shades instead of the bare lightbulbs, which washed out the colors we were selecting. He showed me his design for a sheet-glass rack with places for labels so we didn’t have to guess the color from the edge of the glass.

  “Will it do?” He always had a keen desire to please.

  “It’s perfect.”

  About thirty I would say he was. He had come to work for Tiffany when he was eighteen, an immigrant from England. In the new building, he was to head a Men’s Mosaic
Department at one end of our women’s studio. That way, he could use some of the girls to help on his huge mosaic commissions, and keep them employed if there was a lull in our work, and he would be on hand to turn and cement our own mosaics. It was the first move toward dissolving distinctions between each department, and an important conceptual change by the management.

  Toward that end, Joe had been working with Theresa on a mosaic panel of Christ and Saint John. He was teaching her how the manipulation of color, clarity, and surface could create the sense of pictorial illusion in mosaics that leaded windows have. I heard him explain that the use of clear, colored tesserae backed with textured gold foil invites the viewer to look through the glass to the texture.

  “That can create a splendid illusion of depth and distance,” he told her. “Use it judiciously, because it will attract the eye away from the opalescent and iridescent pieces, and each of them performs a distinct function too.”

  He was taking special pains to teach her nuances, and I was happy to see her be so attentive.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Mr. Tiffany came in on his regular Monday rounds. Even grief could not stop this man. I greeted him with more than usual solicitude, acting as though nothing had happened in his studio, which he seemed to appreciate. Sorrow glazed his eyes and called forth a surge of compassion and love.

  “I have something special to show you. Something extravagant.” I whispered the word mysteriously.

  He raised his eyebrows in only a modicum of interest.

  Undaunted, I continued to speak softly. “You know about hybrids because of your gardening. This is a hybrid in glass. A hybrid of two styles.”

  “Oh?”

  “Blown and leaded glass. A lotus lamp.”

  He squinted at me playfully, a totally different man than the one I had seen two nights earlier. “You must have some inside information to know I love lotus plants.”

  “Oh, no. Just a wild guess,” I said in mock innocence.

  I laid out my two watercolors and explained that I would like the blown buds to dip downward within and slightly above the leaded-glass band, but I stopped there. He didn’t respond. Had I overstepped by involving the glassblowing factory?