Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  He was so sensible. Honorable too.

  “I’ve felt heavy with this secret, with not telling you, but you didn’t ask, and to speak of it unasked would be too awkward in case you didn’t care to know.”

  “I didn’t ask for fear of finding out that you were married, at least in some fashion.”

  He was quiet at that, and reflective. He smoothed a place in the sand and drew a widening spiral, like the side of a moon shell. Riveted, I searched for meaning in it and waited for the second reason.

  “Remember a long time ago I went to the Tiffany showroom to see your lamps? It was after you mentioned Tiffany’s policy against employing married women. His stodgy conservatism angered me, but I couldn’t say anything that would turn you against him. Seeing those lamps made me realize that for the greater good, for generations hence, I shouldn’t, couldn’t, do or say anything that would put a stop to your important lifework.”

  I blew out a puff of air, trying to grasp the generosity of his restraint.

  “It’s hard to believe that you, that anyone, could be so …” Unselfish? Loving? I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “It hasn’t always been easy. When I’ve wavered, I went back to the showroom to have another look, and that bolstered my decision. I’m ashamed to say that earlier, when you came back without Edwin, I hoped he was dead. That was unconscionable of me, I realize.”

  Yes, it was, though it told me how long he had been thinking of me.

  “I existed in that suspended state of not knowing what had become of him just like you did, but when the news filtered through the boardinghouse that he was alive, I thought it was hopeless to wish for anything more than our outings.”

  “He is dead, to me, Bernard.”

  He lifted his face from the fire. “And George?”

  “George knows that, and has accepted it.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I was puzzled. The flickering firelight cast deep shadows in the worry lines of his forehead.

  “You can’t think I haven’t noticed. You love him.”

  My breath came out slowly, in a revealing sigh. “Not to love that man would be impossible. And he loves me, in the only way he can, like a brother would a sister.”

  A wave retreated, leaving an expectant quiet before the next one. For the length of that pause stretching before us like an empty road, he waited for me to say something more.

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t love another.”

  He was slow in reacting, as if he were holding on to the moment, as if it were long-awaited, and therefore one that deserved savoring, deserved a careful, thoughtful response.

  He offered his hands, lifted me to my feet, and held me against his chest, warm from the fire. His mouth brushed my ear with words. “The trouble with us is that we’ve been too polite with each other. We haven’t spoken our minds. You’ve been too Midwestern, and I’ve been too English, but the dowager queen is dead now. Remember? Fate has offered us a future, if we’re brave enough to grasp it.”

  CHAPTER 45

  SQUASH

  “THEY’RE READY TO BE TURNED,” THERESA ANNOUNCED PROUDLY.

  Working out her contrition on tesserae, she had finished the Christ mosaic alone. Joe was taking some time off, which I agreed would be a good idea for a few weeks, even though we would need him if Theresa finished before he returned. I knew the process of turning and cementing but had never done it myself.

  I told Theresa to cut a sheet of oiled paper six inches longer and wider than the dimensions of the panel. I brushed varnish on each tessera, and while they were still sticky, we pressed down the oiled paper until it adhered firmly to every part.

  It would be dangerous to go to the Men’s Mosaic Department on the third floor to ask their help to turn it upside down. They would think we were unable to handle our big commissions ourselves, and I might have another strike on my hands. I saw no other way. We had to turn it ourselves.

  Who could help?

  “Mary, you have a way with Albert down in the basement. Say whatever you have to, even listen to him. Just get him up here to help us. Julia, find Frank and tell him to come here.”

  “Tell him. How?”

  “Wave at him, take his hand and drag him, say it in Polish. I don’t care. Carrie, you get Mr. Belknap. He’s none too big, but he’d be willing.”

  I told Theresa to coat the large marble slab with Venetian turpentine.

  Soon I heard, “Look you, Mrs. Driscoll, I have important things to do down in the netherlands. I can’t be a-comin’ up here to do your bidding at the drop of a hat.”

  “You’re here now, so you can help. We need to turn this upside down on that marble table. There are glass pieces under this paper.”

  “You expect me to do that me self, do you now? Me with a ruptured spleen that ain’t getting any better. You’ll send me to the hospital sure, and then who’ll pay the bill? Answer me that.”

  With Albert, the only way was to go at it quickly. Frank and Henry came in, neither of them very strapping. Oh, how I wished Wilhelmina were here.

  “Mary, come here on this side and hold the paper in place. Carrie, you do the same on the other side. Ready? One, two three, heave!”

  Albert huffed and puffed extravagantly, and Frank grunted, one of the few sounds I’d ever heard him make, but we did it.

  When Albert left, I rolled up my sleeves like a man, mixed the cement with a trowel, and cast the first panel. Henry, who had never put on a work apron in his life; and Theresa, who had to tie it for him; and Frank, who was ecstatic about helping us, worked quickly to get it into every crack before it set up. All evening I worried about it congealing correctly and not being horribly messy on the front. The next morning, we had to get it turned right side up again. We found that seven girls and Frank could do it. I held my breath while Theresa and I peeled back the paper on the first one. It wasn’t much more messy than usual. I assigned Julia to pick it clean while we set to work to get another panel ready to pour. There were five more to do.

  Only one remained to be done when Joe came back looking less pale, even a little ruddy. He closed my studio doors and put a paper sack on my worktable.

  “Reach inside.”

  I pulled out a cucumber, two tomatoes, and three yellow squash with large leaves and floppy blossoms the size of my hand. “What’s all this about?”

  “Aren’t they beautiful colors? I bought a little place in the country this side of White Plains. Nothing much, just a tumbledown house that I can repair a little at a time, but it has a small orchard and a vegetable garden.”

  “This doesn’t mean that you’re leaving the studio to become a farmer, does it?”

  “I wouldn’t think of it. I can get here on the train in an hour, or I can stay with Bessie’s brother in the city a couple of nights a week after she begins to trust me. She was brought up in the country and likes it there. She’s proud that she has four hens laying, and she’ll can our peaches for winter.”

  From behind his back, he brought out a jar labeled BESSIE’S SQUASH SOUP. I was deeply touched.

  “Then you’re happy, or at least happier?”

  Waiting for his answer, I twirled a squash blossom, and its petals, textured like crepe paper, fluttered gracefully.

  He drew his mouth to one side. “We’re finding some satisfaction in what we’re doing there. The place is all our own for us to improve together. It’s a new beginning.”

  “I’m glad for you. You did the right thing. And I have something for you to see here.”

  “Wait. The situation?”

  “Theresa and Marion know never to say a word. No one else knows. It’s as if it never happened.”

  I pointed to the mosaic end of the room, where the five finished panels were propped on their easels.

  “Who poured?”

  “I did! And Frank and Albert and Mr. Belknap helped turn the first one.”

  “Mr. Belknap! Well, doesn’t that beat all.”


  I shook a squash blossom at him so that it fluttered. “You’ve just given me an idea, if blown glass could be tooled to look like crepe paper.”

  Joe grinned the grin of a happier man as he left my studio.

  THE MOVE TO THE new Madison Avenue location a month later meant there was much more space in the new studio, more than we needed.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked Mr. Tiffany in private in his new, larger office.

  “Maybe someday the union will forget my concession to keep the department at twenty-seven.”

  My private hope burst out of me in one shrill word. “Really?”

  Mr. Platt came in and Mr. Tiffany instantly changed the subject to his design for the base of the squash lamp, telling me what I already knew, and he knew that I knew. Mr. Thomas and Henry Belknap arrived, and I offered to leave.

  “No. Stay,” Mr. Tiffany said. “I want you here.”

  We sat at the big display table to review the 1906–07 statistics and to go over the price list for the coming year. Never having been invited to these meetings before, I learned that there were two hundred and six workers in the Men’s Window and Lampshade Department, forty-two in the Men’s Mosaic Department, sixty-four in Corona making and blowing glass, and twenty-seven in my department. Since 1900, lamp production in all departments—the men’s geometric leaded shades, the blown shades, and my nature-based shades—had exploded. The price list showed three hundred models of shade and base combinations, with my department producing the most styles. I was thrilled. They had to recognize my strong contribution to the firm.

  Geometric shades made by the men’s department sold for forty dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars for the twenty-four-inch size. With the larger, straight-edged pieces of glass in their shades, they could make eighty of them in the time it took me to design and make three prototypes with their bases.

  In my department, shades without bases started at fifty dollars and went to three hundred dollars. The small dragonfly shade was eighty dollars, and then jumped to one hundred thirty dollars and two hundred dollars for the larger or more unusual ones, such as dragonflies flying around and the one with the suns. Small-size florals with bases started at ninety dollars, and then leapt to one hundred sixty dollars and one hundred seventy-five dollars for standard sizes. The trumpet creeper lamp was three hundred seventy-five dollars. Then there were the elaborates: wisteria, apple blossom, and pond lily descending at four hundred dollars, and butterfly and cobweb at five hundred dollars. My new Boston ivy would be about the same because of the more expensive red glass poured into specially made molds for leaves. Squash blossom would land between five hundred and seven hundred dollars because of the gaffer’s individualized work on each large petal. The cameo work on lotus placed it at seven hundred and fifty dollars, equal to my room and board for a year, now that Merry had raised it again.

  The last page contained three lists: the uniques, those we would make one at a time only when the single showroom model was sold: Boston ivy, cobweb, lotus, pond lily descending, laburnum, and iris lantern; those to be discontinued: fruit, cyclamen, pansy, arrowhead, and deep sea, which I loved, as well as a dozen others which cast a pall over my earlier pleasure; and those with reduced prices, which grieved me as well.

  “Even a fifty-dollar shade is beyond the range of the average household,” Mr. Thomas said. “We have to scale down, weed out the elaborates and uniques, produce for the middle- and lower-range buyers. There’s only so many millionaires. It’s a limited market.”

  “Eighteen hundred millionaire families, the Times reported,” Mr. Tiffany said. “I wouldn’t call that limited. One mansion after another is creeping up Fifth Avenue for nearly three miles, and they don’t all have a Tiffany lamp yet. New millionaires are arriving from the Midwest every week, and we can expand into stores there as well. Marshall Field has performed well for us. Lamps have done more than any of our products to bring beauty into the American home.”

  “We’re not running a social mission, Louis. We’re running an art business. A commercial art business.”

  “Not we. You. You run the business. I run the designing. You do the commerce. I do the art. I don’t tell you how to keep your account books, so don’t tell me how or what to design. The elaborates have made my reputation. I want them continued, and I want more of them.”

  His reputation, of course.

  “You see the workshops as your playground for trying experiments on a large scale,” said Mr. Platt. “We have to stop that, and produce only what we know will sell at a profit. That doesn’t include new lamps that take costly hours to design.”

  “We have to eliminate the expensive low sellers and produce more of the proven high sellers that don’t require design time,” Mr. Mouse Thomas said.

  How my department fit into the company seemed more tenuous as the discussion went on.

  “I realize that time means money here,” I ventured. “But what about the squash-blossom lamp? It has already been designed. Or is that irrelevant to you?”

  “We’re going to continue into production,” Mr. Tiffany replied.

  “I say no, on account of the high price it would have to fetch,” Mr. Platt said.

  “I say no too,” echoed Mr. Thomas, naturally.

  That left Henry. Everyone turned to him.

  He licked his lips in preparation to speak. “Considering only its sales value is narrow-minded. It’s a showpiece. We should have three—one in our showroom, one in Tiffany and Company, and one in Marshall Field.”

  Mr. Thomas gave a snide glance at Henry for stepping on their marketing toes. I wondered what the repercussions of his incursion from art into commerce would be.

  My freedom was beginning to crumble. I appealed to Henry with my eyes but was afraid he wouldn’t pick up on my urgent call for help.

  “Excuse me, but I think Mr. Belknap has a broader opinion to voice.”

  “Right,” Mr. Tiffany said. “Speak your mind, Henry.”

  “I contend that it’s important to keep creating new designs, from a business standpoint and from an aesthetic one. Repeat customers in our showrooms have to see new models or they won’t come again.”

  “That’s right, Henry. Customers. Strike at his Achilles’ heel.” Mr. Tiffany balled his fist and swung it in front of his chest.

  “And the department has to be kept vital with new designs or it atrophies, and that’s dangerous. Mrs. Driscoll is not a machine. She’s an artist, and an artist has to create according to new vision as it develops, and her department as well.”

  “We’re not running a crafts class, Henry,” Mr. Thomas retorted.

  My God, the ghost of Mr. Mitchell!

  “What Henry says is true,” Mr. Tiffany affirmed. “Each artist sees beauty from a different angle, and achieves it only when she’s free to explore her own vision.”

  “How many of the same lamp styles can we make before they become, pardon my saying so, trite?” Henry asked. “Clichéd because they’re all too familiar? How will repeat customers take to seeing the lamps they own produced year after year? That will sink us to the level of a factory.”

  Mr. Tiffany looked smugly at Mr. Platt while Henry won this point for him. “Brilliant, Henry.”

  The deeper reality hurt. He was depending on someone else to stand up for me. He was handing me off to Henry’s guardianship.

  “It’s cobweb, lotus, pond lily descending, Boston ivy, and now squash blossom that give new life to the medium.” Henry was strident now. “Kill those and all those elaborates and one-of-a-kinds of the future swirling in Mrs. Driscoll’s imagination and you eventually kill the line of specialty lamps altogether.”

  “One,” snapped Mr. Platt. “Make one squash lamp for our showroom, since you’ve started.”

  The balance of power was shifting right before my eyes.

  “So we’ll go on as we have,” Mr. Tiffany asserted, “and Mrs. Driscoll will bring her designs to me, or we’ll design together, as we sometimes do.
Nothing will change.”

  “Your father would have seen the reality. He wouldn’t have resisted,” Mr. Platt said.

  “My father is in his grave. What I do is irrelevant to him.”

  Mr. Platt cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to have to say this in front of Mrs. Driscoll, but you’re blind to the realities of the business world, Louis. You always have been, and that’s why you’re always in the red, which was one thing when your father was here to cover your losses at the end of every year, but it’s quite another now, isn’t it, when you have to dig into your own pocket to make up the difference?”

  I felt like slapping him for shaming Louis so.

  “So what if I do? What difference does it make to you, or to the company?”

  “How long will you be able to, particularly with your extravagances at Laurelton Hall?”

  “Leave Laurelton out of it.”

  “How long before Laurelton drives you to bankruptcy court? How long, Louis? Do you have any idea?”

  All eyes were on him. He squirmed in his oversize chair at the head of the table.

  “No. You have no idea. Come next door to my office, and I’ll show you.”

  Tall Ebenezer Platt swept out of the room with long strides, and short Louis Tiffany trotted after, and part of me followed anxiously in his shadow.

  Mr. Thomas shuffled a few papers. Henry drummed his perfectly manicured fingernails on the polished table until Mr. Thomas noticed the clicking sound and glared at him. Henry stopped.

  After an excruciating quarter-hour of silence, the other two came back.

  “Now that that’s settled,” Mr. Platt said, “there will be no more new elaborate shades designed, nor any new unique, one-of-a-kind shades.”

  “For the time being,” Mr. Tiffany said.

  “For the time being,” Mr. Platt conceded. “Production can be more efficient, and we can get back on track. As for windows, mosaics, and fancy goods, there will be no major change. Adjourned.”