Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  Squashed flat. Such a bitter irony. I hurried to the privacy of the elevator, my eyes straight ahead.

  ON TOP OF ALL OF THAT, it was a Thursday, and Carrie, who had been doing the accounting lately, was at home ill, so I had to do the payroll myself. The pages of the week’s work orders shook as I laid them on my desk. I dumped out the time chits the girls had put in the box. In Mr. Thomas’s new system I had to figure each person’s time on each project for the week and make the aggregate sum come to the same as the payroll. Forty-five hours on item 29877—sixteen-inch dragonfly shade. Marion’s rate of thirty-six and two-thirds cents per hour equaled sixteen-fifty for the week.

  I couldn’t concentrate. The numbers blurred. I blinked and stared and blinked again.

  I felt awful for Louis, the way Mr. Platt humiliated him. Henry did what he could, but it was Mr. Tiffany who should have spoken up for me. The whole thing was disheartening. And where would it lead? The indispensability I believed I had achieved was shriveling.

  At home I asked Merry to have my dinner tray sent up to my room, something I rarely did.

  She looked at me with a scowl aimed at the world. “A fierce day for you, was it? I’ll send up a cuppa right away. The way you like it, with milk and honey. It’ll do your brave heart a world of good, dearie.”

  Fortifying myself with tea, I spread out all the papers and dumped the girls’ accounting chits onto the bed and started. I’d done only six when the kitchen girl came back with my dinner tray. I thought eating might soothe me. Baked shad, potato pancakes, and boiled turnips with carrots. Not very exciting. I ate half and went back to work.

  A knock on my door startled me.

  “Booth Accounting Service. Do you have work for me?”

  I opened the door. He took one look at me and the bed, and said, “Oh, dear, you’ve got the wrong thing on the bed. It should be you, not the papers. Let me do the books. Lie down. Close your eyes.”

  He put the piles on the floor and opened the bedcovers. I was still in my dress. He gestured for me to take it off.

  “I won’t look,” he said, and turned around.

  I took the pins out of my hair and let it fall, and then unbuttoned the dress.

  “Need any help?” he asked brightly.

  “Only with the accounting.”

  “Just offering.”

  I put on my nightdress, and he spun around.

  “You’re too slow. How much can a man stand?”

  He laid me down and traced the lace on my gown with his index finger. “Mmm, pretty.” He combed my hair between his fingers. “It’s very long. I’ve always wondered.”

  With one knee on the bed, he placed a whisper of a kiss on each eyelid, and I was left with the lovely, sad feeling of his elbows, arms, and wrists sliding through my hands as he raised himself upright. Forget the damn accounting. Just lie here with me, I felt like saying.

  Instead I said, “It’s a new system. Their pay varies—there’s a list—but I have to account for their time on each project each day.”

  “I’ll figure it out by what you’ve already done.” He gathered the papers and sat at my desk with his back to me.

  “My assistant usually records the times. I’ve always thought of her as fussy and uninteresting. Now I appreciate her for taking this burden off my shoulders.”

  “I know how to take it off your shoulders permanently.”

  “How? Quit?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  He untied his necktie, and the swishing sound it made sliding under his collar as he pulled it through was decisive and intimate. The back of his neck had two thin creases that disappeared when he looked down at the papers. I longed to touch him there with my lips.

  “Close your eyes, Clara,” he crooned, knowing I was looking at him.

  “There was a big argument in Mr. Tiffany’s office today. Business management won. Louis and Henry and I lost. For the time being, I’m not to design any new elaborate lamps.”

  Saying it made it seem less traumatic, of smaller importance in Bernard’s presence.

  “For the time being, rest.”

  Maybe that was the answer. For the time being, go slower at work. Don’t be so intense.

  It surprised me that I could relax with Bernard so close and me in my nightdress. The warm spirit of love enveloped me peacefully, and my eyes closed of their own accord.

  I WENT INTO MR. PLATT’S OFFICE the next morning to deliver the account book to him. Opening it to the right page, I found, written on Bernard’s page of calculations: So marry me. Don’t you know I love you?

  Stunned, I caught my breath and stared at the words until reason reigned. Marriage had proved a trickster. Ebenezer leaned over to look with his flinty eyes, and I quickly crumpled the loose page, slammed the book shut, and handed it over.

  …

  I FLATTENED OUT the page at my desk. It was no quip. It was a sincere proposal. Bernard was too aware that love was sacred to write such a thing lightly. It deserved an equally sincere answer.

  Mary came in to ask for her next assignment. I folded the paper quickly and put it in my pocketbook, but a dozen times that day I took it out to read it again.

  I made sure I got home before Bernard did, and wrote on my good deckle-edged stationery:

  Dearest,

  Please give me time. It’s a big change. Know that I love you.

  Your Clara

  I slipped it under his door.

  CHAPTER 46

  EBB TIDE

  “I’M GOING WITH YOU IF IT’S THE LAST THING I DO,” GEORGE announced to everyone in the parlor.

  Dudley and Hank chorused a firm “No!”

  George scowled and pouted in one humorous expression. It had been a year of struggle for him. Fainting spells, wrenching coughs, hospital stays, conflicting diagnoses, frenzied painting despite fevers—for unfettered joy, or to leave something behind, I wasn’t sure. Beneath his funny pout he was genuinely disconsolate at the thought of being left alone on New Year’s Eve.

  “I’ll stay here with you, if you’d like,” I told him.

  “Clara!” Bernard said in alarm, and I saw in his eyes that he wanted me with him.

  Tenseness streaked through me. What had I done? All talk, all motion in the room, stopped instantly. All eyes shifted from Bernard to me to George.

  Raising his chin imperiously, George pulled his shoulders back and said, “George Waldo, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son. Give me streets and faces. Give me Broadway. Give me strong voices, pageants, passions. Give me one more year.”

  “All right, Walt. Just so you bundle up,” Hank said.

  Bernard and I sent each other our mutual relief in loving looks.

  Dudley made George wear two woolen sweaters, a muffler, and a stocking cap. George put on two overcoats—his own, which Dudley buttoned in the back to keep out the wind, and Hank’s larger one over it, buttoned in the front. He nearly suffocated in the subway, and I felt the hot, erratic fever of his excitement burning.

  Hank chuckled. “You look like a Maine fisherman.”

  “Maybe Winslow Homer will paint me.”

  As well as he could, cocooned in multiple sleeves, he struck a pose as if looking out across a stormy sea—prophetically, it seemed to me.

  Emerging from the subway at Forty-second Street, Bernard held me by the hand and I held Alice’s and she held William’s and the others followed as we threaded our way down Broadway, passing brothels, mansions, lobster palaces, and a stable to get into the thick of the crowd singing, shouting, blowing tin horns, beating on drums. At Times Square we craned our necks to see the dome on top of the Times Tower, three stories taller than the Flatiron Building.

  “Whoever invented the word skyscraper was stupid,” George muttered. “It should be skytoucher or skypiercer. Scrape is the wrong movement.”

  “My, aren’t we cantankerous tonight,” Dudley said, and patted George’s cheek.

  For the last three years the Owens boarders had celebr
ated New Year’s Eve here to see the Times Tower lit from base to dome, and to gape at fireworks sparkling the sky. This year the fireworks had been banned. Instead, a great ball lit with a hundred twenty-five-watt bulbs was to descend on a flagpole on top of the building.

  “It should rise into the new year instead of fall,” George said.

  At one minute to midnight, the ball blazed into light and began to creep downward. We joined in yelling the countdown, and George coughed his way through it.

  In the cacophony of voices and trumpets and drumbeats, Bernard pressed me to him and kissed me without stopping until we broke apart to take a breath and laugh ourselves silly. He pulled me toward him again and touched my ear with his tongue and whispered, “Clara, darling, 1908 is going to be our year.”

  GEORGE DECLINED RAPIDLY after that. Henry Belknap paid for a private hospital room again, but after a short time there, George insisted on living out his days in his studio. He painted when he could, Merry prepared special meals for him, and Henry brought George’s favorite delicacies from Delmonico’s.

  “Do you think there’ll be paint in heaven, Dud?” George asked one day as I came in with a tray of Irish stew and corn bread, hoping he would eat.

  “Watercolor or oil?”

  “I’m not fussy.”

  “Assuming that’s where you’ll go,” Dudley said.

  “Either way. If I enter heaven, it will be through the back door. If I enter hell, it will be through the back door, which will be wide open for me.”

  Dudley snickered.

  “The most ridiculous, useless thing is a funeral procession. What good does it do for the celebrity of the day? I want mine now.”

  “Now?”

  “Sunday will do. Hire me a carriage, Hank, big enough for the four of us.”

  On Sunday, Dudley dressed him in woolens again and tried to put the stocking cap on him.

  “No! I insist on my fedora with the red feather.” He flung his red silk scarf around his neck. His vanity was alive and well, a good sign. Dudley obliged and found his fedora.

  In front of the hackney pulled by a black mare, a happenstance that brought a grunt from George, he said, “I want to sit in front with the driver.”

  “Be sensible.” Dudley pushed him inside.

  “When was I ever?” he muttered. “Do you have a Whitman with you, Hank?”

  Hank went inside to get one.

  George opened the trapdoor in the roof and said to the driver, “To the Brooklyn Bridge. Up onto the bridge.”

  Nothing less grandiose could serve him.

  George kept his eyes glued to the window as we went down Irving Place and onto Broadway, all the way down to City Hall Park and then up onto the bridge. At the midway point he ordered the driver to stop.

  “I can’t do that, sir.”

  “Accommodate him, if you can,” Hank said through the roof opening. “I’ll make it worth your effort.”

  The driver drew in the reins, and traffic went around us.

  “I want to feel it up here,” George said, and elbowed his way out of the carriage with struggling breaths. He seized the cables to feel them vibrate with the mighty force of Brooklyn and Manhattan. There was bravery and passion and beloved eccentricity in him yet.

  “Being so high above the river, I’m halfway to heaven already. Now read me some of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ ”

  We all stood close around him to block the wind while Hank read.

  “Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face! …

  I too many and many a time cross’d the river …

  Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,

  The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars …

  I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

  I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

  In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,

  In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me …

  but … I was Manhattanese, friendly and proud!”

  Hank turned the page, looking for something else. George gazed eastward over the tidewater flowing back into Upper New York Bay as if to fix it in his mind for eternity.

  “Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

  Frolic on, crested and scallop-edged waves!

  Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me.”

  George looked up to the sky and repeated, “Drench with your splendor me.”

  A passenger steamer’s sustained and melancholy whistle blew long and longing, carrying the tone of departure and loss.

  “To Central Park,” George told the driver. “Take Fifth Avenue.”

  He wanted the spectacle of New York one more time, and I was an earnest acolyte in his procession.

  As we went up Ladies’ Mile, he peered between window shoppers into the department store windows, and said to Dudley, “Buy Clara a scrumptious dress. She looks divine in emerald green.”

  I knew enough not to counter that love. “You’re generous, George.”

  “So have you been.” He reached for my hand. “I’m sorry I put you through that with Edwin.” His voice cracked. “I wanted you in my life so badly.”

  “No need to say it.”

  In the park, he looked hungrily at skeletal trees not yet budding out with new leaves, the grass barely beginning its renewal of life, still sparse and scruffy.

  “Sublime,” he murmured. “It has never looked better.”

  Beauty isn’t just in the eye, after all.

  “I want them back again—those days I worked too hard and played too little.”

  In the gloaming on the way home, we circled quiet Gramercy Park. “Clop, clop, clop,” he said, matching the horse’s rhythm. “Like a timepiece counting out my seconds.”

  He fixed his gaze at the Players Club as though seeing right through the wall to his portrait of Modjeska.

  “That at least will last,” he said.

  I understood that, felt it keenly beneath my ribs, an ever-present pressure to declare the self for future ages.

  After that, he never touched a brush.

  THE NEXT WEEK was another deadly meeting among The Powers. Henry said I had better attend. I was on edge, hoping to hear that “for the time being” was over, and that I could resume my previous freedom of design.

  There were no cheerful greetings, no pleasantries. That alone prepared me for the worst. Mr. Tiffany’s tie stud today was an ominous-looking black pearl. Before we got under way with figures, I leapt into the moment’s void.

  “I know you’ve prepared some numbers for us to see, but I just want to say that you can’t treat art as statistics only, or its makers as soulless mechanics. It’s the feeling I have for nature and color and glass, and the delight I take in designing new shapes and arranging the elements of the motif, that have made leaded-glass shades a significant addition to the income of the company. They will continue to be if you give me back the prerogative of designing more elaborates. They are in complete accord with Mr. Tiffany’s wish to continue building his reputation.”

  Willingly, desperately, I acquiesced my reputation for his. Anything to save the vitality of my department.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Tiffany said. “We appreciate your statement and your position.” Pain slicked his eyes. He must have known what was coming.

  Mr. Thomas passed around copies of the prospectus and the future recommendations. I saw that only six lamps of my new designs had gone into production since the last meeting, all of them low-priced—nasturtium, small begonia, poinsettia, black-eyed Susan, and two versions of tulip. In prior years that would have been the work of four months, not a year.

  Cheaper lamps meant reusing the shade shapes and previously designed bases. I hated to admit it, but some days the repetition of shapes held no excitement for me. Without the possibility of complex i
nvention, the delight in deciding where lead lines would go and in choosing glass had faded.

  The list of new discontinued lamps reduced me to dust and ashes—a death knell for peacock, grape, apple and grape, pansy, snowball, geranium, daffodil, and all three tulips—tulip tree, scattered tulip, and tulip clusters. What did the Lieutenants have against tulips? I half expected butterfly, lotus, cobweb, and squash blossom, the expensive elaborates, to be discontinued, and they were, making the life of the squash blossom ebb the quickest of all. Could my heart ever beat as wildly as it had when I was designing them?

  The small apple blossom was on the list to be discontinued, with a notation that there was only one left in stock. Whoever would buy it would never know that it was the swan song of this motif, and maybe of its maker. Trumpet creeper was there too, with the price of the five left in stock slashed from three hundred seventy-five dollars to two hundred dollars. Bargain-basement price. Liquidate them. No longer desirable. Recoup our losses.

  I faced Mr. Thomas and Mr. Platt across the table with eyes that surely sent shards of glass into theirs. Mr. Tiffany at the head of the table was somber, his shoulders drooping. I wanted to send him a signal to take courage, but he had turned away from me. I leveled at him a look that anyone there could see cried out, “Speak for me!”

  Impotent and staring, he said nothing, and my heart cracked.

  If there had been an argument like last time, I would have felt that there was hope. The funereal silence was a hundred times worse. The pages themselves declared the message: commerce had triumphed over art. It had eroded love and spit back numbers, not feelings.

  “The moratorium on elaborates will continue,” Mr. Thomas said.

  I knew that the days when Louis’s word was law had ebbed, but I never expected him to sacrifice me without a fight. A profound disappointment in him, that he would let it come to this, welled up, and I fought back tears.

  Clasping my hands that had created those elaborates, I said, “I’m convinced that such a short-sighted prohibition is a grave mistake for the future of the company. How long before the originality and enthusiasm of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department will dry up?”