“Don’t go to them for approval. Bring it to me.”
CHAPTER 22
WISTERIA
BERNARD WAS ATTACHING OUR NEW IMPROVED BICYCLE LAMPS when I got home from work that day. They used carbolic acid in the igniting mechanism. That wasn’t something I wanted to think about when my mind was swirling with the prospect of making a dragonfly lamp for Paris.
“Care for a little spin tonight?” he asked.
“Oh, no, thanks. I’m too weary.”
“Just a wee one before dinner?”
“All I want to do is to lie down awhile and close my eyes. I’m sorry. Let’s do it tomorrow evening.”
“In that case, would you like me to read more of A Woman of No Importance to you?”
It was Francie’s choice for this month’s play reading.
“No, thanks. I detest that title!”
“I believe Oscar Wilde meant it ironically.”
I touched his arm lightly as a way of showing appreciation.
Upstairs in my room I drew down the shade and fell into sweet oblivion as soon as I hit my pillow, and was awakened by Hank and George in animated conversation coming up the stairs. Oh, Lord, they were heading for my room. I buried myself more deeply at the knock.
“We know you’re in there,” George said.
“I’m resting.”
He opened the door. “That’s all right. You don’t have to open your eyes. I’ll only have to repeat everything if you don’t listen now.”
“Just don’t pace. Sit, and don’t talk loud.”
He landed with a bounce at the foot of my bed, and Hank took the only comfortable chair. George had been at the Vanderbilt mansion in Hyde Park all week, and launched into a description.
“French classical … half-round portico … massive columns.”
I was aware of his voice in the same way I was aware of birds chirping outside, but I didn’t follow what he said any more than what the birds said.
“Gilded moldings … herringbone parquet floors … Isfahan carpets … Brussels tapestries …”
Bernard ducked his head in the doorway. “Give the poor woman a little peace. Tell us at dinner.”
“She wants to hear now,” George protested.
“No, she doesn’t. Out. Out.”
“Who are you to say what she wants? Her protector?”
“Everyone, please,” I begged.
I felt George leap off the bed, and got twenty minutes’ quiet before the dinner bell rang.
“DON’T YOU WANT TO HEAR what Monsieur and I are going to do for Freddie’s bedroom?” George asked, passing a platter of boiled pork sausage.
“Freddie?” Dudley said archly.
“We can’t live another minute without knowing,” Francie cried. “Save us before we expire.”
And off he went again. “Freddie wants his and Louise’s bedrooms to be unrestrained fantasy chambers. Since she’s such a Francophile, hers will be Louis the Fourteenth, and his will be Italian Renaissance. She can imagine herself as queen to a Louis, and he can imagine himself as a Medici.”
“Quiet down, George,” Merry said. “Not everyone wants to know.”
“Oh, yes, we do,” said Miss Lefevre at the other table. “Just so madame doesn’t make the mistake of imagining herself queen to Louis the Sixteenth,” she said, drawing her finger across her throat and catching the ribbon of her pince-nez, which sent them flying.
“His bedroom will have carved wooden panels containing whimsical characters. Guess who gets to design them!”
“Michelangelo,” Francie replied.
“Me!” He grinned a silly grin.
Oh, he was rolling now, back to his old self. I didn’t want to diminish his triumph by sharing one of my own. It would keep for another day.
THURSDAY, ACCOUNTING DAY, the day I liked least, came all too soon. I hoped to get the design for the mosaic dragonfly base finished by noon so that I wouldn’t have to dash around madly from three to five to make the rounds gathering accounts, but I could do it from one to three instead and have the two hours remaining to work out the bills in the studio instead of taking them home.
No chance for that. Mr. Tiffany had gone home sick after the meeting about the dragonfly lamp and stayed home for three days, but apparently he had improved enough to worry about Winter, a panel of the Four Seasons window. Yesterday he had telephoned Mr. Belknap saying he wanted to see me about it today.
To mark the occasion of a visit to his home, I dressed in my good black skirt, my newest white waist, and a narrow tie of emerald green, which he proclaimed was his favorite color, along with peacock blue, turquoise, and ruby. I put on my black felt hat that I thought he would like because of the iridescent feathers. In the studio, I found a good-sized piece of drizzle glass representing pine needles, wrapped it carefully in flannel, and took the open-air electric car up Madison to Seventy-second Street. I arrived at eleven, which I thought was an appropriate hour.
What a monster of a house it appeared in the daytime. Whoever heard of a medieval spiked portcullis in Manhattan? I was working for an eccentric! I passed under it quickly, walked through the courtyard garden, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. A housekeeper ushered me into the library, where I had never been before.
A large bay window of magnolia panels spread wide before me. The opalescent petals in milky white and pearly cream with blushes of pink reminded me of the glorious magnolia tree in Madison Square Park. The lead cames of various thicknesses had been textured with irregular grooves and ridges and patinated in a dark brown to simulate twigs and branches. Above the vertical panels were square transoms of abundant wisteria entwined on a trellis with blossoms of deep purple, blue, and pink cascading down in various lengths over clear glass.
“Papa fell asleep,” said a prim little pixie who had snuck up on me in her pink stockinged feet. She blinked her big blue eyes like her father’s. “He tried to stay awake till you came. I don’t think he’ll wake up until the afternoon.”
I felt like a lout to have kept the poor man waiting. The self-possessed elf child tipped her head, expecting a response, and when she righted it, her expertly cut Dutch-girl bob fell back exactly in place.
“I see. And what might your name be?”
“Dorothy.”
“Well, Miss Dorothy of, how many, seven years?”
“I’m eight, however small.”
“I beg your pardon. Miss Dorothy of eight years, you must tell him when he awakes that I would be happy to come back.”
I had been at my desk only fifteen minutes, just long enough to spread out my accounting sheets, when Frank rushed in to summon me by urgent gestures. He always appeared urgent about everything. If I could understand his finger spelling, I would have known it was for the telephone call and I wouldn’t have had to go back up three flights of stairs from the office floor to get my hat and coat. As it was, the sweet voice on the line chirped, “Papa woke up and wants to see you now.”
Upstairs, downstairs, on with my hat and coat, out the door, and onto the electric car again. It took off with a lurch, and off flew my hat in the wind. I tried to extricate myself and leap off the car to get it while we were rolling along, but two men restrained me as if I were suicidal. At the next stop I got off, calm as a sea horse to show I was in my right mind, then hurried back two blocks, looking for it. I lingered about miserably. It was George’s favorite. Fuming that someone had snatched it up in just those few minutes, and anxious not to be late for Mr. Tiffany and get there only to find that he’d fallen asleep again, I boarded the next car and arrived in time.
Little Miss Tiffany took me into a large room with a fire crackling, flowers on every flat surface, and other lovely things that I didn’t have the presence of mind to enjoy because Mr. Tiffany lay abed, eyes open, hardly making a mound in the fluffy coverlet. Seeing him so pale and fragile made losing my hat seem less important.
He reached out his hand for me to take. “I apologize for not being awake when
you came this morning,” he said in a weak voice.
“You’ve been working too hard.”
“I can’t seem to help it.” He gestured for me to pull a wicker chair cushioned in emerald green toward the bed. “Closer,” he said, and with effort he raised himself to a sitting position. He had a rose pinned to his Indian silk dressing gown.
“Do you think that rose will help you breathe better?”
He patted it lightly. “It’s my companion. Now, since I missed my Monday rounds, I want to know how all the projects are coming along.”
I reported that the last of the three mosaic panels depicting scenes from Homer that we had been working on for Princeton was more than half completed. Since the three panels together were eighty feet wide and we were that far along, he was pleased. I described our progress on the butterfly lamp with Alice’s prototype enamel base duplicating the mosaic primroses, and Agnes’s magnolia window for the Paris Exposition.
“It’s the worst time for me to be away, with windows needing to be installed in four churches by Easter, and the Grafton Galleries show in London, and the things that need to be sent to Paris.”
“Don’t worry. It will all get done.”
At that moment, I thought of my Thursday accounting and wondered just how that would get done.
“I’ll have to strip the store bare to have enough to make a good showing. What about the Winter window?”
“We’re doing a lot of triple and quadruple plating to get lovely nuances of depth.”
“Don’t be afraid to use five or six layers if you have to. You’re not the one who has to lift it.”
“I’m doing the selecting for the pine boughs, the snow, and the moonlight. It’s going well.” I unwrapped the glass from my handbag and held it up to the light. Thin green threads against blended blue and white represented pine needles against sky.
“Yes, yes. Good. No paint. Make sure the snow has shadows to suggest that it’s melting.”
“We found that the drip of melting snow on the upper pine bough catches the light better in clear rather than white glass.”
“All right.”
“Lillian Palmié is doing the fire in the foreground. She has plated several layers of yellows, golds, and oranges under ripple glass. It really does look like flickering flames. And when the bundled cames are soldered together and get patinated black, they’ll look like charred logs.”
“Good, but you’re foil-wrapping the delicate parts, aren’t you?”
“Yes, and the jewel chunks as well. Miss Byrne and I have hammered out some gorgeous jewels. She is our primary cutter for this window. We don’t give her any critical piece until we’ve all agreed on it.”
“All pieces are critical.” He turned his head to see if that registered. I nodded that it had.
“When I take this to Paris, the French will see Impressionism in glass instead of paint. Instead of the Impressionists using colors and stippling to show light, we’re painting with light. It will be a great comeback after ’89 and La Farge’s bogus honors.”
I doubted that they were entirely bogus. That was just his harbored disappointment surfacing.
“The dragonfly shade for that customer won’t be finished in a week because of the metalwork still to be done. I’m sorry, but it was impossible.”
“She’ll just have to wait. When you finish all three, cut the patterns in brass so they’ll last. You’ll make a series of them, I’m sure. Do you have a design for the mosaic base for Paris?”
“Not yet. It’s only been three days.”
“Just wondering. I want to see Winter before it’s sent to the metal shop.”
“You can’t stand not to be in the center seeing all these things take shape. Don’t you think Rubens or della Robbia was ever sick and had to relinquish their ateliers to others once in a while?”
He choked at that. I brought a glass of water to his lips, and the intimacy in the liberty I took made me tremble. I lingered a few moments in that fleeting closeness before I took the empty glass to the kitchen to refill.
In the breakfast area I noticed maxims burned into the wooden beams of the low ceiling. ‘Plain living and high thinking’ made me murmur, “Absurd.” When I came back to his bedside, I said, “Plain living and high thinking, indeed.”
“That was for my father’s sake. He thought I was running with a fast crowd after May died, meaning Stanford White and my pals from the Lyceum Theatre project. I thought if I had a house big enough for all three generations, he would feel he was keeping an eye on me. So I designed the two lower floors for him, the third for my sister’s family, the fourth floor for us, and the fifth for my studio. Even though I restrained myself in decorating his living space, he called it ‘a magpie’s nest of incongruous design elements.’ He never lived here.”
“You have to admit that a man whose taste runs to diamonds, not Hindustani deities, might not be comfortable here.”
He raised his shoulders. “You don’t have to go just yet, do you?”
I thought of my Thursday accounting. Our business was finished, but this was a rare private hour, and in truth, I wanted as much of him as I could get.
“Not just yet.”
“I’m sorry Lou isn’t here to greet you. She’s at the women’s infirmary most weekdays. Some Sunday you’ll have to come to the Briars, our house on Long Island. In June our gardens are at their peak. You two can get acquainted then.”
“That would be lovely. I’m sure I would find motifs for more lamps there. You know, don’t you, how much I want to establish a permanent line of lamps?”
He patted my wrist. “Yes. I know.”
“I love the Japonisme of the wisteria transoms in the library here. Can’t you just imagine those blossoms hanging vertically around a light source?”
His eyebrows lifted as the idea formed. “Let’s make it an electrolier.”
“Really?”
“I’ve been consulting with Thomas Edison. He says that in a couple of years, more people who can afford our lamps will have electricity. And he agrees that the harshness of electric bulbs ought to be softened with colored glass.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“Now the wisteria base can be a slim bronze standard instead of a bulky oil canister.”
“It can be the trunk of the vine!” The air seemed to crackle around us. I scooted to the edge of my chair. “And the leads in the shade can be roughened to look like branches, like those in your magnolia window.”
“We’ll design it together. You do the shade. I’ll do the base. I want it in the Paris Exposition too.”
“It’s already May. Can we finish it by the entry deadline?”
“We’ll make sure of that. Finish Winter and the mosaic base for your dragonfly lamp, but then do everything you can to make a prototype wisteria. I’ll have Siegfried Bing put it in his Salon de l’Art Nouveau afterward. He’s my representative throughout Europe.”
Reality set in, and the battle between aesthetics and commercial concerns loomed. “With all those small petals,” I said, “there will probably be a thousand pieces of glass to cut.”
“Two thousand, I’ll wager.”
“It will be labor-intensive.”
“It will be beautiful,” he said in a dreamy voice.
“It will be expensive,” I warned.
“Who cares?”
We looked at each other knowing exactly who would care. Then we burst out laughing.
CHAPTER 23
THE HAT, THE FERN, AND THE GIRLS
MANHATTAN GLEAMED. THE STREETS AND SIDEWALKS WERE SLICK with lacquer from the afternoon rain, and now, on Friday evening, Bernard and I rode slowly and carefully. If we had ridden Thursday evening like he’d wanted to, we would have had dry pavement, but I’d had to tell him that because of the time I spent at Mr. Tiffany’s house, I needed to do my weekly accounting that evening at home. Bernard had given me a long scrutinizing look. What was he looking for? Truth? I wasn’t the one hiding anythin
g. Disappointed but gentlemanly, he offered to help with the books.
Now our plan was to take a turn around the four small parks in the vicinity, heading south to Union Square, around the large pagoda-like birdcage, up Broadway to Madison Square Park, around the magnolia tree, across to Gramercy Park and around its iron-gated perimeter. I made Bernard stop to appreciate the flower beds of bearded iris, so exotic and sensuous. Then we turned south to Stuyvesant Square on the East Side. He rode right through a puddle, hands on his head, holding out his legs and sending a fantail of water on both sides, as free and unencumbered as a boy—hardly consistent with his duplicity of being engaged to one woman and cycling with another.
How long was he going to let it go on without telling me? If I wanted the secret of him, of his privacy, why didn’t I just ask him directly: Are you engaged or not? Are you secretly married? Where’s your wife? Rigid codes of conduct ingrained in me forbade it, and Alistair was long gone back to merry ole England so I couldn’t ask him. Maybe I had misheard Alistair. Maybe he’d said that Bernard was with his financier, not fiancée. Then wouldn’t I feel foolish?
It wasn’t just my mother’s etiquette book that constrained me. Bernard’s mystery was convenient. If he ever revealed that he was engaged, it would be blatantly wrong for me to go on outings with him. It was better not to know, so I could continue as we had been, as occasional pleasant companions. His importance, like his presence at the boardinghouse, came and went. When he wasn’t there, my life was full without him. At the end of our ride, I felt freshened from my week indoors but not enlightened. For the time being, that was just fine.
In the parlor Merry gave me a letter. “This was just brought in by a neighbor. Wrong delivery.”
I read the return address.
“Youmans! The milliner who re-blocked and trimmed the hat I lost.” In my excitement, I read it to her.
Mrs. Driscoll,
A lady called saying that she found a hat on the street. Seeing our label, she notified us. From her description, I thought it might be yours. If so, please call at number 24, West Thirty-fourth Street, a Mrs. G. Lee.