Clara and Mr. Tiffany

  I sat down on a bench and prepared to draw. “Leaves pinnate.”

  “Like a feather, with one leaflet at the end,” Alice added.

  “Foliage only above the blossoms.”

  “Trunks twisted and gnarled.”

  “Two entwining around each other,” I said. “Like a wizened old married couple.”

  We became absorbed in drawing until Alice slapped her forehead. “A separate piece of glass for each petal! There’ll be a thousand!”

  “Two thousand, Mr. Tiffany estimated.”

  “That will take forever!”

  A small, gray-haired woman was making her way slowly down the length of the pergola, picking up fallen blossoms, examining them closely, putting some in a little bakery box, and throwing some away. Petals littered the ground around her like a lavender Persian carpet. She stopped to watch us work.

  “Nice pictures, but you only have the drawings. I have the color and the scent. They last a couple of days in a saucer of water.”

  “Then you can come back and get some fresh ones,” Alice told her.

  “I live by the el train, and it soots up the air frightfully. Flowers help.”

  She toddled on, bending her stiff little body precariously, plucking each treasure off the ground, her sweet pinkie finger raised.

  Once she was out of earshot, Alice murmured, “Lady Pillager. That’ll be us one day.”

  “Our legs twisted and gnarled with veins like the trunks of wisteria.”

  “Our noses straining to remember this scent.”

  It left us both thoughtful for a time, our drawing pencils still.

  “She knows what life is for,” I mused.

  We cocked our heads at each other, hoping that we did too, and that our work to make beautiful things might help others live richer lives. This was the other Tiffany Imperative.

  “We can’t use the wide cone mold we used for dragonfly,” I said. “It has to be more perpendicular to give the illusion of the clusters hanging down.”

  “Like a pail upside down?”

  “No. Straight down. More like a cloche hat with a rounded shoulder between the crown and sides.” I drew a rough sketch of the shape of the shade and vine base I had in mind and showed her. “Mr. Tiffany told me this lamp would be electric.”

  “Electroliers can get really hot,” Alice said.

  “Then the opening at the top has to be larger than normal. That’s fine. There could be a tangled net of leads without glass in the center of the crown, thick leads textured to look like branches.”

  “There’s one problem.” Her ominous tone set me on edge.

  “I think I know what you’re going to say, and it’s going to break my heart.”

  “The bottom,” she wailed.

  “Yes. It would be criminal to cut off the blossoms at a bottom ring. They’ve simply got to hang down unevenly, like they do in nature.”

  “Then the mold has to be taller than the lowest hanging blossom,” she said. “But then we can’t build up the glass from a bottom ring resting against the mold.”

  “Start at the top?” I asked.

  “What are you? A magician? How are these tiny pieces going to stay without anything to rest on?”

  “Wax?”

  “And pins,” she said. “We’ll have to put two pins in the wood for each small bottom piece to rest on.”

  “A fringe of pins.”

  When Bernard and Mr. York came back, we packed up and mounted our wheels, our imaginations blossoming but our exuberance darkened, our legs not yet twisted and stiff.

  MR. MITCHELL CAME into the studio one drizzly afternoon and pulled up a stool by my desk, too close for comfort.

  “Hello,” I said. “I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?”

  “What’s going on here?”

  He never started any conversation with “Good morning” or “How are you?” or “Might I interrupt you for a moment?” Mr. I. M. Business.

  The girls were all standing with their hands over their eyes.

  “I called a five-minute break for them to stretch their shoulders and rest their eyes. Those rain clouds outside make it dark in here. We’ve had to work with electric lights all day.”

  “You do this all the time?”

  “Every day we have to work under electric lights. It causes eye-strain.”

  He blew a puff of air out of his mouth. “Never heard of such a thing. The men don’t do it.”

  “Then the men have superior eyeballs. Or inferior brains.”

  Theresa dared to snicker.

  “You’re getting pretty high-and-mighty lately.”

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Mitchell. Good of you to notice.”

  Carrie gasped.

  He pointed to my drawing. “What’s that?”

  “I’m designing a wisteria lamp. It will have a new shape, like a tall cloche hat, and a cascade of small petals in shades of violet-blue. I’m sure it will be a popular model.”

  “He knows you’re doing this?” Mr. Mitchell asked.

  “We thought of it together. He loves wisteria. Haven’t you noticed the transoms in his library?”

  “No.”

  “How unfortunate for you. He’s designing the base to look like a wisteria trunk. It’s for an electrolier.”

  “There’s no guarantee that electroliers will sell. Besides, we can’t have such elaborate lamps. The time involved makes them too expensive. If you make only these expensive one-of-a-kind or eight-of-a-kind lamps, you’ll have to be constantly designing new items.”

  “Which is what I like doing, and what I’m beginning to be good at.”

  He sat in deep thought for a few minutes while I added a few more blossoms to a wisteria colonnade. The clusters shouldn’t hang next to one another like a line of soldiers at roll call. Some should be in front of others, some behind, some branches bursting into blossoms higher than others. The difficulty on a flat plane was to convey in pencil the separation between clusters that one sees with the eye.

  “Since the pattern will be repeated five times around the barrel, that reduces my time expenditure,” I said.

  His scrutiny fell on my plaster model of a new clock.

  “Do you honestly suppose anybody is going to buy that clock?”

  “I most certainly do. It’s more original than any clock in the showroom.”

  “Indeed. Odd little clock, for a museum, but the public wants common white and gold French clocks that sell for a quarter of the price this would be. I tell you, your clock is too original. It will never sell.”

  “Don’t be so quick to assume that, Mr. Mitchell. Save yourself from feeling foolish when it does sell.”

  He pulled his stool even closer.

  “If you could content yourself with utilizing your originality on a few simple things, you would be doing something useful instead of going off on these crazy tangents.”

  I gritted my teeth at the sarcastic way he said “originality” and flung out his arm over everything in my studio as if it were trash.

  “But Mr. Tiffany, whom I believe is your employer as well as mine, has encouraged me to design more lamps.”

  He planted his elbow right in the middle of my wisteria study, wrinkling it, a deliberate move. I pushed on his arm enough to free my drawing, and glared at him none too pleasantly.

  In a conspiratorial whisper, he said, “Mr. Tiffany will be taking a vacation soon. What I want you to do while he’s away, on the sly, so to speak, is to design some simple, cheaper things that can be made more quickly, without so many little pieces.” He wiggled his fingers at my one-fifth wisteria drawing.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, candlesticks, ink bottles, pin trays, desk sets. Those things will fly off the shelves. If you design some uncomplicated bronze items to suit me, without mosaics, I’ll have them made while Mr. Tiffany is away, and I guarantee that they will sell. It will prove to him that there’s money in cheaper things.”

  What a rotten predicament
this was turning out to be. He wasn’t my boss.

  “Cheaper things won’t win him awards. Let’s see at the end of the Paris Exposition if you still feel that way.”

  My clipped cadence would indicate to any sensitive person that the conversation was over, and I resumed my work on the wisteria. Someday I would have my say. In a moment I looked up to see his bald dome of a wooden head with a fringe of hair exit the doorway, self-deceptive in its illusion of victory. I imagined it to be stuck with a fringe of pins instead.

  CHAPTER 25

  RUBY

  OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW WAS ON EVERYONE’S lips that millennial New Year’s Eve. Something spectacular was afoot. The denizens of Miss Owens’s boardinghouse spilled out onto Irving Place, even the Hackleys and frail Francie. Wrapped in mufflers, we spouted the day’s sentiments, fog clouds issuing from our mouths.

  “The new century demands new ideas,” Merry said.

  “Right! Looking ahead to better bread,” George shouted, and Merry playfully cuffed him on the jaw.

  We laughed. We sang. We joined the mass migration downtown, and greeted strangers familiarly. Francie spoke to a newsboy about the headlines, Dr. Griggs joked with shopgirls, and Alice linked arms with a woman in a babushka. In the sea of people jamming City Hall Park, we strained to hear the messages from monarchs of Europe about a new age of peace, diplomacy, and prosperity, a dawning of hope for the masses.

  Mayor Van Wyck gave a speech reminding us of the optimism of early Dutch settlers, and the explosion of commerce with the opening of the Erie Canal, culminating in the burst of entrepreneurial energy in the century just closing. “New York is destined to become the cultural capital of the world,” he declared. There it was—the colliding bedfellows of commerce and art both awakening on this rock between two rivers.

  Combined choral societies of the city sang a new song, “America the Beautiful,” and at the stroke of midnight, City Hall was illuminated with thousands of electric lights. The sudden splendor dazzled us. Speechless, we had never seen anything like it. Tin horns blasted shrilly, kazoos whined, and a deafening cheer went up.

  Mr. York gave Alice a shy little peck on the cheek, and Mr. Bainbridge elbowed his way to her, bent her backward, and gave her a melodramatic stage kiss. Mrs. Hackley raised her chin and tugged at Mr. Hackley’s coat sleeve, reminding him of his marital duty. Dr. Griggs kissed Merry Owens, who responded with an Irish jig. Dudley and Hank tossed public decorum aside and gave each other a brief manly hug, slapping each other on the back. No one noticed in the mad, happy frenzy of the moment.

  When George and I heard, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?” we held tight to each other. Certainly if he were here, if he were living, Edwin with his beautiful patriot dream would have done his bit to “crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”

  There was no sign of Bernard that night, or New Year’s Day, nor for that matter ever since Christmas. That had to mean something, but what? He was certainly an irresistibly charming man—vibrant, caring, witty in that subtle British way—but his unexplained here-today-gone-tomorrow-here-again manner of living was disconcerting. I couldn’t afford another mystery man in my life, so I resolved that in this first year of the new century I would fill my mind with work and beauty instead.

  TO THAT END, Alice and I arrived early at the studio the first workday of the new year, and what did I find on my desk but a notice from Mr. Mitchell: “Beginning immediately, a new policy requires that the Women’s Glass Cutting Department pay the overhead cost of fifty dollars a month for rent of your studio space. Make sure you factor that into your weekly expenditures.”

  Fury boiled up in me. I slapped the message down on Alice’s worktable for her to read.

  “That’s absurd,” Alice said. “We’re part of the company. What a boor. Throwing his weight around.”

  “He’s a skinflint.”

  “He’s a curmudgeon.” She raised her voice.

  “A finagler.” I raised mine.

  “A crook.” She raised her fist.

  “A madman!” I raised mine, holding aloft an imaginary lamp of liberty from oppression.

  Passing in the corridor, Frank saw us and raised his fist in the air too. How desperately he wanted to be part of our studio, and how instinctively I wanted to explain our fists in the air, but it was too complicated for pantomime. Alice blew out a breath and said in a flat voice, “New century, new ideas.”

  On his usual Monday visit that afternoon, Mr. Tiffany said, “Your designs for the metalwork are more inventive than anyone else’s in the building.”

  “With the exception of yours,” I replied with a wink. “Thank you! That’ll keep me going for a while.”

  “I’m leaving for Paris in two weeks to arrange for the Exposition Universelle and to meet with Siegfried Bing to select pieces for his Salon de l’Art Nouveau. Be assured that your dragonfly lamp will have a prominent place in my display at the exposition.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “While I’m gone, don’t let Mr. Mitchell bully you.”

  “He’s already put the thumbscrews on me by charging rent against my department’s profits. For studio space, he says. That’s unjust.”

  “Pay it for now. It’ll blow over. What I meant was not to let him squash any of your design ideas. Take them to Mr. Belknap. If he approves, go ahead with them.”

  “Thank you. I will. I can hardly wait for spring. I want to do some flower shades.”

  “Good. I’ll send up some garden books.”

  WITH THE DRAGONFLY and wisteria lamps shipped to Paris, I had a break and took out my old drawings for a tree-of-life clock. I wanted to get it critiqued by Hank before he left on a trip to Europe, so I took them home. That evening, George, Dudley, Hank, and Mr. York gathered in the parlor. As I launched into a glowing description with the aid of my drawings, the clock grew into something gargantuan, a complex monster of a grandfather clock instead of a mantel clock. It was too late. In the deathly hush, my toes cramping, I waited none too bravely for their verdict.

  Hank, critic-in-training, sporty in his white tennis togs with his legs crossed, was the first to break the silence.

  “Do you know what I think is the matter with your clock?”

  “No. How can I guess?”

  “You don’t mind if I tell you?”

  “Stop pussyfooting around. I wouldn’t have laid my head on the chopping block if I didn’t want your criticism.”

  “There are too many ideas in it. Eight feet of ideas in a two-foot clock and not a quiet spot to rest your eye. You’ve squeezed in all the symbolism known to art.”

  “And some that hasn’t been invented yet,” Mr. York added.

  Another silence descended.

  Dudley cleared his throat. “I would like to say that it’s finer than a she-cat’s belly hair, but I can’t. You’ve got this tortured line trying to be Art Nouveau but overdoing it in a double whiplash. It’s not graceful. It’s forced.” He traced the line in the air, and it looked like a butterfly’s erratic path. “And it doesn’t serve as a plant stem, as in the French style. It’s just a stray line.”

  I had thought of my father fly-fishing when I drew that line. As a little girl excited by the line arcing high in the air and whipping back on itself, I used to say, “Make it last, Papa,” and when he couldn’t, I said, “Do it again, Papa. Just like that one,” but they never were exactly the same, and they didn’t last longer than the blink of an eye. I had thought to honor him on the tree-of-life clock by making something of him last through time.

  Now I saw the drawing as a pitiful mishmash driven by sentiment rather than artful principles, as crowded as the overdecoration of Mr. Tiffany’s home. Like a fish caught on a line, I had swallowed his aesthetic whole.

  “I’m afraid you’re right, but isn’t it sad? I’ve grown so fond of each motif that I don’t know what to discard.”

  “You have to be ruthless,” Mr.
York said. “Cover one element at a time with a piece of paper and ask yourself, would a person miss something there if he didn’t know what you had planned for that spot?”

  “But don’t be like Hercules trying to slay the serpent Hydra, cutting off a head just to have two others grow in its place,” Hank warned.

  “Maybe you should let it simmer awhile,” said George.

  Hank raised his index finger. “It’s good that you weren’t successful at the first go. It’s better this way, because it forces you to think more.”

  A sigh escaped me. “Sad but true. I appreciate you setting me straight.”

  I PUT IT ASIDE at work and turned my thoughts to what I had done that was successful in order to build on that. The lovely orange fish Alice and I had seen swimming among the undulating strips of seaweed at the aquarium came to mind. I took out Alice’s fish drawings and saw that I could design a mosaic wall plaque of two fish swimming among blades of seaweed. Nobody told me I couldn’t design plaques.

  Creativity happens, I thought, when you look at one thing and see another—like Mr. Tiffany seeing a lamp in a nautilus shell. No one would think of a woven basket in connection with an underwater scene, but I did. Fish swimming among tall seaweed made me think of a current threading its way in front of and behind the warp of reeds. Water made of ripple glass could give the illusion that strips of glass could be pliable, as they might appear underwater. The fish would be recognizable but the rest more abstract, simpler, with fewer “things” in the sea. I sensed a coming breakthrough from Victorian quaintness to a new idiom, and took the drawing to Mr. Belknap. He approved it instantly.

  I mustered my courage and said, “I would like to hear your critique of my work as a whole. I’m asking because I value your educated opinion.”

  “Do you want me to speak as myself or as an employee voicing the Tiffany aesthetics?”

  “Both.”

  “Personally, I think your work is fresh and original. You have an excellent eye for color, unity, and placement of elements. Louis would be in accord with that. However, as the director of style for an art enterprise that must position itself on the leading edge, I would disagree with his taste for so much ornamentation. Everything you do is very ornate, and therefore expensive to translate into glass and metal. The thing you need to work toward is to get good effects in simpler ways.”