He looked at me with steely eyes. “This World’s Columbian Exposition is going to turn the tables.”
After his braggadocio was spent, he said, “From now on, it’s a race against time. We barely have fourteen months. How much do you have left to do on The Infancy of Christ?”
“Ten thousand pieces of glass to select and cut is slow going. I’ve finished the central medallion. Now I’m working on the left cross panel of Mary Presenting Christ to the Wise Men. Miss Egbert will help me with the three other pictorial panels as soon as she finishes her window. She can train my best new girl on the decorative spaces between the pictures.”
“Good.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “I saw the way you devoured the double-peacock watercolor the first day you came back. As soon as you finish the Christ window, you can start on it.”
Splendor! All I could think of between the quick beats of my heart was splendor and joy.
“Thank you.”
“Hire from Art Students League and the Metropolitan.”
“The tuition there is costly. The Cooper Union art program is free. I’m likely to find girls who really need the money there. They might be more committed.”
“Fine. Ask Miss Mitchill too. She founded the National Association of Women Painters. She’ll know of someone capable of doing the enlargements. We need more than her and Miss Northrop and you for that.”
“All right. One thing you ought to know. Miss Northrop hasn’t seemed very pleased at my being department head.”
“I need her doing exactly what she’s doing. She’s the best glass selector and a fine watercolorist, but she’s not as sensible as you are. You’ll win her over eventually.”
I wasn’t so sure. Once when I complimented her on her selection of glass, she acted as though she was above needing any comment from me.
“Don’t be hurt, Agnes,” I had said. “He needs your artistry more than mine.”
She’d held a piece of glass against the light, turned it, discarded it, and picked another, all without a glance at me.
“He gave you the Christ window,” she’d remarked. “I designed it.”
“I didn’t know. He didn’t mention that.”
“No, he wouldn’t. At the fair, it will be assumed to be his design.”
“Does that bother you?”
Raising one eyebrow to a perfect arch, she finally turned to me. “It’s the way it is.”
Her temperament was delicate. I had to tread lightly. The same with Mr. Tiffany. At the moment, he was intent on studying his Entombment painting.
“May I ask, who will pose for Mary?”
“I would like Louise to. My wife. If it’s not too hard on her.”
“The pose?”
“The idea. A mother grieving over her dead child.” He took a slow, energy-gathering breath. “We just lost our daughter.” He closed his paint box slowly. The click of the latch made a hollow, final sound. “Our little Annie. Three years old.”
Grief pressed down on him like a giant paw. I offered him the condolence of my eyes, knowing that words would do nothing to lessen his suffering.
In a faraway voice he added, “My first wife, Mary, and I lost our baby boy too, after three weeks. Mary never recovered, and I lost her as well. Now this child of Lou.”
A slight lisp escaped on the word lost. What an enormous, constant effort it must take for him to keep it under control.
“She died with a gardenia in her hand.”
I knew it was he who had put it there, the last loving thing he could do for her. His eyes revealed the fear that he would never get over it.
“Your work, is it compensation enough?” I ventured.
The skin between his eyebrows wrinkled. “Flamingoes and peacocks don’t make up for a child.”
CHAPTER 4
FEATHERS
I HAD ALREADY INTERVIEWED LANDLADIES IN THE EAST SIDE vicinity of the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, had rejected the suspicious, the severe, and the skeletal, and had gone home to soak my discouraged feet. I set out again this Saturday to circle the Tiffany building in ever-widening routes, determined to find exactly the right place.
I couldn’t bear to stay at the boardinghouse in Brooklyn where Francis and I had occupied a suite of rooms. Ever since he died, the boarders spoke to me in hushed and awkward tones as they slithered past me in the corridor like nuns and monks. It was as if they had drawn a black circle around my name in their roster of friends and labeled it: New widow. Treat with kid gloves. They meant well, but their averted eyes told me that they held the notion that a widow must creep through life as though she no longer belonged, taking one tedious, lonely breath after another during the long wait to be reunited with her other half in the hereafter.
Was it wrong for me to want more than constrained existence? Wrong to hunger for change, new faces, a full life? Surprises to please my eyes and ears? Was it improper to seek healing in the roaring crush of Manhattan, city of brilliance and possibility?
I walked on, erect, not creeping, and discovered a little run of quiet blocks called Irving Place between Union Square and Gramercy Park, which promised to be leafy come spring. Greek Revival, Italianate, and Renaissance Revival townhouses lined the street. I saw a ROOM TO LET sign in a window and bounded up the stoop. A gaunt woman answered the buzzer, portending skimpy portions at the dinner table and plates that were whisked away before a second helping could enter the boarders’ minds. The cramped, cheerless parlor had only itchy horsehair settees constraining sitters to maintain Egyptian posture at all times. Apparently she considered the ten-inch-wide ribbon of gauze an adequate runner for the passageway to the bathroom.
“Thank you, no,” I said, and escaped.
Down the block at number 44 I found another sign, this one with a caricature of laughing people at a dining table with the warning SOUR-PUSSES AND CIGAR SMOKERS NEED NOT APPLY. A wide-hipped woman decorated with a fluff of dyed red-orange hair piled on top of her head welcomed me. Hmm. Colorful.
“Come in and have a look, dearie. We won’t bite. I’m Miss Merry Owens.”
She tucked her feather duster into her waistband above her ample hindquarters like a tail. That and her tuft of orange hair made her look like no spring chicken, rather like a mother hen.
“There’s right sweet folks here, artists and such, women on the second floor, men on the third, the help on the fourth. Seventeen paying souls, and all of them respectable, mind you, but not particular fashionable. Of the men, there’s not a good-for-naught or a tippler in the bunch, though there be a couple of mollies, if you don’t mind that. We even have a bona fide doctor, Griggs is his name, and an actor, Mr. Bainbridge. In the evenings we have musicales or read-alouds or charades or drawing lessons and such.”
“Drawing lessons?” Drawing was my embarrassing weakness, which I tried to hide from Mr. Tiffany.
“Oh, ’tis a grand arrangement we have. Mr. Dudley Carpenter is teaching Miss Hettie to draw, and Miss Hettie is teaching piano to Mr. Hackley, and Mr. Hackley is teaching singing to Miss Lefevre, and Miss Lefevre is teaching French to Mr. McBride, and Mr. McBride is teaching art history to Mr. Booth, and Mr. Booth is teaching accounting to Miss Merry Owens, that’s me, and I’m teaching Irish tatting to Mrs. Hackley, and she is teaching the zither to Dudley, so it all comes ’round, ye see, in a happy circle.” She made a circle with fingers plump as sausages and laughed her big bosoms into action.
“And what can you do?” she demanded, knuckles on the shelves of her hips, her head cocked to the side as though the hen’s neck were broken.
“I can recite poetry. I particularly like Emily Dickinson.”
“A lady poet, eh? There’s somes here would like that. Give us a wee morsel.”
“ ‘Each that we lose takes part of us.’ Oh, no. That’s too dreary. How about this?
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
“Ah, sweeter than wine.”
Apparently I passed muster, because she brought me into an airy parlor with comfortable easy chairs and freshly starched antimacassars. Two landscape prints of the Hudson River School hung on the walls, and a bowl of lemon drops sat on a crocheted doily. The Twelve Apostle spoons hanging in their wooden rack on the wall were all bright. Not one, not even the betrayer, was tarnished. Clearly this was a better sort of boardinghouse, probably with a price to match.
Up carpeted stairs that did not creak she showed me to a bedroom all done up in pink and spring green with a window onto Irving Place. Above the iron bedstead a landscape mural had been painted of a pond with floating lilies.
“Charming.”
“George, a former boarder, painted it when he lived here, but Dudley chose the colors for the curtains and spread.”
Decent bed, small desk with an oil lamp and a bookshelf above it, one easy chair, clean, bathroom down the hall. “How much?”
“Fifty dollars a month, and that includes three hearties a day, full Irish breakfast, dessert on Sundays and holidays, hot water all hours. T’would be forty-five but for the window.”
That was higher than I had anticipated, but I earned twenty a week with a promise of a moderate raise every two years.
“I’ll take it. May I move in tomorrow?”
“To be sure you can.”
I RETURNED TO BROOKLYN elated, and late into the night I packed the last things—my alcohol lamp for heating my curling iron, and my grandmother’s porcelain washbowl and pitcher—but the things on Francis’s desk and dresser, I didn’t even touch.
With a trace of sadness I had sold my two evening gowns at the Second Time Around and bought three shirtwaists, ready-mades with narrow skirts, for work, and a new pair of lace-ups so I wouldn’t come back to Tiffany’s looking down-at-the-heels. I took Francis’s silk black-on-black bow tie that I particularly liked. I could wear it hanging down loosely in the modern style. I packed my wedding dress, not out of sentiment but out of longing for spring. It was sky-blue poplin. I packed my opera cloak too, even if I had to wear it over a muslin shirtwaist in the standing-room-only section.
And then I carefully wrapped in a hand towel the one thing I had that no one could wrench from me—the kaleidoscope, his engagement gift to me. Bits of richly colored glass in a chamber served as his sweet acknowledgment that I’d had to give up my joyous work with just such glass in order to marry him. At the slightest turn of the maple-wood tube, the design collapsed with a tiny rattle of falling objects, and in a burst of an instant, nothing was the same.
It was our books that remained. I was careful to pick out my own, leaving his. Into my carpetbag first went my mother’s Shakespeare, the plays and the sonnets. I couldn’t help but think of the first line of Sonnet Twenty-nine, which seemed to be aimed at me this last month as it never had before. When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.
In went my mother’s etiquette book, The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen, which I read with some levity, and my stepfather’s Bible and his Minister’s Bible Concordance, which bristled when I put Whitman’s Leaves of Grass next to it. My leather-bound Keats and Wordsworth came next, reminding me that it wasn’t a bad thing to brighten one’s days with snips of poetry, like my mother did. Then Ibsen’s plays, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and Henry James’s Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. There stood Emily Dickinson. The 1890 collection, her first, Francis had given me. The 1891 collection I had given him. I took them both, wondering what follows The Sweeping up the Heart, / And putting Love away.
ON SUNDAY EVENING in Miss Owens’s dining room, a tall, smartly dressed man pulled out my chair for me, motioned for me to sit, and scooted it in with utter grace but without a word, an easy gesture for him, though one that carried a sense of the momentous for me. A serving girl set down a platter of corned beef and cabbage, and Merry Owens brought in bowls of boiled potatoes and creamed lima beans, then sat at the head of the table.
“Why so glum tonight, you two?” she said to two men just entering.
“Walt Whitman died yesterday.” One of them choked getting out the words. His eyes glistened, and his curly hair grew like a wild garden.
“Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son,” said the other, a studious type wearing horn-rimmed spectacles with expensive gold hinges.
“Song of Myself,” I was quick to say. I had always liked that title.
“Well, then, we’ll have a read-aloud after supper. It’ll make you feel a mite better,” Miss Owens said. “Start the praties and beans around, Maggie. We have a new boarder. Mrs. Clara Driscoll. She’s in George’s old room. Dudley redecorated it.”
“Good thing, unless she likes little Egyptian alligators painted on the walls,” replied a matronly woman with long earlobes, whose cheeks were etched with a fretwork of finely penned wrinkles.
“Much to my dismay, Mrs. Hackley, Merry made me paint over them gators when I told her they were aphrodisiacal.”
Ah, the sad, curly-haired one must be Dudley. Definitely a Southern twang, unless it was put on to be funny. Prolonged vowels. Pa-int said as two slow syllables. I liked it.
“It’s a lovely room. I’m sure I’ll be happy in it.”
Miss Owens asked those seated at my table to introduce the person to their right. There were four men, three women, and an empty chair next to Dudley Carpenter, who kept looking behind him through the arch to the parlor.
“He’ll be along, Dudley,” Miss Owens assured him.
“Will Mr. Driscoll be joining you soon?” Mrs. Hackley asked.
“No.” She wasn’t wasting any time in zeroing in on the suspicion attached to any woman my age living alone. “There is no Mr. Driscoll.”
“Then you’re a working woman?” Mr. Hackley asked.
“Yes. I work at Tiffany’s studio.”
“Polishing silver, I should guess,” Mrs. Hackley declared authoritatively.
“As a matter of fact, no.”
“It can’t be selling jewelry. The sales clerks are all men,” she said.
“That’s Tiffany and Company, owned by Charles Tiffany. I work for his son, Louis Tiffany, in his glass workshop, making leaded-glass windows and mosaics.”
“Workshop! Then you consider yourself a New Woman, do you?” Mrs. Hackley looked down her nose at her plate. “It’s my opinion, and that of many social commentators, that when a woman joins the ranks of men in workshops, her morals sink, so mind your step.”
“She’s employed in the arts, Mrs. Hackley, not in a carriage factory, and the arts are a moral force.”
“Thank you, Mr.—”
“McBride. Henry McBride.”
Him, the scholarly Whitman quoter, I wanted to remember. Longish hair, cleft chin, Cupid’s-bow mouth redder than was common, pearl stud in his flowing maroon four-in-hand necktie, positioned off center. Was that intentional, a rejection of convention?
“Call him Hank,” drawled Dudley. “It takes him down a peg from his high falutin self-appointment as headmaster of Forty-four Irving Place.”
Hank folded his hands in a professorial way. “I know a good deal about the elder Tiffany, if you care to ask me sometime.”
“I will!”
“Plato wrote that men and women would eventually respond much in the same way to the same conditions.” This interjected by Francie, an older woman delicate as a wren, with a complexion the pale pink of her blouse. “I take that to mean that if a man can have integrity and morality in factories and workshops, then so can women.”
“Oh, you and your books,” Mrs. Hackley grumbled. “Will you never stop prattling on about those philosophers? They’re all dead, Francie.” Frumpish Mrs. Hackley forked an overlarge morsel of corned beef and chewed vigorously, her mouth making all sorts of exaggerated shapes. “I have never been able to understand how a true lady could accept money from anyone but a father, a husband, an uncle, or
a brother.”
“Enough, Maggie. I’ll shut off your radiator if you go on against my new boarder. She’s right proper, and I won’t have you laying damage to her person.”
“In this tippy world, Mrs. Hackley, a single woman does what she has to,” I said, “and if she enjoys it, as I do, so much the finer her life.”
“Brava, Mrs. Driscoll,” ventured the gentleman who had pushed in my chair.
I saw now his clean-shaven skin taut over elegant, defined cheekbones.
“Ah, I’d begun to think you were mute,” I said. “Handsome, but mute.” Francie snickered daintily. “Remind me of your name, please.”
“Bernard Booth.”
Not even a full sentence and I could tell he was English. I always melted at an English accent.
The front door opened and slammed shut. A beardless man with ruddy complexion and black hair entered through the arch from the parlor. Whistling “Yankee Doodle,” he swept off his black fedora with its small red feather, flung it onto the hat rack along with his long red silk scarf, and did a little dance step.
“Great news, comrades.” He held out both arms. “You are, at this moment, looking at the recipient of the honor of having my portrait of Helena Modjeska hung in the Players Club.”
Applause burst forth from both tables.
He was a bit of a Yankee Doodle dandy himself, with his red handkerchief pointing up out of the pocket in his frock coat. He bent to lay a humorously loud kiss on Miss Owens’s cheek.
“Sorry I’m late, Merry. The discussion of where it would hang went on and on. In the end it was decided that because of Modjeska’s role as Ophelia, it should hang next to John’s of Edwin Booth as Hamlet.”
“Mind letting us in on who you mean, or are we supposed to know?” asked Merry.
“Why, John Singer Sargent, of course.”
That was impressive enough to me, but Dudley scowled. “You’re on a first-name basis now? Georgie and Johnny?”
“Not just yet.”
“Don’t be filling yourself up with grand ideas like some lawdy-daw or you won’t want to keep taking your meals with the likes of us. I need your tuppence.” Miss Owens turned to me. “Moved out, he did, into his studio. It’s only a good spit from here to next door, so he’s always fiddle-faddling around here as if he owns the place.”