Clara and Mr. Tiffany

  That made him cock his head from side to side and cluck like a metronome. “I’m going to see it.”

  “I don’t have a spare minute to show you.”

  He stuck his nose in the air. “You can’t stop me.” He straightened the rug beside my bed. “What did your girls do today?”

  “Three glass selectors, three cutters, and three assistants finished the big Angel of the Resurrection window. The angel’s face and hands and feet have just been enameled and fired. You should have seen the girls, so giddy to see all the pieces assembled but sad to part with what they created. It took four men to carry each of the four easels to the metal shop to have the leads soldered. The girls were beside themselves with worry. They surrounded the men and held up their aprons along the edges of the easels in case any pieces fell off. The angel’s foot did fall, but a big Swede named Wilhelmina dove for it and saved it.”

  “Ah, a fallen angel with feet of glass. I adore fallen angels. Was she wearing white lace? Were her white wings moving like this when she lost her toes?”

  He flapped his arms crazily.

  “All right, tell me. Why are you being so silly?”

  “I’ll give you a hint. White.”

  “I don’t want a hint. I want the reason.”

  “I’ll tell you at dinner. Hank and I will tell you.” He flapped his wings out the door.

  GEORGE GRINNED IN HIS IMPISH way as he passed me a serving bowl. “Here, Clara, have some white potatoes. To go with your whitefish and cauliflower.”

  I turned to Merry. “Did George have anything to do with this menu?”

  She held up her hands. “None atallatall. The praties is me own favorite, you know.”

  “I don’t believe you. George has to orchestrate everything. All right, Puck, now that you have an audience, tell us what’s sizzling inside of you.”

  He chewed; he took a drink of water; he flipped his white napkin and wiped his mouth with it. “Hank and I are going to the White City.”

  I was puzzled.

  “He means the Columbian Exposition,” Hank explained.

  “No! Truly?”

  “It’s called the White City because the buildings are being painted to look like alabaster,” Hank said. “A swamp outside Chicago is being transformed into canals, promenades, towers, and classical arches and façades. I just received a press release. I’ll be writing about it.”

  “Then it’s true, what Mr. Tiffany says. The greatest meeting of artists—”

  “Since the fifteenth century,” said Hank. “Some sixty-five thousand exhibits.”

  “Among which will be your chapel, peacocks and all,” George said.

  “And my Christ window! And the flamingo window. And you’re going to see it all assembled. I’m green with envy.”

  “Don’t forget Tiffany and Company’s extravaganza,” said Hank. “Father and son competing with each other on the world stage. Definitely worth my writing about for The Century Magazine.”

  “If we finish on time.”

  THAT DOUBT PLAGUED ME, so I worked extra hours almost every day. One evening in early June when I came home from work too late for dinner, Dudley and George were playing the popular new tune “Oh My Darling Clementine” on their zithers. George followed me up to my room, singing,

  “How I missed her! how I missed her,

  How I missed my Clementine,

  Till I kissed her little sister

  And forgot my Clementine.”

  “Brilliant. When is your debut at Carnegie Hall?”

  “Dudley will be in Paris while Hank and I are in Chicago, so I’ve asked my brother Edwin to check in on you from time to time.”

  “I don’t need someone to oversee my activities, thank you very much.”

  “Woo-whoo. Why so cranky?”

  “I’ll do just fine without your zither duets too, you and Dudley serenading each other across the parlor.”

  George screwed up his face in a pout so tight that it made me laugh. He could always make me laugh, no matter how tired I was. I sat at my dressing table, noticed mauve-colored cups under my eyes, and undid the pins in my chignon. They’d given me a headache. George came up behind me and unwound the twist, picked up my hairbrush and brushed from my forehead out to the ends, holding up my hair in his other hand.

  “That’s one thing you know how to do. Brush hair.”

  “You’ve been overworking yourself.”

  “So has everyone else. It’s practically summer. What do you expect me to do?”

  “Just what you’ve been doing, dear heart.”

  “Mr. Tiffany set too big a task for us. He designed too much, and now he’s driven to complete it all.”

  The Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union had gone on strike, and the mosaics on the chapel arches and columns, as well as the leaded-glass dome on the baptismal font, weren’t finished. Some of the glaziers would have wanted to be loyal to Tiffany, but union solidarity prevailed. For one, Joe Briggs, a fine mosaicist, would have worked all night if he could have found a way in, and Frank, the deaf-and-dumb janitor and errand boy, would have stayed with him to help. I had shown Mr. Belknap how to apply the tesserae, but what could one man do for a task that required twenty?

  As a result, the remaining five chapel windows originally assigned to the men’s department had fallen to my department. I hired more girls to do the mechanical work and elevated Mary and Wilhelmina to be junior selectors. I even gave Frank some simple tasks. Now everyone was putting in extra hours. We had to work by those wretched electric lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, which bled out the colors. There was no time to savor our feelings about what we were making.

  May Day had come and gone without notice. Any other year I would have been ecstatic about spring, but the entire Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company exhibit had not been ready when the exposition opened mid-May. The fair would last six months, but it was still a devastating disappointment to Mr. Tiffany. News reports said that tens of thousands of people visited the fair each day, and he was exasperated to be missing out. His dream of introducing landscape windows for churches and showcasing his iridescent glass was threatened.

  He was short-tempered. Everyone in the studios was walking on eggshells. We were all excited about what we were making but also irritable under the pressure, sometimes both in the same breath. Expletives in German and Swedish erupted when nervous fingers fumbled and a piece of glass fell to the floor.

  Just this morning Mr. Tiffany had yanked off half a dozen pieces of glass that I had selected to show the pathos of the crucified Christ in the Entombment window.

  “Can’t you see that the winding cloth in the cartoon has more white across his groin and below his hip?” he had snapped, all gentility gone.

  “We’ll be happy to take them off ourselves, sir. You don’t have to yank,” Wilhelmina retorted, even though it wasn’t her window.

  “You ought to have known that Jesus must be the brightest figure in the window,” he said angrily as he pried off Jesus’s kneecap.

  I winced. His impetuous desecration struck me as sacrilegious. Cornelia crumpled in shame. It wasn’t her fault. She had only cut what I’d given her. After he left, she sobbed out her humiliation.

  “It wasn’t aimed at you,” I said.

  I had selected for that area using electric lights and should have caught my errors before he saw them this morning.

  In a few minutes, Agnes came over to my easel. I felt the muscles around my eyes tighten. She laid a paper cone of gingersnaps on my sample table.

  “Don’t take it to heart. He’s a raging lion some days, a lamb other days. He’s not faultless, you know.”

  She joined me in my work on The Entombment while her own window was left waiting. Working side by side in quiet harmony, we finished Jesus’s torso, legs, and feet, the winding cloth, and part of Mary Magdalene’s robe before quitting time.

  I had walked home in a whirlpool of anger, embarrassment, and gratitude. Now, upstairs in my bedroo
m with George brushing my hair, I was sorry I’d been cranky to him.

  “Haven’t you liked doing the work?” he asked as he took long, firm strokes with the hairbrush.

  “Of course I have. I just wish I could go slower in order to enjoy selecting the glass more, to feed myself with each beautiful swirl, to linger over the nuances building up. If I don’t love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I’m only working for coin and not from soul.”

  “A little bit of pain always rides in the pocket of pleasure,” George said.

  I didn’t want to agree. “It’s not just that.”

  “Then what?”

  I took the hairbrush from his hand. “It’s that I want to go with you.”

  A puff of air exploded from between his lips.

  “Imagine what it would feel like to work on something six days a week and to care about it so intently that you spend the seventh day worrying about it—did I choose the right spot on that sheet of glass for the ultramarine shadow on the Virgin Mary’s white head scarf? Will Mr. Tiffany be pleased with the striated glass I used for the sky at dawn over the figures? Why won’t this chunk of glass chip sharply where I want it to? Imagine living it, breathing it, pouring into each piece of glass my grief at the Crucifixion, or my excitement at a dazzling bird of splendor, dreaming of it week after week for a year, loving it with every ounce of my being, and then not being able to see it all assembled. You’re an independent artist, George. You can paint what you want, take commissions or not, work at whatever speed you want, go wherever you want, whenever you want. You’re entirely free.”

  “You’re free too. No one’s stopping you.”

  “No, George. I’m not free. I have twenty-eight girls that I have to keep busy immediately after our fair projects are finished or the business manager will force me to choose which ones to fire. The wheel’s in motion. We’ll have to design on speculation to tide us over until some orders come from the fair. If they come.”

  “They’ll come.”

  “Your saying so doesn’t stop me wanting to watch people in the chapel as they look, to see what they take away from it—joy or awakening or upliftment or peace or reverence—and to say to someone, anyone, ‘That’s my work you’re looking at,’ and at least one person in a million will say to my face, ‘That’s beautiful,’ or ‘That’s an extraordinary achievement,’ or ‘That helped me.’ ” In my dressing-table mirror, I saw my face taut with yearning, eyes squinting into slits, lips pulled in. “I want to be in the pressing crowds so I can feel I’m part of this great world event, even if I’m not acknowledged.”

  I swung around to face George and grasped his arm.

  “You’ll tell me everything, won’t you? You’ll listen to what people say in front of my peacock wall, and watch to see if anyone is moved by The Entombment? You’ll remember and tell me, won’t you?”

  He patted my cheek. “I’ll memorize every word, and I’ll take photographs for Hank’s articles.”

  “I’ll see them here, won’t I? And I can borrow some to show the girls?”

  “Of course.”

  Two simple words but uttered with such kindness and understanding. I closed my eyes a moment to reconcile myself.

  I had begged Hank and George to postpone their trip until all parts of Mr. Tiffany’s exhibit were in place—not just the chapel but the secular windows in the Dark and Light Rooms as well. Although postponement wasn’t in Hank’s best interest for his articles, George had prevailed on him, and that obliged me to be courteous to his brother.

  “All right. Tell me about this Edwin fellow.”

  “You’ll like him. He’s much smarter than I am. He reads constantly. He’s idealistic. He works for the University Settlement.”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “He’ll tell you. And he’s different than I am.”

  “No one could be like you. Not even a brother.”

  “I mean, he’s not a nellie.”

  CHAPTER 8

  LADY LIBERTY

  WHEN WE GATHERED IN THE PARLOR THE SUNDAY MORNING that George and Hank were to leave, Edwin turned out to be taller than George, handsomer than George, and, thank goodness, quieter than George. Although they both had the same black hair and dark eyes, and the same clean-shaven, well-defined jaw, George was slender as a willow wand and as easily bendable, whereas Edwin was sturdier, more solid. Merry shooed the four of us out the door, saying to me, “You be sure that our George gets on the right train.”

  A torrent of words poured out of George’s mouth in the horsecab on the way to Grand Central Depot. There was much hoopla on the platform because this was a special Columbian Exposition train. A four-piece band played beneath a banner, and boys wore sandwich boards advertising various exhibits, guesthouses, and restaurants. Hank stood quietly, jotting them down, while George trotted up and down the platform like a terrier on a leash until the conductor opened the doors.

  “I hope you have many adventures,” I said quietly to Hank.

  “A person has adventures only when he’s traveling alone. Traveling with another, he has comfort.”

  George performed a few dance steps—loose body, arms akimbo, head waggling—just before he stepped on board.

  Edwin looked on indulgently. “My brother, the antic.”

  “Has he always been like that?”

  “Always. Our mother used to call him Georgie the Jester. That only made him sillier.”

  “And what did she call you?”

  With an expression of embarrassment, he murmured, “Edwin the Educator.”

  Once inside the passenger car, George opened the window to shout and wave his hat as the train pulled out.

  “See everything. Learn all you can,” Edwin shouted back.

  “Aha. The Educator indeed,” I said, and his tawny cheeks reddened.

  I watched George’s head and flailing arm shrink and blur in the distance. The gleaming rails coming together behind the train pointed toward beauties and advancements beyond my imagination, including our finished windows, shipped a month late. The only word that could describe how I felt was bereft.

  Yet there beside me, stately as a statue, was Edwin. Around our awkward silence moved a fluid, noisy crowd. I would have preferred to nurse my sullen mood alone, but Edwin’s gesture invited me to walk back into the terminal with him.

  “And what art do you do?” I asked, facing forward, making an assumption, intending brusqueness.

  “The art of making people happy, or at least happier.”

  “That’s what all artists do, or aim to do.”

  “I work for the University Settlement in the Lower East Side, helping immigrants get their bearings.”

  “Oh.” It came out feebly, flat, and final.

  He invited me to an English tearoom nearby, and since I had promised George, I said yes. There wasn’t much conversation on the way, only that George had told him all about me. At the tearoom, he insisted that I have a scone.

  Feeling obligated to be friendly, I asked, “So what do you actually do at this settlement place?”

  “I help new immigrants learn English and find jobs, enroll their children in school, find doctors and dentists who will take impoverished patients for fifty cents a visit, intervene in cases of tenement disputes, instruct them on the importance of labor unions.”

  Labor unions. Just what caused me to work like a fiend while the men paraded up and down Fourth Avenue for a month.

  “Sometimes I give speeches to society clubs to persuade them to donate, and to political organizations to support changes in labor laws. Other times, I ladle soup.”

  “Soup?”

  “That’s right. Soup. The Fourth Ward of the Lower East Side beneath the Brooklyn Bridge is flooded with immigrants living in poverty, sometimes ten to a room. New arrivals live in hall rooms.”

  “What, pray tell, is a hall room?”

  He adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Imagine a large old house turned into a boardinghouse with a
hundred people living in the bedrooms and only one indoor bathroom and an outdoor privy. The poorest immigrants rent space in the corridors, priced per foot, barely wide enough for a cot, one family’s space partitioned off from another’s by a shredded curtain if they’re lucky.”

  “No privacy?”

  “None. Other families have to walk through the hall to get to their space.” A musing grunt came from deep in his throat. “Shared experience makes the Fourth Ward a tightly knit community.”

  My girls—my Tiffany Girls, as they liked to call themselves—had any of them lived in a hall room when they arrived? Maybe that’s what made Cornelia so serious.

  “It’s all pretty bleak, then?”

  “Not entirely. I’ve met wonderful, hardworking people who want to give back to the country that took them in. Poverty isn’t something deserved because of lack of character. There’s nobility in the Lower East Side, just in their perseverance. At the settlement house where I live we’re proud that we are now offering the first public bath in the city, soap included. We want to provide services free of the paybacks that Boss Tweed required whenever he did an ounce of charity.”

  His eyes, dark as jet, flared with specks of light when he said that. He was radiant, happy about making a difference, pleased to tell me about this world so far removed from jeweled peacocks.

  “You actually live there?”

  “Yes, I do. So I can be more available in crises.”

  How could a handsome, clean, immaculately dressed, intelligent man be content to be surrounded by poverty?

  “You might say I live in the teeming cradle of the promise of this country. The immigrants of the Fourth Ward have troubles, almost insurmountable troubles, but they have dreams too, and ambitions and loves and sorrows. Each person may have left parents and grandparents behind, sisters behind. They gave up their languages and their countries, but each one brings with him a story. Some bring a skill, furniture making or saddlery or ironwork or baking.”