Clara and Mr. Tiffany

  “Or glassmaking.”

  Edwin nodded. “Some bring memories of injustice. Some, only hope. They’re going to give us more than they’ll get.”

  I lathered my scone with clotted cream, a twinge of shame at its excess.

  He asked, “Do you know this poem?

  “Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

  “To me, Mrs. Driscoll.”

  “Clara, please.”

  “Clara, then. ‘To me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ ”

  “No. I haven’t heard it before. It’s very moving.”

  “Imperative, you might say. A woman named Emma Lazarus wrote that poem as a donation to an auction to help fund the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It’s not well known, but I believe someday it will be.” He finished his tea in one gulp. “Have you ever been on an excursion boat that circles the statue?”

  “Never.”

  He gripped the edge of the table and leaned toward me. “Let’s.”

  “Now?”

  His intensity was magnetic, irresistible.

  “Yes. Now.”

  THE NEW OPEN-AIR electric streetcar clanged and rattled as it sped us down Fourth Avenue and along Bowery Street, jammed with people and lined with tenements, flophouses, tawdry saloons, and smoldering ash barrels. Pushcarts piled with pots and pans, potatoes and carrots, shoes and used clothing clogged the street. Boys hurried in all directions carrying bundles as if they had immigrated too late and were racing to catch up. For want of a clothespin, some woman’s washing that had been draped over a line between two buildings blew off into the running gutter.

  “Don’t ever come down here by yourself,” Edwin said. “The Bowery Boys are more or less gone, but other gangs have taken their place.”

  As if I would want to. I put my handkerchief to my nose against the foul odor of unwashed bodies. The ceiling strap held by countless grimy hands before me swung like a noose. Apprehensiveness kept my arm tight to my side, but at a lurch of the streetcar, I quickly grabbed it.

  Why did he take me this way rather than straight down Broadway to the Battery? Was he in love with misery?

  “Where is it you live?”

  “A few blocks from here.”

  Standing on a street corner, a thickset woman in a babushka raised her hand in a timid wave, and Edwin waved back. I was immediately aware of my stylish rose-colored tie at my throat lifting in the breeze in the open car as though it were greeting her too. I took her glance at me not as accusatory of my well-being, only curious.

  When the streetcar slowed for a stop, Edwin leapt off and ran to her. He spoke quickly, urgently, leaning down and holding both her hands in his upraised palms. Her head bobbed in happy acknowledgment. He made a move to jump back onto the running board, but then she said something more and he turned back to her and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. The streetcar started to roll and gain speed.

  “Stop! Stop!” I shouted in a panic.

  The conductor sounded an alarm and the driver slammed on the brakes, which jostled everyone. A little boy was thrown off his mother’s lap, and when I stepped off, the conductor yelled at me. I was rattled and miffed as I hurried back to Edwin, who was running toward me.

  “What were you thinking?” I cried. “The conductor, the driver, all those people were angry with me. I had to step over a child.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Clara. Are you all right?”

  “What was I supposed to do, riding off to God knows where without you?”

  “I’m sorry. I had to tell that woman that I found a job for her son. She doesn’t speak much English, so I didn’t think she got the name of the factory right. I needed to write it for her. I thought I could get back on in time.”

  I calmed down as we waited for the next streetcar. We sat inside this time, quiet for a few minutes. I could not begrudge Edwin his impulse to help. He had given the woman kindness and a moment of extraordinary humanity, and that was of inestimable value. Could a mosaic or a leaded-glass window do that?

  “What’s remarkable,” he murmured, intent on his thought, as though he had not done anything impulsive or reckless or disregardful of me, “is that most newcomers get out of here in one generation, working day and night to honor the parents who brought them here.”

  “The same ethic as the Tiffanys,” I said, “but I’m sure Mr. Tiffany has never set foot here—he of the opal ring who preaches that beauty is within the reach of everybody.”

  “There are other kinds of beauty.”

  And he had just shown me one kind. I forgave him at once.

  THE IRON STEAMBOAT COMPANY’S excursion sternwheeler eased out into the harbor among clipper ships, freighters, coal barges, and ferries. Edwin put his frock coat over my shoulders and stood close to block the wind that plastered his white shirtsleeves to his muscular arms. What a shift between rash disregard and thoughtful caring. We chugged near Ellis Island’s new immigration station, a two-story wooden structure with low towers at the corners. Nearly half a million people came through last year, Edwin said.

  “That’s only the beginning. The floodgates are open, Europe is pouring itself out, and we are witnessing the great drama of human migration.”

  He asked me to imagine the steerage immigrants wearing numbers pinned to their clothing and crowding through turnstiles to have their eyelids pulled up with buttonhooks during the brusque medical checks and health interrogation, New York’s version of Judgment Day. The rejected had to go back.

  My stomach revolted. What bewilderment had my girls felt as little tots? What humiliation and physical suffering had their parents endured first to get here, and then to be admitted? If the daughters were any indication, Wilhelmina’s parents would have stood up to it with square shoulders, but I wasn’t so sure about Cornelia’s.

  Up, out of murky water, the Statue of Liberty proclaimed with upraised arm thirty stories in the air the principles of friendship and welcome and hope, the possibilities of contribution and achievement. Edwin called it by its official name, Liberty Enlightening the World. The copper robes of this mighty woman fluttered in the same wind as my muslin skirt did, stirring me to shine.

  In the other direction, high above the East River, a roadway had been flung over the tops of masts, suspended on wire threads between two lordly towers with double Gothic arches, six times taller than the five-story skyline. The colossus of the Brooklyn Bridge spoke of courage and daring, genius and human effort on a grand scale. Its effect was inspirational, declaring that sustained effort will bring about brilliant accomplishment. The wind blew away my morose self-pity at not being able to go to the fair as I recognized what a glorious city and time I lived in.

  WILHELMINA CAME TO WORK one morning with a black eye. Shock sliced through me.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did some man do that to you?” I was outraged at an imagined assailant.

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Driscoll. My sweetheart isn’t that kind. He’s a gentleman and a butcher.”

  I would have laughed at what she said if I didn’t have to get to the bottom of this. I studied her skeptically. “Then tell me.”

  “You know how Mr. Tiffany told me not to look at anything ugly but to look for beauty? I was practicing. I walked home through Union Square and saw a handsome young man selling flowers, but when I got to my own street, I only saw ugly things like garbage piles and broken houses and ragged people, so I closed my eyes to walk past them. I bumped into a gaslight.”

  The story was delivered in fits and starts, and I began to think that it was just that, a preposterous story to cover up what she was too ashamed to tell me. There probably wasn’t a single gaslight in her neighborhood in the first place.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It hurts you to look at it, so don’t. It’
s ugly.”

  “Can you see?”

  “Oh, I can see all right, but I won’t try that again.”

  Wilhelmina had possibilities here. She was doing fine as a junior selector. If I could get her some outside instruction, I could foresee her as a design assistant someday. Cooper Union had free evening art classes.

  “You’re right that Mr. Tiffany told us to exercise our eyes. I take that to include looking at good art. Have you ever been to the Metropolitan Museum?”

  “No. I don’t go uptown.”

  “Well, then, there’s an art exhibit by the night-school art students of Cooper Union, and that’s not too far from where you live. I want you to see it. Let’s go together on Sunday.”

  Edwin’s descriptions of immigrant life still haunted me, and I needed to see if Wilhelmina lived in a hall room, or just what her living situation was like. I looked at my list of the girls’ addresses. Hers wasn’t in the worst part of the slums I had seen from the Bowery streetcar.

  “I’ll come by to pick you up.”

  “No, no, no,” she said with wild eyes. “I’ll meet you there.”

  We finally agreed to meet on her street corner at one o’clock.

  I arrived on time and waited, feeling conspicuous just standing there. At one-fifteen there was no sign of her but plenty of lewd looks. This was what Wilhelmina dealt with every day. I kept looking at my watch, though I didn’t want to reveal I had one when men or boys passed by. Waiting here was ridiculous. At one-thirty I walked to her address.

  The building wasn’t a block-long tenement, only a shabby wooden apartment house, a fire trap if there ever was one. As I walked up bare stairs, through a corridor with odd little twists and turns, up a step, down two, the deafening hum and rattle of treadle sewing machines assailed me. I could see half a dozen machines going at once through doors open for a breath of air, whole families bending over them. So this was what Edwin meant by tenement sweatshops organized by middlemen, each driving a closer bargain than his rival tyrant across the hall. Trade unions had no jurisdiction over such enterprises, he had said.

  A mere girl at one machine, her arms to the elbows smeared black with the color of the cloth, looked up as I passed, her feet at that instant riding the momentum of the treadle passively. I carried the stark image of her with me down the hall.

  Steam came out of Wilhelmina’s open door, and irons for pressing clothes were heating on a stove. She held one in her hand, wearing only her shift. Apparently proprieties didn’t matter here. Piles of garments lay on the floor.

  “I’m not finished,” she wailed.

  A large woman I took to be her mother was working next to her on another pressing board.

  “Who’s this?” the woman snapped. Her hair was tangled into greasy hanks, and I saw at once what a mammoth, complicated effort it was for Wilhelmina to come to work looking groomed and respectable.

  “This is Mrs. Driscoll, Mama. She’s the lady I work for.”

  The woman’s crazed eyes darted uncontrollably, as though looking for something familiar from the Old World that would give her respectability. Finding nothing, she snarled, “Who told you she could come here?” Her thick arm was in the air in a flash, and she landed a stinging slap on Wilhelmina’s cheek underneath the black eye.

  Wilhelmina didn’t flinch, just turned her mother’s rage on me. “I didn’t say you could come here. I told you to meet me at the corner.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have waited. We’ll do it another time.”

  I escaped quickly, feeling awful about abandoning her to her life.

  On the way home, I wondered when the brutality had begun. Wilhelmina had taken the slap without so much as a blink. How strong she was, able to put the rawness of her life behind her the moment she stepped into the studio.

  The trip over must have started the mother on this road—being crammed into pens and processed like cattle, not at all what she had imagined—and seeing now that she would never live comfortably in the new country, she struck out at any provocation. If only her mother were working at Tiffany’s too. I felt sure the beauty of the work and the kindness of the girls would soften her. A woman can’t stay hard when all around her is loveliness.

  WHEN I WALKED in the front door of 44 Irving Place, the parlor was crowded and noisy with shouts and clapping. George was dancing on a table in stockinged feet, swiveling his narrow hips suggestively, pushing out his flat chest, gyrating his shoulders, twirling his red handkerchief above his head.

  “What in the world?”

  “It’s the hootchy-kootchy!” he shouted.

  “Little Egypt performed it in the Cairo section of the Midway Plaisance,” Hank explained, “wearing only fringe and a veil. She scandalized and delighted thousands.”

  “All along I thought the fair was about art and industry,” said Mr. Hackley.

  “It was! The belly dance is an art form.” George gave a quick thrust of his hip sideways as he flung his handkerchief at Mrs. Hackley. “And it takes industry to perform it.”

  Mrs. Hackley swatted the handkerchief away from her as though it were his unmentionables.

  “Begging the gentleman’s pardon,” Merry said. “Get down off my table, George Waldo, or I’ll take a shillelagh to your backside and send you flying clear to Dublin!”

  George wagged his behind in her direction, tempting her, then jumped down and held out his palm for tips.

  “Which one of you gave him permission to be so corky?” Merry demanded.

  “No one. Our George doesn’t suffer from requiring permission,” I said. “Tell us about the fair.”

  “The Midway leading to the entrance was a mile long,” George said.

  “Decidedly lowbrow,” Hank scoffed. “Barnum’s circus, William Cody’s Wild West Show, and Blarney Castle.” He gave a nod to Merry who huffed at his insinuation.

  “There was a giant wheel more than twenty-five stories high.” George swung his arm up in a big arc. “Our answer to the Eiffel Tower, only you could ride it, sixty people in a cabin.”

  “You could see the whole White City laid out between canals with hundreds of gondolas and gondoliers, lovely boys they were, imported from Venice,” Hank said.

  “Six hundred acres of bridges, arches, temples, palaces, monuments, hanging gardens.” George was flailing his arms. “At night it was a fairyland.”

  “Blazing with three times the electricity used by all of Chicago,” Hank the Fact-finder added. “People came from all over the world. It’s expected that by the end of the fair, twenty-seven million people will have attended. That’s roughly half the population of the country!”

  “Hard to believe,” said Mr. Hackley.

  “A guide told me that he answered a hundred questions an hour, and three-quarters of them repeated the same thing.” Hank looked at me. “ ‘Where’s Tiffany’s exhibit?’ ”

  “Truly?”

  “To be honest, they probably meant Tiffany and Company, to see the one-hundred-twenty-five-carat diamond revolving and shooting off sparks. There was also a smaller one, a mere seventy-seven carats, along with the most costly array of jewelry, gems, tiaras—”

  “What about my Tiffany?”

  “Clocks, crystal, and silver ever made. Even engraved silver spurs.”

  “Oh, wonder of wonders. I’m sure the horse gallops faster spurred on by a work of art,” I said.

  “Smith and Wesson revolvers made of silver and inset with turquoise and lapis lazuli.”

  “I’d much prefer being killed by a gun with turquoise rather than lapis.”

  “And gold and silver vases, bowls, and platters studded with enormous pearls, jade, cut gems—” Hank said.

  “Tell me about the chapel!” I demanded.

  “And a magnificent silver ice bowl decorated with enameled holly leaves and mother-of-pearl berries. Two silver polar bears supported it, surrounded by large rock-crystal chunks that represented icebergs protruding from pine needles and pinecones worked in silver. So gor
geous it made me shiver.”

  “Quit teasing me. What about my Tiffany?”

  “Fifty-four medals to his father’s fifty-six,” Hank said. “Their joint pavilion was well positioned in the center of the behemoth Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Building, the largest building in the world.”

  With an air of importance, George declared, “No doubt about it, your chapel is the most original contribution to the fair.”

  I slapped my hand over my mouth.

  “People were astonished at being surrounded by the exhibit, freely walking around inside a work of art rather than looking at something untouchable beyond a silk museum cord,” George said. “You could stand under an enormous electrolier shaped like a cross no matter from what direction you looked at it. Green fire gleamed behind emerald glass.”

  He pulled out a small notebook from his breast pocket. “The altar was white marble with a mosaic front of iridescent glass, mother-of-pearl, onyx, and alabaster. Risers faced with mosaic led up to it, and it displayed a jeweled filigree tabernacle of brass, amber, abalone shell, and jade. Behind it, a series of wide concentric arches were supported by mosaic columns in rose and green.”

  “What about my peacock panel?”

  “Stunning. The arches framed it, and it was set into a wall of black marble, which made it all the more brilliant. Light from the electrolier created highlights on the chipped chunks of glass you talked about. A triumph, Clara.”

  “People crowded in day and night,” Hank said, “because your windows were lit with electric lights behind them and diffused by a plate of milky glass so it looked like daylight.”

  “How did people respond?”

  George gave me a loving look. “Oh, Clara.” He sighed. “They were entranced. They took off their hats and spoke in low voices as if they were in a holy place.”

  CHAPTER 9

  EMERALD

  “I’M PROPOSING MARRIAGE TO YOU.” GEORGE DROPPED TO THE floor on one knee. “On behalf of my brother.”