Clara and Mr. Tiffany (16 page)

A
JOSTLING OF THE BED AWAKENED ME, BUT I DIDN’T TURN TO
him, giving him privacy, since soft daylight had entered the room. I heard him thrust one leg, then the other, into his trousers. The key clicked in the lock. Instantly, I rose on my elbow.

“Edwin?”

“I’ll be right back. I’m going to get you something. A surprise.”

The place where he had lain was still warm. I moved into it to enjoy the memory—from his kisses, each one a benediction, to his exploratory touch of my thigh, to his startled, wide-eyed look at the moment of effusion. My wild Edwin. Passion and Risk had smiled on me, and I could throw off my worries.

In his plaintive sigh that had signaled his coming back to earth, I sensed that he had been vulnerable to a moment too strong for him. The shadows cast by moonlight had made his face appear troubled. Even so, my happiness had merged into peaceful sleep.

I closed my eyes now to make it night again, and there stretched before me a millennium of Nights of Love. Soon he would give me the surprise, whatever it was, perhaps a breakfast pastry from the dining room, and I would give him this vision of night after night of loving through eternity, like two mirrors facing each other, reflecting smaller and smaller images until they became two pinpoints of color.

The piercingly sharp, two-note song of a wren repeated itself relentlessly, as if saying, “Get up! Get up!” I obeyed it, bathed, dressed, and put up my hair.

Perhaps I had misunderstood. Perhaps I was to meet him in the dining
hall for breakfast. I was suddenly overtaken with a ravishing hunger. I crept downstairs feeling like a fugitive. He was not in the parlor reading the Chicago paper, which would have been natural since it probably contained an account of the Settlement House event. He was not in the dining room. He was not on the porch or in a lounge chair on the lawn or in the pagoda. I felt I shouldn’t venture far, so I returned to the dining room for breakfast. The waiter who had served us the night before gave me a quizzical look at the doorway.

“One, please,” I said. “May I sit by a window?”

I ate looking out and hurried back to the room, thinking that he had returned and was distressed to find me gone. The room was just as I had left it. I went down to the front desk, and Mr. Kaye greeted me as Mrs. Waldo.

“Have you seen Edwin this morning?”

He thought a moment. “No. Can’t say that I have. He probably went to the general store for a newspaper. It’s not far.”

“If you happen to see him, tell him I went for a walk.” I pointed in one direction on the lakeshore path.

“I certainly will, Mrs. Waldo.”

Outside, I stepped onto the dock and peered down into the water, ashamed of my gruesome thought. There were only grasses on the sandy bottom. I looked over the other side of the dock, was relieved to see nothing, and headed in the direction I had pointed, making an effort to acknowledge appropriately the promenading guests. I walked the length of Kaye’s Park and several mansions beyond, looking between them into the woods, and into the water alongside the pathway. I did the same in the other direction. All I found was an abandoned bird’s nest fallen from a tree, once entwined by instinct, now a disheveled bed after a hasty flight, sticks and leaves awry.

Mr. Kaye was working on board his boat when I returned. “Would there be any reason he would go into the woods?” I asked from the dock.

“Only to gather wood violets for you.”

“Are there bears?”

“Not often.”

“Wolves?”

“Yes.” He raised up from his work and looked at me. “Go inside and have a nice lunch. I’ll look in the stables and outbuildings, and then you and I will go out in the small launch to have a look.”

We spent the afternoon navigating the lake, asking everyone, looking in covered boathouses and boatyards, checking at other hotels. We came back without a shred of information.

“What was the last thing he said to you?”

“That he was going to get something for me, a surprise, and that he would be right back.”

Mr. Kaye’s puzzlement was written in a scowl. “We should go into town.”

We took his trap and mare. No one had seen him at the general store, the post office, the land office, the bank, the barbershop. We even went into the icehouse. Huge iron hooks hung from the rafters. I shuddered.

I spotted a small jewelry and handicraft store, hardly Tiffany & Company. Of course! The surprise! I inquired, and was crestfallen.

At the train depot the stationmaster asked me for a description. I was mortified at how little I could say. “Black hair. Tall.”

Mr. Kaye added, “Gold-rimmed glasses.”

“But he left without them.” I shrank from their concerned expressions as they surmised that he had left hastily.

“How old, Mrs. Waldo?”

Another embarrassment. I didn’t know for certain. I knew he was a couple years younger than I. “Thirty-three?”

“What was he wearing?”

“A white shirt. Brown trousers. No vest. No coat. Brown shoes.”

“Carrying anything?”

“I don’t believe so.”

The stationmaster consulted the baggage handler. “Nope. Nobody by that description.”

“I didn’t think he would take a train. He gets sick on trains.”

At the newspaper office, Mr. Kaye put in a missing-person notice. To me, doing that spelled a change of heart, abandonment, escape.

Back in the trap, Mr. Kaye studied the rump of the horse. “I think it’s time we notify the authorities.”

I acquiesced, numb.

The county seat was in Elkhorn. I would have enjoyed passing through stands of sugar maples, elms, and cottonwoods, seeing sunlight dance through the latticework of leaves, and hearing the hollow rat-a-tat of woodpeckers hammering, if I weren’t so plagued by anxiety.

Sheriff Seth Hollister was a broad-chested, capable-looking man wearing boots over his pant legs. We went through the same questions, and he agreed to send out search parties in the woods.

“Do you know any of his relatives and how to reach them?” he asked.

“His younger brother, George, in New York.”

“You’d best be thinking of sending a telegram,” said Mr. Hollister.

“Can we wait another day? I don’t want to alarm him unnecessarily.”

“He might know something that would help us.”

I nibbled at my thumbnail. “I’ll think about it.”

I ATE DINNER IN A STUPOR
, went up to our room on shaky legs, and opened the window so that I might hear anything. Sitting up in bed, I smoothed the sheet neatly, the sheet he had crumpled in his fist at the moment of his passion. Does a man lose something of himself at that moment, and does he gain it back after time? Had I lost him forever?

I turned over in my mind every hour of our recent days together, searching for a clue as to what had propelled him out that door. There were so many possible readings of his disappearance: he fell into the lake, encountered a wild animal in the woods, was robbed and beaten, maybe murdered. Or he was afraid of entanglement, leery of marriage, doubtful about his Mexico plan. Or he remembered an earlier woman. Shades of Francis Driscoll! He didn’t love me as he had loved her. He found me less beautiful than he had imagined.

What tormented me most was that this might have been caused by my own desire to prove something to myself. Had he thought less of me for my willingness to have intimacies before we were married? He was just as eager. Was I less worthy of respect? Was that what his troubled look meant? It didn’t seem possible that he was disappointed in our love-making. He was my wild Edwin. But maybe he had come to his senses, and I had not.

Or maybe he had lost his senses.

At the time, I had thought that his leaping from the streetcar was impulsive, thoughtless, and overly zealous but not irrational. Now I wasn’t so sure. And the other time, at Nutley, in his mind he had good reason to flee George’s studio if he were sick. Fine if he wanted to throw up outside so I wouldn’t see, but it made no sense to escape into a snowstorm at night and on foot in that condition. That was worse than unwise. It was unbalanced.

George. I had to tell George. He had a right to know.

THE FIRST THING
in the morning I went to the hotel desk and asked Mr. Kaye to send a telegram to George, at 46 Irving Place, New York.

“Just say, ‘Edwin has disappeared from Lake Geneva. Come quickly. Clara.’ ”

Mr. Kaye set off in the trap at a fast clip.

Impersonating Edwin’s wife, not quite Mrs. Waldo but certainly not Mrs. Driscoll anymore, I sat in a lounge chair unable to do anything but watch two steamers drag the lake. From time to time they pulled up something on a gruesome iron hook, and a spasm rattled my chest. I strained to see what it might be, but always, thank God, they let it sink back down.

Still, I kept my eyes on the lake. Its streaks of cool green where there was underwater vegetation contrasted with its range of blues fluctuating in response to passing clouds, as though someone were stirring the lake with a giant spoon, like a gaffer marbling a fresh pour of still-viscous glass.

I felt a flash of shame for letting my thoughts drift to the studio instead of thinking continually of Edwin. What was I to do? Close my eyes to the world around me?

The geese kept up their nibbling in the grass, and mallards with their ducklings paddled back and forth near the shore, puttering hour after hour, looking for something too. An emerald dragonfly with double gauze wings worried its skimming way just above the water and dashed off impulsively, but it came back. It came back.

How beautiful it would be to render that dragonfly in glass. I longed
to do it, but how and where? When I had told Mr. Tiffany I was leaving to get married, he shook his head and scowled down at his hands. Rarely was there anything in his domain that was beyond his power to control, so for a moment he didn’t know how to react. His credo of being a gentleman prevented him from trying to convince me otherwise, though he did say, “Are you sure, Clara?”

I only nodded, prepared myself, and asked, “Do you think you might make an exception and keep me on?”

“Justifying it by the importance of your work?”

“By my indispensability. And to develop our secret—the lampshade idea. Remember?”

“A crack in the policy and the whole thing will come tumbling down. I wish I could.”

I froze and could not take another breath. My breezy plan to be both artist and wife collapsed like a house of glass built on shifting sands. Rising to leave, I heard him say in an uncle’s cautionary tone, “Take good care of yourself, Clara.” Although my spine had stayed rigid, my step firm, as I left his office, inside I was seared with embarrassment for having asked, devastated for being denied, stung that our mutual love for what we were creating wasn’t strong enough to maintain the bond of admiration as two artists that I felt we had. I was cast adrift in an uncertain future with no way back. Now, I had thought, I would have to depend upon love alone to fill my cup of life.

A vagary flitted across my mind with the capriciousness of that dragonfly. Could someone have put Edwin up to it? Someone who would offer him something irresistible if he abandoned me? Someone who knew I would return to Tiffany’s studios? Mr. Tiffany himself who offered to reward Edwin extravagantly for giving me back to him? The money might have been too strong a temptation if it were enough to mount a campaign for State Assembly without having to work in Mexico. A freakish thought. I discarded it, but it came back unbidden. How much would my return have been worth to Mr. Tiffany?

Beneath my dark speculation, I felt Edwin’s health and safety weighing heavily on my shoulders, and I flailed in a quagmire of doubts and self-recrimination, not knowing whether to feel angry or jilted or guilty. Would he have come here after Chicago if I hadn’t come with him?
Probably not. Responsibility gouged deep, as it always did. All right, then. From now on I would stick to my Midwestern values, abide by my mother’s etiquette book, and be the honorable stepdaughter of a minister in every proper, humdrum regard.

TWO DAYS LATER
, Mr. Kaye pulled up in his trap alongside the hotel, George leapt out, ran across the lawn to me in the pagoda, scattering the geese, and flung himself into my arms. I wasn’t sure whether I was comforting him or he was comforting me.

“Tell me everything that led up to this.” Mercifully, his tone wasn’t accusatory, only panicked.

“He gave a rousing speech in Chicago, and shook a hundred hands at the reception afterward. The next day, on the train, he felt quite buoyed up about it and spoke of running for State Assembly.”

“Was he sick on the train?”

“No, but he did open the window. Maybe he was queasy. He was happy to show me the lake. In Chicago we’d given the appearance of brother and sister, and had separate hotel rooms. Here, we registered as husband and wife.”

George was expecting more. I blushed to say, “We made love.”

“And?”

“It was beautiful, George. We were both very happy. There wasn’t anything that would lead to this.”

George paced like a caged tiger in the pagoda, muttering, “You don’t seem hurt by this at all. You haven’t cried. You’re not the least bit hysterical.”

“Some women have more contained ways of handling despair.”

The ache in my jaw from grinding my teeth provided no visible proof, so I showed him my nails bitten down to the quick and my handkerchief balled up in a wrinkled wad.

“Did he ask you to come with him?”

“On this trip? No. It was my idea. He was happy about it, though.” I pulled my shawl around me as a way to hold myself together. “After marriage, people make discoveries about each other. I didn’t want to assume
anything, so I invited myself in order to find out if I could satisfy his body’s need, if we were, I might say, compatible.”

“And?”

“Oh, we are, George. We are.”

Such a serious look on George’s face, almost akin to his brother’s troubled look after we had made love. I fiddled with my sleeve. “Do you condemn me?”

“No.”

“Do you think he changed his mind about marrying me?”