Clara and Mr. Tiffany (31 page)

“Maybe true, but my lamps enhance
his
reputation. It’s still a masquerade.”

“We all have masquerades of one sort or another.”

Because of his stillness, with his fork poised in the air as though waiting for something, I realized he wasn’t talking about Mr. Tiffany any longer. He meant himself, and that meant that at least at the opera, I was a partner in his forced masquerade. By the troubled look in his eyes, he knew that I knew it.

“Whatever you think,” he said softly, “I have enjoyed taking you to the opera. I hope we may continue to enjoy it together.”

“We will. Nothing has changed, Mr. Belknap. I have always felt honored by your invitations, and have enjoyed your company. You’re a fine, honorable man.” We were suddenly stiff and formal. I paused for him to respond, but he was too tense. “I believe we all feel different in some individual
way from others. That pain is a natural part of the bereftness of life.”

“Do you feel it, Clara? The bereftness of life?”

“Yes, I do. When I’m longing for intimacy with a man and am constrained.”

“By what?”

“By Mr. Tiffany’s policy against married women. It forces me to keep love at bay, if I want to stay on, and I do.”

After a long moment’s thought, he said, “Then we understand something mutual about each other.”

“Yes, we do.”

He patted his mouth with his napkin. “After this, the formality of surnames is stuffy bourgeois. Please call me Henry.”

I wanted to lighten the conversation. Henry didn’t deserve moroseness. I looked at my empty plate and said, “This is a beautiful plate, Henry, but it would be even more beautiful if it were doing what it was meant to be doing instead of masquerading as a flower garden. Do you have another roll?”

“Certainly. Let me beat another egg for you too.”

His ease and economy of motion made me think he would make a good wife.

Getting stubborn George ready for the hospital and into a horsecab and wrapped in blankets was like ushering a mule into a cage. Dr. Griggs accompanied us, and gave George some whiskey and aromatic ammonia and felt his pulse every few minutes on the way. Fortified, George brightened and looked at the shop windows on Ladies’ Mile. At the hospital a nurse whisked him down a hallway in a rolling chair.

We followed, carrying the pots of jasmine, and saw him settled in his narrow white bed. He looked around and lifted one side of his lip in a sneer. “I’ll die from sterility here.”

“What were you expecting? Freddie Vanderbilt’s bedroom?” I said.

When we were about to leave, Henry refrained from touching him since the nurse was right there, but I knew by the aborted movement of his arm that he wanted to, so I said, “Remember that many people love you, George.”

“
G
OOD MORNING!
”

A month of worry had passed—acute, prolonged, then diminished—and now Henry came into my studio and closed the double doors behind him. “I have some good news.” His lowered his voice. “George will be coming home soon.”

“That’s a relief.”

“He’s begun to pace in his room to demonstrate to the nurses that he’s well, because he wants to show us the Vanderbilt bedroom before it’s transported to Hyde Park.”

“A good sign. Back to his own impatient self.”

“I took him a bouquet of red carnations to urge him on. He demanded a pin to fasten one on his hospital gown, and practically devoured the rest.”

I patted his arm, and he went on his way, a spring in his step.

TO CELEBRATE THE SHOWING
of Vanderbilt’s bedroom, George wore his fedora with the red feather. He walked faster as we approached the warehouse.

“Slow down, George. You just got out—”

“Of prison! White, white, nothing but white! I
had
to get better to get out of that colorless cube.” Just outside the carved bedroom door, he said, “Be prepared. Vanderbilt’s favorite color is red. Like Lorenzo’s.”

With a flourish, he opened the door onto the fifteenth century. Red and gold blazed in every direction, and not a square inch went unornamented. The monumental bed was flanked by twisted columns, and
gilded Corinthian capitals supported a canopy. A carved frieze, a pastoral tapestry, and a red velvet hanging stitched in gold adorned the walls. A sofa, a settee, and six chairs upholstered in red velvet had Florentine gold stitching.

“I see the Gilded Age is still alive and well. Is this robber baron expecting to entertain in his bedroom?”

“Yes. Just like a Renaissance potentate. Isn’t it splendiferous?” George darted around the room, pointing out the sconces, porcelains, and male nudes on pedestals that he had selected.

“Fit for a king, George.”

But way too ornate for contemporary taste. Henry Belknap would swoon under the overpowering weight of it. After his assessment of my work, I had thought that maybe I belonged to Medici’s court instead of Tiffany’s, but now I saw that I didn’t. There was no place to rest one’s eyes in this room, just like the drawing of my poor, tortured clock.

Saving the thing he was most proud of for last, George whisked away the sheet covering the wood panels carved from his fanciful drawings of faces and animals peeking out from dense foliage. It was a game to find each one. A man with rabbit ears was winking as if to say, “Aha, you found me. Aren’t I funny?” Two wizened women had their arms around each other, one crying and the other laughing uproariously. A boy was doing a handstand, his mouth shaping a perfect
O
as though surprised by the look of things upside down.

George turned in a circle, hands on his head. I understood the excitement of having one’s concepts executed in the final medium.

“The rest of the room is work for a patron. You did what he wanted. But these panels are the true you, George. A marvel of whimsy.”

I had never seen him happier.

A NOISY PARADE
of five Palmié sisters, Alice, and I pedaled our wheels on the boardwalk of Point Pleasant, New Jersey. It was nothing more than boards laced together and laid temporarily upon the dunes, to be rolled up in winter. It made our insides jiggle. The fresh salt air was a tonic, and the call of seabirds invigorated us. We came back through the woods to their family’s summer cottage on the beach, and had a supper
of fish their father had caught. We capped off the day with a sail by moonlight.

The next morning we put on our scanty bathing costumes. What an exhilarating feeling to have nothing around our calves but air! How many sensations had we been missing out on since Alice and I had lifted our school jumpers to wade in Ohio’s streams? Now we dared each other to take another step into the cold sea—calves, knees, hips, waist. I made a wild, splashy imitation of swimming a short distance. Then we took a walk.

“Look!” I cried.

“It’s Queen Anne’s lace,” Lillian said.

“Or wild carrot, if you’re a naturalist type.”

“What’s the difference? A weed’s a weed,” Marion said.

Clusters of tiny white flowers grew out from a single point on the stalk like a burst of fireworks.

“They do remind me of lace,” Lillian observed.

“Oh, they’re just another kind of dandelion,” Marion rejoined.

“They’d be simple to draw.”

“No!” Marion wailed. “This is supposed to be a vacation from work.”

“We never think about work when we’re here,” Lillian said.

“But you don’t have to keep a department of thirty girls working.”

Here could be the answer to Mr. Mitchell’s demand for simpler, smaller, cheaper items.

“Lillian, do you think you could use a stalk of this as a motif for a candlestick? The little cup holding a candle could be a mature cluster curling in on itself, and a tall, slim rod could represent the stalk, and over the disk of the base, you could carve the roots spread out like wiggly spokes of a wheel. What do you think?”

She kept looking at the blossoms I was picking, and I thought I had her.

“I’ll answer you on Monday.”

AND ON MONDAY
she said yes.

Over the next few weeks she designed two styles of wild-carrot candlesticks, both of them lovely and delicate. I was as proud of her as a
mother hen. Meanwhile I used the same motif for a bronze ink pot. I resisted fancifying it with a single mosaic. Now Mr. Mitchell had three quick moneymakers, and I could finish designing my peacock lamps.

The next weekend Point Pleasant was teeming with poppies. Their crepe-paper petals fluttered and beckoned seductively in saturated vermilion, the Vanderbilt red, bright enough to put out your eyes, with enough variation that we could use marbled and mottled glass. We picked them madly, as in a pagan dance, and carried large bunches home.

At my worktable the next day, I vowed to make this shade simple, but the blossoms had intricate black stamens like spokes around a closed yellow pistil. They wouldn’t be identifiable as poppies without the ring of stamens. There was no way around it. They had to be made as metal filigree overlays in the same method as the dragonfly wings. My mind couldn’t be regimented into plainness. Even though I simplified the petal shapes, they absolutely cried out for an irregular border of leaves at the bottom, which meant painstaking pins. For the sake of harmony, the leaves
had
to have subtle filigree veins attached on the inside of the glass. And there I was with another elaborate design.

I promised myself that the next lamp would be simple. What should it be? Cyclamen, with its petals aloft like wings in flight? Peony, a nest of petals enfolding something precious? The humble geranium? The stately iris? The hanging begonia? One idea propelled me to another. I was intoxicated by summer, on fire with flowers.

AT SUMMER’S END
, two white buck shoes and two short white linen trouser legs came in the doorway below a huge bouquet of voluptuous peonies topped by a white fedora. Mr. Tiffany had slipped into our studio without warning us with his cane. A little flustered, I hurried to lay out all of our work.

“Time enough for that in a few minutes. I have an announcement.”

The instant Mr. Tiffany said that, the girls set down their tools and turned to him. Agnes stood by the door to her studio.

“I’m happy to tell you that the
Four Seasons
windows received much admiration at the Paris Exposition Universelle, so you should be very proud. Miss Northrop’s magnolia window received a Diploma of Merit.”

Congratulations ensued, and enthusiastic clapping of hands.

“And …” Mr. Tiffany paused for dramatic effect, milking the moment. Barnum would have done the same. “Mrs. Driscoll’s dragonfly lamp received a Bronze Medal.”

The room exploded with applause.

“That should make you feel pretty good, eh?”

“I do. I feel I’ve taken quite a journey.”

Delicately, I inquired about any awards for him by asking about other departments.

With a flash of sheepishness that disappeared into sparkling blue eyes, he said, “I was awarded the Grand Prize for my Favrile glass pieces, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France.”

More applause, although I knew some of the girls had no idea what that award signified. I clapped louder and longer than anyone.

He didn’t say that Arthur Nash got any recognition, which made me wonder whether the Bronze Medal was granted to me or to the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company or to Louis Comfort Tiffany, artist, but for the moment, he was pleased with me, and euphoria bubbled up in me deliriously.

After he looked at all that we had accomplished during his absence, he beckoned me into my studio and closed the door behind us.

“When the exposition is over, Siegfried Bing is taking all of the Favrile glass vases, the dragonfly lamp, some blown lamps, and some windows from the exhibition for his Salon de l’Art Nouveau to sell throughout Europe.”

“Wonderful.”

“But I have to keep him supplied. Europe is a big continent. I expect to be inundated with window commissions in our own cities, so I’m increasing the size of the Men’s Window Department to two hundred.”

Why was he telling me that? Thoughtless braggadocio?

“Make eight more wisteria lamps for Bing’s gallery.”

“Gladly. The new ones won’t be exactly the same. I’ll have selectors develop their own color schemes.”

“All the better. I don’t like to think of myself as running a factory
that produces look-alike art, but I’ve set things in motion and have to proceed.”

This was the right moment to show him the poppy design. “I thought you’d like it because of the deep colors.”

“Yes, I do. Always intensify the colors. The small bronze items are well executed and just as important, so I want more. They’ll reach more middle-class homes. Even small items can express ideal beauty.”

Mr. Mitchell had given him an earful. I felt the conversation shift.

“Who did the poppy watercolor?”

“Alice Gouvy.”

“She’s the one who did the enamel primrose base?”

“Yes. She’s very talented.”

“Who designed the Queen Anne’s lace items?”