Clara and Mr. Tiffany (39 page)

“Tedious old man,” I muttered to Beatrix in the elevator. “Remind me never to send Mary or Nellie down here. We’d never get them back.”

“He’s hungry for conversation,” she said. “He’s down there alone all day, just shuffling glass in and out. He wants so much to be important.”

“Doesn’t everyone? That’s what this whole effort is about, Beatrix.”

Upstairs, I devised a schedule. Prepare cartoons by Tuesday at ten o’clock. Cut patterns and apply to glass easels by Wednesday at ten o’clock. Select and cut one-third of the way down all panels by Thursday
at ten o’clock. The sky and three tiers of hills would have the largest pieces, so that would go quickly. Do the middle ground by Friday noon. That would leave the foreground iris, daffodils, floating lilies, moss, rocks in the river, the most complex portion of the panels, for Saturday, the last day.

I dispatched Julia with an order for copper foil, acid, beeswax, and lead cames; studied the cartoons; and made a list of types of glass we would need, then started on panel six.

ON TUESDAY MORNING
, an hour earlier than usual, Merry prepared a big breakfast with double the rashers of bacon for me. I arrived at the studio first. As a precaution, I posted a note on the door for the scrubwoman, written in large letters:
Elsie, There is no need for you to clean the studio this week
.

Everyone arrived at quarter to seven, and we fell to work immediately. Agnes was the first to finish her cartoon, so she began marking in the cutting lines, which had to be done artfully, with the lines outlining rather than crossing figurative elements. She had to avoid creating difficult-to-cut pieces and areas that would be too busy with lead lines. She also had to avoid creating a multicolored piece that would be impossible to find. Only an experienced hand could do this well. Miss Stoney began putting in lead lines on another panel.

The moment Agnes finished her cutting lines, she shooed me away from my panel and took over the watercoloring so that I could go down to order glass. It was more than I’d asked her to do, since she wasn’t officially part of this department. I never knew what to expect from her.

I took Beatrix again, and prayed that there would be twig glass in dark green for long pine needles.

I ignored Albert’s windiness and pulled out glass sheets from their wooden slots while Beatrix recorded the code numbers. I was back upstairs in a flash and took up the watercoloring on my cartoon again, which freed Agnes to mark the cutting lines on Mary’s panel. When Carrie finished her cartoon, I handed over the watercoloring on my cartoon to Mary so I could draw in the lead lines on Carrie’s panel.

Juggling tasks in this way, we were finished with the cartoons by ten o’clock, on schedule, and the assistants began marking the carbon copies, two girls for each window, and the numbering and pattern cutting began. Selectors were already holding the glass up to the light for the sky and hills.

BY WEDNESDAY MORNING
, the selecting and cutting had fully begun. Cutters Nellie, Anna, and Miss Byrne were faster than their selectors, so I put Carrie, Mary, and Minnie as second selectors on different portions of those windows, and still, with Olga’s help, Nellie, Anna, and Miss Byrne could keep up, leaving the finish grozing to be done by assistants when necessary.

In the afternoon, hurrying too much while cutting a piece, Olga sent a glass shard deep into her finger. Carrie and Mary worked with her quite a while to get it out with tweezers, to no avail.

“The bloody thing’s got to be lanced,” Mary concluded.

I lit my alcohol flame and passed a razor blade through it. Theresa, she of the feather boa, gave her an apple to bite into. Olga shook her head no.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I sliced her skin.

She winced but didn’t utter a sound. I spread open the cut, and Nellie pulled out the sliver with tweezers, nearly half an inch long.

Tears ran from Olga’s eyes, and her bottom lip was bleeding where she had bitten it. “Thank you,” she said weakly.

“Now go hold it under cold water. Carrie, make sure it’s wrapped well. Take home these extra bandages, Olga. Keep it clean.”

AT DINNER EVERYONE
asked how the work was going, and I gave a report.

“Tomorrow is your accounting day,” Bernard said. “Have someone else gather the figures, and I’ll do everything tomorrow night, wages and materials.”

“I was hoping you might.”

“Don’t give it another thought.”

I looked for the same expression I had seen on his face between the flames of the beach fire, but it wasn’t there. He was all business.

ON THURSDAY
, I had Minnie step in for Carrie while she gathered my accounts from the various departments. Meanwhile, I selected on window number six. No Irish songs wafted through the studio. Everyone was concentrating, rising to the situation nobly. No one complained about the extra hours.

Mr. Tiffany came in at three o’clock to look over our work. For the first time, the girls ignored the Supreme High Commander and kept working. His expression alternated between smiles of approval and knit brows of worry. He stood behind Fannie, who was working on the branches of the birch trees.

“Use crackle glass for the spaces between leaves and branches. It will make the air full of life.”

“Oh, yes!” she said.

“And do more of the leafy areas in spring green to show new growth.”

“All right.”

He pulled off half a dozen pieces around the pine boughs on Marion’s window. “Too dark. Let in more light there between the pine branches. Light suggests spirit.”

With quick nervous jerks of her head, she repeated, “More light.”

He looked up at the mountains and tugged at his beard. “This won’t do. Find one piece of glass for each mountain so you don’t have to have a lead line cross them.”

Miss Judd’s face and neck instantly became splotchy. Poor gal. She was older and was inordinately serious about her work, and chastised herself whenever I had to correct a glass selection she had made.

“I’ll go back to the basement and have a look,” I said.

“Plate with mottles behind to suggest trees on the lower hills but not on the distant mountains.”

He stepped back to get the effect of all six panels together. “Press on,
ladies. You’re doing fine. And remember, infinite, meticulous labor makes the masterpiece.”

“But we don’t have
infinite
time, Mr. Tiffany,” Nellie said, mimicking his favorite maxim. “Mark my words, this will be finished at five o’clock on Saturday. You come then and shake our hands, and on Monday, you can tell the men what a spanking job we did.”

He turned to me. “A bit of a Wilhelmina, isn’t she?”

I nodded, awash with love for both girls.

After he left, Theresa said, “Makths the matherpieth. He has a lisp, doesn’t he?”

“Only when he’s excited about something. Or riled up.”

BY SIX O’CLOCK THURSDAY EVENING
, it was clear that the schedule I’d written looked fine on paper but only on paper. There wasn’t always space for the full complement of girls to work on a panel at one time. I sent the girls home with a cheery “Good work. Get to bed early.”

Walking home alone, carrying my accounting papers and books, doubt and discouragement took over. A shaft of fear streaked like lightning across my mind: it would be infinitely worse for Mr. Tiffany to have promised his client the windows and have us fail to finish them on time than to have declined the commission at the outset. And I would be the cause of his mortification. I went cold at the thought.

When I entered the parlor, Alice, George, and Bernard exchanged worried looks. With a lingering touch on the back of my hand, Bernard took the accounting records. “I’ll have them by your breakfast plate in the morning.”

ON FRIDAY MORNING
at five o’clock, there they were. Merry burst through the swinging doors from the kitchen like a barmaid, holding two big plates.

“Double rashers and boxty. That’s potato pancakes to you,” she announced, and then sang out, “ ‘Boxty on the griddle, boxty in the pan. If you can’t make boxty, you’ll never get a man.’ ” There was so much
good cheer in her voice that one might have the impression she had wanted to be a boardinghouse cook all her life.

“Two plates! Isn’t that overdoing it?”

I heard footsteps behind me.

“No, it isn’t. I’m coming with you. Lillian will be there too.”

“Oh, Alie-girl,” the name I had called her when we were school chums. “Thank you!”

Except for Agnes, the girls started arriving at six, weary and red-eyed. After lunch Agnes finally came out of her studio to help. Either she had ambivalent feelings about wanting us to succeed, or she had work of her own to get out, or she thought it was already too crowded in front of the windows. It was impossible to read her motives.

We still had to do the lower birch trunks, the bottom frieze of irises in the right foreground, the clump of daffodils on the left riverbank, the six lilies and lily pads, and the surrounding water. The press of girls in front of each window made working difficult. Some sat on low stools to work the lower portions, while others stood behind them and stretched over their heads. They knocked each other’s elbows and stepped on each other’s skirts. Noticing this, Julia took on the self-assigned duty of holding hemlines out of the way. Alice, Lillian, Marion, Beatrix, and I stayed until the sun descended behind the building to the west, when lack of light forced us to stop. Alice and I linked arms on the way home to hold each other up.

This time, George, Hank, Dudley, Bernard, William, Merry, Francie, Dr. Griggs, Miss Lefevre, and the Hackleys all dropped their conversations and Mrs. Slater raised her ear horn when Alice and I came in and collapsed at the dinner table.

“Well? Are you going to make it?” Mrs. Hackley asked, the corners of her mouth lifting, apparently hoping for confirmation that we would. She had come a long way since her criticisms of women working when I moved in.

“Too soon to tell.”

“Too soon! Today’s Friday, girl!” Without realizing it, she made the funniest face, lips turned down and pinched together, forehead scowling. At that moment, she glimpsed what we were up against.

“It’s not just a question of getting it done on time. It has to be perfect.
I have to superintend each step to make sure the colors represent those on the original painting, and to give nuances of shade, sunlight, movement of air, and the effect of one color on a neighboring one.”

“In many places we have to plate several layers of glass behind the surface glass to create the right color and depth,” Alice said. “That slows our progress.”

“And the edges of each window have to match up with the window next to it.”

Mrs. Hackley reached across the table and touched my wrist. “I’d lend a hand if I could.”

ON SATURDAY MORNING
Alice and I went to work at five-thirty, feeling a little wobbly. In the studio, I wrote on the posted schedule:

“That ought to cheer them on,” Alice said.

Until Miss Stoney arrived, I selected for the irises using a palette of mottled blue and white to deep purple and magenta. Alice cut, trimmed, wrapped, and stuck each piece on the glass easel until Nellie came to cut for me. That freed Alice to work on the daffodils, picking up where Miss Stoney left off, doing all the steps herself until Lillian came. By six-thirty all the girls were working except Agnes, who didn’t arrive until her usual nine o’clock, and she went directly into her studio, flaunting her privileged status. I almost expected it, but we certainly could have used her.

Carrie and Mary had the two central panels where the river widened and spilled over rocks in the foreground. Getting both panels to match up was critical, and necessitated some redoing.

“Work from the center to the banks, and choose from the same sheet of glass,” I said. “Where the sun is shining on the water, use fractured glass with gold and yellow confetti to make it shimmer, and begin to integrate ripple glass as you work downward so that the bottom foreground is completely ripple glass around the water lilies.

“Mary, find some opalescent rose madder for the lilies. Marion, find
some emerald glass shading into blue-black for the creases in the upright water-lily leaves. If you can’t find any, we’ll have to plate in the creases from the rear.”

We weren’t going to take lunch, but at noon, two deliverymen came in with platters of sandwiches and potato salad and pickles and tea. It must have been Mr. Tiffany’s doing.

In the afternoon I directed Fannie Gober to find some dark brown glass to cut in curved slivers to double-pane parts of the birch trunks as the horizontal rings in peeling white bark. I saw that I needed to double-pane the second tier of hills to make it a deeper blue-violet compared to the misty lavender of the more distant hills. We still had the empty space on the edge of panel three where the glass for the river zigzagging down from the distant hills was being made specially. Even if it had been made last Monday, it needed to stay in the annealer several days to cool slowly. Mr. Tiffany had promised it would be here on Friday, but it hadn’t come.

As each panel grew downward, I asked Miss Stoney, Mary, Alice, and Miss Judd to critique them and look for areas that could be improved with double or triple plating.

“I think the sky is too pale and simple,” Miss Stoney said. “There’s no movement or excitement to it.”

I hated to hear that, but I agreed. It didn’t balance with the activity at the base of the windows.

“Let’s try another streaky salmon glass behind it,” Mary suggested.

She found some and held it up behind the easel. A sunset was on the way. The second pane had to be applied to entire areas within the cut lines so as not to necessitate new lead lines crossing the sky. We searched our bins and didn’t find streaky pieces large enough. My spirit wilted.

“I’m going down,” Mary announced, and charged out the door.

I thought it would be a waste of time. Albert would surely have locked the basement tight this late on a Saturday afternoon.