Clara and Mr. Tiffany (40 page)

An hour later, Mary came back, singing, “ ‘Down in Bottle Alley lived Timothy McNally.’ ” Behind her was Albert, with his leather gloves on, carrying the perfect large piece.

“Well, blow me down,” exclaimed Nellie.

Mary’s face radiated pure triumph. “I spied ’im at O’Flannery’s liftin’ his pint, and told him he had a beautiful brogue, so rich and sweet.”

“A man can’t have the full pint that’s owed him with a lass like Mary McVickar a-tugging at his sleeve.” He belched. “It did make the boys jealous, to be sure, a bonny lass pleading for me to come away with her. ‘Isn’t that a sight to behold,’ said they. ‘An Irishman leaving a pub before dark on a Saturday night.’ ” He held the glass up to the light. “There you be. A streaky vitreous pane of the decline of the sun over Galway Bay.”

“You’re our hero, sure,” said Nellie.

“We’ll settle up next Thursday. You can count on it,” he said to me, and swayed out the door.

AT FIVE O’CLOCK
, Olga held up a small piece of blue-green ripple glass with her bandaged finger. “Who gets to stick on the last piece?” she asked.

“Clara!” came the thunderous answer.

I took it, gave it a little farewell kiss, and stuck it on.

“I’m getting the boss himself,” Nellie said, darted toward the door, and ran into him, chest to chest.

“Oh, begging your pardon, sir.”

“You didn’t think I’d miss your crowning moment, did you?”

Frank came in behind him, twitching to beat the band, his face strained with fright as he carried the zigzag river piece. We all clapped madly, and it was hard to believe that he couldn’t hear it. Only four pieces had to be changed, and the new large piece cut to size to create a perfect match. It had to be done without error. There would be no chance for a replacement. I gave that job to Miss Judd. “Everyone, stop talking!” she demanded. Never had I seen her be so authoritarian. I handed her my diamond cutting wheel. A piece that long and narrow with such sharply concave edges could easily break if mishandled. Everyone watched except Olga, who covered her eyes. With her lips puckered in concentration, Miss Judd measured three times before she made each cut. It was a perfect fit.

Mr. Tiffany examined the panels without a word. The younger girls froze, held their breaths, bit their lips, chewed on their fingernails, squeezed each other’s hands, nudged each other’s ribs. Beatrix shot him a look that said, “Don’t you dare find fault.” The Misses Byrne, Judd,
and Stoney stood in a row at attention, elder soldiers of the studio. Though I dug my fingernails into my palms, it wasn’t from nervousness. It was from the conviction that we had created something sublime.

He crossed his arms and rocked on his heels and toes. “It conveys nature in her most seductive aspects,” he said, “with nuances that keep the viewer entranced and discovering little treasures. It’s a Tiffany window of the first water,” he said, using the diamond-cutting term. “I had my doubts Thursday, but—”

“But you shouldn’t have.” Nellie slapped her chest. “We in the Women’s Department keep our promises,” she crowed, thrusting out her hand for him to shake.

M
ISS JUDD, WHO CONSIDERED IT A PERSONAL PRINCIPLE NEVER
to arrive one minute before nine, stood looking at the landscape windows one last time when I arrived at quarter to nine on Monday.

Sheepishly, she explained, “I had to see that they were real before the glaziers came to get them.”

Soon others arrived and Mary asked Nellie what Patrick had said.

“He was none too happy that we showed them up, but ’neath his mad, he was proud of me.”

“What did he say about the other men?” I asked.

“There was a big carryin’-on. Some were fiery mad, I guess, and want to squeeze us dry. Others were just middling.”

That could mean trouble down the road. I was surprised Mr. Tiffany hadn’t foreseen that this would pit us against one another. In my mind, it put a damper on our victory. Most of the girls didn’t hear what Nellie reported, so I kept my worries to myself.

A parade of glowering men, Patrick Doyle among them, arrived to carry out the windows to be soldered, four to a panel.

With no sense of self-restraint, Theresa blurted, “You said it couldn’t be done. Just take a good, hard look.” Nellie jabbed her in the ribs.

“Uppity women,” one man muttered.

Without the windows, we stood disoriented, momentarily wondering what to do. The twenty-eight-inch dragonfly shade was the first to be uncovered, and Miss Judd started working. Others followed. In a few minutes, it seemed from outward appearances that no monumental event had taken place in this room, but I knew otherwise.

…

THE LOBBY OF THE
Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston was impressive with flags and banners. The walls were filled with large framed photographs of women leaders in the hat-, glove-, button-, and carpet-making industries. Broad-shouldered, big-bosomed women wearing neckties and often spectacles, they looked strong and confident. Alternating with them were framed newspaper articles of women’s victories in labor disputes.

I thought of Edwin. Had he stayed in Manhattan, had we not taken that trip to Lake Geneva, his photograph might be on the walls of Cooper Union by now. He might have been hailed as the leader who turned the tide in the tailors’ strike. He might even be in city or state politics, doing good on a larger scale, and my admiration would have deepened into abiding love.

The large main hall, full to capacity and noisy with hundreds of women’s voices, brought me back to the here and now. The air was charged with the energy and potential of future women workers.

I was introduced as “the force behind the expanded opportunity for women in leaded-glass work,” and began my talk by explaining how opportunities for women in craft workshops had come about through Mrs. Candace Wheeler’s Society of Decorative Art for Women in New York.

“The biggest step forward was to convince women that the work of their hands deserved payment and wasn’t just a pleasant domestic pastime. Mrs. Wheeler asserted that creative art was more than a matter of instinct, but of study, so she set up classes and included other art forms, such as enameling, china painting, knitting, small mosaics, and ceramics. She founded the Women’s Exchange, where women would not lose their social standing by engaging in a commercial craft enterprise.”

I explained that when Mr. Louis Tiffany observed these women working in needlework, he saw their dexterity and their fine sensitivity to color. I related his experiments to re-create the saturated colors of the stained-glass windows in France’s medieval cathedrals as well as the iridescent glass of ancient civilizations, both with an eye toward a new, American aesthetic.

I described our Women’s Department and explained that it fluctuated between twenty-five and thirty-five young women, and bragged a bit about our fine camaraderie during the recent rush order of six windows. When I explained our apprenticeship program, a brave, heavily accented voice asked about wages, and I answered that apprentice glass cutters start at seven dollars a week, and increase as they advance to become selectors, and perhaps apprentice designers, who might make twenty a week. That last amount caused a murmur through the hall.

“A girl can get free art training at Cooper Union and the YWCA in New York, or can come to Tiffany Studios with an innate artistic sense and be trained on the job, though she would probably advance more slowly.”

When someone asked how the lamps were made, I trotted out the wooden mold I had brought, and the samples of every stage, and explained the process.

“As yet, women are not permitted in the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union, but I have hopes that it will change. The prevailing thought today is that the decorative arts are more important to the nation than the fine arts of painting and sculpting, because more people see them in homes, churches, and public buildings. So if you direct yourself to this or other decorative arts, you have a chance to take your place as a contributor to American artistic culture.”

Hearty applause was followed by a storm of young women at the podium asking me questions and examining the things I had brought, and I felt I had won a victory for women in the decorative arts.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
I came home on the train still elated, and found Alice crying in her room.

“It’s all ruined. All our ceramics. Five months of work.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t even know enough to know.”

“Just the wheel-thrown pieces?”

“Coiled and modeled too.”

“Does Mr. Tiffany know?”

“He’s coming in tomorrow to see them.”

I put my arm around her and stroked her hair. Coming so soon after our victory in the glass studio, this was doubly grievous for her.

“In a little while, Alie-girl, it won’t matter at all.”

WITH THOSE WOMEN
labor leaders still on my mind, I went to Corona with Alice the next day to make sure Mr. Tiffany wouldn’t vent his anger like a despot. Without a union to support the Arcadia four, if the results were as bad as Alice had described, this might mean that in a fit of temper, he might fire them. It might necessitate the kind of intervention Edwin had provided for immigrant workers who didn’t dare speak up for themselves.

Porcelain tulips, lilies, bowls carved with a milkweed motif, and vases decorated with fern fronds had all slumped, sagged, or completely collapsed in unbearable heat. Where they tipped onto neighboring pieces their glazes stuck them together. Only fourteen pieces made of other clay survived, those untouched by the collapsing porcelains.

We mourned the loss of each one. The stem on Alice’s water-lily bowl didn’t have the strength to hold itself upright, and the cup of the open blossom drooped permanently onto the base of lily pads.

“It was my favorite,” Alice said wistfully. “I loved the frogs on the lily pads. I made each one different.”

“Keep it for yourself,” I said. “I know it isn’t what you intended, but it’s still a graceful accident. A sculpture rather than a bowl.”

The instant we heard the tapping of his cane on the threshold, Lillian poured out profuse apologies. Alice was so ashamed that she didn’t even straighten up to greet him. He took one look and saw disaster. One deep breath that raised his chest was the only sound he made. He picked up one after another without a word, as though sympathetic with their fallen postures. He rotated on his palm the water-lily bowl.

“This is an exquisite design. Who did this?”

“I did,” Alice whimpered.

“I want you to make it again, only make the pedestal thicker. You were trying for the delicacy of chinaware, but this is pottery. Let the petals rest on the frogs’ heads for support.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“It’s the way with all new things. We worked three years trying to make iridescent glass before we got anything good enough to sell, so don’t be discouraged. We’ll find another clay that’s more stable.”

Bless the man. He spoke kindly, as though hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars had not gone up in smoke.

He caught Alice’s eye, and added, “What the world calls failure, I call learning.”

She pulled her mouth to one side. He had tried, but his words were not a comfort to her.

“Come watch the glassblowing,” Mr. Tiffany urged. “We have a new gaffer handling large pieces. It’s quite a spectacle.” To Alice and Lillian, he added, “It might make you feel better.”

NOTHING COULD BE
more incongruous than Mr. Tiffany, with a rose in the buttonhole of his cream-colored suit, surrounded by grimy, sweating men in a factory full of ash and soot. By contrast, the new barrel-chested, big-bellied gaffer, whose thick lips squeezed a cigar, wore only an undershirt beneath his suspenders.

Mr. Tiffany threw a twenty-dollar gold piece into the glory hole.

“What did you do that for?” Lillian asked. “Are you crazy? That’s more than my week’s wage.”

“It takes gold to make the purest red,” he said. “It’s soft and will melt quickly.”

We waited until the gatherer handed off the blowpipe with an enormous gob of incandescent red glass to the gaffer, who shaped and supported it with a paddle in one hand while he spun the blowpipe with the other, all the time smoking his cigar. The vase was to have a teardrop shape at the bottom, narrowing gracefully to a tall throat. Since vases were blown with the aperture attached to the pipe, this would be an extremely difficult piece to manage with all the weight of the wide base at the opposite end.

After half a dozen trips back into the glory hole, the bulb was about twelve inches tall when the gaffer signaled to the blower for more air to stretch the throat. The weight of the glass on the slender throat pulled it
down, almost to the floor, but he quickly spun the blowpipe just in time to bring it back into round.

The safest thing to do would be to stop right there, but he signaled for more air again. Alice and Lillian gasped. Men from other shops came to watch as it grew to twenty-five inches. He almost lost it again at thirty.