Clara and Mr. Tiffany (52 page)

“I wouldn’t think of it. I can get here on the train in an hour, or I can stay with Bessie’s brother in the city a couple of nights a week after she begins to trust me. She was brought up in the country and likes it there. She’s proud that she has four hens laying, and she’ll can our peaches for winter.”

From behind his back, he brought out a jar labeled
BESSIE’S SQUASH SOUP
. I was deeply touched.

“Then you’re happy, or at least happier?”

Waiting for his answer, I twirled a squash blossom, and its petals, textured like crepe paper, fluttered gracefully.

He drew his mouth to one side. “We’re finding some satisfaction in what we’re doing there. The place is all our own for us to improve together. It’s a new beginning.”

“I’m glad for you. You did the right thing. And I have something for you to see here.”

“Wait. The situation?”

“Theresa and Marion know never to say a word. No one else knows. It’s as if it never happened.”

I pointed to the mosaic end of the room, where the five finished panels were propped on their easels.

“Who poured?”

“I did! And Frank and Albert and Mr. Belknap helped turn the first one.”

“Mr. Belknap! Well, doesn’t that beat all.”

I shook a squash blossom at him so that it fluttered. “You’ve just given me an idea, if blown glass could be tooled to look like crepe paper.”

Joe grinned the grin of a happier man as he left my studio.

THE MOVE TO THE
new Madison Avenue location a month later meant there was much more space in the new studio, more than we needed.

“What were you thinking?” I asked Mr. Tiffany in private in his new, larger office.

“Maybe someday the union will forget my concession to keep the department at twenty-seven.”

My private hope burst out of me in one shrill word. “Really?”

Mr. Platt came in and Mr. Tiffany instantly changed the subject to his design for the base of the squash lamp, telling me what I already knew, and he knew that I knew. Mr. Thomas and Henry Belknap arrived, and I offered to leave.

“No. Stay,” Mr. Tiffany said. “I want you here.”

We sat at the big display table to review the 1906–07 statistics and to go over the price list for the coming year. Never having been invited to these meetings before, I learned that there were two hundred and six workers in the Men’s Window and Lampshade Department, forty-two in the Men’s Mosaic Department, sixty-four in Corona making and blowing glass, and twenty-seven in my department. Since 1900, lamp production in all departments—the men’s geometric leaded shades, the blown shades, and my nature-based shades—had exploded. The price list showed three hundred models of shade and base combinations, with my department producing the most styles. I was thrilled. They had to recognize my strong contribution to the firm.

Geometric shades made by the men’s department sold for forty dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars for the twenty-four-inch size. With the larger, straight-edged pieces of glass in their shades, they could make eighty of them in the time it took me to design and make three prototypes with their bases.

In my department, shades
without
bases started at fifty dollars and went to three hundred dollars. The small dragonfly shade was eighty dollars, and then jumped to one hundred thirty dollars and two hundred dollars for the larger or more unusual ones, such as dragonflies flying around and the one with the suns. Small-size florals
with
bases started at ninety dollars, and then leapt to one hundred sixty dollars and one hundred seventy-five dollars for standard sizes. The trumpet creeper lamp was three hundred seventy-five dollars. Then there were the elaborates: wisteria, apple blossom, and pond lily descending at four hundred dollars, and butterfly and cobweb at five hundred dollars. My new Boston ivy would be about the same because of the more expensive red glass poured into specially made molds for leaves. Squash blossom would land
between five hundred and seven hundred dollars because of the gaffer’s individualized work on each large petal. The cameo work on lotus placed it at seven hundred and fifty dollars, equal to my room and board for a year, now that Merry had raised it again.

The last page contained three lists: the uniques, those we would make one at a time only when the single showroom model was sold: Boston ivy, cobweb, lotus, pond lily descending, laburnum, and iris lantern; those to be discontinued: fruit, cyclamen, pansy, arrowhead, and deep sea, which I loved, as well as a dozen others which cast a pall over my earlier pleasure; and those with reduced prices, which grieved me as well.

“Even a fifty-dollar shade is beyond the range of the average household,” Mr. Thomas said. “We have to scale down, weed out the elaborates and uniques, produce for the middle- and lower-range buyers. There’s only so many millionaires. It’s a limited market.”

“Eighteen hundred millionaire families, the
Times
reported,” Mr. Tiffany said. “I wouldn’t call that limited. One mansion after another is creeping up Fifth Avenue for nearly three miles, and they don’t all have a Tiffany lamp yet. New millionaires are arriving from the Midwest every week, and we can expand into stores there as well. Marshall Field has performed well for us. Lamps have done more than any of our products to bring beauty into the American home.”

“We’re not running a social mission, Louis. We’re running an art business. A
commercial
art business.”

“Not we. You. You run the business. I run the designing. You do the commerce. I do the art. I don’t tell you how to keep your account books, so don’t tell me how or what to design. The elaborates have made my reputation. I want them continued, and I want more of them.”

His
reputation, of course.

“You see the workshops as your playground for trying experiments on a large scale,” said Mr. Platt. “We have to stop that, and produce only what we know will sell at a profit. That doesn’t include new lamps that take costly hours to design.”

“We have to eliminate the expensive low sellers and produce more of the proven high sellers that don’t require design time,” Mr. Mouse Thomas said.

How my department fit into the company seemed more tenuous as the discussion went on.

“I realize that time means money here,” I ventured. “But what about the squash-blossom lamp? It has already been designed. Or is that irrelevant to you?”

“We’re going to continue into production,” Mr. Tiffany replied.

“I say no, on account of the high price it would have to fetch,” Mr. Platt said.

“I say no too,” echoed Mr. Thomas, naturally.

That left Henry. Everyone turned to him.

He licked his lips in preparation to speak. “Considering only its sales value is narrow-minded. It’s a showpiece. We should have three—one in our showroom, one in Tiffany and Company, and one in Marshall Field.”

Mr. Thomas gave a snide glance at Henry for stepping on their marketing toes. I wondered what the repercussions of his incursion from art into commerce would be.

My freedom was beginning to crumble. I appealed to Henry with my eyes but was afraid he wouldn’t pick up on my urgent call for help.

“Excuse me, but I think Mr. Belknap has a broader opinion to voice.”

“Right,” Mr. Tiffany said. “Speak your mind, Henry.”

“I contend that it’s important to keep creating new designs, from a business standpoint and from an aesthetic one. Repeat customers in our showrooms have to see new models or they won’t come again.”

“That’s right, Henry. Customers. Strike at his Achilles’ heel.” Mr. Tiffany balled his fist and swung it in front of his chest.

“And the department has to be kept vital with new designs or it atrophies, and that’s dangerous. Mrs. Driscoll is not a machine. She’s an artist, and an artist has to create according to new vision as it develops, and her department as well.”

“We’re not running a crafts class, Henry,” Mr. Thomas retorted.

My God, the ghost of Mr. Mitchell!

“What Henry says is true,” Mr. Tiffany affirmed. “Each artist sees beauty from a different angle, and achieves it only when she’s free to explore her own vision.”

“How many of the same lamp styles can we make before they become,
pardon my saying so, trite?” Henry asked. “Clichéd because they’re all too familiar? How will repeat customers take to seeing the lamps they own produced year after year? That will sink us to the level of a factory.”

Mr. Tiffany looked smugly at Mr. Platt while Henry won this point for him. “Brilliant, Henry.”

The deeper reality hurt. He was depending on someone else to stand up for me. He was handing me off to Henry’s guardianship.

“It’s cobweb, lotus, pond lily descending, Boston ivy, and now squash blossom that give new life to the medium.” Henry was strident now. “Kill those and all those elaborates and one-of-a-kinds of the future swirling in Mrs. Driscoll’s imagination and you eventually kill the line of specialty lamps altogether.”

“One,” snapped Mr. Platt. “Make one squash lamp for our showroom, since you’ve started.”

The balance of power was shifting right before my eyes.

“So we’ll go on as we have,” Mr. Tiffany asserted, “and Mrs. Driscoll will bring her designs to me, or we’ll design together, as we sometimes do. Nothing will change.”

“Your father would have seen the reality. He wouldn’t have resisted,” Mr. Platt said.

“My father is in his grave. What I do is irrelevant to him.”

Mr. Platt cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to have to say this in front of Mrs. Driscoll, but you’re blind to the realities of the business world, Louis. You always have been, and that’s why you’re always in the red, which was one thing when your father was here to cover your losses at the end of every year, but it’s quite another now, isn’t it, when you have to dig into your own pocket to make up the difference?”

I felt like slapping him for shaming Louis so.

“So what if I do? What difference does it make to you, or to the company?”

“How long will you be able to, particularly with your extravagances at Laurelton Hall?”

“Leave Laurelton out of it.”

“How long before Laurelton drives you to bankruptcy court? How long, Louis? Do you have any idea?”

All eyes were on him. He squirmed in his oversize chair at the head of the table.

“No. You have no idea. Come next door to my office, and I’ll show you.”

Tall Ebenezer Platt swept out of the room with long strides, and short Louis Tiffany trotted after, and part of me followed anxiously in his shadow.

Mr. Thomas shuffled a few papers. Henry drummed his perfectly manicured fingernails on the polished table until Mr. Thomas noticed the clicking sound and glared at him. Henry stopped.

After an excruciating quarter-hour of silence, the other two came back.

“Now that
that’s
settled,” Mr. Platt said, “there will be no more new elaborate shades designed, nor any new unique, one-of-a-kind shades.”

“For the time being,” Mr. Tiffany said.

“For the time being,” Mr. Platt conceded. “Production can be more efficient, and we can get back on track. As for windows, mosaics, and fancy goods, there will be no major change. Adjourned.”

Squashed flat. Such a bitter irony. I hurried to the privacy of the elevator, my eyes straight ahead.

ON TOP OF ALL OF THAT
, it was a Thursday, and Carrie, who had been doing the accounting lately, was at home ill, so I had to do the payroll myself. The pages of the week’s work orders shook as I laid them on my desk. I dumped out the time chits the girls had put in the box. In Mr. Thomas’s new system I had to figure each person’s time on each project for the week and make the aggregate sum come to the same as the payroll. Forty-five hours on item 29877—sixteen-inch dragonfly shade. Marion’s rate of thirty-six and two-thirds cents per hour equaled sixteen-fifty for the week.

I couldn’t concentrate. The numbers blurred. I blinked and stared and blinked again.

I felt awful for Louis, the way Mr. Platt humiliated him. Henry did what he could, but it was Mr. Tiffany who should have spoken up for me.
The whole thing was disheartening. And where would it lead? The indispensability I believed I had achieved was shriveling.

At home I asked Merry to have my dinner tray sent up to my room, something I rarely did.

She looked at me with a scowl aimed at the world. “A fierce day for you, was it? I’ll send up a cuppa right away. The way you like it, with milk and honey. It’ll do your brave heart a world of good, dearie.”

Fortifying myself with tea, I spread out all the papers and dumped the girls’ accounting chits onto the bed and started. I’d done only six when the kitchen girl came back with my dinner tray. I thought eating might soothe me. Baked shad, potato pancakes, and boiled turnips with carrots. Not very exciting. I ate half and went back to work.

A knock on my door startled me.

“Booth Accounting Service. Do you have work for me?”

I opened the door. He took one look at me and the bed, and said, “Oh, dear, you’ve got the wrong thing on the bed. It should be you, not the papers. Let me do the books. Lie down. Close your eyes.”

He put the piles on the floor and opened the bedcovers. I was still in my dress. He gestured for me to take it off.

“I won’t look,” he said, and turned around.

I took the pins out of my hair and let it fall, and then unbuttoned the dress.

“Need any help?” he asked brightly.

“Only with the accounting.”

“Just offering.”

I put on my nightdress, and he spun around.

“You’re too slow. How much can a man stand?”

He laid me down and traced the lace on my gown with his index finger. “
Mmm
, pretty.” He combed my hair between his fingers. “It’s very long. I’ve always wondered.”

With one knee on the bed, he placed a whisper of a kiss on each eyelid, and I was left with the lovely, sad feeling of his elbows, arms, and wrists sliding through my hands as he raised himself upright.
Forget the damn accounting. Just lie here with me
, I felt like saying.

Instead I said, “It’s a new system. Their pay varies—there’s a list—but I have to account for their time on each project each day.”