Clara and Mr. Tiffany (54 page)

The list of new discontinued lamps reduced me to dust and ashes—a death knell for peacock, grape, apple and grape, pansy, snowball, geranium, daffodil, and all three tulips—tulip tree, scattered tulip, and tulip clusters. What did the Lieutenants have against tulips? I half expected butterfly, lotus, cobweb, and squash blossom, the expensive elaborates, to be discontinued, and they were, making the life of the squash blossom ebb the quickest of all. Could my heart ever beat as wildly as it had when I was designing them?

The small apple blossom was on the list to be discontinued, with a notation that there was only one left in stock. Whoever would buy it would never know that it was the swan song of this motif, and maybe of its maker. Trumpet creeper was there too, with the price of the five left in
stock slashed from three hundred seventy-five dollars to two hundred dollars. Bargain-basement price. Liquidate them. No longer desirable. Recoup our losses.

I faced Mr. Thomas and Mr. Platt across the table with eyes that surely sent shards of glass into theirs. Mr. Tiffany at the head of the table was somber, his shoulders drooping. I wanted to send him a signal to take courage, but he had turned away from me. I leveled at him a look that anyone there could see cried out, “Speak for me!”

Impotent and staring, he said nothing, and my heart cracked.

If there had been an argument like last time, I would have felt that there was hope. The funereal silence was a hundred times worse. The pages themselves declared the message: commerce had triumphed over art. It had eroded love and spit back numbers, not feelings.

“The moratorium on elaborates will continue,” Mr. Thomas said.

I knew that the days when Louis’s word was law had ebbed, but I never expected him to sacrifice me without a fight. A profound disappointment in him, that he would let it come to this, welled up, and I fought back tears.

Clasping my hands that had created those elaborates, I said, “I’m convinced that such a short-sighted prohibition is a grave mistake for the future of the company. How long before the originality and enthusiasm of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department will dry up?”

I rose to leave.

Mr. Thomas cleared his throat. “One more thing, Mrs. Driscoll. With anticipated lower production, we can’t keep your full complement of artisans. Who is your slowest worker?”

“I don’t like to say.” The exacting care Miss Judd took in every task naturally required more time. I would quit before I ever gave them her name! “Slowest sometimes means finest.”

“Well, whoever it is, she and one more of your choosing will have to go.”

Rebellion boiled. “Then I’ll design a mosaic to keep all twenty-seven of us.”

“They’re only made to order now,” Mr. Thomas said. “You have two weeks to reduce your department by two.”

Feeling a curdling in my stomach, I strode quickly to the door and heard Henry murmur, “I’m sorry.”

I WALKED HOME ALONE
, bewildered, knowing my creativity had been strangled along with my department. No one was getting married soon, so I couldn’t use that to decrease our number. For the first time, I wished someone was. I refused to choose. There was a reason for keeping each one.

In former days, I would have wailed in self-pity to Alice. Now I slipped a note under Bernard’s door.

I laid out the pages on my bed and waited, feeling the approach of change. The minutes crawled. I picked up the kaleidoscope and watched the glass shards slip into a new pattern.

It wasn’t long before he knocked and peeked in.

“Is it George?” he said softly.

“It’s Tiffany’s. There was a meeting.”

I pointed to the pages and he stood by the bed, stately and serious, picking up each page, studying it, putting it down, picking up another, while I chewed on my thumbnail.

“Look at all the discontinued ones. It felt like murder.” My voice was petulant. I couldn’t help it.

“Are the sales slipping?”

“I’m not privy to any sales figures. I only see the orders. The moratorium on designing new elaborates is still in effect, I suspect forever. As an artist, I can’t expand any more. I’m like a blown vessel that has reached its capacity for thinness, and the glassblower has to stop or it will lose its shape and individuality.”

He stacked the pages and set them on my desk, sat on the bed, and pulled me over to sit next to him.

“Your individuality is greater than as an artist, Clara. Do you think that’s all there is to the woman? Do you think I’m in love only with the
artist? Do you think I haven’t seen the beauty of your character? Your strength in leading the girls, your compassion in responding to the issues of their lives? That I haven’t fed off your joy in cycling, in parks, woods, the sea, the crush of New York? That I haven’t recognized a lovely, vibrant woman of intelligence and humor and passion and keen sensitivity and a thousand intense and beautiful feelings? A woman with a bigger capacity to love than she admits. A woman I’ve loved for years.”

A swirling exhilaration exploded in me. Breathless and half frightened at the prospects, I glimpsed my larger self shining in his eyes, and I loved him for showing it to me.

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

“How could I force the issue when I saw every day how much you love your work and the girls? Besides, do you think I wanted to risk another love affair with a woman more committed to work than to life?”

Edging toward accusation, the words resounded with hard truth.

“Over time, I recognized that I’d rather go along as we have been rather than to force you to sacrifice what you love and maybe make a mistake and come to resent me,” he said. “But now, with this moratorium, maybe you see things differently. Maybe you can see possibilities for yourself outside Tiffany Studios. On your own, or with me.”

“It’s a big change.” Though not one I hadn’t contemplated.

“An enormous change. I realize that. I’ve read your note a hundred times. I can barely imagine what it would mean to you to give up what you love, but it would kill me to see you stay there out of loyalty to a policy that does not value you because you are a woman.”

“Policy! It’s not loyalty to a policy, Bernard. I hate the policy. It has ruined lives.”

Olga. Wilhelmina. If only they could have kept working. It was bigger than just Tiffany policy. All across the city that policy held women in its unholy grip.

“Think what you just said, Clara. ‘Ruined lives.’ Think of the import of what you said.”

Although the policy constrained me too, there was an ironic safety in it. I could finally admit to myself why I had let the years slip by without asking Bernard if he was married. I was just as afraid of learning that he
wasn’t
as learning that he
was
. Now, without the security of the slim possibility that he was a married man, the protection from having to make a decision that would force me to leave Tiffany’s was gone. I hugged my pillow against my ribs, knowing that I stood on the edge of a precipice. Olga and Wilhelmina and Ella and Cornelia and Edith and Beatrix had all left to get married under their own individual circumstances. Had they all sensed a similar precipice, even for a moment? No. Not Olga. Her certainty that nothing was as important as love was a case of wisdom out of the mouths of babes.

Gently, Bernard took the pillow away, turned me toward him, and cradled my wrists in his open palms. “When I was a little boy living in Gloucester, I watched workers make a clearing for a street of row houses. They chopped down all the trees. A bird sat on a stump. A worker tossed it in the air to fly away, but it came back to the stump. The next week, I found only feathers and part of a wing. It had perished out of fear to go beyond what it knew. Do you understand?”

I felt my soul moving closer to his.

“Yes.”

GEORGE HUNG ON UNDER
the care of Dudley, Hank, and Henry for another week. At his bedside the next Sunday, I dribbled water into his mouth from a straw, and Dudley tried to make him comfortable. Weaker and struggling more for breath, he turned his head to him.

“Don’t cry over me, Dud. It’s better to die young than …” We waited. “To be an aging, feeble nellie.”

Dudley’s face distorted.

“Tell me again my favorite lines.”

“I float in the regions of your love, O man, O sharer of my roving life,” Dudley managed to say.

Hank opened the book and read softly,

Light passed from the window, and none of us wanted to leave the bed for so much as half a minute to draw the shade, so it became a big black eye looking in at us. Hank lit the oil lamp. George’s breath coming irregularly now sounded like the retreat of a wave over pebbles.

“Read, ‘All goes onward.’ ”

Dudley found the page and tried to read, but no sound came. He handed the book to me.

With Dudley holding his right hand and Hank his left, and I on my knees warming his cold feet against my breasts, we waited to receive the last precious ounce of him. Minute by inexorable minute, the skin of his face lost its fever flush and became bluish gray.

He took a jagged breath, struggled to say, “Look. The geese are flying,” and relaxed at last.

Dudley’s head dropped to George’s chest in a muffled sob.

After some minutes, Hank said in a pinched voice, “Frolic on, comrade.”

He stepped out onto the stoop to give Dudley time with him alone. I followed him, we touched hands, and I went back to the boardinghouse alone.

Bernard leapt to his feet in the dimly lit parlor and enfolded me. His arms, hands, eyes, breath, all spoke comfort.

“It wasn’t brutal,” I murmured against his chest. “They loved him so. Such extraordinary, generous love.”

Seeing Bernard’s folded white handkerchief, and the tenderness with which he offered it, I wept.

B
ERNARD KNOCKED AT MY DOOR IN THE MORNING AS I WAS GETTING
ready to go to the studio.

“Don’t go today,” he said. “There’s nothing there that can’t wait. We’ll go to Central Park, or to Point Pleasant. Wherever you want.”

“No. You have to go to work.”

“You are more important. Love is more important than work, Clara. Be reasonable. Let me help you.”

“I have to go.” I laced up my shoes.

“You’ve been married to Tiffany Studios for at least a dozen years. You’ve proven your loyalty and your talent. You don’t have to go to the grave still proving it. And to whom? Nobody cares, Clara, as much as you do. Now won’t you take a day with me? You’ve just had two big blows. Take time to put yourself together again.”

“I have to tell someone there, George’s friend.”

“You can’t send a message?”

“No. I have to tell him myself. And I have to see Mr. Tiffany.”

I could see the hurt in his eyes. He was holding my arms, but not so tightly that I couldn’t free myself.

“Just remember that I know you and love you better than anyone,” he said.

I nodded, assured that he loved me in the way I had always longed for, but this had to be done this morning, while the resolve was hot. I walked quickly out the door and turned off Irving Place to Fourth Avenue to catch the subway. It would get me there before I changed my mind.

…

GOING INTO TIFFANY STUDIOS
, I said to myself, Hold fast the fort, dear women. I went to Henry’s office first, and closed the door behind me.

“I already know. Hank came to tell me last night.” We both stood numb in each other’s arms. “Hank and Dudley and I may have been his lovers,” he said softly, “but you were his finest friend.”

“We said some lines from Whitman right at the end.”

“Hank told me.”

I wiped away tears.

“Take care of yourself, Clara. You don’t have to stay at the studio.”

I looked at him curiously.

“I meant today, but take it as you wish.” With utter delicacy, he added, “Onward and outward.”

“Thank you for everything you did for him, and for me.”

I went across the corridor into the ladies’ room, blew my nose, tidied my hair, pulled back my shoulders, and looked in the mirror. What I saw was the face of a survivor—one who would find her own surprises, design her own adventures. In the next five minutes, I would have to tear myself away from him, the loved one who, like Edwin, like Francis, came close but did not measure up. Too many disappointments tumbled one after another. I breathed in resolve. Then I entered Mr. Tiffany’s office.

“I’m glad I found you before you started your rounds. I was afraid I’d be too late.” I sat down at the side of his desk. Three gardenias floated in an enamel bowl. Maybe it had been made by Alice.

“There’s no other way to say this. I have to leave.” My voice did not quaver.