Clara and Mr. Tiffany (9 page)

“All right. Tell me about this Edwin fellow.”

“You’ll like him. He’s much smarter than I am. He reads constantly. He’s idealistic. He works for the University Settlement.”

“Whatever that is.”

“He’ll tell you. And he’s different than I am.”

“No one could be like you. Not even a brother.”

“I mean, he’s not a nellie.”

W
HEN WE GATHERED IN THE PARLOR THE SUNDAY MORNING
that George and Hank were to leave, Edwin turned out to be taller than George, handsomer than George, and, thank goodness, quieter than George. Although they both had the same black hair and dark eyes, and the same clean-shaven, well-defined jaw, George was slender as a willow wand and as easily bendable, whereas Edwin was sturdier, more solid. Merry shooed the four of us out the door, saying to me, “You be sure that our George gets on the right train.”

A torrent of words poured out of George’s mouth in the horsecab on the way to Grand Central Depot. There was much hoopla on the platform because this was a special Columbian Exposition train. A four-piece band played beneath a banner, and boys wore sandwich boards advertising various exhibits, guesthouses, and restaurants. Hank stood quietly, jotting them down, while George trotted up and down the platform like a terrier on a leash until the conductor opened the doors.

“I hope you have many adventures,” I said quietly to Hank.

“A person has adventures only when he’s traveling alone. Traveling with another, he has comfort.”

George performed a few dance steps—loose body, arms akimbo, head waggling—just before he stepped on board.

Edwin looked on indulgently. “My brother, the antic.”

“Has he always been like that?”

“Always. Our mother used to call him Georgie the Jester. That only made him sillier.”

“And what did she call you?”

With an expression of embarrassment, he murmured, “Edwin the Educator.”

Once inside the passenger car, George opened the window to shout and wave his hat as the train pulled out.

“See everything. Learn all you can,” Edwin shouted back.

“Aha. The Educator indeed,” I said, and his tawny cheeks reddened.

I watched George’s head and flailing arm shrink and blur in the distance. The gleaming rails coming together behind the train pointed toward beauties and advancements beyond my imagination, including our finished windows, shipped a month late. The only word that could describe how I felt was bereft.

Yet there beside me, stately as a statue, was Edwin. Around our awkward silence moved a fluid, noisy crowd. I would have preferred to nurse my sullen mood alone, but Edwin’s gesture invited me to walk back into the terminal with him.

“And what art do you do?” I asked, facing forward, making an assumption, intending brusqueness.

“The art of making people happy, or at least happier.”

“That’s what all artists do, or aim to do.”

“I work for the University Settlement in the Lower East Side, helping immigrants get their bearings.”

“Oh.” It came out feebly, flat, and final.

He invited me to an English tearoom nearby, and since I had promised George, I said yes. There wasn’t much conversation on the way, only that George had told him all about me. At the tearoom, he insisted that I have a scone.

Feeling obligated to be friendly, I asked, “So what do you actually do at this settlement place?”

“I help new immigrants learn English and find jobs, enroll their children in school, find doctors and dentists who will take impoverished patients for fifty cents a visit, intervene in cases of tenement disputes, instruct them on the importance of labor unions.”

Labor unions. Just what caused me to work like a fiend while the men paraded up and down Fourth Avenue for a month.

“Sometimes I give speeches to society clubs to persuade them to donate,
and to political organizations to support changes in labor laws. Other times, I ladle soup.”

“Soup?”

“That’s right. Soup. The Fourth Ward of the Lower East Side beneath the Brooklyn Bridge is flooded with immigrants living in poverty, sometimes ten to a room. New arrivals live in hall rooms.”

“What, pray tell, is a hall room?”

He adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Imagine a large old house turned into a boardinghouse with a hundred people living in the bedrooms and only one indoor bathroom and an outdoor privy. The poorest immigrants rent space in the corridors, priced per foot, barely wide enough for a cot, one family’s space partitioned off from another’s by a shredded curtain if they’re lucky.”

“No privacy?”

“None. Other families have to walk through the hall to get to their space.” A musing grunt came from deep in his throat. “Shared experience makes the Fourth Ward a tightly knit community.”

My girls—my Tiffany Girls, as they liked to call themselves—had any of them lived in a hall room when they arrived? Maybe that’s what made Cornelia so serious.

“It’s all pretty bleak, then?”

“Not entirely. I’ve met wonderful, hardworking people who want to give back to the country that took them in. Poverty isn’t something deserved because of lack of character. There’s nobility in the Lower East Side, just in their perseverance. At the settlement house where I live we’re proud that we are now offering the first public bath in the city, soap included. We want to provide services free of the paybacks that Boss Tweed required whenever he did an ounce of charity.”

His eyes, dark as jet, flared with specks of light when he said that. He was radiant, happy about making a difference, pleased to tell me about this world so far removed from jeweled peacocks.

“You actually live there?”

“Yes, I do. So I can be more available in crises.”

How could a handsome, clean, immaculately dressed, intelligent man be content to be surrounded by poverty?

“You might say I live in the teeming cradle of the promise of this country. The immigrants of the Fourth Ward have troubles, almost insurmountable troubles, but they have dreams too, and ambitions and loves and sorrows. Each person may have left parents and grandparents behind, sisters behind. They gave up their languages and their countries, but each one brings with him a story. Some bring a skill, furniture making or saddlery or ironwork or baking.”

“Or glassmaking.”

Edwin nodded. “Some bring memories of injustice. Some, only hope. They’re going to give us more than they’ll get.”

I lathered my scone with clotted cream, a twinge of shame at its excess.

He asked, “Do you know this poem?

“To
me
, Mrs. Driscoll.”

“Clara, please.”

“Clara, then. ‘To me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ ”

“No. I haven’t heard it before. It’s very moving.”

“Imperative, you might say. A woman named Emma Lazarus wrote that poem as a donation to an auction to help fund the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It’s not well known, but I believe someday it will be.” He finished his tea in one gulp. “Have you ever been on an excursion boat that circles the statue?”

“Never.”

He gripped the edge of the table and leaned toward me. “Let’s.”

“Now?”

His intensity was magnetic, irresistible.

“Yes. Now.”

THE NEW OPEN-AIR
electric streetcar clanged and rattled as it sped us down Fourth Avenue and along Bowery Street, jammed with people and
lined with tenements, flophouses, tawdry saloons, and smoldering ash barrels. Pushcarts piled with pots and pans, potatoes and carrots, shoes and used clothing clogged the street. Boys hurried in all directions carrying bundles as if they had immigrated too late and were racing to catch up. For want of a clothespin, some woman’s washing that had been draped over a line between two buildings blew off into the running gutter.

“Don’t ever come down here by yourself,” Edwin said. “The Bowery Boys are more or less gone, but other gangs have taken their place.”

As if I would want to. I put my handkerchief to my nose against the foul odor of unwashed bodies. The ceiling strap held by countless grimy hands before me swung like a noose. Apprehensiveness kept my arm tight to my side, but at a lurch of the streetcar, I quickly grabbed it.

Why did he take me this way rather than straight down Broadway to the Battery? Was he in love with misery?

“Where is it you live?”

“A few blocks from here.”

Standing on a street corner, a thickset woman in a babushka raised her hand in a timid wave, and Edwin waved back. I was immediately aware of my stylish rose-colored tie at my throat lifting in the breeze in the open car as though it were greeting her too. I took her glance at me not as accusatory of my well-being, only curious.

When the streetcar slowed for a stop, Edwin leapt off and ran to her. He spoke quickly, urgently, leaning down and holding both her hands in his upraised palms. Her head bobbed in happy acknowledgment. He made a move to jump back onto the running board, but then she said something more and he turned back to her and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. The streetcar started to roll and gain speed.

“Stop! Stop!” I shouted in a panic.

The conductor sounded an alarm and the driver slammed on the brakes, which jostled everyone. A little boy was thrown off his mother’s lap, and when I stepped off, the conductor yelled at me. I was rattled and miffed as I hurried back to Edwin, who was running toward me.

“What were you thinking?” I cried. “The conductor, the driver, all those people were angry with me. I had to step over a child.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Clara. Are you all right?”

“What was I supposed to do, riding off to God knows where without you?”

“I’m sorry. I had to tell that woman that I found a job for her son. She doesn’t speak much English, so I didn’t think she got the name of the factory right. I needed to write it for her. I thought I could get back on in time.”

I calmed down as we waited for the next streetcar. We sat inside this time, quiet for a few minutes. I could not begrudge Edwin his impulse to help. He had given the woman kindness and a moment of extraordinary humanity, and that was of inestimable value. Could a mosaic or a leaded-glass window do that?

“What’s remarkable,” he murmured, intent on his thought, as though he had not done anything impulsive or reckless or disregardful of me, “is that most newcomers get out of here in one generation, working day and night to honor the parents who brought them here.”

“The same ethic as the Tiffanys,” I said, “but I’m sure Mr. Tiffany has never set foot here—he of the opal ring who preaches that beauty is within the reach of everybody.”

“There are other kinds of beauty.”

And he had just shown me one kind. I forgave him at once.

THE IRON STEAMBOAT COMPANY’S
excursion sternwheeler eased out into the harbor among clipper ships, freighters, coal barges, and ferries. Edwin put his frock coat over my shoulders and stood close to block the wind that plastered his white shirtsleeves to his muscular arms. What a shift between rash disregard and thoughtful caring. We chugged near Ellis Island’s new immigration station, a two-story wooden structure with low towers at the corners. Nearly half a million people came through last year, Edwin said.

“That’s only the beginning. The floodgates are open, Europe is pouring itself out, and we are witnessing the great drama of human migration.”

He asked me to imagine the steerage immigrants wearing numbers pinned to their clothing and crowding through turnstiles to have their
eyelids pulled up with buttonhooks during the brusque medical checks and health interrogation, New York’s version of Judgment Day. The rejected had to go back.

My stomach revolted. What bewilderment had my girls felt as little tots? What humiliation and physical suffering had their parents endured first to get here, and then to be admitted? If the daughters were any indication, Wilhelmina’s parents would have stood up to it with square shoulders, but I wasn’t so sure about Cornelia’s.

Up, out of murky water, the Statue of Liberty proclaimed with upraised arm thirty stories in the air the principles of friendship and welcome and hope, the possibilities of contribution and achievement. Edwin called it by its official name,
Liberty Enlightening the World
. The copper robes of this mighty woman fluttered in the same wind as my muslin skirt did, stirring me to shine.

In the other direction, high above the East River, a roadway had been flung over the tops of masts, suspended on wire threads between two lordly towers with double Gothic arches, six times taller than the five-story skyline. The colossus of the Brooklyn Bridge spoke of courage and daring, genius and human effort on a grand scale. Its effect was inspirational, declaring that sustained effort will bring about brilliant accomplishment. The wind blew away my morose self-pity at not being able to go to the fair as I recognized what a glorious city and time I lived in.