Clara and Mr. Tiffany (19 page)

“And what is it that you manage, Mr. Booth, besides managing to read with all this going on?”

“I manage the New York office of a London export firm.”

“Fine qualifications, I’m sure. But do you manage thirty-some girls who are used to their partners and won’t take lightly to rotation?”

“Excuse me, Clara,” Miss Hettie said from the parlor. “This would be so much more enjoyable if we had a man to play Cyrano. Mr. Booth, would you oblige us?”

“Fame calls,” he said softly.

“It’s poor casting, Hettie,” I said. Unlike Cyrano, Bernard had a perfectly formed nose in an appropriate size on his handsome, clean-shaven face. I gave myself time to enjoy him bending over me solicitously before I responded.

“Go to! Thy poor players await.”

I was left with my scratched-out charts, seething with resentment toward Mr. Mitchell and wishing I were brighter so I could do this different kind of thinking easily. I planted my elbows on the table and stared down at my vague attempts to diagram my idea, aborted that afternoon when Mr. Tiffany had come in to see our progress on the four big conservatory windows.

He was none too complimentary. Alice; the twins, Lillian and Marion Palmié; Miss Judd, who was so careful about everything; and Miss Stoney, who was one of the original six, had all stood back to let Mr. Tiffany study what we had done so far. He never gave an assessment after only a first impression, so we had to wait in suspense as he scrutinized every aspect—coloring, textures, degree of transparency, grace of the lead lines. I had thought the windows looked gorgeous.

“Very good,” he had said.

Not gorgeous. Not splendid. Just very good.

“Colors are good. These three gourds”—he pointed to them—“are too thin. We want them plump so the whole effect is luxuriant, healthy growth at the peak of the season.”

I thought we had followed the cartoon, but perhaps the cartoon was in error when his painting was expanded. Or maybe the cutters had skimped.

“Easy enough to cut rounder ones and shave off the contiguous
leaves and background so they’ll fit,” I said. “We’ll make sure the ones still to be cut will have big bellies.”

“Let in more light in the upper areas between the leaves. In the visual world, the mind naturally seeks light. It’s a spiritual hunger. George Inness tells us that. Don’t have solid foliage.”

“I’m sure we followed the painting,” I said.

He gave me an indulgent look. “An artist has the prerogative to change his mind.” He tapped his cane once against the floor, always the preamble to his stock saying, “Infinite, meticulous labor makes a masterpiece, ladies.”

Remembering him spouting that tired old saying of his was enough to sour my work on the charts that evening, charts that demanded mathematical methods I couldn’t clearly conceive of, and then tedious, meticulous labor to get it all down. I puffed out a big breath onto my papers, piled them up, and went upstairs to my room, thinking how pleasant the morning had been, how much I had loved the creative work on the nasturtiums before Mr. Tiffany had come into the studio.

How curious work is. We say that we work on something, but the work is working on us too. Breaking up glass into small shapes, harmonizing colors, choosing textures, and setting them right to make something beautiful was healing. It was more than the pleasure of assembly that made it so. It was letting the colors sing, being open to their song. It was the stray thoughts that came when quietly occupied. Doing something I loved with color and light tended to make those thoughts positive ones.

Even in the throes of despair, I’d thought this morning, before Mr. Tiffany had come in, that if Edwin was walking somewhere, he might see something in cheerful yellow or orange, and it would lift his spirit for a moment. I could only hope.

If he were still in the area around Lake Geneva and heard the honking of geese and looked up, he might think of me. They mate for life, he had said. I wanted him to think of me, but I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to pick up where we had left off.

…

THE NEXT MORNING
I stopped at Horton’s on my way to work and ordered three quarts of ice cream and a two-pound box of chocolate daisies to be delivered to the fifth floor at one o’clock. I posted a notice saying that there would be a meeting to discuss the new system. By one-fifteen they all sat in a circle, happily eating. Since Agnes was a designer now, and not officially part of the department, she stood outside the circle, but she couldn’t resist the ice cream.

“The Powers That Be—I don’t mean Mr. Tiffany, and I don’t mean Mr. Belknap—have decided, without consulting us, that there will be no raises in wages this year. Instead, a bonus will be paid to the selector on every project if it is completed before the production deadline. However, I want to give each of you the same chance, whether or not you’re a selector. We have to decide on a plan to accomplish that. You can ask all the questions and raise all the objections you want today, you can even suggest a better way, but when we come to vote, and the majority favors one plan, we all have to agree to it.”

“We get to tell you whether we like it or not?” Mary McVickar asked, her voice rising.

“Today. I’ll adopt whatever plan we decide on, whether it’s suggested by one of you or by me, and because you decided it, you’ll be honor bound to uphold it without complaint.”

They looked at one another in astonishment and murmured, not used to having their opinions asked for. I doubt if they had ever heard of any factory or workshop in the city where employees, particularly women, had a say in deciding anything.

I proposed that the bonus awarded to the selector be divided among members of her team, not equally but in ratio to their base wage and the number of hours they put in on the project.

“But those selectors working with slower cutters won’t be as likely to finish before deadline,” said Agnes.

“True. Therefore, I suggest that the cutters be rotated. Each selector will take a turn with slower and faster cutters. What she would lose with a slower cutter she would gain back with a faster cutter.”

The floodgates opened, and in came the rushing waters.

“What’s to prevent a selector from always getting a slow cutter and other selectors getting faster ones?”

“Or a cutter who can cut faster than the selector can select?”

“What will happen when there are two or three selectors working on the same window?”

“Or two or three cutters?”

“Sometimes you have to cut slower on smaller pieces.”

“And on pieces with concave curves that have to be snipped round.”

“Ripple glass is harder to cut.”

“So is drapery glass. Some windows have a lot of it, so you have to go slower.”

What seemed a simple solution at the dinner table last night became infinitely more complicated, and I felt my spirit sink. I let them have their say, and then the room fell silent, the mood heavy, all of us realizing the dilemma we shared. They ate their ice cream in slow spoonfuls.

Little by little we came up with a plan, one element of which was to rank the cutters based on the number of pieces of average difficulty they could cut in an hour. I would have to time them. In the end, everyone except the cartoonists seemed content with what we decided, but since they often served as selectors as well, they acquiesced. I went home that night feeling rather puffed up about it. Bernard was the first to ask, and I explained what we had agreed upon.

“You’re a stateswoman of the first order,” he said, and I wished that Edwin, wherever he was, could hear that.

“That still leaves me to figure out an accounting system. The amount of detail this requires is appalling.”

“Let me help.”

Hearing his simple offer relaxed the tension I’d held in my back during the meeting. I took a moment to appreciate his hazel eyes alive with specks of contrasting colors, so sincere in his willingness to help. I felt the lifting of a burden.

After dinner I passed around the remaining chocolate daisies, and together Bernard and I designed a way to record estimates of the cost of materials, as well as enter deadlines and actual finishing dates. Then we
set to work on another account book to manage the rotations. Bernard devised formulas to divide the bonuses to establish each girl’s share on windows requiring one, two, and three teams, and partial teams.

After three hours, which would have been dreadful if it weren’t for Bernard, I slammed closed the second account book.

“Ugh! I’ve never had anything to do with this before. I’m being turned into an accountant when I want to be an artist!”

Bernard bit off a petal of the last chocolate. “She loves numbers.” He bit off another petal and shook his head slowly. “She loves them not.” Another bite. “She loves colors.” And then he nodded.

G
EORGE WAS BACK!

We hugged long and hard right there in the parlor. He followed me upstairs to my room, and I asked him how he was getting along. I was half afraid to hear the answer.

“I think about him constantly.” His voice was flat.

I couldn’t say that I did. Not constantly, a little less each week, though he regularly occupied my thoughts on weekend evenings at home, and on Sunday afternoons, when we would have gone on outings together.

“Do your parents think it was my fault?”

“They don’t know what to think. My mother is still hoping he’ll turn up.”

I knew it would be indelicate to ask, but I needed to know. And I needed him not to blame me.

“And you?”

He drew in a long nasal breath and straightened my rag rug with his foot.

“I cleared out his things at the settlement house today.” He reached into his pocket and laid a small velvet drawstring bag into my palm. “Open it.” Out rolled a narrow gold band with one small diamond. “It must have been meant for you.”

Edwin’s intention lay in my hand, a raised six-pronged solitaire, pure Charles Tiffany. Unanticipated sorrow threatened to overcome me. I felt ashamed of needing a memento to add to a collection that was maudlin at best, cursed at worst.

“Not exactly the Tiffany diamond, is it?” George said.

“More meaningful.” It meant I had not been purposely misled.

Some days I felt the mystery of his disappearance would never reveal itself, never seem natural, never right. Seeing the ring in my palm made this one of those days. Accepting it would bind me to him as a sea captain’s wife is bound, pledged to wait for the return of her beloved. I looked at it a moment longer, in case I needed to remember it some troubled night, slipped it into the bag, and folded George’s fingers around it.

“Give it to your mother,” I said softly.

I had no longing for diamond wedding rings. I had sold the last one. I had no longing for a wedding either. I would proceed solo in the performance of my life, and call it good.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

“Go to Nutley. Try to paint.”

“You’re not going to be here for New Year’s Eve? The big celebration of the consolidation of the boroughs at City Hall Park?”

He hesitated on the brink of agreeing, so I went on.

“Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx all one city, the second largest in the world. It fulfills Whitman’s prophecy of inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks. Fireworks, cannons, ferry whistles, bands. It will be just the kind of wild, happy event you love.”

“I don’t feel much like celebrating anything.”

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY
, Madison Square Park was splendid with every twig of the magnolia tree edged with lofty snow and illuminated by bright winter sunshine. The glory would melt within an hour. What good fortune to experience it.

“Look up! Look at that tree!” I said to an elderly lady picking her way carefully along the already slushy sidewalk.

She stopped and raised her head. Her etched wrinkles lifted in a brief bittersweet smile before she tipped her head down again to continue with the business of walking. I wondered why her smile was so brief. What had her year been like? A year passes like a revolving wheel, and when the spoke of January comes round again, it finds itself in a different place. And so with pain. It does not leave us where it found us.

I walked past a demolition project on the triangle of land created by Broadway’s diagonal path, and in a few minutes, I was at the door of Hank and Dudley’s studio overlooking the park.

“You bring your diamond cutting wheel?” Dudley asked.

“Of course. I have to earn my lunch.”

I had agreed to trim eight large sheets of milk glass to fit into a wooden framework to separate their two working areas.

In a modest way, their studio echoed Tiffany’s as a showplace of the artists’ sensibilities as well as being a work space. There were the typical patterned and solid drapes for portrait backgrounds, Chinese urns, a red lacquered Japanese screen, a vase of silk irises, a Dutch blue-and-white figured bowl of wax fruit, a model’s platform, and various styles of chairs to be used for portrait sittings of tycoons and their bejeweled wives pouring into New York for the high life.