Clara and Mr. Tiffany (21 page)

“You find marvelous significance in everything, don’t you?”

BERNARD’S BROTHER ALISTAIR
, very blond, very British, very athletic, an amateur naturalist visiting from England, was sharing Bernard’s room for the summer. One evening, he said with elocution that would please Queen Victoria, “Since we both appear to be free this evening, and Bernard is with his fiancée, would you care for a bit of company on a spin up Riverside Drive?”

A jolt went up my spine. Fiancée?
Fiancée?
I felt disoriented, as one feels the moment after a cataclysm, but it was devoid of any foundation. A couple of cycling outings did not signify any claim.

I recovered my composure enough to say, “That would be lovely,” although what my baser nature wanted to say was, “How dare he keep that little tidbit of information a secret!”

We rode uptown all the way to Grant’s Tomb, where thousands of New Yorkers on wheels were rolling along gaily, and the only thing that wobbled was my mind, jarred by the collapse of the illusion I had naïvely believed. The shimmering lights on the other shore reflected in the river like shards of golden glass tumbling in the minute turn of a kaleidoscope to reveal an entirely different picture.

While we rested by the river, Alistair asked me if I would like to go with him on a specimen-gathering expedition in the country by bicycle. He collected moths and butterflies and wildflowers, he said.

“Where would we go?”

“Bronxville. A beautiful place near Yonkers. We can put our bicycles on the train, and ride once we get there.”

A timid Victorian would say no, politely. I said yes, blithely.

ON SUNDAY MORNING
, Alistair Booth, decked out in a sportsman’s brown shirt, knickerbockers, felt hat, and boots, oiled both of our bicycles and checked the tires. Bernard had not been at breakfast and was
nowhere in sight. Two butterfly nets stuck out of Alistair’s knapsack, and collecting apparatus was strapped to his bicycle. We were off to Grand Central Depot, and forty minutes on the train brought us to the Bronxville station.

Alistair knew every rock and rut in the track. Excruciating hills alternated with thrilling, breezy descents. The narrow path was a challenge for me, with high grass and daisies on both sides. Branches sprang back at me when Alistair passed them, the names of which he reeled off, inspired.

Sunlight dappled the wild grapevine and laurel. Birds piped to each other in friendly jubilation. The woods and the frequent glimpses of the valley of the Hudson with the blue hills beyond lifted me to a state of grace, at least with nature.

Across a high meadow, goldenrod grew in a beautiful yellow swath. At our approach, the blossoms took flight.

“Butterflies!” I cried. “I thought they were flowers.”

“This is what we came for. They’re taxiles skippers.”

He leapt off his wheel, took out his collecting jars, and tossed me a butterfly net. “See what you can catch.”

Never had I seen so many yellow butterflies all in one place. They flew in a dazzling yellow cloud, and I danced in its center. They circled around one another, touched in brief midair flirtations, and darted their separate ways only to repeat the happy ritual a few seconds later. We bounded this way and that, and I swung the net with abandon, not caring whether I caught one or not. If I did by chance, I flung the net upward to send it soaring.

“Don’t do that. When you get one, bring it to me.”

He captured dozens of them and released them into a large jar with airholes. One got away in the process, and I was glad. The rest flapped in a frenzy, beating themselves against the glass. I mourned their imminent death, singing to myself, “All too brief lasts earthly joy.” Stunned, they lay still a moment, and I could see their beauty—variegated yellow and gold with darker gold on the edges of their wings. Among them was a solitary powder-blue one with black speckles, miraculous and fragile.

“That’s a summer azure,” he said.

How did they know the right moment to emerge from their cocoons?
I imagined the imperceptible din of the cracked cocoon, like a clap of thunder to them, the first threadlike leg feeling its way into a vast, airy world, a faceted eye bewildered by brightness, color, and incomprehensible shapes.

“What will you do with them?”

“Pin them onto a board and seal them with glass to preserve them.”

“Impale them? You murder them to study them?”

“How else?”

It was criminal to catch these beauties aloft in their prime of life and suffocate them, and I hated him for it.

He crept, he hunched, he pounced, and shouted, “I’ve got one! At last! A rare red admiral.
Vanessa atalanta
. I’ve lusted after one of these for years. This one alone would have been worth the trip!”

“The trip today?”

“From England.”

Trapped in a jar by itself, it flaunted its exquisite beauty—dark brown to black velvet wings decorated with a bright vermilion band on each of the four wing sections, and dazzling white patches like dollops of paint, the left wing exactly matching the right. Such care God took to design so dramatic a creature, and yet so restrained He was, not to let humans see it often. Maybe He was offering a lesson about the value of the uncommon. In that moment, I glimpsed how the sheer power of loveliness and rarity could drive the craving to possess. I thought Mr. Tiffany would understand that too. Beauty lust.

AT MY DESK
the next day, the cloud of yellow butterflies rose off the goldenrod in my mind’s eye. How translucent they had looked with the light passing through their wings like it does through opalescent glass. I relegated Alistair, the killer, to the recesses of my mind, and began to draw the butterflies from memory, guessing their shapes. It was aimless, so I went about my other work, but the image of them persisted. I added more, thinking that butterflies might just be my first original motif.

That evening, I asked Alistair if I could see them. They had all died in a heap in the bottom of the jar. Some were already pinned to a corkboard. Gently, he took one out of a humidifying box, where its wings
had softened enough for him to get it to relax and stay open, but when he plunged a pin into its tiny head and I heard a soft pop, I couldn’t stand it and had to leave.

In bed that night, an idea flew across my hazy consciousness. Once it landed, I pounced on it as surely as Mr. Butterfly Booth had captured the red admiral. It was the secret that Mr. Tiffany and I had agreed to keep until the right time.

The lampshades of Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company were single pieces of blown or molded glass, but the dome covering the baptismal font for the chapel at the Chicago Fair had been made of hundreds of opaque glass pieces set with lead cames. A small dome constructed in that manner but using transparent and opalescent glass and placed over a light source would transmit a soft light. A lampshade could be a three-dimensional, wraparound leaded-glass window. A hundred yellow butterflies cut and placed as if in joyous flight over a sky-blue dome would revolutionize Tiffany lamp making. I could hardly wait for morning. The right moment for the emergence of our secret idea had come.

No. Not quite. I had to work out the concept first so he could envision what I had in mind. When I had confronted him before I left with Edwin, Mr. Tiffany hadn’t thought I was indispensable because I only executed his or someone else’s paintings. Any good selector could do that. I needed to contribute something unique and expressive of me, of what excited me, in order to become invaluable. That meant designing from the very inception of a project something he would love as much as he loved his own work.

I had to have a domelike form, wooden or plaster, to support the glass pieces. After some struggle behind my closed studio doors the next day, I fashioned a rough, shallow dome, wider than its height, in muslin stretched over wire.

I looked up, and Frank was peeking in my studio, bucket and rag in hand, to clean my window even though he had already done it once this week. He pointed to the muslin-and-wire form and cocked his head in puzzlement. A longing to tell him came over me, knowing my secret would be safe with him. He raised his hands over his head as though he was putting on a wide hat. I shook my head no, pointed to the hanging lightbulb, and made motions of bringing it down onto the table. I raised
the muslin form over it. He opened his mouth wide, and I thought a sound would come out, but he just nodded vigorously, grabbed a pencil from my desk, and wrote “lamp hat.” I nodded back at him, and he raised his shoulders in quick little jerks. I put my finger to my lips in a gesture indicating a secret, and he did the same. Delight spread all over his face that he knew something others didn’t.

That evening I entered the room that Alistair, Mr. Butterfly Booth, shared with Bernard, Mr. Book Booth, and asked Alistair if he could mount some yellow butterflies with wings closed and some in attitudes of flight, with wings at various angles.

“It’s not the scientific way. The scientific way is fully open.”

“I’m not asking you to be scientific. I’m asking you to be artistic.”

“It will ruin some of the butterflies.”

“Then go and get more! Please?”

Alistair gave Bernard a quick, irritated look.

“Do it for her,” Bernard said.

“Can’t you use a book?”

He showed me a beautiful book with color plates.

“I’ll use the book
and
the butterflies. It’s best to work directly from nature. This is important. It just might open up a whole new art form. You wouldn’t want to be the one who halted the development of art, would you?”

“Do it,” Bernard commanded.

Grumbling, Alistair set to work.

BACK IN THE STUDIO
with Alistair’s collection before me, I wrapped stiff paper around the muslin-and-wire form, cut gussets, and stapled it to fit over the muslin shape. On the paper, I sectioned off what would be one-third of the shade, cut it away from the rest, and laid it flat. A fan shape resulted, much wider at the bottom than the top. Stretching out one threadlike appendage into the bigger world of designing, I drew thirty butterflies on the fan, soaring up and to the left as though a breeze were carrying them aloft. I drew lead lines around them and in the sky, which would be light blue at the bottom rim, becoming darker at the top, with a few blushes of pinkish white for clouds.

I showed Alistair’s butterfly case to Lillian Palmié and Miss Stoney, and asked them to look in our bins for some beautiful yellow glass with markings suggestive of the subtle variation of color on the wings.

“What are you going to do for a base?” Miss Stoney asked, skepticism sharpening her voice.

A simple blown vase for the oil wouldn’t add much. I needed this to be so spectacular that Mr. Tiffany would shout to have it made.

“A base could be made in mosaics,” I said on impulse. “It could depict the meadow.” Mr. Tiffany had used mosaics vertically on columns in the chapel. Joe Briggs could tell me how to get mosaics to adhere to an urn shape tapering to a bullet point at the bottom to hold the oil. Its height and slenderness would make it more elegant than the bulbous oil canisters of blown lamps. I sketched it as I imagined.

On our outing, the butterflies had risen above a field of goldenrod, but those blossoms were too spiky to be made in mosaic. The perfect flower would be the evening primrose, the creamy yellow variety, like those edging the neighbor’s field on our road in Tallmadge, Ohio. Their flat petals would be easy to cut and would echo the shapes and colors of the butterflies. I went to the reference library on the second floor and found a shelf full of books of flower drawings but no primroses. And the season had passed.

What to do? Just describe it? This was beyond any minimal designing I had done on windows, so it was a risk. I wasn’t considered a designer like Agnes was, but nobody told me I couldn’t become one. Even a dandelion has aspirations of being a peony in full purple storm. On my desk I caught sight of the dollop of glass Tom Manderson had given me. Trust, he had said. I put it in my pocket for good luck.

With excitement pulsing in my temples, I loaded onto a cart the wire-and-muslin shade form, my fan-shaped drawing watercolored by Alice, Alistair’s glass-covered specimen tray, and several pieces of opalescent yellow and amber glass. It was important that Mr. Tiffany see everything at once. I checked my appearance in a mirror and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear.

Passing the business office on the way, I found Mr. Tiffany sitting at Mr. Mitchell’s desk with an electric fan blowing on him, making his hair move like tall grass in the wind.

“Do you have a few minutes?” I asked.

“Yes. Come in. I can’t work in this humidity.”

I spread everything out. “Do you remember years ago when you were working on the drawings for the chapel? I looked at the cover of the baptismal font and imagined a smaller version in translucent glass as a lampshade. It was to be our secret until the right time.”

He nodded and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

“Isn’t it inevitable that you should make leaded-glass lampshades, since you are as much in love with light as you are with color?”

“I am.”

I took that as encouragement to go on. “I’ve been thinking how lovely it would be to wrap a window of yellow butterflies around a sun—I mean a light source.”

He studied Alistair’s butterflies and my drawing. “It just might be possible. Go ahead and work on it a little farther.”

“I can’t do much more without having a clay mold to work on.”

“You have no experience in clay. I’ll send Giuseppe Baratta in the plaster room to make a cast to your specifications.”

Mr. Mitchell came in.

“Look here, Mitch. A leaded-glass lampshade. Not a wall sconce. This one with butterflies, but it could just as well be flowers or foliage.”

“An interesting notion,” Mr. Mitchell said, “but riddled with construction problems.”

“I realize the shape of the shade is clumsy,” I said.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Mr. Tiffany said. “Most new ideas start with something clumsy.”