Clara and Mr. Tiffany (24 page)

“There is absolutely nothing like this that I’ve seen in the decorative arts,” Agnes said. Her eyes shone, giving me a rush of satisfaction.

THE TIFFANY WEEK ENDED
Thursdays at five-fifteen, when all the accounts had to be collected for reconciliation—the week’s work detailed and recorded, the cost of time and materials figured, and the payroll determined as well, for submission first thing on Fridays. On Thursday afternoons, three o’clock arrived to throw cold water on whatever project I was working on. With dampened spirit, I had to break away, armed with my clipboard, to gather the week’s charges from other departments.

In the metal room I was stopped by Alex, the foreman, with a pencil behind his ear and some papers covered with labored figures.

“I thought I’d have to hunt you down. Got anything against me this week?” he said in the slang of the metal room, a way of asking if his department owed my department any money.

“Yes, three dollars and a half for lamp design.”

He recorded it mournfully, and I said, “Got anything against me?”

“Only fifty cents.”

“What for?”

“Aciding on window 7378.”

“But my department is doing all the aciding on that number.”

“Well, my man mixes the acid.”

“Oh, all right.” I borrowed his pencil to make a note of it, and hurried on to the elevator.

As I rang the bell, he called after me, “You forgot to give me back my pencil.”

Pencil returned, we each went our separate ways to make out our puny bills against each other.

After dinner, with my accounting sheets spread out on the dining table, I recounted this trifling routine to Bernard while I laboriously entered the amounts and figured the receipts and expenditures.

“What an exorbitant amount of time this accounting takes,” I said.

“There are certainly more expedient ways for the departments to tally the charges,” he said.

“I’m sure there are, but this one is entrenched, and as a result, I’m
forced to do double duty. I refuse to let go of the designing, but I almost regret that I’m good at managing production. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have to fiddle around with numbers every week.”

“Regret it enough to hide it?” Bernard asked.

“No. It’s just that it’s a mixed blessing. What I want to do and what I have to do are always fighting each other like alley cats.”

“But you love it all the same, don’t you?” He gave me a penetrating look that nearly unnerved me.

“Yes. I love it all the same.”

MR. TIFFANY HAD SAID
he wanted a clock, so I took the risk to design one, determined that he would get a simple one before the month was out. I thought how smooth and lustrous the smaller mother-of-pearl pieces were, so I went to the purchasing agent and asked him to get five hundred flat-backed mother-of-pearl beads, each about a quarter of an inch in diameter.

The next morning I spent a couple of hours way downtown on Maiden Lane, a narrow street south of the Brooklyn Bridge near the docks where the silversmiths and clockmakers had their dark little workshops. One German fellow with curly gray muttonchops had several clock mechanisms, some with short pendulums, ready to be mounted into cases, and one already in a wooden case with a beveled glass door about eight inches high.

“How much for one of these?” I asked, pointing to the mechanisms.

“Come back three days. I put it in.”

“No. I don’t want it in.”

“No case?” His thick eyebrows came together in a hedge of puzzlement.

“That’s right. No case.”

He scowled. “No. I don’t sell. Only finished clocks in boxes.”

Pride in his workmanship. I understood that.

“How about if I buy that one in the case now, and two more without the cases?”

He squinted at me as though trying to figure me out, but need overcame his suspicions, and he said eagerly, “Yes. Now I sell.”

He called his wife, who came out from the back room in her carpet slippers, chewing. In loud, fast German, he directed her to start wrapping the pieces in newspaper, and he hastened to add up the price, all the time scurrying about as if he wanted to be done with this irrational woman.

Back in the studio I found some rectangular pieces of opalescent glass in swirls of green and blue for panels to be bordered by rows of mother-of-pearl beads. I was on my way to please Mr. Tiffany with clocks.

“Q, R, S, T, U. WHAT COMES NEXT?
” George asked at dinner.

“W,” I said, just to be contrary.

“Nooo. Who started the Staten Island Ferry?” George asked.

“Mr. Staten,” Alice answered, picking up my cue.

“Wrong again.”

“Who lives in Hyde Park?”

“Edward Hyde,” Francie replied. “Dr. Jekyll’s evil side.”

“Very wrong.”

“Then Queen Victoria,” Bernard said. “Actually, it’s a bit of a jaunt away.”

“Such as she is to the Irish, refusing us home rule,” Merry muttered.

“Wrong Hyde Park,” George said. “What ought to be the most comfortable room in a house?”

“The loo,” Bernard said.

Mrs. Hackley hiccuped her disapproval of saying that vile word at the dinner table.

“The bedroom,” I suggested quickly to stop her from chastising him.

“Clara’s right. So don’t you get it?”

“No. We don’t get it because we’re all bloomin’ eejits,” Merry said. “I have a house full of ’em. Enough to send a decent landlady like me to an early grave. Ignore ’im and maybe he’ll go away.”

“I think you’d better tell them, George,” Hank said.

“Have you figured it out?”

“Simple,” Hank said. “
V
comes after
U
and stands for Vanderbilt,
‘the Commodore’ Cornelius Vanderbilt, who started ferrying people from Staten Island to Manhattan in a secondhand sailboat when he was a boy, built up a shipping line, then a rail line, and became the richest man on the continent. His grandson Frederick recently purchased an estate on the Hudson called Hyde Park only to tear it down and rebuild it, and hired our own George Waldo to decorate the most comfortable room in the mansion, Vanderbilt’s bedroom.”

“You’re right, comrade!” cried George. “Bravo!”

“How did you make it happen?” asked Dudley.

“When I went to the settlement house to get Edwin’s things, I stopped in at Justus Schwab’s saloon, a place he frequented. Seedy and very Lower East Side. A bohemian enclave transported from the cafés of Eastern Europe. I talked to immigrant Jewish intellectuals, artists, labor sympathizers, socialists, journalists, and asked them all if they knew or had seen Edwin. Several people knew him, but no one had seen him. One man said that Edwin had made their lives his lifework.”

Scorched dry I was, instantly, by emptiness and irony. His passion for helping others made him a rare human being, and I loved him for it enough to think I could give up the work I love, but as it happened, he was the one who forfeited his lifework, allowing me to keep mine. Was that fair? Was that right? Oh, to be at peace, whatever floated by.

“Mostly I listened,” George went on. “I didn’t understand a lot of it. Quarrels flared up in Yiddish, Russian, German, all at once. Emma Goldman was haranguing. I went back several times to hear arguments about radical reform movements, anarchists, Yiddish theater, Gorky, Zola, Tolstoy, even Whitman. I began to understand why Edwin liked living there.”

“If he could stand the smells,” Mrs. Hackley said.

In defense of Edwin, I was annoyed at her for having to say that.

“I noticed uptown gentlemen out for adventure in the slums,” George continued. “Social tourists, you might call them, at odds with their class. There are even self-styled guides, protectors, and interpreters to squire these fellows around to the cafés where things are happening. I made connections at Schwab’s with a few of the uptown interlopers. One of them invited me to the Century Club, where I happened to be introduced
to a Monsieur Glaenzer, one of the decorators on the Vanderbilt estate operating out of a warehouse near here. He offered me a post, and I accepted it on the spot.”

“Nimble, my boy,” Hank said, holding up his glass. “What a scoop! A new chapter in the tale of bohemia turning outsiders into insiders. It’s worth an article. ‘Products of a culture of bland material comforts seek intense experience with the nation’s fiery newcomers.’ ”

“What was it called? Schwab’s? I want to go there,” I said. “I can take my wheel.”

“Be reasonable, Clara. If George couldn’t find Edwin, you certainly can’t,” Bernard said.

“That’s not why I want to go. I meant that I want to hear Emma Goldman.”

“That anarchist?” Bernard scoffed. “Not without a protector.”

Calm as a sea horse, I said, “Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud, Bernard. She’s a woman acting on her opinions. That’s why I want to hear her.”

I
T HAD SEEMED NO GREAT MATTER THAT EDWIN HADN’T SEEN THE
dragonfly at Lake Geneva dazzle me with its gorgeous rainbow wings, but now I wished he had. He’d been tutoring me in concern for the less fortunate, and I had wanted to tutor him in matters of beauty. A person ought to have a counterbalance to downward thought. Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life. It would have done him some good.

I set my clock aside and began to draw the dragonfly as I remembered it. The wings were long and narrow, two on a side. Mr. Nash’s iridescent glass would be perfect, glistening in emerald green, turquoise, cobalt, and purple.

Like sea horses, dragonflies were remnants of an ancient epoch when pigs were dinosaurs without brains enough to step around tar pits. What a fecund, swampy world dragonflies saw below them, flashing their brief warnings at dinosaurs too dull to notice their call to escape while they could.

In my drawing, I exaggerated the size of the eyes. I wanted them to glow red-orange like the sun descending on the lake that last happy evening we had together. Molten glass could be dripped into half-spherical molds, or the eyes could be beads. If I used beads, I could have the hole in the bead facing out so a pinpoint of light would shine through. Gracious, what a lark this was!

Then I was stumped. I didn’t know what the body was like. I rushed downstairs to the library and bumped into Mr. Belknap coming through the doorway carrying ecclesiastical textile designs.

“Why such a hurry?” he asked.

“Ideas make me hurry.”

He was too curious to go on his way. I found a book on insects, which had precise entomological drawings of different sorts of dragonflies.
Libellula lydia
. What a lovely name.
Belle
, French for beautiful.
Lydia
. Feminine. A good omen. Behind the roundish head, the body and tail consisted of seven tapered sections. Each one would have to be a separate piece of glass, with the end one no bigger than a pencil eraser.

“The tails would be lovely in emerald, wouldn’t they? For a lamp.”

“Ah. Indeed,” Mr. Belknap said.

“Do you find them strange-looking, with a north-south axis and an east-west axis?” I asked.

“No. They’re beautifully exotic. Dragonflies are often used as a motif in the Aesthetic Movement.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“Why?”

“I would rather it be seen as my own devising.”

“Oh, you’ll do something original with them. I’m sure of that.”

“How can I get the veins in the wings? I want the look of black lace.”

“You wouldn’t want it painted on?”

“Too time-consuming. Mr. Mitchell would have a mortal fit. He’s already complained about the labor cost on the butterfly lamp. I’m afraid if this one is that expensive again, he’ll kill it. Or Mr. Platt will, since he’s the moneybags. And if they kill this idea, what does that do to the next idea and the next? Until I get the lamps established as a vital part of the business, it’s important that each one is approved and goes into production.”

“These lamps mean that much to you?”

“They mean the world to me. I conceived them. They’re my own expression. I can go anywhere with them. Insects, flowers, fruit, vines, birds. Maybe even landscapes. The possibilities are endless.”

“And too expensive. That’s not my opinion. It’s Mr. Platt’s.”

“You mean Mr. Scrooge’s,” I whispered. “Miss Stoney told me his first name is Ebenezer. Is that true?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Anyone whose real name is Ebenezer would do well not to aspire to financial occupations.”

“Out of kindness, we don’t use his first name.”

“It still leaves me on edge. I have to make this dragonfly lamp more exquisite and more individual than any blown shade, more art than craft. It’s got to have a place in Mr. Tiffany’s heart so he’ll circumvent the tight fists of Platt, Mitchell, and Company.”

Mr. Belknap fidgeted with his thumbnail. “I hate to be the one to tell you. At Mr. Mitchell’s suggestion, the men’s department has begun to develop leaded-glass shades in simpler geometric designs.”

A cannonball landed on my chest.

“No! The idea was mine! The process is mine! Mine even more than Mr. Tiffany’s.”