Clara and Mr. Tiffany (30 page)

The morning after the critique of my clock, he laid a jewel of chipped red glass by my hand as I was drawing, and spelled R-U-B-Y
F-O-R Y-O-U. With gestures of hammering, he indicated that he had chipped it himself.

For once, I was the one mute.

We weren’t so different. His yearning for human connection was as strong as mine. I imagined him observing the world keenly each day and distilling it at night to its quintessence, simple enough that I could grasp it from his fingers the next morning.

At that moment it dawned on me. Frank’s restrained simplicity was what would make my clock elegant.

T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U.

“
W
HAT THAT BOY NEEDS IS COD-LIVER OIL
,”
MRS. HACKLEY
declared with self-appointed authority, standing wide-legged on the porch, knuckles pressed into her pillowy hips. “A teaspoonful every three hours.”

“It can’t hurt,” Dr. Griggs said diplomatically as he and I hurried next door.

George lay on his narrow bed in a fit of coughing with Dudley bent over him holding a glass of water. George managed to drink a little, which helped for a few minutes, and then the coughing started again.

“Get onto your stomach,” Dr. Griggs said. “Hang your head over the side. Cough it out.”

A horrendous seizure of coughing followed, which left him so weak he couldn’t right himself. Dudley helped him onto his back, and George fell asleep immediately. Dr. Griggs said he would bring him some medicine in the morning and then left, but I stayed for a couple of hours, during which another episode happened. Dudley sent me home and said he would stay the night and sleep on some cushions on the model’s platform.

After work the next day, I found a note from George waiting for me.

It wasn’t far, only a block past Gramercy Park, but why the secrecy? Dudley not being home to ask, I went there immediately.

The townhouse had a shiny red door. Inside, a marble floor, a potted palm, a stairway, and two doors on the ground floor, numbers one and two. I knocked at number two. The door opened.

“Mr. Belknap!”

Shock rippled through me.

In his shirtsleeves. No eyebrows. No Brilliantine. He hadn’t been at work today.

“I was given this address. Is there a George Waldo here?”

He stepped back from the doorway. “Come in.” A solemn voice, and such a look. Worry swam in his eyes. Minute crow’s-feet formed, froze in position, and slowly dissolved in resignation. “He’s here.”

In a bedroom of butter-yellow walls and mint-green curtains, George was dozing comfortably against a pile of pillows. Blooming jasmine plants in blue ceramic pots sat on tables on both sides of him.

“His studio is no place for him now,” Mr. Belknap explained. “He’s too weak to take care of himself, and Dudley has an important portrait sitting to do this week.”

“Then you know Dudley too?”

“Yes, Clara. All that you see and all that you imagine is true. I would ask you never to mention it or allude to it in any way.”

“Of course,” I murmured.

Nothing prepared me for this connection, yet, once grasped, it didn’t seem unnatural.

He pulled up the pale yellow quilt that had fallen awry, and brushed George’s hair back with a loving gesture. “He asked for you, and I couldn’t deny him.”

Our voices woke him enough for him to say, “Clara, you came. To give me last rites?”

“Being sick gives you no cause to be ridiculous.”

“
Au contraire, madame
. It gives me every right.”

Mr. Belknap spooned broth into George’s mouth, adeptly, comfortably, as a woman would feed a young child, resuming what he had apparently been doing earlier. What a marvel of caring he was. What a shame
that he was forced to constrain it. I felt privileged to see the authentic Mr. Belknap.

He was always meticulous about his appearance, but not today. Without his exact center part oiled in place, his silky blond hair falling forward in straight wisps over his forehead had a young boy’s innocence. I saw how fine-looking he was in his natural self, what well-suited features he had—narrow, straight nose, small mouth, and almost invisible blond eyebrows. I watched him take tender care of George, and it was beautiful. He was his own man, and there was something brave and noble and wholly mysterious in that.

All this time that I’d known George and Hank and Dudley, I’d never pursued them in my imagination into their rooms, never thought beyond the joy they took in one another’s company as comrades, and the happiness they rendered to me. I’d kept myself from imagining them taking joy in touch, but now I wished it for them.

Mr. Belknap insisted that I sit next to the bed. I remarked on the lovely jasmine.

“A scent strong enough to make a prizefighter swoon,” George said.

“I ran out this morning to the flower shop around the corner because my mother used to drink jasmine tea when she had a cough.” Mr. Belknap shrugged. “I thought smelling them might have the same effect.”

“You’re missing your dinner hour, Clara,” George said.

“Dudley is coming any minute to relieve me,” Mr. Belknap said. “Might I take you to dinner at the National Arts Club after he arrives?”

“You’re a member? I’d love to. I’ve always wanted to see the inside.”

WHEN DUDLEY ARRIVED
he was carrying his zither, intending to strum some southern lullabies to help George sleep, and a letter from Hank, mailed in Paris.

“Read it,” George said. “It might be entertaining.”

George closed his eyes and nestled deeper into the pillows. “There you have it, Clara. Our blithe comet trailing streaks of Continental grandeur.”

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED
, Dr. Griggs checked on George every evening, and feared he was heading toward pneumonia. Henry, Dudley, and I took shifts and tried to make him comfortable. George wasn’t an easy patient. Once when Dudley and I were changing his bed with him in it, George said, “Don’t roll me like a log, Dud. You’re not a lumberjack.”

“Certainly nurses can do this better,” I grumbled. “Maybe it’s time for you to be in the hospital.”

“No! Hospitals smell like chemical plants. I’d rather die. People can’t come to see me there.”

“What are you thinking, that you’ll be on exhibit like one of Barnum’s freaks?” Dudley said.

We were all getting worn out. I went home one Friday night after the dinner hour, and Bernard offered to take me to the Oyster House on Fourth Avenue, but I said no and went straight to bed. In the morning, George seemed worse. I waited till nine o’clock for Henry to get up. Fatigue made him oversleep. He said he would get me some breakfast right away, but Dr. Griggs came and insisted on George being in a hospital. After much persuasion and pouting, George was willing to go, and Dr. Griggs left to make arrangements.

I felt weak from hunger, having eaten only crackers and cheese and a glass of wine at George’s bedside the night before. Henry’s dainty preparations for breakfast made my anticipation sink. He laid out orange
slices in a scalloped pattern on the plate, poured coffee from a silver coffeepot, and brought in the rolls that had been heating in the kitchen. Only one for each of us! I bit into mine without waiting for him. He set up a chafing dish at his end of the long dining room table, broke four eggs and scrambled them, and served me the larger half.

His linen was crisp, his china flowery with a gilt edge. The stemware for water was Favrile glass in iridescent pink from one angle, pale gold from another, shaped like tulips.

“The glasses are exquisite.”

I knew from the showroom that similar goblets cost twenty-five dollars a dozen. Almost my week’s wage. I picked mine up and set it down with concentration.

“Are they goblets or are they tulips?” Henry asked.

“Tulips,” I said, knowing he wanted the other answer. I held my glass aloft. “I am drinking the nectar of a flower.”

“You’re catching on to the scampishness of the new idiom, more than Louis has. I don’t believe he’s aware that the new sensibility of presenting one thing as another extends beyond Art Nouveau. It’s a duplicity more likely appreciated by those living a duplicity. There’s not a name for it yet, though I’m sure one will emerge that will suggest its playfulness.”

“And you see it?”

“I’m living it, the ambiguity of a double life. Because Louis is innocent of the wit in duplicity, his products are even more enjoyable to those who know that there’s more going on than meets the eye.”

“In my lamps as well?”

“Especially in your lamps.”

I took a sip of water, pleased to be a participant in this new idiom.

“Have you ever seen Loïe Fuller dance?” he asked. “Swinging yards of fabric so it looks like enormous petals or wings that dwarf her?”

“Yes. She’s quite astonishing.”

“Is she a hibiscus or a dancer? An exotic butterfly or a dancer? Will your wisteria lamp be a vine or an electrolier?”

“This opens up an entirely new way of enjoying things.”

“A less serious way. A sportive way.”

“You are initiating me into an inner circle.”

He raised his glass in acknowledgment that I was understanding.

“These tulip goblets,” I said. “Do you know if Tom Manderson made them?”

“He could have. The company line is that Tiffany made them.”

“Like the windows and mosaics and wallpaper and vases and furniture and rugs and tapestries and fabric and clocks, even buttons, and now probably my lamps. Don’t you find that absurd, that people would think a single human being could design all those things, much less make them?”

He pushed out his lips. “He had something to do with everything. They’re all his aesthetic.”

“But not necessarily his design.”

“Some of the window designs bear signatures other than his. Mr. Wilson and Miss Northrop sometimes get publicly recognized now.”

“Why not a lamp designer?”

He hesitated. “I suppose because the public thinks windows are a higher art than lamps.”

“They’re flat! Lamps are sculptural, infinitely more difficult.”

“Windows are more like paintings, and so they’re valued more. Using the Tiffany name on them strengthens his position in the marketplace, his bid for a place in the history of art. I’m not defending that, though. It also strengthens the sales of your lamps.”