Clara and Mr. Tiffany (36 page)

“Quite! I’m overjoyed.”

I knew now that I had made the right decision.

After he left, I cleared off my desk to make a chart of assignments, and found a neglected piece of mail. It was a request that I give a talk on women’s work at Tiffany Studios before the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Albany and Boston. I was flattered and felt obligated to do my bit for women in the arts. Although I hardly needed one more thing to think about with all these orders, I dashed off an acceptance.

Mr. Tiffany came in with his hands full, sat on the little kitchen chair, and asked how I was feeling.

“Ecstatic.”

“Thought so. Here’s something else that will make you happy.”

From underneath his papers he pulled out a leather presentation folder tooled with the words
EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, PARIS, FRANCE, 1900
.

“The French. They think we’re happy to wait two years before they get around to mailing out the awards,” he said.

I opened it. The certificate, which was called a
diplôme
, gave my name, the name of the award, and the identification of
Une lampe avec le motif d’un insecte en forme de dragon
.

I chuckled. “There’s a world of difference between a dragon and a dragonfly.”

In the lower-right corner was an embossed bronze medallion. “It’s quite impressive,” I said, an octave above my normal voice.

He pulled out of his pocket a hinged box and laid it in front of me to open. It was the bronze medal itself, nameless except for
TIFFANY GLASS AND DECORATING COMPANY
.

“I wanted you to see it, but I’d like to use it in a display of all the medals in the showroom. Just for a while.”

I closed the box to show it was all right with me, and immediately seized the opportunity to tell him my idea for the cobweb shade over a narcissus mosaic base. I showed him the preliminary drawings and spun out a few threads of description leading up to the coup de grâce which I’d learned from Alice at Corona: “They wouldn’t be geometrically circular.
They’d be distorted to show that they were being blown by a breeze.”

“I like it. I like it. The spontaneity and activity of nature.”

The web was doing its work.

“If you use the palest yellow ocher crackle glass with slight fissures below the surface, it would simulate the fine sections of the webs between the leading, as well as reflect ambient light.”

“Then are you caught?”

“Like the proverbial fly. You know that crackle glass would catch the early-morning light just like the spiderwebs do in my garden at the Briars. There are usually some on the lilacs. I’ll let you know when they’re in bloom. You must come see them.”

He had invited me before, but for some reason, maybe the bronze medal, this time I thought he meant it.

I WAS TURNING
in a circle in my bedroom late that afternoon with the certificate in my hand, wondering where to put it, when Merry came down the hall carrying curtains. She peeked in.

“Practicing a new waltz step?”

I showed it to her. She looked properly impressed.

“Do you want a nail?”

“What for?”

“Why, to frame the thing and hang it on the wall.”

“I wouldn’t defile your wall. I’ll just keep it in a drawer, and when someone doesn’t think much of me, I’ll haul it out and brandish it. And when I’m old and need to convince myself that my being here mattered, I’ll take it out and wonder what it was for.”

“Being here? In my boardinghouse? Of course it matters. I get fifty-five dollars a month from you.”

“Being here on earth, Merry.”

“Oh, Lordy. Don’t you go getting philosophical on me. You’ll be just like Francie if you don’t watch out. Married to Plato, she is. Be wide o’that, or you’ll be an old maid the likes of her.”

We eyed each other head to toe and howled. We were all old maids.

…

MR. TIFFANY WAS GOOD
for his word, and asked me to come to the Briars on Sunday. He didn’t ask anyone else. The visit would be with me alone. I put on my sky-blue poplin, which had been my wedding dress, lo, a dozen years ago, and was happy that it still fit my forty-year-old figure. It was spring at last, and I wanted to breathe spring, see and smell spring, and look like spring. Outside my window, the trees between the stoops were jubilant, dressed in the pigment called Permanent Green Light, but the oil-paint color charts had it all wrong. It wasn’t permanent. It was all too brief.

It was pleasurable brushing my hair at my window and looking out on those violet morning shadows I loved. The sparrows of Irving Place were preening too, and gossiping pianissimo, and hopping about with an air of importance. Distant medleys of the city blended into a pleasant humming, punctuated at intervals by the Third Avenue elevated rumbling in a crescendo, grinding its brakes shrilly for the Eighteenth Street station, expelling its
pfft
of steam, then starting up again and fading away in a diminuendo.

I parted my hair carefully, wound my chignon, fluffed up the bow on my straw boater, and set off on foot for the el train going across the Brooklyn Bridge, changed to the Long Island Rail Way there, and got off at the Oyster Bay station. Mr. Tiffany had sent his driver to pick me up in his Rambler Runabout. What a thrill to speed along the road on the high red leather seat, holding my hat against the breeze, hearing the motor purr like a tiger, and seeing the countryside whiz by.

The house overlooked Oyster Bay and was surrounded by birches, chestnuts, and oaks, and behind them, hemlocks and pines. A white shingle neo-Colonial, the house itself wasn’t palatial or formidable like his Seventy-second Street mansion, though certainly comfortable. Naturally, for him, it had a tall clock tower, evidence of his preoccupation with height and his imperative punctuality. As I approached, it struck the quarter hour with a resounding peal. Woe be to the son or daughter who was not at the breakfast table before seven bells.

A wide wooden porch wrapped around the house, irises edged a lily
pond, and wisteria cascaded from a pergola. Mr. Tiffany was sitting on a driftwood chair on the lawn, painting his garden while wearing—unbelievably!—a white silk pongee suit with, yes, a gardenia in his buttonhole. Except for a big floppy-eared dog dozing at his feet, he was alone. He set down his brush as soon as he saw me, and was full of apologies that his wife was feeling poorly and wouldn’t be able to come out to welcome me, and the twins were visiting their aunt. Instead, his youngest daughter, Dorothy, “however small,” as she had said, came outside to take me on a tour of the garden.

“Fog comes across the water,” Mr. Tiffany said, “so I like to have a palette of cool, dusky colors like those hollyhocks, foxgloves, hydrangeas, and lilacs against the gray air.”

“Do you do any of the planting?”

“A couple times a year I get on my hands and knees for an hour with the gardeners. Then I go wash. I never do the pruning. It hurts too much. I like the creepers to meander. They give a sense of unity to everything. Permitted disorder is intriguingly beautiful. In gardens, I mean, not in people.” He glanced down at his daughter affectionately.

“Miss Dorothy, help me find a spiderweb in the lilacs,” I said.

Before long, she cried out, “Here’s one!”

We traced the filaments to see how they connected one bush to another.

“How did he get from here to there if he doesn’t have wings?” she asked.

“It’s a mystery, like the Brooklyn Bridge,” I said. “Maybe she launched herself on a breeze and hoped for the best.”

“Maybe he tried and tried and fell to the ground but climbed back up and kept at it until he succeeded,” Mr. Tiffany said, delivering a lesson.

I breathed the fragrance of lilac and watched the pendulous yellow blossoms of a laburnum tree move in the breeze. Dorothy skipped ahead to another pergola draped with white clematis. She picked one and came to her father’s side, plucking off the petals and saying, “He loves me. He loves me not.”

“Dorothy! Never pick a flower. You know better than that. Picking a flower is like poking a hole in a painting.”

“I was just playing.”

“Never damage any living thing! Don’t ever let me see you doing that again.”

I’d never known his voice to have that harshness.

“It’s not a crime, Papa. It’s just a game.” She threw the flower to the ground and stomped on it. “You’re mean,” she cried, and ran away, swerving to topple his easel on her way into the house.

“I apologize for her behavior. She’s sensitive and stubborn and rebellious, just like I was at her age. She’s not a happy child.”

“That’s hard to imagine when she has everything.”

“Everything but a good feeling about herself. Her nanny and her mother mention the charms of Annie, the child who died, way too much. Lou works so often at the women’s infirmary that I’m afraid Dorothy suffers from a lack of attention. She thinks she’s unloved.”

“That’s common among girls of all ages.”

He gave that a moment’s thought before he said, “We have some sweet times, though.”

On our stroll through the garden, he commented on the shape of the trees, the hue of heliotrope blossoms vibrating against the viridian leaves, the brilliance of an iris petal shot through with sunlight, and the darkness of the edge of the same petal where it was in the shade. Lou must have tired easily in his presence. No wonder she wasn’t feeling well and had to rest. He was just too much for daily consumption.

He cupped his hand under a peony tenderly, as if it were the chin of his beloved, for the sake of the frailty of one petal about to fall. “Beauty is everything, isn’t it?” His gaze moved from the blossom to my face in the most penetrating way.

No, it isn’t, but I refrained from contradicting him.

My mouth tensed involuntarily with an awful tightness. I wished I didn’t have my glasses on, wished my nose were smaller, my mouth more upturned, my eyelids less droopy, my hair more stylish. Oh, what was the use? I could fill a book with the ill design of my face. All my observations of New York told me that a plain face led a plain life. With that as a truth, there might not be any possibility for intimacy with any man.

In Mr. Tiffany’s eyes, though, my claim to beauty was to make beautiful
things, one after another, until he noticed that they came from a beauty within.

When you look at me, don’t you see more than a design machine? Don’t you see a woman with more than one passion? Don’t you see my adoration for you? Don’t you recognize the longing heart within the glass I’ve touched? I ached to ask him these things, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t want him to think I wanted romance. What I wanted would have to be a finer union than any romance I’d ever known. We stood without moving, looking at each other, until a breeze caught a magnificent double dahlia near us and made it bounce. Our intensity dissolved. The moment was lost.

“So alive. See how many petals are nestled in there?”

“How is it that you came to love flowers so intensely?” I asked, recovering myself.

“Oh, that started when I was a boy. We had a country house overlooking the Hudson, and my father bought an old Dutch farm adjacent as my playground. I loved wildflowers, tiger lilies, dandelions, brooks, trees, birds. I drew and painted them all.”

“Sounds idyllic.”

He scratched his chin through his beard. “It made me dreamy. No Tiffany male child in generations before me had such leisure, so my father was determined to shorten it.”

“How?”

“By trying to entice me into his company as his successor. By showing me gems and teaching me to distinguish garnets from rubies. I cared more about pebbles I found along the river. When other boys took tennis rackets to military school, I took paints. He tried to instill in me the value of a dollar, but I was more interested in the value of a color. He considered that a bald-faced revolt. Things turned sour, and ever since, I’ve been hell-bent on proving to him that following my own way, I could be just as successful as he was.”

“I’ve known that about you for a long time. It must have been a tremendous burden.”

“The Paris Exposition helped balance the scale. Before that, he was as hard as granite.”

“Always?”

Mr. Tiffany bent down to pick up a few dried leaves that had fallen.

“I remember a letter I wrote to him from military school, telling him that I was trying to be a man but I couldn’t learn the school lessons, my teachers scolded me, and my fellows ridiculed me. In despair I pleaded with him to let me come home. I’ll never forget his answer. ‘A diamond, though of the first water, without hard grinding and polishing, would always remain without luster.’ ”

He crushed the leaves in his fist.

“I can’t imagine him saying something so uncompassionate.”

“All the same, I owe my insistence on perfection to him.” Looking off to the bay, he murmured, “He was ninety years old.”

“I’m sure he was proud of you.” He raised his shoulders noncommittally.

“Now the lock is off the strongbox.” Bitter relish spilled out in his tone. “At last I can build my legacy, my complete and unlimited artistic vision of fine and decorative art.”

“More than you’ve done already?”

“There’s a resort called Hotel Laurelton overlooking Cold Spring Harbor not too far from here. I’m buying it, razing it to the ground, and taking over the public picnic grounds too, five hundred acres. The estate I’m building there will
dwarf
what you see here. It will be twice the size of Teddy Roosevelt’s mansion on Oyster Bay.”

He flung his arm out over the garden and said it with such fire and overweening zeal that it was almost frightening. Something pent up had been released with Charles’s death, and was dangerous. His daughter Dorothy knew it, and now so did I.