Clara and Mr. Tiffany (5 page)

ON SUNDAY EVENING
in Miss Owens’s dining room, a tall, smartly dressed man pulled out my chair for me, motioned for me to sit, and scooted it in with utter grace but without a word, an easy gesture for him, though one that carried a sense of the momentous for me. A serving girl set down a platter of corned beef and cabbage, and Merry Owens brought in bowls of boiled potatoes and creamed lima beans, then sat at the head of the table.

“Why so glum tonight, you two?” she said to two men just entering.

“Walt Whitman died yesterday.” One of them choked getting out the words. His eyes glistened, and his curly hair grew like a wild garden.

“Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son,” said the other, a studious type wearing horn-rimmed spectacles with expensive gold hinges.

“
Song of Myself,
” I was quick to say. I had always liked that title.

“Well, then, we’ll have a read-aloud after supper. It’ll make you feel a mite better,” Miss Owens said. “Start the praties and beans around, Maggie. We have a new boarder. Mrs. Clara Driscoll. She’s in George’s old room. Dudley redecorated it.”

“Good thing, unless she likes little Egyptian alligators painted on the walls,” replied a matronly woman with long earlobes, whose cheeks were etched with a fretwork of finely penned wrinkles.

“Much to my dismay, Mrs. Hackley, Merry made me paint over them gators when I told her they were aphrodisiacal.”

Ah, the sad, curly-haired one must be Dudley. Definitely a Southern twang, unless it was put on to be funny. Prolonged vowels.
Pa-int
said as two slow syllables. I liked it.

“It’s a lovely room. I’m sure I’ll be happy in it.”

Miss Owens asked those seated at my table to introduce the person to their right. There were four men, three women, and an empty chair next
to Dudley Carpenter, who kept looking behind him through the arch to the parlor.

“He’ll be along, Dudley,” Miss Owens assured him.

“Will Mr. Driscoll be joining you soon?” Mrs. Hackley asked.

“No.” She wasn’t wasting any time in zeroing in on the suspicion attached to any woman my age living alone. “There is no Mr. Driscoll.”

“Then you’re a working woman?” Mr. Hackley asked.

“Yes. I work at Tiffany’s studio.”

“Polishing silver, I should guess,” Mrs. Hackley declared authoritatively.

“As a matter of fact, no.”

“It can’t be selling jewelry. The sales clerks are all men,” she said.

“That’s Tiffany and Company, owned by Charles Tiffany. I work for his son, Louis Tiffany, in his glass workshop, making leaded-glass windows and mosaics.”

“Workshop! Then you consider yourself a New Woman, do you?” Mrs. Hackley looked down her nose at her plate. “It’s my opinion, and that of many social commentators, that when a woman joins the ranks of men in workshops, her morals sink, so mind your step.”

“She’s employed in the arts, Mrs. Hackley, not in a carriage factory, and the arts are a moral force.”

“Thank you, Mr.—”

“McBride. Henry McBride.”

Him, the scholarly Whitman quoter, I wanted to remember. Longish hair, cleft chin, Cupid’s-bow mouth redder than was common, pearl stud in his flowing maroon four-in-hand necktie, positioned off center. Was that intentional, a rejection of convention?

“Call him Hank,” drawled Dudley. “It takes him down a peg from his high falutin self-appointment as headmaster of Forty-four Irving Place.”

Hank folded his hands in a professorial way. “I know a good deal about the elder Tiffany, if you care to ask me sometime.”

“I will!”

“Plato wrote that men and women would eventually respond much in the same way to the same conditions.” This interjected by Francie, an
older woman delicate as a wren, with a complexion the pale pink of her blouse. “I take that to mean that if a man can have integrity and morality in factories and workshops, then so can women.”

“Oh, you and your books,” Mrs. Hackley grumbled. “Will you never stop prattling on about those philosophers? They’re all dead, Francie.” Frumpish Mrs. Hackley forked an overlarge morsel of corned beef and chewed vigorously, her mouth making all sorts of exaggerated shapes. “I have never been able to understand how a true lady could accept money from anyone but a father, a husband, an uncle, or a brother.”

“Enough, Maggie. I’ll shut off your radiator if you go on against my new boarder. She’s right proper, and I won’t have you laying damage to her person.”

“In this tippy world, Mrs. Hackley, a single woman does what she has to,” I said, “and if she enjoys it, as I do, so much the finer her life.”

“Brava, Mrs. Driscoll,” ventured the gentleman who had pushed in my chair.

I saw now his clean-shaven skin taut over elegant, defined cheekbones.

“Ah, I’d begun to think you were mute,” I said. “Handsome, but mute.” Francie snickered daintily. “Remind me of your name, please.”

“Bernard Booth.”

Not even a full sentence and I could tell he was English. I always melted at an English accent.

The front door opened and slammed shut. A beardless man with ruddy complexion and black hair entered through the arch from the parlor. Whistling “Yankee Doodle,” he swept off his black fedora with its small red feather, flung it onto the hat rack along with his long red silk scarf, and did a little dance step.

“Great news, comrades.” He held out both arms. “You are, at this moment, looking at the recipient of the honor of having my portrait of Helena Modjeska hung in the Players Club.”

Applause burst forth from both tables.

He was a bit of a Yankee Doodle dandy himself, with his red handkerchief pointing up out of the pocket in his frock coat. He bent to lay a humorously loud kiss on Miss Owens’s cheek.

“Sorry I’m late, Merry. The discussion of where it would hang went on and on. In the end it was decided that because of Modjeska’s role as Ophelia, it should hang next to John’s of Edwin Booth as Hamlet.”

“Mind letting us in on who you mean, or are we supposed to know?” asked Merry.

“Why, John Singer Sargent, of course.”

That was impressive enough to me, but Dudley scowled. “You’re on a first-name basis now? Georgie and Johnny?”

“Not just yet.”

“Don’t be filling yourself up with grand ideas like some lawdy-daw or you won’t want to keep taking your meals with the likes of us. I need your tuppence.” Miss Owens turned to me. “Moved out, he did, into his studio. It’s only a good spit from here to next door, so he’s always fiddle-faddling around here as if he owns the place.”

“So this is the artist who painted the lovely pond in my room.”

“A mere caprice done on a rainy day.” He dismissed it with a flip of his slender hand.

“All it needs is the ruins of a temple in the background,” I said.

George made a circle of his lips. “Great idea, Miss—”

“Driscoll. But please call me Clara.”

“Clara.”

“
Claire,
” said Bernard Booth. “Light. Brilliant. Clear-sighted.” He held up his water glass. “To Clara, our brilliant new friend.”

“Flattery in the Queen’s English sends me to the moon,” I murmured, and our eyes met for an instant.

“And to George.” Dudley raised his glass. “Our brilliant old friend.”

“And to Walt, our forever friend,” Hank McBride added.

“All right,” Merry said. “You can have your read-aloud now.”

“I know one line by heart,” I said. “ ‘A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.’ ”

Hank nodded as if in appreciation for my offering. We adjourned to the parlor, and Dudley produced
Leaves of Grass
and read,

“
Pismire
. That’s an offensive word in a poem,” scoffed Mrs. Hackley, making a big puff of air on the
p
, which shook her earlobes. “
Pismire.
”

If it was so offensive, why did she take such pleasure in saying it twice?

“Madam, your pious offense weighs no more than a straw against the great tide of humanity that celebrates this magnanimous mind,” said Hank.

Madam made a face and wagged her head at him.

“I want a Manhattan poem,” said George, the latecomer with the red handkerchief. He thumbed through the book and read.

Oh, what promise in that, I thought.

He balled his hand into a fist and gave it a little shake.

Not a peep out of Mrs. Hackley, but Mr. Hackley humphed. “It will take more than affection to solve the problems of freedom. Affection can’t solve bank and brokerage failures or railroad bankruptcies or the recession that’s sure to follow. Labor unions strike at the drop of a hat,” Mr. Hackley continued. “That’s not affection. Affection can’t bring rain to the drought in the West. It’s a poet’s pipe dream. Affection can’t stop the rich from getting richer, and the immigrant populations poorer.”

“Yes, perhaps it
can
do that,” said Bernard Booth. “What you need is another Lincoln to demonstrate that.”

“We need the idealism and values of a Lincoln, certainly,” Hank said. “And the foundation of his values was love for humanity.” He reached
for the book, adjusted his spectacles, found a particular page, and read in his deep voice.

I was impressed by the quiet attentiveness of everyone, even the Hackleys, when Hank read so reverently a passage full of fair prospects and broad affection.

“May our comrade go onward peacefully,” George said.

“Amen,” murmured Dudley, his head lowered.

M
R. TIFFANY LAID SEVEN HUGE GARNETS AND A HANDFUL OF
copper beads on my sample table for me to work into the peacock mosaic.

“Put metallic foil beneath the plainer pieces,” he said, “even those you’ve already placed, to intensify their brilliance. Choose carefully, though, because the eye will naturally go there. In other areas, I want you to use my new iridescent glass.”

He untied a drawstring bag and let half a dozen gorgeous pieces of glass tumble out. Seen from one direction, they were deep turquoise and cobalt blue. From another direction, shimmery silver.

“I’ve never seen any glass like this.” Another piece was golden or emerald green, depending on how I held it. “They’re like pigeons’ necks.”

“Like peacock feathers,” he said, correcting my analogy to be more apropos. “With my own glassmaking factory in Queens now, nobody can snatch this secret. The formulas, I mean.”

“You
made
these?”

“No. These are ancient, dug up in the Middle East, but at my glasshouse we’ve learned to duplicate what nature took centuries to do.”

“Amazing.”

At that moment, he became the Creator of Marvels, the Artificer of Beauty, second only to God.

“Come with me now to see it.”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because of the work ahead of me. Yet I gladly threw out all thought of it in favor of time alone with him. I felt proud, sure of myself, elevated. He had not asked Agnes, or the oldest member of our department, Miss Stoney of the hard, serious face, to see what he had made. Only me. Privileged, happy me.

AT THE CORONA END
of the rail line, Tiffany Furnaces took up a whole walled block. Fumes and smoke and spurts of flame spewed out of its looming brick smokestack, and nine smaller metal chimneys sent up waves of heat.

Just inside the factory, Mr. Tiffany struck his cane against the floor to announce his presence. Through the open door to an office, a man with a grizzled mustache looked up and hastened to stand and extend his hand.

“Good timing, Louis. They’re just about to pour.”

Mr. Tiffany introduced me to Arthur Nash, the glasshouse manager. We walked past the chemist’s laboratory and into the heat of a vast factory and stopped at the first furnace.