Clara and Mr. Tiffany (51 page)

By asking him, no matter how impudent it would be. I wouldn’t let Sunday at Point Pleasant pass without finding out. Better to be criticized as insolent than to be thought of as a Jezebel. That wasn’t my mother’s etiquette handbook speaking. That was me.

DURING THE WEEKEND
at the shore, I made it a point to sit next to Marion at meals at the Palmiés’ cottage and to invite her bathing with Alice and me. I tried to make her laugh as I flailed around when a breaker lifted us up. I liked her, and I didn’t want any residual ill feelings.

Bernard was quieter than usual even though he entered into the bicycle riding just the same as always; he filled my lamp with fuel, oiled my brakes, adjusted the beach umbrella to shade my eyes, drew out my chair at meals, but he still seemed distant, which hurt me. I was paralyzed to signal to him that I wanted to be alone with him.

I stayed on the porch where he and William were reading in the wicker rockers, and anxiously yanked leaves off the Boston ivy growing against the clapboards of the house. In a few weeks they would be deep, brilliant red. The sound of the vine rustling as I plucked each leaf annoyed them.

“I wish they were red already.”

“Patience, Clara.”

The one thing I didn’t have today.

After our beach supper, I was edgy. Time was running out. Bernard could see that I was restless, and convinced everyone else to go on a bicycle ride to Manasquan Beach for ice-cream cones, leaving the two of us to tend the fire.

Stalling, I picked up a small moon shell that looked like a snail’s shell spiraling out from a tiny eye, bleached white on the outside, pearly on the inside. I brushed off the sand, and put it on each of my fingertips. My ring finger happened to be the best fit.

“The life of a shell must be a tremendous struggle,” I remarked, looking at it from all directions, perched there on my fingertip.

“In what way?”

“To push that hard protective surface outward in order to grow.”

“It has no choice.” He lifted the shell off my finger and pocketed it.

“Why did you do that?”

“So I could give it back to you someday to remind you of this evening.”

“Is it a special night?”

“I feel it is.”

“But you’ve hardly spoken three words together to me all day.”

“I’m a patient man.” He gathered the hem of my skirt in his hands. “I saw that you had to mend the rupture with Marion, so I’ve stayed in the background to let you. Your girls are first to you. Even before yourself.”

“Most of the time.”

“You’ve been thinking about Joe and Theresa, haven’t you?”

“How can you tell?”

“After living in the same boardinghouse with you for a decade—”

“Off and on,” I blurted.

“I know a few things.”

I cupped sand in my palm and let it fall between my fingers. “Like what?”

“I know that you love the sea, and poetry, and flowers, and glass, and your work.”

“All true.”

“And you love the girls in your department, and maybe even Mr. Tiffany.” Bernard stirred the fire, and new flames erupted. “And that you hate hypocrisy.”

I jerked my head up to his penetrating gaze.

A wistful, maybe even an amused expression passed over his face as he said, “And I know that you flinched when I put my arm around you, but you leaned in to me all the same.”

“I just didn’t want to be what we had both denounced. That would be the worst hypocrisy. I couldn’t stand it if—”

“Clara, stop.” He took my hand. “I’m not married, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Instantly, a flush of heat enveloped me and I backed away.

“Alistair told me you were engaged.”

“I was, and I
was
married.”

“What happened?”

“You’re so obsessively proper that it’s kept me from telling you. I waited for you to ask, and when you didn’t, I thought it wasn’t of interest to you.”

“But it was. It is.”

Exasperation spilled out of him. “You’re a paradox, you know. You’re a modern woman in most ways, but you still wrap yourself in the trappings of Victorian etiquette.”

I fidgeted at that. “Maybe it takes another generation to emerge fully emancipated. Tell me. Please.”

“I became engaged when I saw you falling for Edwin’s
character
, and I married a woman named Ann just after you left with him. It was an impulsive reaction that I’ve regretted, because I hurt someone who was never anything but kind to me. She had character too. She was the head nurse at the children’s ward of the Nurses’ Settlement House on Henry Street.”

“I know of it. The Lower East Side. I told the mother of one of my girls to go there.”

“Ann lived in the ward—
settled in
was the euphemism—in order to be available to patients instantly in crises. She was very committed. I tried living there with her in her small room several times. It was unbearable, with children crying constantly and Ann leaping out of bed all hours of the night. I don’t have the social worker’s zeal like your Edwin had. I wanted us to get a flat like any normal married couple, but she refused to leave the hospital, so I only spent lunch hours with her, and the days she had free. After her exhausting days and nights, there wasn’t anything left of her for me.”

After a few moments of letting this news settle, I realized our situations were similar. “We’ve both been on the neglected end of commitment.”

He ran his hand through his hair. Looking into the fire, he nodded agreement, a slow, minute movement.

“Once she went with me on holiday to London, and to Boston and
Maine another time, but that was all she allowed herself. So I came back to the boardinghouse to wait for better times.”

“Did they come?”

“No. The ward was a den of disease. It wasn’t long before she contracted tuberculosis. The end came quickly.”

Alarm choked me. “You could have died too, if you had stayed there.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said softly, and we both waited for what would be said next. Etiquette demanded that I say I was sorry he had lost her. Honesty clamped shut my jaw.

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

“Two reasons. I wanted to get past grief first. I didn’t want you to think I was grasping on to you as a quick replacement.”

“Are you? Past the grief?”

“I haven’t felt a mite of guilt over the enjoyments we have had together. A grieving person would feel guilty for pleasure with any but the memory of the departed. So yes, I’m over it.”

He was so sensible. Honorable too.

“I’ve felt heavy with this secret, with not telling you, but you didn’t ask, and to speak of it unasked would be too awkward in case you didn’t care to know.”

“I didn’t ask for fear of finding out that you were married, at least in some fashion.”

He was quiet at that, and reflective. He smoothed a place in the sand and drew a widening spiral, like the side of a moon shell. Riveted, I searched for meaning in it and waited for the second reason.

“Remember a long time ago I went to the Tiffany showroom to see your lamps? It was after you mentioned Tiffany’s policy against employing married women. His stodgy conservatism angered me, but I couldn’t say anything that would turn you against him. Seeing those lamps made me realize that for the greater good, for generations hence, I shouldn’t, couldn’t, do or say anything that would put a stop to your important lifework.”

I blew out a puff of air, trying to grasp the generosity of his restraint.

“It’s hard to believe that you, that anyone, could be so …” Unselfish? Loving? I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It hasn’t always been easy. When I’ve wavered, I went back to the showroom to have another look, and that bolstered my decision. I’m ashamed to say that earlier, when you came back without Edwin, I hoped he was dead. That was unconscionable of me, I realize.”

Yes, it was, though it told me how long he had been thinking of me.

“I existed in that suspended state of not knowing what had become of him just like you did, but when the news filtered through the boardinghouse that he was alive, I thought it was hopeless to wish for anything more than our outings.”

“He
is
dead, to me, Bernard.”

He lifted his face from the fire. “And George?”

“George knows that, and has accepted it.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I was puzzled. The flickering firelight cast deep shadows in the worry lines of his forehead.

“You can’t think I haven’t noticed. You love him.”

My breath came out slowly, in a revealing sigh. “Not to love that man would be impossible. And he loves me, in the only way he can, like a brother would a sister.”

A wave retreated, leaving an expectant quiet before the next one. For the length of that pause stretching before us like an empty road, he waited for me to say something more.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t love another.”

He was slow in reacting, as if he were holding on to the moment, as if it were long-awaited, and therefore one that deserved savoring, deserved a careful, thoughtful response.

He offered his hands, lifted me to my feet, and held me against his chest, warm from the fire. His mouth brushed my ear with words. “The trouble with us is that we’ve been too polite with each other. We haven’t spoken our minds. You’ve been too Midwestern, and I’ve been too English, but the dowager queen is dead now. Remember? Fate has offered us a future, if we’re brave enough to grasp it.”

“
T
HEY’RE READY TO BE TURNED,” THERESA ANNOUNCED PROUDLY
.

Working out her contrition on tesserae, she had finished the Christ mosaic alone. Joe was taking some time off, which I agreed would be a good idea for a few weeks, even though we would need him if Theresa finished before he returned. I knew the process of turning and cementing but had never done it myself.

I told Theresa to cut a sheet of oiled paper six inches longer and wider than the dimensions of the panel. I brushed varnish on each tessera, and while they were still sticky, we pressed down the oiled paper until it adhered firmly to every part.

It would be dangerous to go to the Men’s Mosaic Department on the third floor to ask their help to turn it upside down. They would think we were unable to handle our big commissions ourselves, and I might have another strike on my hands. I saw no other way. We had to turn it ourselves.

Who could help?

“Mary, you have a way with Albert down in the basement. Say whatever you have to, even listen to him. Just get him up here to help us. Julia, find Frank and tell him to come here.”

“
Tell
him. How?”

“Wave at him, take his hand and drag him, say it in Polish. I don’t care. Carrie, you get Mr. Belknap. He’s none too big, but he’d be willing.”

I told Theresa to coat the large marble slab with Venetian turpentine.

Soon I heard, “Look you, Mrs. Driscoll, I have important things to
do down in the netherlands. I can’t be a-comin’ up here to do your bidding at the drop of a hat.”

“You’re here now, so you can help. We need to turn this upside down on that marble table. There are glass pieces under this paper.”

“You expect me to do that me self, do you now? Me with a ruptured spleen that ain’t getting any better. You’ll send me to the hospital sure, and then who’ll pay the bill? Answer me that.”

With Albert, the only way was to go at it quickly. Frank and Henry came in, neither of them very strapping. Oh, how I wished Wilhelmina were here.

“Mary, come here on this side and hold the paper in place. Carrie, you do the same on the other side. Ready? One, two three, heave!”

Albert huffed and puffed extravagantly, and Frank grunted, one of the few sounds I’d ever heard him make, but we did it.

When Albert left, I rolled up my sleeves like a man, mixed the cement with a trowel, and cast the first panel. Henry, who had never put on a work apron in his life; and Theresa, who had to tie it for him; and Frank, who was ecstatic about helping us, worked quickly to get it into every crack before it set up. All evening I worried about it congealing correctly and not being horribly messy on the front. The next morning, we had to get it turned right side up again. We found that seven girls and Frank could do it. I held my breath while Theresa and I peeled back the paper on the first one. It wasn’t much more messy than usual. I assigned Julia to pick it clean while we set to work to get another panel ready to pour. There were five more to do.

Only one remained to be done when Joe came back looking less pale, even a little ruddy. He closed my studio doors and put a paper sack on my worktable.

“Reach inside.”

I pulled out a cucumber, two tomatoes, and three yellow squash with large leaves and floppy blossoms the size of my hand. “What’s all this about?”

“Aren’t they beautiful colors? I bought a little place in the country this side of White Plains. Nothing much, just a tumbledown house that I can repair a little at a time, but it has a small orchard and a vegetable garden.”

“This doesn’t mean that you’re leaving the studio to become a farmer, does it?”