Clara and Mr. Tiffany (55 page)

His face contorted. He turned the opal ring on his pinkie finger back and forth, a small, agitated movement. “May I ask why?”

“I can’t grow any more here.”

“I feared as much at the meeting.” He hunched over the gardenias for a long moment, and suddenly straightened himself. “I could move you to enamels.”

“No. It’s more than that.”

He inclined his head toward me. “Is it a man in your life?” His eyebrows went up in avuncular curiosity.

“I lost a dear friend yesterday. You met him once at a Christmas ball and took us up to your studio. He’s the brother of the man I left the company for a long time ago. Our friendship wasn’t a romance, but it made me see how vital love is in a fully lived life. Art alone can’t suffice.”

He stared at the bowl of gardenias, his fist pressing against his mouth. “I’ve come to suspect that myself,” he said.

“There is another man who gives me the loving regard I’ve always wanted.”

“What if I bent the rule in your case? Our little secret.”

“If I marry him? No. I’m done with secrets. Thank you, though.”

“Then an open breaking of policy under mitigating circumstances? No one else is capable to lead the department.”

I could have fainted dead away at the hugeness of his offer. This I was unprepared for. It was staggering, and wonderful—solid evidence of his recognition of me, that I mattered that much to him—a solution. My much simplified tree-of-life clock sitting on his mantel ticked out the moments when my chance for both, Louis and Bernard, existed side by side.

“That’s kind of you to offer.”

It seemed a precursor, and I wanted to be there when it happened. But if my leaving made him consider loosening the strings, maybe it was my last act of love for the Tiffany Girls. Maybe someday Olga could come back to work here.

“There was a time when I wanted that. Under the current business situation, though, it wouldn’t make a difference.”

“I see.”

“It’s been a once-in-a-lifetime partnership, Louis, and I’ve grown tremendously under your guidance. The joy of our collaboration has been central to my life. Mr. Platt and Mr. Thomas have destroyed any further opportunity for that.”

The corners of his mouth tightened downward. “That’s going to hurt me too.”

“What I leave undone here will be taken up by someone behind me in the great parade of creativity.”

“I can’t imagine who.”

“Make Alice head designer, but don’t saddle her with administrative responsibility. It divides a person to have to focus on art and commerce.”

“That’s been my Achilles’ heel. Commercial concerns have smothered the breath of life of art for the time being, but I can’t expect you to wait around until it revives.”

“Carrie McNicholl would be a good department head. She’s very organized, she knows the skills of each girl, and she knows the bookkeeping. Anna Ring can assist her with it.”

He wrote down their names.

“Another thing. My salary is more than that of two of the newer girls together. Now you don’t have to fire any of them.”

“I’ll tell that to Mr. Thomas.” He let out a long, loud breath, a sigh. “I don’t know how I’ll get along without you. Your devotion and contributions have been inestimable, and your inventiveness has been brilliant.”

“And I don’t know how I’ll get along without you, your genius on fire, and Mr. Belknap, and my girls, and Frank.”

It was my life’s cup spilling over, and a lump of love formed in my throat.

I opened my pocketbook. We had been so formal and careful, but I wanted something lighter today too.

“I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. This morning I copied out a verse for you.” I handed it to him, and he read it to himself slowly.

“I know you’ve always wanted to be taller. I understand that. I’ve always wanted to be prettier.”

A mix of feelings creased the skin under his eyes. “The verse means more than that, and you know it.” He took out his billfold and slipped it in.

“One thing I’ve been meaning to tell you.” I grinned to prepare him
for something quibbling. “Shorten those two pedestals. That will make you appear taller.”

He scowled at them, and his mouth opened slowly. “You’re right. All these years.” He shook his head as though he were amused, but when he turned to me, his amusement dissolved. “Then we’re through? Isn’t there anything else?”

“Yes. There is one thing. If I might say so, your daughters have as much right to an education as your son.”

“I have conceded to some night classes.”

“That’s a start. You’ll do more in winning back their love by supporting their goals than by refusing.”

He pondered that a few moments, and then said, “I want you to know that what you saw that night in my studio doesn’t happen anymore. I was at my lowest when you saw me.”

“I knew you could pull yourself out of it.”

After an awkward moment, I told him I would finish out the week so as to leave everything in order.

He asked if he could take me to lunch. I felt a tremor of panic. Time exclusively with Louis—how I had yearned for that. Out of recognition for the policy concession he had offered, I thought I should accept, yet the urgency of getting to Bernard beat strongly in me.

“Any other time, I would love that, but I have someone waiting for me, I hope.”

We stood. The cord connecting us unraveled, though not so fast that we did not feel the prolonged, inevitable tearing away, as though we were cupping each other’s chins like peonies, holding for one more moment the eyes of the once beloved before stepping away.

I HURRIED FROM THE SUBWAY
back to Irving Place, and was out of breath. Or maybe I was short of breath because of the momentous decision I had made. Exhilaration made me sweep through the parlor and run up the stairs. Bernard didn’t answer my urgent knock on the door to his room. Of course not. He was at work, but where was that? I went through the corridor calling, “Bernard? Merry?” and found her in the pantry.

“Did Bernard go to work today? Do you know where his office is?”

“Why, dearie, he left here this morning with a bag packed.”

“Good God! Not another disappearing man!”

“He looked fearful sad.”

“If he comes back, tell him I went looking for him. Keep him here.”

On a slim hunch I hurried to the station and got there in time for the eleven-fifteen to Point Pleasant. The train crept along at a snail’s pace. I could have
run
there faster.

He must have thought I chose Tiffany over him. I bit my lip until it bled. I should have told him, but I hadn’t been sure that I’d go through with it.

At the station, I felt like lifting my skirt and racing down the wooded path toward the cottage like a madwoman, but that wouldn’t change anything. He was either there or he wasn’t. I forced myself to walk along the coast in a measured pace, all senses alert to remember this momentous act.

Waves licked at the sand deliciously, sensually, like a blue-gray silk scarf undulating, calming me. A soft-breasted sandpiper chased each retreating wavelet seaward, poked her long arched beak into bubbling sand to get some morsel, and raced back up the beach on slender, elegant legs before the next wave would catch her—inward and outward, rhythmically, tirelessly doing her lifework. I was awash with love for her.

I stopped in front of the house, presenting myself simply, without a tremor. He’d been sitting on the porch steps, but he stood up the instant he saw me, honoring me with elegant posture. I didn’t move, stretching the moment, both of us gathering what each other’s presence meant.

“What are you doing here?” I finally asked.

“Thinking.”

“About what?”

“About you. Trying to make myself not love you. Trying to let you go.”

“Have you had any success?”

“Not a smidgen.”

I moved onto the porch close to him and saw the adoration in his eyes flower into a beautiful future, a new life that would begin from this moment.

“Don’t try anymore.”

He held out his arms for me, and I stepped in, telling him with my eyes that I felt the love in him embrace the love in me. He reached into his pocket and put the moon shell on the end of my ring finger.

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

C
LARA MARRIED EDWARD BOOTH, KNOWN IN THIS NOVEL AS
Bernard Booth, from Gloucester, England, on September 1, 1909, in Montclair, New Jersey. She was forty-seven, and he was her junior by six years. He had immigrated to New York within a year of Clara’s move to Manhattan, and was married to an unknown woman sometime between 1893 and 1907 for an indeterminate amount of time. The particulars of that marriage were, perforce, my invention.

Clara and Edward Booth continued living at Miss Owens’s boardinghouse as a married couple while she developed a modest career painting silk scarves with flowers and sunset skyscapes. None have survived. The couple also owned a house in Point Pleasant. Booth retired in 1930, and they moved to Ormond Beach, Florida, while still spending the summers at Point Pleasant. Clara died November 6, 1944, at the age of eighty-two, and her ashes were interred in the cemetery in Tallmadge, Ohio, her family home. Booth died in 1953 at the age of eighty-five.

The intimate circumstances of Clara’s marriage to Francis Driscoll are unknown.

As to whether Clara independently conceived of leaded-glass lampshades, there is still question. According to the New-York Historical Society exhibition catalog
A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls
, “Although not specifically stated in her letters, it was possibly Clara who hit upon the idea of making leaded shades with nature-based themes.” Given that the first leaded shades appearing in 1898 were coincident with Clara’s return to Tiffany Studios, it is highly likely.

Alice Gouvy left Tiffany Studios in 1907, before Clara left, and returned to Ohio to teach school. Agnes Northrop continued to work for
Tiffany Studios until it closed, and then for its offshoot, Westminster Studios. She remained active as a designer of leaded windows until age ninety-four. Her memorial window for her father is in the Bowne Street Community Church in Flushing, Queens, New York. Carrie McNicholl stayed on at Tiffany Studios until 1930 working as a secretary. Nothing is known of the subsequent lives of Nellie Warner, Mary McVickar, Anna Ring, Theresa Baur, and the three misses.

George Waldo exhibited at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894. He died in 1904 at the age of thirty-seven. Nothing more was heard from his brother after the one letter.

Dudley Carpenter, originally of Nashville, Tennessee, kept a residence in Paris, where he studied at Académie Julian. He eventually went west, sculpting and painting as a California Impressionist in Santa Barbara. His studio became a gathering place for artists, students, and patrons. There he shaped a generation of Southern California painters. He died in 1946.

Henry McBride became the art critic for
The New York Sun
and worked in that capacity for thirty-seven years, as well as being a contributing editor of
ArtNews
and a writer for
L’Âge Nouveau
and
Cahiers d’Art
in Paris. His keen recognition of artistic talent was prophetic. He was the first to discover Thomas Eakins, and he became an early champion of modernism. His article “The Lost Children of New York,” about the Lower East Side, was published in
Harper’s Weekly
in January 1894. His correspondence revealed that he prodded and cajoled Mrs. Hackley into being more progressive. He retreated annually to a rustic cabin in rural Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed chopping wood, carrying water, and reading biographies of people he wished to emulate.

Louis Comfort Tiffany continued to receive awards and remained active in the arts the rest of his life. The modern styles introduced at the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and the effects of the First World War, as well as changing artistic tastes, resulted in diminished production at Tiffany Studios. Louis Tiffany resigned as art director of his father’s Tiffany & Company in 1918. Arthur Nash retired in 1919, and Tiffany withdrew his financial support of the studios and furnaces in 1928, leaving the management of the studios to Joe Briggs as president, and leaving the furnaces to Douglas Nash, a relative of Arthur Nash.
Tiffany Studios filed for bankruptcy in 1932, although Briggs kept it functioning until the time of his own death. Louis Comfort Tiffany died in 1933 in the Seventy-second Street house. By 1937, it was razed and a seventeen-story apartment building was completed on the premises.

The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, which he created in 1919 to aid gifted young artists, provided studio space at Laurelton Hall. A fire destroyed most of Laurelton Hall in 1957, including most of the records of work production, a factor that made Clara’s letters so valuable. Surviving architectural features of Laurelton Hall—notably the fountain court and the loggia—were rescued and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while windows and lamps collected by Mr. and Mrs. Hugh F. McKean became the basis for the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida.