Clara and Mr. Tiffany (6 page)

“Don’t get too close,” Mr. Nash warned. He pointed to a round opening that glowed and sent out waves of heat. “That glory hole is twenty-three hundred degrees.”

A squat, thick-armed man in a leather protection vest but no shirt hefted a giant ladle out of the glory hole and poured molten glass thick and incandescent into a rectangular oiled pan two feet long. It sent up smoke. Pot metal, Mr. Nash called it, and he called the man a gatherer.

“Beautiful!” Mr. Tiffany said over the roar of the furnace. He turned to me. “We’ve devised a new method of annealing so we can pour more than one color onto a single sheet, and stir a bit so the different glass bodies will adhere and marbleize. Do you see what that allows us to do?”

“Cut pieces from a single multihued sheet so they’ll be in harmony?”

“Exactly.”

“More than that,” Mr. Nash said. “We can now control clarity, color, and surface to create nuances in an infinite variety of glass. We’re approaching five thousand types now.”

“That’s staggering,” I said, knowing I had to keep all of them in
mind when I placed my glass orders for each window and mosaic that my department would create.

“Watch closely.” Mr. Tiffany held up his index finger. “This is when the artistry happens.”

The gatherer drew a different mix out of a smaller glory hole, and another man whom Mr. Nash called a gaffer directed its pour over the first layer in a thin stream that widened slowly.

“This sheet will cool into cream-colored glass with shadings of amber,” Mr. Nash said. “It will be used for a woman’s robe.”

The gaffer and his assistant on opposite sides set metal bars inside the pan, and pushed them toward each other. The glass yielded and buckled like hanging drapery.

“More.” Mr. Tiffany couldn’t just watch. With the air of a boy at play, he put on padded leather gloves and pushed the bar again, which raised the folds higher and made more of them.

“Give them a slight curve,” he said.

The gaffer jostled the pan in a quick movement. Instantly, the folds curved. In my mind’s eye, I could see the woman’s robe drape gracefully.

Mr. Tiffany looked at me. “This was how mountain ranges were created, eh?” he said, as if he suspected I had thought of him as God’s assistant.

We moved on to another shop, which meant another glory hole and its team of men, some in overalls, some in leather aprons, one wearing an undershirt and another oddly wearing a necktie. Mr. Nash introduced Tom Manderson as the gaffer, the chief craftsman of this blowing team in charge of every piece his shop creates. Tom was bare to the waist, broad-shouldered, and muscular.

Mr. Tiffany stood back and said to me, “I’m hoping for some good news today. We’ve succeeded in making iridescent flat glass, but that’s made with lime. Blown glass is made with lead, and it’s been giving us problems.”

I distinctly remembered his father telling him to postpone these experiments until after the fair.

Mr. Tiffany explained that the process exposed the blown piece to various metallic vapors. “We’re trying a new formula on this batch.”

Mr. Nash stopped him with a scowl. Apparently he didn’t want to reveal
his formulas out in the shop for fear they might leak to competing glass factories.

Mr. Tiffany tugged at his beard. “What happened to the last batch?”

“It didn’t adhere.” Mr. Nash’s voice was flat with disappointment. “I saved samples in the take-out room.”

On a standing blackboard, Mr. Tiffany sketched an irregular bulb shape with a long, curved neck and a lip taller on one side than the other, stretched outward like a tongue. “Try this,” he said to Tom. “Like a Persian flask, only more spontaneous. Let yourself go.” He flung out his hand. “Forget those classical shapes. They’re too much like the conventional English shapes coming out of Stourbridge. We want natural shapes.”

“You want that crooked neck?” Tom asked, his voice rising in pitch, his eyes squinting at the blackboard.

“Yes, I want that crooked neck!” he fired back. “Nature is always right, and always beautiful.”

I was anxious to see if this Tom fellow could please the perfectionist.

“Think of an asymmetrical gourd hanging on a vine. Let the neck relax. Tolerate its lopsidedness.”

Tom looked skeptical, and gestured to the gatherer to prepare a fresh pipe for him.

The gatherer turned the long blowpipe in the glory hole, drew out a red-hot gob of glass, like honey in consistency, and handed it off to Tom. In one swift movement, Tom rolled the gather of glass on a wet steel slab until it held its roundness, took it to his bench, sat, and rested the pipe on the supports on each side of him. Another man blew on the mouthpiece of the pipe to create a bulb at the other end, and Tom spun it and began shaping it with a wooden paddle as it changed from glowing red to orange, then amber. When it started to harden, his server rushed it back into the glory hole to reheat it for more shaping. All that in less than three minutes. It was like an ancient fire dance.

I wanted to watch him finish, but Mr. Tiffany stepped away and murmured, “Maybe this batch.”

In the take-out room large rectangles of the new iridescent flat glass in blues and greens and golds were propped against one wall.

“You’ll use this for the double-peacock mosaic,” said Mr. Tiffany.
“By God, this will make the world take notice. La Farge will seethe with envy. Eighteen ninety-three will be a big year for us.”

“If we finish in time,” Mr. Nash said.

And if they didn’t, what kind of angry boss would we have?

“How many sheets do we have now for the columns and altar?”

“Forty or fifty,” Mr. Nash said.

“Set two more shops on this. Take them off the commissioned windows. Clients can wait. We’ll never have enough for sixteen columns at this rate.”

Mr. Tiffany turned his attention to the two dozen blown vases on the sample table. On one batch, the slight iridescence had begun to flake off. On another, there was only dullness. No sheen at all. He let out a roar and swept them off the table with his cane, two-handed, in a powerful, shocking swing. I scooted back as they flew off the table and shattered on the floor.

“Mr. Tiffany!”

“I’ll be its master yet,” he bellowed, shaking his cane, fire in his eyes, shoving the pieces to the edge of the floor with the side of his foot.

I’d never seen such explosive, dangerous rage, and could hardly believe what had happened. In my shock and embarrassment for him, for my presence witnessing this, my throat was instantly parched, and it was impossible to swallow.

He glanced at me, looked abashed, and lowered his voice. “Too much Stourbridge, anyway. We want original shapes derived from nature, not these tired old classics.” He waved his arm derisively at the rubble on the floor.

I felt protective of my girls if he would ever unleash his dissatisfaction with our work with a swing of his cane.

“You still want us to keep experimenting with iridescence?” Mr. Nash asked in a surprisingly calm tone.

“Perfection, Arthur! Nothing less! We work until we attain it.”

“But the time. The fair is only ten months away now.”

“Don’t tell me what I already know!”

“And the expense. We’ve already spent—”

“Don’t tell me that either!”

…

THAT EVENING AT
the dinner table I described Mr. Tiffany’s outburst and glass smashing.

“What is he? A maniac?” Mrs. Hackley asked.

“I never thought so before this,” I said.

Hank patted his mouth with his napkin. “There are a few things I know that might explain his behavior. I’ve been researching his family history for an article to come out during the Chicago Fair.”

“Please, tell me everything.”

“You sure you want the whole deal?” Dudley asked. “Nobody’s windier than Hank when he gets rolling.”

“The lady asked, Dudley, so I have to start with Theophania, a Greek merchant named after a festival honoring Apollo, where he sold silk. His descendants inched northward across Europe, selling what came to be known as tiffin silk.”

“How did you find that out?” I asked.

“The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and early company brochures in the Astor Library. One leap took the family from England to New England, and a few more generations followed as cotton merchants in Connecticut, each one shrewdly outdoing the preceding one. Comfort Tiffany rose above his father by hiring Indians to build a mill, and then selling them molasses and rum to recoup the wages he had paid.”

“A canny business move,” said Bernard Booth, the Englishman, an import businessman himself.

“Comfort’s son Charles, Louis’s father, had ambitions that stretched beyond backwater towns.”

“He’s the one who established Tiffany and Company,” I said.

“By buying crates of goods abandoned on the docks during a depression, and selling the contents to the carriage trade, since the upper class wasn’t affected. When working-class people could buy again, he opened a gimcracks emporium selling glass ‘diamond’ necklaces, Japanese fans, Chinese parasols. For the middle class, he imported Bohemian glass and French porcelain.”

“Smart to offer a range of products to entice people to buy up,” said Bernard.

“Everything had a price tag, an innovation that put a stop to undignified haggling over every sale,” Hank said.

“I believe his company was one of the first to send out mail-order catalogs,” Bernard remarked.

“They still do. I have one,” boasted Mrs. Hackley.

“Save it. It will be a collector’s item someday,” Bernard said.

“How did Charles Tiffany elevate the company into fine jewelry?” I asked.

“That happened through blind luck.”

Hank explained that Charles’s partner was in Paris on a buying mission in 1848 when Louis Philippe’s regime collapsed and the aristocracy was on the run and sold their jewels for half their value. The partner bought up as much as he could. Charles had the gems reset in new styles, and the Goulds, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Astors all came running. Even Queen Victoria. So he became known as the King of Diamonds.”

“From gilt to gold, from glass to gems,” said Bernard, piling mashed potatoes and peas on the back of his fork. “Ingenuity bred wealth, and now wealth is breeding art. We could call it the Tiffany Imperative for each son to exceed his father.”

“And that was behind his fiery temper in the take-out room,” I said, understanding more now.

“You near ’bout done?” Dudley asked.

“No! Charles capitalized on the notoriety by selling silver officers’ swords in Central Park during the Civil War.”

“An opportunist!” said Mrs. Hackley. “Who can respect an opportunist?”

“I can,” Bernard said. “Who was hurt by this? No one.”

“Tell that to the Tennessee boy soldier who had one of those fancy swords planted in his gut,” said Dudley. Such a sensitive one, he was.

Hank told us that through Charles’s friendship with P. T. Barnum he learned the benefits of linking his name with fame by giving magnificent silver loving cups to Jenny Lind, the midget Tom Thumb, and the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. Newspapers picked up the stories. Free publicity for Tiffany & Company.

“A conniver,” Mrs. Hackley muttered.

“One of Barnum’s circus elephants ran amok once,” Hank said.

“I remember that,” said Merry, brightening. “It trampled a few chaps, so it had to be killed.”

“Charles bought the carcass, had it stuffed, and put it in his store window with a sign: ‘Killer elephant to be made into commemorative belts, fine wallets, ivory cuff links. Order yours while the finest parts last.’ It was a huge success.”

“Bully for him!” Bernard said. “The King of Diamonds tops the Prince of Humbug.”

“But there’s one more generation.” Hank peered at me. “I don’t know if you’re aware, Clara, that your employer has never finished a year in the black. It’s Charles and his Tiffany and Company, not Louis, that keeps your Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company afloat.”

Then everyone, even Mrs. Hackley, looked at me. I swallowed the morsel of fish in my mouth without chewing. I was not working in a carefree land of fantasy flamingoes and jeweled peacocks. Now I understood the tension that made him smash vases.

“I suppose the stakes for him in Chicago rest in part on your shoulders.” Bernard patted my arm. “No need to worry. Diamonds are made under pressure, and you’re our brilliant
Claire.
”

S
PRING, AND GRAMERCY PARK WAS DRESSED THIS SUNDAY IN
yellow daffodils, frilly-edged goblets on six-pointed saucers. They reminded me of Wordsworth’s poem about wild ones. How did it begin? Oh, yes. “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” And later, “What wealth the show to me had brought.” Fine for him. Only a poet or a woman in love could measure wealth by flowers. I wasn’t either one.

Wandering too, and in a similar mood, I came to Madison Square Park. An organ-grinder had stationed himself and his monkey beneath a magnolia tree radiant with enormous creamy blossoms, each petal a cup of sunlight. He was surrounded by children, nannies, and white-veiled prams looking like mobile wedding cakes. Everyone in the park was with someone. Even the organ-grinder had a furry friend. Loneliness crept over me despite his cheerful tune.