Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

“What was the last thing he said to you?”

  “That he was going to get something for me, a surprise, and that he would be right back.”

  Mr. Kaye’s puzzlement was written in a scowl. “We should go into town.”

  We took his trap and mare. No one had seen him at the general store, the post office, the land office, the bank, the barbershop. We even went into the icehouse. Huge iron hooks hung from the rafters. I shuddered.

  I spotted a small jewelry and handicraft store, hardly Tiffany & Company. Of course! The surprise! I inquired, and was crestfallen.

  At the train depot the stationmaster asked me for a description. I was mortified at how little I could say. “Black hair. Tall.”

  Mr. Kaye added, “Gold-rimmed glasses.”

  “But he left without them.” I shrank from their concerned expressions as they surmised that he had left hastily.

  “How old, Mrs. Waldo?”

  Another embarrassment. I didn’t know for certain. I knew he was a couple years younger than I. “Thirty-three?”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “A white shirt. Brown trousers. No vest. No coat. Brown shoes.”

  “Carrying anything?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  The stationmaster consulted the baggage handler. “Nope. Nobody by that description.”

  “I didn’t think he would take a train. He gets sick on trains.”

  At the newspaper office, Mr. Kaye put in a missing-person notice. To me, doing that spelled a change of heart, abandonment, escape.

  Back in the trap, Mr. Kaye studied the rump of the horse. “I think it’s time we notify the authorities.”

  I acquiesced, numb.

  The county seat was in Elkhorn. I would have enjoyed passing through stands of sugar maples, elms, and cottonwoods, seeing sunlight dance through the latticework of leaves, and hearing the hollow rat-a-tat of woodpeckers hammering, if I weren’t so plagued by anxiety.

  Sheriff Seth Hollister was a broad-chested, capable-looking man wearing boots over his pant legs. We went through the same questions, and he agreed to send out search parties in the woods.

  “Do you know any of his relatives and how to reach them?” he asked.

  “His younger brother, George, in New York.”

  “You’d best be thinking of sending a telegram,” said Mr. Hollister.

  “Can we wait another day? I don’t want to alarm him unnecessarily.”

  “He might know something that would help us.”

  I nibbled at my thumbnail. “I’ll think about it.”

  I ATE DINNER IN A STUPOR, went up to our room on shaky legs, and opened the window so that I might hear anything. Sitting up in bed, I smoothed the sheet neatly, the sheet he had crumpled in his fist at the moment of his passion. Does a man lose something of himself at that moment, and does he gain it back after time? Had I lost him forever?

  I turned over in my mind every hour of our recent days together, searching for a clue as to what had propelled him out that door. There were so many possible readings of his disappearance: he fell into the lake, encountered a wild animal in the woods, was robbed and beaten, maybe murdered. Or he was afraid of entanglement, leery of marriage, doubtful about his Mexico plan. Or he remembered an earlier woman. Shades of Francis Driscoll! He didn’t love me as he had loved her. He found me less beautiful than he had imagined.

  What tormented me most was that this might have been caused by my own desire to prove something to myself. Had he thought less of me for my willingness to have intimacies before we were married? He was just as eager. Was I less worthy of respect? Was that what his troubled look meant? It didn’t seem possible that he was disappointed in our love-making. He was my wild Edwin. But maybe he had come to his senses, and I had not.

  Or maybe he had lost his senses.

  At the time, I had thought that his leaping from the streetcar was impulsive, thoughtless, and overly zealous but not irrational. Now I wasn’t so sure. And the other time, at Nutley, in his mind he had good reason to flee George’s studio if he were sick. Fine if he wanted to throw up outside so I wouldn’t see, but it made no sense to escape into a snowstorm at night and on foot in that condition. That was worse than unwise. It was unbalanced.

  George. I had to tell George. He had a right to know.

  THE FIRST THING in the morning I went to the hotel desk and asked Mr. Kaye to send a telegram to George, at 46 Irving Place, New York.

  “Just say, ‘Edwin has disappeared from Lake Geneva. Come quickly. Clara.’ ”

  Mr. Kaye set off in the trap at a fast clip.

  Impersonating Edwin’s wife, not quite Mrs. Waldo but certainly not Mrs. Driscoll anymore, I sat in a lounge chair unable to do anything but watch two steamers drag the lake. From time to time they pulled up something on a gruesome iron hook, and a spasm rattled my chest. I strained to see what it might be, but always, thank God, they let it sink back down.

  Still, I kept my eyes on the lake. Its streaks of cool green where there was underwater vegetation contrasted with its range of blues fluctuating in response to passing clouds, as though someone were stirring the lake with a giant spoon, like a gaffer marbling a fresh pour of still-viscous glass.

  I felt a flash of shame for letting my thoughts drift to the studio instead of thinking continually of Edwin. What was I to do? Close my eyes to the world around me?

  The geese kept up their nibbling in the grass, and mallards with their ducklings paddled back and forth near the shore, puttering hour after hour, looking for something too. An emerald dragonfly with double gauze wings worried its skimming way just above the water and dashed off impulsively, but it came back. It came back.

  How beautiful it would be to render that dragonfly in glass. I longed to do it, but how and where? When I had told Mr. Tiffany I was leaving to get married, he shook his head and scowled down at his hands. Rarely was there anything in his domain that was beyond his power to control, so for a moment he didn’t know how to react. His credo of being a gentleman prevented him from trying to convince me otherwise, though he did say, “Are you sure, Clara?”

  I only nodded, prepared myself, and asked, “Do you think you might make an exception and keep me on?”

  “Justifying it by the importance of your work?”

  “By my indispensability. And to develop our secret—the lampshade idea. Remember?”

  “A crack in the policy and the whole thing will come tumbling down. I wish I could.”

  I froze and could not take another breath. My breezy plan to be both artist and wife collapsed like a house of glass built on shifting sands. Rising to leave, I heard him say in an uncle’s cautionary tone, “Take good care of yourself, Clara.” Although my spine had stayed rigid, my step firm, as I left his office, inside I was seared with embarrassment for having asked, devastated for being denied, stung that our mutual love for what we were creating wasn’t strong enough to maintain the bond of admiration as two artists that I felt we had. I was cast adrift in an uncertain future with no way back. Now, I had thought, I would have to depend upon love alone to fill my cup of life.

  A vagary flitted across my mind with the capriciousness of that dragonfly. Could someone have put Edwin up to it? Someone who would offer him something irresistible if he abandoned me? Someone who knew I would return to Tiffany’s studios? Mr. Tiffany himself who offered to reward Edwin extravagantly for giving me back to him? The money might have been too strong a temptation if it were enough to mount a campaign for State Assembly without having to work in Mexico. A freakish thought. I discarded it, but it came back unbidden. How much would my return have been worth to Mr. Tiffany?

  Beneath my dark speculation, I felt Edwin’s health and safety weighing heavily on my shoulders, and I flailed in a quagmire of doubts and self-recrimination, not knowing whether to feel angry or jilted or guilty. Would he have come here after Chicago if I hadn’t come with him? Probably not. Responsibility gouged deep, as it always did. All right, then. From no
w on I would stick to my Midwestern values, abide by my mother’s etiquette book, and be the honorable stepdaughter of a minister in every proper, humdrum regard.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Mr. Kaye pulled up in his trap alongside the hotel, George leapt out, ran across the lawn to me in the pagoda, scattering the geese, and flung himself into my arms. I wasn’t sure whether I was comforting him or he was comforting me.

  “Tell me everything that led up to this.” Mercifully, his tone wasn’t accusatory, only panicked.

  “He gave a rousing speech in Chicago, and shook a hundred hands at the reception afterward. The next day, on the train, he felt quite buoyed up about it and spoke of running for State Assembly.”

  “Was he sick on the train?”

  “No, but he did open the window. Maybe he was queasy. He was happy to show me the lake. In Chicago we’d given the appearance of brother and sister, and had separate hotel rooms. Here, we registered as husband and wife.”

  George was expecting more. I blushed to say, “We made love.”

  “And?”

  “It was beautiful, George. We were both very happy. There wasn’t anything that would lead to this.”

  George paced like a caged tiger in the pagoda, muttering, “You don’t seem hurt by this at all. You haven’t cried. You’re not the least bit hysterical.”

  “Some women have more contained ways of handling despair.”

  The ache in my jaw from grinding my teeth provided no visible proof, so I showed him my nails bitten down to the quick and my handkerchief balled up in a wrinkled wad.

  “Did he ask you to come with him?”

  “On this trip? No. It was my idea. He was happy about it, though.” I pulled my shawl around me as a way to hold myself together. “After marriage, people make discoveries about each other. I didn’t want to assume anything, so I invited myself in order to find out if I could satisfy his body’s need, if we were, I might say, compatible.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, we are, George. We are.”

  Such a serious look on George’s face, almost akin to his brother’s troubled look after we had made love. I fiddled with my sleeve. “Do you condemn me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he changed his mind about marrying me?”

  “No. He’s wild about you.”

  “I’m not so sure now. Maybe he thinks poorly of me on moral grounds, he being so high-minded.”

  “He’s a man, Clara!”

  “A man doesn’t just walk off and leave his fiancée in a hotel room. He had to intend to escape.”

  “But he didn’t take his coat.”

  George pounded the railing once with his fist. “What we don’t know is whether he would have come here if you weren’t with him.”

  I felt an unintentional stab of incrimination.

  “Has anything like this ever happened before?”

  It was the wrong time to ask. Sheriff Hollister was approaching the pagoda.

  “Excuse me for interrupting. You the brother?”

  “Yes. George Waldo.” He held out his hand.

  “They’re going to drag the west part of the lake tomorrow. If they don’t find him, I’m afraid they’ll call off the search. The longer you wait, the less likely—”

  “I know,” George was quick to say.

  “It’s time to get a detective.”

  “Let’s go.”

  WE WAITED TEN DAYS at Kaye’s Park while two detectives tried to track him. Time hung heavy on us. As the reality descended, we were careful not to say anything that might upset each other. We drifted aimlessly in a rowboat some days, and George sketched in a desultory manner other days, until temperatures dropped dramatically and a storm blew in and stayed. Edwin was only in his shirtsleeves! I thought of the bard’s sonnet defining love: True love “looks on tempests and is never shaken.” I was shaken.

  The detectives had traced Edwin passing through Clinton and Beloit, Wisconsin, where he inquired at a bus station how to get to Savannah, Illinois, but there they lost him. A week later they picked up traces of him in Dubuque and Davenport, and lost him again. George’s hope was fading. He cabled his parents in Connecticut.

  An early frost had turned the maple leaves a deep, blood red vibrating in the wind, and the oaks a sallow yellow. Before breakfast one morning, I came to the parlor window and saw George hurling stones into the lake, one right after another, angrily flailing about, pitching them wildly until he exhausted himself and came in, shivering and embarrassed when he saw that I’d been watching.

  During breakfast, a din of honking started the geese moving in agitated fashion on the lawns, stretching their wings. We left our plates and hurried outside. At a distance, one goose flapped its wings and lifted, no longer earthbound, honking wildly. Others near him followed, forming a V, their beautiful white underwings tipped in black, their necks stretched forward into the ether. Then the gaggle on the lawn where we stood lifted off the ground with a great thrumming of wings, and another flock became airborne off the water, and formed their V’s, each with the lead bird gaining height quickly. All over the lake and shore, the sky became full, the honking a deafening jubilation of flight, of freedom of movement, of instinct.

  “A great drama of avian migration, Edwin would have called it,” I said.

  We watched standing close together but separate in our sorrowful thoughts until the sky was full of mere specks. And then the vastness took them in.

  Goose, oh, my wild goose, no longer earthbound, no longer mine. Do not fold your wings.

  Still fixed on the sky, I abandoned caution and asked, “You never did answer me. Has he ever flown before?”

  During an excruciating silence, George seemed to be at war with himself.

  “Once. But that was ten years ago.”

  “Tell me.”

  George turned away to speak. “He was studying at Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. During the break between terms, he went south with another student, heading toward Charleston. Coming back north alone, he wound up here at Lake Geneva instead of returning directly to Andover. He had no recollection of how he got here. He didn’t remember anything after being on the train heading south. My parents didn’t miss him because they assumed he had returned to Andover after his trip with his friend, and he arrived there the day the new term started. Apparently he came to his senses on his own, here at the lake, and then went back to the seminary. It was years before he confessed it to me.”

  “You knew that and you didn’t tell me? You just let me go ahead? Why didn’t you say something when he left Nutley like a madman?”

  He cringed at my shrieking accusation.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  A long moment passed before he spoke to the empty sky. “Because I couldn’t have you as my wife. But he could.” His voice rose in pitch. “The prospect of having you in the family was irresistible. And I wanted so badly for him to have you, for him to be happy. He would have been a broken man if you had said no.”

  CHAPTER 15

  NASTURTIUM

  AT IRVING PLACE AGAIN AFTER A MONTH AWAY CAREENING FROM happiness to anger, wrung by injury and sorrow, I unpacked, stopping often to stare at nothing and wonder what Edwin was doing right at that moment, whether he was suffering, hurt, lucid—or bewildered, like I was. The number of possibilities made my temples throb, my jaw ache. I nestled in my bed in this private crevice of the day to look for comfort from Emily Dickinson, and found not comfort so much as wisdom, with a bookmark at the page. One innocent day I must have thought the verse clever before I knew its truth.

  For each ecstatic instant

  We must an anguish pay

  In keen and quivering ratio

  To the ecstasy.

  Discerning and wry, yes, but not comforting. I doubted if she had ever sunk into a night of love like Isolde’s, or like mine. If she had, she would have been too controlled to lose her equilibrium, and I didn’t want to lose mine either. The words blurred, and that sting
ing feeling that comes just before tears swelled up around my eyes. I reached for Mr. Tiffany’s handkerchief, but not soon enough. Loss overwhelmed me. I had the handkerchief from Mr. Tiffany, the kaleidoscope from Francis, but what from Edwin? Nothing. He had given me nothing but promises. I was bereft of even a memento to clutch in private, desperate moments, like a soul-sick nun clutching a crucifix. What was wrong with me to lose one man after another?

  A knock at my door rescued me from at least this bout of self-pity.

  “It’s me. Alice!”

  I flung open the door.

  “I live here now,” she said. “I took your advice. West Fifty-seventh was too far from Tiffany’s.”

  We fell into each other’s arms. “You couldn’t have picked a better time. Your face is sunshine after rain.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  “Then you know?”

  “In a general way. No details. Chatty Miss Owens is cautioning everyone not to be too inquisitive, then leaves them with innuendos, which only makes them more curious.”

  By now the Lesser Furies at the other dining table had probably discussed it thoroughly, making speculations, leveling judgments. At my table, the only one I had to brace myself for was Mrs. Hackley.

  I sat back against the iron headboard and patted the quilt next to me, an invitation to get comfortable.

  “He just disappeared. Bolted. One night of love, a glimpse of him out the door the next morning, and then he was gone. Poof. A master of irony.”

  “What irony?”

  “He had promised me adventure and surprise. Who would have thought that by this bizarre surprise he would throw me over? If he had come back the next day or the next week and I had married him, he would have done me the honor of keeping me in perpetual anxiety over another disappearance, or other aberration on his otherwise solid veneer.”

  “Don’t be sharp, Clara. I expected you to be upset and sad.”

  “I am upset. I’ve been racked with worry for him. It’s that responsibility issue torturing me again. What did I do or say that made him run off?”