Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  Hearing that, I felt my spirit soar. I didn’t breathe until his velvet voice came through the semidarkness again.

  “Someday, when women are considered equal to men, it will become known that a woman of great importance created those lamps. This isn’t the Middle Ages, Clara. You will not be lost to history like the makers of those medieval windows in Gloucester are. Someone will find you.”

  Could that be? I drank in this comfort hungrily, momentarily released from the prison of resentment. I could not even find words to thank him, but after some moments of relishing what he said, sharp embarrassment descended. My need for recognition was as transparent to him as a pouting child’s. My complaints about Mr. Tiffany seemed petty after hearing Bernard paint a larger picture. At once I saw that I was too preoccupied with the present, and with myself. There was no grace in so nakedly reaching after fame. What would I have to do, or give up, in order to outgrow it?

  “THE WISTERIA LAMP is finished if you want to take a look,” the note said the next day. It was from Alex, the foreman of the Metal Department. If. If. What did he think I was? A turtle who lays her eggs and immediately abandons them to hatch and fend for themselves? I beat his messenger boy downstairs and arrived just as Alex was attaching the electric socket to the base.

  My disheartened feelings melted away at the sight. I, we, had transformed glass and metal into an illusion of a living plant.

  “It’s spectacular!”

  The open crown for release of heat looked fine as a network of thick, textured leads in a patina of black representing the vines. Five of them snaked all the way down to the irregular bottom edge, diminishing in thickness to become the same width as the other lead lines dividing one column of blossoms from another.

  “It was mighty troublesome to solder all those tiny pieces,” Alex said.

  “It’s expertly done. With so many lead lines, they could have overpowered the shade if the solder was laid on too thickly.”

  “You have Harry to thank for that.”

  “You did a superb job, Harry,” I said. “I know it was difficult.”

  “I hope I don’t see another one of those for a while,” he grumbled.

  Alex set it on the base and lit it. The brilliance took my breath away. The blossoms sparkled as if a magical vine had produced amethysts and sapphires. I needed to linger over it, glory in it, share it.

  “Can you send it up to fifth for a couple of days?”

  “No. The boss wants it in his office for a client to see. Then it’s going to Paris.”

  “Then just one day. I want the girls to study it.”

  “Can’t do.”

  Rage rose, swift and violent, even to my teeth. “But it’s mine!”

  His stunned look made me think how false that was, how puny my claim. A dozen people, counting both of our departments and the bronze foundry, had worked on it.

  “I’m sorry. An hour? Can you do without it for an hour?”

  “An hour.”

  “Harry, will you bring it up? I want you to hear what the girls say.”

  When Harry delivered it on a cart, and I told the girls that he was the man who put it together, their praise came thick and fast and loud. Harry blushed his happiness. He never got any credit for anything.

  “Let’s light it,” he said.

  Everyone quieted. The room crackled with the electricity of suspense. When he turned it on, what squeals and cheers ensued. I thought even Frank could hear them.

  Nellie marched right up to him, arm extended. “I want to shake your hand, Mister. I can’t imagine how happy a body would be to have that in his house and be able to turn it on whenever he wanted some light.”

  “There will be more,” I said to the girls, but Harry heard it on his way out. His shoulders sagged and he looked cross-eyed in exaggerated despair, and the girls giggled.

  “Now that you see how electricity illumines every piece, I want to talk about selection. None of the wisteria lamps we produce will be the same as this or as each other, although we’ll be using the same lead lines and patterns. The small size of the pieces lends itself to creating variations.”

  I gave them the range of colors from white through pale cerulean to Prussian blue, and from mauve through the violet range to purple. The foliage could depict a specific time in the blooming season, using yellow-green and emerald for early spring, with olive and ocher for summer.

  “There are two types of color schemes, so before you begin, you’ll have to make a choice. In one type, the petals are almost uniform in color, but the clusters contrast, light ones alternating with darker ones.”

  “Do they both grow on the same vine?” Mary McVickar questioned.

  “Not usually, but there could be more than one vine tangled together. The other scheme would follow a pattern of maturation, light tints higher on the cluster, descending to darker shades on the newer, lower blossoms.”

  “What types of glass would you like us to use?” asked Minnie.

  “Mottled glass could have darker spots on a lighter petal, which would provide a smooth transition down the column. Knobby glass, with the texture on the inside of the shade, would give the petals luster.”

  “What about any background?” Miss Stoney asked.

  “You are free to choose how much air you want showing between clusters, and the glass for the air might be transparent, or active with striations, ripples, pinpoint mottling, or blue streaks.”

  Nellie slapped her hands on the sides of her head. “Too much for a mind to hold.”

  What a darling. She was becoming my pet.

  IN THE BASEMENT one morning I was selecting glass panels for the wisteria lamps when Albert unloaded some gorgeous thick glass in pale yellow gold flecked with orange. Imbedded fractures made it alive. Cut round and beveled, what splendid suns they would be.

  I took one panel upstairs and went right to work cutting a four-inch circle and chipping irregular bevels into its perimeter. Mr. Tiffany would love this. He would see it as the radiance of the divine, the new sun on the first morning of creation. Let there be light, and there was light. Accomplished as simply as that. Ultimate power. I held the disk up to my window, and it shot out shafts of yellow light in all directions. And it was good.

  Wasn’t it the fifth day that God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life?” Dragonflies! There had to be dragonflies darting around each sun on a domed shade, the dome of heaven. No filigree this time. The glass for the wings could have streaks of violet, even magenta, against cerulean and turquoise. In the exuberance of their flight, their wings would overlap, making dazzling variations in color. Feeling that I was soaring, I finished a watercolor study of a one-fifth section by the end of the day, surprising myself with my own swiftness.

  Mr. Mitchell came in. I steeled myself and showed it to him. No hello. No comment. Not even a glance at it with his brown wooden eyes. Just a wild launch into a diatribe about the cost of my lamps and my unbridled whims, ending with, “We do not need ten varieties of dragonfly shades.”

  “Yes, we do. In this room, we most certainly do.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep up the momentum of creation. To keep the girls from becoming complacent about color.”

  “We are not running a hobby house here, Mrs. Driscoll.”

  “Unlike you, my women are artists, Mr. Mitchell, and artists are more alive when they see new possibilities of color combinations. If we keep making the same thing, putting the same colored glass in the same spot, lamp after lamp, our color keenness becomes dull.”

  “Inconsequential. Go ahead and put the same color in the same spot. Your girls can work faster that way.”

  “That’s shortsighted of you. When we make the eight wisteria lamps that Mr. Tiffany asked for, their color schemes will reflect each selector’s cultivated taste for nuances of hues, which you obviously don’t have. Each shade will be individual. To you that only means that you can charge more. To us it means
the boundlessness of creation. Let’s face it, Mr. Mitchell, you only value our work for its dollarable quality, not its adorable quality. Your soul doesn’t have that capacity.”

  His whole face reddened, even to his ears.

  “What’s that you’re working on?”

  “A new dragonfly lamp with gorgeous yellow suns.”

  He huffed and puffed and blew out the words, “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  CHAPTER 29

  ARCADIA

  THOSE WERE THE LAST WORDS MR. MITCHELL EVER SAID TO ME. He went home and died.

  The news hit me like a flying hammer. That monstrous sense of responsibility overtook me again. That evening I told Alice that I couldn’t help but think I had caused it.

  “You think you have that power?” she said.

  “I upset him. I returned diatribe for diatribe, decorated with some snide remarks, until he was red in the face. I ought to dress in sackcloth and smear my face with ashes.”

  “It’s a false sense of responsibility you have. You put too much importance on yourself. Throw it off, Clara. It’s not yours to take on.”

  “He was a relative of the Tiffanys.”

  “Immaterial.”

  “Maybe my sharpness caused his heart to beat too fast until it gave out.”

  “Your stepfather would not agree. He believed in only one cause, bigger than you, bigger than us all.”

  That calmed me somewhat, but the next day in the quiet studio when I called for a five-minute closed-eye rest, it was hard not to feel guilty again. Alice was right about one thing, though. Overblown responsibility was part of my preoccupation with myself.

  Despite the rush job on a wisteria lamp for an impatient customer who wanted it for some dinner party, I let the eye rest go on longer than usual. Any hurrying on the wisteria lamps was particularly nerve-racking to the girls. With my eyes closed too, I listened to the clop-clop of a horse’s hooves get louder and then softer, a newsboy calling out the headlines, and the scrubwoman scrape her bucket against the floor.

  “Time’s up,” I said.

  A deafening crash jolted us. The scrubwoman, cleaning under the sawhorse table holding the wisteria shade, jerked up at my command. She took the whole table with her. In an instant the work of three girls for seven days was in an undistinguishable heap.

  The sudden silence in the room spoke more loudly than wails. We dropped to the floor to try to fit the two thousand pieces together. Not a word issued from their mouths about the cost of broken glass that would normally be taken from their wages. I vowed I would find a way for that not to happen.

  Only Frank, coming in to collect the trash, let out a strange yawp and crawled under nearby tables to pick up scattered pieces. As for the scrubwoman, she looked around in a dazed way for a minute, and then calmly went on scrubbing elsewhere, the only untroubled person in the room. Was I responsible? She probably thought my “Time’s up” was meant for her. Don’t take it on yourself, Alice would say, but could I be that nonchalant?

  Nellie and Carrie hurried to cut new pieces when we couldn’t find a quick match. Many of them had a tricky concave curve. After three hours of trying to find pieces to salvage and determine where they belonged, we were all discouraged. “It’s all arseways,” Mary cried in disgust. Miss Judd had tears in her eyes. Everyone’s skirts were dirty. Groveling on the floor was more trouble than starting over. Is it a wisteria vine or an electrolier? Neither. It’s a pile of trash. T-H-R-O-W I-T A-W-A-Y, I spelled to Frank. I would take the cost of the broken glass out of my own wages.

  “Let’s all go home,” I said. “We’ll start a new one in the morning.”

  “But the customer. He won’t get it in time,” Miss Judd said.

  “No, he won’t. I’ll tell Mr. Mitchell—I mean Mr. Thomas—tomorrow.”

  Bleary-eyed, I shooed everyone out, left Frank to clean up, and took the elevator with Nellie.

  “Do you ever wonder what kind of family buys these lamps and puts them in their houses?” she asked.

  “Rich ones,” I said drily.

  “Don’t you wonder whether they love them as much as we do? But we’ll never know, will we?”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “You might think this is blarney, but do you ever have the feeling that what we do is a little like God making the flowers in the first place, hoping someone will notice?”

  “Yes.”

  “But He keeps on making them anyway, year after year,” Nellie said. “Isn’t that love, Mrs. Driscoll?”

  “The highest kind.”

  Outside the workers’ entrance on Twenty-fifth Street, there was her faithful Patrick Doyle waiting to walk her home in the dark. That was love too.

  THE WORLD—SMALL AND GREAT—careened from its axis. To boarders gathering in the parlor before dinner, I announced, “The year of 1901 will come to be known as the year the Victorian Era died, and the Queen with it, though many purists would hold that it was the other way around. I read in a design magazine that she was a sucker for trite little objects placed symmetrically cheek by jowl on every flat surface in Buckingham Palace. I’m declaring the end of fussy Victorianisms on our overcrowded mantel museum.”

  I removed the snow globe, the little red rocking horse, the daguerreotype of the Siamese twins, the Jack and Jill figurines, the miniature Dutch windmill, the pirouetting ostrich, and the polka-dotted bunny scratching his behind. I moved the two handsome brass candlesticks to the left side and the upright Chinese plate to the right instead of in the middle.

  “There. Now the housekeeper will have less to dust, and we can enjoy a post-Victoria simplicity.”

  English to the bone, Bernard looked askance at my audacity, and sank into an inordinate sadness at dinner, as if his mother, not the distant Queen, had died. Unwittingly I had wounded him, acting from aesthetics rather than considerateness. I felt awful, especially after he had been so kind to comfort me. I went to my room to think of something nice to do for him. I wanted it to be English so I looked through my volume of Shakespeare. I found the passage about England from Richard II with the scattered lines,

  This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle …

  This precious stone set in the silver sea …

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

  I had always loved it, but it didn’t give me any specific image that I could draw for him. I turned to my Wordsworth. The frontispiece was an etching of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament seen from Westminster Bridge. It wouldn’t be a masterpiece, but with “infinite, meticulous labor,” I could render it passably and write out neatly below it the first few lines of his sonnet, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge.”

  Earth has not anything to show more fair;

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty:

  This City now doth, like a garment, wear

  The beauty of the morning.

  ON THE STAIRWAY a few days later, I said to him, “I apologize for being disrespectful to your Queen. I know how beloved she was.”

  “No, no. It wasn’t that.” His thought trailed off. “It was something else.”

  I held forward my drawing with the verse. “It’s for you.”

  A bashfulness came over me as he admired it.

  “I would have drawn Gloucester Cathedral if I’d had something to go by.”

  “It’s the most thoughtful thing you could have done for me.”

  OLGA ZOFIA LIPSKA, the Polish waif whom Hank finally let me hire when she promised to take his evening drawing class, hadn’t shown up to work for three days, so I took the electric car down Bowery, got off near the waterfront, and looked for Olga’s street in this Polish neighborhood.

  I suspected her absence might be related to the shooting of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where Mr. Tiffany, with Thomas Edison’s collaboration, astonished crowds with his Fountain of Light. The assassin was the son
of Polish immigrants, one Leon Czolgosz, who boasted in court that he’d been heavily influenced by Emma Goldman and that he killed the president “because he was the enemy of the good people.”

  I stepped aside for two women carrying bundles of firewood on their heads. Eyes averted to avoid my gaze, they turned in at a stoop where men lounged on the steps occupied with their pipes without so much as moving their legs out of the way for the women to pass. Another woman selling wreath-shaped bread like giant crullers did not look up at me, and farther on, two women haggling in Polish over frowsy salad weeds in a basket fell silent when I approached. Olga’s building wasn’t a tenement but a large old house divided into small apartments. When she answered my knock, her eyes red from crying, she cowered instantly against her drawings tacked to the wall.

  “You don’t have to be afraid, Olga.”

  The drawings were excellent. A still life of an intricate wedge of cabbage, a potato, and a carrot arranged on a plate showed that she had really seen the objects, as Hank had said artists do. A scene with her ramshackle house and a shoeless toddler holding a cup under a dripping street faucet revealed the sensitivity Dudley had spoken of too. Her work was delicate, expressive, and nuanced with light and shadow, and I told her so. Now I understood what Hank saw in her, and what he meant about the immigrant experience expressed in art. She would design for me someday, but I would insist she continue under Hank’s tutelage at night.

  “Are you sick, Olga? Why haven’t you come to work?”

  “The other girls will hate me because I’m Polish,” she murmured. “That murderer was Polish.”

  “No, they don’t hate you. There’s too much work to do for them to think about that. So much work that I hired another girl, Julia Zevesky.”

  Julia had come like a thin, wet puppy asking for a job on a rainy day. She must have walked miles without an umbrella, asking at any business that would let her dripping form enter. Dire need shadowed the skin below her dark, pleading eyes. Though she had no art experience, her eyes made me hire her as an errand girl and cutter’s assistant at three-fifty a week, half the standard apprentice’s wage.