Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “Does Mr. Tiffany know?”

  “He’s coming in tomorrow to see them.”

  I put my arm around her and stroked her hair. Coming so soon after our victory in the glass studio, this was doubly grievous for her.

  “In a little while, Alie-girl, it won’t matter at all.”

  WITH THOSE WOMEN labor leaders still on my mind, I went to Corona with Alice the next day to make sure Mr. Tiffany wouldn’t vent his anger like a despot. Without a union to support the Arcadia four, if the results were as bad as Alice had described, this might mean that in a fit of temper, he might fire them. It might necessitate the kind of intervention Edwin had provided for immigrant workers who didn’t dare speak up for themselves.

  Porcelain tulips, lilies, bowls carved with a milkweed motif, and vases decorated with fern fronds had all slumped, sagged, or completely collapsed in unbearable heat. Where they tipped onto neighboring pieces their glazes stuck them together. Only fourteen pieces made of other clay survived, those untouched by the collapsing porcelains.

  We mourned the loss of each one. The stem on Alice’s water-lily bowl didn’t have the strength to hold itself upright, and the cup of the open blossom drooped permanently onto the base of lily pads.

  “It was my favorite,” Alice said wistfully. “I loved the frogs on the lily pads. I made each one different.”

  “Keep it for yourself,” I said. “I know it isn’t what you intended, but it’s still a graceful accident. A sculpture rather than a bowl.”

  The instant we heard the tapping of his cane on the threshold, Lillian poured out profuse apologies. Alice was so ashamed that she didn’t even straighten up to greet him. He took one look and saw disaster. One deep breath that raised his chest was the only sound he made. He picked up one after another without a word, as though sympathetic with their fallen postures. He rotated on his palm the water-lily bowl.

  “This is an exquisite design. Who did this?”

  “I did,” Alice whimpered.

  “I want you to make it again, only make the pedestal thicker. You were trying for the delicacy of chinaware, but this is pottery. Let the petals rest on the frogs’ heads for support.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “It’s the way with all new things. We worked three years trying to make iridescent glass before we got anything good enough to sell, so don’t be discouraged. We’ll find another clay that’s more stable.”

  Bless the man. He spoke kindly, as though hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars had not gone up in smoke.

  He caught Alice’s eye, and added, “What the world calls failure, I call learning.”

  She pulled her mouth to one side. He had tried, but his words were not a comfort to her.

  “Come watch the glassblowing,” Mr. Tiffany urged. “We have a new gaffer handling large pieces. It’s quite a spectacle.” To Alice and Lillian, he added, “It might make you feel better.”

  NOTHING COULD BE more incongruous than Mr. Tiffany, with a rose in the buttonhole of his cream-colored suit, surrounded by grimy, sweating men in a factory full of ash and soot. By contrast, the new barrel-chested, big-bellied gaffer, whose thick lips squeezed a cigar, wore only an undershirt beneath his suspenders.

  Mr. Tiffany threw a twenty-dollar gold piece into the glory hole.

  “What did you do that for?” Lillian asked. “Are you crazy? That’s more than my week’s wage.”

  “It takes gold to make the purest red,” he said. “It’s soft and will melt quickly.”

  We waited until the gatherer handed off the blowpipe with an enormous gob of incandescent red glass to the gaffer, who shaped and supported it with a paddle in one hand while he spun the blowpipe with the other, all the time smoking his cigar. The vase was to have a teardrop shape at the bottom, narrowing gracefully to a tall throat. Since vases were blown with the aperture attached to the pipe, this would be an extremely difficult piece to manage with all the weight of the wide base at the opposite end.

  After half a dozen trips back into the glory hole, the bulb was about twelve inches tall when the gaffer signaled to the blower for more air to stretch the throat. The weight of the glass on the slender throat pulled it down, almost to the floor, but he quickly spun the blowpipe just in time to bring it back into round.

  The safest thing to do would be to stop right there, but he signaled for more air again. Alice and Lillian gasped. Men from other shops came to watch as it grew to twenty-five inches. He almost lost it again at thirty.

  “If it falls, there’ll be ten pounds of molten glass spreading all over the floor,” Mr. Nash said.

  “And twenty dollars’ worth of gold as well,” Lillian flashed back.

  The gaffer’s bulbous cheeks and triple chin were red with heat and concentration, and the well-chewed cigar was dripping annoyingly down his chin.

  “You ain’t doing nothing, bub. Hold this,” he muttered, handing the soggy stub to Mr. Tiffany.

  Caught off guard, Mr. Tiffany took the dripping morsel and held it away from his suit, mortal repugnance writhing on his face. Laughter exploded from everyone but the gaffer and the blower.

  The vase grew to a dramatic height, and finally the gaffer signaled to have it transferred to the pontil, a solid rod with a dab of molten glass on its tip to secure it to the bottom of the vase. He scored it at its rim, tapped gently, and it snapped off the blowpipe cleanly. The show was over. The gaffer reached for his precious butt, put it in his mouth, and said between his teeth, “Thanks, bub.”

  “This is Mr. Tiffany you gave that to,” exhorted Mr. Nash.

  The gaffer took one expressionless look at him and signaled his gatherer for a new gob of glass.

  “That was about three feet,” Mr. Tiffany said. “If you can make one five, I’ll put it in a lily pool in my new house.”

  The gaffer chewed a moment and remarked, cigar still between his teeth, “You don’t ask much, do you, bub?”

  Out in the yard, all of us laughed again.

  Mr. Tiffany tapped his cane jauntily on the cement. “See? Success and disaster are only a moment apart.”

  His effort at consolation had the opposite effect than he intended. Alice stopped laughing.

  CHAPTER 36

  BEER, WINE, AND COGNAC

  ON SUNDAY MORNING ALICE AND I TOOK THE EL TRAIN OVER the Brooklyn Bridge and then the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railroad. She had felt so downhearted that she hadn’t wanted to go to Coney Island, but I insisted, just as I had done with Julia, for a different reason.

  Julia had protested that she wouldn’t like the place, but I saw beneath that to a deeper reason. She had no money of her own. I suspected that she gave all of her three dollars and fifty cents to her parents. I doubled her pay that week for her fine help during the landscape challenge. She still resisted. It wasn’t until I said I would be angry with her if she didn’t come that she agreed.

  Everyone met at Lucy Vanderveer’s restaurant on the boardwalk to eat clams at a penny apiece. A Tin Pan Alley band was playing “In the Good Old Summer Time,” and Theresa sang the line, “ ‘When your day’s work is over then you are in clover and life is one beautiful rhyme.’ ” I’m sure we all felt it.

  Those who had to rent a bathing costume for twenty-five cents got a free bowl of clam chowder at Vanderveer’s. I pretended that I was given two bathing middies by mistake and didn’t let on that one was my own. When I offered the other to Julia, she kept her hands to her sides.

  “Take it. I won’t have you standing on the shore while the rest of us are in the water.”

  Reluctantly, she lifted her hands for it, and a few moments later in the bathhouse that Miss Stoney and Miss Judd rented for everyone, I heard Olga speaking forcefully to Julia in Polish.

  I paid for our group picture to be taken in our bathing middies before we splashed into the water. Picking up cockleshells, Julia hesitated to wade into the sea.

  From a distance farther out, I shouted to her, “It’s free, so enjoy
it.”

  Olga waded back to shore and took Julia’s hand in order to get her in the water. Only Lillian and Marion knew how to swim, and they tried to teach the brave ones, but mostly we enjoyed the waves in an upright position, holding on to a rope with floats. Julia held on with both hands, looking terrified. What would I have to do to get her to loosen up? When a big breaker crashed over her and she came to the surface afterward, realizing that she hadn’t drowned, she smiled with a smile I had never seen on her face before, spontaneous and radiant. Even dear Miss Prim-and-Proper Judd let loose and squealed when our feet were pulled out from under us.

  “I didn’t think the old gal had it in her,” Alice said just to me.

  “Had what?”

  “Frivolity.”

  “It’s The Week We Dared that did it.”

  Later we crowded into a peep-show parlor to see the actualities, moving pictures for individual viewing in boxes. While it was nothing of note to see a man’s hat blow off on Madison Avenue, seeing the same thing in a peep show sent them into convulsions. Theresa’s favorite was the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade, Miss Judd was thrilled by scenes of firemen in action, and Beatrix was moved to tears by immigrants crowding through turnstiles at Ellis Island.

  “Oh, the people who come to New York to seek better lives,” she said. “What volumes could be written about them!”

  At Famous Feltman’s Grills, which boasted service to eight thousand hungry diners at a time, we bought frankfurters for five cents. Marion and Lillian loved the Tyrolean chorus singing German folk songs. We all rode the carousel and rose and sank to the music of a drummer and a piccolo player. And Julia smiled again.

  It was hard to keep Mary and Nellie from going into Paddy O’Shea’s for a pint, especially when touts at the doorway called them bonny damsels.

  “Coom in and ’ave a bit o’ the craic, won’t you?” one of them said, waving a paddle in the shape of a shamrock.

  “They’re not going in,” I said in my firmest civil tone.

  “Then can you sing us a diddlyie, lasses, right here on the boardwalk?”

  “To be sure we can,” said Mary, and started in with “ ‘Down in Bottle Alley lived Timothy McNally.’ ”

  Nellie joined in for the rest:

  “A wealthy politician

  And a gentleman at that.

  The joy of all the ladies,

  The gossoons and the babies,

  Who occupy the buildings called

  McNally’s row of flats.

  It’s Ireland and Italy,

  Jerusalem and Germany,

  Chinese and Africans,

  And a paradise for rats.”

  The touts gave a cheer and brought out half-pints for both of them and one for me, and there was nothing I could do but drink the beer along with them and think what a picture the song gave of the flats of Edwin’s Fourth Ward.

  At Steeplechase Roller Coaster we had to climb up a steep wooden stairway to a high point to get in the cars of the Switchback Railway. Theresa and Nellie stepped right up to get in the front car. Olga pulled Julia along to the second car, the others scrambled in, and Alice and I brought up the rear. After that, only a few of us wanted to go on the Flying Boat. Theresa, who had the strongest constitution, dared others to go on the Loop the Loop with her, then dragged us into Streets of Cairo, where imitators of Little Egypt did the hootchy-kootchy.

  Fascinated and envious, not having her boa to fling around, Theresa said, “I’m going to go home and practice!”

  “Why wait until you go home?” Mary challenged, launching her hips in an exaggerated gyration. Not to be outdone, Theresa did the same, unleashing her whole midsection in a broad orbit and speeding up the rhythm. Nellie was the next to join, her arms above her head, undulating like sea grass, her face coloring like a ripe peach. Admittedly, I did my share of swiveling too, which had the effect of encouraging others. “Revolting,” Miss Stoney declared, stifling a cackle at Miss Judd whirling in a hip-swinging tarantella that put Theresa to shame, but Miss Judd couldn’t sustain it, and we all collapsed on one another’s shoulders in stitches.

  WE STRETCHED SUMMER as long as we could, and on the last Saturday in September, Alice, William, Bernard, and I set out along the coast road to Point Pleasant Beach, although it was longer than the wooded path. It would be our last visit of the season, and we wanted to linger. The floating docks had been taken up, and the boats were gone, which gave us a touch of melancholy.

  In the yard of the cottage, William began to chop the remaining firewood rounds into wedges for the next season. Then Bernard rolled up his sleeves and said, “Let me have a go at it.”

  When he took the ax, I saw that his pale English forearms had fine light brown hair.

  “This makes me feel rather like a true American out west,” he said, shaking his shoulders to loosen up.

  He took one mighty swing and shaved off only the bark. We laughed, which only made him more determined. Was this the same man who performed that powerful, spontaneous leap on the ice last winter?

  “Pity,” I said. “You swing your arms gracefully, and you’re a top-notch cyclist and skater. I thought you would take to this more easily, but you chop like you’re made of sticks.” That was almost exactly what he had said to me at the ice rink.

  He chuckled at himself. “It’s because I forgot the spit.” He spit in both palms, rubbed his hands together, and attacked the wood again, improving slightly.

  I loved watching him, his finely sculpted jaw working as he prepared for a stroke, his full lips pushing out with his breath each time the ax landed, and I loved that he responded with good humor. Eventually he could land the blade close to where it would do the most good.

  “You did very well for the first time,” I said, laying on the condescension thick as mud. “I’m sure you can learn, if you practice.”

  In the evening, Bernard and William took blankets and a bottle of wine, and Alice and I took glasses, and we went down to the mouth of the river where it met the sea in a great crashing of waters. I wanted to walk on the boardwalk over the misty, deserted dunes, but it had already been rolled up.

  William uncorked the bottle and poured. “Here’s to the end of summer.”

  “A beautiful summer,” Bernard added.

  “I wish it would last forever,” Alice said.

  “You wouldn’t value it as much,” said Bernard. “When joys are sparse, they sink into you more deeply.”

  Was that a thought coming from a happily married man?

  We finished off the bottle just before a wind blew in at high tide, and we wrapped ourselves in the blankets, daringly one couple to each. The roar of the breakers rushing toward us, moonlight illuminating the white foam, and especially our enclosed closeness—I caught my breath at the exquisite pleasure of it all. We hobbled with baby steps to the water’s edge, which required getting closer to each other and coordinating our movements. We laughed at ourselves, and Bernard said, “I’m sure we can learn to do this if we practice.” Reeling a bit from the wine, I pressed myself against his side to feel as much of him as I could, yearning to stay wrapped together all night.

  The wind changed its mind and came from the west, which blew the spray backward.

  “The waves are like galloping horses with their manes flying,” I said. “Or maybe they’re the white beards of Tritons blowing their conch-shell trumpets to call land dwellers to worship the sea.”

  “Your imagination is priceless,” Bernard murmured.

  “Here’s a better idea.” I cocked my head, looked at him flirtatiously out of the corner of my eyes, and said, “They’re mermaids letting loose their silver locks to entice men to dangerous escapades.”

  …

  FROM THEIR STUDIO overlooking Madison Square Park, Hank and Dudley had been watching a building grow on the triangle of land cut by Broadway’s diagonal path across Fifth Avenue. It was taller each time I took my wheel across the snarl of traffic there, and I was awed by the architects’ dari
ng.

  When the scaffolding and barricades were removed Hank suggested that we toast the architects from the top floor. We agreed to meet at the point of the triangle right after work the following day. Coming down through Madison Square Park, I saw the building thrusting skyward above the trees. At a certain angle, only one of its long sides was visible, so it looked like a completely flat building, a mere façade without any width at all, like a giant piece of cardboard balanced on end and painted with windows. It was both disconcerting and thrilling. Walking farther west, I could see a slice of the other side, which made it look more stable.

  I crossed the street and found Dudley, Hank, and George, all with silly grins on their faces, waiting for me at the point. Instantly my skirt flew up, billowing in the eddy of wind swirling around the point. When I pushed it down in one place it ballooned up in another. I let out a squeal, and Dudley helped me get control of it.

  “Men hang around here just to catch a glimpse of leg,” Hank said.

  “Then you knew this would happen!” I cried.

  “Now policemen patrol the corner at night and tell them, ‘Skidoo. Get moving.’ Since this is at Twenty-third Street, they’ve named the billowing skirt phenomenon ‘Twenty-three Skidoo.’ ”

  “You might have warned me, Mr. Know-it-all.”

  George was chortling, and I conceded that it was funny. Exhilarating too, to be at the mercy of wind.

  Looking up at the soaring building, Dudley said, “It’s defiant and bold.”

  “It’s like the prow of a ship sailing uptown,” Hank observed.

  George wagged his head. “It’s dizzying.”

  “You’ve got to see it from the park,” I demanded. We waited for a streetcar to pass, and then crossed. “Don’t turn around until I tell you.” I was turning, though, to find just the right spot for them to stand so nothing of the back wall would be visible and it would look absolutely thin.

  “All right. Turn.”

  “Egad!” George cried. “It makes my hair stand on end.” He gazed awhile and then concluded, “A prime viewing spot,” and I agreed until he added, “to see the wind topple it.”