Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “Down home in Tennessee we’d call that an undertaker’s dream come true,” said Dudley.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Hank said authoritatively. “It’s the new way to build. The outer walls are attached to steel girders inside rather than the building’s innards being attached to stone exterior walls.”

  I had a feeling that good big things were going to happen here.

  “Wouldn’t Walt have loved to see this?” Dudley remarked. “He would have put in another line in ‘Mannahatta.’ ”

  “Do it for him,” I urged.

  “Let’s see. ‘Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies.’ That’s his line. Now mine. When, lo! upsprang a building like no other, manly, strong-faced, pointed uptown to a bright future.”

  “Bravo!” Hank said. “Let’s see if we can get to the top.” He patted his breast pocket. “For a little liquid ceremony.”

  George tipped his head way back, swayed, and his arm shot out to Dudley.

  “Hold on, comrade,” Dudley said.

  He looked down and shook his head. “I’m all right. Let’s go on up.”

  No one stopped us at the elevator. We went in with a crowd of people and nervous silence descended. After the ninth floor, we had it to ourselves. “Straight to the top,” Hank said to the elevator boy.

  My ears popped as though I were in a train going through a tunnel. We stopped with a bounce that made me grab my stomach.

  “Twenty-two,” the operator announced, and pulled aside the iron grille.

  From the hallway, we entered an empty office on the east side and looked down at rooftops. Birds flew below us. What an odd sensation.

  “Look. There’s Tiffany Studios,” I said, feeling oriented now.

  We traced Fourth Avenue south and found tiny Gramercy Park, like a rectangular green throw rug. And beyond it, to our great delight, Irving Place.

  George stepped up close to the window, looked straight down on Broadway, and slumped to the floor in a dead faint, white to the lips. We all dropped to our knees around him.

  “Lay him flat.” I undid his necktie.

  Hank pulled out his flask, poured cognac onto his handkerchief, and held it to his nose. George moved his head but didn’t rouse.

  “George! Wake up!” I shouted. “Get his legs up.”

  Hank handed me the sopping handkerchief to hold to his nose, and lifted George’s legs. Dudley slapped George’s cheek until his mouth dropped open, and we dribbled in the cognac. We worked with him in this way until he came to and could sit up with his head down between his knees. When his disorientation disappeared, Hank made him drink the rest of the cognac.

  “Let it go down easy, comrade,” Dudley said. “Jes’ like a dose of Southern Comfort.”

  Eventually he could stand. With Dudley and Hank on both sides of him, we walked him home. Dudley put him to bed in his room, and I fed him some Irish stew left from dinner.

  As he ate, he grinned roguishly and said, “I’m the only one who got to drink a cognac to the Flatiron Building.”

  CHAPTER 37

  SNOWBALL

  HENRY SHUT MY STUDIO DOORS BEHIND HIM, SAT DOWN CLOSE to me, and inquired into my well-being, as if to reassure himself before he proceeded.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but the principals in the Men’s Window Department have been harboring resentment against you ever since you did the six landscape windows.”

  “Against me personally?”

  “Against how you’ve made this department succeed and grow.”

  “They had their chance to do those windows.”

  “Regardless, now that Louis has given you the commissions for the big snowball and wisteria windows, they’ve taken their anger to the union.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “As part of the management, I wasn’t permitted to sit in on the union meeting, but I suspect they talked strike if your department doesn’t stop making windows.”

  “Strike! When might that happen?”

  “Depends on whether the union formalizes a grievance and on how Louis and Mr. Thomas respond to their demands. It might not happen, Clara. I just thought you ought to know.”

  A SENSE OF FOREBODING took root in me, but a month passed without further event. I didn’t tell the girls, and just went on as though nothing was threatening us. We had begun the intricate wisteria window as well as the snowball window, that round white puff of a flower that demanded subtle glass selection using mottles to suggest individual petals in the round masses. With Miss Judd and Mary McVickar as selectors, the panels were about one-third finished. I knew they would be splendid.

  One day Julia came in to work red-eyed and sniffling. Discreetly, Beatrix told me she was crying on the far side of the studio behind a mosaic panel. By noon it hadn’t subsided. A girl can’t foil-wrap a piece smoothly with vision blurred by tears. Olga lingered at lunchtime after the others left and spoke to her softly in Polish, which got her to stop crying. When I approached, Olga’s serious expression, eyebrows pinched together, told me it was a problem too big for either of them to handle.

  I sat down next to Julia. “Can you tell me what’s bothering you?”

  A sob ripped out of her at the awareness of my caring. I waited until she could speak.

  “My mother’s been sick for a long time. She coughs up yellow. She won’t go to a hospital. She just wants to die next to Papa, and he’s a drunk,” she said bitterly.

  “Who earns the money in your house?”

  “She does piecework as a lacemaker. Six-fifty a week, but she can’t work so much now.”

  “Why doesn’t your father work?”

  “He’s locked up a lot of the time on Blackwell’s Island.”

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “Three. Two younger than me. My older brother is seventeen. He can’t keep a job either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Every time he’s caught stealing, he has to go to The Mercury.”

  The grimness of her tale overwhelmed her, and she couldn’t go on.

  “It’s a ship in the harbor that holds bad boys doing their time,” Olga explained, holding Julia’s hand.

  As delicately as I could, I asked if she would like me to speak to her mother about going to a charity hospital.

  “She’s saved a little money, but she won’t use it for a hospital. She says people catch diseases there. It’s for her burial, she says.”

  “Would you like me to come?”

  Looking down at her lap, she cupped her fist in her other hand and squeezed. Olga said a few soft words in Polish. I waited until she finally gave a slight nod.

  THE ERRAND INTO the Lower East Side was made worse by deep, dirty slush in the streets. Julia’s apartment was in the rear of a once grand house on the riverfront of the Seventh Ward. On the way up to the third floor, I stepped around an old man hunched on the stairs, weeping quietly. His worn shoes had no laces and the soft tongues hung out sideways like the tongues of thirsty dogs. At least Julia’s domicile wasn’t a hall room. In fact it consisted of three narrow rooms, one leading into another, bare of any comfortable furniture. Towels hung on nails above a bucket on a stool, and a small mirror and a hairbrush hung from another nail. An oil lamp with a soot-coated glass chimney was perched on a steamer trunk alongside a delicate, half-finished lace collar pinned to a piece of cardboard.

  Julia’s mother was a pretty little woman still bearing Julia’s dimples, but lost in her clothes. Her eyes, pale blue irises set into moonstone, looked past me—rather, through me—through this world to the next. She was tired and glad to die at age thirty-seven. How much pain would it take to turn a person away from life, from wanting another day, and another? How much of it was physical pain and how much was despair? The root cause of her sickness might well have been the hopelessness of her bleak life.

  I left sorrowfully, with the mother’s halfhearted promise that she would
go to the free Nurses’ Settlement House hospital on Henry Street, but that, I knew, couldn’t cure her despair.

  WHEN I LEAST expected it, on Valentine’s Day, of all days, the ax fell. Ten of the artisans from the Men’s Window Department paraded into the studio in a bluster, elbowed Miss Judd and Mary out of the way, and rolled up the big cartoons for the wisteria and snowball windows.

  I darted out of my studio. “Stop! What do you think you’re doing?”

  They took down the two glass easels from their upright position with glass pieces attached.

  “You can’t do that!” Mary shouted. “Those are our windows.”

  “You have no right—” Miss Judd said evenly, forcefully.

  “Those windows have been assigned to us, and we intend to finish them,” I declared.

  “Not anymore you won’t.” He and another man dumped the pattern pieces onto the glass easels.

  Nellie and Theresa grabbed as many as they could, but two men pried them out of their fists.

  “I’ll report this to Mr. Thomas as a flagrant violation of our rights.”

  “Uppity woman. Watch your step, or we’ll come for the shades next.”

  I hurried to block the doorway, but one man shoved me out of the way, and they left with the two windows, patterns, cartoons, the original watercolors, and smirks on their faces. Hot rage tore through me, and I lifted my skirt and raced downstairs to the second floor.

  I strode into Mr. Thomas’s office. “Did you send ten men to get the wisteria and snowball windows?”

  “No.”

  “They’ve just come and carried them off, patterns, cartoons, and all.”

  “They shouldn’t have.”

  “Then do something about it!”

  “Calm down, Mrs. Driscoll. Have a seat.”

  “I will not calm down.” I pounded my fist on his desk, and he jerked back. “Don’t try to pacify me. Don’t expect that I’ll take it lying down when my department’s work is taken from us wrongfully.”

  “Go back to your studio. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Wisteria is too small and intricate for men to do. Their fingers are too big for the tiny pieces.” I pointed at his, as fat and stiff as cigars. “And snowball blooms are too subtle for them. They don’t have the selecting skill. Mr. Tiffany will tell you so himself.”

  “I said I’ll see what I can do.”

  Mouse!

  “I expect those windows back by the end of the day. You can deliver them yourself.”

  I waited. Six girls sat idle, bewildered, looking to me for information.

  I asked Joe Briggs what he knew. Nothing. He wasn’t involved with windows. Mr. Tiffany was scarce these days, he said, because Mrs. Tiffany was ill.

  Joe said, “He’s getting involved in photography, so he works a lot in his darkroom at home.”

  I felt my posture sag. When a new passion ignited him he left the old ones to function more on their own. I could only go to Mr. Thomas again and Mr. Platt, the treasurer, who had always kept aloof from my department. There would be no loyalty there. And Henry didn’t have the managerial power.

  They were meeting behind closed doors in Mr. Platt’s office, so I waited in the corridor. When Mr. Thomas came out and saw me, he muttered, “Later,” and escaped, hunch-shouldered, into the men’s room. Mr. Platt closed his door in my face but not fast enough, because I saw Henry inside with his head in his hands. The sight of him bent forward like that left me numb.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, Henry came into my studio and closed the doors again.

  “I’m sorry, Clara, but this has to be quick. I just wanted you to know that the action of taking the windows by force was sanctioned by the Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union.”

  That news went through me like a cold wind. The men were afraid of us! In a perverse way, that puffed me up at the same time that it enraged me.

  “Have you been in touch with Mr. Tiffany? Where does he stand?”

  “Uncertain, at this point. The men have threatened strike.”

  “Unless what happens? What concession does he have to make?”

  Henry hesitated. His pain to speak further contracted his precise eyebrows.

  “Unless the twenty-seven women of your department be ‘removed,’ their word.”

  I tapped out an agitated rhythm with the end of a watercolor brush against my worktable, and it resounded in my head after I stopped.

  “So they actually mean to get rid of us.”

  “Certainly Louis can’t afford to have a work stoppage in the Men’s Window Department,” Henry said. “It would shut down their studio here and in Corona.”

  “So he might agree to their demand? I can’t believe that.”

  “Other departments might strike to support them.”

  “What does it matter to the metalworkers and foundrymen? I send them work.”

  “Their union might pressure them for solidarity. I’m sorry. I have to go. Mr. Thomas and Mr. Platt don’t even want me talking to you.”

  That last sliced me to the bone.

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of weeks, the recognition that trouble had been snowballing right under my nose descended like wet fog. One afternoon when worry pulsed so fiercely I couldn’t work, I went to Agnes’s studio, knocked, and didn’t wait to enter. I caught a glimpse of her quickly slipping into her apron pocket what looked like a small silver flask. How incongruous, in light of her primness. After all these years, I knew her very little.

  I told her what Henry had said. She shook her head slowly. Since she was part of the firm’s design staff, any strike would not affect her.

  “If the foundrymen sided with the men glass workers, they could effectively shut down my lamp production just by not fulfilling my orders. The same if Albert didn’t release any glass to us.”

  “This has turned serious.”

  “Ever since those men confiscated the two windows, we’ve had no new window commissions. That has to be Mr. Tiffany’s decision, maybe to cool the heat.”

  “Maybe it was a union demand,” she said.

  It hurt to imagine him buckling under to them so easily, stooping to shut us out by letting us dry up. He loved our department. I was sure of it.

  “Whether he chose to stop giving us commissions or he was forced to, it amounts to the same thing—a penalty for talent, punishment for being women. We can’t let the girls become idle, Agnes, or one by one they’ll be picked off and fired.”

  “They can do this project when I have it ready.” The window depicted a River of Life coming out of distant hills with an apple tree in the foreground. “It’s a memorial panel for my father for our church in Flushing. He died last year.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “He had an orchard, and there are many garden wholesalers in Flushing, so I’m hoping the motif will appeal to the congregation.”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  “I expect that all other church commissions will go to the men until this is resolved,” she said.

  “That may be a while.”

  She tapped her front teeth with her fingernail and looked around the room for ideas. “A New Orleans couple asked for a magnolia window. I’ll prepare it next, and give it to the girls.”

  “Good. That will occupy two cutters because of the drapery glass.”

  “And I have an idea for a parrot window on speculation. We’ll keep them going. I know you don’t want to lose any of them.”

  “Thank you, Agnes.”

  “I’m sorry it has come to this.” She drew out the flask again and poured two small glasses. “You might need some fire in your belly before this is over, so come to me.”

  I felt it impolite not to take what she offered. The sip scorched my throat even as it burned away some formality that had existed between us.

  “Be prepared. Have a plan.”

  A rare thing it was for her to reach out to me. I nodded an acknowledgment and stepped out.

  A PLAN. I WENT TO the
Astor Library on Lafayette Street and read up on the women’s labor movement. I was much impressed by Rose Schneiderman, who organized the girls working in the cap-making trade. They weren’t allowed in the union either, but that worked to their advantage because it prevented the bosses from using the union label. As a consequence, the bosses encouraged the women to start a women’s union. The organizing spread quickly from Schneiderman’s factory with twelve girls to the thirty cap- and hat-making factories throughout the city. When the men went on strike for higher wages, the women’s union went on strike too, one hundred of them for thirteen weeks. I couldn’t imagine what effort it must have taken to bolster their spirits for that long, and remembered Edwin working day and night to maintain the morale of the striking tailors. In the end, the cap makers won an increase from five to seven dollars a week. That situation was different, but the solidarity Schneiderman developed was inspiring. The account didn’t give me a plan, though it did prepare me for what I might have to do.

  In the meantime, I knew Agnes’s work wouldn’t occupy all of the girls. I was desperate to keep new shade designs coming faster than ever so that my own bosses would recognize our contributions to the business.

  Something of Puck got into me, and I wanted to make a lamp that was a landscape window in the round, to remind The Powers downstairs of what we did that one magnificent week that the men refused to attempt. I set irises alongside a stream with cypress trees in the distance. It was a radical departure, and I loved it, not just because it was beautiful but because it meant daring and accomplishment. It would remind the girls of that week too. I needed to keep that spark alive. In Mr. Tiffany’s absence, Henry approved it instantly.

  At the first sign of spring, I studied the apple blossoms in Central Park for a vanity lamp that would reuse the small wisteria mold and base. That way I could start someone on it without asking for a new wooden mold to be spun. I was overcome with gratitude for the unknown woman who would buy it without knowing the anxiety that had accompanied its making. All she would know was that her dressing table would have apple blossoms all year round.