Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  “Come with me.”

  He walked out of the women’s studio with his quick, short strides, and turned back to make sure I was following him. On the elevator, he said, “It’s high time we had another elaborate.”

  In his office, he thumbed through some French design journals until he found the photograph he was looking for, a slender Art Nouveau water lily lamp by Louis Majorelle. The sinuous stemlike vertical standard supported two upright buds and a fully opened flower. All three were exquisite blown forms.

  “The buds are similar to what I had in mind. Only mine, ours, would be upside down.”

  The caption explained that the inner petals were pale amber and the five outer sepals were coral.

  “How’s it done, with two colors?”

  “It’s called cameo work. The inner bulb is blown first in one glass, and then it’s sent back to the glory hole of another color. The shape is finalized, and when it’s cool, a glass carver grinds away the top layer in some areas to show the coral sepal shapes beneath.”

  “That’s quite involved. Can we do it here?”

  “Of course. We don’t believe in limits here.”

  He said it in a soft, sad way that acknowledged it to be the same thing he had said to his daughter. I could use this moment to tell him I thought it was unreasonable of him to deny the twins an education, but his expression was already so dispirited that I let the moment pass.

  “How will you hold the leaded-glass band in place?” he asked.

  “I need you for that.”

  He thought for a while, and then said, “Elegance is natural when you follow the principle of repetition. Think about it.”

  He sat back and gave me time, showing no sign of impatience.

  “Repetition. Of course! Attach the band to similar bronze rods used for the buds only arched higher and wider? Yes?”

  “Yes. I knew the answer was in you all along.”

  His pride in me was warm enough to ignite my heart.

  “How about the shape of a single round leaf for the base?” he said.

  “I was hoping for mosaic—”

  “Fine. Give it thin bronze veins splayed out from the vertical standard.”

  “What are the edges of lotus leaves like?” I asked.

  He took up my drawing pencil to show me. “Some varieties are wavy. Parts of the edge lift off the water, while other parts are slightly submerged.”

  “Like a girl spinning in a full skirt?”

  “Exactly. But remember. Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.”

  “I know.” Inside my chest, wings beat, bells rang, so thrilled I was to be collaborating with him again.

  “Ha! This one will top the list.” He clapped his hands together and rubbed his palms. “Seven hundred and fifty smackers, I’ll wager. Keep this a secret from Mr. Thomas.”

  OLGA LINGERED AFTER the others left at the end of the day. She looked down at my lotus drawings and pulled in her lips. “I like those fat buds.” Her voice was threaded with wistfulness.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  She didn’t raise her head to speak to me.

  “I have to tell you. I got married on Sunday.”

  “Olga!” I slammed down my drawing pencil and broke the point. “What could you be thinking?”

  She backed away from me with that same taut, pained expression she’d had at the Tiffany Ball.

  “You couldn’t have asked me first? You couldn’t have postponed it?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And how old is he?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “You make seven-ninety a week. In a month, you would have been getting eight twenty-five. You’re one of the best. How much does he make a week?” She wrung her hands in that subservient way I hated. “Tell me!”

  “Two dollars.”

  “Two dollars!” I yelled. “This just makes me sick to think of it. Consider the kind of life you’ll have.”

  It was tempting to ignore her marriage, make her swear to tell no one, just so she would have a decent life and I could keep her.

  “You have to think of yourself, Olga, to be watchful for your own concerns.”

  “If only you knew how little that matters. I’m not like you.”

  “You could be. You could be in charge of this department someday.”

  “I could live in a shack with him and call it heaven.”

  “Easy enough to say that now when there are potatoes on your dinner plate provided by your papa. Did you even consider how much faith Mr. McBride has in you as an artist? How could you have done this?”

  She hesitated. “I had to.”

  “Pregnant? Are you expecting?”

  Two tears leapt from her eyes and made a torturous path down her cheeks. I felt like cradling her in my arms. I had lost her. One of the most promising of the young ones, sunk now into the quagmire of the Lower East Side. Hank would be heartsick.

  “You’ve bloomed so beautifully I hate to lose you.”

  “I hate to go, but nothing is as important as love, Mrs. Driscoll.”

  Her simple certainty tore through me, a quick, head-to-heart plunge.

  “I can go back to curling feathers. I can do it piecework, at home. Or I can roll cigars. A lot of people in the tenements do that. It pays a mite more than curling feathers.”

  That was what Edwin meant—only the strong come.

  “That’s a horrible, dirty thing to bring into a house with a baby.”

  “God gave me this baby for a reason, and I’m going to love him all the way.”

  “I believe you will. Anything you do, you do heartily.” I felt the choking surge just before crying, but all I allowed to come out was a sigh. “All right. Work until the end of the week, and I’ll have a little extra for you on Friday.”

  “Thank you. You’re a nice lady.”

  “Try to take care of yourself.”

  I hoped she would have potatoes to peel.

  Potatoes. Even in the Age of Enlightenment, there had been Polish girls or German or Irish girls whose primary occupation was peeling potatoes. Maybe they took private enjoyment in the subtle curves of the lines their blades left between the dark skin and the moist whiteness while they dreamed hopeless dreams. Maybe they experienced meager pleasure in solitary moments carving a face or a flower in a potato, and serving it to their husbands, who, in their exhaustion from working the soil or the mine or the docks, bit into the bloom without noticing. How would Olga’s artistry be expressed? Drawing a baby on the walls of their tenement, then drawing a toddler, then a street urchin? Only if she could afford a drawing pencil.

  “Here. Take these with you.” I handed her all of mine.

  AFTER LUNCH, ALONG with a note to Mr. Thomas saying that Olga was leaving, I sent a note to Mr. Tiffany telling him the same, and added, “So now we have a place for Alice to return to what she loves best.”

  I was offering him a chance to prove that what Julia had said about his not caring about anyone else wasn’t true. I waited, looking at my drawing of the flower that grows out of the muck. Frank brought the answer.

  Tell her she can return when she finishes her current enamel, which is coming along beautifully. Have her select for your lotus lamp.

  CHAPTER 43

  GEMSTONE

  WE WERE READING GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S MAN AND SUPERMAN in Francie’s room. Bernard rubbed his hands together as if he were going to wield the ax again, relishing the evening’s entertainment. He had the part of Jack Tanner, the confirmed bachelor; Mr. Bainbridge was the devil; and Francie was Ann Whitefield, who was conniving to make Jack marry her.

  Well into the second act, Merry came to the door. “Begging your pardon for interrupting, but there’s a limey here to see you, Clara. All hot and bothered. Says his name is Joe Briggs.”

  “From Tiffany’s. Send him up.”

  I left Francie’s room to meet him at the top of the stairs. Being
protective, Bernard followed me. There was no need for that, but it was caring of him to act the gentleman. We went into my room, and I introduced Joe as Tiffany’s most gifted mosaicist and a fine helper in our department. He had that typical ivory English complexion, but tonight his face was even whiter.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m here to say goodbye. I’m going back to England tomorrow.”

  “Sit down. You’ll do no such thing. We need you too much. What could have happened in the three hours since I saw you?”

  He looked beside me, not at me, as he said, “I’ve made a mess of my life. Escape is my only solution.”

  “Nothing is so bad that it can’t be remedied. Tell me.”

  “No one at Tiffany’s knows this, and you must never tell anyone. I’ve been married for eight years.”

  My mouth fell open. “Why have you kept it a secret?”

  Misery was written in his quivering chin. “Because she’s a Negro.”

  I tried not to show my surprise but probably failed.

  “I lost my head when I was young, and now I loathe her, and she knows it. You can’t hide a thing like that. It’s unbearable to go home at night, or even to be in the same room with her.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “The darky quarter. The Tenderloin, close to Hell’s Kitchen.” He laughed bitterly at the second name. “My life outside the studios has been wretched. The studios have been my haven.”

  “Eight years. Do you have children?”

  A pained tightness formed beneath his eyes. “Two little ones.”

  “So why this decision now?”

  He took a big breath, as if gathering strength to tell me. “It has to do with Theresa. I sometimes meet her at night to do something together. Just for relief.”

  “Such as?”

  “We go to the Haymarket to dance ragtime, or to the Blue Vipers in Brooklyn, or to a gallery. She’s a nice girl, and we get along.”

  I glanced at Bernard, who was scowling.

  “A dangerous practice, Joe,” I said.

  “I know,” he mumbled. “Sometimes Marion comes too.”

  “Have you told them that you’re married?”

  “No.” He screwed up his face at that. “My wife is still in love with me. I had hoped she would get angry and leave me, but she just gets more jealous, to the point of irrationality. She has taken to spying on me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Tonight I went to Brooklyn to meet Theresa to go to an art show. Bessie, my wife, confronted us and said, ‘Joe is my husband, you little hussy.’ She pulled a pistol out of her handbag and backed Theresa against a wall and took a good look at her. She said something like, ‘I was going to kill the two of you, but I see you’re not a whore, so I’ll just warn you to stay away from my man.’ She pointed the pistol at Theresa’s face and said, ‘Remember what this looks like up close so it won’t be the last thing you see.’ ”

  What a sordid melodrama. I could hardly believe it.

  “You didn’t accost her?” Bernard asked. “Knock the gun from her hand like any man would do?”

  Joe recoiled like a struck dog. “I couldn’t move.” His voice faltered. “I was too ashamed.”

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “Marion came out of her house—we were on her street—and Bessie threatened her too. The girls ran off. Bessie vowed to go to Tiffany’s tomorrow to tell everyone she’s my wife and that I’ve been fooling around with your girls. I could face death more easily than disgrace, so I’m leaving the country.”

  Shrunken and mortified, he appealed to me with frightened eyes.

  “You’re a fine man otherwise, but you have no moral courage.”

  His hands went up to cover his face. “I know.”

  “I hope you also know that it threatens my department if Bessie comes.”

  I could see I had to do something tonight or I’d lose all three. It was nearly nine o’clock. I picked up my shawl.

  “Take me to your house,” I said.

  “I’m going with you,” Bernard said.

  “I can do it myself, Bernard.”

  As I headed toward the door, I felt his hand restraining me.

  “Don’t be headstrong, Clara.” His grip on my arm was firm. “What do you think? That I’d let you see this woman with a gun and not go with you? It fairly killed me that I couldn’t go with you to the morgue to identify that girl. I had no right, so I yielded like a gentleman. Now I do. It was on my recommendation that you hired Theresa. That gives me a responsibility.”

  He was so earnest and intense that I agreed.

  Joe took us by way of Tin Pan Alley, Twenty-eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, where the sheet-music publishers were located, to the next block of saloons. A Negro banjo player on a wooden balcony was playing ragtime. Loud Negro voices and piano music spilled out of open tavern doors. At one of them, Joe said with delight, “That’s Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’ Bessie’s favorite. Theresa’s too,” he added with chagrin.

  What a hodgepodge of emotions he must go through every day.

  Joe’s block, three blocks farther into the West Side, was unlit, foul-smelling, and frightening. No streetlamps, no sidewalks, and deep ruts in the pavement. It was hard to see sleeping or drunken bodies lying on the ground until we nearly stumbled over them. Out of nowhere two big fellows came toward us in threatening postures.

  “Give way,” Joe murmured.

  I held tight on to Bernard’s arm, and he pulled me aside to let them pass.

  “The Stovepipe Gang makes their living by mugging visitors to this quarter,” Joe said.

  “Then how do you get along here?” Bernard asked.

  “They know I’m not a visitor. If a chap minds his own business and doesn’t butt in or make a ruckus in the Negro dives, he’ll be left alone. Nobody bothers us here, whereas they might in a white neighborhood, even half a dozen blocks uptown in the Irish shantytown.”

  He turned in at a brownstone like all the others we had passed, and we climbed two flights of creaking stairs to his flat. We entered through a bedroom with the mattress on the bare floor and clothes strewn over chair backs in order to get to the living room. On the walls Joe had tacked his unframed watercolors of figures from his mosaic work, street scenes in the darky quarter showing a keen perception of people, and one of a black child bearing a huge bundle of newspapers on his back. Full of pathos, the painting revealed Joe’s sensitivity. He watched me looking at it, and his face lifted with hope for my approval.

  “You’re a gifted artist, Joe. Keep painting, no matter what.”

  On one side of the room three wide planks laid across crates served as a drawing table. Joe lit a large oil desk lamp, and I saw two sleeping toddlers nestled against each other under a soiled quilt on the couch.

  “I take them in to sleep with Bessie, and I sleep here,” he said.

  It was almost more than I could absorb. The kitchen was only an alcove, where a colored girl was washing dishes.

  “My wife’s sister,” Joe explained. “Where’s Bessie?”

  “Out,” the sister said.

  Bernard and Joe both insisted I sit on the only cushioned chair while they sat on wooden kitchen chairs. Upholstered in corduroy, the armchair wasn’t new, but it wasn’t shabby either. The chair, the good desk lamp, and some green curtains showed that an effort toward improvement was being made.

  We waited until ten o’clock in the airless living room. Every ten minutes Joe begged us to stay ten more. It was a trying ordeal for Bernard to sit still.

  “She could be out all night,” he said.

  Joe lifted his shoulders, not knowing.

  “This seems like a task for a minister,” Bernard said. “Do you know of one who could come in the morning before you go to work?”

  Joe suggested a Negro mission two blocks away, and we went right away. Inside, a program of some sort was in progress. In a room with all dark face
s, a portly man was singing about “a better day a-comin’.” Bernard inquired about seeing a minister, and while we waited, a tall, striking woman wearing a wine-colored dress rose dramatically, solemnly, and stepped up to the makeshift stage. The room fell silent.

  In a sumptuously rich soprano, she sang slowly, her face uplifted.

  “There is a balm in Gilead

  To make the wounded whole.

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To heal the sin-sick soul.”

  I was transfixed. The rich clarity and power and conviction of her voice were worthy of the Met rather than this dingy hall.

  “Sometimes I feel discouraged,

  And think my work’s in vain,

  But then the Holy Spirit

  Revives my soul again.”

  “That’s for you, Joe,” I whispered, but as he nodded miserably, I knew it was for me too.

  The graying minister sweating in his clerical vestment took us upstairs to his windowless office. We sat on a bench opposite his desk and under a hanging bulb giving off heat. He put his palms together piously, which struck me as a pretense, and, like King Solomon, asked what the trouble was, regarding us as though he were capable of settling the world’s problems in one visit, and furthermore, that we ought to know it.

  After explaining the situation, Joe smiled, out of nervousness, I believe, but Bernard took it as a lack of seriousness.

  “You’re an Englishman, so act like one. Where’s your stiff upper lip? Drop your pathetic excuses and your spineless self-pity. You got yourself into this. Running home to England isn’t going to make a man of you. Treat her with decency and make the best of it.”

  He paused only to take a breath before unleashing more of the same. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. Bernard was the archangel Gabriel, Justice Enthroned. Poor Joe, hunched over, hugging himself and rocking back and forth. The minister held out his hand to get Bernard to stop.

  I had to say something. “You can correct your mistake by not seeing the girls anymore. That will be easy, but you’ll have to find a way to live with Bessie properly.”

  After a moment’s pause in which we all sat sweating under the heat of the lightbulb, the minister, who hadn’t said a word that was helpful so far, intoned in a bass voice, “You are connected to her by God’s amazing grace. Now, do you promise not to deceive her from this day forward?”