Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland

  Joe nodded in pained contrition.

  “Would you like me to see her in the morning to persuade her to forgive you, and to stay away from your workplace?”

  “Yes,” came his weak answer.

  “Son, if the mountain was smooth, you couldn’t climb it.”

  The minister bowed his head a moment—in prayer, I suppose—then stood and slapped his palms and splayed fingers down on the desk as if to say, “Finished, solved.”

  Bernard had a mind to go home then, but I knew we had to see her. I didn’t trust that the minister’s visit with Bessie would keep her away from the studios. Out on the street, Joe looked at us as a drowning man might look at a departing lifeboat, so we went to the apartment again and waited. Still agitated, Bernard wrote Bessie a letter, begging her to wait until the following night, when we could see her, before she took any further steps in her revenge. He finished around midnight, and Joe accompanied us down to the street. He saw her coming, so we all went back upstairs.

  Bessie wasn’t the ill-featured, slovenly woman I had imagined from Joe’s description. Except for some blemishes, she was pretty, and still slim after having had two babies. She cried and told how she had followed Joe night after night, how he had lied and had hurt her feelings. My talking to her was of no use to get her to calm down. She had to spill it all out in a torrent. Bernard held up his hand just like the minister had done, as if to say we had heard enough, and miraculously, she stopped.

  “Joe has treated you shamefully,” he said, “but he made a promise to your minister that he will mend his ways and be faithful to you. He’s going to treat you decently and fix up this house for you.”

  “I don’t ask him to fix it up. I’m willing to sit on one soapbox and eat on another. I only want to be happy.”

  Joe looked as though he was bored to death by a play he didn’t care for. Bernard couldn’t stand it and seized him by his shoulders, shook him, and shouted, “Look me in the eye. You know you’ve done wrong. Be a man and say so. Don’t make me speak for you. Say it yourself.”

  “I won’t lie. I won’t see the girls again. But I won’t sleep with you.”

  “Until,” Bernard said, shaking him. “Until …”

  “Until you wash the sheets.”

  That’s all we could get out of him.

  The whole depressing situation overwhelmed me so much that I couldn’t find any honest way to show my compassion for both of them. Not knowing what else to do, I put my arm around her, which brought on a wild sob. She laid her cheek against mine, slick with sweat and tears, and quieted enough to say, “I don’t have a single friend to talk to. I pray to God, but I want a friend.”

  “Making a scene at Tiffany’s won’t bring you a friend,” I said, “and it certainly won’t make Joe love you. Will you promise not to go there?”

  “I promise.”

  At last we got out into the fresh air. Walking home, Bernard kept spitting in the gutters. “I’m sorry. I can’t get the taste of that place out of my mouth.”

  “Didn’t you just tell him to stay put the rest of his life?”

  “Yes, but he’s her husband! And I should think you’d be anxious to get home and wash your face.”

  “She needed a show of sympathy. It didn’t hurt me.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders. “Well, you’re one of a kind. A precious gemstone.”

  CHAPTER 44

  MOON SHELL

  JOE CAME IN LATE THE NEXT MORNING, ALL HUMBLE PIE AND nervous strain, looking behind him every few minutes.

  “It’s not over yet, slick as a fiddle. Bessie was still raving this morning until the minister came, saying she was going to lie in wait for Marion to come out the door at the end of the day and pummel her.”

  “Then Marion and I will leave early. I will walk her to the el train. Go about your business now. It will help.”

  “Do you want me to stop working with Theresa?”

  “No. Go on just as yesterday. There’ll be no change.”

  He walked through the studio to the mosaic easels, his bony shoulders sagging.

  At noon I asked Theresa and Marion to join me for lunch. They gave each other nervous glances.

  It would have been quicker to go to Peter Cooper’s Restaurant near the studio, but the three misses lunched there, and that meant six ears vibrating with curiosity. I had a reason to get Theresa and Marion into Healy’s Café on Irving Place and Eighteenth, in addition to their chicken hash, which I loved. On the way, I urged them to try it with chunky applesauce and corn bread.

  As we approached the café, a dapper man walking in the opposite direction opened the door for us, and a sheaf of handwritten pages slipped out of his hand.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Marion.

  “It’s nothing.” The man continued to hold the door for the three of us while his papers were blowing away. Once inside, we watched him chase them, enter the café, and sit at the far table.

  “One of the men at my boardinghouse knows him,” I said in a near whisper. “He lives alone across the street, and takes his meals here. Rumor has it that he was in prison once. He writes stories here about characters who have lost respectability or integrity and find a way to win it back again. He goes by the name of O. Henry.”

  Marion’s cheeks blanched. Theresa set down her fork.

  After we ordered and began to eat, I said, “Joe came to see me last night and told me what happened.”

  “How come he never admitted he was married?” Accusation sharpened Theresa’s voice.

  “Because he wanted to keep seeing you.”

  “Oh, Clara, I would never have gone anywhere with him if I’d known he was a married man,” Marion said.

  “I believe you.”

  The inadvertent pertinence of her statement gave me a twinge. Her assertion was one I could not make about Bernard.

  “It was all innocent enough, I suppose, but obviously that wasn’t apparent to Joe’s wife,” I said. “You both have intruded on a marriage. I know you’re hungry for life. I am too. Most people are. We’ve all seen happy couples on the street and have ached with the question—why not me? But that craving can be properly directed.”

  I felt the chicken hash pile up in a ball when I heard myself say that, but it tasted so good that I couldn’t stop forking it in.

  “If your secret meetings continue, even if you try to hide your carrying-on, and the management finds out, one, or two, or all three of you will be fired, and not by me. It’s extremely important to Mr. Tiffany personally and to Tiffany Studios that his clients see his staff as beyond reproach.”

  “We won’t tell anyone,” Marion said, and nudged Theresa.

  “At the moment, both of you are more replaceable than Joe. He’s head of the whole Men’s Mosaic Department, and there are forty now on the third floor. He has responsibilities far bigger than yours.”

  “So if anyone has to go—” Theresa said.

  “It won’t be him. He’s on the rise in the company, as well he should be, and I beg you not to utter a word that would dislodge that. He has helped our department immensely.”

  “But he shouldn’t have taken me places if he was married.”

  “Granted. Understand, the more you say, the greater the chance of being overheard and talked about. Once a girl is talked about, she’s done for.”

  “What’s the harm if it’s between ourselves?” Theresa asked.

  “Because it loosens your tongue. The matter cannot get out. You may think New York is freer than it is. Despite your feather boa, the gay nineties have passed, Theresa. New York is a big city, and you think you can get lost in it. But we aren’t anonymous people. Our actions, good or bad, have consequences, and in this case, they could be dire.”

  Chagrin was written on their faces. As I took a sip of tea, the potential repercussions loomed more threateningly the more I thought about it.

  “We still need to be on the alert to prove that women are as capable as men, and that includes w
orking without emotional involvement or disturbances. If it does get out, all of the men’s departments will have a field day with it, and the management will have second thoughts about any eventual consolidation of our departments. We will have lost what we’ve gained, and that could affect us in a devastating way.

  “Theresa, you’re the first of the Tiffany Girls to be working so closely with a man, so the responsibility of proving our capability to do that without entanglements rests on your shoulders. From time immemorial, women have had to be more careful than men in a number of ways. This is one of them. Don’t think that The Powers aren’t watching. We still operate under the threat of being shut down. All the union needs to fuel their actions again is a morals charge. Do you understand, Theresa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Marion?”

  “Yes.”

  “It remains our privilege to work with the best mosaicist in the country. Keep that in mind.”

  “Do you want me to continue to cut for him?” Theresa asked.

  “Yes. Being under his tutelage puts you in a privileged position. He has taught you a lot. You’ll go on just as if nothing has happened. Understand, nothing has happened.”

  They both nodded contritely.

  “Now, how about some vanilla ice cream? It’s my favorite thing on a hot day.”

  WHEN WE FINISHED, I sent them on to the studio and went to my room to lie down with the shade drawn, thinking I would doze for fifteen minutes. Even with my new little fan blowing on me, I lay in nervous perspiration, my eyes wide open. I had done what I had to, but it didn’t make me feel good.

  How many times had I gone bicycling with Bernard? I couldn’t count them. Being with him in a group was one thing, but we had gone bicycling and ice-skating just the two of us. How I had loved it when he performed that spectacular, heart-stopping leap and a full turn in midair, landing in a long-legged arabesque. What a thrill when he scraped to a stop in front of me and grabbed me by the waist, twirling me, my feet flying off the ice.

  Confound it all! Was Bernard married or wasn’t he? If he was, it was a stranger kind of marriage than Joe’s, and he was no better than Joe, nor I than Theresa. We had both let loose with a moral accusation that might just as well be applied to us. If he hadn’t put his arm around me, or if I had lifted it off, I might consider our actions honorable, but after all the strain of the evening, I had loved the feel of his arm, loved the caring for me that it showed.

  I understood Theresa’s hunger for something beautiful and intimate, but she had to have known that Joe was married. She would have picked up on signals: not getting together on weekends and holidays. Valentine’s Day passing without a card. Sweet things unsaid. Nervous looking at his watch. Leaving abruptly. Her longing had blinded her to the warnings.

  What made Bernard and me different? Every fiber of my being told me he wasn’t married, but morally, if there was any sliver of a doubt, I had to give up the luxury of not knowing.

  The hash and corn bread topped off with ice cream covered in chocolate syrup lay like a molten gob in my stomach, churning like the earth’s innards before a volcano erupts. I got out of bed and tried to vomit into my washbowl, but the hash refused to budge. I lay down again with a wet washcloth over my forehead and eyes. The haunting melody of that woman’s hymn came to me—a balm in Gilead. Where was Gilead? Some holy place. Some peaceful place in the mind. How could I get there?

  By asking him, no matter how impudent it would be. I wouldn’t let Sunday at Point Pleasant pass without finding out. Better to be criticized as insolent than to be thought of as a Jezebel. That wasn’t my mother’s etiquette handbook speaking. That was me.

  DURING THE WEEKEND at the shore, I made it a point to sit next to Marion at meals at the Palmiés’ cottage and to invite her bathing with Alice and me. I tried to make her laugh as I flailed around when a breaker lifted us up. I liked her, and I didn’t want any residual ill feelings.

  Bernard was quieter than usual even though he entered into the bicycle riding just the same as always; he filled my lamp with fuel, oiled my brakes, adjusted the beach umbrella to shade my eyes, drew out my chair at meals, but he still seemed distant, which hurt me. I was paralyzed to signal to him that I wanted to be alone with him.

  I stayed on the porch where he and William were reading in the wicker rockers, and anxiously yanked leaves off the Boston ivy growing against the clapboards of the house. In a few weeks they would be deep, brilliant red. The sound of the vine rustling as I plucked each leaf annoyed them.

  “I wish they were red already.”

  “Patience, Clara.”

  The one thing I didn’t have today.

  After our beach supper, I was edgy. Time was running out. Bernard could see that I was restless, and convinced everyone else to go on a bicycle ride to Manasquan Beach for ice-cream cones, leaving the two of us to tend the fire.

  Stalling, I picked up a small moon shell that looked like a snail’s shell spiraling out from a tiny eye, bleached white on the outside, pearly on the inside. I brushed off the sand, and put it on each of my fingertips. My ring finger happened to be the best fit.

  “The life of a shell must be a tremendous struggle,” I remarked, looking at it from all directions, perched there on my fingertip.

  “In what way?”

  “To push that hard protective surface outward in order to grow.”

  “It has no choice.” He lifted the shell off my finger and pocketed it.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “So I could give it back to you someday to remind you of this evening.”

  “Is it a special night?”

  “I feel it is.”

  “But you’ve hardly spoken three words together to me all day.”

  “I’m a patient man.” He gathered the hem of my skirt in his hands. “I saw that you had to mend the rupture with Marion, so I’ve stayed in the background to let you. Your girls are first to you. Even before yourself.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “You’ve been thinking about Joe and Theresa, haven’t you?”

  “How can you tell?”

  “After living in the same boardinghouse with you for a decade—”

  “Off and on,” I blurted.

  “I know a few things.”

  I cupped sand in my palm and let it fall between my fingers. “Like what?”

  “I know that you love the sea, and poetry, and flowers, and glass, and your work.”

  “All true.”

  “And you love the girls in your department, and maybe even Mr. Tiffany.” Bernard stirred the fire, and new flames erupted. “And that you hate hypocrisy.”

  I jerked my head up to his penetrating gaze.

  A wistful, maybe even an amused expression passed over his face as he said, “And I know that you flinched when I put my arm around you, but you leaned in to me all the same.”

  “I just didn’t want to be what we had both denounced. That would be the worst hypocrisy. I couldn’t stand it if—”

  “Clara, stop.” He took my hand. “I’m not married, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Instantly, a flush of heat enveloped me and I backed away.

  “Alistair told me you were engaged.”

  “I was, and I was married.”

  “What happened?”

  “You’re so obsessively proper that it’s kept me from telling you. I waited for you to ask, and when you didn’t, I thought it wasn’t of interest to you.”

  “But it was. It is.”

  Exasperation spilled out of him. “You’re a paradox, you know. You’re a modern woman in most ways, but you still wrap yourself in the trappings of Victorian etiquette.”

  I fidgeted at that. “Maybe it takes another generation to emerge fully emancipated. Tell me. Please.”

  “I became engaged when I saw you falling for Edwin’s character, and I married a woman named Ann just after you left with him. It was an impulsive reaction that I’ve regretted, because I hurt
someone who was never anything but kind to me. She had character too. She was the head nurse at the children’s ward of the Nurses’ Settlement House on Henry Street.”

  “I know of it. The Lower East Side. I told the mother of one of my girls to go there.”

  “Ann lived in the ward—settled in was the euphemism—in order to be available to patients instantly in crises. She was very committed. I tried living there with her in her small room several times. It was unbearable, with children crying constantly and Ann leaping out of bed all hours of the night. I don’t have the social worker’s zeal like your Edwin had. I wanted us to get a flat like any normal married couple, but she refused to leave the hospital, so I only spent lunch hours with her, and the days she had free. After her exhausting days and nights, there wasn’t anything left of her for me.”

  After a few moments of letting this news settle, I realized our situations were similar. “We’ve both been on the neglected end of commitment.”

  He ran his hand through his hair. Looking into the fire, he nodded agreement, a slow, minute movement.

  “Once she went with me on holiday to London, and to Boston and Maine another time, but that was all she allowed herself. So I came back to the boardinghouse to wait for better times.”

  “Did they come?”

  “No. The ward was a den of disease. It wasn’t long before she contracted tuberculosis. The end came quickly.”

  Alarm choked me. “You could have died too, if you had stayed there.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” he said softly, and we both waited for what would be said next. Etiquette demanded that I say I was sorry he had lost her. Honesty clamped shut my jaw.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

  “Two reasons. I wanted to get past grief first. I didn’t want you to think I was grasping on to you as a quick replacement.”

  “Are you? Past the grief?”

  “I haven’t felt a mite of guilt over the enjoyments we have had together. A grieving person would feel guilty for pleasure with any but the memory of the departed. So yes, I’m over it.”