Clara and Mr. Tiffany (14 page)

It was so evocative—the measured pace, the nostalgia, the sweetness of it, the wonder of his playing—that I felt as though I had drunk wine. I closed my eyes to give myself over to the magic of his playing, and lost all bodily sensation in the consummate joy of listening. Anyone who could bring that about had to have a capacious soul. When the last lovely chord faded into silence, my eyes opened with deeper love.

“What does ‘up in G’ mean?” Francie asked.

“Why, ’tis gaol. The cooler,” Merry said. “Irish lads gone wrong in some desperate neighborhood like Five Points. You learned this song, then, in the Bowery where ’twas born, Edwin?”

“No. I haven’t heard it before.”

“You never told me you could play the piano like that,” I said softly.

“Adventures
and
surprises,” he said, sporting with me.

I had been loving him for his goodness, but now my heart was brimming with something new—not only the thrill that he could surprise me so, but that he had this beautiful gift to enrich our lives. He was an artist too!

George peeked his head in the door. “Tally-ho,
allons-y, y vamos.
”

Madison Square Garden, at Twenty-sixth Street, was close enough to walk, so we all donned mufflers, hats, and coats. Edwin looked dashing in a belted Irish ulster with a fur collar turned up. Dudley wrapped his knitted scarf around Hank’s neck just so, and we set off. We could see the tower of the palazzo from a block away, designed by Mr. Tiffany’s friend Stanford White.

“Can’t you just imagine the wild man White cavorting up there with his chorus girls in his tower apartment right now?”

“Careful, Hank. You’ll go to hell for gossiping just as fast as for stealing chickens,” deadpan Dudley warned.

“White keeps his Gramercy Park house for his wife. Propriety’s sake.”

“How do you know that for sure?” I asked.

“By being chummy in the right circles. You want to know who else lived around Gramercy Park?”

“We know you’re fixin’ to tell us,” Dudley muttered.

“Herman Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane. The actor Edwin Booth, who founded the Players Club there, brother of Lincoln’s assassin. And Peter Cooper, the inventor and philanthropist who founded Cooper Union.”

“
And
founded the all-female School of Design there,” I said, “as well as the very building where Edwin gives union-rallying speeches. Edwin is magnificent in front of a crowd. I know that for a fact. I went to one.”

“You did?” Edwin’s voice rose.

I loved turning the tables and giving him a surprise. “He makes a person see great possibilities. He’s charismatic.”

When he gave that speech, I saw that humanity was his canvas. To him the immigrant population wasn’t a single nondescript body. He saw each one individually, an infinitude of voices, passions, griefs, fears, yearnings.

The crowd got noisier as we approached the palazzo, and we couldn’t carry on a conversation, so Edwin just squeezed my hand and kissed it. The Tiffany gas tower was the showpiece of the whole Gas Exhibition. Gothic arches, one above the other, culminated in an immense glowing torch of blue gas flame at the top. Finials and crockets on the lower spires spewed out turquoise steam that created a vaporous rainbow. Thousands of gaslights illuminated the steam, while jets sent water sliding down stained-glass windows lit from within the building and tumbling over huge rock crystals.

Many of the Tiffany employees were there congratulating one another. Impressed with Mr. Tiffany’s extravaganza, Edwin shook their hands. A light snow began to fall, and flakes sparkled in the gaslights, adding a magical effect. We were all feeling lighthearted.

On the way back, Merry started singing low, “East Side, West Side, all around the town,” and we hummed along, taking slow waltz steps on the sidewalks of New York. The jolly laughter of the crowd, the honey-gold flicker of gas lamps, the fairyland we had just seen, the piano notes in my head, the memory of Edwin’s long fingers dancing on the keys, the revelation of this new side to him, all cast a blissful spell on me.

I snuggled up to him and whispered, “Can we have a plantation in our piano house? I mean, a piano in our plantation house?”

He stopped on the sidewalk, and Merry and Mr. York bumped into us from behind, and George and Dudley bumped into them.

“ ‘We’? ‘Our’?” Edwin questioned.

“We. Our.”

The euphoria lasted as long as the song. Then panic at my impulsiveness rose like a steamy specter. How could I tell Mr. Tiffany? How could I leave the girls? How could I give up the work I love? I
had
to become indispensable.

Mercifully, it would be awhile before the plantation was ready to receive Edwin, and so I told no one at work, not even Alice. Instead, I threw myself into our latest window assignment,
Young Woman at a Fountain
, desperate to make it so exquisite that Mr. Tiffany would gladly say he couldn’t do without me. In the painting, a red-haired maiden clad in a sheer golden gown with streaks of honey and pale olive stood by an oval stone basin, with water pouring over its edge into a pool. One shapely leg up to her thigh, as well as her hip, waist, and the under portion of one upraised arm, were all subtly visible through the diaphanous fabric.

I propped up several panes against the window ledge to see the light through them, loving what I could suggest with them. Mr. Tiffany would be dazzled if viewers could see through multiple layers of his glass to her flesh. For the shoulder-to-floor gossamer falling in folds, I could use transparent drapery glass with a second layer behind of shimmery gold and amber shadows, and the rear layer cut to reveal the shape of her body within the flowing chiffon. I would have to ask Mr. Nash to make a piece of gold glass with a spot of amber for her navel, shading to darker amber to give the lower curvature of her belly.

Sensuousness was the genius of the original painting, and I wanted Mr. Tiffany to recognize it in my rendition too. I wanted to see his eyes spark at its brilliance, and at me. Maybe that would be the right moment to ask him to make an exception for me as a married woman.

Were the woman’s arms raised to her shoulder to fasten or unfasten her robe? A man had commissioned the window. Unfasten, I decided.
That would be more erotic. If left to me, I would give it the title
Trembling Maiden Preparing for Her Wedding Night
.

I WAS AN EAGER DEVOTEE
of the Wagner craze that swept New York operagoers off their patent-leather feet, so I accepted Mr. Belknap’s invitation to see
Tristan und Isolde
despite knowing that I was in for a good cry. The week before the performance, we went to a lecture about it at Cooper Union. In immaculate evening dress, Mr. Belknap sat next to a heavy workman in overalls who wore his cap during the entire evening. That was Peter Cooper’s ideal—culture, free and available for all.

The next week Mr. Belknap insisted on getting to the opera house early, part of the ritual of the dress circle life he frequented, to see and to be seen among the plummiest of New York’s high society. We made our way slowly through the foyer among three thousand princes and princesses of fashion pouring into the opera house. Mr. Belknap greeted many whom he knew. Ears dripped diamonds. Necks emerged from jeweled collars. Elegantly coiffed heads supported tiaras. Sequined and beaded dresses sparkled as works of art. Exotic birds they were, with extravagant plumage, enough ostentation and glitter to make my head spin. The richness of their decoration made them beautiful. How rare it was to find a beautiful face in a babushka.

“I wonder how many of these jewels passed from French aristocracy through Tiffany and Company,” I whispered to Mr. Belknap.

He rubbed his freshly shaven chin in thought. “All of them, my dear.”

Surrounded by the enormous five-tiered horseshoe of crimson velvet seats and walls, I quickly read the program notes to learn the main lyrics in English. From the first strains of the cellos, my whole body tingled with excitement. The aria, “His eyes in mine were gazing,” swept me away. The swell of sound made me yearn to yearn like Isolde did.

Realizing the impossibility of their love, Tristan and Isolde drank a death potion in order to be together in the only place they could be, the afterlife, and found out later that it was a love potion, which heightened their passion to the sublime in the duet, “Oh, sink upon us, Night of Love.”

They sang of the “sweet little word,”
und
, binding Tristan and Isolde together in love’s union, and I rolled over in my mind the sound of Edwin and Clara. Not bad. Two syllables each.

In the last act, Tristan and Isolde sang the prophetic lyric “All too brief lasts earthly joy,” and I succumbed to the mournfulness of their deaths. I stepped out of the opera house on Mr. Belknap’s arm seduced by the beauty and devastated by the sadness.

“Why so serious? It’s only a story.”

“Regardless, it’s very moving,” I said as we walked, still choked up by the image and music of Isolde’s death.

“Of course it is, but it’s not trying to be realistic. No matter how much we love it, opera can’t do justice to the depth and complexity of human love, or human nature, for that matter. It theatricalizes experience.”

It wasn’t until our midnight supper at Sherry’s that I was able to formulate my thoughts enough to respond.

“Isolde dying without poison in order to be with Tristan made me think of Wilhelmina. The horror of continuing to live with a pain so overpowering could, in fact, make death—”

“The only peace.”

“Yes.”

“In Wilhelmina’s case, the acid only helped her arrive where she wanted to be,” he said.

“Then she’s a casualty of too much hunger for love.”

“Probably so.”

“Her dying was like a cheap opera,” I said. “I can’t see Wilhelmina drinking her death potion as something tragically fine or beautiful. If she were wearing a white silk gown like that diva in an idyllic landscape, with the violins inducing her to drink her death, I might be able to accept it, but not in a fetid alley surrounded by squalor. There, it was only self-pity, a foolish reaction to cheated womanhood and false romance.”

“Are you saying that beauty ennobles even foolish actions?”

“Impulsive ones, yes, I suppose I am,” I answered, feeling a twinge.

“You’re tenderhearted, Clara, but you’re missing the point. You’re looking for truth in the beauty onstage, but an opera just presents beauty, not truth.”

“It could suggest truth.”

“It’s artifice. If Wilhelmina had taken her life in beautiful surroundings and a lovely gown, her death wouldn’t be any more tragic or authentic than it already was. Opera, and ballet too, don’t convey the truly tragic. Wilhelmina’s death may have been tragic, but Isolde’s death is not. It wasn’t real love that you saw on the stage tonight. It was style.”

I thought that over while we ate our lobster Newburg.

“Consider Tiffany’s windows,” he said after some time. “A window picturing a garden, for example. Should you take it as a window or as a real garden?”

“A window.”

“Right. If you take it as a garden and try to smell or pick a flower, you’ll be disappointed because you will not have surrendered to the theatricality. You’d be investing it with undue seriousness. That’s what you’re doing with this opera, because it touches on someone you know. Instead, an opera, like a pictorial window, is purely aesthetic. Style above truth.”

“Art for art’s sake?”

“Exactly.”

“I’m not so sure. If it gets me to have an emotional response, it’s more than merely a beautiful thing made for the sake of being beautiful. It’s made for the sake of activating and enriching my affections.”

I WANTED TO SEE
if music alone, without the trappings of character, setting, and story, could have that effect, so when George invited Edwin and me to come to his country studio in Nutley, New Jersey, for a chamber music concert at the nearby community hall, I was eager to go.

The afternoon was blustery, with sleet and dropping temperatures even this late in March. Edwin was quieter than usual on the train.

“Are you thinking about the people that come to you?” I asked.

“Come to me?”

“The tempest-tossed. On a stormy night like this, do you think of them shivering in their tenements?”

“Yes, I do. They burn coal on Bowery Street on nights like this. Crowds gather. Sometimes fights erupt to get close.”

“What was the line in the poem?”

“ ‘
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
’ ”

“That was it. Do you think there’s a moment when God holds our souls in His hand before we’re born and decides whether we’re going to be one of those troubled ones? Does He give those souls something more, like hope or grace, in order to endure?”

“Clara, how you’re talking. It’s a matter of social needs, not religion.”

I assumed that was meant as a defense of his activities. He began to brood, preoccupied with Bowery Street, I suppose. The starkness of his vacancy unsettled me. I didn’t challenge it with words, though I did try to engage him with my eyes. It took the blast of cold air and the snow coming down thick and fast as we stepped out of the train to bring him back to the here and now.

We took a horsecab in the gathering darkness, and he insisted on carrying me from the road to George’s studio despite my protests that I had on my rubber overshoes. Nevertheless, his gallantry made me feel cherished. Inside, George gave us a merry welcome, declaring that I looked angelic with snow on my hat and eyelashes, and drew us close to a crackling fire. He showed us the paintings and sketches he had completed, and the cartoon of his mosaic entry for the prize of a three-year residency at the American Academy in Rome.

“We were to have depicted the theme of
The Triumph of Commerce,
” he said. “Dudley entered too.”

“Ominous title for a piece of art when art and commerce are often at odds,” I remarked.

He served us ham sandwiches, coleslaw, pickles, and hot tea. After half a sandwich, Edwin said he wasn’t feeling well. Wind blew snow pellets against the window in a chilling spray.