Clara and Mr. Tiffany (4 page)

“You can’t help but think extravagantly,” I said more seriously.

“I’m thinking
innovatively
. This chapel will announce an entirely new direction—the ecclesiastic
landscape
window to help people worship God’s creation. Narrow-minded clergymen can resist all they want. Nature is God’s work, so I say nature motifs are just as spiritual, just as inspirational, as biblical images. The mind of the Creator is unlimited in devising the forms of nature. Do you see what that means? There are infinitely more ways for us to express spiritual truth than just the tired old figures crammed into every medieval church across Europe.”

“Therefore the peacocks.”

“The goodly wings of the peacocks, the Bible says, and therefore the trees and the flowers and the streams. There are birds and mountains and hills all through the Bible. So for the first time the general public, not just my wealthy clients who buy landscape windows for their homes, will see the art of Louis Comfort Tiffany convey the beauties of nature. No temporary strike is going to stop me.”

He sounded like P. T. Barnum bragging about his circus.

“But I made a mistake.”

He sat at his desk and plunked down his elbows with a thud. “John La Farge slipped into that Paris Exposition three years ago with one measly window, and was decorated as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France, and I didn’t exhibit.”

He flung out his arm, and the opal glinted in envious green.

“The Paris papers hailed him as the inventor of opalescent glass. Puh! I made it before he ever did. Several window makers used it here before La Farge took it to Paris.”

He looked at me with steely eyes. “This World’s Columbian Exposition is going to turn the tables.”

After his braggadocio was spent, he said, “From now on, it’s a race against time. We barely have fourteen months. How much do you have left to do on
The Infancy of Christ
?”

“Ten thousand pieces of glass to select and cut is slow going. I’ve finished
the central medallion. Now I’m working on the left cross panel of
Mary Presenting Christ to the Wise Men
. Miss Egbert will help me with the three other pictorial panels as soon as she finishes her window. She can train my best new girl on the decorative spaces between the pictures.”

“Good.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “I saw the way you devoured the double-peacock watercolor the first day you came back. As soon as you finish the Christ window, you can start on it.”

Splendor! All I could think of between the quick beats of my heart was splendor and joy.

“Thank you.”

“Hire from Art Students League and the Metropolitan.”

“The tuition there is costly. The Cooper Union art program is free. I’m likely to find girls who really need the money there. They might be more committed.”

“Fine. Ask Miss Mitchill too. She founded the National Association of Women Painters. She’ll know of someone capable of doing the enlargements. We need more than her and Miss Northrop and you for that.”

“All right. One thing you ought to know. Miss Northrop hasn’t seemed very pleased at my being department head.”

“I need her doing exactly what she’s doing. She’s the best glass selector and a fine watercolorist, but she’s not as sensible as you are. You’ll win her over eventually.”

I wasn’t so sure. Once when I complimented her on her selection of glass, she acted as though she was above needing any comment from me.

“Don’t be hurt, Agnes,” I had said. “He needs your artistry more than mine.”

She’d held a piece of glass against the light, turned it, discarded it, and picked another, all without a glance at me.

“He gave you the Christ window,” she’d remarked. “I designed it.”

“I didn’t know. He didn’t mention that.”

“No, he wouldn’t. At the fair, it will be assumed to be his design.”

“Does that bother you?”

Raising one eyebrow to a perfect arch, she finally turned to me. “It’s the way it is.”

Her temperament was delicate. I had to tread lightly. The same with
Mr. Tiffany. At the moment, he was intent on studying his
Entombment
painting.

“May I ask, who will pose for Mary?”

“I would like Louise to. My wife. If it’s not too hard on her.”

“The pose?”

“The idea. A mother grieving over her dead child.” He took a slow, energy-gathering breath. “We just lost our daughter.” He closed his paint box slowly. The click of the latch made a hollow, final sound. “Our little Annie. Three years old.”

Grief pressed down on him like a giant paw. I offered him the condolence of my eyes, knowing that words would do nothing to lessen his suffering.

In a faraway voice he added, “My first wife, Mary, and I lost our baby boy too, after three weeks. Mary never recovered, and I lost her as well. Now this child of Lou.”

A slight lisp escaped on the word
lost
. What an enormous, constant effort it must take for him to keep it under control.

“She died with a gardenia in her hand.”

I knew it was he who had put it there, the last loving thing he could do for her. His eyes revealed the fear that he would never get over it.

“Your work, is it compensation enough?” I ventured.

The skin between his eyebrows wrinkled. “Flamingoes and peacocks don’t make up for a child.”

I
HAD ALREADY INTERVIEWED LANDLADIES IN THE EAST SIDE
vicinity of the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, had rejected the suspicious, the severe, and the skeletal, and had gone home to soak my discouraged feet. I set out again this Saturday to circle the Tiffany building in ever-widening routes, determined to find exactly the right place.

I couldn’t bear to stay at the boardinghouse in Brooklyn where Francis and I had occupied a suite of rooms. Ever since he died, the boarders spoke to me in hushed and awkward tones as they slithered past me in the corridor like nuns and monks. It was as if they had drawn a black circle around my name in their roster of friends and labeled it:
New widow. Treat with kid gloves
. They meant well, but their averted eyes told me that they held the notion that a widow must creep through life as though she no longer belonged, taking one tedious, lonely breath after another during the long wait to be reunited with her other half in the hereafter.

Was it wrong for me to want more than constrained existence? Wrong to hunger for change, new faces, a full life? Surprises to please my eyes and ears? Was it improper to seek healing in the roaring crush of Manhattan, city of brilliance and possibility?

I walked on, erect, not creeping, and discovered a little run of quiet blocks called Irving Place between Union Square and Gramercy Park, which promised to be leafy come spring. Greek Revival, Italianate, and Renaissance Revival townhouses lined the street. I saw a
ROOM TO LET
sign in a window and bounded up the stoop. A gaunt woman answered the buzzer, portending skimpy portions at the dinner table and plates that
were whisked away before a second helping could enter the boarders’ minds. The cramped, cheerless parlor had only itchy horsehair settees constraining sitters to maintain Egyptian posture at all times. Apparently she considered the ten-inch-wide ribbon of gauze an adequate runner for the passageway to the bathroom.

“Thank you, no,” I said, and escaped.

Down the block at number 44 I found another sign, this one with a caricature of laughing people at a dining table with the warning
SOUR-PUSSES AND CIGAR SMOKERS NEED NOT APPLY
. A wide-hipped woman decorated with a fluff of dyed red-orange hair piled on top of her head welcomed me. Hmm. Colorful.

“Come in and have a look, dearie. We won’t bite. I’m Miss Merry Owens.”

She tucked her feather duster into her waistband above her ample hindquarters like a tail. That and her tuft of orange hair made her look like no spring chicken, rather like a mother hen.

“There’s right sweet folks here, artists and such, women on the second floor, men on the third, the help on the fourth. Seventeen paying souls, and all of them respectable, mind you, but not particular fashionable. Of the men, there’s not a good-for-naught or a tippler in the bunch, though there be a couple of mollies, if you don’t mind that. We even have a bona fide doctor, Griggs is his name, and an actor, Mr. Bainbridge. In the evenings we have musicales or read-alouds or charades or drawing lessons and such.”

“Drawing lessons?” Drawing was my embarrassing weakness, which I tried to hide from Mr. Tiffany.

“Oh, ’tis a grand arrangement we have. Mr. Dudley Carpenter is teaching Miss Hettie to draw, and Miss Hettie is teaching piano to Mr. Hackley, and Mr. Hackley is teaching singing to Miss Lefevre, and Miss Lefevre is teaching French to Mr. McBride, and Mr. McBride is teaching art history to Mr. Booth, and Mr. Booth is teaching accounting to Miss Merry Owens, that’s me, and I’m teaching Irish tatting to Mrs. Hackley, and she is teaching the zither to Dudley, so it all comes ’round, ye see, in a happy circle.” She made a circle with fingers plump as sausages and laughed her big bosoms into action.

“And what can you do?” she demanded, knuckles on the shelves of her hips, her head cocked to the side as though the hen’s neck were broken.

“I can recite poetry. I particularly like Emily Dickinson.”

“A lady poet, eh? There’s somes here would like that. Give us a wee morsel.”

“ ‘Each that we lose takes part of us.’ Oh, no. That’s too dreary. How about this?

“Ah, sweeter than wine.”

Apparently I passed muster, because she brought me into an airy parlor with comfortable easy chairs and freshly starched antimacassars. Two landscape prints of the Hudson River School hung on the walls, and a bowl of lemon drops sat on a crocheted doily. The Twelve Apostle spoons hanging in their wooden rack on the wall were all bright. Not one, not even the betrayer, was tarnished. Clearly this was a better sort of boardinghouse, probably with a price to match.

Up carpeted stairs that did not creak she showed me to a bedroom all done up in pink and spring green with a window onto Irving Place. Above the iron bedstead a landscape mural had been painted of a pond with floating lilies.

“Charming.”

“George, a former boarder, painted it when he lived here, but Dudley chose the colors for the curtains and spread.”

Decent bed, small desk with an oil lamp and a bookshelf above it, one easy chair, clean, bathroom down the hall. “How much?”

“Fifty dollars a month, and that includes three hearties a day, full Irish breakfast, dessert on Sundays and holidays, hot water all hours. T’would be forty-five but for the window.”

That was higher than I had anticipated, but I earned twenty a week with a promise of a moderate raise every two years.

“I’ll take it. May I move in tomorrow?”

“To be sure you can.”

I RETURNED TO BROOKLYN
elated, and late into the night I packed the last things—my alcohol lamp for heating my curling iron, and my grandmother’s porcelain washbowl and pitcher—but the things on Francis’s desk and dresser, I didn’t even touch.

With a trace of sadness I had sold my two evening gowns at the Second Time Around and bought three shirtwaists, ready-mades with narrow skirts, for work, and a new pair of lace-ups so I wouldn’t come back to Tiffany’s looking down-at-the-heels. I took Francis’s silk black-on-black bow tie that I particularly liked. I could wear it hanging down loosely in the modern style. I packed my wedding dress, not out of sentiment but out of longing for spring. It was sky-blue poplin. I packed my opera cloak too, even if I had to wear it over a muslin shirtwaist in the standing-room-only section.

And then I carefully wrapped in a hand towel the one thing I had that no one could wrench from me—the kaleidoscope, his engagement gift to me. Bits of richly colored glass in a chamber served as his sweet acknowledgment that I’d had to give up my joyous work with just such glass in order to marry him. At the slightest turn of the maple-wood tube, the design collapsed with a tiny rattle of falling objects, and in a burst of an instant, nothing was the same.

It was our books that remained. I was careful to pick out my own, leaving his. Into my carpetbag first went my mother’s Shakespeare, the plays and the sonnets. I couldn’t help but think of the first line of Sonnet Twenty-nine, which seemed to be aimed at me this last month as it never had before.
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
.

In went my mother’s etiquette book,
The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen
, which I read with some levity, and my stepfather’s Bible and his Minister’s Bible Concordance, which bristled when I put Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
next to it. My leather-bound Keats and Wordsworth came next, reminding me that it wasn’t a bad thing to brighten one’s days with snips of poetry, like my mother did. Then Ibsen’s plays, Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
, and Henry James’s
Daisy Miller
and
The Portrait of a Lady
. There stood Emily Dickinson. The 1890 collection, her first, Francis had given me. The 1891 collection I had given him. I took them both, wondering what follows
The Sweeping up the Heart, / And putting Love away
.