Clara and Mr. Tiffany (50 page)

“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?”

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.”

J
OE 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 working 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?