Clara and Mr. Tiffany (10 page)

WILHELMINA CAME TO WORK
one morning with a black eye. Shock sliced through me.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Did some man do that to you?” I was outraged at an imagined assailant.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Driscoll. My sweetheart isn’t that kind. He’s a gentleman and a butcher.”

I would have laughed at what she said if I didn’t have to get to the bottom of this. I studied her skeptically. “Then tell me.”

“You know how Mr. Tiffany told me not to look at anything ugly but
to look for beauty? I was practicing. I walked home through Union Square and saw a handsome young man selling flowers, but when I got to my own street, I only saw ugly things like garbage piles and broken houses and ragged people, so I closed my eyes to walk past them. I bumped into a gaslight.”

The story was delivered in fits and starts, and I began to think that it was just that, a preposterous story to cover up what she was too ashamed to tell me. There probably wasn’t a single gaslight in her neighborhood in the first place.

“Does it hurt?”

“It hurts you to look at it, so don’t. It’s ugly.”

“Can you see?”

“Oh, I can see all right, but I won’t try that again.”

Wilhelmina had possibilities here. She was doing fine as a junior selector. If I could get her some outside instruction, I could foresee her as a design assistant someday. Cooper Union had free evening art classes.

“You’re right that Mr. Tiffany told us to exercise our eyes. I take that to include looking at good art. Have you ever been to the Metropolitan Museum?”

“No. I don’t go uptown.”

“Well, then, there’s an art exhibit by the night-school art students of Cooper Union, and that’s not too far from where you live. I want you to see it. Let’s go together on Sunday.”

Edwin’s descriptions of immigrant life still haunted me, and I needed to see if Wilhelmina lived in a hall room, or just what her living situation was like. I looked at my list of the girls’ addresses. Hers wasn’t in the worst part of the slums I had seen from the Bowery streetcar.

“I’ll come by to pick you up.”

“No, no, no,” she said with wild eyes. “I’ll meet you there.”

We finally agreed to meet on her street corner at one o’clock.

I arrived on time and waited, feeling conspicuous just standing there. At one-fifteen there was no sign of her but plenty of lewd looks. This was what Wilhelmina dealt with every day. I kept looking at my watch, though I didn’t want to reveal I had one when men or boys passed by. Waiting here was ridiculous. At one-thirty I walked to her address.

The building wasn’t a block-long tenement, only a shabby wooden
apartment house, a fire trap if there ever was one. As I walked up bare stairs, through a corridor with odd little twists and turns, up a step, down two, the deafening hum and rattle of treadle sewing machines assailed me. I could see half a dozen machines going at once through doors open for a breath of air, whole families bending over them. So this was what Edwin meant by tenement sweatshops organized by middlemen, each driving a closer bargain than his rival tyrant across the hall. Trade unions had no jurisdiction over such enterprises, he had said.

A mere girl at one machine, her arms to the elbows smeared black with the color of the cloth, looked up as I passed, her feet at that instant riding the momentum of the treadle passively. I carried the stark image of her with me down the hall.

Steam came out of Wilhelmina’s open door, and irons for pressing clothes were heating on a stove. She held one in her hand, wearing only her shift. Apparently proprieties didn’t matter here. Piles of garments lay on the floor.

“I’m not finished,” she wailed.

A large woman I took to be her mother was working next to her on another pressing board.

“Who’s this?” the woman snapped. Her hair was tangled into greasy hanks, and I saw at once what a mammoth, complicated effort it was for Wilhelmina to come to work looking groomed and respectable.

“This is Mrs. Driscoll, Mama. She’s the lady I work for.”

The woman’s crazed eyes darted uncontrollably, as though looking for something familiar from the Old World that would give her respectability. Finding nothing, she snarled, “Who told you she could come here?” Her thick arm was in the air in a flash, and she landed a stinging slap on Wilhelmina’s cheek underneath the black eye.

Wilhelmina didn’t flinch, just turned her mother’s rage on me. “I didn’t say you could come here. I told you to meet me at the corner.”

“I’m sorry. I should have waited. We’ll do it another time.”

I escaped quickly, feeling awful about abandoning her to her life.

On the way home, I wondered when the brutality had begun. Wilhelmina had taken the slap without so much as a blink. How strong she was, able to put the rawness of her life behind her the moment she stepped into the studio.

The trip over must have started the mother on this road—being crammed into pens and processed like cattle, not at all what she had imagined—and seeing now that she would never live comfortably in the new country, she struck out at any provocation. If only her mother were working at Tiffany’s too. I felt sure the beauty of the work and the kindness of the girls would soften her. A woman can’t stay hard when all around her is loveliness.

WHEN I WALKED
in the front door of 44 Irving Place, the parlor was crowded and noisy with shouts and clapping. George was dancing on a table in stockinged feet, swiveling his narrow hips suggestively, pushing out his flat chest, gyrating his shoulders, twirling his red handkerchief above his head.

“What in the world?”

“It’s the hootchy-kootchy!” he shouted.

“Little Egypt performed it in the Cairo section of the Midway Plaisance,” Hank explained, “wearing only fringe and a veil. She scandalized and delighted thousands.”

“All along I thought the fair was about art and industry,” said Mr. Hackley.

“It was! The belly dance is an art form.” George gave a quick thrust of his hip sideways as he flung his handkerchief at Mrs. Hackley. “And it takes industry to perform it.”

Mrs. Hackley swatted the handkerchief away from her as though it were his unmentionables.

“Begging the gentleman’s pardon,” Merry said. “Get down off my table, George Waldo, or I’ll take a shillelagh to your backside and send you flying clear to Dublin!”

George wagged his behind in her direction, tempting her, then jumped down and held out his palm for tips.

“Which one of you gave him permission to be so corky?” Merry demanded.

“No one. Our George doesn’t suffer from requiring permission,” I said. “Tell us about the fair.”

“The Midway leading to the entrance was a mile long,” George said.

“Decidedly lowbrow,” Hank scoffed. “Barnum’s circus, William Cody’s Wild West Show, and Blarney Castle.” He gave a nod to Merry who huffed at his insinuation.

“There was a giant wheel more than twenty-five stories high.” George swung his arm up in a big arc. “Our answer to the Eiffel Tower, only you could ride it, sixty people in a cabin.”

“You could see the whole White City laid out between canals with hundreds of gondolas and gondoliers, lovely boys they were, imported from Venice,” Hank said.

“Six hundred acres of bridges, arches, temples, palaces, monuments, hanging gardens.” George was flailing his arms. “At night it was a fairyland.”

“Blazing with three times the electricity used by all of Chicago,” Hank the Fact-finder added. “People came from all over the world. It’s expected that by the end of the fair, twenty-seven million people will have attended. That’s roughly half the population of the country!”

“Hard to believe,” said Mr. Hackley.

“A guide told me that he answered a hundred questions an hour, and three-quarters of them repeated the same thing.” Hank looked at me. “ ‘Where’s Tiffany’s exhibit?’ ”

“Truly?”

“To be honest, they probably meant Tiffany and Company, to see the one-hundred-twenty-five-carat diamond revolving and shooting off sparks. There was also a smaller one, a mere seventy-seven carats, along with the most costly array of jewelry, gems, tiaras—”

“What about
my
Tiffany?”

“Clocks, crystal, and silver ever made. Even engraved silver spurs.”

“Oh, wonder of wonders. I’m sure the horse gallops faster spurred on by a work of art,” I said.

“Smith and Wesson revolvers made of silver and inset with turquoise and lapis lazuli.”

“I’d much prefer being killed by a gun with turquoise rather than lapis.”

“And gold and silver vases, bowls, and platters studded with enormous pearls, jade, cut gems—” Hank said.

“Tell me about the chapel!” I demanded.

“And a magnificent silver ice bowl decorated with enameled holly leaves and mother-of-pearl berries. Two silver polar bears supported it, surrounded by large rock-crystal chunks that represented icebergs protruding from pine needles and pinecones worked in silver. So gorgeous it made me shiver.”

“Quit teasing me. What about
my
Tiffany?”

“Fifty-four medals to his father’s fifty-six,” Hank said. “Their joint pavilion was well positioned in the center of the behemoth Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Building, the largest building in the world.”

With an air of importance, George declared, “No doubt about it, your chapel is the most original contribution to the fair.”

I slapped my hand over my mouth.

“People were astonished at being surrounded by the exhibit, freely walking around
inside
a work of art rather than looking at something untouchable beyond a silk museum cord,” George said. “You could stand under an enormous electrolier shaped like a cross no matter from what direction you looked at it. Green fire gleamed behind emerald glass.”

He pulled out a small notebook from his breast pocket. “The altar was white marble with a mosaic front of iridescent glass, mother-of-pearl, onyx, and alabaster. Risers faced with mosaic led up to it, and it displayed a jeweled filigree tabernacle of brass, amber, abalone shell, and jade. Behind it, a series of wide concentric arches were supported by mosaic columns in rose and green.”

“What about my peacock panel?”

“Stunning. The arches framed it, and it was set into a wall of black marble, which made it all the more brilliant. Light from the electrolier created highlights on the chipped chunks of glass you talked about. A triumph, Clara.”

“People crowded in day and night,” Hank said, “because your windows were lit with electric lights behind them and diffused by a plate of milky glass so it looked like daylight.”

“How did people respond?”

George gave me a loving look. “Oh, Clara.” He sighed. “They were entranced. They took off their hats and spoke in low voices as if they were in a holy place.”

“
I
’
M PROPOSING MARRIAGE TO YOU.” GEORGE DROPPED TO THE
floor on one knee. “On behalf of my brother.”

I laughed. “Get up, Puck. He’s had more than two years to do it for himself if he had wanted to.”

I laid out my mended silk stockings on the bed next to my new emerald-green skirt, way beyond my means. George had picked it out on a shopping trip for me to wear this evening with his brother. My sly black satin sash and the deceptive leg-of-mutton sleeves on my white organdy blouse would magically make my waist look smaller.

“Magic in love plots only works in Shakespeare’s comedies and Italian opera,” I said. “One has a happy ending, and the other … Well, you know how most operas end.”

“With a swan song.” He let his head fall.

“Marriage is risky business under the best of circumstances, let alone when orchestrated by a sprite.”

“Edwin yearns for you. His admiration makes him tongue-tied. He’s afraid you’ll turn him down.” He got up and walked in a circle, exhilarated by an idea. “It would be a delicious kind of union—plucky New Woman and idealistic New Man.”

I gazed at George, slightly younger than Edwin, more spirited, more creative, more intoxicated with life.

“I’d much rather it were you,” I said softly.