Clara and Mr. Tiffany (28 page)

“Yes?”

“My name is Nellie Warner, Miss, and I’m hoping as you might have some work for me. I know how to cut glass.”

She was a wholesome-looking girl, with a scattering of cinnamon-colored freckles across her milky cheeks.

“How is it that you know?”

She blushed. “A friend taught me. I can show you if you’d like.”

What a melodic voice she had, with a tinge of the Irish in it. I traced a curved pattern onto a piece of glass with grease pencil and handed her my diamond wheel. She grasped it correctly, scored the glass with a steady hand, and snapped it clean.

“I need nippers to finish it off. To groze it, I mean.”

She had the vocabulary too.

I handed her a pair. With a minimum of snips, it was the exact replica of the pattern piece, which I laid over it.

“Can you give it a convex curve?”

“To be sure.”

She showed me. It was a tricky task, but she managed admirably. She
had certainly been well coached. I hated to put such a talent to work on cutting rectangles until the moon sprouted horns.

“What’s his name, Nellie?” I asked in a whisper. She raised her head quickly, surprised and embarrassed, a bud of womanhood. I gestured to the doorway. “Your friend who taught you?”

“Patrick Doyle, Miss.”

“You’re not engaged, are you?”

“Oh, no, Miss. I’m too young for that. I want to work on me own.”

“Well, you can tell Mr. Doyle that he taught you very well, and that you will be starting on Monday at nine o’clock.”

“Oh, thank you, Miss. Thank you.”

She began to back out the door, hunched forward facing me, but with one more thank you, she turned to the doorway, threw her shoulders back, lifted her chin, and entered New York’s paid labor force.

ON MONDAY, NELLIE WARNER
arrived wearing a plain shirtwaist, crisply laundered. Her light red hair shone, done up tidily with a narrow white ribbon. Theresa Baur arrived in a party dress with puffy pink silk sleeves and a ruffled pink dickey with a wide bow.

“Pink to make the boys wink,” Minnie whispered on the sly, sizing her up. “An English saying.”

“An English sarcasm, in this case,” I murmured back.

At least there was no boa to fling about. I’d have to see how long it would take for Theresa’s audacity to be based on high-quality work instead of on the accoutrements of frippery imitating uptown women.

I started by showing them two cartoons for the Wade mosaic, each one four feet wide, explaining that cartoons were enlargements from the original painting and would be transferred by stylus onto large sheets of paper that would be mounted on boards inclined at a slight angle.

I introduced them to the selectors, Marion Palmié and Mary McVickar.

“Mary was born in Ireland, so I’m sure you’ll get on well with her, Nellie.”

“Where in Ireland?” Nellie instantly asked.

“Dunmore, County Waterford, where they make the glass.”

Nellie pointed to herself. “Cobh, County Cork, where the immigrant ships leave from.”

Their voices rang with love for the old country. I realized that I was creating a community. In this regard, I could matter here. It wasn’t just satisfying Mr. Tiffany or creating beauty that would make a person sensitive and compassionate. As Edwin had said, there were other kinds of beauty. I liked to think he would have been pleased with me.

F
OUR OF US WHEELED UPTOWN PAST THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
château of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, crossed through Grand Army Plaza, and entered Central Park. We dismounted by the pond to rest and enjoy the calm after the noisy streets.

“How far do you think we’ve come?” Alice asked.

Mr. York looked at his cyclometer. “About two and a half miles.”

“Only that? I feel like I’ve pedaled to Boston.”

After watching the ducks awhile, she stood and said, “All right. Up and at ’em. Next stop, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. For Clara’s sake.” She raised herself onto the seat and chirped out, “Just think of what has happened to you, Clara. To us. Because you could ride a wheel, Alistair invited you to go on that ride in the country. Because of that, you had the idea of butterflies on a lampshade. And because of that, we’re here today!”

And off she went.

We took the East Drive, passing the statue of Shakespeare, and went up Literary Walk to the wisteria pergola. The blooms were at their most glorious, spilling over themselves in profusion. With our necks craned back under an overhead lattice, we breathed in their fragrance. Dense clusters of two-lipped blossoms hung pendulous, lilac-blue and violet-blue and purple, depending on their position on the stems.

“They’re darker where they hang lowest,” I observed.

“They must open at the highest part of each cluster first, so those blossoms are the first to lose their color,” Alice said.

“Eight inches long, those clusters,” I marveled.

“Some longer,” she noted.

“With blossoms only half an inch long.”

“Some shorter.”

“Some prettier,” Bernard chimed in.

“Some uglier,” Mr. York countered.

“Some smellier.” Bernard pinched his nose, looking at me playfully.

“Some more pendulous,” Mr. York intoned in a deeper-than-usual voice, and the two men snickered.

“All right, you two, just keep on riding as far as you want,” I said. “We’ll still be here when you come back.”

Looking smug and perky, Alice pulled out our small sketchbooks from the satchel that I’d strapped on my bicycle. “Take your time,” she sang out as they rode off.

I sat down on a bench and prepared to draw. “Leaves pinnate.”

“Like a feather, with one leaflet at the end,” Alice added.

“Foliage only above the blossoms.”

“Trunks twisted and gnarled.”

“Two entwining around each other,” I said. “Like a wizened old married couple.”

We became absorbed in drawing until Alice slapped her forehead. “A separate piece of glass for each petal! There’ll be a thousand!”

“Two thousand, Mr. Tiffany estimated.”

“That will take forever!”

A small, gray-haired woman was making her way slowly down the length of the pergola, picking up fallen blossoms, examining them closely, putting some in a little bakery box, and throwing some away. Petals littered the ground around her like a lavender Persian carpet. She stopped to watch us work.

“Nice pictures, but you only have the drawings. I have the color and the scent. They last a couple of days in a saucer of water.”

“Then you can come back and get some fresh ones,” Alice told her.

“I live by the el train, and it soots up the air frightfully. Flowers help.”

She toddled on, bending her stiff little body precariously, plucking each treasure off the ground, her sweet pinkie finger raised.

Once she was out of earshot, Alice murmured, “Lady Pillager. That’ll be us one day.”

“Our legs twisted and gnarled with veins like the trunks of wisteria.”

“Our noses straining to remember this scent.”

It left us both thoughtful for a time, our drawing pencils still.

“She knows what life is for,” I mused.

We cocked our heads at each other, hoping that we did too, and that our work to make beautiful things might help others live richer lives. This was the other Tiffany Imperative.

“We can’t use the wide cone mold we used for dragonfly,” I said. “It has to be more perpendicular to give the illusion of the clusters hanging down.”

“Like a pail upside down?”

“No. Straight down. More like a cloche hat with a rounded shoulder between the crown and sides.” I drew a rough sketch of the shape of the shade and vine base I had in mind and showed her. “Mr. Tiffany told me this lamp would be electric.”

“Electroliers can get really hot,” Alice said.

“Then the opening at the top has to be larger than normal. That’s fine. There could be a tangled net of leads without glass in the center of the crown, thick leads textured to look like branches.”

“There’s one problem.” Her ominous tone set me on edge.

“I think I know what you’re going to say, and it’s going to break my heart.”

“The bottom,” she wailed.

“Yes. It would be criminal to cut off the blossoms at a bottom ring. They’ve simply
got
to hang down unevenly, like they do in nature.”

“Then the mold has to be taller than the lowest hanging blossom,” she said. “But then we can’t build up the glass from a bottom ring resting against the mold.”

“Start at the top?” I asked.

“What are you? A magician? How are these tiny pieces going to stay without anything to rest on?”

“Wax?”

“And pins,” she said. “We’ll have to put two pins in the wood for each small bottom piece to rest on.”

“A fringe of pins.”

When Bernard and Mr. York came back, we packed up and mounted our wheels, our imaginations blossoming but our exuberance darkened, our legs not yet twisted and stiff.

MR. MITCHELL CAME
into the studio one drizzly afternoon and pulled up a stool by my desk, too close for comfort.

“Hello,” I said. “I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?”

“What’s going on here?”

He never started any conversation with “Good morning” or “How are you?” or “Might I interrupt you for a moment?” Mr. I. M. Business.

The girls were all standing with their hands over their eyes.

“I called a five-minute break for them to stretch their shoulders and rest their eyes. Those rain clouds outside make it dark in here. We’ve had to work with electric lights all day.”

“You do this all the time?”

“Every day we have to work under electric lights. It causes eye-strain.”

He blew a puff of air out of his mouth. “Never heard of such a thing. The men don’t do it.”

“Then the men have superior eyeballs. Or inferior brains.”

Theresa dared to snicker.

“You’re getting pretty high-and-mighty lately.”

“Why, thank you, Mr. Mitchell. Good of you to notice.”

Carrie gasped.

He pointed to my drawing. “What’s that?”

“I’m designing a wisteria lamp. It will have a new shape, like a tall cloche hat, and a cascade of small petals in shades of violet-blue. I’m sure it will be a popular model.”

“He knows you’re doing this?” Mr. Mitchell asked.

“We thought of it together. He loves wisteria. Haven’t you noticed the transoms in his library?”

“No.”

“How unfortunate for you. He’s designing the base to look like a wisteria trunk. It’s for an electrolier.”

“There’s no guarantee that electroliers will sell. Besides, we can’t have such elaborate lamps. The time involved makes them too expensive. If you make only these expensive one-of-a-kind or eight-of-a-kind lamps, you’ll have to be constantly designing new items.”

“Which is what I like doing, and what I’m beginning to be good at.”

He sat in deep thought for a few minutes while I added a few more blossoms to a wisteria colonnade. The clusters shouldn’t hang next to one another like a line of soldiers at roll call. Some should be in front of others, some behind, some branches bursting into blossoms higher than others. The difficulty on a flat plane was to convey in pencil the separation between clusters that one sees with the eye.

“Since the pattern will be repeated five times around the barrel, that reduces my time expenditure,” I said.

His scrutiny fell on my plaster model of a new clock.

“Do you honestly suppose anybody is going to buy that clock?”

“I most certainly do. It’s more original than any clock in the showroom.”

“Indeed. Odd little clock,
for a museum
, but the public wants common white and gold French clocks that sell for a quarter of the price this would be. I tell you, your clock is
too
original. It will never sell.”

“Don’t be so quick to assume that, Mr. Mitchell. Save yourself from feeling foolish when it does sell.”

He pulled his stool even closer.

“If you could content yourself with utilizing your
originality
on a few simple things, you would be doing something useful instead of going off on these crazy tangents.”

I gritted my teeth at the sarcastic way he said “originality” and flung out his arm over everything in my studio as if it were trash.

“But Mr. Tiffany, whom I believe is your employer as well as mine, has encouraged me to design more lamps.”

He planted his elbow right in the middle of my wisteria study, wrinkling it, a deliberate move. I pushed on his arm enough to free my drawing, and glared at him none too pleasantly.

In a conspiratorial whisper, he said, “Mr. Tiffany will be taking a vacation soon. What I want you to do while he’s away, on the sly, so to
speak, is to design some simple, cheaper things that can be made more quickly, without so many little pieces.” He wiggled his fingers at my one-fifth wisteria drawing.

“Like what?”

“Oh, candlesticks, ink bottles, pin trays, desk sets. Those things will fly off the shelves. If you design some uncomplicated bronze items to suit me, without mosaics, I’ll have them made while Mr. Tiffany is away, and I guarantee that they will sell. It will prove to him that there’s money in cheaper things.”