Clara and Mr. Tiffany (8 page)

“Do you think he has the magic to put a few daffodils in the meadow?”

L
ATE ONE AFTERNOON I WAS SEWING A BAND OF LACE ONTO A
collar to disguise its worn condition when George came in, pulled my curtains aside, and peered out into the early twilight.

“It’s beginning to snow,” he said. “Tomorrow everything will be covered in white. White buildings. White streets. White omnibuses. White lampposts. An alabaster city.”

“I get the idea, George. You don’t have to catalog every snowflake.”

Snow meant three months left until the fair would open in May. With so much still left to do, I felt as nervous as a sparrow pecking at the frayed edge of resolve.

George was bursting to tell me something, but he kept it in, nosing around, picking up my powder puff, rearranging the things on my dresser scarf, making it seem as though he was only going to reveal it if I asked. To tease him, I refused to, which sooner or later would force him to reveal it on his own. Over the last several months it had become our mutual cat-and-mouse game.

He adjusted the curtain, he twirled the tassel on the curtain tieback, he played with my kaleidoscope, and he asked me what I did at work today.

“The same things I did yesterday and the day before that. Chipped chunks of lime green, orange, and gold glass into jewels for the crown in the double-peacock mosaic. It’s still not finished because we’ve had to take over some of the windows from the men’s department so they could stay home, sleep late, talk, talk, talk, and create a work stoppage. You can’t choose a million unique pieces of glass in a week, you know. And
none of these are tesserae—simple rectangles. They’re sectiliae, cut to conform to the shapes outlined on the cartoon. Much more work because they’re irregular. It’s going to be gorgeous, but it’s nerve-racking because I hear the clock ticking every time I lay down a piece.”

That made him cock his head from side to side and cluck like a metronome. “I’m going to see it.”

“I don’t have a spare minute to show you.”

He stuck his nose in the air. “You can’t stop me.” He straightened the rug beside my bed. “What did your girls do today?”

“Three glass selectors, three cutters, and three assistants finished the big
Angel of the Resurrection
window. The angel’s face and hands and feet have just been enameled and fired. You should have seen the girls, so giddy to see all the pieces assembled but sad to part with what they created. It took four men to carry each of the four easels to the metal shop to have the leads soldered. The girls were beside themselves with worry. They surrounded the men and held up their aprons along the edges of the easels in case any pieces fell off. The angel’s foot did fall, but a big Swede named Wilhelmina dove for it and saved it.”

“Ah, a fallen angel with feet of glass. I adore fallen angels. Was she wearing white lace? Were her white wings moving like this when she lost her toes?”

He flapped his arms crazily.

“All right, tell me. Why are you being so silly?”

“I’ll give you a hint. White.”

“I don’t want a hint. I want the reason.”

“I’ll tell you at dinner. Hank and I will tell you.” He flapped his wings out the door.

GEORGE GRINNED IN HIS IMPISH
way as he passed me a serving bowl. “Here, Clara, have some white potatoes. To go with your whitefish and cauliflower.”

I turned to Merry. “Did George have anything to do with this menu?”

She held up her hands. “None atallatall. The praties is me own favorite, you know.”

“I don’t believe you. George has to orchestrate everything. All right, Puck, now that you have an audience, tell us what’s sizzling inside of you.”

He chewed; he took a drink of water; he flipped his white napkin and wiped his mouth with it. “Hank and I are going to the White City.”

I was puzzled.

“He means the Columbian Exposition,” Hank explained.

“No! Truly?”

“It’s called the White City because the buildings are being painted to look like alabaster,” Hank said. “A swamp outside Chicago is being transformed into canals, promenades, towers, and classical arches and façades. I just received a press release. I’ll be writing about it.”

“Then it’s true, what Mr. Tiffany says. The greatest meeting of artists—”

“Since the fifteenth century,” said Hank. “Some sixty-five thousand exhibits.”

“Among which will be your chapel, peacocks and all,” George said.

“And my Christ window! And the flamingo window. And you’re going to see it all assembled. I’m green with envy.”

“Don’t forget Tiffany and Company’s extravaganza,” said Hank. “Father and son competing with each other on the world stage. Definitely worth my writing about for
The Century Magazine.
”

“
If
we finish on time.”

THAT DOUBT PLAGUED ME
, so I worked extra hours almost every day. One evening in early June when I came home from work too late for dinner, Dudley and George were playing the popular new tune “Oh My Darling Clementine” on their zithers. George followed me up to my room, singing,

“Brilliant. When is your debut at Carnegie Hall?”

“Dudley will be in Paris while Hank and I are in Chicago, so I’ve asked my brother Edwin to check in on you from time to time.”

“I don’t need someone to oversee my activities, thank you very much.”

“Woo-whoo. Why so cranky?”

“I’ll do just fine without your zither duets too, you and Dudley serenading each other across the parlor.”

George screwed up his face in a pout so tight that it made me laugh. He could always make me laugh, no matter how tired I was. I sat at my dressing table, noticed mauve-colored cups under my eyes, and undid the pins in my chignon. They’d given me a headache. George came up behind me and unwound the twist, picked up my hairbrush and brushed from my forehead out to the ends, holding up my hair in his other hand.

“That’s one thing you know how to do. Brush hair.”

“You’ve been overworking yourself.”

“So has everyone else. It’s practically summer. What do you expect me to do?”

“Just what you’ve been doing, dear heart.”

“Mr. Tiffany set too big a task for us. He designed too much, and now he’s driven to complete it all.”

The Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union had gone on strike, and the mosaics on the chapel arches and columns, as well as the leaded-glass dome on the baptismal font, weren’t finished. Some of the glaziers would have wanted to be loyal to Tiffany, but union solidarity prevailed. For one, Joe Briggs, a fine mosaicist, would have worked all night if he could have found a way in, and Frank, the deaf-and-dumb janitor and errand boy, would have stayed with him to help. I had shown Mr. Belknap how to apply the tesserae, but what could one man do for a task that required twenty?

As a result, the remaining five chapel windows originally assigned to the men’s department had fallen to my department. I hired more girls to do the mechanical work and elevated Mary and Wilhelmina to be junior selectors. I even gave Frank some simple tasks. Now everyone was putting in extra hours. We had to work by those wretched electric lightbulbs
hanging from the ceiling, which bled out the colors. There was no time to savor our feelings about what we were making.

May Day had come and gone without notice. Any other year I would have been ecstatic about spring, but the entire Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company exhibit had not been ready when the exposition opened mid-May. The fair would last six months, but it was still a devastating disappointment to Mr. Tiffany. News reports said that tens of thousands of people visited the fair each day, and he was exasperated to be missing out. His dream of introducing landscape windows for churches and showcasing his iridescent glass was threatened.

He was short-tempered. Everyone in the studios was walking on eggshells. We were all excited about what we were making but also irritable under the pressure, sometimes both in the same breath. Expletives in German and Swedish erupted when nervous fingers fumbled and a piece of glass fell to the floor.

Just this morning Mr. Tiffany had yanked off half a dozen pieces of glass that I had selected to show the pathos of the crucified Christ in the
Entombment
window.

“Can’t you see that the winding cloth in the cartoon has more white across his groin and below his hip?” he had snapped, all gentility gone.

“We’ll be happy to take them off ourselves, sir. You don’t have to yank,” Wilhelmina retorted, even though it wasn’t her window.

“You ought to have known that Jesus must be the brightest figure in the window,” he said angrily as he pried off Jesus’s kneecap.

I winced. His impetuous desecration struck me as sacrilegious. Cornelia crumpled in shame. It wasn’t her fault. She had only cut what I’d given her. After he left, she sobbed out her humiliation.

“It wasn’t aimed at you,” I said.

I had selected for that area using electric lights and should have caught my errors before he saw them this morning.

In a few minutes, Agnes came over to my easel. I felt the muscles around my eyes tighten. She laid a paper cone of gingersnaps on my sample table.

“Don’t take it to heart. He’s a raging lion some days, a lamb other days. He’s not faultless, you know.”

She joined me in my work on
The Entombment
while her own window was left waiting. Working side by side in quiet harmony, we finished Jesus’s torso, legs, and feet, the winding cloth, and part of Mary Magdalene’s robe before quitting time.

I had walked home in a whirlpool of anger, embarrassment, and gratitude. Now, upstairs in my bedroom with George brushing my hair, I was sorry I’d been cranky to him.

“Haven’t you liked doing the work?” he asked as he took long, firm strokes with the hairbrush.

“Of course I have. I just wish I could go slower in order to enjoy selecting the glass more, to feed myself with each beautiful swirl, to linger over the nuances building up. If I don’t love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I’m only working for coin and not from soul.”

“A little bit of pain always rides in the pocket of pleasure,” George said.

I didn’t want to agree. “It’s not just that.”

“Then what?”

I took the hairbrush from his hand. “It’s that I want to go with you.”

A puff of air exploded from between his lips.

“Imagine what it would feel like to work on something six days a week and to care about it so intently that you spend the seventh day worrying about it—did I choose the right spot on that sheet of glass for the ultramarine shadow on the Virgin Mary’s white head scarf? Will Mr. Tiffany be pleased with the striated glass I used for the sky at dawn over the figures? Why won’t this chunk of glass chip sharply where I want it to? Imagine living it, breathing it, pouring into each piece of glass my grief at the Crucifixion, or my excitement at a dazzling bird of splendor, dreaming of it week after week for a year, loving it with every ounce of my being, and then not being able to see it all assembled. You’re an independent artist, George. You can paint what you want, take commissions or not, work at whatever speed you want, go wherever you want, whenever you want. You’re entirely free.”

“You’re free too. No one’s stopping you.”

“No, George. I’m not free. I have twenty-eight girls that I have to keep busy immediately after our fair projects are finished or the business
manager will force me to choose which ones to fire. The wheel’s in motion. We’ll have to design on speculation to tide us over until some orders come from the fair. If they come.”

“They’ll come.”

“Your saying so doesn’t stop me wanting to watch people in the chapel as they look, to see what they take away from it—joy or awakening or upliftment or peace or reverence—and to say to someone, anyone, ‘That’s
my
work you’re looking at,’ and at least one person in a million will say to my face, ‘That’s beautiful,’ or ‘That’s an extraordinary achievement,’ or ‘That
helped
me.’ ” In my dressing-table mirror, I saw my face taut with yearning, eyes squinting into slits, lips pulled in. “I want to be in the pressing crowds so I can feel I’m part of this great world event, even if I’m not acknowledged.”

I swung around to face George and grasped his arm.

“You’ll tell me everything, won’t you? You’ll listen to what people say in front of my peacock wall, and watch to see if anyone is moved by
The Entombment
? You’ll remember and tell me, won’t you?”

He patted my cheek. “I’ll memorize every word, and I’ll take photographs for Hank’s articles.”

“I’ll see them here, won’t I? And I can borrow some to show the girls?”

“Of course.”

Two simple words but uttered with such kindness and understanding. I closed my eyes a moment to reconcile myself.

I had begged Hank and George to postpone their trip until all parts of Mr. Tiffany’s exhibit were in place—not just the chapel but the secular windows in the Dark and Light Rooms as well. Although postponement wasn’t in Hank’s best interest for his articles, George had prevailed on him, and that obliged me to be courteous to his brother.