Clara and Mr. Tiffany Read online

  ALSO BY SUSAN VREELAND

  Girl in Hyacinth Blue

  The Passion of Artemisia

  The Forest Lover

  Life Studies: Stories

  Luncheon of the Boating Party

  Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Vreeland

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Vreeland, Susan.

  Clara and Mr. Tiffany: a novel / by Susan Vreeland.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60451-8

  1. Driscoll, Clara, 1861–1944—Fiction. 2. Women glass artists—Fiction. 3. Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 1848–1933—Fiction. 4. Tiffany and Company—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3572.R34C63 2010

  813′.54—dc22 2010007758

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design and illustration: Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  v3.1

  FOR

  Barbara Braun

  and John Baker,

  who led me to

  Clara and Tiffany

  …

  Beauty is what Nature has lavished upon us as a Supreme Gift.

  —LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE • 1892–1893

  1. Peacock

  2. Flamingo

  3. Opal

  4. Feathers

  5. Fire and the King of Diamonds

  6. Daffodil

  7. White

  8. Lady Liberty

  BOOK TWO • 1895–1897

  9. Emerald

  10. Rose

  11. Chrysanthemum

  12. Sidewalks

  13. Lake Geneva

  14. Wild Geese

  BOOK THREE • 1897–1900

  15. Nasturtium

  16. Daisy

  17. Diamond and Egret

  18. Butterfly

  19. Xanadu

  20. Sea Horse

  21. Dragonfly

  22. Wisteria

  23. The Hat, the Fern, and the Girls

  24. Pins

  BOOK FOUR • 1900–1903

  25. Ruby

  26. Jasmine

  27. Point Pleasant

  28. Wisteria

  29. Arcadia

  30. Tiffany Girls and a Boy

  31. A Bronze and a Garden

  32. The Letter

  33. Mayflower

  34. The Week

  35. Water Lily

  36. Beer, Wine, and Cognac

  37. Snowball

  38. Madison Square Park

  39. Red, White, and Blue

  BOOK FIVE • 1904–1908

  40. Laurelton Hall

  41. Fire

  42. Chestnuts, Lotus, and Drawing Pencils

  43. Gemstone

  44. Moon Shell

  45. Squash

  46. Ebb Tide

  47. Lifework

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  PEACOCK

  I OPENED THE BEVELED-GLASS DOOR UNDER THE SIGN ANNOUNCING Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in ornate bronze. A new sign with a new name. Fine. I felt new too.

  In the ground-floor showroom of the five-story building, stained-glass windows hung from the high ceiling, and large mosaic panels leaned against the walls. Despite the urgency of my business, I couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the free-form vases, bronze desk sets, pendulum clocks, and Art Nouveau candelabras. It was the oil lamps that bothered me. Their blown-glass shades sat above squat, bulbous bases too earthbound to be elegant. Mr. Tiffany was capable of more grace than that.

  A new young floor manager tried to stop me at the marble stairway. I gave him a look that implied, I was here before you were born, and pushed his arm away as though it were a Coney Island turnstile.

  On the second floor, I peered into Mr. Tiffany’s large office-studio. With a gardenia pinned to his lapel, he sat at his desk behind a row of potted orchids. In February, no less! Such were the extravagances of wealth. His formerly trim bottle brush of a mustache had sprouted into robust ram’s horns.

  His own paintings hung on the walls—Citadel Mosque of Old Cairo, with tall, slender minarets, and Market Day at Tangier, with a high tower on a distant hill. A new one depicted a lily on a tall stalk lording over a much shorter one. Amusing. Little Napoléon’s self-conscious preoccupation with height was alive and well.

  New tall pedestals draped with bedouin shawls flanked the fireplace. On them Oriental vases held peacock feathers. In this his design sense went awry, sacrificed to his flamboyancy. If he wanted to appear taller, the pedestals should have been shorter. Someday I would tell him.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Why, Miss Wolcott!”

  “Mrs. Driscoll. I got married, you remember.”

  “Oh, yes. You can’t be wanting employment, then. My policy hasn’t—”

  I pulled back my shoulders. “As of two weeks ago, I’m a single woman again.”

  He was too much the gentleman to ask questions, but he couldn’t hide the gleam in his eyes.

  “I’ve come to inquire if you have work for me. That is, if my performance pleased you before.” A deliberate prompt. I didn’t want to be hired because of my need or his kindness. I wanted my talent to be the reason he wanted me back.

  “Indeed” was all he offered.

  What now to fill the suspended moment? His new projects. I asked. His eyebrows leapt up in symmetrical curves.

  “A Byzantine chapel for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago next year. Four times bigger than the Paris Exposition Universelle. It will be the greatest assembly of artists since the fifteenth century.” He counted on his fingers and then drummed them on the desk. “Only fifteen months away. In 1893 the name of Louis Comfort Tiffany will be on the lips of millions!” He stood up and swung open his arms wide enough to embrace the whole world.

  I sensed his open palm somewhere in the air behind the small of my back, ushering me to his massive, carved mahogany exhibit table to see his sketches and watercolors. “Two round windows, The Infancy of Christ and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child, will be set off by a dozen scenic side windows.”

  A huge undertaking. How richly fortunate. Surely there would be opportunity for me to shine.

  Practically hopping from side to side, he made a show of slinging down one large watercolor after another onto the Persian carpet, each one a precise, fine-edged rendering of what he wanted the window to be.

  “Gracious! You’ve been on fire. Go slower! Give me a chance to admire each one.”

  He unrolled the largest watercolor. “An eight-foot mosaic behind the altar depicting a pair of peacocks surrounded by grapevines.”

  My breath whistled between my open lips. Above the peacocks facing each other, he had transformed the standard Christian icon of a crown of thorns into a shimmering regal headdress for God the King, the thorns replaced by large glass jewels in true Tiffany style.

  Astonishing how he could get mer
e watercolors so deep and saturated, so like lacquer that they vibrated together as surely as chords of a great church pipe organ. Even the names of the hues bore an exotic richness. The peacocks’ necks in emerald green and sapphire blue. The tail feathers in vermilion, Spanish ocher, Florida gold. The jewels in the crown mandarin yellow and peridot. The background in turquoise and cobalt. Oh, to get my hands on those gorgeous hues. To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea. To chip the gigantic jewels for the crown so they would sparkle and send out shafts of light. To forget everything but the glass before me and make of it something resplendent.

  When I could trust my voice not to show too much eagerness, I said, “I see your originality is in good health. Only you would put peacocks in a chapel.”

  “Don’t you know?” he said in a spoof of incredulity. “They symbolized eternal life in Byzantine art. Their flesh was thought to be incorruptible.”

  “What a lucky find for you, that convenient tidbit of information.”

  He chuckled, so I was on safe ground.

  He tossed down more drawings. “A marble-and-mosaic altar surrounded by mosaic columns, and a baptismal font of opaque leaded glass and mosaic.”

  “This dome is the lid of the basin? In opaque leaded glass?”

  He looked at it with nothing short of love, and showed me its size with outstretched arms as though he were hugging the thing.

  I was struck by a tantalizing idea. “Imagine it reduced in size and made of translucent glass instead. Once you figure how to secure the pieces in a dome, that could be the method and the shape of a lampshade. A wraparound window of, say”—I looked around the room—“peacock feathers.”

  He jerked his head up with a startled expression, the idea dawning on him as if it were his own.

  “Lampshades in leaded glass,” he said in wonder, his blue eyes sparking.

  “Just think where that could go,” I whispered.

  “I am. I am!” He tugged at his beard. “It’s brilliant! An entirely new product. We’ll be the first on the market. And not just peacock featherth. Flowerth too!”

  Excitement overtook his struggle to control his lisp, which surfaced only when he spoke with passion.

  “But the chapel first. This will be our secret for now.”

  Men harboring secrets—I seemed attracted to them unwittingly.

  “Besides the window department and the mosaic department, I have six women working on the chapel windows. I’ve always thought that women have greater sensitivity to nuances of color than men do. You’ve proved that yourself, so I want more women. You’ll be in charge of them.”

  “That will suit me just fine.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FLAMINGO

  “YOU HAVE TO LOVE IT ENOUGH TO FORGO AND FORGET ALL OTHER loves,” I told her. “Including men, Wilhelmina.”

  Women around us cutting glass or drawing or painting in the women’s studio on the fifth floor lifted their heads at this truth, sizing her up.

  “If you’re not willing to, go right out the door you came in, and look for other work.”

  “I’m willing.” Her tone carried impatience as surely as mine carried brusqueness.

  “All right, then.” I gave her a steel cutting wheel and a four-inch scrap of glass, and showed her how to score it.

  “Don’t be afraid. Press firmly,” I said. “You have to be in command of the glass, telling it where to release its hold on itself. Just like life. Otherwise it will splinter.”

  “It’s none too easy the first time, Mrs. Driscoll,” said Wilhelmina.

  “You can call me Clara.”

  I had found this flaxen-haired, broad-shouldered, bosomy Swede at the YWCA, where she was taking the free art classes. Despite her arms like a stevedore’s and her imposing six-foot stature, she was only seventeen years old.

  Wilhelmina scored the glass against a straight edge.

  “Now tap it gently.”

  She tapped it over the edge of the table, and the released piece fell to the floor and broke. “Cripes!”

  “Make sure your hand is under it to grab it. This is only practice, but once you start, broken pieces will be charged against your wage.”

  “Too many broke ones, and I’d be paying you. What kind of a job is that?”

  Agnes Northrop cleared her ticklish throat at that and aimed a judgmental look not at Wilhelmina but at me.

  The two other girls I had just hired came through the door together—maybe they would please her more—Mary McVickar, eighteen, red-haired, freckle-faced, and full of bright anticipation, and Cornelia Arnoth, a few years older, quieter, more serious, as though she were carrying a burden. Cornelia had asked if the job would be permanent, and I had replied that it would be, though I wasn’t at all sure of what would happen after the fair. Both had been recommended by my former teacher at the Metropolitan Museum School.

  I’d already interrogated them the same way I had done with Wilhelmina, warning them that Mr. Tiffany had a policy against having married women working for him. When they pledged their commitment to work over love, I walked them around the workroom among sawhorse tables and high stools, tall wooden easels for the enlarged drawings, and clear glass easels for glass selection, introducing the new girls along the way to the six original women in the department and the three I had hired a week earlier. I showed them where the tools were kept—watercolor sets, brushes, india ink, pens, drawing pencils, grease pencils, copper pattern shears, paper shears, three-bladed shears, scoring wheels, glass nippers, files, needle-nose pliers, small hammers, and chisels.

  I introduced Agnes as Miss Northrop and explained that she was expanding a small painting of birds on a branch to a full-size watercolor of the window, called a cartoon.

  “Cartoon? Like the funny picture of your Uncle Samuel in the red striped trousers and high hat?” Wilhelmina asked.

  “No. The term is much older than that. When Michelangelo enlarged a drawing for a fresco to the size it would eventually be, that was called a cartoon.”

  I told them that Agnes would decide where to draw in lead lines to indicate the separate pieces of glass, and that Mr. Tiffany’s own style was to have the lead lines follow the shapes in the design wherever possible.

  “The birds are good,” Wilhelmina said. “They’re parakeets.”

  I was amused that she thought of herself as qualified to critique it. Agnes sent me another loaded look, this one insinuating Who does she think she is?

  “Over here, Edith Mitchill is working on a finished cartoon, which has two sheets of paper under it with carbon paper in between each. She is going over all the lead lines with a pointed stylus to transfer the design to the two sheets beneath it, which will only show the outline of each individual shape, not the shadings. Mary, this outlining will be your first task.”

  I lifted the corner of the cartoon to reveal the carbon copies.

  “It’s a bloomin’ jigsaw puzzle,” said Mary.

  I walked them over to another cartoon on an easel, which would be their first assignment. “It’s called Feeding the Flamingoes.”

  Wilhelmina snickered. “Who painted it?”

  “Mr. Tiffany. It’s for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, so it’s very important to him.”

  “It’s silly,” Wilhelmina blurted. “Flamingoes don’t eat out of a person’s hand.”

  “How do you know?” asked Mary.

  “Just look at their beaks. Anyone can see that they’re made to scoop up food upside down in the water. We painted birds from a book at the YWCA. Holding out her hand like that, this lady doesn’t know the first thing about feeding a flamingo. You expect me to work on something that’s wrong?”

  Agnes pressed her lips together in a tight line like a disapproving schoolmarm. It threatened to dampen my joy in teaching the new girls, which was exactly what she intended.

  I liked Wilhelmina for speaking her mind, if she didn’t do it too often or too loud.

  “I suppose art
ists call this a caprice,” I said. “It’s something Mr. Tiffany imagined. The fountain and the columns suggest a Roman villa.”

  “What’s that circle?” Wilhelmina asked.

  “A fishbowl. Two pieces of glass were made specially for it. The front layer is turquoise and green ripple glass, and the back layer has a swish of orange for the goldfish. We call that plating. Sometimes we use as many as four or five layers to get the depth and color we want. Just wait. It will be gorgeous.”

  Curiously, I felt I had to defend Mr. Tiffany despite having teased him in private about this window. “Peacocks aren’t enough for you?” I had said. “You need flamingoes in the chapel too? Are you collecting a Noah’s Ark? How about a pair of ostriches? Kangaroos?” It was good for him to be teased once in a while. In his domain, where his word was law, nobody else dared to.

  Now I told Mary to number the individual sections, left to right.

  “If a body can count that high,” she said.

  “This one only has several hundred pieces because they’re large, but some windows have thousands of smaller ones. When she’s finished, Cornelia, you will cut up the first copy into its sections using these special scissors with three blades.”

  I showed the girls how the lower blade fit between the two upper parallel blades to remove a one-sixteenth-inch strip, which would create space for the lead strips that hold the pieces of glass together.

  “It looks hard with those big scissors,” Cornelia said.

  “You’ll get used to them.”

  I told her to leave the cutting of the woman’s profile, her hand, and the birds’ necks to me, and to practice drawing some curves on stiff paper and cutting them, keeping the drawn lines evenly visible in the channel between the two upper blades.

  “While she’s doing that, Wilhelmina, since you’re tall, you’ll paste the other copy of the cartoon to the back side of this big sheet of clear glass in a frame, which we call an easel. You’ll paint those lines on the glass using a fine-tipped brush and black paint. Then you’ll remove the paper backing.