Clara and Mr. Tiffany Read online

  “Cornelia, you will put a dot of this wax on the back of each of the numbered sections, which we call pattern pieces, and Wilhelmina, you attach them to the clear glass in their exact positions that you painted. Then your jobs are finished and the window will be ready for the glass selector, who will choose glass in the colors and shadings and textures needed to convey the subject. The colors could be transparent, opaque, or in between. We call glass that transmits light but is not clear opalescent.”

  “How will we ever do the lady’s face?” Worry wormed its way across Cornelia’s forehead. Oh, she was so deadly serious.

  “Mr. Tiffany will do that with enamel paint. The figure’s hand too. It’s his only concession to medieval stained-glass craftsmanship of painting on glass with powdered enamels and then firing the pieces.” I explained that we avoid enameling whenever possible because it cuts out some of the light.

  They were sweet girls, excited but anxious, especially Cornelia. I would have to guard against her overly intense desire to please. It would limit her originality.

  “Soon these steps will be second nature to you.”

  I heard the Tiffany tap, his malachite-tipped cane striking the wooden floor with authority. It was a blatant affectation. He was only in his early forties. The reddish brown hair in his beard struggling to hold its own against the onslaught of premature gray still had some years left. He didn’t need a cane any more than I did. He just used it to create a mystique about himself. Right behind him was Mr. Henry Belknap, slick and tidy.

  Mr. Tiffany set a vase of hothouse irises on a worktable and tapped his cane lightly, three times. All except Agnes Northrop looked up in unison, like birds alerted to some potential danger, poised to fly. With her customary mien of a prima donna, Agnes remained seated on her stool as though exempt, barely turning toward Mr. Tiffany. Since she was his first female glass artist, she fancied herself a favorite.

  “Good afternoon, ladies. You’re doing beautiful work.” He turned one iris to face Agnes. “Have I ever told you how important it is to have beauty in our lives?”

  “Not less than a hundred times,” Agnes said, studying the painting she was enlarging.

  “Why, I don’t believe you, Miss Northrop.” His tone of mock disbelief revealed his playful side, which I loved. Addressing the new girls, he said, “I want to welcome you to Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company and introduce you to Mr. Belknap, the artistic director who will consult with Mrs. Driscoll in my absence. She has chosen you with great care because you will be involved in a stupendous undertaking.”

  Here it comes. One of his declamations. The peacock spreading his tail feathers.

  “The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago commemorates Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492, four hundred years ago, though it won’t actually open until next year. This fair will be the greatest event in the history of our country since the Civil War, and you will be my contributing partners.”

  Pure bluster. He didn’t need this to set the girls at awe. His art itself would do that. His comparison of the fair, an event likely to be wonderful, with an event so devastating and tragic was insensitive to the gravity of the war. Sometimes his inflated style tripped him up.

  “The American exhibits will show that the New World has taken its rightful place among older nations, so we want to demonstrate to the Old World what we’ve accomplished here in terms of the arts and culture and industry.”

  I clamped shut my jaw. Cornelia was Prussian, Mary was Irish, and Wilhelmina was Swedish. Others were just one generation removed from the Old World. They certainly didn’t grasp the significance of our Civil War.

  Wilhelmina raised her hand to her shoulder and wiggled her fingers. She towered over Mr. Tiffany by a foot.

  “Excuse me, sir, but flamingoes eat with their beaks upside down. Even girls from the Old World know that if they’ve ever opened a book.”

  Mary jabbed an elbow into her ribs. “Mind your mouth,” she whispered. “It’s Himself that’s speakin’.”

  Now Agnes stood up, her stiff posture elegantly commanding despite her small stature. I felt as if the politeness of the whole studio rested with me, and judgment might be leveled against me for hiring such a brazen girl. Mr. Belknap cast an amused glance at Mr. Tiffany, waiting for his response. I held my breath, but was amused along with him. It must have been a new experience for Mr. Tiffany to have to justify himself to a seventeen-year-old immigrant, but he stood unflinching before this formidable Amazon.

  “What is your name?”

  “Wilhelmina A. Wilhelmson, sir.”

  “Granted, Miss Wilhelmson, flamingoes don’t eat this way. You’re smart to see that. But they are tamed this way. The woman is offering the bird a rock, not food.”

  “It looks like a bun.”

  “If the bird tries to peck at the woman’s hand, he hurts his beak on the rock, so he stops.”

  “Then you should call it Taming the Flamingoes,” Wilhelmina declared.

  Mr. Tiffany lifted his shoulders. “Maybe I will,” he said, a gentleman from sole to crown. “Take it as a fantasy of a happy land where things that please the eye do not have to make sense. Just being beautiful is enough. Art for art’s sake, we say, because beauty blesses humanity with a better life.”

  He couldn’t get the s’s right in art’s sake, which made me think Wilhelmina had upset him, but he went right on. How bravely he struggled against his lisp. I prayed that Wilhelmina wouldn’t snicker.

  “The window is a display of shape and color,” he said, “with shadows, not in gray but in blues and greens, as they are in the revolutionary work of Mr. Édouard Manet, who was a fine painter of your Old World. We stand on the shoulders of those before us, but we also stretch.

  “Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives,” he told them. “Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.”

  I was glad he said this. It was what made even the simplest day a thrill. On the street or in a park or a room, I often felt I was seeing small glories that the rest of the world didn’t notice.

  “What if we see something ugly?” Wilhelmina asked, her voice tinged with challenge.

  “Don’t look at it.”

  She pulled back her chin and made a face. I gave her a stern look so she wouldn’t say more.

  “Be courageous with color. Let it pour out of you.” He touched his chest and then opened his palms toward the girls. “That’s the way to bring out the drama in nature. There’s a feeling these days that color is a danger. People are timid because they can’t distinguish between deep, strong coloration and gaudiness, so they choose pale, anemic colors to be safe. That just makes art bland. They have to be educated, and our new windows can do that. Thousands will see them. Even hundreds of thousands. So be brave.” He ended with his habitually evoked maxim, “Infinite, meticulous labor makes a masterpiece.”

  He was in his own world, oblivious of whom I had hired, girls taken away from their own languages. How could he expect them to know words like gaudiness and anemic and bland? I would have to show them examples of these words as part of their training. He made the rounds of the new girls, starting with Wilhelmina, which was a touch of grace on his part. She blushed, looking down at him. Cornelia’s slight Old World curtsy brought a pinch of benevolence to Agnes’s face.

  Soon after the two men left, Agnes followed me into my office-studio, which was partitioned off from the department but with wide double doors so I could see the whole room. She said under her breath, “ ‘Infinite, meticulous labor.’ As if we don’t do that already. If I hear that one more time I’m going to cut his tongue out.”

  She shook her cutting wheel at the place where he had stood. It was my good diamond-edged wheel with the red handle that fit my hand perfectly, the only diamond wheel in the department. The others were steel. She must have appropriated it after I left, and wanted me to know it. Tool envy. I let i
t be. As department head, I could order another.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said in a near whisper. “How did you get him to take you back, you being a married woman?”

  Stiffness shot up my backbone. “My husband died a month ago,” I answered, equally softly.

  There was a general intake of breath throughout the big studio. Amazing the aural capacities of female glass workers.

  “Oh! I’m sorry.” Hardly finishing her obligatory condolence, she returned to her worktable, having gotten what she wanted.

  SOME TIME LATER, Mr. Belknap came into my studio and set a pot of cyclamen on the sill of my tall window.

  “I bought this yesterday for my office, but I want you to have it. You might need some encouragement.”

  “Why, Mr. Belknap, that’s sweet of you. It’s beautiful. The petals look like wings of fuchsia butterflies about to fly out the window.”

  He was a slim, small-boned man half a head shorter than I but I was perched on my stool so we were eye to eye. His blond hair was slicked down with Brilliantine from a center part. Following the design principle of harmony in repetition, his waxed mustache carried the same center division of hair neatly below his nose.

  He leaned toward me. “You’ll have your hands full with that saucy blonde.”

  “The bird expert. We might come to need one sometime. Don’t worry. When I taught school in Ohio I learned that the most impertinent ones are often the most lovable.”

  At this close range, I was startled to see that he had drawn his eyebrows on with a sepia-colored grease pencil—artistically.

  “If at any time I could offer you some diversion, I would be honored,” he said, scraping the pad of his thumb with the nail of his index finger, a quick, nervous mannerism.

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  In the hierarchy of the firm, he was the intermediary between Mr. Tiffany and me. I might come to need him to champion my requests.

  “There are two more operas this season,” he said. “Verdi’s Otello and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.”

  “I adore opera. That is, operas from the Old World.”

  A long, loud, unladylike sigh came from the studio. We both looked out the double doors. At that moment, Wilhelmina stood up and stretched, her big arms high in the air, her fingers wiggling, her bosoms thrust forward.

  “The cheeky one.” Mr. Belknap tipped his head toward her. “She’ll keep you on your toes.”

  I agreed, knowing that bumpy times lay ahead.

  “Oh, Louis wants to see you in his office right away,” he mentioned on his way out.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me right away?” Exasperated, I grabbed my notepad and pencil and flew out the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  OPAL

  A WHITE-HAIRED MAN WITH A COTTONY BEARD WAS CROUCHING close to the floor when I entered Mr. Tiffany’s office-studio.

  “What happened? Can I help?”

  “Have a seat,” Mr. Tiffany said, dabbing a paintbrush on his palette, his opal ring shooting out the colors of the wet paint. “I’ve wanted you to meet my father, Charles Tiffany, and he came today to pose. This is Mrs. Driscoll, head of the Women’s Department.”

  “Oh, hello,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” An inane thing to say to a man draped in a classical red robe and wearing sandals. I ought to have exclaimed, “Hail, Caesar,” or implored, “Lead us to the Promised Land.”

  “A pleasure.” The father kept his pose, his craggy face tipped down.

  On the unfinished canvas I recognized Joseph of Arimathea having just lowered Christ from the cross. Barely sketched in with charcoal, Mary Magdalene knelt at Jesus’s feet, and the Virgin Mother looked heavenward. The scene had the look of a Dutch Renaissance pietà, and the father’s face could have been painted by Hans Holbein the Elder.

  “The window is called The Entombment. It’s for the chapel. Your department will make it.”

  Mr. Mitchell, the stout business manager, burst in waving a page from a newspaper. “Do you know about this? The city Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union is demanding higher wages.”

  “Well, satisfy them.” Mr. Tiffany went right on mixing a touch of yellow ocher into white for the winding cloth draped over his father’s arm.

  “They also want shorter hours, only fifty a week, and a beer break at three o’clock.”

  Tiffany the Elder broke his pose. “Now, that’s a problem. Shorter hours.”

  The splotch on Mr. Mitchell’s cheek in the shape of Africa was redder than usual. “If the union strikes,” he said, “our men will be forced to strike too, for solidarity, no matter what agreement you have with them, wages or hours.”

  “When might that happen?”

  “Only after several rounds of discussion.”

  “The union has to whip up the spirit of strike,” the elder Tiffany said. “That will take a while.”

  My mind did a flip, seeing this man looking as though he stepped straight out of the Bible talking about a labor strike.

  “We can move slowly in negotiation to forestall it,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It’s the worst possible time. Any other year, we could sail through it with our stock on hand.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The experiments in iridescent blown glass can go on regardless. I want them in Chicago.”

  “Don’t be stubborn, son. Let that lie. Your iridescent glass will be in the mosaics. Devote all the furnaces to that.”

  “Does the article mention us?” asked Tiffany the Younger.

  “Yes. And Maitland, Armstrong, Colgate, Lathrop, and Lamb.”

  “Ha! Then La Farge will be held back too.”

  I could smell competition brewing in him like molten glass.

  “You can still top me if you’re canny about how you handle things,” Charles Tiffany said. “I expect nothing less from you.”

  “Not with all your diamonds and silver masterpieces.”

  “You have one advantage,” said the father.

  “Over you?”

  “Over other stained-glass houses.” He tipped his head toward me. “Women aren’t allowed in the union, so they won’t be called upon to strike.”

  He stepped behind an Oriental lacquered screen to dress.

  “How many girls did you hire?” Mr. Tiffany asked me.

  “Six, just as you said. There are twelve now, and me.”

  “Double the department, as soon as you can. You’ll need to take over some of the men’s projects.”

  “If I might say so, doubling the department all at once would mean some of the experts and I would be drawn off our projects to train so many new girls. It wouldn’t result in accomplishing twice as much work.”

  “She’s right, son. Don’t go off half-cocked.”

  “Well, then, take on teams of three as you see fit, but quickly.”

  “There’s another issue,” I said, thinking of Cornelia. “I don’t want to hire them as temporaries. They would be viewed as scabs. It’s not fair to hire them without a commitment that they’ll have permanent work after the exposition.”

  “They’ll have work. Once the world sees what we do here, there’ll be plenty of work.”

  “If you use the fair to your marketing advantage,” remarked the elder Tiffany as he came out from behind the screen, dressed properly now for the nineteenth century.

  “Hire them as permanents,” Tiffany the Younger said.

  Was that bluster or well-founded confidence? I knew risk was inevitable in New York, but I hadn’t counted on being the person forcing others to take risks on an egotist’s say-so.

  “We’ll talk tonight.” His father delivered that last directive with an ominous air, and beckoned to Mr. Mitchell to leave with him.

  “Don’t get too cozy, now.” Mr. Tiffany scowled as the two men left together.

  He was quiet and distant as he cleaned his brushes, so I made a move to leave.

  “The director of the fair sent out a memo,” he said, detaining me by pointing to a l
etter on his desk. “ ‘Make no little plans,’ it says. ‘They have no magic to stir men’s blood.’ ”

  “I would never doubt the size of your plans.”

  “I have twenty embroiderers doing piecework with gold thread on altar cloths, miters, and vestments.”

  “Ah, nuns of the cloth, Order of Tiffany. How fortunate for you that Catholics haven’t outgrown their taste for pomp. Now poor Protestants can catch envious glimpses of the trappings of sacred royalty.”

  He gave me a playful, shame-on-you look.

  “You can’t help but think extravagantly,” I said more seriously.

  “I’m thinking innovatively. This chapel will announce an entirely new direction—the ecclesiastic landscape window to help people worship God’s creation. Narrow-minded clergymen can resist all they want. Nature is God’s work, so I say nature motifs are just as spiritual, just as inspirational, as biblical images. The mind of the Creator is unlimited in devising the forms of nature. Do you see what that means? There are infinitely more ways for us to express spiritual truth than just the tired old figures crammed into every medieval church across Europe.”

  “Therefore the peacocks.”

  “The goodly wings of the peacocks, the Bible says, and therefore the trees and the flowers and the streams. There are birds and mountains and hills all through the Bible. So for the first time the general public, not just my wealthy clients who buy landscape windows for their homes, will see the art of Louis Comfort Tiffany convey the beauties of nature. No temporary strike is going to stop me.”

  He sounded like P. T. Barnum bragging about his circus.

  “But I made a mistake.”

  He sat at his desk and plunked down his elbows with a thud. “John La Farge slipped into that Paris Exposition three years ago with one measly window, and was decorated as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France, and I didn’t exhibit.”

  He flung out his arm, and the opal glinted in envious green.

  “The Paris papers hailed him as the inventor of opalescent glass. Puh! I made it before he ever did. Several window makers used it here before La Farge took it to Paris.”