Clara and Mr. Tiffany (42 page)

“It’s like the prow of a ship sailing uptown,” Hank observed.

George wagged his head. “It’s dizzying.”

“You’ve got to see it from the park,” I demanded. We waited for a streetcar to pass, and then crossed. “Don’t turn around until I tell you.”
I was turning, though, to find just the right spot for them to stand so nothing of the back wall would be visible and it would look absolutely thin.

“All right. Turn.”

“Egad!” George cried. “It makes my hair stand on end.” He gazed awhile and then concluded, “A prime viewing spot,” and I agreed until he added, “to see the wind topple it.”

“Down home in Tennessee we’d call that an undertaker’s dream come true,” said Dudley.

“It’s not going to happen,” Hank said authoritatively. “It’s the new way to build. The outer walls are attached to steel girders inside rather than the building’s innards being attached to stone exterior walls.”

I had a feeling that good big things were going to happen here.

“Wouldn’t Walt have loved to see this?” Dudley remarked. “He would have put in another line in ‘Mannahatta.’ ”

“Do it for him,” I urged.

“Let’s see. ‘Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies.’ That’s his line. Now mine. When, lo! upsprang a building like no other, manly, strong-faced, pointed uptown to a bright future.”

“Bravo!” Hank said. “Let’s see if we can get to the top.” He patted his breast pocket. “For a little liquid ceremony.”

George tipped his head way back, swayed, and his arm shot out to Dudley.

“Hold on, comrade,” Dudley said.

He looked down and shook his head. “I’m all right. Let’s go on up.”

No one stopped us at the elevator. We went in with a crowd of people and nervous silence descended. After the ninth floor, we had it to ourselves. “Straight to the top,” Hank said to the elevator boy.

My ears popped as though I were in a train going through a tunnel. We stopped with a bounce that made me grab my stomach.

“Twenty-two,” the operator announced, and pulled aside the iron grille.

From the hallway, we entered an empty office on the east side and looked down at rooftops. Birds flew below us. What an odd sensation.

“Look. There’s Tiffany Studios,” I said, feeling oriented now.

We traced Fourth Avenue south and found tiny Gramercy Park, like a rectangular green throw rug. And beyond it, to our great delight, Irving Place.

George stepped up close to the window, looked straight down on Broadway, and slumped to the floor in a dead faint, white to the lips. We all dropped to our knees around him.

“Lay him flat.” I undid his necktie.

Hank pulled out his flask, poured cognac onto his handkerchief, and held it to his nose. George moved his head but didn’t rouse.

“George! Wake up!” I shouted. “Get his legs up.”

Hank handed me the sopping handkerchief to hold to his nose, and lifted George’s legs. Dudley slapped George’s cheek until his mouth dropped open, and we dribbled in the cognac. We worked with him in this way until he came to and could sit up with his head down between his knees. When his disorientation disappeared, Hank made him drink the rest of the cognac.

“Let it go down easy, comrade,” Dudley said. “Jes’ like a dose of Southern Comfort.”

Eventually he could stand. With Dudley and Hank on both sides of him, we walked him home. Dudley put him to bed in his room, and I fed him some Irish stew left from dinner.

As he ate, he grinned roguishly and said, “I’m the only one who got to drink a cognac to the Flatiron Building.”

H
ENRY SHUT MY STUDIO DOORS BEHIND HIM, SAT DOWN CLOSE
to me, and inquired into my well-being, as if to reassure himself before he proceeded.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but the principals in the Men’s Window Department have been harboring resentment against you ever since you did the six landscape windows.”

“Against me personally?”

“Against how you’ve made this department succeed and grow.”

“They had their chance to do those windows.”

“Regardless, now that Louis has given you the commissions for the big snowball and wisteria windows, they’ve taken their anger to the union.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“As part of the management, I wasn’t permitted to sit in on the union meeting, but I suspect they talked strike if your department doesn’t stop making windows.”

“Strike! When might that happen?”

“Depends on whether the union formalizes a grievance and on how Louis and Mr. Thomas respond to their demands. It might not happen, Clara. I just thought you ought to know.”

A SENSE OF FOREBODING
took root in me, but a month passed without further event. I didn’t tell the girls, and just went on as though nothing was threatening us. We had begun the intricate wisteria window as well as the snowball window, that round white puff of a flower that
demanded subtle glass selection using mottles to suggest individual petals in the round masses. With Miss Judd and Mary McVickar as selectors, the panels were about one-third finished. I knew they would be splendid.

One day Julia came in to work red-eyed and sniffling. Discreetly, Beatrix told me she was crying on the far side of the studio behind a mosaic panel. By noon it hadn’t subsided. A girl can’t foil-wrap a piece smoothly with vision blurred by tears. Olga lingered at lunchtime after the others left and spoke to her softly in Polish, which got her to stop crying. When I approached, Olga’s serious expression, eyebrows pinched together, told me it was a problem too big for either of them to handle.

I sat down next to Julia. “Can you tell me what’s bothering you?”

A sob ripped out of her at the awareness of my caring. I waited until she could speak.

“My mother’s been sick for a long time. She coughs up yellow. She won’t go to a hospital. She just wants to die next to Papa, and he’s a drunk,” she said bitterly.

“Who earns the money in your house?”

“She does piecework as a lacemaker. Six-fifty a week, but she can’t work so much now.”

“Why doesn’t your father work?”

“He’s locked up a lot of the time on Blackwell’s Island.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Three. Two younger than me. My older brother is seventeen. He can’t keep a job either.”

“Why not?”

“Every time he’s caught stealing, he has to go to
The Mercury.
”

The grimness of her tale overwhelmed her, and she couldn’t go on.

“It’s a ship in the harbor that holds bad boys doing their time,” Olga explained, holding Julia’s hand.

As delicately as I could, I asked if she would like me to speak to her mother about going to a charity hospital.

“She’s saved a little money, but she won’t use it for a hospital. She says people catch diseases there. It’s for her burial, she says.”

“Would you like me to come?”

Looking down at her lap, she cupped her fist in her other hand and
squeezed. Olga said a few soft words in Polish. I waited until she finally gave a slight nod.

THE ERRAND INTO
the Lower East Side was made worse by deep, dirty slush in the streets. Julia’s apartment was in the rear of a once grand house on the riverfront of the Seventh Ward. On the way up to the third floor, I stepped around an old man hunched on the stairs, weeping quietly. His worn shoes had no laces and the soft tongues hung out sideways like the tongues of thirsty dogs. At least Julia’s domicile wasn’t a hall room. In fact it consisted of three narrow rooms, one leading into another, bare of any comfortable furniture. Towels hung on nails above a bucket on a stool, and a small mirror and a hairbrush hung from another nail. An oil lamp with a soot-coated glass chimney was perched on a steamer trunk alongside a delicate, half-finished lace collar pinned to a piece of cardboard.

Julia’s mother was a pretty little woman still bearing Julia’s dimples, but lost in her clothes. Her eyes, pale blue irises set into moonstone, looked past me—rather, through me—through this world to the next. She was tired and glad to die at age thirty-seven. How much pain would it take to turn a person away from life, from wanting another day, and another? How much of it was physical pain and how much was despair? The root cause of her sickness might well have been the hopelessness of her bleak life.

I left sorrowfully, with the mother’s halfhearted promise that she would go to the free Nurses’ Settlement House hospital on Henry Street, but that, I knew, couldn’t cure her despair.

WHEN I LEAST
expected it, on Valentine’s Day, of all days, the ax fell. Ten of the artisans from the Men’s Window Department paraded into the studio in a bluster, elbowed Miss Judd and Mary out of the way, and rolled up the big cartoons for the wisteria and snowball windows.

I darted out of my studio. “Stop! What do you think you’re doing?”

They took down the two glass easels from their upright position with glass pieces attached.

“You can’t do that!” Mary shouted. “Those are our windows.”

“You have no right—” Miss Judd said evenly, forcefully.

“Those windows have been assigned to us, and we intend to finish them,” I declared.

“Not anymore you won’t.” He and another man dumped the pattern pieces onto the glass easels.

Nellie and Theresa grabbed as many as they could, but two men pried them out of their fists.

“I’ll report this to Mr. Thomas as a flagrant violation of our rights.”

“Uppity woman. Watch your step, or we’ll come for the shades next.”

I hurried to block the doorway, but one man shoved me out of the way, and they left with the two windows, patterns, cartoons, the original watercolors, and smirks on their faces. Hot rage tore through me, and I lifted my skirt and raced downstairs to the second floor.

I strode into Mr. Thomas’s office. “Did you send ten men to get the wisteria and snowball windows?”

“No.”

“They’ve just come and carried them off, patterns, cartoons, and all.”

“They shouldn’t have.”

“Then do something about it!”

“Calm down, Mrs. Driscoll. Have a seat.”

“I will not calm down.” I pounded my fist on his desk, and he jerked back. “Don’t try to pacify me. Don’t expect that I’ll take it lying down when my department’s work is taken from us wrongfully.”

“Go back to your studio. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Wisteria is too small and intricate for men to do. Their fingers are too big for the tiny pieces.” I pointed at his, as fat and stiff as cigars. “And snowball blooms are too subtle for them. They don’t have the selecting skill. Mr. Tiffany will tell you so himself.”

“I said I’ll see what I can do.”

Mouse!

“I expect those windows back by the end of the day. You can deliver them yourself.”

I waited. Six girls sat idle, bewildered, looking to me for information.

I asked Joe Briggs what he knew. Nothing. He wasn’t involved with windows. Mr. Tiffany was scarce these days, he said, because Mrs. Tiffany was ill.

Joe said, “He’s getting involved in photography, so he works a lot in his darkroom at home.”

I felt my posture sag. When a new passion ignited him he left the old ones to function more on their own. I could only go to Mr. Thomas again and Mr. Platt, the treasurer, who had always kept aloof from my department. There would be no loyalty there. And Henry didn’t have the managerial power.

They were meeting behind closed doors in Mr. Platt’s office, so I waited in the corridor. When Mr. Thomas came out and saw me, he muttered, “Later,” and escaped, hunch-shouldered, into the men’s room. Mr. Platt closed his door in my face but not fast enough, because I saw Henry inside with his head in his hands. The sight of him bent forward like that left me numb.

LATE THAT AFTERNOON
, Henry came into my studio and closed the doors again.

“I’m sorry, Clara, but this has to be quick. I just wanted you to know that the action of taking the windows by force was sanctioned by the Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union.”

That news went through me like a cold wind. The men were afraid of us! In a perverse way, that puffed me up at the same time that it enraged me.

“Have you been in touch with Mr. Tiffany? Where does he stand?”

“Uncertain, at this point. The men have threatened strike.”

“Unless what happens? What concession does he have to make?”

Henry hesitated. His pain to speak further contracted his precise eyebrows.

“Unless the twenty-seven women of your department be ‘removed,’ their word.”

I tapped out an agitated rhythm with the end of a watercolor brush against my worktable, and it resounded in my head after I stopped.

“So they actually mean to get rid of us.”

“Certainly Louis can’t afford to have a work stoppage in the Men’s Window Department,” Henry said. “It would shut down their studio here and in Corona.”

“So he might agree to their demand? I can’t believe that.”

“Other departments might strike to support them.”

“What does it matter to the metalworkers and foundrymen? I send them work.”