He cupped his hand under a peony tenderly, as if it were the chin of his beloved, for the sake of the frailty of one petal about to fall. “Beauty is everything, isn’t it?” His gaze moved from the blossom to my face in the most penetrating way.
No, it isn’t, but I refrained from contradicting him.
My mouth tensed involuntarily with an awful tightness. I wished I didn’t have my glasses on, wished my nose were smaller, my mouth more upturned, my eyelids less droopy, my hair more stylish. Oh, what was the use? I could fill a book with the ill design of my face. All my observations of New York told me that a plain face led a plain life. With that as a truth, there might not be any possibility for intimacy with any man.
In Mr. Tiffany’s eyes, though, my claim to beauty was to make beautiful things, one after another, until he noticed that they came from a beauty within.
When you look at me, don’t you see more than a design machine? Don’t you see a woman with more than one passion? Don’t you see my adoration for you? Don’t you recognize the longing heart within the glass I’ve touched? I ached to ask him these things, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t want him to think I wanted romance. What I wanted would have to be a finer union than any romance I’d ever known. We stood without moving, looking at each other, until a breeze caught a magnificent double dahlia near us and made it bounce. Our intensity dissolved. The moment was lost.
“So alive. See how many petals are nestled in there?”
“How is it that you came to love flowers so intensely?” I asked, recovering myself.
“Oh, that started when I was a boy. We had a country house overlooking the Hudson, and my father bought an old Dutch farm adjacent as my playground. I loved wildflowers, tiger lilies, dandelions, brooks, trees, birds. I drew and painted them all.”
“Sounds idyllic.”
He scratched his chin through his beard. “It made me dreamy. No Tiffany male child in generations before me had such leisure, so my father was determined to shorten it.”
“How?”
“By trying to entice me into his company as his successor. By showing me gems and teaching me to distinguish garnets from rubies. I cared more about pebbles I found along the river. When other boys took tennis rackets to military school, I took paints. He tried to instill in me the value of a dollar, but I was more interested in the value of a color. He considered that a bald-faced revolt. Things turned sour, and ever since, I’ve been hell-bent on proving to him that following my own way, I could be just as successful as he was.”
“I’ve known that about you for a long time. It must have been a tremendous burden.”
“The Paris Exposition helped balance the scale. Before that, he was as hard as granite.”
“Always?”
Mr. Tiffany bent down to pick up a few dried leaves that had fallen.
“I remember a letter I wrote to him from military school, telling him that I was trying to be a man but I couldn’t learn the school lessons, my teachers scolded me, and my fellows ridiculed me. In despair I pleaded with him to let me come home. I’ll never forget his answer. ‘A diamond, though of the first water, without hard grinding and polishing, would always remain without luster.’ ”
He crushed the leaves in his fist.
“I can’t imagine him saying something so uncompassionate.”
“All the same, I owe my insistence on perfection to him.” Looking off to the bay, he murmured, “He was ninety years old.”
“I’m sure he was proud of you.” He raised his shoulders noncommittally.
“Now the lock is off the strongbox.” Bitter relish spilled out in his tone. “At last I can build my legacy, my complete and unlimited artistic vision of fine and decorative art.”
“More than you’ve done already?”
“There’s a resort called Hotel Laurelton overlooking Cold Spring Harbor not too far from here. I’m buying it, razing it to the ground, and taking over the public picnic grounds too, five hundred acres. The estate I’m building there will dwarf what you see here. It will be twice the size of Teddy Roosevelt’s mansion on Oyster Bay.”
He flung his arm out over the garden and said it with such fire and overweening zeal that it was almost frightening. Something pent up had been released with Charles’s death, and was dangerous. His daughter Dorothy knew it, and now so did I.
CHAPTER 32
THE LETTER
THE SKY CRACKED OPEN IN A VIOLENT THUNDERSTORM ON MY way home from work. What a way for April Fool’s Day to announce itself. I’d been hoping for spring sun. My umbrella popped inside out at the corner of Fourth and Twenty-third. I fought with it for seven blocks and was soaked to the skin when I arrived home. In my room I dropped my wet coat, dress, shift, corset, shoes, and stockings onto the floor, dried with a towel, put on my nightgown, and climbed under the covers.
In my comfortable semi-doze, I heard an urgent knock.
“I have to talk to you.”
“Yes, George. Come in.”
He would anyway, but I liked to remind him that permission was needed.
Even with my eyes closed, I knew he saw the heap of clothes by his cluck of disapproval, tidiness being one of his sacred principles. I heard him hang my dress and shift and coat on hangers on the curtain rod, and imagined him laying my corset and stockings over the back of the chair. The bed gave way as he sat next to me.
“Edwin is alive.”
A jolt into consciousness. I shot upright.
“I received a letter. He wrote it on New Year’s Day. But he must have had second thoughts about sending it. Look how rumpled it is.”
George gave it to me to read. Postmarked San Francisco. I had trouble holding it still. The handwriting was similar, but faltering and uncontrolled.
JANUARY 1, 1902
Dear George,
You must be surprised to hear from me. I don’t know how much time has gone by, and I don’t know where I went or why. A period in my life is missing.
I came to myself down on the Mississippi, far south. I’m not sure where. I can’t remember anything between that time and the previous election night in New York.
“What election? McKinley’s in ’96? That’s hard to believe. We saw him often around that time. I didn’t notice any change in him after that day. Did you?”
“No.”
“He was completely lucid. He didn’t forget what he was saying. He didn’t go off on a tangent.”
“I know.”
“This suggests that he remembers what came before election day. His extravagant claims that he’d loved me since the day he met me, for God’s sake!”
George winced.
“We weren’t engaged until the new year, so he’s forgotten that? He remembers an election, but he’s forgotten that he loved a woman enough to want to marry her? He’s forgotten Lake Geneva? Our night of love? Escaping in the morning? He doesn’t remember how he got rid of me?”
“Clara, don’t say it that way!”
I pulled up the covers and read on.
I felt I was only capable of doing simple manual labor for fear that I would tax my mind with thinking. I wasn’t the same as I was before, so I thought it would be better to be dead to my family and friends. I wandered about and got what simple work I could do. I felt like an immigrant and a lost soul. I joined the army. I hoped it would give me some regularity. That was under another name—I’ve forgotten what. I was transported with my regiment to California, en route to Manila. I didn’t want to go there, so I left the barracks one day and wandered in California under another name. Eventually I felt I was gaining back some stability, so I’ve taken a good job in a new copper mine in the northern part of the state. I’m expecting to go there soon.
I’m sorry for the worry I’ve caused you and Mother and Father.
Edwin
And that was all. End of letter. No mention of me. No hint that there was, vaguely, in some folded recesses of his dark and troubled brain, a woman in his life.
“He con
sidered me of no consequence to mention.” My voice was pinched with the truth. How little I mattered. I was a woman of no importance.
“We don’t know if all of this is true,” George said. “We’ll probably never know.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know the truth either.”
Numbness gripped me. How fragile my victory over self. I had not conquered The Me Obsession by simply tearing up a job offer.
“Do your parents know?”
“Yes. I told them right away, and was going to tell you immediately after. I’ve had the letter for three weeks, but they asked me not to tell you until we found out more. It’s been hard seeing you practically every day and keeping it from you.”
“Don’t think about that. For their sake I’m glad he’s alive. I can hardly imagine how they’ve suffered.”
“They contacted a psychiatric doctor in San Francisco who has located him and has sent his son to the mining town to observe him for a while. The report just came today, saying that there’s no reason why Edwin should not stay working there, so I felt I could tell you now.”
I examined Edwin’s letter for a clue to his state of mind, but I could deduce nothing. I wondered whether he had money enough to purchase the paper, the pen, and the ink, or whether he had borrowed them. To some degree, he had focused his thoughts. He had folded the paper evenly, not haphazardly. And then he had kept it for a couple of months, unsure. Or had he mislaid it and was content not to write another, and then discovered it unsent? Did he reconsider sending it, or did he post it without much thought?
“He must have had conflicts we didn’t know about,” I said. “The intensity of his social dreams distorted his rational mind. The poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free proved too much for him.”
George sighed. “What a future he might have had.”
Well, it was nice to think so. I let George have that, though the reality might have been that he knew he was a lesser man than we had built him up to be. Maybe he left Lake Geneva before he had a chance to fail in politics. Maybe he knew his reason could not match his zeal. There would always be this mystery. The letter did nothing to resolve that.
One thing that had bothered me all these years rose up again. How awful that Edwin couldn’t feel our compassion. I would have to leave it to George to convey that, if he chose to. Along with compassion, I still felt concern for Edwin’s safety, especially at a mine. He was entirely capable of forgetting where he was going or not knowing what he was doing.
“Another occurrence could happen again without warning,” I said softly, “and yet it would be unjust to put him in a home for such people.”
The thought startled him.
“Should I go see him?” he asked.
“Would it make you feel better?”
“It depends on what I’d find.”
“It’s a little frightening, isn’t it, not knowing what you’ll see?”
His face was drawn tight. “Do you want me to tell him about you? To see if he’ll remember you? I’ll go there for that reason alone if you want me to.”
“That’s good of you, George.”
A chance that my being could be reinstated. A temptation to feed my obsession with self. I had yearned too recklessly for love. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.
“I don’t wish him ill, but he’s been as if dead to me for nearly six years. It’s best that I keep it that way. Please don’t be hurt when I say I’m grateful for my own escape. No, don’t go on my account.”
“Then I don’t think I’ll go at all. I’ll write to him, though. That’s only right. Do you want me to mention you?”
“No. That might disturb him. I don’t want to destroy the calm he has achieved.” I reached out to hold his hand. “I need to let him go, George. Like the beautiful, wild goose you painted.”
CHAPTER 33
MAYFLOWER
I WAS MENDING A STOCKING WHEN ALICE BURST INTO MY ROOM with Lillian’s news that the twin Queen Anne next to her family’s cottage on the beach at Point Pleasant was for rent from May through September for seventy-five dollars.
“If four of us went in on it, say, Bernard and William—”
“ ‘William’?”
“Mr. York.” The hint of a blush came to her cheeks.
“I’m relieved to know that he owns a first name,” I said.
“If the four of us agreed, we’d only have to pay eighteen seventy-five each. And if we don’t want to cook, we could have our meals at the Palmiés’ for two dollars each for a weekend.”
“There’s only one thing.”
“What’s that?”
Stretching the stocking, I took two more stitches before I said, “Bernard. If he’s engaged, would he want to bring his fiancée? And would we want her there?”
“This would tell you. If he said yes to the plan and didn’t mention bringing her, then you’d know.”
Three more stitches and a knot. I snipped the thread. “Not necessarily.”
ALICE’S PLAN WOULD force the issue. It was ridiculous not to know after all this time, and it was hard to deny my curiosity. At lunchtime the next day when I knew Bernard wouldn’t be home, I pushed Merry into her niche of an office and closed the door behind us.
“I have a question to ask you, and I don’t want you to tell anyone I asked.”
“You want to know what’s for dinner tonight? That I can tell you, but not much more. I’m not the fountain of all knowledge, you know.”
“I want to know if Bernard is engaged.”
“Oh, Lordy.”
“Well?”
Her puffy face contorted. “As an upright and honest landlady, I can’t divulge my tenants’ privacies.”
“What about as a friend? Alistair said he was engaged.”
She turned to her desk and rearranged the inkwell and blotting roller, and whittled a pencil to a point, all without looking at me.
“As a friend, I’d say that what Alistair told you is or was true.”
“Then is he married now? Where’s his wife?”
She waved her pocketknife vaguely before she closed it with a snap. “Truth to tell, I haven’t got a baldy.”
I slumped on her little stool. “A plague on men with secrets.”
“He don’t appear much married to me. His strange comings and goings is all I know to tell you.”
“I don’t relish being a worm,” I said.
“A worm. What’s a worm got to do with anything?”
“Worms like being kept in the dark. I don’t.”
A throaty cackle, a tsk-tsk, a head wagging from side to side. “He’s a Brit through and through, and like as not, he’ll always play his hand close to his chest. Walk well behind your heart is my advice, dearie.”
“Thank you,” I said, and left, a little embarrassed for having asked.
That evening in Alice’s room I braided her hair, a silly attempt to go back to our girlhood when dilemmas about men were only happy conjectures. “Maybe I don’t want to know,” I said. “It would be easier if there were some chance of him being married.”
“Easier? Why?”
“No decision to make.”
I let her do the inviting. Bernard and Mr. York—William, that is—agreed eagerly. I said to Alice in her room, “All this tells us is that he isn’t spending summer weekends with her. She might be away for the summer.”
“So? What do you care? You’re a New Woman.”
THE NEXT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Marion, Lillian, Bernard, William, Alice, and I rode our wheels along the oceanfront, cooled by wind coming off a solid line of white surf. In the village of Point Pleasant, I skidded to a stop in front of a dressmaker’s shop that had some bolts of colorful fabric in the window. Everyone piled up behind me, and Bernard and William had to wait in the street while we investigated. The cloth was only seven and a half cents a yard instead of the twenty-five it would be in Manhattan. What fun it would be to have colored aprons instead of the standard black like the men used. Wit
h much frivolity the four of us picked our colors and agreed to return the next weekend to get them. Mounting our wheels to go home, we found that Bernard and William had bought potatoes and chops and tomatoes and lemon cookies for a beach supper around a fire.
What a lark this was turning out to be. In front of our cottage, we roasted our chops on skewers whittled from pine branches, and ate them right off the stick like primitives. We bit into our tomatoes whole, and used clamshells to scoop out the fluffy potatoes from the roasted skins, everything tasting better than anything cooked indoors. I stole glances at Bernard. Although I ate most of my meals at the boardinghouse with him usually present, this was different. It was an adventure, outside of our workaday lives, freer. Once he caught me looking at him, and I felt my cheeks flush. We finished the cookies in twilight, mesmerized by the flames.
“They look like wind-tossed orange tulips,” I said, and between the flames I saw Bernard looking at me too, with what seemed to be deep interest, maybe even something more, but the light was flickering and I couldn’t be sure.
When the fire burned down for the night, all of us took a little walk together, and Bernard fell into step beside me. We spoke of the softness of the air, all misty and still, the briny tang of the sea, and the goodness of the day—nothing more significant than that. Then we drifted into quietness with contained feeling, which left me with unbroached questions.
In bed that night, smelling the lingering smoky odor of the beach fire made me wonder whether Edwin had been eating outdoors by a campfire in some California mining camp. If he were here instead of Bernard, would he have enjoyed the day as much as Bernard seemed to? The Edwin that the letter revealed was gravely altered from the Edwin I had known and loved, and my reaction to him now might be compassion and sadness, but it wasn’t love. I turned over in bed to let him go. Content for the time being, I listened to friendly taps of light rain on the metal porch roof and fell asleep wondering if Bernard was listening to them too.