Read Online Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland - Free Book Online Page A

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 lightbulbshanging 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