Susan Vreeland - Clara and Mr. Tiffany

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 authors 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.

R ANDOM H OUSE 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, 18611944Fiction. 2. Women glass artistsFiction. 3. Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 18481933Fiction. 4. Tiffany and CompanyHistoryFiction. I. Title.
PS3572.R34C63 2010
813.54dc22 2010007758

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design and illustration: Shasti OLeary 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.

L OUIS C OMFORT T IFFANY

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 couldnt 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. Tiffanys 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 rams horns.

His own paintings hung on the wallsCitadel 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 Napolons 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 cant be wanting employment, then. My policy hasnt

I pulled back my shoulders. As of two weeks ago, Im a single woman again.

He was too much the gentleman to ask questions, but he couldnt hide the gleam in his eyes.

Ive come to inquire if you have work for me. That is, if my performance pleased you before. A deliberate prompt. I didnt 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 Worlds 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 Botticellis 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! Youve 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 mere 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.

Dont 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?