Read Clara and Mr. Tiffany Online

Authors: Susan Vreeland

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #Biographical

Clara and Mr. Tiffany

ALSO BY SUSAN VREELAND

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 author’s 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, 1861–1944—Fiction.   2. Women glass artists—Fiction.   3. Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 1848–1933—Fiction.   4. Tiffany and Company—History—Fiction.   I. Title.
PS3572.R34C63 2010
813′.54—dc22          2010007758

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design and illustration: Shasti O’Leary 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

CONTENTS
BOOK ONE •
1892–1893
                                  
BOOK TWO •
1895–1897
                                  
BOOK THREE •
1897–1900
                                  
BOOK FOUR •
1900–1903
                                  
BOOK FIVE •
1904–1908
                                  
CHAPTER 1
PEACOCK

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 couldn’t 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. Tiffany’s 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 ram’s horns.

His own paintings hung on the walls—
Citadel 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 Napoléon’s 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 can’t be wanting employment, then. My policy hasn’t—”

I pulled back my shoulders. “As of two weeks ago, I’m a single woman again.”

He was too much the gentleman to ask questions, but he couldn’t hide the gleam in his eyes.

“I’ve come to inquire if you have work for me. That is, if my performance pleased you before.” A deliberate prompt. I didn’t 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 World’s 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 Botticelli’s
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! You’ve 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.

Other books

Mated with the Cyborg by Cara Bristol
Falling Forward by Olivia Black
Stolen Fate by Linsey Hall
Dead Over Heels by MaryJanice Davidson
Midnight Wrangler by Cat Johnson
Firewing by Kenneth Oppel
The Great Airport Mystery by Franklin W. Dixon
Judgment II: Mercy by Denise Hall


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024