Clara and Mr. Tiffany Read Online Free PDF Page A

she is teaching the zither to Dudley, so it all comes ’round, ye see, in a happy circle.” She made a circle with fingers plump as sausages and laughed her big bosoms into action.
    “And what can you do?” she demanded, knuckles on the shelves of her hips, her head cocked to the side as though the hen’s neck were broken.
    “I can recite poetry. I particularly like Emily Dickinson.”
    “A lady poet, eh? There’s somes here would like that. Give us a wee morsel.”
    “ ‘Each that we lose takes part of us.’ Oh, no. That’s too dreary. How about this?
    “
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
    That perches in the soul
,
    And sings the tune without the words
    And never stops at all.
”
    “Ah, sweeter than wine.”
    Apparently I passed muster, because she brought me into an airy parlor with comfortable easy chairs and freshly starched antimacassars. Two landscape prints of the Hudson River School hung on the walls, and a bowl of lemon drops sat on a crocheted doily. The Twelve Apostle spoons hanging in their wooden rack on the wall were all bright. Not one, not even the betrayer, was tarnished. Clearly this was a better sort of boardinghouse, probably with a price to match.
    Up carpeted stairs that did not creak she showed me to a bedroom all done up in pink and spring green with a window onto Irving Place. Above the iron bedstead a landscape mural had been painted of a pond with floating lilies.
    “Charming.”
    “George, a former boarder, painted it when he lived here, but Dudley chose the colors for the curtains and spread.”
    Decent bed, small desk with an oil lamp and a bookshelf above it, one easy chair, clean, bathroom down the hall. “How much?”
    “Fifty dollars a month, and that includes three hearties a day, full Irish breakfast, dessert on Sundays and holidays, hot water all hours. T’would be forty-five but for the window.”
    That was higher than I had anticipated, but I earned twenty a week with a promise of a moderate raise every two years.
    “I’ll take it. May I move in tomorrow?”
    “To be sure you can.”
    I RETURNED TO BROOKLYN elated, and late into the night I packed the last things—my alcohol lamp for heating my curling iron, and my grandmother’s porcelain washbowl and pitcher—but the things on Francis’s desk and dresser, I didn’t even touch.
    With a trace of sadness I had sold my two evening gowns at the Second Time Around and bought three shirtwaists, ready-mades with narrow skirts, for work, and a new pair of lace-ups so I wouldn’t come back to Tiffany’s looking down-at-the-heels. I took Francis’s silk black-on-black bow tie that I particularly liked. I could wear it hanging down loosely in the modern style. I packed my wedding dress, not out of sentiment but out of longing for spring. It was sky-blue poplin. I packed my opera cloak too, even if I had to wear it over a muslin shirtwaist in the standing-room-only section.
    And then I carefully wrapped in a hand towel the one thing I had that no one could wrench from me—the kaleidoscope, his engagement gift to me. Bits of richly colored glass in a chamber served as his sweet acknowledgment that I’d had to give up my joyous work with just such glass in order to marry him. At the slightest turn of the maple-wood tube, the design collapsed with a tiny rattle of falling objects, and in a burst of an instant, nothing was the same.
    It was our books that remained. I was careful to pick out my own, leaving his. Into my carpetbag first went my mother’s Shakespeare, the plays and the sonnets. I couldn’t help but think of the first line of Sonnet Twenty-nine, which seemed to be aimed at me this last month as it never had before.
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
.
    In went my mother’s etiquette book,
The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen
, which I read with some levity, and my stepfather’s Bible and his Minister’s Bible Concordance, which bristled when I put