Clara and Mr. Tiffany Read Online Free PDF

Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
next to it. My leather-bound Keats and Wordsworth came next, reminding me that it wasn’t a bad thing to brighten one’s days with snips of poetry, like my mother did. Then Ibsen’s plays, Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
, and Henry James’s
Daisy Miller
and
The Portrait of a Lady
. There stood Emily Dickinson. The 1890 collection, her first, Francis had given me. The 1891 collection I had given him. I took them both, wondering what follows
The Sweeping up the Heart, / And putting Love away
.
    ON SUNDAY EVENING in Miss Owens’s dining room, a tall, smartly dressed man pulled out my chair for me, motioned for me to sit, and scooted it in with utter grace but without a word, an easy gesture for him, though one that carried a sense of the momentous for me. A serving girl set down a platter of corned beef and cabbage, and Merry Owens brought in bowls of boiled potatoes and creamed lima beans, then sat at the head of the table.
    “Why so glum tonight, you two?” she said to two men just entering.
    “Walt Whitman died yesterday.” One of them choked getting out the words. His eyes glistened, and his curly hair grew like a wild garden.
    “Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son,” said the other, a studious type wearing horn-rimmed spectacles with expensive gold hinges.
    “
Song of Myself,
” I was quick to say. I had always liked that title.
    “Well, then, we’ll have a read-aloud after supper. It’ll make you feel a mite better,” Miss Owens said. “Start the praties and beans around, Maggie. We have a new boarder. Mrs. Clara Driscoll. She’s in George’s old room. Dudley redecorated it.”
    “Good thing, unless she likes little Egyptian alligators painted on the walls,” replied a matronly woman with long earlobes, whose cheeks were etched with a fretwork of finely penned wrinkles.
    “Much to my dismay, Mrs. Hackley, Merry made me paint over them gators when I told her they were aphrodisiacal.”
    Ah, the sad, curly-haired one must be Dudley. Definitely a Southern twang, unless it was put on to be funny. Prolonged vowels.
Pa-int
said as two slow syllables. I liked it.
    “It’s a lovely room. I’m sure I’ll be happy in it.”
    Miss Owens asked those seated at my table to introduce the person to their right. There were four men, three women, and an empty chair nextto Dudley Carpenter, who kept looking behind him through the arch to the parlor.
    “He’ll be along, Dudley,” Miss Owens assured him.
    “Will Mr. Driscoll be joining you soon?” Mrs. Hackley asked.
    “No.” She wasn’t wasting any time in zeroing in on the suspicion attached to any woman my age living alone. “There is no Mr. Driscoll.”
    “Then you’re a working woman?” Mr. Hackley asked.
    “Yes. I work at Tiffany’s studio.”
    “Polishing silver, I should guess,” Mrs. Hackley declared authoritatively.
    “As a matter of fact, no.”
    “It can’t be selling jewelry. The sales clerks are all men,” she said.
    “That’s Tiffany and Company, owned by Charles Tiffany. I work for his son, Louis Tiffany, in his glass workshop, making leaded-glass windows and mosaics.”
    “Workshop! Then you consider yourself a New Woman, do you?” Mrs. Hackley looked down her nose at her plate. “It’s my opinion, and that of many social commentators, that when a woman joins the ranks of men in workshops, her morals sink, so mind your step.”
    “She’s employed in the arts, Mrs. Hackley, not in a carriage factory, and the arts are a moral force.”
    “Thank you, Mr.—”
    “McBride. Henry McBride.”
    Him, the scholarly Whitman quoter, I wanted to remember. Longish hair, cleft chin, Cupid’s-bow mouth redder than was common, pearl stud in his flowing maroon four-in-hand necktie, positioned off center. Was that intentional, a rejection of convention?
    “Call him Hank,” drawled Dudley. “It takes him down a peg from his high falutin self-appointment as headmaster of Forty-four Irving