Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland

slowly, with pauses in between for long, slow strokes of the hairbrush. I told her how Francis took out his frustration against me in subtle ways, for example, saying that a new hat made me look foolish when it was really his sense of failure that was speaking.
    “Whether he failed me or I failed him, I don’t know, but he may have had glorious memories of his earlier woman.”
    “Had he been married to her?”
    “I’ll never know, but that’s immaterial. His money went to commemorate his success, not his failure.”
    “Maybe it was remorse money for something.”
    I shrugged. “Leaving me without money isn’t what grieves me most. I would have gone back to work for Tiffany anyway. I don’t want to be a kept woman to a dead man. It’s that he left me without any sign of regard.”
    “Did you love him?”
    Instantly I saw the adorable creases around his lips, the way he stretched his face to shave, and heard his sweet murmured apologies in his sleep when I nudged him to stop snoring. Maybe it was just the intimacy of those things that I loved, and I would love them pasted on another man. Did all men stretch their faces to shave and murmur apologies for snoring?
    Alice’s hair got caught in the prongs of my wedding ring, and I had to work to free it. Ridiculous to keep wearing it. I should sell it and buy opera tickets. Francis and I did enjoy opera together, and our quiet walks in bucolic Fort Greene Park, and our thrilling ones on the Brooklyn Bridge. I had always held the notion that if two people love the same thing, they must love each other as well, but now the memories of that love had been tarnished by betrayal.
    “I miss him. Does one spiteful action kill love? If it can, then what sort of flimsy love was it?”
    I wound her hair in a figure eight and let it tumble down.
    “Yes, I did come to love him, though I wasn’t sure I did when I married him. You might call it a marriage of sacrifice. I still love him formany things he did, but now I wonder if he did those things for the first woman.
    “Listen, Clara, I might be all wrong, but maybe he did it to force you to go back to work for Tiffany. Maybe he knew that was the best way to provide a life for you.”
    That startled me. Could he have been that calculating?
    “You still like it there, don’t you?”
    “I love it. When I left to get married, I intended to work for another glass company that didn’t have a policy against hiring married women, but I found that no other company wanted a woman in a man’s job, married or not.”
    “It’s not a man’s job.”
    “I suppose some people would call it mannish work because of the tools we use. I’ve always loved hand tools—chisels, rasps, pliers, calipers. I got that from my own father, and was forever following him around as a child when he was making something.”
    “I remember the birdhouses he built.”
    “Once he was on his knees working on one, and I was handing him tools. I was playing at swinging a hammer like an ax, enjoying the lopsided weight of it, and it flew out of my hands and hit him in the forehead. I was horrified. I’ll never forget the bloody gash. Soon after that, his health started to fail, and in two years, he was dead. I blamed myself, but was too ashamed to tell you.”
    “It wasn’t your fault.”
    “I can see that now, but nightmares of flying hammers tortured me for years afterward. Burdens of responsibility have hounded me ever since.”
    “That has nothing to do with Francis.”
    “Yes, it does. Put the pieces together, Alice. Girl feels responsible for father’s death. Uses family money to go to art school. Later, younger sister wants to go too. Crisis: Stepfather earns little as village minister. Family funds dwindle. Older gentleman comes along offering to pay younger sister’s tuition. A fatherly gesture. Complication: Proper mother thinks it unseemly to accept money unless he’s part of the family. Gentleman proposes marriage to elder daughter. Out of