The Story of Mr. Clark’s Fan
And many serendipities along the way
The winter of my senior year in college, I applied to the Sotheby’s American Arts Course in New York, thinking it might help set me up for a job in the art world. Part of the interview was something called an “objects test.” They’d put me in a room with a pencil, a blue book, and a dozen or so decorative arts objects dating from 1700 to 1945, and I’d have one hour to guess what they were; when and where they were made; and why I thought so.
I wasn’t even clear what decorative arts were, but the closer I got to graduation with no job in sight, the more I wanted into that program. I studied Miller’s guides, museum collections, and as many monographs about American furniture, silver, porcelain, textiles, and glass as I could find. An old friend of my grandmother schooled me in antique porcelain. There was no guessing what would be on that test — much less how much fun I’d have taking it.
This was when I fell in love with decorative arts and crafts, loosely defined as functional objects beautifully made. Whereas fine arts like painting and sculpture aim to inspire and stimulate our minds, decorative arts elevate mundane activities or necessities. Objects and tools absorb our touch and bear scars of our use, offering tantalizing clues. Their bodies, like our own, tell stories, bringing the past into the present and connecting us across time.
Heir-loom /ˈerˌlo͞om/
Origin: Middle English heir-lome, a tool or article passed to one’s heirs; from Anglo French: heir + Old English: gelōma — a tool of any kind.
More often than not, the stories attached to heirlooms are more valuable and enduring than the objects themselves. My favorites are the ones with mystery, controversy, and coincidence too eerie to dismiss. Mr. Clark’s Fan has all of the above.
I carried this Victorian lady’s fan with white orchids when I got married, just like my mother did. Fashioned from ivory inlaid with mother of pearl and bobbin lace sprinkled with tiny sequins, it’s extremely fragile. Two of its inner sticks stubbornly resist repair, having broken first at my parents’ wedding.
“I think someone sat on it,” Mom mused aloud, brow knit in memory, when we pulled the fan out for my wedding.
I like to think it was Dad. This is absolutely something he would do: loud and lively in conversation, gesticulating and distracted, he’d sit, hear the snap, and rise from the chair with a scoot. Shocked incredulity would flood his face — “Who would put something breakable there for me to sit on?!” — before quickly turning sheepish and apologetic, looking to Mom with eyebrows a-shrug. After a beat, they’d both burst out laughing and the party would continue, the fan forgotten until long after their getaway.
Someone must have found the fan and returned it to the mother-of-the- bride, clucking with regret. Gran would have tucked the heirloom back in its box and deep in a drawer somewhere. I’ve no idea what brought it out several years later, but I’m glad.
For the most part, I only remember Gran as a tiny, physically fragile woman, more often bed-ridden than not following a debilitating stroke and other serious health episodes.
Bed-ridden, but sharp as a tack and tough as nails. Impeccably groomed and clad in quilted silk bed jackets, Gran would sit upright like a queen, supported by bolsters and shielded by monogrammed blanket covers over crisp cotton sheets. A white wicker desk tray usually straddled her lap, its side compartments stuffed with crossword puzzles, newspapers, medical journals, and the occasional Vogue or Travel & Leisure. A stack of hardback bestsellers stood on her night table alongside a tidy pile of mail, a monogrammed notepad, reading glasses, and an etched glass decanter set for water; the pill box tucked discreetly in the shadows.
I’d perch on the edge of Papa’s twin bed and we’d chat. A born problem solver, she often had suggestions for this or that and almost always had a story to share. I loved her pleasing Georgia lilt and crisp enunciation, the brightness of her brown eyes and the movements of her manicured hands. Sometimes there was the flash of a fabulous cocktail ring; was that the finger missing its tip, sliced off by farm machinery one summer in Nacoochie and cleverly disguised under classic red nail polish? I can’t recall. Gran had few opportunities to wear jewelry anymore, too frail to attend the fancy-dress parties their friends loved to throw. I imagine her slipping on a ring or pinning a brooch on her bed jacket while seated at her dressing table; sneaking a cigarette and tapping its ash in that silver-gilt ashtray shaped like a sultan’s slipper.
I couldn’t have been more than ten the day a rectangular box covered in threadbare silk appeared on her desk tray. I knew a story was going to rise from it like a genie in a swirl of sweet smoke.
Gran lifted the fan out of the box, carefully unfurling it for my eager eyes. “Do you recognize this?” she asked. I did not. Mother-of-pearl inlays glowed from its ivory guards, and tiny sequins winked across the lace, creamy gold with age. A tattered satin ribbon was still knotted around the gilt loop at the fan’s base.
“I thought you might have seen it in your parents’ wedding pictures,” she said. “Susan (as she called Mom) carried it with her flowers. Sadly, it broke,” she sighed, pointing out the snapped ivory sticks. Oftentimes, such breaks shelter the very best stories. It went something like this.
Gran’s mother, Emma Griffin Hardman (1881–1953), was the cherished only child of Josephine Staten and Jasper Newton Griffin of Valdosta, Georgia. Called Granny in our family, she was adored by everyone, as best I can tell. Doesn’t she look like a Granny?
When Granny was 19, her father introduced her to Dr. Lamartine Griffin (“L.G.”) Hardman, a doctor from Commerce, GA. She thought Dr. Hardman was dashing, and he seemed quite smitten, too. Still, he was 25 years her senior and never married, thoroughly occupied with practicing medicine and other business interests.
Dr. Hardman wasn’t alone in his admiration of Miss Emma Griffin, known for her warm sense of humor. “Mama had the loveliest light touch,” Gran said. “But she also knew what she wanted, and she wanted Dr. Hardman. So she waited.”
For years.
Dr. Hardman was taking far too long.
Meanwhile, a persistent gentleman known to us only as Mr. Clark continued to court Emma steadily. “He thought Mama had hung the moon,” Gran said, her smile saying that she did, too. To make his intentions clear, Mr. Clark gave Emma an exquisitely feminine lace and ivory fan, highly fashionable in the day. By then 25 years old, Emma agreed to marry him.
Anytime they heard this story, this is when Papa or Dad would let out a mournful chuckle and say, “Poor Mr. Clark.”
The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Museum says the most coveted fans were made in France at that time:
… As with other fashion accessories, fans offered women an opportunity to display discerning taste, personal style, and financial status. … Fans also had unique communicative properties. Held in the hand, a fan intensified every gesture. In an era when women were bound by strict ideas regarding personal decorum, fans could help entice or discourage potential suitors.
If Mr. Clark hoped this lovely gift would do the latter, he didn’t know what he was up against.
By the time Dr. Hardman got wind of it (a newspaper announcement? A tip from a friend; even a doting father?), Emma and her mother were already in Washington, D.C. shopping for her wedding trousseau. Dr. Hardman dashed off a letter (how did he know where to send it?) imploring Miss Griffin and her mother to stop in Atlanta on their return journey so that he could “plead his case.” (This letter, I’ve recently learned, is in the Hardman Collection at the University of Georgia Library. Time for a field trip!)
As their train approached the Atlanta station, Emma and her mother looked out the window and lo and behold, there was Dr. Hardman, driving a shiny buggy with a pair of black horses racing alongside the track. Stepping off the train, Emma accepted Dr. Hardman’s request that she join him for a ride. By the time they returned to her waiting mother, Emma had agreed to marry Dr. Hardman instead of Mr. Clark.
Poor Mr. Clark.
That was the end of the story as Gran told it, but of course now I wonder who told Mr. Clark, and how did he take the news? Did Josephine Griffin hastily send word to the shopkeepers in D.C. that monograms must be changed from EGC to EGH?
Emma Griffin and Dr. L.G. Hardman married soon thereafter, in 1907. She was 26, he was 51, and they were happily married for 30 years. My grandmother, Sue Colquitt Hardman Ivie, was the third of their four children, and one way or another, she became the keeper of Mr. Clark’s fan.
Why my mother carried Mr. Clark’s fan in her wedding is a mystery. Gran certainly hadn’t, being a wartime bride. At times, I’ve wondered if carrying a trophy of a jilted suitor while walking down the aisle wasn’t a bit Black Widow. Not on Mom’s part; she was very much the obedient daughter. But Gran? She wasn’t just iron-fisted inside her velvet glove. She’d dared to rip the gloves off altogether, leaving a strict Baptist upbringing to become a doctor, marry a fellow physician, and practice as an internist in Nashville.
Or maybe Gran simply saw Mr. Clark’s fan as a sentimental heirloom, kept even as a token of gratitude. After all, it appears to have prompted her father’s finally proposing marriage to her mother.
When Mom and Dad got engaged in 1966, they’d been dating for several years. Their parents were friendly acquaintances and would become dear friends. Grand E (my paternal grandmother) genuinely loved Mom, crediting her with bringing Dad closer to his family. She also knew it could be hard in a new family, having been terribly lonely and homesick when she moved to Nashville from the Northeast as a young wife and mother.
On a visit to Gran and Mom at home to discuss wedding plans, Grand E brought the lace bridal train made for her own grandmother’s wedding in 1870. Grand E had worn it when she married Gramps in 1933.
“If you would like to wear it, I hope you will,” Grand E would have said, pulling back the tissue to reveal the lace, creamy gold with age. As the story goes, Gran’s face blanched when she saw it, peering closer before excusing herself from the room. Soon she returned with a tissue-wrapped parcel of her own.
“Joe and I bought this for Susan on a trip to Europe, when she was just a girl. We hoped she might need it one day,” Gran said, unwrapping the tissue to reveal folds of antique duchesse lace — a perfect match to the lace of Grand E’s train.
The headpiece and bodice of Mom’s wedding gown were made with the lace from her parents, worn with the heirloom train from her mother-in-law.
In a similar spirit, Mom chose to carry white orchids because of their significance in Dad’s family. Given how important family heritage also was to Gran, I can imagine her saying, “Wouldn’t it be divine for Susan to carry Mr. Clark’s fan with the orchids?”
“So of course I did,” Mom said. And of course, I’m so glad.
Recently, Dad told me that Mom didn’t like how dutiful and demure she looks in this photo, but it was always a favorite of his. “Not because I wanted a dutiful little wife,” he scoffed, but because of her pensive, faraway expression. Dad’s loving this part of her was at the heart of Mom’s knowing he was the man she wanted to marry. “I never had to perform, or hide, with him,” she once told me.
I was quite young when Eric and I married, and it was also when Mom and I were closest. Despite the speed and surprise of our engagement, Mom embraced our decision and loved Eric from the start. A graduate student in Hebrew and Old Testament at the time, Mom saw the richness, not just the challenges, of our being an interfaith couple. The memory of Mom’s piping up to sing the blessing over the Hanukkah candles with Eric’s dad — when they’d just met a few hours before — is one of our all-time favorites.
I wanted to wear a family wedding dress, but Mom’s was ‘way too small and the chiffon of Grand E’s started to shred as I tried it on. I did wear the Ames lace train and carry white orchids with Mr. Clark’s fan.
Tulip Tree Mark, as we called Nashville’s beloved and talented florist, mended the fragile fan sticks before binding the fan to the orchid branch under an antique linen handkerchief.
No one sat on the fan at our wedding, but the sticks did break again, true to its own storied past.
When I was visiting my aunt and uncle last summer, I stopped for a look at Gran’s portrait, which used to hang in my grandparents’ house.
I’d studied the painting a thousand times in the hushed formality of Gran’s and Papa’s living room, a little girl sunk deep into the down cushions of the silk-brocaded sofa beneath it. Whoever was tasked with refilling the nearby candy dish never ratted me out for consuming quantities of Smooth & Melty Mints while I was busy critiquing.
I wasn’t sure about Gran’s hairdo, and I wondered where she was going in that gown. Her manicure also unsettled me. It was a classic look, quintessentially her, but quite different from the New Englanders in my family, who preferred a more understated look. Not Sue Colquitt Hardman Ivie.
If you notice similarities between this portrait and others I’ve written about, that’s because it also was painted by Goode P. Davis, my paternal great uncle. Recently returned to Nashville from California, he was working out of the tenant house studio at my paternal grandparents’ place until his own home studio was set up. A few years ago, I came across a letter Grand E wrote in 1952 to her eldest son, my Uncle Johnny, at boarding school:
Uncle Goode is here — staying with the Macs and painting in our studio — first the Paul Davis children together — and then a doctor’s wife — Mrs. Ivie.
Little did Grand E and the “doctor’s wife” know, they’d be together 16 years later, at the rehearsal dinner of their younger son and eldest daughter on the shaded lawn just up the gravel driveway.
I stepped closer to peer at Gran’s portrait, curious if Uncle Goode had included or concealed her abbreviated finger. Then my eyes dropped lower.
“I’ll be damned,” I said into the silence.
There was Mr. Clark’s fan.
The same way I ended up holding a silver cup in my portrait, Uncle Goode probably suggested that my grandmother occupy her hands with something. Did Gran choose Mr. Clark’s fan to signify a connection to her beloved mother, a tribute to her father’s triumph, recognition of how her parents shaped her? Like Granny, Gran knew what she wanted. She delighted in her successful scheme to transfer from Shorter Female College (“a terrible, dull place,” she groused) to Randolph Macon College, telling her parents it was her only chance of going to medical school. Hearing that, Dr. Hardman promptly set his second daughter free to fly wherever her brain and ambition might carry her.
Or maybe the fan was just a fitting accessory for a Southern lady’s portrait, its history barely a foot note in Gran’s mind. My own decision to carry Mr. Clark’s fan and wear the lace train was simple; I wanted to feel connected to the women who made me, their love and wisdom folded into my heart as I walked toward a new life and family.
Whatever happened to Mr. Clark? I hope he found a true love and life companion, and they grew a family with storied heirlooms of their own. I hope that generations of Clark descendants have been entertained by a ‘Poor Miss Griffin’ tale about the young lady too silly to accept the best ever marriage proposal. To all of these Clarks, my heartfelt thanks for all that your Mr Clark continues to give to me and mine.
