The Glass Ocean (15 page)

A silver compact in the shape of a scallop shell, containing a mirror in which my mother can see, behind the shoulder of her own reflection, the ghostly reflection of somebody else, who, when she turns around, is not there—

It is my Papa, look and see!
she cries—

My father looks, sees his sister, Anna, standing behind him in the mirror, declares it
a sneaky trick
, and throws it at the fire. When my mother retrieves it from the ashes, the mirror is shattered, reflects nothing, will never reflect anything again; but this is all right.

Mr. Argument will bring me another
, she says.

And he does.

In fact, Thomas Argument has become a frequent visitor to the Birdcage. His long, angular figure slouches and slopes uncomfortably through the low, crooked doorways of the three whitewashed pentagonal rooms, makes its stiff and hampered way up and down the tortuous, narrowly turning stairs packed with Felix Girard’s curiosities, folds itself awkwardly, yet surprisingly often, into a chair before the fire, after having brought forth from some pocket or other (very much as Felix Girard used to do), a gift, varyingly exotic, eccentric, or strange, for my mother. In this chair, which, perhaps, should have been my father’s—except that my father, delayed at the glasshouse, working erratic journeys of ten hours on, twenty-four off, never the same ten, never the same twenty-four, typically arrives too late, too tired, and too dirty to claim it first—Argument shifts, stretches his long legs toward the hearth, then draws them back again, crosses and uncrosses, leans right and then left, then sits forward on his haunches, elbows propped on knees, fingertips pressed together to form a tense arch that he will shortly dismantle by leaning backward again and putting his hands behind his head. His discomfort is evident. Thomas Argument does not fit—not in the house, not in the chair. Perhaps not in my parents’ lives. But he comes very often, and sometimes he stays very late.

And he talks.

My father, coming home at midnight, having just put the crimped rim around the top of a glass jar or the notch in the spout of a creamer, enters wearily upon these conversations-in-progress, finds Thomas Argument delivering to my mother a lecture upon the suitability of gas lighting for home use (
The depletion of oxygen, madam, is vastly overstated, as is the staining—and the explosions? Pah! Just rumor, my dear
);
his dislike for French
cristal opaline
(
Fine glass should not look like blancmange. It should sparkle, madam, it should sparkle!
); or the wonders of the latest addition to his collection—a drinking cup inside which is nested a magical mirror (
The first time you look you will see yourself in it. Look again and you are gone! It is most amusing when drunk. I bought it in Greece, Madam Dell’oro, the last time I was there
). Sometimes, when he is excited, Argument reaches out with his silver-headed walking stick and prods the coal in the fireplace.
It is the wave of the future—the wave of the future!
he cries (whether the subject is gaslight, or electrical conduction, or the daguerreotype, my father is not sure) and—poke!—crimson sparks shoot up the flue. Clotilde in her own chair sits, smiles, gently caresses a yellow bird made from glass. If she winds its mechanism it will sing; it will sound almost like a real bird; but she does not wind it. Her glass bird, a gift, is silent. Above their heads a living bird flits, flashes its ruby breast, quickly is gone.

My father, coming in like a stranger upon these peculiar conversations in which Thomas Argument talks very much and very enthusiastically while Clotilde sits sphinxlike, inserting only the occasional and perhaps ironic comment (
Is that so, Mr. Argument? I think you are quite—wrong!—about that
), never feels included. Perhaps he does not desire inclusion. Perhaps he has had enough of Thomas Argument at the glasshouse. This same Thomas Argument who arrives at the Birdcage with gifts in hand, Thomas Argument the charming enthusiast, my mother’s friendly admirer, is a tyrant in his own house, a petty martinet who abuses the men, accuses them of sullying the batch, destroys entire trays of finished glass that do not meet his specifications after failing to say what the specifications are. Whole trays are returned to the furnace to be melted and made again:
This glass is blistered! That is seedy! It is uneven! It’s poorly flattened!

No one but Thomas Argument can see the flaws.

It is terrible, madam
, Argument confides to my mother,
the master’s appalling burden of—surveillance!

Naturally his behavior gives rise to bitterness. There are even rumors about the batch, which Argument insists on mixing himself. He is protective of it, secretive. It is said, both inside the glasshouse and outside it, that he mixes it with ash of animal bones, and that this is why his glass is so dexterous, so translucent. Thomas Argument, it seems, cannot leave the knacker’s yard behind; skeletons rattle in his angry gaze.

Not surprising, then, that my father might wish Thomas Argument would go home.

•   •   •

If indeed he does wish it. My silent father may have removed himself from Thomas Argument entirely—mentally, at least. Almost certainly by this time, during his second year working in the glasshouse, he has begun thinking like a Dell’oro. Fretting like one. He wants to make; he is frustrated because he cannot. He has begun, secretively, sketching. Almost certainly he has received by now the first of many similar letters that will be sent to him, from London, by Harry Owen:
Despite my best attempts preservation has failed . . . Can you please send to me at your soonest convenience, your drawings of the Holothuriae, the Monochirus amatus Owenii, and the Aplysi, which remain, at present, the sole scientific record of these wonderful animals . . .

My father reads these letters, and thinks about glass. He remembers, in felt memory, perhaps, more than in thought (because
making
, for him, increasingly resides in touch, not in thought), the handle he attached to a pitcher in the glasshouse this afternoon—the hot responsive twist of the molten glass. Like a living thing. The white-hot sensuous melting. He hears my mother saying to Thomas Argument—

Why Mr. Argument, that is so very
 . . . interesting!

Her soft insinuating laughter the sudden, barely detected spark that begins the conflagration.

•   •   •

In retrospect, of course, it seems inevitable; I already know what my father will do. But for him, sitting there, in front of the fire, like a stranger in his own house, exhausted, listening to Thomas Argument’s glib pronouncements, then my mother’s adulatory ejaculations in response—what can he have been feeling? I already know what he will do, so I am not surprised when, eventually, inevitably, he gets up and leaves the room (receiving, as he does it, barely a glance from either my mother or Thomas Argument, so engrossed are they in their mutual game of
admire
and
be admired
). But what can my father be thinking, in that moment when he decides to leave my mother alone with Thomas Argument? What will he be thinking on all those afternoons, those evenings, yet to come, when he will do the same again? All those evenings when, returning home from his shift, entering the kitchen, and hearing Thomas Argument’s excitable voice reverberating down the screw-turn stairwell, he will simply pass up the stairs to bed, or through the house and out, going straight to his studio, without even bothering to find out what is being discussed in the parlor above?

I know what he will do. In his studio, in the cold, in the wavering light of his oil lamp, my father will pour over his drawings from the voyage of the
Narcissus
; bringing out his pencils and paints, he will begin the painstaking process of copying and coloring each one. Some of the originals he will send to Harry Owen, in London.
Your drawings . . . which remain, at present, the sole scientific record . . .

Others he will keep. These are his secrets.

•   •   •

And then he will do something else.

For each drawing, he will also begin to prepare accompanying sheets of additional sketches. He will detail each spine, each filament, each fin, each limb, each tentacle, every undulation, each swelling sinuosity of each creature, separately, from every possible angle, creating, as he does so, a map—yes, as near as he can come, with just his paper and pencils, to a three-dimensional map of each individual creature. And as he does it, he will be thinking about glass.

•   •   •

Of this I am quite certain.

•   •   •

What he thinks about my mother, I don’t really know. Perhaps he avoids thinking of her. Perhaps, with his drawing, he seeks to replace her. This may be what he is really doing, out in his studio, in the cold, as he pulls his paper and his pencils close, surrounds himself, makes, for himself, a second skin of paper within which he shelters. Perhaps he grows ignorant, unknowing, sheds knowledge there, within a fortress of paper. His actions, in regard to her, make very little sense—become, at a certain level, uninterpretable. His intentions cannot be translated. I only know that he leaves her alone with Thomas Argument many times, that
that
is his choice. There is a certain inevitability about it, I suppose. Viewed in retrospect, as I view it. Of course my father cannot have viewed it so; and so I can suppose that he did not know what he was doing, that he did not see the danger that was there, before his eyes, plain to be seen, were he only willing to see it.

Although I think, perhaps, he did see it, and acted as he did, inevitably, in spite of what he saw.

Or so that he would not.

In retrospect, therefore, I ask myself the following:

Did my father Leopold love my mother, Clotilde?

And I respond:

Yes, certainly he did.

And then again I ask, in regard to her relationship with Thomas Argument, did my father act like a fool?

And again: Yes, certainly. He did.

•   •   •

Of course I do not know what goes on in the Birdcage, those nights before the fire, when my father, rather than going upstairs, goes straight through the kitchen and out, taking away with him a cold slice of ham on bread, or some other scrap, some poor leftover rind of whatever those two, upstairs, have had for dinner. I am not sure, really, what my mother and Thomas Argument could talk about up there in the parlor, what they could possibly have in common. He is, after all, nearly twice her age. But he has his fads—his glass, his gas lighting, his gas furnaces, the excise tax (which he opposes, because, he says, it stifles innovation); the obnoxious behavior of the duty collectors, who hang around his shop on tax day, harassing the men; the union (which he also opposes, apparently because of the financial costs to him, but really, although he cannot say this aloud, even to my mother, because it makes him nervous to think of the men who work for him meeting together, grumbling, talking about him, complaining about him, making up stories, and especially,
telling tall tales about
the batch
); the likelihood of communication by electrical cable (which he expects to happen soon, within the decade); or his latest trinket, obtained by him for his collection from—. It is always from a far-flung place, somewhere exotic.

He is not an attractive man. He is long, thin, spidery, angular, uncomfortable, with long, thin, probing fingers like spider’s legs, coarse, ill-cut black hair, and dense opaque black eyes, like Hyalith glass from the von Buquoy glassworks in Gratzen—reflecting much, expressing little, other than anger or impatience, neither of which he shows to my mother, not, at least, at this stage. He acts pleasantly, dresses well, is gentlemanlike. And yet there is, at the same time, something about his demeanor that is off-putting. An edge of something, carefully disguised.

He says, bitterly, it is the fault of the knacker’s yard that he never found a wife. Nobody wants to marry into bones and corpses. Maybe it is true.

•   •   •

He admires my mother. This is certainly true.

He picked her up, after all, when she fainted, carried her, set her down on a couch covered with rugs and tapestries; first loosened, then removed her boots. Having lifted her in his arms, he knows how light she is, how fragile, how slender and pale her neck, her arms, her legs.

And he is a shrewd man. He has seen how easily he can drive my father into retreat. He is a calculating man, this Thomas Argument, and he has made his calculations.

•   •   •

As for my mother, she is a beautiful woman, young, sad, and lonely. She misses her Papa terribly. She spends her days alone in the Birdcage, listening to the River Esk rushing beneath her feet. She avoids the windows, so she will not have to see the sea. She batters herself about, trying not to think of her Papa, the same way her Papa’s last remaining hummingbird batters itself along the moldings at the tops of the walls, above the windows and doors, looking for a way out, even though what is outside is the cold, the killing cold. The hummingbird does not know what it is seeking; it merely acts and reacts, instinctively responds. My mother, alone in a room with Thomas Argument, noticing that my father comes in through the kitchen and goes directly out again, and missing her dear Papa so much, does the same. Acts and reacts. Responds.

As he produces a gift from a pocket, Argument’s hand brushes hers. This, it is clear, is an accident. To this no response is necessary, other than the usual thank you, the usual teasing smile. She caresses the gift gratefully: this time, it is a lacquered music box from China, decorated with a pattern of swallows. She turns the delicate winding mechanism, listens with an attitude of appreciation. But when he reaches out, as they sit before the fire, to touch her, taking between his fingers a strand of her hair, or laying his palm upon her arm, all in the excitement of some discussion—about the inferiority of press molding versus cut glass, for example—this is not an accident, this requires a response. Perhaps not much of a response, but a response. My mother rises, moves away from Thomas Argument, stands with her back to one of the five corners of the pentagonal room or, going to the window, parts the curtains so that she can see my father’s studio below, the hesitant pinprick of light in the inky darkness that is my father’s lamp. What is Leopold doing out there? Why isn’t he here? But my mother is all right. She has made a response, and she feels secure in it. She has moved away from Thomas Argument. This, certainly, is enough. Thomas Argument will not pursue her. He will lean forward in his chair before the fire, sit awkwardly, elbows on knees. He will not take offense. The black opacity of his eyes will remain undisturbed. For all I know, for all my mother knows, he, like my father, thinks of nothing but glass.