The Glass Ocean (16 page)

The inferiority of press molding. The inferiority of opaline. The inferiority of latticino. The sanctity of the batch.

•   •   •

In his studio, my father draws the clear concave bell of a medusa, the central peduncle, the dangling tentacles—forty-nine of them, exactly forty-nine, no more, no less. He is exacting, never having forgotten the boyhood sting of Felix Girard’s
It is wrong here. And here. And here.
Around the margin of the bell, he adds slightly raised spots, blue-green bulbs; these would be phosphorescent, in a living animal, in an ocean thickened by night.
Dear Harry, I have received your letter and thank you for the kind words regarding my little sketches. Please find inclosed, copies, as many as I could complete, with more to come. Dear Harry, I work very slowly these days. The cold cramps my fingers and I do not want to make a mistake. Dear Harry, Since you have asked, Clotilde is very well except she misses her Papa. Too, the early darkness at this time of year can be so oppressive. Dear Harry, Another recent rockfall has exposed more petrifactions on the Scaur. I think they are worth exploring, despite the danger of further collapses. Dear Harry, Recently I have begun, by necessity, to work in glass, a medium difficult and unfamiliar to me, but filled, I think, with possibilities, could I only gain the opportunity to explore them. Dear Harry, Clotilde is very quiet, and unless I am mistaken, she thinks often of her “Darling Papa.” I am sure it would cheer her immeasurably, and me too, if you could make a foray north . . .

He draws an anemone, the thick, warty stem, the pale olive disk, the lobes of the mouth, the four surrounding rows of lilac tentacles. These are slender and tapering, like fingers. The soft, inner whorl of an oyster like the whorl of an ear, listening. He writes to Harry Owen in London. But he does not go into the Birdcage, and so he is not there on that particular night, that one out of the many nights, to stop Thomas Argument rising from his chair, following Clotilde to the window where she has sought shelter in her discomfort and anxiety. Argument stands close behind her as she looks down into the courtyard, seeking that wavering light, my father’s light. He stands so close that she does not dare to turn around, lest she find herself closer still. Closer than she wants to be.

A single probing fingertip traces the edge of her lace collar. In response, a nervous vibration. She trembles. Perhaps from fear.

•   •   •

I am sure it would cheer her immeasurably, and me too, if you could make a foray north . . .

•   •   •

All this, of course, is speculation. I do not know what Thomas Argument did, or how my mother reacted. This is all a refraction of my fears, which are my father’s fears, handed down to me through his diary. My mother wrote nothing, left nothing, except, of course, that charming enigma, her photograph. She is a sphinx, a cipher. We have projected upon her in turn, first my father, now me. We are making her, he in his way, I in mine. She is our creature, our creation. At the same time, she is not ours at all. She has slipped away from us. Our created Clotilde is a simulacrum, inserted by us into the space where she really used to be, the space we are always seeking, and always failing, to fill.

It was a warm space. Warm no longer.

I believe the process of her slipping away began that night, at the window, when Thomas Argument stood so close behind her that she could feel, without touch, the heat of his body on hers.

And then the touch.

Every night since, there has been less and less of her.

Does my father, out in his studio, feel her slipping away, feel the escaping molecules of her attachment to him? Is that why he begins work on the complicated sketch of a prawn—striped carapace, tail-fan, antennas, the legs with their complex joints, the blue pincers, the stalk-eyes? Is this when he begins it? So as not to feel it, this process that is taking place despite him, beyond his control? Or because he thinks he can keep her, through some mysterious alchemy, by working harder?

It is easy for me, in retrospect, to imagine that it is so. More likely, though, my father sees nothing but the drawing he must copy, feels nothing but anxiety lest he make a mistake that will undermine the scientific basis of his work, and Harry Owen’s, and Felix Girard’s. Indeed, he apparently feels so little concern on my mother’s behalf that he returns to the house very late that night, later than usual. She is already in bed when he comes in. The light from his candle outlines the curve of her cheek against the curve of the pillow, the delicate half-moon of her closed eye, the featherlight, telltale quiver of gold lashes. Already she is an abstraction. My father does not pause to calculate the geometry of my mother’s sleep or wakefulness; he is too busy thinking about sea creatures, and glass, and rockfalls, and science. In the morning she is unusually tired, still asleep when he leaves. In the evening, when he comes home, Thomas Argument is at the Birdcage already: my father feels himself preempted, but as usual he does nothing about it, retreating silently to his studio, as has become his habit.

And then he is made to work, at the glasshouse, several exhausting journeys in a row. My mother is always in bed when he gets home, and already out running her morning errands when he is awakened, at the teazer’s call, and made to go back.

Several days will pass in this manner. And in the course of this dark passage, Leopold and Clotilde will barely talk with each other at all. Outside, it snows. Stinging grains of ice, cold-struck from anvil-shaped clouds, slick the brine-spackled streets, web the distant fields in a ghostly frozen caul.

•   •   •

When at last they do finally speak, the process begun that night at the window will have advanced—my mother seeming paler than usual, almost translucent, Nordic, cold in her beauty; gentle, yet distant; withdrawn.

•   •   •

Clotilde is very quiet, and unless I am mistaken, she thinks often of her “Darling Papa.”

•   •   •

He
is
mistaken. Clotilde works very hard not to think of her Darling Papa at all, finding, in this respect, the early darkness a relief because it spares her the watchful blue eye of the sea. She turns away; her head is lowered; she gazes at something, some object she caresses with pale fingers and slips quickly into her pocket at my father’s approach. As she smiles and moves toward him, he feels, vertiginously, as if she is moving away. The closer she comes, the farther she has gone, her touch the inversion of a touch, an absence; her warmth, cold.

It is all very hard to understand. Leopold does not understand it. Willfully, perhaps. By an effort of will, he fails to understand, and, failing, he does the opposite of what he should. He pulls away. Perhaps, confused, disoriented, he has begun to think and to act and to feel in inversions. Farther is closer. Cold is warm. Absence is touch. Glass is flesh.

Glass is flesh.

Yes. This is when it started. Already it has begun.

•   •   •

As my mother grows more remote, Leopold thinks very much about glass. After working all day, then sometimes all night, in the glasshouse, he dreams of it: the heat of the ovens, the feel of the rough iron punty or the blowing rod in his hands, the molten core that remains inside, persistent as heartbeat, even after the glass has been removed from its source, the batch. The throb of it. He wakes to the persistent rhythm of the river, sees its myriad dark reflections scudding over the bedspread, up the curtains, across the ceiling. My mother is beside him, her back turned; shrouded in blankets, she is a curve, an ellipse, a mystery. He touches her and she moves away, murmurs a sleeping complaint. Her skin is cool, smooth. Already she has grown too distant for him to feel the inner fire.

In response to this new loneliness that he hardly understands, he sketches: obsessively, in his studio; surreptitiously, during spare moments in the glasshouse; myopically, while walking in the street; and, when murmurs and reflections will not allow him to sleep, in his bedroom, by the light of a thin and sulfurously smoking candle. What is he drawing? My mother does not know. Clotilde does not awaken. She has entered a place of deepest dreaming, from which she will not emerge.

•   •   •

They are dissections, my father’s drawings: the many-rayed body of a sea star, its flat, orange spherical eye, the spiny, sandpaper hide, tubular feet; a heart cockle splayed open, stomach, genitals, egg sack, siphon, mantle, tentacles, eyes, all exposed. The roughened spot on the shell’s interior where a grain of sand once entered between the delicate membranes. Bud of a pearl, thwarted. Dissections of himself as well, perhaps. During these long days when Clotilde seems so distant, so cool, so like a river, frozen over, which he can skate upon but never touch (all movement now hidden beneath the sparkling surface), does he imagine himself like his subjects: split open, splayed, exposed? Are these drawings what he hides behind, shields himself,
covers
himself with? And her. Dissections of her as well.
I can’t get any closer than this
. Seeking the warm unreachable core.

Glass is flesh.

He makes them, then he copies them, then he sends them to Harry Owen in London. Having completed the cycle, finding himself suddenly idle, he is confronted again by that which he does not want to confront, again exposed, laid bare. And so he starts over. It is, in its way, a time of great productivity for him, during which Harry Owen receives, in a period of two months, two hundred copies of detailed sketches of specimens gathered during the voyage of the
Narcissus
.

Think how much time my father must spend with his paper and pencils and paints, to make two hundred copies in two months. This in addition to the many hours that he spends, Monday through Saturday, in Thomas Argument’s glasshouse, bearing the stink and the heat of the ovens, the sting of Thomas Argument’s ire, the frustration of being held back—always held back—from being allowed to make glass. And then there are the other drawings, the secret drawings, that are for his eyes only. I have no idea how many of those there were.

I have seen the drawings that my father made for Harry Owen during this time. The lines are neat and precise, the renderings detailed, his lettering, in the labels, small, rounded, self-contained. There is a sense of control. Nothing is extra, nothing superfluous. This is his disguise. He hides here. He is becoming, perhaps, much more like his own father, Emilio Dell’oro. A small precise man, tight-lipped, difficult to know.

I haven’t seen the others. Those are my father’s secret.

With my mother’s distance begins my father’s impenetrability.

With what he supposes is her betrayal.

•   •   •

Because that is what he does suppose. Although, if she has betrayed him, there is no real evidence of it. A whiff of scent in the glasswares shop. The trailing edge of a familiar skirt, disappearing behind a closing door in the High Street. The sound of a woman’s laughter, familiar or perhaps not, stifled at his approach.

This is not evidence.

This is my father’s imagination.

It torments him all the time. Even in the overwhelming black heat and stink of the furnace. When he eats. When he walks.

He is only free when he draws.

•   •   •

Your drawings . . . which remain, at present, the sole scientific record of these wonderful animals . . .

•   •   •

It is hard to know at what point, out in his studio, in the glasshouse, in the street, he rereads Harry Owen’s letter and thinks,
If only I could make them in glass!

At some point he does think it. Lying in bed, perhaps, contemplating my mother’s turned back.

•   •   •

If only I could make them in glass!

•   •   •

I prefer to imagine it comes to him in a moment of creative ferment, not in a moment of cuckoldry. I like to imagine him in the street, his hands filled with papers, a disorganized flurry of papers—his drawings, on the way to the post, perhaps—passing the window of William Cloverdale, Argument’s ever-bested rival, chancing to look in at a display of glass eyes on a velvet tray (
Just the kind of thing
, Thomas Argument would say, has said, a hundred times, in my father’s hearing,
that holds that fool Cloverdale back!
) and thinking:

I could make them in glass!

But he cannot make them in glass. Not as long as he works for Thomas Argument. And even if he could get access to the batch, gain independent use of the tools . . . how could he do it? The material is light and strong and supple, but the tools used in Argument’s glasshouse are coarse, and coarse tools create coarse objects. What do Argument’s heavy, cut-glass goblets and pretentious lusters have in common with the delicate, questing tentacles, the soft mouth, of the rosy anemone?

But those eyes in Cloverdale’s window . . . the hazel irises shot through with threads of gold, the deep browns, the filamentous blues and greys . . . like living things. Living glass.

Glass is flesh.

There must be a way.

Or, perhaps more aptly:

There
is
a way, but Thomas Argument doesn’t know what it is.

•   •   •

I imagine it would have been a turning point for my father—a small jubilation—the diminution of a hated (though as yet only barely consciously acknowledged) rival.

There is a way; Thomas Argument doesn’t know what it is.

Nor does he care.

I imagine there must have grown, in my father, a certain disdain for Thomas Argument then. A relieving disdain. A diminishment of the fear inspired in him by those expressionless black eyes.

•   •   •

Of course this is all speculation. I don’t know what happened, really. A process took place, and this is how I imagine it. I try to imagine it to my father’s advantage. But the bare fact is that, after two and a half years in the employment of Thomas Argument, during which time he has advanced only from the position of taker-in, a boy’s job, to footmaker, a better job, a man’s job, but one allowing no creative independence, my father will transfer his allegiance directly across the street, to William Cloverdale, Argument’s nearest competitor—into what Argument calls
That dingy little Cloverdale establishment
. In Cloverdale’s shop, small as it is, dark as it is (lacking the brilliant gas jets that emblazon Argument’s Glasswares, its more modest window must depend for its sparkle on sunlight, a scant resource in Whitby in the winter), my father will work, for the first time, with the lamp.