The Glass Ocean (2 page)

•   •   •

My father is in Bury Place. I have contained him upstairs, in the peculiar pink-and-blue confection of a building, so unexpected among all the red brick and whitewash of Bloomsbury, where are located my grandfather’s lodgings.

•   •   •

Is this precise enough?

•   •   •

No. I can be more specific yet. The pink building is at the corner of Bury Place and Great Russell Street, just around the corner from Montagu House. On the street level there is a shop, very dark, that bears the placard: A
.
P
ETROOK,
A
NTIQUITIES;
C
OINS;
C
ARPETS;
O
LD
C
OINS;
P
APER
M
ONEY
B
OUGHT AND
S
OLD
. Small, intriguing objects are contained within this shop, displayed in its windows. A head of Isis, for example. Another of Aphrodite. Greek vases and other odds and ends of pottery. An iron Celtic figure of a horse and rider. A red terra-cotta hand and arm, very roughly made, probably broken off an early Roman figurine. Something Mayan.

Arthur Petrook is there as well, at the back, one among his objects, like them rough, with an unfinished quality, as if poorly cast, by old-fashioned methods. A short man, squat, dark, balding, foreign looking (not unlike my father in this), apparently untouched by the heat (in this very unlike my father indeed), surrounded by old, piled newspapers, dusty bound squares of carpet, a jumble of packing crates and boxes from which straw stuffing protrudes. He sits at—or rather, it seems, crouches over—a desk, though, of course, this isn’t true, he doesn’t crouch, not really, more it’s that he’s leaning over something, leaning avidly over an object that lies before him, on the desk. It’s a page from what must be (have been) a very old book, lettered in Latin, brilliantly colored in the margins in gold and crimson and deep blue, borders illuminated with strange, deformed figures, some human, some not, cavorting, coupling, consuming themselves and each other and the text in an infinite, uncheering roundelay that, from the look of it, Arthur Petrook finds infinitely cheering.

•   •   •

There are only two ways he could have obtained a single plate from a manuscript this old. He cut it out of the book himself, I bet. No stranger Arthur Petrook to this and other profitable mutilations.

•   •   •

How can I say such things? What do I know about it? It’s not like he’s got the knife in his hand right now.

It’s something else, that sharp glint, something else altogether.

•   •   •

Anyway, that’s no business of mine. Look away, look away.

•   •   •

And find, in the corner, behind a narrow door surrounded by stacks of crates, the stairway leading up to my grandfather’s lodgings.

Like the shop itself, this stairway, dim and airless, is choked with objects—papers, books, boxes, terra-cotta heads, grimy textiles—that almost completely occlude the passage up. It is very like a burrow, dug with tooth and claw by some eager, gnawing mammal. At the top is a landing piled with carpet samples, and a door with a card upon it that reads:
PROF. F. GIRARD
. Behind the door: a dim, low-ceilinged room, antechamber to the warren, carpets rolled and leaning against the wall, large packing crates, some with the lids pried off, from which protrude rocks and bones partially wrapped in old newspapers. In one corner hangs the skeleton, strung together with wires, of some kind of ape, orang-utan, perhaps, how should I know, this is not my area of specialty; in another corner, a stuffed vulture, the feathers grown patchy with mange—El Galliñazo this is, wattled, beloved companion of my mother’s childhood. The collection continues into the adjoining corridor; here are shelves crowded with seashells and birds’ eggs and butterflies of great beauty, side by side with glass jars containing dark things pickled in brine, all kinds of things: fish, insects, tree tumors, parasitical worms; here again a box in which somebody has mounted, perfectly, an exquisite set of colorful dried beetles with enormous mandibles, like something from a dream; there, anemones and hydras in fluid, indifferently prepared, poorly preserved, hardly worth keeping, but kept nonetheless. Stinking, in the heat.

•   •   •

My grandmother, Marie-Louise Girard, has already left my grandfather by now. By ’41 she’s returned to her father’s house in Paris. Very soon she will remarry. This, perhaps, explains the state of my grandfather’s lodgings. Or does the state of his lodgings explain her departure? And anyway, the house doesn’t belong to my grandfather; it belongs to the one downstairs, him with the cutting eye and edge, Petrook. My grandfather is a kind of employee, a procurer, who, by supplying Petrook with antiquities and curiosities from foreign lands, obtains a favorable deal on the rent.

•   •   •

I imagine the two of them, Petrook and my grandfather, as two vultures sitting side by side on a single branch, each guarding his pile of decaying treasure, pecking and squabbling, biting and squawking, eating, shitting, shedding, scratching, as vultures will do.

Really, though, it’s more complicated than that. The households Girard and Petrook are intimately entwined in a cheerless roundelay all their own, one that will prove unfortunate for my grandfather (and my mother) in the long run.

Little wonder my grandmother left this place. Who could blame her?

•   •   •

To think I’ve put my father in here.

•   •   •

It’s all right. I’ll let him out soon. And anyway, he feels at home. He’s in the study, safe and warm. Like part of the collection.

It’s hard to see him really, it’s so dark, the room so crowded, with books (both on shelves and in stacks, rising up like stalagmites from the floor and from the surfaces, nearly submerged, of a drowning desk and a few weary armchairs, paddling for their lives among the debris), as well as with rolled-up carpets smelling of incense and cloves, with grimacing carved stone heads of Central American origin, and with the ubiquitous specimens, swimming in their bottles of murk.

Not one to be deterred, my father is poking among these objects, ferreting, sorting, examining things in the very dim light provided by the room’s single window, narrow, dirty, and distant.

Bit of a collector himself, my da. Crumpling something soft into his pocket, left pocket, something that doesn’t belong to him. I can’t quite see what it is. But the sly, shamefaced expression, that I can see. Even in this lousy light.

He starts then, gives a sudden, sharp little quiver, surreptitious creature that he is, all alert, scenting the air, listening, ears and whiskers turning like pinwheels because he’s heard, from somewhere within the softly swaddled chambers of the burrow, a reedy distant susurrus that might or might not have been a
Hallo—

•   •   •

Yes. There it is again.
Hallo
from the next room, rattle of hand on doorknob, minor rupture followed by inward collapse, a geometry of light and dust containing a figure, unfamiliar. Round glint of glasses, sharp spade of beard, tweedy sleeve, inserted. And a voice.
Hallo! Is somebody there?

This will be Harry Owen. He’s been waiting, too, in another part of the burrow. Drawn by my father’s scrabbling. Something else alive in here! It’s not just me! Or so it seems.

My father comes toward him eagerly, emerges from the shadows, hastily checking his pockets, gasping slightly, as if rising in a very great hurry from a very great depth.

Yes, yes, it’s me
, he says,
I’m here. Leo Dell’oro—ship’s artist.

Harry Owen is startled by this. It shows. Slight retraction of the beard. We aren’t on a ship, we’re in a burrow. But being impeccable in manners, introduces himself nonetheless.

Yes
, says my father.
I’ve heard all about you.
And unhelpfully adds,
Felix Girard is out. Would you like to see my pictures?

Oh my dear my father I miss him so. Such a child, scampering off into the warren in search of a sketch pad with which to impress the tweedy stranger. Where has he gone? I don’t know; I can’t see that part of my grandfather’s kingdom. And anyway, he’s back now, already, panting, sketch pad in paw. The stranger, encompassing this, draws book and boy both out into the passage, where the light, such as it is (an aqueous matter no matter where, in this house), is somewhat better for looking.

The sketch pad is a ragged, well-thumbed thing, thickened by interpolation into it of other matter—pages torn out of books and periodicals, letters heavily annotated in the margins, daguerreotypes, restaurant menus, old postcards, tickets, pieces of carpet, a swatch of wallpaper—no wonder my father feels at home in Felix Girard’s house, and will soon possess an impulse to make the collecting a family matter. Nasty, unhygienic stuff. But in among it—the drawings. These are very good, precociously good. Pencil sketches mainly, flora and fauna, North Yorkshire coast, moors. And bones. These are his drawings of the Whitby ichthyosaur, which was excised from the cliff called Black Cap by my grandfather, Felix Girard, several years ago.

The ichthyosaur was and is my grandfather’s most famous find, crowning achievement of his career as a bone monger, the career for which he left his other, previous, more respectable career, that of surgeon, in Paris, at l’Hôtel-Dieu.

•   •   •

Charnel house on the Seine. All those infected linens hanging out on metal clotheslines on terraces above the river. Bloated monster, breathing sickness on the city of light.

•   •   •

He had to leave it.
So much death
, that’s what he said.
Ah, the stink, Marie!
Without irony. And so my grandmother left him.

I can’t blame her. There’s an issue here of contracts, as well as of expectations.

•   •   •

So this is how my father met my grandfather: by sketching his ichthyosaur. The drawings, amazingly exact and to scale, accompanied Felix Girard’s paper on the find, and were published, along with it, in the
Proceedings
of that year. My father was very young then, just a boy. That is why, now, the drawings look familiar to Harry Owen, a man of science himself. He saw them in the
Proceedings
. But he doesn’t remember that he did.

My father received no credit for this work, nor any money either.

Nor did the cliff Black Cap receive any money, though it very conveniently collapsed, exposing the ichthyosaur to my grandfather’s opportunity-seeking eye.

Which just goes to show that success really does consist, first and foremost, in being there.

•   •   •

Why
, says Harry Owen, evidently surprised,
these are very good! You have an amazing quality of—of—
tact
—with your living creatures especially—they really look alive—

This is excruciating to my father, this praise. He never could accept a compliment. He blushes painfully, begins rubbing his left wrist rapidly against the heel of his right hand, cannot look Harry Owen in the eye. Unbearable, unbearable. Now he has to run off—run off!—with his sketch pad, back into the warren, and disappear. Gone to ground. Leaving Harry Owen alone.

Or not exactly alone.

Many eyes, in that place.

•   •   •

I don’t know where my father’s gone. Some parts of the burrow lie too deep even for me to excavate. Nor do I desire to dig there. I’ll remain with Harry Owen instead.

Here he is, left alone in the hallway with my grandfather’s jars of pickled fish and a number of those grinning Mayan heads Felix Girard trades to Petrook in lieu of rent. Clearly, he’s as taken aback by my father’s abrupt departure as he was by his unexpected appearance. At a loss, he stands in his tweeds (it isn’t just my father: they all wear too many clothes in this August heat, sweat trickling down behind the very proper collar and cuffs, soaking the starched shirtfront beneath the tightly buttoned waistcoat, dampening the worsted trousers, pooling around the garters at the stocking tops, such a way to live, so very, for lack of a better word, Victorian); he flashes his spectacles this way and that, intelligently pointing his spade of a beard, patting down his smooth, fine hairs, looking around, looking around, looking around at all the
stuffed, pickled, and preserved
. Then, finally and suddenly giving up on my father (now classified:
Homo enigmaticus
, form
juvenilis
), retreating back into the study, removing a stack of books from one of those poor groaning easy chairs, sitting down, and lighting a cigar.

•   •   •

I can see the red spark of cigar ash wavering in there, in the semidark.

It is very rude of my grandfather, is it not, to leave his guests sitting around like this?

Poor Harry Owen, sitting around in the semidark with his cigar in that oppressive room. I can see now that he’s noticed the smell, the sour-sweet smell of death, not quite disguised by the pungency of the cigar. He’s running his finger around inside his collar, shifting uncomfortably on his hams. There’s a large, poorly stuffed, mottle-coated, buck-toothed South American rodent on the low table by his elbow, this for company, such lousy conversation
.
Mrs. S—, is that you?
No. No. Though it looks quite like her, it flirts less well. All communication is by other means, other channels. Harry Owen sniffing slightly, there, in the dark.

•   •   •

Honestly, I don’t know why he waits. He lacks my father’s aptitude for snooping, he’s far too proper, this is all just tedium to him. And he doesn’t even know my grandfather. When the summons came to him at the house on Half Moon Street, he hesitated, even, over whether he ought to come. Debated, pro and contra.

•   •   •

My grandfather has something of a reputation, hardly any of it good. Though his books are quite good.
Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak
in particular. That’s the one about Mongolia. I like it very well, myself. But Harry Owen hasn’t read it, not yet.

It must have been very dull, that summer of 1841, to keep Harry Owen waiting in that study.