The Glass Ocean (20 page)

•   •   •

This is what anger, and Thomas Argument, have made of him.

•   •   •

The Dell’oros are not, by nature, sneaky people. It is just that the family
tendenza
sometimes drives us to commit acts that appear, for want of a better word, sneaky.

•   •   •

And so my stiff, anxiety-ridden father, with his shirt collar buttoned up tight, hoards rods of glass beneath William Cloverdale’s unsuspecting nose, stuffing them in drawers, secreting them in bins, burying them at the bottom of the box marked “Scrap.” He trembles a little each time Cloverdale, soft footed, whistling, comes near to one of these stashes, as a squirrel may tremble for the safety of its supply of wintertime nuts. But he is lucky; he is never discovered. If Cloverdale notices a slight diminishment in his stock of glass rods, he says nothing, assuming, perhaps, that my father is creating some new innovation for the betterment of the glass eye and, hence, for the wallet of William Cloverdale. If my father feels any qualms at this betrayal of trust, he does not indicate it by any diminishment of his “borrowing”; indeed, if anything, he hoards more, driven, it seems, by a larcenous rapture previously unknown to him. In the rapture’s grip he even takes up Cloverdale’s habit of whistling, identifying, in this way, with the man whom he defrauds.

As for creating the circumstances under which he can be alone with what he has stolen, this, too, is easy enough—the orders mount up, my father falls behind, he will remain into the night to complete his work; Cloverdale, shuttering up the shop, thinks profit is the motive—profit, and the desire to aggravate Thomas Argument by keeping the night fires burning late—and he is pleased. He sheds his leather apron, shambles off to the Fox, and will not think about Leopoldo Dell’oro again, until he returns early to find his master glassmaker asleep at the workbench, surrounded by bits and pieces of castaway glass, the lamp still on, burning low and dangerously close to the top of Leo’s tangle-haired, unconscious head.

Hey, you, Mister Dell’oro! Wake up there! Get up! Come on now! Here all night again? Ye’re a madman, all right! Get out of that now and clean yoursef up! Shop’s open, man, quick, quick! No foolin’! Customers comin’! Customers comin’! What can that young bride of yours think, eh? You out all night like this. Bet she wishes now that she’d married an Englishman . . . A nice, normal Englishman . . . Not a crazy furriner like you . . . Out all night, and that lovely young woman home all by hersef . . . Ought to be ashamed of yoursef, y’ should . . .

The large man moves back now from the workroom out into the shop, taking down the shutters, letting the first watery light of morning filter through the smudged tumblers and fruit bowls and creamers, the dust-blurred decanters, the higgledy-piggledy piles of doorknobs and buttons, the ornate lusters greasy with fingerprints. He whistles as he does it, his first tune of the day. He has looked into the crucible. He knows how much work was done overnight. Despite all his huffing and scolding, William Cloverdale is happy.

•   •   •

He does not know that he has been robbed.

My father has used three rods of William Cloverdale’s green glass in a botched attempt to create the model of a sea anemone for Harry Owen; the sad, mutilated result lies now in pieces in the bottom drawer, left, in the cabinet behind the master glassmaker’s workbench.

My father, rudely awakened, has only just remembered this himself.

He meant to remove the evidence. Now he cannot.

He has used a certain amount of enamel, too, in an effort to replicate the delicate shading of the tentacles, deep mauve at the base, lightening to rosy pink at the tips.

This was also a failure. And a robbery.

A tremor of anxiety passes through my father as he thinks of the evidence lying in the bottom drawer, left, along with some yellowed packing slips, disused tools, and a very old leather apron, folded, cracking along the seams. Flakes of leather like black moths broke free and scattered when he tried to unfold the apron to wrap what he had made, to hide the aborted remains. Black moths still lie on the floor, the fortunately filthy floor. He meant to sweep them up, but he didn’t. Black moths that are really flakes of skin. Instead he fell asleep, there beneath the gaze of the glass eyes in their cases. They watch him still.

This makes him tremble.

Though they are silent. Of course.

The robbed man—the victim—William Cloverdale—will not notice, or, if he does, will think it is a tremor of awakening.
Crazy filthy furriner
.

That is one of the advantages. Filthy. Crazy. Foreign. Therefore unaccountable. Bound to behave unaccountably. The unexpected, expected.

•   •   •

All day, as Leopold labors, deprived of sleep, over his glass eyes, he will think about his failures of the night before. The color was wrong. The shapes. The pieces cracked and crazed. And the overarching problem:
it did not look alive
.

It was a dead thing. An abortion. He should have returned it to the batch, but he didn’t. Instead he put it in the drawer, and then he fell asleep. Now it will be in the drawer all day, all day he will worry about it, will tremble when William Cloverdale comes near, sigh with relief when he goes away on his wide, silent feet. That particular drawer is seldom used, it is forgotten, but still, it is dangerous. This and the falling asleep with the lamp still lit. And the reluctance (because there was reluctance) to return his failure, his mess, to the batch. To consign it to the fiery pit.
I will do it later
. But then there was no later.

It is dangerous.

The thievery could be detected.

My father, when he began his experiment, half expected to fail. But he did not expect to have feelings about his failure, to want to keep his failure, to study it. He has surprised himself. In this, he is unaccountable to himself.

Now, because of his failure and his falling asleep, which was careless, he will have to stay late another night, if only to melt down and thus repatriate that which he has stolen. Expunge the theft. The guilt. Perhaps, too (so he hopes), the failure.

This is what my father does. He stays another night. And another. Thomas Argument, from across the street, sees the glow of fire from between the slats of William Cloverdale’s shutters, and feels himself goaded. But goaded to what? He has no idea what is going on in Cloverdale’s glasshouse. Because he does not know, he will work longer, and later, himself. Just in case. So as not to be surprised. So as not to be outdone.

Which makes one thing clear:

He isn’t with my mother.

Thomas Argument and Leopold Dell’oro are both in Church Street, working, while Clotilde Girard Dell’oro, CGD’O, is at the Birdcage, alone, listening to the river.

She has a secret that she is holding to herself, very tightly. She holds it tightly even when she is alone, as if she is afraid of revealing, to herself, something she already knows, yet does not want to know. During these long nights, though, when my father does not bother to come home at all, she sometimes lets go just a little—just enough to be able to hold the secret at a small distance from herself, at arm’s length, as if it belongs to someone else, so that she can look at it, and think what it is that she ought to do.

Hers is a secret requiring action. That is what she thinks.

She just doesn’t know which action.

In fact, she has very few choices. It makes her feel better, though, during the long nights alone, to imagine that she has many.

•   •   •

It is difficult for me to understand why, feeling as he does, my father leaves my mother alone on these nights. Even if he thinks she is already lost to him, why does he not stay there, fight? Or at the very least, watch? Guard? Observe? Forbid? It is foreign to his character to forbid, but ought he not do it,
in this case
?

And I don’t understand Thomas Argument either—seeing the breach, why does he not step into it, if this is what he wants, has wanted, all along? Inexplicable.

My mother, though, is all too easy to understand. I know what she must be feeling, alone in the dark in the Birdcage with its crazy jims and jambs, the staircases crammed with preserved corpses, the stink and froth and rage of the river beneath her as it carries off to sea Whitby’s whale grease and slag and excrement. Her Papa gone, lost. A perpetual torment of rushing water. This is all too easy to imagine.

She doesn’t understand why they’ve left her alone. They’ve left her, all of them. Left her with her secret, trying, all alone, to decide what to do.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to like my father. He is, as William Cloverdale would have it, foreign to me. Unaccountable. Lost in more ways than one. While Clotilde, who will run away, washing her hands of me completely, feels close.

Despite everything, we have a lot in common, she and I. Not that I like to admit it.

Like me, for instance, she, too, has a map of the place where her father disappeared. She found it among the odds and ends of her “inheritance,” in a box also containing the preserved head of a lowland gorilla and a specimen tray labeled “miscellaneous pupae.” The map itself was carelessly folded and stuck in between the lid of the tray and the pupae themselves, which, true to their label, were rolled about loose, slightly seedy, peeling, like the fossilized stubs of partially smoked cigars. The map was Felix Girard’s own map, bearing the stains of Bury Place and home—it even smelled like home, when she first unfolded it, a rich mélange of preserving fluid, gazpacho, Beaujolais, and chocolate. It is marked by Felix Girard’s soup, by his tea, by his pencil. There, on the map with which he planned his trip, is Punta Yalkubul, a green, ape’s-brow bulge at the northernmost prominence of the Yucatán. And there, to the north, in the blue void of the Gulf of Mexico, marked in pencil in her Papa’s beloved hand:
Isla Desterrada
.

•   •   •

My mother discovered this map by accident. She was not, initially, interested in the map at all, but rather exclusively in the pupae. She had even some notion that she would try to identify and label the pupae, as a completion of and testament to the work of her dear Papa. She thought she would feel close to him that way. The map, at first, she set aside and ignored. She surrounded herself instead with books belonging to her Papa, containing pictures of pupae, and tried her hand at identification. The pupae, though, proved unpromising. She realized she did not even know where they were from. Were they European pupae? North American? South American? Central Asian? From New Guinea? Malaya? Mongolia? Toronto? Clotilde did not know, could not begin to know. Instead of making her feel closer to her Papa, the pupae made her feel farther away. There was nothing, in them, of her Papa. Clearly he had found them uninteresting himself, or else he would have labeled them. He did label very many things, but not these. Already distracted, she could not concentrate. Then one afternoon, she opened the map. She opened it listlessly, without any conviction. That is when she noticed it—written in, in her father’s hand.

Isla Desterrada
.
22'49" N, 89'70" W.

She noticed, and then she quietly put the map away. She put it away without thinking. She also immediately lost what little interest remained for her in the pupae as well. She thought she would never look at them again, and the map, if she thought of it at all, was included in that.

It would take her a while to digest the implications. She even, for a time, forgot about the map, as if she had never seen it. She put it and the pupae back in the box with the gorilla’s head and took the whole thing out, into the shed, and left it in my father’s studio. Dropped it on the floor and walked away.

Then one day she suddenly thought:

He knew.

A huge realization.

And then:

He planned it.

An even huger.

And worse yet:

He knew, and he left me alone regardless.

No, that can’t be right. It’s impossible.

•   •   •

She went back out to the shed, into the box with the pupae and the gorilla’s head, and retrieved the map, and looked at it again. Saw that it was, indeed, as she thought.

•   •   •

No wonder my mother is preoccupied during the long nights when my father and Thomas Argument, too, leave her alone.

There is, of course, a positive side to her discovery.

My Papa is alive!

That is what she begins to think, at first hesitantly, then with greater and greater conviction. Over time, as her discovery chafes at her—as she grows pale, and distant, and lies awake at night, watching the reflections of the river crawling up the wall—it becomes
all
she thinks. She succeeds, almost, in forgetting the other implications.

My Papa left me. He did not care
.

Now, when she is alone, she brings out the map, and studies it, and runs her fingers over the pencil marks. If she shuts her eyes she can feel them. That is how hard her Papa bore down, when he marked
Isla Desterrada
on his map.

Even then, I think, she was already packing her suitcase. Mentally, at least.

Emotionally speaking, she had packed it already.

How many times, growing up, was she filled with despair at the sight of her Papa caressing a map? Now she does exactly as he did. Except no one sees her. There is no one to despair. There is no one to beg her to stay. No one will want to come with her. She is alone. That is what she thinks.

There is a freedom involved in no one caring. Also, in not caring oneself. There is a detachment in it, a knot unraveled, a detail set free from context. That is what my mother has learned. Not caring makes the limbs lighter. She caresses the map without worries. I doubt she thinks twice about Leopold. Thomas Argument, with all his toys and gifts, is not even on her horizon. It is her Papa that she thinks of.

He is alive! I must find him!

•   •   •

It is interesting, is it not, how we always think most about the one who has gone away and left us? And least about the one who has remained behind?