The Glass Ocean (34 page)

•   •   •

My giantess’ footfall and large shadow portending an unknown danger.

Then moving on. Peaceful resumption of nibblings, gnawings, dreamings.

•   •   •

My grandfather’s boxes, never fully unpacked, do constitute a kind of forest, one that sways slightly, like a real forest, settles, seems to respire. Of course this is just the wind, entering through chinks and gaps and fissures. How many years have the boxes been here now? Many. There are traces of my mother’s gnawings, boxes she has opened and from which she has extracted bits and pieces of her patrimony, taking what interested her, leaving the rest for the mice.

The rest. Thousands of stilled breaths there, in these boxes. Thousands of lifeless, formerly living things. And that soft sibilance: the sound of specimens breathing.

I wonder if my grandfather, Felix Girard, the collector, the explorer, the naturalist, he whose remarkable
regio frontalis
,
regio orbitalis
,
regio zygomatica
, large feet, long fingers, thrusting elbows, broad back, and ginger hair I have inherited—did he ever hear the sound of his lifeless specimens, breathing?

Maybe that was why he collected them—why he grabbed and gathered and piled up as much and as fast as he could, why he disappeared over the edge of the earth, still desperately grasping and clutching and snatching—going over—past the edge—taking my mother with him, in the end. To obtain the company of these many strange, lifeless respirations.

To replace a single, beloved,
living
breath that had gone away?

•   •   •

No. He preferred these. This is hardest of all to understand. Though there is much company here, among my grandfather’s boxes. This I acknowledge.

•   •   •

Imagine the ghosts!

I walk between them, think, what are these to me? Though the wind rattles fiercely, causing all my father’s flames to flicker. This is not a reassuring thing, when surrounded by ghosts.

But then, of course, I have my own ghost, I take her with me everywhere. Sometimes she even speaks to me, or so it seems.

Carlotta
.

Soft susurration of wind.

Carlotta!

Irritated now. Impatient. Peremptory.

Oh angry ghost.

Burst of wind, gust, sudden upspark of flame, tinkling, sighing, coruscation of glass. The boxes sway.

Carlotta!

Finally I see her, just a glimpse, between the stacks. Tangled gold gleam, pale smooth cheek, whorl of ear. Pink and white.
She’s beautiful, your Ma.

Carlotta!

There is another fierce burst of wind and the door flies open, Harry Owen is saying,
It’s a damn fine vessel!

My father is less certain. Though Harry Owen thinks they should take advantage immediately.

But,
he says,
you must make more glass. She won’t go on like this forever, you know.

Yes.

My father admits that this is true.

Nobody will give money for nothing
, says Harry Owen.

I emerge then, into their company, and Harry Owen tells me that the patroness, she who
has been taken
, has donated a small, seaworthy vessel for their use, his and my father’s. It’s wonderful news!
And a diving suit
, he says,
the latest thing. Rouquayrol and Denayrouse.
Great excitement, expressed as bristling of beard.

Less so for my father.
I’m n-not an ex-p-plorer, Harry.

Eyes large and dark, thin, pale gesture toward a neck. I look at him closely: he’s a stranger, too. He notices me looking. Expression turns evasive.

I’m d-doing the best I c-can, Harry.

This is for my benefit also.

Anxiously rubbing one wrist against the other.

A sensation as of sinking through black water, bubbles rushing upward, colliding, humming as of a thousand bees in my ears, or is that just the wind—

The wind.

The shed door banging in it. Clatter now, of hail on the roof. I have seen what I should not see.

The fine, translucent hands, delicate fingers, nails like seashells, tiny, perfect. Mother of pearl.

This has been his real work.

My mother is and is not on the sea.

Harry Owen says,
Come! Let’s go inside. We can discuss it further in the morning.

Some things, though, cannot be discussed. My father locks the shed door behind us, carefully slips the key into his waistcoat pocket. In the new world, the gangway has been lowered, my aunt’s hand is on my shoulder, she’s pushing me, a gentle hand but insistent, the moment of embarkation has come,
Carlotta,
she’s saying,
Carlotta, it’s time to go.

ON A WINTER NIGHT A TRAVELER

On Christmas eve, late, I mounted the East Cliff in the rain: a ginger giantess, orphaned now, hugging my thin coat around me, carrying my sole remaining possession, a broken suitcase tied with twine. Below me, as I climbed, Whitby spread itself, the same sea-spittled, brine-slicked place it had ever been, stinking of rot and ocean, the harbor with its ships groaning restlessly at anchor, the cottages huddled stoically together like barnacles on a rock, backs turned, windows bundled, releasing only, like errant fingers beckoning, thin shafts of light that hinted at the hidden lives lived behind the tightly closed shutters and carefully drawn shades. I could not see the Birdcage, from where I stood; perhaps that was just as well, for it was my home no longer. I couldn’t see the
Emerald Isle
either where I knew it must be, turning at anchor, restless in the tide. Whitby was a place I knew, and yet I did not: it had been made strange for me; there was no longer, here, a door I could knock on, and expect to be let in, except, perhaps, for one. Penniless I mounted toward the Ravenscar Hotel and my future, whatever it might hold. I had been summoned there, and so I went.

As for that place, which had loomed large and mysterious over my childhood, it burned like a torch above the darkened city, threw off mad sparks of light and laughter and music, and gravel, too, from beneath the churning wheels of carriages ricocheting up and down the long drive—blurred faces turned toward me behind frost-covered windows, gawked, then were carried swiftly past, rocketing forward as I persisted in my own slow, orphan’s trudge: I a spectacle again as always, on the verge of the road with my flimsy case, my hair disheveled, my frock a baggy enigma in wool, my shoes unsuited to the snow, and yet.

•   •   •

And yet this was the one place in Whitby where they must let me in—which they did—though there was, it’s true, an exchange of glances at the threshold, the eyebrow raised.
Does Madam wish a room? No. Does Madam wish to check her, ah, bag? No—.
But the mockery of porters and bellmen, refined to the point of abstraction, were easy for me to step over and past, and I found myself, rather quickly, and for the first time ever, in that glittering, mythic lobby, where a tannenbaum stood, starred tip nearly touching the distant eminence of the dark-paneled ceiling, candles burning low and dangerously among the needles, branches festooned with gold garlands and glittering ornaments shaped like planets, seashells, saints, stars. Revelers, moon faced themselves, clustered like moons at the foot of the tree, festive hats tipped back at dangerous angles on seal-sleek heads, clutching their stemware as they toasted together giddily over the fizzing fruit of the second fermentation.

Anybody who cared to look could have seen that I didn’t belong there—gawky goony bird that I was, with my shabby clothes and my twined-together bag; but nobody looked, or else they looked quickly and then looked carefully away, in the usual mannerly violence of exclusion that is practiced in such places. Stranger in a strange land, that was I.

Until finally, from among one of the groups surrounding the tree, a single figure detached from the many, came toward, extended.

It was a woman, with long, straight, dark hair, wearing a snug, black velvet sheath with a low-cut bustier, droplet of pearls at the white throat, tapering black gloves, wristlets of marcasite gently tinkling, giving off those characteristic cold, black sparks.

I did not take her hand.

Sound of amusement at the back of the throat. The hand withdrawn.

You’re like your father in that
, she said.
He was stubborn, too
.

Of course it was she: I had recognized her immediately. It was Anna, my aunt.

She knew me, too, of course, there was a conflict of eyes between us then, as we sought and found in each other that which was familiar conflated with that which was strange; then she took me by the arm, and moved me away from the crowd. They were glancing at me curiously now that she’d made me visible by acknowledging me; they were gawping at my ginger frizz, all right, judging me, surreptitiously, over their shoulders, through their lorgnettes, from beneath the glittering brims of their holiday hats, oh yes, they were taking me in, every inch, with a smirk, and finding me lacking. So I performed the curtsey my mother taught me, holding out, with the tips of my fingers, the edges of my ill-mended colorless skirt, so as to expose my laddered stockings, and taking a bow, low and deep, and holding it, that bow, right foot forward, left knee bent, just as Clotilde showed me, until, in consternation and embarrassment, they were forced one by one to look away, and hotly to reconsider the bubbles in the depths of their champagne.

She, of course, did not look away, but instead looked more closely, with an ironical lift of a single, darkly penciled eyebrow eloquent as a hieroglyph incised on pale marble.

I hoped you’d come
, she said, quite calm, as if she’d assumed it all along.

Which was presumptuous: for I had debated, when I received her letter. More than six months my father had been gone, by the time she finally wrote me.

You should have come to me
, said I, tartly I fear,
after all, I’m the one who’s orphaned and alone, my world emptied out of protectors and friends, and I only sixteen—

She said nothing in answer to this, but her grip on my arm tightened, and I felt, in the place where we touched, a soft shudder, by which I knew my remark had struck home. She looked down, hair sliding forward to hide her eyes, large and dark, which so resembled my father’s.
Come
, she said, and began to propel me, not quite against my will, through the glittering public rooms of the Ravenscar Hotel. Each room was a new chapter of festivity, here diners tucking into venison and chestnuts, there dancers moving together at a leisurely pace, like dreaming, ladies’ gloved hands on gents’ arms, all of us somnambulating, they and we, through a sweeping diminuendo that took Anna and me all the way to the broad, red-carpeted staircase, then up, through and around a complication of hallways like lovers’ knot. Mirrors blazed along the walls, reflecting, as if at a great distance, pale intimations of movement that I recognized as ourselves, mounting yet another flight of stairs. Finally Anna paused, fumbled at the wall, and disappeared into a rectangle of light.

With only a moment’s hesitation, I followed.

Behind the door of Room 301 I found her, once my eyes had adjusted to the glare of the gaslight, sprawled out on a bed richly wrapped in softly ambiguous undulations of vermillion and gold; she had taken off her shoes, and comfortably stretched her toes in the direction of the hearth, where a fire fiercely blazed.

Relax
, she said.
It’s all mine; I’ve rented the entire floor. Make yourself at home.

A gesture urged me to come join her in that luxuriant wilderness of pillows, but I chose, instead, a nearby upright chair of red velveteen that clashed brilliantly with my hair.

She laughed.
You’re just like him
, she said,
he wouldn’t have sat next to me neither, at least not yet. Though you don’t look like him much, nor much like her, for that matter.

There was something, I thought, derogatory in the way she’d pronounced that
her
, which, for all that it was justified, caused me to jut out my chin, pridefully as I could.
I’m like my grandfather
, I said,
the explorer, Felix Girard.

She laughed again, and finished me with a smile that disarmed somehow any perturbations I felt, so that I slipped lower in my chair, and took a moment to contemplate the room in which we sat, taking in the plush, enveloping cossetingness of it, the thickness of the carpet into which my feet had sunk, and, seemingly, disappeared; the veritable mummification of the windows beneath layer upon layer of curtains that served to disguise utterly the distinction between windows and wall, all of it vermillion and gold like the soft ambiguities that swathed the bed, and all of it hectic with reflected gaslight. The tops of the bureaus, of which there were many, were crowded with knickknacks, hairbrushes, powders, pins, jewelry spilling from casks, pictures in silver frames, all of it suggesting that the occupant of these rooms had made herself thoroughly at home. The mantel above the hearth was likewise crowded with objects, some of which looked strangely familiar: small, ambiguous, glassy shapes, strange bristlings, my father’s work.

My father’s things!
I cried.

They’re mine
, she calmly said, stretching out her toes toward the fire,
I paid for them. I was his patroness, you know. It was I who paid your bills. It was wonderful of me, was it not?

She patted her pillows again, which invitation I once again ignored.

You can look at those pictures if you want. Go ahead! Put your nose in among ’em if you must—they won’t bite. You’re a Dell’oro through and through all, though you don’t look like un. I’ll put the pictures in your hands then if I must—

And jumping up from the bed in a single, catlike movement she joined me by the fire, and began gently, oh very gently (these objects, clearly, were precious to her), taking up the daguerreotypes in their silver frames and, making good on her threat, forced them, one by one, into my reluctant hands. Why did I resist? I don’t know—why do we do anything? As I had no choice now, I looked at these pictures, which were of strangers, but familiar to me. Here was one of two children, a boy and a girl, standing stiffly in their Sunday best; here a stern-faced man gazing out from behind glasses like twin silver moons; here a little boy standing next to a pony on the Scaur, his eyes directed off somewhere, away from the camera—

Oh! It was me he was looking at in that one. Mama never forgave me for ruining it. His birthday it was, his tenth. We had a lovely day that day.

She caressed the picture fondly.

He must have talked about me
, she said.
I was so angry when he left. He left me, you know. High and dry on Henrietta Street, without so much as a word, and went off to sea with that awful man, your grandfather, and that awful woman, your mother—yes, high and dry he left me, high and dry.

But I’m over that now. I’m not angry anymore. Not for a long time
.

My father looked for you
, said I.
It’s we who were all alone, after she left us—and he looked for you—in Henrietta Street—and all the other streets—up and down, at the top of the cliff, at the bottom, on the Scaur, everywhere—all over Whitby. You were gone.

Yes
, she said slowly, taking the picture from me, and putting it back, and perching herself on the foot of the bed, among the wraps and cossetings.
That’s right, I was gone by then. I was married by the time Leo came back. As you can see, I’ve been left a wealthy woman: widow now—an orphan—alone—like you. He paid for all this—

She made a gesture encompassing the room in which we were sitting and, perhaps, too, by implication, all that lay beyond it, the empty hallway outside, the Ravenscar Hotel, Whitby, the cold, white-capped North Sea with the
Emerald Isle
turning upon it, unseen, in the dark; and maybe more than that; maybe, even, the vast reach of all the space that had opened, and opened, that was opening still, vertiginously, between my mother and me, between my father and his father, my father and Anna, small ships all of us, fanning out, upon cold dark oceans of our own. Outside, as if in reply, the Christmas wind rattled at the windowpanes so that, inside, the thick, warm curtains billowed inward, toward us, then receded, softly, into the casements; inhale, exhale, a soft, tinkling tremor, then a settling; a sparking up and then a diminution of the gaslight, a sudden relaxation of vision, the pupil dilated in the dark.

—and for your father’s glass. My late husband. All his various goods and chattels.

Against my will almost I found myself drawn then toward the other things, my father’s things, those small, self-contained ambiguities that proved, on closer inspection, to be very specific indeed: a delicate yellow nudibranch, a prawn striped red and white like a candy cane, and something else, resting on a tiny pillow, like a reliquary itself or the finger of a saint, delicate and perfectly lifelike, down to the blush of pink beneath the nail. I had seen something like this before, picked it up now, held it in my hands, turned it over, my father’s work certainly. Though she whose finger it resembled was no saint. I am sure, could I have examined it closely enough, I would have seen, in a thread of gold, her initials, CGD’O.

But I could not; and as I held it the clock struck twelve, the curtains exhaled again, cold blasts without, spackling of rain against the windows, and fragments of sound filtering up to us from below—laughter, “Carol of the Bells,” doors slamming, a woman’s voice crying out
Oh, no, you wouldn’t
, a man’s replying,
Oh, yes, I would!
, heatless sparks thrown off some distant source of incandescence—it was a party down there, corks being popped, songs sung, dances danced (awkwardly, skillfully, gracefully, reluctantly), troths plighted and plights complexified amid the tinsel and party hats and streamers. Another world it was. It was for others, not for us, this celebration. And then she asked me, as we were each other’s only family now, what gift she could give to me for Christmas.

I want to sail,
I said.
I want to find my mother. And my father.

For I still believed, as I do now, that he was not dead, but had slipped away somehow, in search of her; disappeared, on some pathway multifarious and branching, in pursuit of his obsession. He is a Dell’oro, after all; as am I.

•   •   •

And so I find myself at the point of embarkation. Mother I have none, father neither; both gone; missing; having stepped off, as I am about to do, over the edge of the world.