The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  Inconsolable! Yes, that my mother is: inconsolable over the loss of he who returned from the deserts of Bain Dzak one day to stare at her in her cradle, a desert-stained stranger fingering the frizzy blond ringlets that had only lately exploded upon a blue-veined scalp as delicate as an eggshell. Ah, he had said, there you are, Tildy. There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.

  • • •

  He with whom she had fallen in love, and searched for, in vain, ever since. He who was always leaving.

  • • •

  Gone now, again. She cannot bear to think where he might be. So she turns her back on the ocean, averts her eyes from windows where the blue is contained, in the sitting room, in the bedroom, in the turnings of the staircases both down and up. She catches a glimpse, sometimes, by mistake, in the mirror over the mantel, above the heads of the goddesses, and then she feels something inside herself tighten ominously; she imagines a spring inside her, something mechanical, not human, a vise in her chest that constricts her heart, her lungs, her stomach, until the margins of her vision darken and she must sit down; or else she flies down the stairs into the kitchen, shouting at the girl-of-all-work, You slattern, you slut, the beef was bad, the dishes were dirty, the bedbugs are back … thus releasing, for a moment, temporarily, the tension in the spring.

  It is winter. The darkness, coming in midafternoon now, relieves her of the burden of vision. The black outside the windows presses close for a while, then Mary draws the shades, ignites the fire, sparking smoking anthracite. My mother sits, her face and breasts and thighs directed toward the dazzle of heat and light and flame. Behind her, shadows gather. Her back is cold. Outside, carts pulled by stolid ponies, their breaths hot upon the air, rumble over icy cobblestones, the lamplighter makes his progress up Bridge Street, gas jets flare in shopwindows, beneath the house the Esk rushes, the vibration is carried up, through the stone foundation, the walls, the floor … into my mother’s body, her chest, her spine, her heart.

  In the distant steppe, the camels stride …

  Holding her father’s book on her lap makes her feel better. But she does not read it; holds it, merely. It is her amulet, her talisman. Her hands are idle, her eyes half closed; she resides in a firelight dream. Suddenly a sharp, whirring buzz rouses her; jumping up, she urgently shoos the hummingbird, its gemlike feathers flashing, away from the flames. For this purpose, and this only, does she move.

  In the distant steppe, the camels …

  It is half past three. She will not stir, even to prod the coals when the fire dies. Her face is unwashed, her hair in disarray, the house dirty, the supper uncooked, Leopold’s socks unmended. When he comes in, he will find her sitting, just like this, face forward toward the hearth, hands resting, palms down and open, upon a dog-eared copy of Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak.

  I went there with him, you know. I helped him to write this book. My Papa took me with him everywhere … to Bain Dzak … to Khartoum … to Sfax … to Morocco … to Patmos … to Peru … Why do you not take me anywhere, Leopold?

  She turns upon him blue eyes puzzled, sad, reproachful. If you loved me you would take me somewhere, those eyes seem to say; or, perhaps, Why has my Papa gone away, and left me here, in this terrible place, with you?

  Madame Marie-Louise Girard, confronted similarly ten or more years before, responded with indifference, and reached for another slice of bread. This Leopold cannot do. He loves Clotilde … loves her to distraction. In the shed in the back garden where, in the cold and dark, surrounded by boxes from Bury Place, he is building his studio, he keeps every drawing of her that he made while on board the Narcissus: Clotilde at the taffrail, Clotilde in the saloon, Clotilde at the spinet, Clotilde bending over to button her boot. He still keeps, always, in his breast pocket, the piece of soft textile bearing the woven image of the fair servant girl reaching to place an emerald upon the head of the sultan’s elephant, because the girl looks so very much like Clotilde. He knew it even then, when he stole it: she is his fate. And so what can he do? He is not indifferent to her suffering.

  I … I … I will t-take you e-everywhere… .

  He promises; he means it. But he is still nervous when in her presence. He stutters. Familiarity has not diminished his fear. If anything he is more nervous, now that he has seen and touched her luminous white body, her body that seems always to recede before him, no matter how tightly he holds her. Even in the entanglement of the bedsheets she torments him—especially there.

  My Papa—

  In her grief for Felix Girard she seeks, it seems, something lost that Leopold cannot replace—that he never will replace, no matter how hard he tries. And he knows it.

  I used to stand on my Papa’s feet, and we would walk together in the garden … Dash was there … Where is he now, I wonder? Leo, where is Dash now? Is he with my Papa, do you think?

  Leo cannot answer; he hardly knew Dash; Dash, to him, is a dark figure, silent, receding into the jungles of memory.

  I d-don’t know—

  Her disappointed gaze settles upon him for a moment, then wanders away, searching around all the five fire-lit corners of the pentagonal room, along the walls where her father’s orchids hang dying of the cold; probes the tops of the curtains where sometimes a hummingbird hovers; circles six terra-cotta goddess heads on the mantel; then settles back into the hearth.

  My Papa will come for me … You’ll see. He would not leave his Clotilde … My Papa always comes back.

  It is true, Leopold thinks, that sometimes people come back. Himself, for example. He did not intend to come back to Whitby, and yet he has come back. And then, having once come back—having contradicted himself the one time—he had sworn he would not return to the Dell’oro Jet Works, and yet he has done that, too. For one entire afternoon he has stood in Henrietta Street, slightly up and around the corner from his father’s house, pressed into the alley between the millinery and the joiner’s, watching the pony carts laden with stone rumbling into his father’s cobbled courtyard, then rumbling out again, emptied (the ponies, unburdened, tossing with relief their lathered necks, slavering, their hot breaths white on the cold, damp air). He has seen, from a distance, the men with whom he’d grown up, with whom he’d sorted jet and carved it, and one more, a man he doesn’t know, a short, squat, red-faced, scowling figure, directing the carts into and out of the yard with sharp, impatient gestures of his thick hands—Matty Mohun, the man to whom, one day, in the absence of my father’s interest, the jet works shall eventually belong. He has seen Gentilessa emerge carrying a basket, a kerchief tied around her head, obscuring her face; heard Emilio, in the yard, shouting at the men. But he has not seen Anna.

  That is who he is looking for. That is who he must find.

  He has followed the path of her usual errands, through narrow streets and alleys upon the turnings of which the harbor may be seen, to the market, to the bake house, to the fishmonger’s; but her familiar silhouette, the longed-for figure of his sister, dark hair flying out behind her, eludes him. She is not in the yard; she is not in the streets. From the corner where he stands, he can see, in the window of the bedroom they once shared, the shade drawn firmly down. It is well past her time for rising. Certainly she is not there.

  He thinks, She never answered any of my letters. All those hours, writing. Hiding from Clotilde. Hiding from his fate.

  In his distress he does not know whom to ask, Where is my sister? He will not ask anyone at all until one evening, by accident, in the rain, he runs into Jamie Humber in Sandgate Street, neighbor of his childhood but a different Jamie Humber, hunched beneath the weight of jetty’s tools, his eyes older than they used to be; and then without even the preamble of a decent greeting he will blurt it out, Where is Anna? Hast seen her?—falling, in his anxiety, into the old, childish way of talking; and Jamie Humber will look at him and want to move on; his face will be streaked with dirt because he has been out on the Scaur all day; he is tired, the rain edged with ice stings both
of them as they stand awkwardly together beneath the awning of Edward Corner’s, the butcher’s shop. A half dozen slaughtered piglets and a dead goose, hanging in the window, peer over their shoulders, listening eagerly. Leo, too hasty, impatient: Hast seen her? Jamie Humber, soft voiced, gentle as ever—I ain’t seen nowt, Leo. Nowt. And then Jamie will do what he wants to do, will shrug and move on, in the dark and rain, into the crowd in Market Square and then up the cliff, toward Henrietta Street, and home.

  Nowt. I ain’t seen nowt.

  Shrugging indifferently, as if it were not he who, as a boy, once scrambled desperately behind her up the twilit Scaur, calling her name, begging her to wait, longing for her indulgent mercy, mercy received and forgotten.

  • • •

  Yes, my father thinks. Sometimes people come back. Sometimes they don’t.

  • • •

  Outside, in the cold, in the shed, where he is attempting to make himself a studio, he wonders where his sister can be. Beneath his preoccupied gaze the penciled lines of his own drawings come together and fall apart, transform into runes, maps, a palimpsest, which, if only he can read it rightly, will reveal the answer. But the answer is not there. There is only Clotilde at the taffrail, Clotilde in the saloon, Clotilde at the spinet, Clotilde bending over to button her boot; Harry Owen with his cigar; Felix Girard, hat over his face, sleeping in the smallboat; and specimens—endless specimens, drawn in exacting detail. My father, while recognizing the skill with which he has worked, nonetheless regards all these with despair. Where, he thinks, is Anna? He had hoped for her indulgent mercy himself; and finds himself, now that he is unable to claim that mercy, suddenly bereft. It has been brought home to him that he and Clotilde are utterly alone. With the remains of his stipend as Narcissus ship’s artist, with Clotilde’s small inheritance (mostly the last proceeds of Felix’s Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak), and by selling the few saleable objects from Bury Place that held neither sentimental value for Clotilde nor sufficient worldly value to interest Petrook, they have rented this five-sided, shuddering house above the river, the Birdcage, for one year. Beyond that: the abyss. Sitting by the fire with his bewildered young wife, feeling the house shiver and shake beneath them, Leopold feels their future, too, shuddering and shaking, ready to sink, to slide, to fall, to drown, to be carried, along with the rest of the offal in the River Esk, out into the cold North Sea.

  He must work. He does not know what to do. He will not carve jet again, not ever. He will never step foot inside the Dell’oro Jet Works.

  But then what?

  In the cold, dark, sleeting afternoons he rounds the streets, as if, looking into windows, he will find the solution—will, perhaps, peer into a grocer’s or shoemaker’s or a smithy and see himself looking out, staring back through time from the vantage of some happier and better-ordered future. Round he goes, up Bridge Street past Horne and Richardson, Booksellers, to Grape Lane, skirting the entry of Walker, Hunt, and Simpson, Attnys-at-Law; he clings to rough-surfaced, whitewashed walls, guides himself where the lamps have not yet been lit, until he emerges around a corner into Church Street; then up past Jonathan Smallwood’s smithy, Appleton’s brewery, and Jim Watt the chemist’s; past the My Infant Academy, Ann Davis, Proprietress; all the way up to the circle at Tate Hill, where, barely pausing to glance at the purpling line of horizon at the lip of the sea, he skirts the turning to Henrietta Street, makes his way instead down Sandgate Street, past Hugill’s Hairdressers and the Victoria Inn, into the bustle of Market Square, where, pushing through a wooden door heavy at the hinges, he makes his way into the Bird in Hand, settles himself into a dark unnoticed corner, his drawing paper unfolded from within his coat and opened surreptitiously on the bench beside him. The place is filled with fug of smoke, wet steam rising off drying woolens, voices decrying the state of the weather, the state of the state, the state of the neighbors. What a flirtigiggs she is, a woman is saying, close to him, by the reeking fire. She’s browden on un, surely, the daft fool. From farther off, by the counter: It’s cawd as hell. Better button up them gammashes, Robby. And then, softly, a whisper almost, carried to him on an eddy in the conversation: He’ll rue it tomorrow. He’ll rue it for sartain.

  In his corner my father does what he has always done when he seeks distraction: he draws; with quick absent strokes creates curve of cheek, curl of hair, plump, booted foot, shawl with fringe unraveling across a broad, matronly back. But he is not content; cannot remain absorbed; it itches at him. He cannot get quite right the mole upon the cheek, the angle of the hairpin, the knots in the yarn. This is painful; he turns away. And when he turns away, the twin anguishes from which he has sought momentary escape come rushing back, like brutal jabs—One! two!—of the butcher’s knife.

  Where is Anna?

  What will we do?

  Folding up his paper he emerges into the cold, turns left, finally, back to Bridge Street and the acrid stink of the Esk. Leaning above the water, he sees, in the semidark, shadowy objects barely discernable and therefore dreadful, circling, quivering, trembling along the surface, then disappearing into the swift, green-grey rush of the river.

  Like us, he thinks.

  What will we do?

  • • •

  All the time, of course, it is right there in front of him, although he does not see it; or rather, perhaps, he sees it without seeing. How many times, walking along Church Street, has he passed, without a second glance, Argument’s Glasswares, with its ambitious glittering window, lighted from below by brilliant, jewel-bright jets of gas? Or, if he happens to be walking on the opposite side of the street, the somewhat darker but no less crammed shop front of Argument’s chief competitor-in-trade, William Cloverdale? Perhaps the translucence of the glass has allowed it to hide itself from him; perhaps that is why, passing these windows, he has not looked inside, at and then past the wares—the everyday glasses and plates, the wine goblets, the candy dishes, the deep green and burgundy decanters, the vases and goblets, the figurines, the paperweights, and other, more fanciful creations—to see the glow of the ovens beyond, the flare of the fires, the white-hot, rotating globes and cylinders of glass, the objects being made.

  What, after all, is my father, if not a maker of objects? A creator of things from nothing? Despite the lessons of his cousin, Giorgio Dell’oro, it seems clear that my father still does not, at this time, comprehend his own true nature. He is still searching.

  In the end it is my mother who sees, and understands. On one of her few excursions outside the Birdcage, on the rare day cold but clear, strolling down Church Street in her blue shawl and fur muff, averting her eyes from views of the sea, Clotilde pauses, just for a moment, in front of a window, to rest; the window happens to belong to Argument’s Glasswares. The name on the door, Thomas Argument, means nothing to her, although it would to my father, were he to notice it, since Thomas Argument is the son of Argument the knacker, whose yard Leopold walked past many times, as a boy, on his way from Henrietta Street down to the Scaur, and vice versa. The Arguments are an old Whitby family; Thomas is not the first to resent the family trade but he is the first to succeed in leaving it. He fought to leave it, tooth and claw; to remove himself from it and to remove it from himself, to eradicate, from his very being, even the faintest clinging molecule of the knacker’s yard. He is a fiercely competitive man—the brightness of the gas lighting in his window being directly proportional to the nearness, in time, of the reek of rendered livestock, the rattle of disarticulated skeletons, in his past. Can the brightness of the light blind the passersby to the too-close proximity of corpses? Can pure white heat burn away the stink of death? Thomas Argument thinks so. He stakes his livelihood upon it. The gaslight in his window, in the evening, is dazzling white, dazzling hot, and it is reflected, magnified, ferociously, again and again, in a hundred faceted surfaces of glass.

  But it is still early afternoon when Clotilde rests against Argument’s window, so the gas jets aren’t yet lit. All she sees in that vast and
flawless pane is an unexpected and therefore unbearable reflection of the sea. It is because of this—to escape the sea—that she opens the door of Argument’s Glasswares and ducks inside. As she does, a tiny bell jingles merrily above her head. Immediately she is absorbed into a world shadowless and clear, sharp and sharply articulated; she must blink several times, so intense is the winter sunlight refracted in shelf upon shelf (the shelves, extending from floor to ceiling, are much taller than my mother is) of Thomas Argument’s pitchers and sugar bowls, his saltcellars, his magnifying glasses, his oil lamps, his hourglasses and pipes, his glazed boxes and dangling chandeliers, his millefiori paperweights and parti-colored perfume bottles, his sherry glasses and wine glasses and brandy snifters … and his mirrors.

  In Whitby Thomas Argument is known for his mirrors. He makes them himself, casting the glass in his shop, painting the silver foil on the backs of the plates with his own brush. This is part of the competitiveness of Thomas Argument: his mirrors must contain no flaws, no warps, no blurs, no bubbles. His rival across the street, William Cloverdale, makes mirrors, too; once Thomas Argument, who looks very closely into things, found a bubble in one of Cloverdale’s mirrors, and this, for Argument, was a triumph. A bubble in glass is a great misfortune, sir, a great misfortune, madam, Argument has been known to tell his customers, because a bubble, madam, is a flaw; and what is flawed is fragile; and what is fragile can break—never forget it. Argument has certainly never let Cloverdale forget it, referring, whenever they meet, to the misfortunate bubble. Of course it is unpleasant; Thomas Argument is not always a pleasant man. But his mirrors are very good, this even William Cloverdale must concede. Argument makes mirrors that can turn a single, poor room into an endless suite, a dark claustrophobic hallway into a maze. Light, reflected in his mirrors, is more vivid; colors are brighter; shadows more dense; faces more beautiful; images are multiplied, fragmented, reduced, distorted … But my mother has not heard about Thomas Argument’s mirrors, and, overwhelmed, she does not notice them, hanging along the back wall of the shop (the better to reflect, to magnify, to multiply Argument’s wares, which are vast enough in any case), until it is too late—until she suddenly finds herself a hundred times reflected (a small woman, blond, pale, astonished), staring over her own shoulder, a hundred times, into the cold, unblinking blue eye of her enemy, the sea.