The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  I know what he will do. In his studio, in the cold, in the wavering light of his oil lamp, my father will pour over his drawings from the voyage of the Narcissus; bringing out his pencils and paints, he will begin the painstaking process of copying and coloring each one. Some of the originals he will send to Harry Owen, in London. Your drawings … which remain, at present, the sole scientific record …

  Others he will keep. These are his secrets.

  • • •

  And then he will do something else.

  For each drawing, he will also begin to prepare accompanying sheets of additional sketches. He will detail each spine, each filament, each fin, each limb, each tentacle, every undulation, each swelling sinuosity of each creature, separately, from every possible angle, creating, as he does so, a map—yes, as near as he can come, with just his paper and pencils, to a three-dimensional map of each individual creature. And as he does it, he will be thinking about glass.

  • • •

  Of this I am quite certain.

  • • •

  What he thinks about my mother, I don’t really know. Perhaps he avoids thinking of her. Perhaps, with his drawing, he seeks to replace her. This may be what he is really doing, out in his studio, in the cold, as he pulls his paper and his pencils close, surrounds himself, makes, for himself, a second skin of paper within which he shelters. Perhaps he grows ignorant, unknowing, sheds knowledge there, within a fortress of paper. His actions, in regard to her, make very little sense—become, at a certain level, uninterpretable. His intentions cannot be translated. I only know that he leaves her alone with Thomas Argument many times, that that is his choice. There is a certain inevitability about it, I suppose. Viewed in retrospect, as I view it. Of course my father cannot have viewed it so; and so I can suppose that he did not know what he was doing, that he did not see the danger that was there, before his eyes, plain to be seen, were he only willing to see it.

  Although I think, perhaps, he did see it, and acted as he did, inevitably, in spite of what he saw.

  Or so that he would not.

  In retrospect, therefore, I ask myself the following:

  Did my father Leopold love my mother, Clotilde?

  And I respond:

  Yes, certainly he did.

  And then again I ask, in regard to her relationship with Thomas Argument, did my father act like a fool?

  And again: Yes, certainly. He did.

  • • •

  Of course I do not know what goes on in the Birdcage, those nights before the fire, when my father, rather than going upstairs, goes straight through the kitchen and out, taking away with him a cold slice of ham on bread, or some other scrap, some poor leftover rind of whatever those two, upstairs, have had for dinner. I am not sure, really, what my mother and Thomas Argument could talk about up there in the parlor, what they could possibly have in common. He is, after all, nearly twice her age. But he has his fads—his glass, his gas lighting, his gas furnaces, the excise tax (which he opposes, because, he says, it stifles innovation); the obnoxious behavior of the duty collectors, who hang around his shop on tax day, harassing the men; the union (which he also opposes, apparently because of the financial costs to him, but really, although he cannot say this aloud, even to my mother, because it makes him nervous to think of the men who work for him meeting together, grumbling, talking about him, complaining about him, making up stories, and especially, telling tall tales about the batch); the likelihood of communication by electrical cable (which he expects to happen soon, within the decade); or his latest trinket, obtained by him for his collection from—. It is always from a far-flung place, somewhere exotic.

  He is not an attractive man. He is long, thin, spidery, angular, uncomfortable, with long, thin, probing fingers like spider’s legs, coarse, ill-cut black hair, and dense opaque black eyes, like Hyalith glass from the von Buquoy glassworks in Gratzen—reflecting much, expressing little, other than anger or impatience, neither of which he shows to my mother, not, at least, at this stage. He acts pleasantly, dresses well, is gentlemanlike. And yet there is, at the same time, something about his demeanor that is off-putting. An edge of something, carefully disguised.

  He says, bitterly, it is the fault of the knacker’s yard that he never found a wife. Nobody wants to marry into bones and corpses. Maybe it is true.

  • • •

  He admires my mother. This is certainly true.

  He picked her up, after all, when she fainted, carried her, set her down on a couch covered with rugs and tapestries; first loosened, then removed her boots. Having lifted her in his arms, he knows how light she is, how fragile, how slender and pale her neck, her arms, her legs.

  And he is a shrewd man. He has seen how easily he can drive my father into retreat. He is a calculating man, this Thomas Argument, and he has made his calculations.

  • • •

  As for my mother, she is a beautiful woman, young, sad, and lonely. She misses her Papa terribly. She spends her days alone in the Birdcage, listening to the River Esk rushing beneath her feet. She avoids the windows, so she will not have to see the sea. She batters herself about, trying not to think of her Papa, the same way her Papa’s last remaining hummingbird batters itself along the moldings at the tops of the walls, above the windows and doors, looking for a way out, even though what is outside is the cold, the killing cold. The hummingbird does not know what it is seeking; it merely acts and reacts, instinctively responds. My mother, alone in a room with Thomas Argument, noticing that my father comes in through the kitchen and goes directly out again, and missing her dear Papa so much, does the same. Acts and reacts. Responds.

  As he produces a gift from a pocket, Argument’s hand brushes hers. This, it is clear, is an accident. To this no response is necessary, other than the usual thank you, the usual teasing smile. She caresses the gift gratefully: this time, it is a lacquered music box from China, decorated with a pattern of swallows. She turns the delicate winding mechanism, listens with an attitude of appreciation. But when he reaches out, as they sit before the fire, to touch her, taking between his fingers a strand of her hair, or laying his palm upon her arm, all in the excitement of some discussion—about the inferiority of press molding versus cut glass, for example—this is not an accident, this requires a response. Perhaps not much of a response, but a response. My mother rises, moves away from Thomas Argument, stands with her back to one of the five corners of the pentagonal room or, going to the window, parts the curtains so that she can see my father’s studio below, the hesitant pinprick of light in the inky darkness that is my father’s lamp. What is Leopold doing out there? Why isn’t he here? But my mother is all right. She has made a response, and she feels secure in it. She has moved away from Thomas Argument. This, certainly, is enough. Thomas Argument will not pursue her. He will lean forward in his chair before the fire, sit awkwardly, elbows on knees. He will not take offense. The black opacity of his eyes will remain undisturbed. For all I know, for all my mother knows, he, like my father, thinks of nothing but glass.

  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 oppress
ive. 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 hims
elf 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.

  • • •