The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  Because that is what he does suppose. Although, if she has betrayed him, there is no real evidence of it. A whiff of scent in the glasswares shop. The trailing edge of a familiar skirt, disappearing behind a closing door in the High Street. The sound of a woman’s laughter, familiar or perhaps not, stifled at his approach.

  This is not evidence.

  This is my father’s imagination.

  It torments him all the time. Even in the overwhelming black heat and stink of the furnace. When he eats. When he walks.

  He is only free when he draws.

  • • •

  Your drawings … which remain, at present, the sole scientific record of these wonderful animals …

  • • •

  It is hard to know at what point, out in his studio, in the glasshouse, in the street, he rereads Harry Owen’s letter and thinks, If only I could make them in glass!

  At some point he does think it. Lying in bed, perhaps, contemplating my mother’s turned back.

  • • •

  If only I could make them in glass!

  • • •

  I prefer to imagine it comes to him in a moment of creative ferment, not in a moment of cuckoldry. I like to imagine him in the street, his hands filled with papers, a disorganized flurry of papers—his drawings, on the way to the post, perhaps—passing the window of William Cloverdale, Argument’s ever-bested rival, chancing to look in at a display of glass eyes on a velvet tray (Just the kind of thing, Thomas Argument would say, has said, a hundred times, in my father’s hearing, that holds that fool Cloverdale back!) and thinking:

  I could make them in glass!

  But he cannot make them in glass. Not as long as he works for Thomas Argument. And even if he could get access to the batch, gain independent use of the tools … how could he do it? The material is light and strong and supple, but the tools used in Argument’s glasshouse are coarse, and coarse tools create coarse objects. What do Argument’s heavy, cut-glass goblets and pretentious lusters have in common with the delicate, questing tentacles, the soft mouth, of the rosy anemone?

  But those eyes in Cloverdale’s window … the hazel irises shot through with threads of gold, the deep browns, the filamentous blues and greys … like living things. Living glass.

  Glass is flesh.

  There must be a way.

  Or, perhaps more aptly:

  There is a way, but Thomas Argument doesn’t know what it is.

  • • •

  I imagine it would have been a turning point for my father—a small jubilation—the diminution of a hated (though as yet only barely consciously acknowledged) rival.

  There is a way; Thomas Argument doesn’t know what it is.

  Nor does he care.

  I imagine there must have grown, in my father, a certain disdain for Thomas Argument then. A relieving disdain. A diminishment of the fear inspired in him by those expressionless black eyes.

  • • •

  Of course this is all speculation. I don’t know what happened, really. A process took place, and this is how I imagine it. I try to imagine it to my father’s advantage. But the bare fact is that, after two and a half years in the employment of Thomas Argument, during which time he has advanced only from the position of taker-in, a boy’s job, to footmaker, a better job, a man’s job, but one allowing no creative independence, my father will transfer his allegiance directly across the street, to William Cloverdale, Argument’s nearest competitor—into what Argument calls That dingy little Cloverdale establishment. In Cloverdale’s shop, small as it is, dark as it is (lacking the brilliant gas jets that emblazon Argument’s Glasswares, its more modest window must depend for its sparkle on sunlight, a scant resource in Whitby in the winter), my father will work, for the first time, with the lamp.

  Argument’s Glasswares doesn’t do lampwork, Thomas Argument seeing this kind of glassmaking as backward-thinking practice, tawdry, fairground trickery, gypsy’s trade, suited for itinerant makers who set up stalls in the street where they make little glass animals, glass ships webbed with glass rigging, replicas of the abbey ruins, and other mementos for the mantelpiece, intended to amuse sentimental women, small children, summer tourists, and others who lack serious discernment in glass.

  William Cloverdale, of course, can’t afford to be finicky about lampwork, not with Argument’s window, which some might describe as a fairground in itself, glaring at him, full wattage, from right across the street. William Cloverdale will make whatever people will buy.

  • • •

  Who is this man, Cloverdale, with whom my father has linked his fortunes?

  • • •

  He is Thomas Argument’s opposite: fat where Argument is lean, short where Argument is tall, coarse where Argument is smooth, terse where Argument is talkative. He is a red-faced, squat, balding, muscular man, bullnecked, with thick arms like butcher’s arms (shades of Felix Girard in this)—it is easy to imagine him wielding the cleaver, strongly, through meat and blood and bone, although, in fact, he wields the blowing iron, the punty, the pincer, and the wood jack, artfully as Thomas Argument does—more artfully. When he bears himself forth into the world, which is often, he does it gut-first, fearlessly, yet with a delicacy unexpected, unnerving even, in a man of his size. There is something surprisingly subtle about him, in word as well as deed. More than one customer has been startled, in the act of fingering a vase or a doorknob in Cloverdale’s shop, to find the man looming suddenly at his elbow, so silent and light of foot is this vast, leather-aproned, flux-and-enamel-stained figure, who frequents the Fox, where he drinks freely of bitter, ale, and beer; who is not a gentleman; who does not aspire to be a gentleman; and who thinks Venice is a term Thomas Argument invented in order to stimulate the sale of violet and blue latticino glass.

  • • •

  William Cloverdale is a devotee of the candle. He does not believe in gas lighting in shops or showrooms or bedrooms. He does not believe in electrical conduction, in foreign food, or in foreign travel. He is fairly certain the Far East does not exist. It isn’t that he thinks progress is a dirty word; it just isn’t a word he knows.

  In his shop shiny objects grow dusty, and are allowed to remain so.

  • • •

  Glass eyes are his specialty. He enjoys making them, and he does it well.

  • • •

  It makes sense, of course. What better meeting place for the coarse delicacy, the delicate coarseness, of a William Cloverdale? The perfectly bluegrey iris of a perfectly convex glass sphere made for shoving into a raw, empty socket in somebody’s skull. Glass and flesh, together.

  It’s easy to understand why Thomas Argument would find this work of Cloverdale’s repellent, even threatening: the shadow of the knacker’s yard again, prosthesis as dismemberment, glass rendered flesh; flesh rendered glass (because what is the sand, the ash, the manganese, the arsenic Argument is melting in his furnace, if not flesh broken down into its constituent elements, flesh rendered earth rendered glass?). No wonder Thomas Argument shudders each time he passes Cloverdale’s window and looks into all those staring glass eyes; no wonder he cries Dingy! Tawdry! Backward-thinking! Fairground trickery! Those eyes simultaneously remind and expose him: knacker’s son!

  My father, of course, has no such sensitivity. I like to imagine Leopold, in the street, with his drawings in hand (these bound for the post and London and Harry Owen), pausing at William Cloverdale’s window, and having an epiphany.

  Glass is flesh.

  • • •

  The apprenticeship with Cloverdale is a risky proposition. Leopold will be paid by the piece. If what he makes sells, he earns. If not, then not. Difficult terms, given his and my mother’s impecunious state, his lack of experience with glass, and the marginal nature of Cloverdale’s business. Yet my father accepts them, and there appears, in the Whitby Gazette, the following advertisement:

  William Cloverdale, Glassmaker

  Since 1824

  Introduce
s Signor Leopoldo Dell’oro

  Master Glassmaker Extraordinaire

  Exclusive—from the Continent

  Maker of Glass Eyes

  Mineral Teeth

  Porcelain Prostheses of All Kinds

  • By Appointment Only •

  Lies, of course: Cloverdale’s bid to outdo and annoy his neighbor and competitor. For as it will emerge, outchaffing Thomas Argument where he cannot outsell him is something the tight-lipped and subtle William Cloverdale enjoys. He has, perhaps, hired my inexperienced father on this basis alone. After all, the arrangement is risky for Cloverdale, too—he will invest his time, his space, and his materials on an untried novice, when he has little of any of those things to spare. Perhaps Leopold has shown Cloverdale some of his drawings, which demonstrate skill and artfulness, patience, and the kind of exactitude needed for the creation of “porcelain prostheses of all kinds.”

  Or perhaps William Cloverdale has simply seen an opportunity to get on Thomas Argument’s nerves.

  This is, after all, a realm within which Thomas Argument cannot fight back. He will not, cannot, ever, make glass eyes, mineral teeth, prostheses. The union of glass and flesh is a horror to Thomas Argument, a chimera unbearable to his temperament, which otherwise seeks out, actively, glasswork wonders and curiosities of all kinds.

  No doubt he’s put out, too, by the exoticism of this Signor Leopoldo Dell’oro, Master Glassmaker Extraordinaire, with its implications of Araby, of foreign soils and glasswork magic, all of which have, up to now, belonged to him exclusively: his Venetian latticino, his Parisian cristal opaline, his Bohemian marbled lithyalin and bright yellow pieces of Annagelb. The Count von Buquoy is his personal friend! Whereas William Cloverdale has never even left Whitby, except to visit his niece in Staithes.

  Thomas Argument is annoyed. If chaffing Thomas Argument is his wish, William Cloverdale has almost certainly succeeded. This alone, to Cloverdale, may be worth the risk of hiring my father and paying him by the piece. My father’s career: founded on a joke.

  And so Leopold gives his resignation; Argument accepts it wordlessly, with a thin-lipped canny smile, handing over without protest my father’s modest remaining pay, a small sum, and having paid it he is back at the Birdcage the very same evening, projecting onto the parlor wall, for my mother’s amusement, with a magic lantern from his collection, the image of a forest burning—Leopold hears Clotilde’s shriek of combined delight and fear as specular birds, fleeing the illusion of flame, emerge from among dark pines and seem to swoop out, into the room—

  Oh, Mr. Argument! It is so real—!

  —as he passes through the downstairs, out, again, into his studio.

  • • •

  In this regard, nothing, it seems, has changed.

  • • •

  But in another regard, everything has.

  My father will use the lamp for the first time.

  He will not work at a furnace (although William Cloverdale does have one of those—a small, outdated, soot-puffing old beehive that barely suffices to heat the batch). Rather, he will sit at a broad table, surrounded by rods of glass of various thicknesses and colors, by containers of metal oxides, and by an array of fine-handled metal tools, wicked, gleaming sharps and hooks, pliers and pincers and shears, by delicate, soft-bristled brushes. The lamp itself, at which he will work, is just a tin cup containing a wick and paraffin, with a bellows beneath to fan the flame, controlled by the glassworker’s—William Cloverdale’s—now my father’s—foot. There is a hot metal plate for keeping the glass pliable while it is worked, a crucible in which to cool it when it is finished. That is all.

  He will work in a small room at the back of William Cloverdale’s shop, surrounded by cabinets filled with drawers of glass rods and glass sticks and glass-eyes-in-progress; by completed glass eyes awaiting fittings; and by glass eyes that have failed. These fascinate Leopold most of all—the failures. Whether out of perversity or a reluctance to waste his materials, Cloverdale keeps a wooden box full of them—the eye with a pupil shaped like a rabbit; the one with the impossibly beautiful, impossibly, inhumanly violet iris; another with the white tinted green—a case of too much iron in the batch (Leopold has already learned, from Thomas Argument, that iron in the batch can be balanced by manganese, the green tint eliminated, the white made pure again; in the case of this eye, William Cloverdale hasn’t bothered); the eye with the edges ground too sharp for any man to tolerate; the eye that is too large, too long; and one that is very small—a tiny bowl that fits the tip of Leopold’s index finger, with a diminutive grey-green iris—the eye of a child … apparently perfect, unclaimed, in the box marked “Scrap.” Whose eye is this? My father turns it around on his fingertip, a small, staring cap of blue glass, a false interiority, disembodied embodiment, an enigma; shivers slightly as he feels himself caught in its sightless gaze. Seen and not seen.

  Cloverdale should have melted it down by now, melted all of them down, returned them to the batch. And yet he has not.

  It is a reluctance that my father understands.

  (Glass is flesh …)

  This is the beginning. Beyond doubt it started here. He will always be surrounded by multiple gazes when he works in this room, watched yet not watched; will grow accustomed to knowing that when he is here, he is simultaneously always and never alone. This doubledness is natural; it will become restful in time; in time my father will relax beneath those watching eyes, beneath their gaze he will shape more gazes like them, melting, first, in the slender, red-hot jet of his lamp, a white glass rod from which he will tease forth the form of the bulb or bowl that is the prosthesis itself, carefully measured; then the colored rod (made from smaller, intertwined rods of blue and black and grey, or green and copper, or brown and gold, that William Cloverdale has braided together himself at his furnace), a slice of which will form the iris; then the black flux, comprised of equal parts manganese and iron oxides, with which he will paint the pupil; and then the clear, curved dome of glass that overlays it, the delicate half bubble of faux cornea. When it is completed, he will place this object that is an eye and yet is not, this piece of glass that is and is not flesh, into the crucible for cooling.

  There cannot be any flaws. What is inconvenient in a candy dish or a luster is critical here. A glass eye must not crack. Imagine the consequences! My father does, he sweats and grows anxious at the lamp, imagining. But in the crucible the glass eyes cool carefully, reliably, evenly. They gaze with calm indifference upon my father’s puffing anxiety. He has caught it from Thomas Argument, this mania for flawlessness, and it serves him well in the making of William Cloverdale’s glass eyes.

  • • •

  It is not, of course, the only mania that my father and Thomas Argument share. She rotates in his mind all the time, as he melts the glass in the flame, as he presses and manipulates it, caresses it with his metal sharps and tweezers, paints it with the fine-haired brush, anneals it. This living glass that is warm but not alive, that looks at him without seeing, gazes with the calm, cold indifference of flesh that is not flesh.

  Her gaze, too, seems cold very often now, when it deigns to fall upon him.

  She is against his leaving Thomas Argument although she will not say so. What, after all, can she say? She will not protest aloud, will not tell him. Instead he has to read it in the quality of her turning away from him, which is a new turning away, different somehow from all the other turnings. Her various averted profiles a series of runes for him to decipher. The averted face a palimpsest. And the body. Her face. Her body. Not glass but the actual body, actual flesh, which turns away from him, like pages turning, over and over again. Certainly she is flesh but in her silence she seems almost to become glass. She is so fair, so blond, so cool, so translucent. She glows from the inside, like glass when it is hot. Yet looking into her eyes he sees nothing. This is like glass, too. Glass looks back but it does not recognize. It may be inscribed but it does not read. Runes cannot read themselves. Nor can
she.

  It would be best, he’d feel better, if she’d shout angrily, nag him, yell about the money, at least, if nothing else, but she does not. This in itself is a warning, a sign. This indifference to her own fate, which is so closely, so dangerously, even, entwined with his. How can she be indifferent? She just is. She says, Look what Mr. Argument brought me yesterday. Isn’t it nice? By which means he is made to know that despite his action, the visits continue. Inevitably.

  He should forbid them but he doesn’t. To forbid is to accuse, and of what, after all, can he accuse her? Of loneliness? Of boredom? Of missing her lost Papa, he who was everything to her? Is she not allowed to have friends?

  Because as of yet it is all still in his imagination: the whiff of scent which may or may not be familiar; the skirt disappearing, perhaps or perhaps not, behind a door that closes, maybe abruptly, in the High Street; the woman’s laughter that ceases, or so it seems, at his approach. This is all in him, not in or of or from her. And he knows enough to know it. Or, at least, he realizes he does not know what is real and what is imagined, and so, in his actions, he carefully assumes it is all imagined, assumes her innocence, does not accuse. Will never.

  He doesn’t want to make her life worse. That’s not what he wants at all. On the contrary.

  • • •

  But in his head it is different. In the privacy there he tortures himself. The thoughts rotate constantly in his mind, the whiff of scent, the skirt, the laughter, as he melts glass in the flame of the lamp, pressing it, shaping it, manipulating it with his delicate tools; or as he turns round and round, on the tip of his index finger, a small glass eye in blue and grey, taken from a box marked “Scrap.” Whose eye is this?

  No doubt William Cloverdale knows, but Leopold never asks. He thinks of slipping it into his pocket, this small, living-but-not-alive object, as if he could hatch it there like an egg, or guard it, just make sure it is safe; but he doesn’t do that either. He always puts it back in the box, but he revisits it often.

  For whom is this intended?

  Glass is clear, and yet my father cannot find clarity. Flesh and glass, intention and action, seem strangely obscured and without boundary. He thinks: I am a ridiculous figure, my future is based on a joke, my present a tragedy, my past a series of random shufflings across distant and near cities and moors and oceans. My sister is gone. Where?