by Lori Baker
• • •
Cloverdale shakes his beefy head and saunters away, whistling. Those that got holes in their heads will always need glass eyes, no matter what, Mister Dell’oro, he says. That is what he says.
The only accusation my father’s, against himself.
Against her.
Or perhaps there is an accusation of a sort. Those that got holes in their heads will always need glass eyes.
Leopold reluctantly departs his station at the window, returns to his lamp, to the creation of a hazel eye for a farmer’s wife who lost hers in an accident in the fields. Thresher threw a stone. That is how it happens. The thrown stone, the shattering glass, the slip of the knife, the splash of acid, the fall downstairs, the punch in the face. Diseases. Or some are born that way. The gap. The lack. The fissure.
The missing piece.
Those that got holes in their heads will always need glass eyes.
As he works, my father thinks about the people on the sidewalk in front of Argument’s Glasswares. He pictures her among them, until the image in his mind becomes so real that he believes it. He can feel her there. It is a strong feeling, palpable as a touch. It mounts in him until he is almost crazy with belief.
Were he to look, though, she would not be there. She is at home, in the Birdcage.
He resists. He longs to look, but he resists. This time.
He diverts a strand of honey-colored glass to form the initials CGD’O.
Sometimes my father also thinks or imagines that William Cloverdale has noticed these small acts of simultaneous self-destruction and homage. Sometimes Cloverdale smiles in a manner that suggests it—a sly, confidential smile. A wink. But Cloverdale never says so—just fishes the finished piece out of the crucible, measures with his calipers, looks at the color, checks it against his slips of paper, nods. Very pretty, Mister Dell’oro. A good fit. Once again.
And smacks his lips.
Cloverdale does not know.
He knows nothing about Clotilde, about Argument, about the state of Leopold’s marriage. There is no secret wink.
It is in my father’s mind, all of it.
• • •
The most recent letter from Harry Owen, though, is not in his mind. My Dear Leo, having received from Hornsby of the British Museum, Zoological Divisions, a commission … am very pleased to be able to ask of you further drawings, and to offer this small remittance for your considerable labors; and also to request further information in re: your suggestion, of the possibility of reproducing, in glass …
• • •
Here is a place for my father to disappear into, when he finds himself thinking too much about my mother, or about the volcanic emanations of Thomas Argument. A bolt-hole.
He is finally positioned to try it. He has the lamp, the rods of glass. William Cloverdale has taught, and my father has learned. He is timid though. His collar is still buttoned up tight.
Hornsby is skeptical but will pay …
Emerging into Church Street, into Thomas Argument’s crowd, my father feels something quicken inside him. Eruption of Vesuvius! Destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii!
The crowd shifts and murmurs in front of Thomas Argument’s window. They are buying tickets, already, for Wednesday next. Leopold threads his way through and between and among, feels the anxiety, the indrawn breath of the waiting, the shift and surge and ebb of it, the hoping for a seat at Argument’s spectacle.
She is not there.
Perhaps it would be better if she were. If it were for her, too, a public thing, a matter of tickets, of crowds, of waiting on sidewalks. But she is at home, in the Birdcage. Thomas Argument may be there as well.
• • •
It is a goad.
Dear Harry, while the materials are somewhat lacking …
• • •
Leopold is tepid. He is timid.
• • •
Dear Harry, though the materials are somewhat lacking and the tools imperfect …
• • •
Where does it come from, this fearfulness of my father’s? The timidity, the hesitation, the acquiescence plus qualifier? The materials are lacking, the tools imperfect. And so, too, the maker. This, I believe, is what my father is thinking. But will not say. He remembers Felix Girard’s It is wrong here. And here. He would rather hide than expose himself in an error. He does hide, feels himself hiding as he pushes through the crowd in front of Argument’s Glasswares. Head down. Shoulders hunched. If he doesn’t see them then maybe they can’t see him. But of course he sees them, feels them, strikes against them, collides, no matter how small he tries to make himself he cannot be small enough, in this crowd: shoulder jostling shoulder, elbow prodding waistcoat, fingers brushing silk, brushing velvet, brushing serge. The ubiquity of ladies’ hats, his face menaced by bristling feathers plucked with savagery from the New World. The intimate and inescapable intrusion of their perfume. GREAT ERUPTION IN THE YEAR 79! DESTRUCTION OF HERCULANEUM AND POMPEII! It is another cold day, spit of rain and stink of sea, the sky above him a ceiling, pressing down. He feels himself constrained, in his collar, in his coat, in this town. Making his way, once again, home to the Birdcage where he will find—what?
• • •
Dear Harry, though the materials are lacking and the tools imperfect, I will attempt the experiment, making no guarantee as to the outcome …
• • •
He is earlier than usual (a trick? a trap?), but he finds her alone. Of Thomas Argument there is no sign, beyond the growing profusion of gifts, which have edged in among the beloved mementos of Felix Girard. No immediate sign, then, of the hated rival, though the proximate signs remain to provoke my father. And they do provoke him. The house is chilly, damp, the old stones wet with the rushing of the river, and yet there is no fire. Leopold, adding enamel capillaries to glass eyes, subtracts from Clotilde’s coal. This, perhaps, is part of his anger, but if so, then he does not know it himself. My mother knows it. Of course.
I had a letter from Harry, he says.
She pinks with excitement.
News of my Papa?
No—n-no news. He asked me to make—he sent m-money—
He holds out the coin to show her.
But it is no use, already she has subsided, she barely listens, news of her Papa is all she wants to hear. She holds in her lap Thomas Argument’s yellow glass bird, strokes it as if it is a real bird, the imaginary plumage soft and warm beneath her palm. Her own hummingbird, the one that belonged to her Papa, has disappeared somewhere among the curtain rods; she has not seen it for several days, but she continues putting out sugar water for it regardless, and the water is drunk, which seems, under the circumstances, enough.
If he hoped to impress her with the news of his commission, to overwhelm and blot out with his new money the drama of Argument’s Vesuvius, he has failed. Clotilde, it seems, no longer cares about money, at least not about his money. What does my mother care about? It would be difficult, at this moment, for Leopold to say. He senses that a new quality has entered into her typical reserve, a quality of concealment as determined as it is fragile. She is herself and is not herself, simultaneously. It seems to him as though she has a secret that she holds fast. She would rather break than reveal it, that is what he thinks, even though the act of holding back might, in itself, shatter her into a thousand pieces.
Yet she does not break. She will not. She is determined. She is stronger than my father thinks. Her secret is not what he thinks it is.
Of course he has imagined what she must be hiding. There has been that whiff of scent, the stifled laughter, the trailing familiar edge of skirt behind the closing door, thoughts that torture him. My father’s imagination (on this subject) is, in the end, an impoverished one, rushing to the obvious conclusions.
• • •
I w-will have to work m-more, he says. But it will mean m-more money.
• • •
My mother barely glances up at this statement
, the towering irony of it. The icy pallor has returned. She does nod, though, and her mute acceptance seems to him another indication of that which he has already accepted as true, as inevitable.
• • •
She does not care what he does. If he works more, so much the better for her. His absence will be to her advantage. That is what my father, lacking in imagination, assumes she thinks.
• • •
And so he will begin.
• • •
He is surreptitious at first. In spite of what he has told Clotilde—that there will be more money—at first, in fact, there will be less: he takes what glass he needs, surreptitiously, from that which William Cloverdale has supplied for the creation of the prosthetic eyes. As he is paid by the piece, fewer pieces from more supply means greater cost to Cloverdale, therefore less money not more: less coal, fewer petticoats, scanter food, no tea, this being, perhaps, one expression of my father’s anger at my mother, although he does not think so. He does not tell her what he is doing. Simply, it happens that there is less. Nor does he tell William Cloverdale what he is doing. Instead, each day, he sets aside, surreptitiously, a few rods of glass, in various colors. This he will do, each day, until he has enough. It is clear that there will be problems. As he has said to Harry Owen, materials are lacking. There are severe limitations of color, and, what’s more, he can only steal so much. This is, after all, what he is doing—stealing—although he does not think of it that way. He has other ways to think of it. He thinks, for example, that it is all a matter of expediency, a temporary arrangement, until he can find a better. He is merely conducting an experiment, and when the experiment is completed, he will cease to borrow (this is the word my father uses, in his mind) from William Cloverdale. He practically expects his experiment to end in failure, in which case there will be no further need for borrowing anyway. The situation is, by definition, short term. And so forth. So he thinks.
• • •
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 anoth
er. 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.