The Glass Ocean (24 page)

Did you make these, Mister Dell’oro?

Cloverdale holds up, at the tip of a tweezer, something small, fleshlike, unnameable.

My father says nothing, nods; somehow the vibration of the nod is carried on the thickness of the air to William Cloverdale, who is not looking up, who looks down, rather, heavy lidded, terse lipped, at the mess upon the bench.

Using my stuff?

Yes.

And my tools?

Yes.

What are they, Mister Dell’oro?

My father cannot answer this question, not entirely. Silence the only solution.

So Cloverdale says, still pleasant:
It is disgraceful, Mister Dell’oro. I ought to have known. Crazy furriner.

He looks at my father now. Or rather, he looks up, smiling, but his gaze is focused somewhere above and behind my father’s head.

My father’s response is inadequate.

I-I-I—

He cannot, of course, justify what he has done.

When Cloverdale finally speaks, he speaks calmly.

That’s all right, Mister Dell’Oro. You can go now. I won’t be needing you again.

The big man’s disappointed gaze shifts back down into the crucible. He begins fishing around in it again, with the tweezer. There are no glass eyes left; he has already removed them all; but he fishes.

My father is dismissed. It takes him a minute to know it.

•   •   •

It is only when Cloverdale persists in refusing to look at him that he knows.

•   •   •

Dear Harry,
said the letter my father placed in his package,
here are a few first efforts, inadequate I am sure, but I think promising . . .

•   •   •

Returning home unexpectedly he finds the house in disarray, my mother in tears: she has found Felix Girard’s last remaining hummingbird, missing for days, between the cushions on the sofa, holds it, now, cupped, like a sun, in the palm of her hand.

THE GLASS OCEAN

I write these things in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore.

I write as if I know that they are true.

For example: In Whitby it is summer. At the twistings and turnings of the streets the sea may be seen: blue emerging behind and between whitewashed walls, black iron gates, roofs of tin or of red tile on which nets are spread. Rough fibers swollen with brine, set out to dry in the sun, which is high at this time of year; high, but sparse, brittle. There is a brittleness about everything, even the roses, of red, yellow, lavender, and white, which climb the walls of stucco and granite, pulling themselves, hand over hand, like jetties, up the trellises, the cornices, and the gutters; addressing, with their leaves and their thorns, the warped windows of the Birdcage. Gently they tap, lovingly, with their thorns, on the thick, bubbled glass, high above the River Esk.

•   •   •

I do not exist yet in this world, the old world, even though, in the new, I am addressed with various forms of desire.
Over here, Red. Walk my way, girlie! Oh, you’re a biggun, ain’t you? Come over here, Big Red!

I am desired, therefore I exist. But also I do not.

In the old world, everything is about to begin.

•   •   •

My father, Leo Dell’oro, unyoked once again, spends his days watching his wife, Clotilde, expand. Despite the season, he does not confuse her burgeoning belly with the sun. He has not the imagination for that.

My mother lies naked in the heat. Her body, in past hidden scrupulously even from herself, has become a thing of opulent display: breasts, belly, thighs, glistening—tempting, untouchable fruit, openly on offer in the middle of the afternoon. She lies on the sofa, fans herself, turns immodestly from side to side, each revolution an eclipse as she tries, unself-consciously and without success, to balance her discomfort on the worn cushions.

She need not be modest. Modesty is no longer required. There is nobody to see her. Even the girl-of-all-work, she who was nobody and who saw nothing, is gone now.

Everyone is gone.

For the first time, Leo and Clotilde are truly alone. Or rather,
we
are alone, the three of us. Because of course I am there, too; though I do not yet exist, I am a determining presence. I turn with my mother, revolve with her. We wax and wane together, she and I, on the worn-out cushions of the sofa. We seek a point of compromise. Seek and do not find.

•   •   •

Around us all is disorder, disarray bordering on squalor. With Mary gone there is nobody but my mother to do the cleaning up, and Clotilde does not clean. And so, everywhere: piles of books; old newspapers; my father’s sketches, pencils, paints; boxes, half unpacked, with half-eaten plates of herring balanced on their lids; discarded stockings; half-darned pillowcases with the needle and thread still in them; a hairbrush knotted with tangles of blond hair; a comb likewise, knotted with dark; stained shirt collars, stained shirt cuffs; scissors; opened envelopes; sealed envelopes; cold toast; and bills. Bills from the grocer, the butcher, the fishmonger, the coal merchant, the surgeon, the chemist, the tailor . . .

Leo and Clotilde survive on credit. On good will. On air. Mostly.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, roaches dine languidly on weeks-old bacon grease and drippings.

It’s not my problem, of course. We are together, we three, but their struggles are not my struggles. I am safe and well fed, turning silently on my tether, leeching off my mother, tethering her to me, opposing from within: rotating left when she turns right, then right when she turns left, migrating down when she stands up, and up when she lies down . . .

In this I mean no harm. It’s just my nature, something I can’t help. Despite this, how she complains about me:

Oh, Leo, it’s so awful . . . this thing . . . this awful thing . . . it’s so heavy . . . I can’t put it anywhere . . . I turn here and it kicks there . . . turn there and it kicks here . . . I hate it, the little monster, and it hates me . . . look at the size of my ankles! Bring me a pillow, will you? A lemonade? My Papa’s book? . . . Oh, it’s so dreadfully hot in here, Leo . . .

In the green light cast by the vines of the climbing roses, my father regards his wife, the beautiful smooth globe of the belly, the mystery of what lies within. What am I? He doesn’t know. I am an unknown substance. She doesn’t know me either, though she has her suspicions.

Such an awful thing . . . I wish I could get rid of it.

She still makes these bitter remarks, but without the old conviction—her physical assaults upon me are a thing of the past. Though she tosses and turns, rages, complains, calls me
this thing . . . this awful thing . . . this terrible thing . . . the little monster . . . the beast within . . .
she has fully acquiesced, in her way, to my presence: all the self-inflicted bruises have healed, her body ripens unimpeded, expands, blushes, softens, even seems to emanate a radiant light—

Thanks to me she has become even more lovely than she was before. Not that she is grateful. There’s no gratitude in her. She will go on, calling me names, even after I am born. It’s true: on the day after my birth day, she’ll hold me to her warm, soft, milk-scented breast, dangle her lovely blond curls in my face, stare speculatively, and say:
What an awful, ugly thing . . . it don’t favor me a bit, does it, Leo? It’s biting me something awful, the beast.

•   •   •

But this is still in the future, as well as in the past. For the present moment we are still one creature, she and I. I still dance at the end of her umbilicus, though not for long now.

Leo, my back hurts! Leo, will you rub my back? Oh, and my feet, too . . . will you rub my feet?

In the green twilight he adjusts her pillow, rubs her back, rubs her feet, then brings her the book written by her Papa, which she does not read but holds idly, the pages wilting in the heat.

That is what we’re all doing: wilting in the heat. Wilting and waiting. We seem to occupy a timeless space, he and she and I. Expectation hangs heavy above the River Esk. It hangs in all the five corners of the three pentagonal rooms of the Birdcage, fifteen corners in all.

Here are neglected Turkish carpets eaten with mold. Butterflies crumbling on their pins. Unlabeled pupae that will never hatch. My mother averts her eyes from those.

Only the river moves. It moves faster than ever—roaring and rushing, boiling over with the rotting offal of the entire city. It stinks to high heaven—stinks so badly even I can smell it, I who only provisionally can be said to have a nose.

The river is what reminds us that time is truly passing.

•   •   •

Leo—are you going out? Where are you going, Leo?

Pregnancy has heightened all my mother’s senses. She can hear my father upstairs in the bedroom, tying his shoes. She can practically hear him breathing, from any room in the house. She can sense, if it so happens, the acceleration of his heartbeat.

He does not answer her, but then appears suddenly in the turning of the stairs, unbuttoned, black hair raised up at the crown of his head in a careless, unintentional crest. Poverty has ungroomed him.

Just out to the shed.

Can’t you stay and read to me? Please, Leo?

If you like.

He is mild, does not resist, sits with her on the sofa, her feet (the toes like little pink shells) resting in his lap. He will read aloud to her from her Papa’s book even though she does not really want to hear it, because he knows (and I know, too) that she is afraid.

My mother doesn’t like to be left alone with me. Not since the day, a week ago Monday, when the midwife came and pressed on me, hard, with her bony, long-fingered hand.

Any day now. She’s a’most ready. A big, strong barne. Healthy.

She has prognosticated me. She a sinewy, grizzle-headed crone from among the cottages at the bottom of the cliff—not the same one who sold my mother the hellebore and juniper leaf, but one of that kind. Bony, adept hands. It is she who will yank me out when the time comes, when my mother gets tired of pushing. This is who will attend my birth instead of the surgeon. And there will be no chloroform. Leo and Clotilde cannot afford that.

Leo will avoid most of the screaming by retreating into his shed.

But this is not yet. Not yet. For now he holds my mother’s feet on his lap, the ankles swollen but the toes still small and pink as ever, the soles delicately lined, heels calloused and dirty because she has, of course, given up on shoes as well as on clothes and because there is nobody to wash the floors anymore. A thin, grim layer of grease coats everything now.

Maybe it won’t come at all. Maybe it will stay in there forever.

This is my mother dreaming. It is her waking dream of timelessness, here in the crooked house above the river, in the summer heat, with the windows lit green by the vines of climbing roses. And it nearly seems possible—nearly. That I will never be born. That she will hold me inside forever, will stop time, through sheer strength of will, because she is afraid to let me out.

She is afraid, of course, that I, whom she wanted so badly to kill, will rip her to pieces in the process of being born.

My father says, gently,
It will come.

He still loves her, you see. In spite of all.

There is a silence between them then. His words are devastating, dream shattering, though this is not intended.

Beneath them the river rushes, carrying clots of blubber and bone inevitably out to sea.

Inevitability. That’s the thing. My father has recognized mine, and doesn’t flinch from it, while my mother strives to forget. To forget, and to remain suspended in timelessness.

In this, though, her body betrays her. She is betrayed by her body, again. She ripens unwillingly. In the humidity her hair grows thicker and more curly, becomes a mane. Unbrushed, unwashed, it has a strong, musky, not unpleasant smell, such as might emanate from a healthy, fecund animal. This is what she is. What she does not want to be.

Savage!

From the strength of her savagery alone she hopes she may prevent me.

•   •   •

This is her waking dream. Her dreams in sleep are of a different order. Then she dreams of birthing monsters. Flippered things. Faceless. Footless. On awakening she can only remember vague, troubling shadows.

Leo, you won’t go out today? You’ll stay with me today?

This is how afraid she is. Her knuckles white against the cushions as she lifts herself slightly toward him. Her belly like the sun.

•   •   •

Even he cannot acquiesce all the time. The sense of inevitability from which she averts her eyes has gotten under his skin, eats at him from the inside out. He knows he must provide. Because I am coming. I am inevitable.

I have no one to blame but myself
, he thinks.
I shouldn’t have stolen from William Cloverdale. It’s my own fault. I was careless
.

But he thinks it mainly out of politeness. Really, he blames me.

Beast. Little monster.

Now he works for Harry Owen only, for a pittance, out in the shed. This innovation, the arrival of the bench, and the lamp, and the oven, and the tools—the hooks and tweezers and calipers and brushes of my father’s trade—as well as the coal to fuel the furnace, is paid for by Harry Owen. In return, my father makes glass: scientific models, for which he is paid by the piece, if they pass muster.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.

My mother is unhappy about this.

It all belongs to him—the bench is his, the tools are his, the glass is his—what’s in it for us?

He pays me.
Defensively. Defiantly even. Black topknot of hair upright.

He pays you pitifully!

Enough to keep you in lace.

She is silent at this. There is nothing she can say. Harry Owen’s money has bought no lace, and my father knows it. So where did the money come from? This he doesn’t know. Thomas Argument being out of the picture, as far as he can tell. But then, the lace has gone, too: a silent disappearance. My mother has different desires now, desires that must be provided for. Clotilde eats so much now! She feeds me with entire fowls, with roasts, with whole loaves of bread, platters of herring, anything she can get her hands on. She never seems to stop eating.

And so he must make. That is his justification.

Really, though, he loves the glass. The red-hot responsiveness of it. Its lightness contrasted with the cool, heavy iron of the tools. His desire for glass is a tactile desire, a longing lodged in the tendons of his fingers, his arms, it is a physical part of him now. And then there are his creatures. That desire is emotional. The work like a living thing.

•   •   •

Despite his need for money, he will avoid, as much as possible, that block of Church Street where are located the opposed and facing competitors, Argument and Cloverdale. Were he to go, he’d see that
Leopoldo Dell’oro, Master Glassmaker
is still up on Cloverdale’s sign, that Argument’s Vesuvius is as eruptive as ever, the lines of those hoping to see it as long, or longer.

It mattered, once, that he was there. But it doesn’t matter that he’s gone. The relentless mill of their competition grinds on without him, he who was once the grist forgotten now.

That world is his no longer.

•   •   •

I have to go out, Clotilde. I have to work.

When she refuses to remove her feet from his lap he lifts them himself, gently though (he is always so gentle), cupping the rough heels in his palms.

Oh, Leo, must you—

Yes. I really must. I’ll just be outside, in the shed.

•   •   •

He won’t go to Henrietta Street, seeking help, any more than he’ll go to Church Street. No matter what their level of desperation, he will never seek his father’s help. That’s what he thinks, as he stands at the corner, looking left, then right, dark eyed, the upright crest of hair giving him an appearance of false alertness. He is like a crow about to pounce on a crumb, except there is no crumb, either to the left or to the right. And below him: that is the river, rushing, boulders looming smooth and dark beneath the surface.