The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  She gasps; cries out one or two words that she will not remember but that sound (Thomas Argument will tell her later) like My Papa! or, perhaps, more puzzlingly, the contradictory Not my Papa! Then she faints (her collapse reflected a hundred times in a hundred reflecting surfaces); sags against Argument’s crowded shelves, but so gently that nothing falls, nothing breaks; there is just an ominous shiver, followed by the soft, high-pitched, troubled sighing of glass.

  • • •

  When she returns to herself (this strange expression implying she has lost herself somewhere—and perhaps she has—or perhaps she will) she finds she is no longer in the bright main room of the shop, with its relentless light and its vertiginous shelves of glass, but in another room, darker; the light here filtered through thick, drawn curtains, a vigorous fire burning on the hearth. It is warm—almost too warm. Someone has laid her on a couch thick with pillows and tapestries; someone (the same someone?) has removed from her feet the clever little black boots that her father bought her in France. Her skirts are disarranged, her stockings exposed, but nonetheless, in this close and thickly carpeted space, she feels cosseted, wrapped, strangely protected. She feels (for the first time, perhaps, since the day Felix Girard disappeared from the decks of the Narcissus): safe.

  Madam, Thomas Argument says to her, you frightened me.

  Clotilde starts. In the semidarkness she has been unaware of Thomas Argument, except as a mysterious rescuing presence, a cosseter-in-wraps, an unseen remover-of-boots; now, suddenly, she realizes he has been sitting behind her, in a low, leather chair, all along, watching. She does not know how long he has watched her, and the sudden consciousness that it may have been a very long time fills her with shame. She colors, and is briefly confused about everything: who she is, where she is, who Thomas Argument is. She is confused at being addressed as a married woman. In her faint she has momentarily forgotten about Leopold, about her marriage. Who does he mean? Madam who? But the ring is there on her finger—evidence, clearly. Clearly Thomas Argument has noticed it. He is a man who misses very little; and so, inevitably, he has noticed Clotilde’s confusion, as brief as it is, as quickly disguised. Indeed, he enjoys her confusion, for he already perceives, better than she, everything that it contains. The only question remaining for Thomas Argument is what, if anything, he wants to do about it.

  This he will decide in time.

  Now he says again, gently, You frightened me. Are you all right?

  Yes … I … it was so bright …

  Clotilde smiles placatingly in the direction of this man who is as yet an indistinct presence in the darkness; but she does not tell him the real reason why she fainted.

  It is my fault, says Thomas Argument. The shop is very bright. Sometimes my customers are overcome. Men as well as women. You’d be surprised. The gaslight in particular is too much for some of them … it is so new.

  And there are so many … reflections.

  Yes, Argument says. There are very many reflections. I apologize. Let me get you a brandy.

  Abruptly, before she can refuse, he unfolds himself from his chair and with a swift, spiderlike motion of his long legs, disappears through a door she hasn’t noticed, into the inner recesses of the house.

  By the time he returns she has risen, straightened herself, put on her boots and buttoned them, and circled the room twice. It is filled with books. At its rear is a large desk of some heavy, dark wood—walnut, perhaps?—the surface of which is strewn with papers and what can only be called “apparatus”—small, smooth machines of ambiguous purpose. Clotilde has her fingertips upon one of these machines when Thomas Argument returns with her brandy.

  Ah! I see you have found my collection. A few toys with which I amuse myself. Would you like to see?

  Clotilde sips, grimaces slightly, nods. Argument parts the curtains, filling the room with bright light in which motes of dust dance and then settle, revealing that they stand, he and she, in a typical gentleman’s study decorated in burgundy and green—or in the study of a man who aspires to be a gentleman; and he reveals himself, also, as a gentleman or a man who aspires to be a gentleman, it is not quite clear which: an unusually tall, thin, aspiring gentleman, with small, hooded eyes and a high, hooked nose, dark hair, long arms, long, delicate, spidery fingers. The overall impression is one of disjointedness rather than of grace, yet as Clotilde watches, fascinated, those long, delicate fingers probe with surprising precision among the disorder of objects on the desk, finally selecting one by touch, it seems, rather than by sight. He holds it out to her; taking it, she finds that it is a small bronze disc, one side of which is elaborately carved with the figures of animals—a snarling tiger, a dog on its back in a posture of submission, a plunging stallion, a grinning rat, a hen on its nest, a pig with its snout thrust deeply into the earth, others—and with a finely detailed calligraphy that Clotilde cannot read. The other side of the disc is smooth, slightly convex, polished—a mirror!

  She catches the reflection of her own blue eye, stiffens unhappily.

  You’re making fun of me, she says, pouting.

  I’m not, says Thomas Argument. Take it to the window. Hold the surface to the light.

  Clotilde does as she is told, holds the mirror’s reflecting surface up to the light; instantly the images on its back are cast in bright relief onto the wall behind her, the snarling tiger, the docile dog, the foraging pig, the stallion, the rat …

  But how—

  No one knows how, says Thomas Argument quickly. It is a tou guang jian—a magical Chinese mirror. I obtained it from a fellow dealer in glass who obtained it, himself, in the Orient.

  Clotilde, whose Papa has traveled everywhere, is neither impressed nor intimidated by mention of the Orient. Thoughtfully she hands Thomas Argument his mirror.

  What else have you?

  You might like these, he says, smiling, and sets gilded spectacles on the bridge of her nose.

  Oh! cries Clotilde, they make me dizzy! I see six of your room … or eight … I am not sure how many …

  At this Thomas Argument laughs aloud. Yes, he says. I am never sure myself how many of anything I see through these glasses … they are multiplying spectacles … the lenses are made from faceted rock crystal.

  If I were to wear them very often, says Clotilde, equally often would I fall down, disgracing myself and all who know me. Have you anything more?

  More! Madam wants more? She is difficult to satisfy … this he says more to himself than to her, and strokes his chin in pretend perplexity.

  My Papa sometimes said I was, says Clotilde.

  Your Papa is a wise man, says Thomas Argument.

  Yes, says Clotilde, very serious now, almost stern, almost defiant, lower lip thrust out. My Papa is a wise man!

  Argument registers this—the sudden seriousness, the defiance, the stern self-correction, the emphasis, as if in reminder to herself, on that present tense is … Registers it, and, being himself a shrewd man (if not a wise one), says nothing. Instead he retreats into a corner, and brings forward, from behind the desk, a polished cabinet, longer than it is wide, made up of six hinged wooden panels, four long, two short, standing on a painted wooden pedestal of Dutch design; he has picked this up, despite its size, despite its awkwardness, and carried it forward, pedestal and all, carefully—gracefully, even (with surprising grace, given the disjointed appearance of his long, agile limbs)—before finally setting it down at the center of the carpet, near Clotilde’s feet.

  Madam, he says, observe.

  Clotilde does observe, for a moment, in silence; then she begins to laugh.

  Why, it is just a silly box, she says, with a window in it!

  It is, says Thomas Argument, not at all nettled, my theatre catoptrique—my splendid show-all. Look!

  He gestures toward the pentagonal peephole centered in one of the shorter end-panels of the cabinet, and Clotilde, willing despite her scorn, leans over to peer inside, pressing her eye, unsteadily because she is still laughing
, as close as she can to the glass.

  Abruptly her laughter ceases.

  Oh! she says. That is all. And then once again, rapturously:

  Oh!

  She stands quite still, leaning forward, blond hair tumbling over her shoulders, unable to look away.

  She sees an impossible paradox, a panorama inside a box, a vast desert stretching infinitely forward, sand dunes of red and gold undulating toward a distant horizon, mysterious stony obelisks, cliffs glittering with quartz, an endless ochre dome of sky; she hears—or thinks she hears—the familiar, the beloved voice—

  In the distant steppe, the camels stride …

  But, she cries, how—?

  If you will allow me …

  Thomas Argument gently draws a reluctant Clotilde away from the cabinet, smoothly turns a metal crank in its base. Look now, he commands.

  She looks again, and finds herself, this time, in the midst of a snowy forest of dense pines through which stealthy figures glide, always just slightly out of sight—the white tip of a fox’s tail retreating at the periphery of her vision—dark mountains beyond …

  But—I don’t understand!

  I will show you.

  With sensitive fingertips Thomas Argument probes the join where the cabinet’s long top panel meets its side, folds it open upon its hinges to reveal a catacomb of mirrors—sixty small mirrors, at least, attached to five of the cabinet’s six sides; on the sixth side, the bottom or floor, is arranged a minute scene, a cluster of miniature pine trees made from wax, painstakingly painted to achieve an admirable realism; on the left edge is a tiny cork fox with a brush made from real hair. He turns the crank; the bottom panel flips over, and here is Clotilde’s desert, the dunes glued sand, the obelisks a scattered handful of stones, the cliffs tiny quartzes, the ochre sky a painted illusion …

  Ingenious, is it not? These mirrors, you see, magnify the scene, these others multiply it, creating the appearance of infinite horizon … It was made in the seventeenth century, in Amsterdam, by a Jesuit named Kircher, a master of illusions. I purchased it there myself from a collector I know …

  Oh.

  Clotilde has turned pale; Argument helps her to sit down.

  I am sorry, he says. My mirrors have upset you again. I am being inconsiderate. You see, I am so fond of my toys, and so eager to share them … and I so seldom have visitors …

  It is just, Clotilde whispers, I just thought …

  But what does she think? Uncertain, she falls silent. Before her mind’s eye: deserts, dunes, cliffs of red sandstone, ancient bones turned to rock, to clay. In the distant steppe, the camels stride.

  I should go.

  He does not try to keep her—he is too shrewd for that. With one hand cupped protectively beneath her elbow, stooped, obsequious, a very tall man embarrassed by his height, he leads her into the passage that will take them from the house where he lives alone, with just a housekeeper, across the yard, and into the rear of his shop, passing en route first through the glassworks itself. Argument walks this passage very often, walks it automatically now, even at night, when he is alone—especially at night, especially when he is alone. He follows a habitual path. His limbs know it, follow it, almost without the active intervention of his will. But for Clotilde it is new. For her it is all revelation: the heat, the darkness, the fiery furnace with its sulfurous hiss, the colored rods of glass, the men with their blowing irons and shears and punties, the sight of Jack Rose, Argument’s gaffer, swinging a black metal rod upon which a blossom of red-hot molten glass bursts, suddenly, to form the open bud of a drinking vessel. Men and boys seem to hurry everywhere, barefoot, bare-legged, nets drawn over their faces, bearing red-hot fiery masses of glass. A boy runs past too close, flush with the heat, carrying, at the end of a pronged stick, a goblet shaped like a fish, mouth agape, ready to receive, to pour … Pardon, madam! Pardon, sir! The object quivers in the pincer’s grip, flashes close beside Clotilde’s muff, disappears into the crimson maw of the lehr.

  Argument yanks her aside with a tug so sharp that for a moment—for a moment only—she falls against him, and then, laughing, he chides the boy, who has already disappeared. You, sir! Take care! ’Tis hot!

  The boy is lucky. Because my mother is there, Thomas Argument will not strike him, not this time. Not while she is there.

  • • •

  It’s like hell, that glasshouse. The heat. The stink. The fire. A revelation of hell.

  Clotilde thinks of my father right away.

  • • •

  You make it here?

  • • •

  Now she has realized—now she has her idea. Argument feels her sudden small start of excitement. It puzzles him; he cannot understand it; nonetheless, he responds smoothly, as always.

  Yes. We make most of our glass here, good English lead crystal, the best. Some I purchase abroad. Specialty items. Venetian pieces, ice glass, latticino, opaline … Inferior items, but ladies like them …

  It is a small shop—a dozen men, four boys—but I have plans—expansion—a gas furnace—in time, a factory. There’s a bit of land near Thirsk I’ve got my eye on—

  If she can see or sense the smokestacks belching on the horizon of his words, Clotilde gives no sign. She says nothing, merely nods; yet Argument can still feel, through his cupped palm where it touches her elbow, the nervous throb, like an electrical impulse, of her quickened interest.

  But she only says, It is very hard to breathe—

  Yes. It is very hot.

  He gently leads her out; yet even as they pass through the glasshouse and back into the shop he can still feel her excitement; and still he does not know what it means.

  At the street door, just as she is about to leave, he hands her something—a small, smooth object, wrapped in paper.

  Please accept this, he says, as a token of my apology. I hope you will return, despite all.

  Clotilde, her eyes already averted, grants him a sweet, quick, evasive smile, tucks the gift into her muff, and steps out into the street. As she goes the bell tinkles cheerfully above her head.

  • • •

  It isn’t until later, when she is back home again, seated in front of a tamer fire, that she recalls the package hidden in her muff and decides to open it. All afternoon the new idea, the revelation, has turned quietly in her mind like the gather of glass at the tip of Jack Rose’s blowing iron. She cannot see what it will be quite yet, the idea is still vague, it troubles her, she cannot shape it, it resists form, but sensing its promise she cannot let it go; and then, quite suddenly, she remembers Argument’s lagniappe and runs to retrieve it. She pulls at the twine with eager, agile fingers, tears away the brown paper, and finds, inside, a short, squat, polished, tapering wooden cylinder with glass at either end—an optical instrument of some kind; applying her eye to the narrower end, she sees a symmetrical mosaic composed of brilliantly colored bits of glass that fall together and apart as she turns the instrument, forming the images of, on the one hand, a circle of doves entwined in a garland of roses, and, alternately, crows in a holly bush, their fiercely gleaming beaks reaching to burst the blood-red berries. After contemplating these twin visions for a time, she slips the kaleidoscope (for that is what it is, although she has never seen one before, and does not know its name) into her pocket; and that evening, when my father comes in from his studio, she shows him Argument’s gift, and tells him how and where she got it. Then she tells him that she knows what he must do.

  He must learn to make glass.

  • • •

  Glass! Leopold resists it. He has never thought about glass before. He has walked past Argument’s Glasswares, past the plaque for Wm. Cloverdale, Glass, a hundred times, at least, without noticing either. Surely that means something. He does not wish to make glass. Glass does not excite him; he feels no desire for it. It is purely utilitarian. It is uninteresting. Glass is tumblers and decanters and bowls. It is Gentilessa’s sideboard. It does not challenge him. And yet … turning t
he kaleidoscope around in his hands, peering through the lens at the narrow end of that polished wooden rod, watching as the brightly colored splinters of glass fall together, then apart, he recognizes the potential. Knowing nothing, yet, of the mirrors housed inside the wooden tube, of how they work—of how the illusion works—because it is, of course, an illusion—he recognizes the potential. Of course! He is a Dell’oro, after all. He recognizes the potential, sees that it is unrealized, and immediately, at the back of his brain, feels the scrabbling, the scratching, the unbearable, itchy longing to reach for his paper and pencil. The family tendenza!

  Yet he says, sulkily, resisting it for all he is worth:

  But I don’t know how to make glass.

  To which my mother, in one of her better moments, replies:

  So what? You’ll learn.

  My father sighs; sits, like an old man, with his chin on his chest, in front of the fire. He has to think about it. But his attention is piqued. Glass, the idea of it, has entered his awareness at last. It will be some time yet before he has worked with it, felt its dangerous heat, its malleable, deceiving lightness, the stringy, sticky, viscous liquidity hardening into a fragile perfection so different from the solidity of jet. It will be a long time yet. All that is in the future. For the moment, glass is still an abstraction. Nothing of what it will become for him exists yet. It all hangs in the balance of this moment, as my father, an old man of twenty, sits, before the fire, with his chin on his chest, like a much older man.

  • • •

  One thing is not abstract. One thing is not in the future. It is all too present, all too real: the expression on my mother’s face—a mysterious, secretive something that plays fleetingly about her lips and her eyes as she slips Thomas Argument’s kaleidoscope safely back into her pocket. It is ephemeral, yes, and quickly disguised; it is unclear whether she is even aware of it herself; my father will not, perhaps, ever see it again; but it is certainly not an abstraction.