The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  • • •

  He is also not unaware that, had her dear, dear Papa not vanished, Clotilde probably would not have married him.

  • • •

  This is what he turns away from. She is not the only one who can turn away. When he remembers this, he immediately thinks of something else.

  • • •

  If only I could make them in glass!

  He is closer now, of course. He is learning what he needs to know. And he almost realizes it. He is aware. It is there in front of him: his life’s work, founded on a joke. On a tragedy.

  • • •

  I would be alone.

  If a crazy man, an impetuous man, a great man, a stupid one—had not been foolish enough to get into a boat and lose himself at sea. Leaving her alone.

  (Why would he want to leave her alone? It doesn’t make sense, offends all that seems right and rational …)

  • • •

  My father, aware that his fate has been decided by the inscrutable act of a madman, cannot know where he might have been, what he might have been doing now, had Felix Girard not disappeared. He’d be in London, perhaps, not Whitby, cataloging a collection in a museum instead of making glass eyes, illustrating a book, perhaps.

  But she?

  She would have been with her Papa, in their rooms on Bury Place. She would have been happier. She would not have noticed me, except to tease:

  Papa! Who is that ridiculous boy?

  Are you quite thoroughly done being sick, Mr. Dell’oro?

  • • •

  He has forgotten none of it. It revolves there, in the painful and private place inside his head, as he carefully paints a red enamel web of capillaries on the otherwise startling white of a glass eye destined to slip into an empty socket in the head of a man named Sherman. Sherman, of Scarborough.

  Sherman of Scarborough has come a goodly distance for this. Scarborough is a city in its own right, with glassmakers of its own. It is a fact, one that would be galling to Thomas Argument if Argument knew it: Sherman of Scarborough has been drawn in by William Cloverdale’s ridiculous advertisement. Signor Leopoldo Dell’oro, Master Glassmaker Extraordinaire, Exclusive—from the Continent! And Sherman isn’t the only one. They are tricked! They come! It seems almost unbelievable, but they do. Because of this—out of a sense of guilt and obligation, trying to give something extra to those who have been fooled—my father has begun the innovation of painting enamel capillaries to make his glass eyes look more realistic. It is a process that makes his job more difficult, forces him to work more slowly, to use more materials. Because he paints capillaries, my father makes fewer pieces and, therefore, makes less money. Yet it is not for this reason that he finds his work unsatisfactory.

  The eyes don’t look alive enough.

  They don’t glisten. It isn’t just the expression in them, or the lack thereof, that my father can’t, at present, and probably shouldn’t, control. It’s that they don’t look wet. They don’t look alive. Something is lacking. The vital membrane, slipped. This makes my father uneasy.

  He doesn’t know how to remedy it. He tries different methods, various fluxes, enamels, blendings of glass. Nothing works. He discards pieces, wastes money, gets no results.

  • • •

  Why does he do it? He doesn’t know. Only that it is the seed of something.

  • • •

  Nobody complains of course. The eyes he makes are beautiful, and because they are beautiful, nobody expects more, nobody notices what is missing, even conceives that anything is missing, except him; and he only thinks of it because he is a Dell’oro, because of the family tendenza: nothing can ever be good enough.

  If only I could make them in glass!

  But he can’t do it yet. They won’t look alive, those creatures of Harry Owen’s, any more than the glass eyes look alive. My father longs to create a chimera, a melding of glass and flesh, but lacks the formula for this particular feat of alchemy. Is there a formula?

  If there is one, William Cloverdale doesn’t know it. The large man, approaching softly from behind, as is his habit, finds my father contemplative at his table, turning round and round on the tip of his finger (where it fits perfectly, like a cap), the diminutive blue eye once intended for a child.

  It’s a beauty, that, Cloverdale says, a regretful sigh (the best I ever made, spurned) working its way out from among the ruddy complexity of his butcher’s jowls. He blinks slowly, deliberately, as if it is an effort to gaze across the broad, red tumbled vastness of his person; but the quick perception is there, too, as always.

  Too dry, says my father. It don’t look real.

  Cloverdale purses his lips, begins to whistle. Between thick fingers he bears a sheaf of papers: orders for the master glassmaker. Jotted on each sheet in Cloverdale’s meaty hand are requirements of measure, of color, of time. Sometimes there is an old prosthesis to work from, in which case my father will copy, trying, though, in each instance, to add some improvement, something of his own.

  Now handing over the sheaf Cloverdale says to him, That’s all right, Mister Dell’oro. Because it ain’t real. And everybody knows it.

  • • •

  Even when they are alone he insists on calling my father Mister, a weird incongruity between master and man to which Leopold cannot adjust himself, wondering always if it is another of Cloverdale’s deeply buried jokes. But this time as ever he can detect no mockery, and his employer, still whistling, recedes bulkily into the dimness of the shop, that place of perpetual evening through which one swims as if through a murk of clouded vitreous fluid, past shelves of dimly viewed, dust-occluded glass objects, at last toward the filthy windows, where can be glimpsed the street and, directly across it, the inescapable, perfect, shining front of Argument’s Glasswares.

  • • •

  It ain’t real. And everybody knows it.

  Thus Cloverdale, in a moment’s quick and bloody-minded butchery, exposes the hard, intractable knot at the heart of my father’s obsession, the one thing he can’t ever and will never get past.

  Glass is not flesh.

  How easily it flies apart, once the flaw is touched upon!

  • • •

  My father is haunted for a time. He thinks about the impossibilities in Cloverdale’s box, the pupil shaped like a rabbit, the violet iris, the eye that is too large, the eye that is too small, and suddenly understanding them, wishes to create depredations of his own, depredations too subtle to be noticed by anyone other than himself—a series of purposeful failures that will succeed and be joined to flesh in the revolting intimacy of prosthesis and socket. The desire grips him like a fever that is fanned ever hotter by the indifference of my mother’s turned back. And so he does it: one day he places, among the intricate black and grey and white filaments of a grey iris, a very tiny black letter C. The glass eye goes to its owner with my father’s mark unnoticed, and, encouraged by his success to a greater outrage, he plants in a hazel eye the golden initials CG. When this, too, remains undetected, he goes further yet: in a blue iris, in white, just above the pupil, the letters CGD’O, entwined among the strands in a slice from one of Cloverdale’s braided rods of colored glass.

  But these tricks, a form of vandalism against his own work, do not satisfy my father’s restlessness for very long, nor in the end do they even amuse him, leaving as they do, like something sour at the back of his throat that he can neither spit out nor swallow, the thought—And nobody noticed! Nobody noticed this, either! It is an invitation to a cynicism that has been, up until now, foreign to his nature; and indeed he cannot stop himself from painting in enamel capillaries to make his glass eyes look more real, and experimenting with methods for making them look wet, while at the same time, surreptitiously, he continues to implant in each prosthesis the cancellation of that realism in the form of my mother’s initials, CGD’O, formed of the very tiniest granules of colored glass that he can manipulate, hidden in the webbed core of the iris. From this time fo
rward all his work in glass will embody not just the thing but also its contradiction, the acknowledgment of the frustrated artificer that nature has defeated him once again. It ain’t real. And everybody knows it. CGD’O.

  Now he’s started. If only in a small way.

  • • •

  It amuses me to imagine my mother’s initials, stealthily placed in the glass eye of a farmer from Thirsk, or a tailor from Thornaby-on-Tees, or in one lost by accident at sea by a fisherman pursuing mackerel somewhere east of Spurn Head. No doubt my father was amused, too. It is difficult to know whether this series of degradations of his own work by use of her name was an homage or a joke, a self-abnegation or something else entirely, an expression, perhaps, of the anger he must feel, but will not voice, when, on return to the Birdcage, he finds her caressing yet one more thoughtful lagniappe from his rival, the ubiquitous Thomas Argument.

  He must be angry. How can it be otherwise? It would be unnatural were my father, coming home after twelve hours with William Cloverdale, Glassmaker, not to grow angry at finding my mother by the hearth, in hushed colloquy with Argument, their two heads bent closely together, hers golden, graceful, his dark, awkward, vaguely oblong, her soft laughter ceasing as my father enters the room.

  Oh, Leo! Look what Mr. Argument has brought me this time!

  • • •

  Angry. Yes, it would be natural for my father to be angry—at himself more than at her, perhaps. Because he cannot make it stop.

  Argument at this point has virtually ceased speaking to my father, as if the bonds of employment, now severed, were all that ever held civility in place. If they pass on the stairs, as sometimes happens, Argument ducking and stooping in cramped quarters, my father forced to press himself against the banister between an elephant’s foot and a shuddering stack of collector’s trays containing butterflies pinned to cork so as to let the interloper pass, Argument does not even acknowledge that my father is there. To him my father is an indistinct ghost that lurks in the turning of that stair, or a specimen indistinguishable from all the other rubbish collected by Felix Girard (for to Thomas Argument, with his mania for the made, Girard’s collections from nature, his preserved flesh—despite being Clotilde’s beloved patrimony, her memories—are indeed all rubbish, although he hasn’t told her that he thinks so—at least, not yet).

  If Argument and my father meet while my mother is present, then Argument nods—a terse, stiff, barely detectable motion of chin above shirt collar, nothing friendly in it, as if to say, Yes, it’s me. I’m here again. At times it seems to convey, in a specific, slight jutting forward of the lower jaw, the pugnacious corollary: What are you going to do about it?

  That’s all.

  What little he does, clearly, he does for her sake. If he meets my father alone in the street—as sometimes happens on Church Street, there at the junction of their mutual glassworld—he cuts my father completely.

  My mother seems to see nothing wrong with this, or else maybe she simply doesn’t see it, because she is too remote—too remote to see, too remote to respond. She is like a glacier, retreating, trailing behind her, as she goes, a brilliant, unnavigable train of ice. She observes my father as if from a great distance, even if it is just the distance across a pillow. The pillow might as well be the Mongolian steppe, she might see very tiny camels striding across it, attempting—and failing—to bridge the gap that has grown between them.

  In short, no matter what Thomas Argument does, she will not interfere on my father’s behalf.

  • • •

  Of course it is possible that Argument, in addition to whatever designs or desires he may harbor in regard to Clotilde, is, above all, angry, just as my father is angry, jealous, just as my father is jealous, and equally unwilling to admit any of it. He cannot be angry openly, jealous openly—not yet. So he resorts to demonstrating his feelings in the angle of his chin.

  Naturally he has noticed the increase in foot traffic at Cloverdale’s shop, not to mention the large, galling new sign, CLOVERDALE & DELL’ORO, MASTER GLASSMAKERS, that has lately replaced the small tarnished plaque above the doorbell that for many years read, in the cheapest available lettering, just, WM. CLOVERDALE, GLASS.

  Not so long ago, my father was a footmaker, unqualified to work independently with glass. He could press the foot of a wine glass with the forming tool, bend forward the lip of a decanter with a pliers, use a wooden paddle to smooth the rim of a jar, stretch a blob of molten glass to make a handle attach to the side of a pitcher. Now, suddenly, he is a master glassmaker? Thomas Argument need not waste his time harboring deep suspicions—he knows, as well as my father does, that it is all lies: the new sign, the newspaper advertisements, Master Glassmaker, Direct from the Continent!, all of it. All gibes, all taunts, from William Cloverdale. As a master glassmaker himself, Argument is angry about this. He feels his profession reduced by the inclusion, even the sham inclusion, of my father within its ranks.

  • • •

  Perhaps also, though, Thomas Argument is afraid. Perhaps he senses a truth that he seeks to avoid:

  William Cloverdale is teaching my father.

  My father is learning.

  • • •

  This possibility makes Thomas Argument angrier. In the place inside him where my mother resides—where he fears my father will overtake, will surpass, him—he is angry.

  • • •

  Thomas Argument is a man who does not like to be bested. It is only a matter of time, therefore, before he must respond to the provocation across Church Street.

  • • •

  It comes quickly. One morning my father, approaching Cloverdale’s shop, with, as usual, his mind elsewhere (he has had another letter from Harry Owen, containing a request for further drawings), finds himself entangled on the sidewalk in front of Argument’s window with a crowd of admirers who have gathered to read a poster plastered up on the glass:

  View of Naples

  Eruption of Vesuvius!

  and Destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii!

  In the year 79 (by Argument)

  THE ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS!

  THIS PICTURE

  Represents as accurately as can be done, the

  GREAT ERUPTION IN THE YEAR 79,

  WHEN THE DESTRUCTION OF

  HERCULANEUM AND POMPEII

  TOOK PLACE

  The practical observation and experience

  of Mr. Argument

  Has enabled him to produce effects never before attempted.

  Argument has obtained the new double magic lantern of Negretti and Zambra, and will use it, on alternate Wednesdays, to show, in dissolving view, glass slides he has created himself, using a new and secretive process of etching and enameling: Vesuvius erupting by moonlight, image dissolving into a lurid, rubble-strewn Pompeian dawn; the Great Fire of London gradually reducing St. Paul’s Cathedral to ashes; the flood of the Huskar Pit overwhelming the child laborers of Silkstone … fade to a particularly affecting view of the seven mass graves in bright July sunlight …

  • • •

  There is nothing William Cloverdale can do about this—his customers sucked, every Wednesday week, into the inexhaustible maw of Thomas Argument, Showman; into the voyeuristic thrill of all that plummeting, scorching, drowning, exsanguinating humanity, projected onto a neutral wall in a glasshouse; all those thrilling, glowing, palpitating fades, enhanced by rolling voile screens or shades of fine muslin; and later, when the more sensational subjects have begun to pall, those that settle more gently beneath the banner of education and enrichment: sunrise over Tintern Abbey, or, Napoleon, at sunset, facing his men.

  • • •

  My father’s glass eyes, even those containing, in secret, my mother’s initials, are no competition for this. This is the full emanation, after all, of Thomas Argument’s mania, his passion, and his anger. All that flame and hot lava! The raging floods! The secret unveilings! From behind Cloverdale’s grimy windows my father watches, surreptitiously
, the crowds that gather across the street.

  • • •

  He is looking for her.

  She isn’t there, of course. All showings, for her, are private.

  • • •

  Cloverdale is watching, too, although for different reasons. He gazes narrowly, disapprovingly, upon the ebb and flow of Argument’s public. William Cloverdale dislikes the magic lantern in principle, just as he dislikes kaleidoscopes, stereoscopes, praxinoscopes, thaumatropes, dioramas, panoramas, spectacles in particular and entertainments in general—all of it, in William Cloverdale’s opinion, goes beyond the bounds, just as the idea that there is a place called Venice where latticino glass is made goes beyond the bounds. Such things, for Cloverdale, enter rapidly into the realm of the not possible. We can’t have this, Mister Dell’oro, Cloverdale’s grey glance, cast over, above, and across the mountainous bulk of himself, coming at last to rest upon my father, seems to say. Mister Dell’oro, something must be done!

  It is almost as if he knows—He knows!—that it is all Leopold’s fault, as if he knows—He knows!—that Clotilde Dell’oro is at the root of it. Leopold must do something—must mend it. Customers, drawn to Church Street by William Cloverdale’s Gazette advertisements—Master Glassmaker! Exclusive—from the Continent!—are being diverted by Thomas Argument’s poster. They come, they see the poster, they are drawn in. They enter Argument’s Glasswares and they never return. And it is Leopold’s fault. He must do something. But what can he do?

  There is nothing. Nothing he can do. He is helpless. This he knows.

  My father, beneath the presumed accusation of Cloverdale’s glance, begins sweating, runs his finger nervously around and around inside the too-tight collar of the dress shirt—the one dress shirt he owns, the one Gentilessa bought him, which he wears regardless the state of the weather because it is all he has and what’s more, because he feels safest that way. All buttoned up, my father, just like his father before him. All buttoned up at the lamp, at the oven, at the window, regardless the heat. All buttoned up so as to prevent—?