The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  A gesture urged me to come join her in that luxuriant wilderness of pillows, but I chose, instead, a nearby upright chair of red velveteen that clashed brilliantly with my hair.

  She laughed. You’re just like him, she said, he wouldn’t have sat next to me neither, at least not yet. Though you don’t look like him much, nor much like her, for that matter.

  There was something, I thought, derogatory in the way she’d pronounced that her, which, for all that it was justified, caused me to jut out my chin, pridefully as I could. I’m like my grandfather, I said, the explorer, Felix Girard.

  She laughed again, and finished me with a smile that disarmed somehow any perturbations I felt, so that I slipped lower in my chair, and took a moment to contemplate the room in which we sat, taking in the plush, enveloping cossetingness of it, the thickness of the carpet into which my feet had sunk, and, seemingly, disappeared; the veritable mummification of the windows beneath layer upon layer of curtains that served to disguise utterly the distinction between windows and wall, all of it vermillion and gold like the soft ambiguities that swathed the bed, and all of it hectic with reflected gaslight. The tops of the bureaus, of which there were many, were crowded with knickknacks, hairbrushes, powders, pins, jewelry spilling from casks, pictures in silver frames, all of it suggesting that the occupant of these rooms had made herself thoroughly at home. The mantel above the hearth was likewise crowded with objects, some of which looked strangely familiar: small, ambiguous, glassy shapes, strange bristlings, my father’s work.

  My father’s things! I cried.

  They’re mine, she calmly said, stretching out her toes toward the fire, I paid for them. I was his patroness, you know. It was I who paid your bills. It was wonderful of me, was it not?

  She patted her pillows again, which invitation I once again ignored.

  You can look at those pictures if you want. Go ahead! Put your nose in among ’em if you must—they won’t bite. You’re a Dell’oro through and through all, though you don’t look like un. I’ll put the pictures in your hands then if I must—

  And jumping up from the bed in a single, catlike movement she joined me by the fire, and began gently, oh very gently (these objects, clearly, were precious to her), taking up the daguerreotypes in their silver frames and, making good on her threat, forced them, one by one, into my reluctant hands. Why did I resist? I don’t know—why do we do anything? As I had no choice now, I looked at these pictures, which were of strangers, but familiar to me. Here was one of two children, a boy and a girl, standing stiffly in their Sunday best; here a stern-faced man gazing out from behind glasses like twin silver moons; here a little boy standing next to a pony on the Scaur, his eyes directed off somewhere, away from the camera—

  Oh! It was me he was looking at in that one. Mama never forgave me for ruining it. His birthday it was, his tenth. We had a lovely day that day.

  She caressed the picture fondly.

  He must have talked about me, she said. I was so angry when he left. He left me, you know. High and dry on Henrietta Street, without so much as a word, and went off to sea with that awful man, your grandfather, and that awful woman, your mother—yes, high and dry he left me, high and dry.

  But I’m over that now. I’m not angry anymore. Not for a long time.

  My father looked for you, said I. It’s we who were all alone, after she left us—and he looked for you—in Henrietta Street—and all the other streets—up and down, at the top of the cliff, at the bottom, on the Scaur, everywhere—all over Whitby. You were gone.

  Yes, she said slowly, taking the picture from me, and putting it back, and perching herself on the foot of the bed, among the wraps and cossetings. That’s right, I was gone by then. I was married by the time Leo came back. As you can see, I’ve been left a wealthy woman: widow now—an orphan—alone—like you. He paid for all this—

  She made a gesture encompassing the room in which we were sitting and, perhaps, too, by implication, all that lay beyond it, the empty hallway outside, the Ravenscar Hotel, Whitby, the cold, white-capped North Sea with the Emerald Isle turning upon it, unseen, in the dark; and maybe more than that; maybe, even, the vast reach of all the space that had opened, and opened, that was opening still, vertiginously, between my mother and me, between my father and his father, my father and Anna, small ships all of us, fanning out, upon cold dark oceans of our own. Outside, as if in reply, the Christmas wind rattled at the windowpanes so that, inside, the thick, warm curtains billowed inward, toward us, then receded, softly, into the casements; inhale, exhale, a soft, tinkling tremor, then a settling; a sparking up and then a diminution of the gaslight, a sudden relaxation of vision, the pupil dilated in the dark.

  —and for your father’s glass. My late husband. All his various goods and chattels.

  Against my will almost I found myself drawn then toward the other things, my father’s things, those small, self-contained ambiguities that proved, on closer inspection, to be very specific indeed: a delicate yellow nudibranch, a prawn striped red and white like a candy cane, and something else, resting on a tiny pillow, like a reliquary itself or the finger of a saint, delicate and perfectly lifelike, down to the blush of pink beneath the nail. I had seen something like this before, picked it up now, held it in my hands, turned it over, my father’s work certainly. Though she whose finger it resembled was no saint. I am sure, could I have examined it closely enough, I would have seen, in a thread of gold, her initials, CGD’O.

  But I could not; and as I held it the clock struck twelve, the curtains exhaled again, cold blasts without, spackling of rain against the windows, and fragments of sound filtering up to us from below—laughter, “Carol of the Bells,” doors slamming, a woman’s voice crying out Oh, no, you wouldn’t, a man’s replying, Oh, yes, I would!, heatless sparks thrown off some distant source of incandescence—it was a party down there, corks being popped, songs sung, dances danced (awkwardly, skillfully, gracefully, reluctantly), troths plighted and plights complexified amid the tinsel and party hats and streamers. Another world it was. It was for others, not for us, this celebration. And then she asked me, as we were each other’s only family now, what gift she could give to me for Christmas.

  I want to sail, I said. I want to find my mother. And my father.

  For I still believed, as I do now, that he was not dead, but had slipped away somehow, in search of her; disappeared, on some pathway multifarious and branching, in pursuit of his obsession. He is a Dell’oro, after all; as am I.

  • • •

  And so I find myself at the point of embarkation. Mother I have none, father neither; both gone; missing; having stepped off, as I am about to do, over the edge of the world.

  Acknowledgments

  A number of literary, historical, and scientific sources were invaluable to me in the creation of The Glass Ocean. These include Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica; George Henry Young, A Geological Survey of the Yorkshire Coast: Describing the Strata and Fossils Occurring Between the Humber and the Tees, from the German Ocean to the Plain of York; Lyn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870; Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home; Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880; R. H. Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: and Twenty-four Years After; Sidney Waugh, The Making of Fine Glass; Geoffrey Wills, Victorian Glass; and Barbara Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen.

  I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Corning Museum of Glass and Cornell University Libraries for allowing me access to the papers, drawings, and works in glass of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, whose lives and art provided the initial inspiration for this book.

  With especial thanks to Harry Mathews, Melanie Jackson, Ann Godoff, and to my husband, Peter Gale Nelson, without whose loving support and editorial guidance The Glass Ocean could not have been written.

  , The Glass Ocean