But I feel the excitement he has brought with him. My parents have sparked with it, their eyes bright, smiles relaxed, mindful, suddenly, of a distant place I can’t even imagine. It’s just a name to me, a place packages come from. Chromate of potash. Sugar of lead. Gold chloride. Copper oxide. Bone ash. Arsenic. Oxide of manganese. Saltpeter. Colors are made from these. They are the spark, the snap, the heat of my father’s glass.
Harry Owen is the source of all these, the source of the glass, of bench, of the tools. Of whom my mother has said: It all belongs to him! What’s in it for us?
Despite this, though, she is smiling now, cheeks brightened with excitement as she stands by the door, the flowers Harry Owen brought her cradled in her arms. She averts her eyes as I am examined. Her eyes are on the window above the cast-iron sink. Through that occluded glass nothing is visible except the clattering torrent, rain laced with ice.
• • •
I think of her differently now, my golden mother. Does she think of me the same way?
• • •
When the examination is over and Harry Owen has released me she says, Carlotta, go upstairs now.
Sharply. A bright, cutting tone.
This is my cue. I curtsy, just as she has taught me. I do not, in this instance, trip over my too-large feet.
Remarkable! Harry Owen says. Remarkable!
He does not say: What a lovely young woman.
Rather: Remarkable regio frontalis!
By which he means to admire my broad, bulging forehead, recipient of a Felix Girard–sized brain.
Again I have that sensation, shaft of bubbles breaking upward, opalescent, through black water, a gasp for air, as I mount the spiral staircase, circling round and round and up, their voices growing indistinct below me.
The light notes of my mother’s laughter, the deeper tones of the men, of my father and of this stranger, Harry Owen. Feel myself: shut out. Afloat. Cast adrift and carried upward on the foamy roar of the river. Turkish carpet a raft for me and my thoughts. Hip, ah, Hip: where are you? Rising on the flood.
Two words surface from below, bob clear in sound if not in meaning, a magical incantation in a stranger’s voice:
Argonauta argo.
The Birdcage shudders, groans with the combined vehemence of wind and water; there is a shift, a change in pressure, a blast of cold air carried up, with a scattering of leaves, brown and brittle, deprived of vital juices, around the winding stairwell; then a slam that shakes the house.
From the window I see the three of them, my mother and father, Harry Owen, wrapped in winter coats, hats, gloves; moving slowly against the driving rain, their bent bodies a series of ciphers. Inscrutable alphabet that I cannot yet read.
The shed door sucks open, then closes, they disappearing within it. I, in the Birdcage alone, rifle through my mother’s drawers, withdrawing these secret garments, the corsets and camisoles and stockings, the small cask for jewelry, with which I stretch out then on the carpet, my vessel, legs stretched forward, arms back, making desultory examination of my mother’s belongings, then casually brushing, beneath the white fringe of the bedspread, an object. A hard object, large, smooth, resolutely right-angled.
I allow my fingers to play over it for a time, idly exploring. Until an image comes to mind, of my mother kneeling. The bed between us. Her body obscured. She was shoving something under the bed, something heavy. I had forgotten. Now my fingertips remember, passing over the smooth surface of the wood.
It is my mother’s trunk. I slide it out from under the bed, undo the clasps. Fingers beneath the lid. It is awkward, even for my large hands.