In his corner my father does what he has always done when he seeks distraction: he draws; with quick absent strokes creates curve of cheek, curl of hair, plump, booted foot, shawl with fringe unraveling across a broad, matronly back. But he is not content; cannot remain absorbed; it itches at him. He cannot get quite right the mole upon the cheek, the angle of the hairpin, the knots in the yarn. This is painful; he turns away. And when he turns away, the twin anguishes from which he has sought momentary escape come rushing back, like brutal jabs—One! two!—of the butcher’s knife.
Where is Anna?
What will we do?
Folding up his paper he emerges into the cold, turns left, finally, back to Bridge Street and the acrid stink of the Esk. Leaning above the water, he sees, in the semidark, shadowy objects barely discernable and therefore dreadful, circling, quivering, trembling along the surface, then disappearing into the swift, green-grey rush of the river.
Like us, he thinks.
What will we do?
• • •
All the time, of course, it is right there in front of him, although he does not see it; or rather, perhaps, he sees it without seeing. How many times, walking along Church Street, has he passed, without a second glance, Argument’s Glasswares, with its ambitious glittering window, lighted from below by brilliant, jewel-bright jets of gas? Or, if he happens to be walking on the opposite side of the street, the somewhat darker but no less crammed shop front of Argument’s chief competitor-in-trade, William Cloverdale? Perhaps the translucence of the glass has allowed it to hide itself from him; perhaps that is why, passing these windows, he has not looked inside, at and then past the wares—the everyday glasses and plates, the wine goblets, the candy dishes, the deep green and burgundy decanters, the vases and goblets, the figurines, the paperweights, and other, more fanciful creations—to see the glow of the ovens beyond, the flare of the fires, the white-hot, rotating globes and cylinders of glass, the objects being made.
What, after all, is my father, if not a maker of objects? A creator of things from nothing? Despite the lessons of his cousin, Giorgio Dell’oro, it seems clear that my father still does not, at this time, comprehend his own true nature. He is still searching.
In the end it is my mother who sees, and understands. On one of her few excursions outside the Birdcage, on the rare day cold but clear, strolling down Church Street in her blue shawl and fur muff, averting her eyes from views of the sea, Clotilde pauses, just for a moment, in front of a window, to rest; the window happens to belong to Argument’s Glasswares. The name on the door, Thomas Argument, means nothing to her, although it would to my father, were he to notice it, since Thomas Argument is the son of Argument the knacker, whose yard Leopold walked past many times, as a boy, on his way from Henrietta Street down to the Scaur, and vice versa. The Arguments are an old Whitby family; Thomas is not the first to resent the family trade but he is the first to succeed in leaving it. He fought to leave it, tooth and claw; to remove himself from it and to remove it from himself, to eradicate, from his very being, even the faintest clinging molecule of the knacker’s yard. He is a fiercely competitive man—the brightness of the gas lighting in his window being directly proportional to the nearness, in time, of the reek of rendered livestock, the rattle of disarticulated skeletons, in his past. Can the brightness of the light blind the passersby to the too-close proximity of corpses? Can pure white heat burn away the stink of death? Thomas Argument thinks so. He stakes his livelihood upon it. The gaslight in his window, in the evening, is dazzling white, dazzling hot, and it is reflected, magnified, ferociously, again and again, in a hundred faceted surfaces of glass.
But it is still early afternoon when Clotilde rests against Argument’s window, so the gas jets aren’t yet lit. All she sees in that vast and flawless pane is an unexpected and therefore unbearable reflection of the sea. It is because of this—to escape the sea—that she opens the door of Argument’s Glasswares and ducks inside. As she does, a tiny bell jingles merrily above her head. Immediately she is absorbed into a world shadowless and clear, sharp and sharply articulated; she must blink several times, so intense is the winter sunlight refracted in shelf upon shelf (the shelves, extending from floor to ceiling, are much taller than my mother is) of Thomas Argument’s pitchers and sugar bowls, his saltcellars, his magnifying glasses, his oil lamps, his hourglasses and pipes, his glazed boxes and dangling chandeliers, his millefiori paperweights and parti-colored perfume bottles, his sherry glasses and wine glasses and brandy snifters . . . and his mirrors.