The Glass Ocean(45)
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 the 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.