A boy’s job, then. The heat, the stink, the humiliation, the danger. Always the hovering edge of blame, the hot edge of Thomas Argument’s temper. Responsibility without reward.
• • •
For a year my father will create nothing in Thomas Argument’s shop. Even in his own studio, he will very seldom draw. He will lack the energy; and, in the uncertainty of never knowing when the teazer will call him back to Church Street, he will lack the concentration. Everything will be subsumed into the glasshouse. Into the fire.
• • •
One thing, at least, is to the good. At the end of a year of being balked by Thomas Argument, Leopold will balk himself no longer. He will long to make glass. But still he will not be permitted. Instead, he will be promoted to the position of footmaker, which means that it will be his job to stand at the red-hot glory hole containing the molten glass, right beside Jack Rose, the gaffer, and, using a handle shear, to stretch a blob of the molten liquid to form the handle of a pitcher; or, with the steel forming tool, to press out the foot of a wine glass; or sometimes to hold a wooden paddle against the rim of a sugar bowl to make sure the edges are true, or use a pliers to bend the lip of a carafe. And he will help to set the pot—winching the new clay tub full of seething, white-hot glass into the furnace—the dirtiest, most dangerous job in the glasshouse.
By some strange freak of chance, my father is always called when it is time to set the pot.
He will return home with his face blackened, his eyebrows scorched, his hands cramped. He will have made the base of a wine glass, the handle of a pitcher, the lip of a bottle, the spout of a jug. Nothing more. He will have watched Jack Rose animate the molten glass with his own breath, filling it, shaping it, but will have been unable to do this himself.
Over time this denial, this frustration, will become, for my father, the equivalent of watching, impotently, another man kiss the woman he loves.
And coming home to the Birdcage, there above the foul-smelling River Esk—the Birdcage with its bent angles, its jambs askew, its ill-fitting doors, its windows that stick at the hinges, its staircases and closets and corners crammed with artifacts belonging to Felix Girard, he will find Clotilde in the bedroom, folding garments purchased for her by her father in Paris, or sitting before the fire, saying Mr. Argument was with me today; he brought me the most cunning new toy!
What will it be this time?
A delicate bird, made from yellow glass, with hinged wings, and a winding mechanism that makes a strange piping sound, very like, and yet at the same time eerily unlike, singing.
A diminutive lantern, made from bamboo and translucent paper upon which is painted a complex pattern of branches and leaves; inside it, silhouetted figures, cut from tin, circle upon a metal gyre around four candles, in the light of which they cast monstrous shadows upon the wall—a man with a stovepipe hat and an umbrella and a grotesquely hooked nose pursuing a fat policeman with a whistle pursuing a pig that runs upright on its rear trotters with an enormous French horn pressed to its porcine lips.
A silver compact in the shape of a scallop shell, containing a mirror in which my mother can see, behind the shoulder of her own reflection, the ghostly reflection of somebody else, who, when she turns around, is not there—
It is my Papa, look and see! she cries—
My father looks, sees his sister, Anna, standing behind him in the mirror, declares it a sneaky trick, and throws it at the fire. When my mother retrieves it from the ashes, the mirror is shattered, reflects nothing, will never reflect anything again; but this is all right.
Mr. Argument will bring me another, she says.
And he does.
In fact, Thomas Argument has become a frequent visitor to the Birdcage. His long, angular figure slouches and slopes uncomfortably through the low, crooked doorways of the three whitewashed pentagonal rooms, makes its stiff and hampered way up and down the tortuous, narrowly turning stairs packed with Felix Girard’s curiosities, folds itself awkwardly, yet surprisingly often, into a chair before the fire, after having brought forth from some pocket or other (very much as Felix Girard used to do), a gift, varyingly exotic, eccentric, or strange, for my mother. In this chair, which, perhaps, should have been my father’s—except that my father, delayed at the glasshouse, working erratic journeys of ten hours on, twenty-four off, never the same ten, never the same twenty-four, typically arrives too late, too tired, and too dirty to claim it first—Argument shifts, stretches his long legs toward the hearth, then draws them back again, crosses and uncrosses, leans right and then left, then sits forward on his haunches, elbows propped on knees, fingertips pressed together to form a tense arch that he will shortly dismantle by leaning backward again and putting his hands behind his head. His discomfort is evident. Thomas Argument does not fit—not in the house, not in the chair. Perhaps not in my parents’ lives. But he comes very often, and sometimes he stays very late.