And he talks.
My father, coming home at midnight, having just put the crimped rim around the top of a glass jar or the notch in the spout of a creamer, enters wearily upon these conversations-in-progress, finds Thomas Argument delivering to my mother a lecture upon the suitability of gas lighting for home use (The depletion of oxygen, madam, is vastly overstated, as is the staining—and the explosions? Pah! Just rumor, my dear); his dislike for French cristal opaline (Fine glass should not look like blancmange. It should sparkle, madam, it should sparkle!); or the wonders of the latest addition to his collection—a drinking cup inside which is nested a magical mirror (The first time you look you will see yourself in it. Look again and you are gone! It is most amusing when drunk. I bought it in Greece, Madam Dell’oro, the last time I was there). Sometimes, when he is excited, Argument reaches out with his silver-headed walking stick and prods the coal in the fireplace. It is the wave of the future—the wave of the future! he cries (whether the subject is gaslight, or electrical conduction, or the daguerreotype, my father is not sure) and—poke!—crimson sparks shoot up the flue. Clotilde in her own chair sits, smiles, gently caresses a yellow bird made from glass. If she winds its mechanism it will sing; it will sound almost like a real bird; but she does not wind it. Her glass bird, a gift, is silent. Above their heads a living bird flits, flashes its ruby breast, quickly is gone.
My father, coming in like a stranger upon these peculiar conversations in which Thomas Argument talks very much and very enthusiastically while Clotilde sits sphinxlike, inserting only the occasional and perhaps ironic comment (Is that so, Mr. Argument? I think you are quite—wrong!—about that), never feels included. Perhaps he does not desire inclusion. Perhaps he has had enough of Thomas Argument at the glasshouse. This same Thomas Argument who arrives at the Birdcage with gifts in hand, Thomas Argument the charming enthusiast, my mother’s friendly admirer, is a tyrant in his own house, a petty martinet who abuses the men, accuses them of sullying the batch, destroys entire trays of finished glass that do not meet his specifications after failing to say what the specifications are. Whole trays are returned to the furnace to be melted and made again: This glass is blistered! That is seedy! It is uneven! It’s poorly flattened!
No one but Thomas Argument can see the flaws.
It is terrible, madam, Argument confides to my mother, the master’s appalling burden of—surveillance!
Naturally his behavior gives rise to bitterness. There are even rumors about the batch, which Argument insists on mixing himself. He is protective of it, secretive. It is said, both inside the glasshouse and outside it, that he mixes it with ash of animal bones, and that this is why his glass is so dexterous, so translucent. Thomas Argument, it seems, cannot leave the knacker’s yard behind; skeletons rattle in his angry gaze.
Not surprising, then, that my father might wish Thomas Argument would go home.
• • •
If indeed he does wish it. My silent father may have removed himself from Thomas Argument entirely—mentally, at least. Almost certainly by this time, during his second year working in the glasshouse, he has begun thinking like a Dell’oro. Fretting like one. He wants to make; he is frustrated because he cannot. He has begun, secretively, sketching. Almost certainly he has received by now the first of many similar letters that will be sent to him, from London, by Harry Owen: Despite my best attempts preservation has failed . . . Can you please send to me at your soonest convenience, your drawings of the Holothuriae, the Monochirus amatus Owenii, and the Aplysi, which remain, at present, the sole scientific record of these wonderful animals . . .
My father reads these letters, and thinks about glass. He remembers, in felt memory, perhaps, more than in thought (because making, for him, increasingly resides in touch, not in thought), the handle he attached to a pitcher in the glasshouse this afternoon—the hot responsive twist of the molten glass. Like a living thing. The white-hot sensuous melting. He hears my mother saying to Thomas Argument—
Why Mr. Argument, that is so very . . . interesting!