Her soft insinuating laughter the sudden, barely detected spark that begins the conflagration.
• • •
In retrospect, of course, it seems inevitable; I already know what my father will do. But for him, sitting there, in front of the fire, like a stranger in his own house, exhausted, listening to Thomas Argument’s glib pronouncements, then my mother’s adulatory ejaculations in response—what can he have been feeling? I already know what he will do, so I am not surprised when, eventually, inevitably, he gets up and leaves the room (receiving, as he does it, barely a glance from either my mother or Thomas Argument, so engrossed are they in their mutual game of admire and be admired). But what can my father be thinking, in that moment when he decides to leave my mother alone with Thomas Argument? What will he be thinking on all those afternoons, those evenings, yet to come, when he will do the same again? All those evenings when, returning home from his shift, entering the kitchen, and hearing Thomas Argument’s excitable voice reverberating down the screw-turn stairwell, he will simply pass up the stairs to bed, or through the house and out, going straight to his studio, without even bothering to find out what is being discussed in the parlor above?
I know what he will do. In his studio, in the cold, in the wavering light of his oil lamp, my father will pour over his drawings from the voyage of the Narcissus; bringing out his pencils and paints, he will begin the painstaking process of copying and coloring each one. Some of the originals he will send to Harry Owen, in London. Your drawings . . . which remain, at present, the sole scientific record . . .
Others he will keep. These are his secrets.
• • •
And then he will do something else.
For each drawing, he will also begin to prepare accompanying sheets of additional sketches. He will detail each spine, each filament, each fin, each limb, each tentacle, every undulation, each swelling sinuosity of each creature, separately, from every possible angle, creating, as he does so, a map—yes, as near as he can come, with just his paper and pencils, to a three-dimensional map of each individual creature. And as he does it, he will be thinking about glass.
• • •
Of this I am quite certain.
• • •
What he thinks about my mother, I don’t really know. Perhaps he avoids thinking of her. Perhaps, with his drawing, he seeks to replace her. This may be what he is really doing, out in his studio, in the cold, as he pulls his paper and his pencils close, surrounds himself, makes, for himself, a second skin of paper within which he shelters. Perhaps he grows ignorant, unknowing, sheds knowledge there, within a fortress of paper. His actions, in regard to her, make very little sense—become, at a certain level, uninterpretable. His intentions cannot be translated. I only know that he leaves her alone with Thomas Argument many times, that that is his choice. There is a certain inevitability about it, I suppose. Viewed in retrospect, as I view it. Of course my father cannot have viewed it so; and so I can suppose that he did not know what he was doing, that he did not see the danger that was there, before his eyes, plain to be seen, were he only willing to see it.
Although I think, perhaps, he did see it, and acted as he did, inevitably, in spite of what he saw.
Or so that he would not.
In retrospect, therefore, I ask myself the following:
Did my father Leopold love my mother, Clotilde?
And I respond:
Yes, certainly he did.
And then again I ask, in regard to her relationship with Thomas Argument, did my father act like a fool?
And again: Yes, certainly. He did.
• • •