It is easy for me, in retrospect, to imagine that it is so. More likely, though, my father sees nothing but the drawing he must copy, feels nothing but anxiety lest he make a mistake that will undermine the scientific basis of his work, and Harry Owen’s, and Felix Girard’s. Indeed, he apparently feels so little concern on my mother’s behalf that he returns to the house very late that night, later than usual. She is already in bed when he comes in. The light from his candle outlines the curve of her cheek against the curve of the pillow, the delicate half-moon of her closed eye, the featherlight, telltale quiver of gold lashes. Already she is an abstraction. My father does not pause to calculate the geometry of my mother’s sleep or wakefulness; he is too busy thinking about sea creatures, and glass, and rockfalls, and science. In the morning she is unusually tired, still asleep when he leaves. In the evening, when he comes home, Thomas Argument is at the Birdcage already: my father feels himself preempted, but as usual he does nothing about it, retreating silently to his studio, as has become his habit.
And then he is made to work, at the glasshouse, several exhausting journeys in a row. My mother is always in bed when he gets home, and already out running her morning errands when he is awakened, at the teazer’s call, and made to go back.
Several days will pass in this manner. And in the course of this dark passage, Leopold and Clotilde will barely talk with each other at all. Outside, it snows. Stinging grains of ice, cold-struck from anvil-shaped clouds, slick the brine-spackled streets, web the distant fields in a ghostly frozen caul.
• • •
When at last they do finally speak, the process begun that night at the window will have advanced—my mother seeming paler than usual, almost translucent, Nordic, cold in her beauty; gentle, yet distant; withdrawn.
• • •
Clotilde is very quiet, and unless I am mistaken, she thinks often of her “Darling Papa.”
• • •
He is mistaken. Clotilde works very hard not to think of her Darling Papa at all, finding, in this respect, the early darkness a relief because it spares her the watchful blue eye of the sea. She turns away; her head is lowered; she gazes at something, some object she caresses with pale fingers and slips quickly into her pocket at my father’s approach. As she smiles and moves toward him, he feels, vertiginously, as if she is moving away. The closer she comes, the farther she has gone, her touch the inversion of a touch, an absence; her warmth, cold.
It is all very hard to understand. Leopold does not understand it. Willfully, perhaps. By an effort of will, he fails to understand, and, failing, he does the opposite of what he should. He pulls away. Perhaps, confused, disoriented, he has begun to think and to act and to feel in inversions. Farther is closer. Cold is warm. Absence is touch. Glass is flesh.
Glass is flesh.
Yes. This is when it started. Already it has begun.
• • •
As my mother grows more remote, Leopold thinks very much about glass. After working all day, then sometimes all night, in the glasshouse, he dreams of it: the heat of the ovens, the feel of the rough iron punty or the blowing rod in his hands, the molten core that remains inside, persistent as heartbeat, even after the glass has been removed from its source, the batch. The throb of it. He wakes to the persistent rhythm of the river, sees its myriad dark reflections scudding over the bedspread, up the curtains, across the ceiling. My mother is beside him, her back turned; shrouded in blankets, she is a curve, an ellipse, a mystery. He touches her and she moves away, murmurs a sleeping complaint. Her skin is cool, smooth. Already she has grown too distant for him to feel the inner fire.
In response to this new loneliness that he hardly understands, he sketches: obsessively, in his studio; surreptitiously, during spare moments in the glasshouse; myopically, while walking in the street; and, when murmurs and reflections will not allow him to sleep, in his bedroom, by the light of a thin and sulfurously smoking candle. What is he drawing? My mother does not know. Clotilde does not awaken. She has entered a place of deepest dreaming, from which she will not emerge.