• • •
They are dissections, my father’s drawings: the many-rayed body of a sea star, its flat, orange spherical eye, the spiny, sandpaper hide, tubular feet; a heart cockle splayed open, stomach, genitals, egg sack, siphon, mantle, tentacles, eyes, all exposed. The roughened spot on the shell’s interior where a grain of sand once entered between the delicate membranes. Bud of a pearl, thwarted. Dissections of himself as well, perhaps. During these long days when Clotilde seems so distant, so cool, so like a river, frozen over, which he can skate upon but never touch (all movement now hidden beneath the sparkling surface), does he imagine himself like his subjects: split open, splayed, exposed? Are these drawings what he hides behind, shields himself, covers himself with? And her. Dissections of her as well. I can’t get any closer than this. Seeking the warm unreachable core.
Glass is flesh.
He makes them, then he copies them, then he sends them to Harry Owen in London. Having completed the cycle, finding himself suddenly idle, he is confronted again by that which he does not want to confront, again exposed, laid bare. And so he starts over. It is, in its way, a time of great productivity for him, during which Harry Owen receives, in a period of two months, two hundred copies of detailed sketches of specimens gathered during the voyage of the Narcissus.
Think how much time my father must spend with his paper and pencils and paints, to make two hundred copies in two months. This in addition to the many hours that he spends, Monday through Saturday, in Thomas Argument’s glasshouse, bearing the stink and the heat of the ovens, the sting of Thomas Argument’s ire, the frustration of being held back—always held back—from being allowed to make glass. And then there are the other drawings, the secret drawings, that are for his eyes only. I have no idea how many of those there were.
I have seen the drawings that my father made for Harry Owen during this time. The lines are neat and precise, the renderings detailed, his lettering, in the labels, small, rounded, self-contained. There is a sense of control. Nothing is extra, nothing superfluous. This is his disguise. He hides here. He is becoming, perhaps, much more like his own father, Emilio Dell’oro. A small precise man, tight-lipped, difficult to know.
I haven’t seen the others. Those are my father’s secret.
With my mother’s distance begins my father’s impenetrability.
With what he supposes is her betrayal.
• • •
Because that is what he does suppose. Although, if she has betrayed him, there is no real evidence of it. A whiff of scent in the glasswares shop. The trailing edge of a familiar skirt, disappearing behind a closing door in the High Street. The sound of a woman’s laughter, familiar or perhaps not, stifled at his approach.
This is not evidence.
This is my father’s imagination.
It torments him all the time. Even in the overwhelming black heat and stink of the furnace. When he eats. When he walks.
He is only free when he draws.
• • •
Your drawings . . . which remain, at present, the sole scientific record of these wonderful animals . . .
• • •
It is hard to know at what point, out in his studio, in the glasshouse, in the street, he rereads Harry Owen’s letter and thinks, If only I could make them in glass!
At some point he does think it. Lying in bed, perhaps, contemplating my mother’s turned back.
• • •
If only I could make them in glass!
• • •