I prefer to imagine it comes to him in a moment of creative ferment, not in a moment of cuckoldry. I like to imagine him in the street, his hands filled with papers, a disorganized flurry of papers—his drawings, on the way to the post, perhaps—passing the window of William Cloverdale, Argument’s ever-bested rival, chancing to look in at a display of glass eyes on a velvet tray (Just the kind of thing, Thomas Argument would say, has said, a hundred times, in my father’s hearing, that holds that fool Cloverdale back!) and thinking:
I could make them in glass!
But he cannot make them in glass. Not as long as he works for Thomas Argument. And even if he could get access to the batch, gain independent use of the tools . . . how could he do it? The material is light and strong and supple, but the tools used in Argument’s glasshouse are coarse, and coarse tools create coarse objects. What do Argument’s heavy, cut-glass goblets and pretentious lusters have in common with the delicate, questing tentacles, the soft mouth, of the rosy anemone?
But those eyes in Cloverdale’s window . . . the hazel irises shot through with threads of gold, the deep browns, the filamentous blues and greys . . . like living things. Living glass.
Glass is flesh.
There must be a way.
Or, perhaps more aptly:
There is a way, but Thomas Argument doesn’t know what it is.
• • •
I imagine it would have been a turning point for my father—a small jubilation—the diminution of a hated (though as yet only barely consciously acknowledged) rival.
There is a way; Thomas Argument doesn’t know what it is.
Nor does he care.
I imagine there must have grown, in my father, a certain disdain for Thomas Argument then. A relieving disdain. A diminishment of the fear inspired in him by those expressionless black eyes.
• • •
Of course this is all speculation. I don’t know what happened, really. A process took place, and this is how I imagine it. I try to imagine it to my father’s advantage. But the bare fact is that, after two and a half years in the employment of Thomas Argument, during which time he has advanced only from the position of taker-in, a boy’s job, to footmaker, a better job, a man’s job, but one allowing no creative independence, my father will transfer his allegiance directly across the street, to William Cloverdale, Argument’s nearest competitor—into what Argument calls That dingy little Cloverdale establishment. In Cloverdale’s shop, small as it is, dark as it is (lacking the brilliant gas jets that emblazon Argument’s Glasswares, its more modest window must depend for its sparkle on sunlight, a scant resource in Whitby in the winter), my father will work, for the first time, with the lamp.
Argument’s Glasswares doesn’t do lampwork, Thomas Argument seeing this kind of glassmaking as backward-thinking practice, tawdry, fairground trickery, gypsy’s trade, suited for itinerant makers who set up stalls in the street where they make little glass animals, glass ships webbed with glass rigging, replicas of the abbey ruins, and other mementos for the mantelpiece, intended to amuse sentimental women, small children, summer tourists, and others who lack serious discernment in glass.
William Cloverdale, of course, can’t afford to be finicky about lampwork, not with Argument’s window, which some might describe as a fairground in itself, glaring at him, full wattage, from right across the street. William Cloverdale will make whatever people will buy.
• • •
Who is this man, Cloverdale, with whom my father has linked his fortunes?
• • •
He is Thomas Argument’s opposite: fat where Argument is lean, short where Argument is tall, coarse where Argument is smooth, terse where Argument is talkative. He is a red-faced, squat, balding, muscular man, bullnecked, with thick arms like butcher’s arms (shades of Felix Girard in this)—it is easy to imagine him wielding the cleaver, strongly, through meat and blood and bone, although, in fact, he wields the blowing iron, the punty, the pincer, and the wood jack, artfully as Thomas Argument does—more artfully. When he bears himself forth into the world, which is often, he does it gut-first, fearlessly, yet with a delicacy unexpected, unnerving even, in a man of his size. There is something surprisingly subtle about him, in word as well as deed. More than one customer has been startled, in the act of fingering a vase or a doorknob in Cloverdale’s shop, to find the man looming suddenly at his elbow, so silent and light of foot is this vast, leather-aproned, flux-and-enamel-stained figure, who frequents the Fox, where he drinks freely of bitter, ale, and beer; who is not a gentleman; who does not aspire to be a gentleman; and who thinks Venice is a term Thomas Argument invented in order to stimulate the sale of violet and blue latticino glass.