• • •
William Cloverdale is a devotee of the candle. He does not believe in gas lighting in shops or showrooms or bedrooms. He does not believe in electrical conduction, in foreign food, or in foreign travel. He is fairly certain the Far East does not exist. It isn’t that he thinks progress is a dirty word; it just isn’t a word he knows.
In his shop shiny objects grow dusty, and are allowed to remain so.
• • •
Glass eyes are his specialty. He enjoys making them, and he does it well.
• • •
It makes sense, of course. What better meeting place for the coarse delicacy, the delicate coarseness, of a William Cloverdale? The perfectly blue-grey iris of a perfectly convex glass sphere made for shoving into a raw, empty socket in somebody’s skull. Glass and flesh, together.
It’s easy to understand why Thomas Argument would find this work of Cloverdale’s repellent, even threatening: the shadow of the knacker’s yard again, prosthesis as dismemberment, glass rendered flesh; flesh rendered glass (because what is the sand, the ash, the manganese, the arsenic Argument is melting in his furnace, if not flesh broken down into its constituent elements, flesh rendered earth rendered glass?). No wonder Thomas Argument shudders each time he passes Cloverdale’s window and looks into all those staring glass eyes; no wonder he cries Dingy! Tawdry! Backward-thinking! Fairground trickery! Those eyes simultaneously remind and expose him: knacker’s son!
My father, of course, has no such sensitivity. I like to imagine Leopold, in the street, with his drawings in hand (these bound for the post and London and Harry Owen), pausing at William Cloverdale’s window, and having an epiphany.
Glass is flesh.
• • •
The apprenticeship with Cloverdale is a risky proposition. Leopold will be paid by the piece. If what he makes sells, he earns. If not, then not. Difficult terms, given his and my mother’s impecunious state, his lack of experience with glass, and the marginal nature of Cloverdale’s business. Yet my father accepts them, and there appears, in the Whitby Gazette, the following advertisement:
William Cloverdale, Glassmaker
Since 1824
Introduces Signor Leopoldo Dell’oro
Master Glassmaker Extraordinaire
Exclusive—from the Continent
Maker of Glass Eyes
Mineral Teeth
Porcelain Prostheses of All Kinds
• By Appointment Only •
Lies, of course: Cloverdale’s bid to outdo and annoy his neighbor and competitor. For as it will emerge, outchaffing Thomas Argument where he cannot outsell him is something the tight-lipped and subtle William Cloverdale enjoys. He has, perhaps, hired my inexperienced father on this basis alone. After all, the arrangement is risky for Cloverdale, too—he will invest his time, his space, and his materials on an untried novice, when he has little of any of those things to spare. Perhaps Leopold has shown Cloverdale some of his drawings, which demonstrate skill and artfulness, patience, and the kind of exactitude needed for the creation of “porcelain prostheses of all kinds.”
Or perhaps William Cloverdale has simply seen an opportunity to get on Thomas Argument’s nerves.
This is, after all, a realm within which Thomas Argument cannot fight back. He will not, cannot, ever, make glass eyes, mineral teeth, prostheses. The union of glass and flesh is a horror to Thomas Argument, a chimera unbearable to his temperament, which otherwise seeks out, actively, glasswork wonders and curiosities of all kinds.