The Glass Ocean(57)
No doubt he’s put out, too, by the exoticism of this Signor Leopoldo Dell’oro, Master Glassmaker Extraordinaire, with its implications of Araby, of foreign soils and glasswork magic, all of which have, up to now, belonged to him exclusively: his Venetian latticino, his Parisian cristal opaline, his Bohemian marbled lithyalin and bright yellow pieces of Annagelb. The Count von Buquoy is his personal friend! Whereas William Cloverdale has never even left Whitby, except to visit his niece in Staithes.
Thomas Argument is annoyed. If chaffing Thomas Argument is his wish, William Cloverdale has almost certainly succeeded. This alone, to Cloverdale, may be worth the risk of hiring my father and paying him by the piece. My father’s career: founded on a joke.
And so Leopold gives his resignation; Argument accepts it wordlessly, with a thin-lipped canny smile, handing over without protest my father’s modest remaining pay, a small sum, and having paid it he is back at the Birdcage the very same evening, projecting onto the parlor wall, for my mother’s amusement, with a magic lantern from his collection, the image of a forest burning—Leopold hears Clotilde’s shriek of combined delight and fear as specular birds, fleeing the illusion of flame, emerge from among dark pines and seem to swoop out, into the room—
Oh, Mr. Argument! It is so real—!
—as he passes through the downstairs, out, again, into his studio.
• • •
In this regard, nothing, it seems, has changed.
• • •
But in another regard, everything has.
My father will use the lamp for the first time.
He will not work at a furnace (although William Cloverdale does have one of those—a small, outdated, soot-puffing old beehive that barely suffices to heat the batch). Rather, he will sit at a broad table, surrounded by rods of glass of various thicknesses and colors, by containers of metal oxides, and by an array of fine-handled metal tools, wicked, gleaming sharps and hooks, pliers and pincers and shears, by delicate, soft-bristled brushes. The lamp itself, at which he will work, is just a tin cup containing a wick and paraffin, with a bellows beneath to fan the flame, controlled by the glassworker’s—William Cloverdale’s—now my father’s—foot. There is a hot metal plate for keeping the glass pliable while it is worked, a crucible in which to cool it when it is finished. That is all.
He will work in a small room at the back of William Cloverdale’s shop, surrounded by cabinets filled with drawers of glass rods and glass sticks and glass-eyes-in-progress; by completed glass eyes awaiting fittings; and by glass eyes that have failed. These fascinate Leopold most of all—the failures. Whether out of perversity or a reluctance to waste his materials, Cloverdale keeps a wooden box full of them—the eye with a pupil shaped like a rabbit; the one with the impossibly beautiful, impossibly, inhumanly violet iris; another with the white tinted green—a case of too much iron in the batch (Leopold has already learned, from Thomas Argument, that iron in the batch can be balanced by manganese, the green tint eliminated, the white made pure again; in the case of this eye, William Cloverdale hasn’t bothered); the eye with the edges ground too sharp for any man to tolerate; the eye that is too large, too long; and one that is very small—a tiny bowl that fits the tip of Leopold’s index finger, with a diminutive grey-green iris—the eye of a child . . . apparently perfect, unclaimed, in the box marked “Scrap.” Whose eye is this? My father turns it around on his fingertip, a small, staring cap of blue glass, a false interiority, disembodied embodiment, an enigma; shivers slightly as he feels himself caught in its sightless gaze. Seen and not seen.
Cloverdale should have melted it down by now, melted all of them down, returned them to the batch. And yet he has not.
It is a reluctance that my father understands.
(Glass is flesh . . .)