• • •
But in his head it is different. In the privacy there he tortures himself. The thoughts rotate constantly in his mind, the whiff of scent, the skirt, the laughter, as he melts glass in the flame of the lamp, pressing it, shaping it, manipulating it with his delicate tools; or as he turns round and round, on the tip of his index finger, a small glass eye in blue and grey, taken from a box marked “Scrap.” Whose eye is this?
No doubt William Cloverdale knows, but Leopold never asks. He thinks of slipping it into his pocket, this small, living-but-not-alive object, as if he could hatch it there like an egg, or guard it, just make sure it is safe; but he doesn’t do that either. He always puts it back in the box, but he revisits it often.
For whom is this intended?
Glass is clear, and yet my father cannot find clarity. Flesh and glass, intention and action, seem strangely obscured and without boundary. He thinks: I am a ridiculous figure, my future is based on a joke, my present a tragedy, my past a series of random shufflings across distant and near cities and moors and oceans. My sister is gone. Where?
• • •
He is also not unaware that, had her dear, dear Papa not vanished, Clotilde probably would not have married him.
• • •
This is what he turns away from. She is not the only one who can turn away. When he remembers this, he immediately thinks of something else.
• • •
If only I could make them in glass!
He is closer now, of course. He is learning what he needs to know. And he almost realizes it. He is aware. It is there in front of him: his life’s work, founded on a joke. On a tragedy.
• • •
I would be alone.
If a crazy man, an impetuous man, a great man, a stupid one—had not been foolish enough to get into a boat and lose himself at sea. Leaving her alone.
(Why would he want to leave her alone? It doesn’t make sense, offends all that seems right and rational . . .)
• • •
My father, aware that his fate has been decided by the inscrutable act of a madman, cannot know where he might have been, what he might have been doing now, had Felix Girard not disappeared. He’d be in London, perhaps, not Whitby, cataloging a collection in a museum instead of making glass eyes, illustrating a book, perhaps.
But she?
She would have been with her Papa, in their rooms on Bury Place. She would have been happier. She would not have noticed me, except to tease:
Papa! Who is that ridiculous boy?
Are you quite thoroughly done being sick, Mr. Dell’oro?
• • •
He has forgotten none of it. It revolves there, in the painful and private place inside his head, as he carefully paints a red enamel web of capillaries on the otherwise startling white of a glass eye destined to slip into an empty socket in the head of a man named Sherman. Sherman, of Scarborough.
Sherman of Scarborough has come a goodly distance for this. Scarborough is a city in its own right, with glassmakers of its own. It is a fact, one that would be galling to Thomas Argument if Argument knew it: Sherman of Scarborough has been drawn in by William Cloverdale’s ridiculous advertisement. Signor Leopoldo Dell’oro, Master Glassmaker Extraordinaire, Exclusive—from the Continent! And Sherman isn’t the only one. They are tricked! They come! It seems almost unbelievable, but they do. Because of this—out of a sense of guilt and obligation, trying to give something extra to those who have been fooled—my father has begun the innovation of painting enamel capillaries to make his glass eyes look more realistic. It is a process that makes his job more difficult, forces him to work more slowly, to use more materials. Because he paints capillaries, my father makes fewer pieces and, therefore, makes less money. Yet it is not for this reason that he finds his work unsatisfactory.