The Glass Ocean(60)
The eyes don’t look alive enough.
They don’t glisten. It isn’t just the expression in them, or the lack thereof, that my father can’t, at present, and probably shouldn’t, control. It’s that they don’t look wet. They don’t look alive. Something is lacking. The vital membrane, slipped. This makes my father uneasy.
He doesn’t know how to remedy it. He tries different methods, various fluxes, enamels, blendings of glass. Nothing works. He discards pieces, wastes money, gets no results.
• • •
Why does he do it? He doesn’t know. Only that it is the seed of something.
• • •
Nobody complains of course. The eyes he makes are beautiful, and because they are beautiful, nobody expects more, nobody notices what is missing, even conceives that anything is missing, except him; and he only thinks of it because he is a Dell’oro, because of the family tendenza: nothing can ever be good enough.
If only I could make them in glass!
But he can’t do it yet. They won’t look alive, those creatures of Harry Owen’s, any more than the glass eyes look alive. My father longs to create a chimera, a melding of glass and flesh, but lacks the formula for this particular feat of alchemy. Is there a formula?
If there is one, William Cloverdale doesn’t know it. The large man, approaching softly from behind, as is his habit, finds my father contemplative at his table, turning round and round on the tip of his finger (where it fits perfectly, like a cap), the diminutive blue eye once intended for a child.
It’s a beauty, that, Cloverdale says, a regretful sigh (the best I ever made, spurned) working its way out from among the ruddy complexity of his butcher’s jowls. He blinks slowly, deliberately, as if it is an effort to gaze across the broad, red tumbled vastness of his person; but the quick perception is there, too, as always.
Too dry, says my father. It don’t look real.
Cloverdale purses his lips, begins to whistle. Between thick fingers he bears a sheaf of papers: orders for the master glassmaker. Jotted on each sheet in Cloverdale’s meaty hand are requirements of measure, of color, of time. Sometimes there is an old prosthesis to work from, in which case my father will copy, trying, though, in each instance, to add some improvement, something of his own.
Now handing over the sheaf Cloverdale says to him, That’s all right, Mister Dell’oro. Because it ain’t real. And everybody knows it.
• • •
Even when they are alone he insists on calling my father Mister, a weird incongruity between master and man to which Leopold cannot adjust himself, wondering always if it is another of Cloverdale’s deeply buried jokes. But this time as ever he can detect no mockery, and his employer, still whistling, recedes bulkily into the dimness of the shop, that place of perpetual evening through which one swims as if through a murk of clouded vitreous fluid, past shelves of dimly viewed, dust-occluded glass objects, at last toward the filthy windows, where can be glimpsed the street and, directly across it, the inescapable, perfect, shining front of Argument’s Glasswares.
• • •
It ain’t real. And everybody knows it.
Thus Cloverdale, in a moment’s quick and bloody-minded butchery, exposes the hard, intractable knot at the heart of my father’s obsession, the one thing he can’t ever and will never get past.
Glass is not flesh.
How easily it flies apart, once the flaw is touched upon!
• • •
My father is haunted for a time. He thinks about the impossibilities in Cloverdale’s box, the pupil shaped like a rabbit, the violet iris, the eye that is too large, the eye that is too small, and suddenly understanding them, wishes to create depredations of his own, depredations too subtle to be noticed by anyone other than himself—a series of purposeful failures that will succeed and be joined to flesh in the revolting intimacy of prosthesis and socket. The desire grips him like a fever that is fanned ever hotter by the indifference of my mother’s turned back. And so he does it: one day he places, among the intricate black and grey and white filaments of a grey iris, a very tiny black letter C. The glass eye goes to its owner with my father’s mark unnoticed, and, encouraged by his success to a greater outrage, he plants in a hazel eye the golden initials CG. When this, too, remains undetected, he goes further yet: in a blue iris, in white, just above the pupil, the letters CGD’O, entwined among the strands in a slice from one of Cloverdale’s braided rods of colored glass.