• • •
Dear Harry, though the materials are lacking and the tools imperfect, I will attempt the experiment, making no guarantee as to the outcome . . .
• • •
He is earlier than usual (a trick? a trap?), but he finds her alone. Of Thomas Argument there is no sign, beyond the growing profusion of gifts, which have edged in among the beloved mementos of Felix Girard. No immediate sign, then, of the hated rival, though the proximate signs remain to provoke my father. And they do provoke him. The house is chilly, damp, the old stones wet with the rushing of the river, and yet there is no fire. Leopold, adding enamel capillaries to glass eyes, subtracts from Clotilde’s coal. This, perhaps, is part of his anger, but if so, then he does not know it himself. My mother knows it. Of course.
I had a letter from Harry, he says.
She pinks with excitement.
News of my Papa?
No—n-no news. He asked me to make—he sent m-money—
He holds out the coin to show her.
But it is no use, already she has subsided, she barely listens, news of her Papa is all she wants to hear. She holds in her lap Thomas Argument’s yellow glass bird, strokes it as if it is a real bird, the imaginary plumage soft and warm beneath her palm. Her own hummingbird, the one that belonged to her Papa, has disappeared somewhere among the curtain rods; she has not seen it for several days, but she continues putting out sugar water for it regardless, and the water is drunk, which seems, under the circumstances, enough.
If he hoped to impress her with the news of his commission, to overwhelm and blot out with his new money the drama of Argument’s Vesuvius, he has failed. Clotilde, it seems, no longer cares about money, at least not about his money. What does my mother care about? It would be difficult, at this moment, for Leopold to say. He senses that a new quality has entered into her typical reserve, a quality of concealment as determined as it is fragile. She is herself and is not herself, simultaneously. It seems to him as though she has a secret that she holds fast. She would rather break than reveal it, that is what he thinks, even though the act of holding back might, in itself, shatter her into a thousand pieces.
Yet she does not break. She will not. She is determined. She is stronger than my father thinks. Her secret is not what he thinks it is.
Of course he has imagined what she must be hiding. There has been that whiff of scent, the stifled laughter, the trailing familiar edge of skirt behind the closing door, thoughts that torture him. My father’s imagination (on this subject) is, in the end, an impoverished one, rushing to the obvious conclusions.
• • •
I w-will have to work m-more, he says. But it will mean m-more money.
• • •
My mother barely glances up at this statement, the towering irony of it. The icy pallor has returned. She does nod, though, and her mute acceptance seems to him another indication of that which he has already accepted as true, as inevitable.
• • •
She does not care what he does. If he works more, so much the better for her. His absence will be to her advantage. That is what my father, lacking in imagination, assumes she thinks.
• • •
And so he will begin.
• • •
He is surreptitious at first. In spite of what he has told Clotilde—that there will be more money—at first, in fact, there will be less: he takes what glass he needs, surreptitiously, from that which William Cloverdale has supplied for the creation of the prosthetic eyes. As he is paid by the piece, fewer pieces from more supply means greater cost to Cloverdale, therefore less money not more: less coal, fewer petticoats, scanter food, no tea, this being, perhaps, one expression of my father’s anger at my mother, although he does not think so. He does not tell her what he is doing. Simply, it happens that there is less. Nor does he tell William Cloverdale what he is doing. Instead, each day, he sets aside, surreptitiously, a few rods of glass, in various colors. This he will do, each day, until he has enough. It is clear that there will be problems. As he has said to Harry Owen, materials are lacking. There are severe limitations of color, and, what’s more, he can only steal so much. This is, after all, what he is doing—stealing—although he does not think of it that way. He has other ways to think of it. He thinks, for example, that it is all a matter of expediency, a temporary arrangement, until he can find a better. He is merely conducting an experiment, and when the experiment is completed, he will cease to borrow (this is the word my father uses, in his mind) from William Cloverdale. He practically expects his experiment to end in failure, in which case there will be no further need for borrowing anyway. The situation is, by definition, short term. And so forth. So he thinks.