• • •
This is what anger, and Thomas Argument, have made of him.
• • •
The Dell’oros are not, by nature, sneaky people. It is just that the family tendenza sometimes drives us to commit acts that appear, for want of a better word, sneaky.
• • •
And so my stiff, anxiety-ridden father, with his shirt collar buttoned up tight, hoards rods of glass beneath William Cloverdale’s unsuspecting nose, stuffing them in drawers, secreting them in bins, burying them at the bottom of the box marked “Scrap.” He trembles a little each time Cloverdale, soft footed, whistling, comes near to one of these stashes, as a squirrel may tremble for the safety of its supply of wintertime nuts. But he is lucky; he is never discovered. If Cloverdale notices a slight diminishment in his stock of glass rods, he says nothing, assuming, perhaps, that my father is creating some new innovation for the betterment of the glass eye and, hence, for the wallet of William Cloverdale. If my father feels any qualms at this betrayal of trust, he does not indicate it by any diminishment of his “borrowing”; indeed, if anything, he hoards more, driven, it seems, by a larcenous rapture previously unknown to him. In the rapture’s grip he even takes up Cloverdale’s habit of whistling, identifying, in this way, with the man whom he defrauds.
As for creating the circumstances under which he can be alone with what he has stolen, this, too, is easy enough—the orders mount up, my father falls behind, he will remain into the night to complete his work; Cloverdale, shuttering up the shop, thinks profit is the motive—profit, and the desire to aggravate Thomas Argument by keeping the night fires burning late—and he is pleased. He sheds his leather apron, shambles off to the Fox, and will not think about Leopoldo Dell’oro again, until he returns early to find his master glassmaker asleep at the workbench, surrounded by bits and pieces of castaway glass, the lamp still on, burning low and dangerously close to the top of Leo’s tangle-haired, unconscious head.
Hey, you, Mister Dell’oro! Wake up there! Get up! Come on now! Here all night again? Ye’re a madman, all right! Get out of that now and clean yoursef up! Shop’s open, man, quick, quick! No foolin’! Customers comin’! Customers comin’! What can that young bride of yours think, eh? You out all night like this. Bet she wishes now that she’d married an Englishman . . . A nice, normal Englishman . . . Not a crazy furriner like you . . . Out all night, and that lovely young woman home all by hersef . . . Ought to be ashamed of yoursef, y’ should . . .
The large man moves back now from the workroom out into the shop, taking down the shutters, letting the first watery light of morning filter through the smudged tumblers and fruit bowls and creamers, the dust-blurred decanters, the higgledy-piggledy piles of doorknobs and buttons, the ornate lusters greasy with fingerprints. He whistles as he does it, his first tune of the day. He has looked into the crucible. He knows how much work was done overnight. Despite all his huffing and scolding, William Cloverdale is happy.
• • •
He does not know that he has been robbed.
My father has used three rods of William Cloverdale’s green glass in a botched attempt to create the model of a sea anemone for Harry Owen; the sad, mutilated result lies now in pieces in the bottom drawer, left, in the cabinet behind the master glassmaker’s workbench.
My father, rudely awakened, has only just remembered this himself.
He meant to remove the evidence. Now he cannot.
He has used a certain amount of enamel, too, in an effort to replicate the delicate shading of the tentacles, deep mauve at the base, lightening to rosy pink at the tips.
This was also a failure. And a robbery.
A tremor of anxiety passes through my father as he thinks of the evidence lying in the bottom drawer, left, along with some yellowed packing slips, disused tools, and a very old leather apron, folded, cracking along the seams. Flakes of leather like black moths broke free and scattered when he tried to unfold the apron to wrap what he had made, to hide the aborted remains. Black moths still lie on the floor, the fortunately filthy floor. He meant to sweep them up, but he didn’t. Black moths that are really flakes of skin. Instead he fell asleep, there beneath the gaze of the glass eyes in their cases. They watch him still.