This makes him tremble.
Though they are silent. Of course.
The robbed man—the victim—William Cloverdale—will not notice, or, if he does, will think it is a tremor of awakening. Crazy filthy furriner.
That is one of the advantages. Filthy. Crazy. Foreign. Therefore unaccountable. Bound to behave unaccountably. The unexpected, expected.
• • •
All day, as Leopold labors, deprived of sleep, over his glass eyes, he will think about his failures of the night before. The color was wrong. The shapes. The pieces cracked and crazed. And the overarching problem: it did not look alive.
It was a dead thing. An abortion. He should have returned it to the batch, but he didn’t. Instead he put it in the drawer, and then he fell asleep. Now it will be in the drawer all day, all day he will worry about it, will tremble when William Cloverdale comes near, sigh with relief when he goes away on his wide, silent feet. That particular drawer is seldom used, it is forgotten, but still, it is dangerous. This and the falling asleep with the lamp still lit. And the reluctance (because there was reluctance) to return his failure, his mess, to the batch. To consign it to the fiery pit. I will do it later. But then there was no later.
It is dangerous.
The thievery could be detected.
My father, when he began his experiment, half expected to fail. But he did not expect to have feelings about his failure, to want to keep his failure, to study it. He has surprised himself. In this, he is unaccountable to himself.
Now, because of his failure and his falling asleep, which was careless, he will have to stay late another night, if only to melt down and thus repatriate that which he has stolen. Expunge the theft. The guilt. Perhaps, too (so he hopes), the failure.
This is what my father does. He stays another night. And another. Thomas Argument, from across the street, sees the glow of fire from between the slats of William Cloverdale’s shutters, and feels himself goaded. But goaded to what? He has no idea what is going on in Cloverdale’s glasshouse. Because he does not know, he will work longer, and later, himself. Just in case. So as not to be surprised. So as not to be outdone.
Which makes one thing clear:
He isn’t with my mother.
Thomas Argument and Leopold Dell’oro are both in Church Street, working, while Clotilde Girard Dell’oro, CGD’O, is at the Birdcage, alone, listening to the river.
She has a secret that she is holding to herself, very tightly. She holds it tightly even when she is alone, as if she is afraid of revealing, to herself, something she already knows, yet does not want to know. During these long nights, though, when my father does not bother to come home at all, she sometimes lets go just a little—just enough to be able to hold the secret at a small distance from herself, at arm’s length, as if it belongs to someone else, so that she can look at it, and think what it is that she ought to do.
Hers is a secret requiring action. That is what she thinks.
She just doesn’t know which action.
In fact, she has very few choices. It makes her feel better, though, during the long nights alone, to imagine that she has many.
• • •
It is difficult for me to understand why, feeling as he does, my father leaves my mother alone on these nights. Even if he thinks she is already lost to him, why does he not stay there, fight? Or at the very least, watch? Guard? Observe? Forbid? It is foreign to his character to forbid, but ought he not do it, in this case?
And I don’t understand Thomas Argument either—seeing the breach, why does he not step into it, if this is what he wants, has wanted, all along? Inexplicable.