• • •
It is not very likely that my mother will succeed. She knows, herself, how unlikely it is. Yet she manages to continue the dream, hiding it in a particular space in her mind, where it is safe. In this space, the dream can be real to her, and also not real, and both at the same time. She does not, must not, look too closely. It is in the background, in the periphery. She sees it out the corners of her eyes. It is a bright flash of color, a flash like the flash of a wing.
Look directly and it is gone.
She needs the dream very much. Therefore she slips, each week, another coin into the cambric handkerchief, and continues forward, straight ahead, looking neither left nor right.
• • •
It would be so easy for my father to stop her.
• • •
It will take her a long time to save that money. And in the meantime, there are obstacles that she will face. She will be slowed immeasurably by one inconvenience, then another. There will be many opportunities for Leopold to intervene. But he will not intervene.
The trouble is that he has no imagination.
He becomes aware, for example, that money is missing. It takes time, but he notices a stricture in the domestic budget, greater than that caused by his own waste of material and time at William Cloverdale’s glasshouse. He notices, and quickly forms certain assumptions about what it is that Clotilde is doing with the money. Not long afterward he finds, because he looks for them, already assuming their existence, the suitcases underneath the bed, and this discovery bolsters his confidence in the assumptions he has already made.
• • •
He is too much of a gentleman to look inside the suitcases. He recoils from this—out of respect? Discretion? Fear? So he does not find the map on which Felix Girard has marked Isla Desterrada: 22'49" N, 89'70" W. Nor does he find the schedule for the steamer Emerald Isle. Left to his own devices, he cannot imagine these things. He imagines only the usual things, all of them distasteful, many of them involving his rival, Thomas Argument.
• • •
Missing money. Suitcases brought out of storage. And there are other things, other signs. For a period my mother’s spirits seem to rise. She sends Mary out to the shed to search for her old sheet music, and when, despite the menacing div, it has been found, she sits, for the first time in a very long time, at her little spinet. It is hopelessly warped now and out of tune, this dear instrument bought for her by her Papa; but Clotilde persists in playing, and she does not complain of its poor sound. She plays as if oblivious, simply for the pleasure of touching the instrument that she has not touched in so many months.
My father thinks (because he cannot imagine the dream that has lifted her spirits, the fragile dream that balances, precariously, in a place inside her that is hidden from him), She is leaving me for Thomas Argument. Therefore she is happy.
So little imagination! And so wrongsighted.
Even Thomas Argument knows better than to imagine this. Especially Thomas Argument. He is busy with his magic lantern—too dazzled by his own special effects to be planning any radical moves with my mother. Though he still comes to visit at the Birdcage, of course; and he still brings gifts—except now, he brings corsets instead of music boxes.
• • •
My poor mother. I feel sorry for her sometimes. So much looked at, gazed upon, devoured, even, by them both, yet so little seen. Transformed by them, always, into something other than herself. Her happiness, such as it is, so fragile. She is about to face the first, and greatest, obstacle to her dream.
• • •
Mary! she cries, you’re hurting me! Don’t tie my corset so tight, you terrible creature!