She does not linger long. This new being, her naked self, is not, for her, an object of admiration or of desire. She dresses again, rapidly, twists her hair up into a thick, glossy coil, which she pins neatly into place. A few renegade curls hang loose at the nape of her neck.
• • •
I wonder, does she miss her own mother now? Or is it still her Papa she thinks of—Marie-Louise Girard nothing but a ghost: unsought, unwanted.
• • •
She tries and when she cannot move it herself, carefully covers the mirror with a sheet she unfolds from the linen chest at the foot of the bed, making certain that each flounce of the rococo frame is fully hidden.
• • •
Not long afterward she appears in the kitchen, adjusting her hat, pulling on her ice-blue shawl.
Mary, I’m going out.
Yes, madam. Will you be going to see Mr. Argument, then?
No, Mary. I won’t be long.
Still there is no anger in my mother, despite her servant’s impudence; just a deepening of the glacial reserve, and of that cast of unhappiness that arrived in the morning, which she can neither dispel nor disguise—it shows still, at the corners of her lips, and in her eyes—a seriousness that stifles even the girl-of-all-work, who lowers her head, suddenly embarrassed, and begins to scour the stove.
There is no rush for dinner, Mary. It will just be me tonight. Mr. Dell’oro won’t be home.
Yes, madam.
• • •
My mother emerges onto Bridge Street in the lengthening afternoon. It is spring, still chilly, the sky greenish, gravid, but without rain. She is on her way to Skinner Street.
As there is no sun she casts no shadow.
• • •
It will be three hours before she returns. There will be a wait in Skinner Street. This is beyond her control.
• • •
On her way home she will pass, on the sidewalk, Thomas Argument, who will smile at her, and nod, and walk on, saying nothing.
He is a shrewd man, Thomas Argument. Although my mother doesn’t know it yet, he won’t visit her again. This, too, is beyond her control, as she will very soon discover, to her infinite, though disguised, distress.
• • •
What is my father doing while my mother is in Skinner Street? He is with William Cloverdale, of course, making a beautiful, honey-brown glass eye, the iris shot through with strands of gold, for a girl from Hull who lost hers after being violently punched in the face by her lover because she had been, or so he believed, unfaithful. In this glass eye my father places four tiny brown grains of glass forming the initials: CGD’O.
If looked at very closely, by use of a magnifying glass, for example, these initials will be discernible in the glass iris, just above and to the left of the pupil.
But to most people, gazing unaided into the eye of the assaulted woman, the initials will look like a darker brown fleck in a honey-brown iris, a tiny ripple, constituting not a flaw, but rather an attempt to capture, naturalistically as possible, the inconsistency of the living organ that, as everyone knows, always has its flaws, its mars, its blots, its idiosyncrasies.
Add them up correctly and they equal beauty.
As in this particular case: my father’s joke, his inclusion of my mother’s initials, CGD’O, makes the eye beautiful, although nobody who looks at it will understand why; it is a beautiful enigma.