He has made other things, too, instinctively, without knowing why, small, smooth objects of ambiguous design, which do not please him but which he cannot bear to throw away.
He averts his eyes from these. They are the secret he keeps from himself.
He has labored over his creation. The miscarriages now lie in the bottom drawer, left, in the cabinet behind the master glassmaker’s workbench. My father does not melt down this carnage—cannot sever the umbilicus—he remains attached to his creatures, no matter how deformed, long enough attached, at least, to place them in this hiding place, his equivalent (although he does not think of it that way), of my mother’s trunk. This Pandora’s box, like the other, he also, very successfully, avoids. It is the lack, the gap, the missing piece, the lacunae in my father’s attention. Although intending to study his mistakes, he never thinks about what is in this cabinet once he has placed it there, as if to look would actually cause him pain.
The wound exposed.
He has always been this way. An obsessive and a perfectionist, he dislikes looking at his own failures and secrets, even though he cannot let them go.
As if letting go would be admitting to something. Freeing it into the world.
But the successes—the successes are ready to be sent to Harry Owen, in London.
Really, Leo doesn’t want to let his successes go either . . . he’d like to keep them all close, so that he can look at them again, rest his eye upon the good parts, pick with his thumbnail at the bad, contemplate further improvements, think about how he can make the next set of models better. He has already, it is true, kept his few, whole creatures longer than he should have—given that Harry Owen waits for them—given that Harry Owen has paid for them. My father has kept them in the drawer alongside their unsuccessful and ambiguous counterparts, perhaps for purposes of comparison, so that they rest together, side by side: a perfect solenette and a solenette without a head, another that curls peculiarly in upon itself as if somebody has tried to fry it in a pan, another with malformed fins, and so forth, an evolution, in glass, of Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette.
My father only looks at his successes. That is what he is doing, at dawn, after another long night at Cloverdale’s. It is a last look: he has decided that today he will send what he has made. And then he will wait—for Harry Owen’s verdict. He will make no more until he has heard whether or not these will suit, whether they are sufficiently accurate for Harry Owen’s purpose.
• • •
Very methodically, he wraps his creatures, watches them disappear beneath layers of tape and wadding, then into the box addressed to Owen at the British Museum.
He is exhausted. He has been up all night making glass eyes, trying to atone for a sin of theft that William Cloverdale doesn’t even know he has committed. There lie, in his drawer, the failures on which he has wasted Cloverdale’s glass. From these he must avert his eyes.
He will spend more time with my mother, now that he is done—while he waits for the verdict from London. He has, though, it seems, no feeling about this, no wondering, neither hope nor fear nor anger. It is as if the lack of sleep has left him hollow, lightened, emptied of content. He feels more about sending his models to Harry Owen than he does about my mother.
As he tucks the package under his arm and departs Cloverdale’s shop, passing the still-dark premises of Argument’s Glasswares with its posters touting Vesuvius plastered over the windows, he experiences: a feeling of accomplishment, as if he has completed something, at last, of which he may be proud.
• • •
As he approaches the post office at Old Market Place, having arrived much too early and finding it not yet open: impatience, as if this delay will last forever; anger, as if the postmaster has thwarted him on purpose.