• • •
Wandering down Harbour Road to kill the time, standing and looking out over the Scaur and the harbor, at the fishing boats scudding out between the protective arms of the breakwater into the open sea: a sense of how little he has done, how inadequate his efforts, how intimidating the immensity of this ocean, of the infinity of worlds beneath its surface, unknowable, ungraspable, and mysterious. How puny his skills in attempting to represent even a tiny fraction of this blue vastness.
• • •
When at last the post office has opened and he has handed his parcel across the counter and paid its fare to London: loss, a sense that something has been taken from him that he cannot replace. He fails, in the moment that the parcel disappears into the bin behind the counter, to connect this feeling with the loss of his sister, even though he looks for her every day, unconsciously now, though previously on purpose, fruitlessly, at the turning of every corner, in every shop, along the length and breadth of every street.
Nor does he think about my mother, she who recedes from him, molecule by gleaming molecule. He averts his eyes and thoughts from both my real mother, and from the other, she who has taken form, glitteringly, in his mind.
• • •
All the way back to Cloverdale’s he is dogged by a sense of loss, a sense that haunts him all the more because he cannot quite place its point of origin, a place that seems to shift between several dimly perceived objects, none of which he really wants to think about.
At the twistings and turnings of the streets he sees the sea, blue emerging between and beyond the whitewashed walls, the black iron gates, the red-tiled roofs.
It is early still. The shopkeepers have just begun to open their shutters. Mostly he has the sidewalk to himself, the clamor of his heels on the cobblestones another kind of loss. Occasionally he passes an industrious enshawled housewife, or a servant all in black, clutching a basket, a loaf of bread, a chicken.
• • •
At Cloverdale’s the shutters are up, morning light refracting uneasily through the bubbles, warps, and imperfections of a hundred glassy surfaces. The large man himself is in the back, a shape vague but vast, hunched over the master glassmaker’s bench, humming. With a tweezer he retrieves glass eyes from the crucible, lays them carefully on the surface of the bench. My father paddles toward him through a multicolored shifting of light and shadow.
Mister Dell’oro. Cloverdale speaks softly, pleasantly. Mister Dell’oro, there you are.
Yes, says my father, I’m here.
Up all night again, Mister Dell’oro?
Yes. All night.
You work very hard, Mister Dell’oro.
Yes.
Then my father sees. He pauses. Cloverdale sees that he has seen.
What is this, Mister Dell’oro? What is this?
The bottom drawer on the left-hand side of the cabinet behind the workbench is open, and spread out on the bench itself, all of my father’s abortions in glass. Cloverdale has found them, has laid them out carefully, tenderly even: a workbench of gently nurtured monstrosities. Of corpses.
Did you make these, Mister Dell’oro?
Cloverdale holds up, at the tip of a tweezer, something small, fleshlike, unnameable.
My father says nothing, nods; somehow the vibration of the nod is carried on the thickness of the air to William Cloverdale, who is not looking up, who looks down, rather, heavy lidded, terse lipped, at the mess upon the bench.
Using my stuff?