There is a silence between them then. His words are devastating, dream shattering, though this is not intended.
Beneath them the river rushes, carrying clots of blubber and bone inevitably out to sea.
Inevitability. That’s the thing. My father has recognized mine, and doesn’t flinch from it, while my mother strives to forget. To forget, and to remain suspended in timelessness.
In this, though, her body betrays her. She is betrayed by her body, again. She ripens unwillingly. In the humidity her hair grows thicker and more curly, becomes a mane. Unbrushed, unwashed, it has a strong, musky, not unpleasant smell, such as might emanate from a healthy, fecund animal. This is what she is. What she does not want to be.
Savage!
From the strength of her savagery alone she hopes she may prevent me.
• • •
This is her waking dream. Her dreams in sleep are of a different order. Then she dreams of birthing monsters. Flippered things. Faceless. Footless. On awakening she can only remember vague, troubling shadows.
Leo, you won’t go out today? You’ll stay with me today?
This is how afraid she is. Her knuckles white against the cushions as she lifts herself slightly toward him. Her belly like the sun.
• • •
Even he cannot acquiesce all the time. The sense of inevitability from which she averts her eyes has gotten under his skin, eats at him from the inside out. He knows he must provide. Because I am coming. I am inevitable.
I have no one to blame but myself, he thinks. I shouldn’t have stolen from William Cloverdale. It’s my own fault. I was careless.
But he thinks it mainly out of politeness. Really, he blames me.
Beast. Little monster.
Now he works for Harry Owen only, for a pittance, out in the shed. This innovation, the arrival of the bench, and the lamp, and the oven, and the tools—the hooks and tweezers and calipers and brushes of my father’s trade—as well as the coal to fuel the furnace, is paid for by Harry Owen. In return, my father makes glass: scientific models, for which he is paid by the piece, if they pass muster.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.
My mother is unhappy about this.
It all belongs to him—the bench is his, the tools are his, the glass is his—what’s in it for us?
He pays me. Defensively. Defiantly even. Black topknot of hair upright.
He pays you pitifully!
Enough to keep you in lace.
She is silent at this. There is nothing she can say. Harry Owen’s money has bought no lace, and my father knows it. So where did the money come from? This he doesn’t know. Thomas Argument being out of the picture, as far as he can tell. But then, the lace has gone, too: a silent disappearance. My mother has different desires now, desires that must be provided for. Clotilde eats so much now! She feeds me with entire fowls, with roasts, with whole loaves of bread, platters of herring, anything she can get her hands on. She never seems to stop eating.
And so he must make. That is his justification.
Really, though, he loves the glass. The red-hot responsiveness of it. Its lightness contrasted with the cool, heavy iron of the tools. His desire for glass is a tactile desire, a longing lodged in the tendons of his fingers, his arms, it is a physical part of him now. And then there are his creatures. That desire is emotional. The work like a living thing.
• • •