He’s got the kaleidoscope out there, the one Thomas Argument gave to my mother—that very small first gift—and he’s taken it to pieces. He’s removed the lenses, has laid out in a row its small, cunning mirrors, he’s got the colorful glass innards out of their chamber, in a heap sometimes, at other times spread out on the bench like the pieces of a puzzle, each piece almost but not quite touching the next, and he ruminates over them, these pieces, rearranges, holds them up to the light, thinks about them, puts them back down, puts them away, wraps them up carefully, like objects of value, like gems. Then, too, he’s got the pocket mirror Thomas Argument gave her, in which she’d seen the reflection of her dear, vanished Papa; he’s taken it apart, has picked all the shards of broken mirror out of the silver frame. Even the yellow glass bird is there, carved and filleted on his bench, the wings removed to expose the delicate mechanism within. He’s studying, very carefully, each of these objects, and others, Thomas Argument’s gifts to my mother, studying in depth, contemplating, learning, or trying to learn, how they work.
This, of course, does not satisfy my father, even when he has these objects, innocent in themselves, bared to the bone, as it were; there’s something here he can’t penetrate, not even once the cold mechanism has yielded its secrets—and they do yield, eventually, these objects of Thomas Argument’s, though they don’t do it quickly; no—there are challenges here, even for my father, who, with his Dell’oro tendenza, is an indefatigable scratcher at and ferreter out of secrets of the mechanical kind— though he is less perspicacious with other types, secrets of the flesh or of the emotion, for example. No—apart from the purely intellectual rewards my father derives from understanding, fully, the mechanisms of his rival, his explorations leave him unsatisfied. Carving them down to the wire, to the nuts and bolts, to the mirrors and lenses, still—unsatisfied. But this is the Dell’oro condition, is it not?
He can discern how the mechanisms work, but he cannot discern how they worked on my mother—this, no baring of mechanism will reveal; the secret cannot be reached this way; no merely mechanical penetration, however deep, can ever be deep enough to fathom this mystery. In the gloom of his shed, though, my father does not realize his efforts are in vain; indeed, does not know just what it is that he is seeking—it’s a shadow, something somewhere on the periphery—though he knows very well he isn’t finding it; and so he continues with his dissections. Harry Owen and Montagu House are forgotten (at least until another envelope arrives, and then another; but even these are mere nagging presences, nits buzzing in the ear, pests, to be waved away) in the shadow of this other, more urgent, undertaking.
What a fool my father is, in his shed, with all this tinkering, tinkering, tinkering. He has learned nothing, it is clear, about my mother, or about the high price of neglect. Monsters are fathered that way. He got off lucky the first time. Who knows what’s next. But that doesn’t occur to him; he’s working, that’s all, there’s nothing else, just the work.
In his own odd way he’s not neglecting her, of course. As far as he’s concerned. More like, he’s forgotten where she is. He’s groping blindly, he’s lost. But it’s her he’s thinking of, all the time, every time he turns a screw to recalibrate a mechanism, or reaches for his soldering iron, or examines a minute cog and wheel with the aid of a magnifier that belongs to Harry Owen, and Montagu House. Every time he starts the bellows, bends over his lamp. Because of course he can’t be content just taking Thomas Argument’s gifts to pieces. He’s a Dell’oro, after all. There’s always got to be something more. He’s going to do something with them, these gifts.
• • •
It’s taking him closer to her. That’s what he thinks.
• • •
I remember his hands moving, gently, in the lamplight. There’s nothing left but his hands. That’s what he’s reduced to: it’s memory’s work. The spattering of sunlight across his shoulders, that’s part of it, and his hands, moving, moving, gently, desperately (except I don’t know that yet, I am still a child), in the semidark dark. He cannot continue, yet continues. Ever in the attempt to penetrate that which cannot be penetrated. That which moves away at his approach. Closer is farther. Cold is warm. Glass is flesh.