This is what love has made of him. A creature part flesh, part fire, he’s been winnowed down, has winnowed himself to just lamp and hands, a face partially occluded by goggles (eyes invisible, shielded), neck a thin, pale stalk beneath the untrimmed mane of his curly black hair, he’s bent earnestly in my memory, bent forever, there in the dark semidark, a supplicant before the flame.
• • •
Meanwhile the letters from Harry Owen pile up unanswered, slip down between the dining table and the wall, lie forgotten on the Turkish carpet, among the crumbs. Are trod upon at mealtimes. Beneath her sharp heel, my ill-fitting shoe, his boot with the worn-down sole. Can’t you, Leo, for God’s sake, send more glass? Hornsby is keener than ever—
• • •
But my father is too busy. He is rearranging small, gemlike shards of glass in a glass chamber, a small, tightly lidded capsule, of Thomas Argument’s making; dissatisfied, opens it, adds other shards, other brilliants, of other shapes, other colors; then he turns his attention to the mirrors, gently alters their angles inside the wooden tube of the kaleidoscope. It was my mother’s first gift from Thomas Argument—that which began all. The object that piqued my father’s interest in glass. Without it, perhaps, he would never have made glass. Had he never lifted it, looked inside, and, being a Dell’oro, seen the possibilities. Now at last it is laid bare, disarticulated, exposed. With a sharp knife he cuts a convex curve, delicate as a sliver of new moon, from the narrow far end of each of the three rectangular mirrors. Three new moons fall onto the bench, onto the floor, reflect narrow scimitars of light, scintillating blue scythes of sky. Carefully he replaces the mirrors in the tube, the chamber at its apex, the clear lens into the viewing end. Applies his eye to the viewer. Rotates. Sees what he has made, multiplied two, four, sixteen, a hundred, a thousand times. And is lost there, in precise, brilliant geometries of glass.
• • •
His work, his real work, has begun at last.
• • •
Carefully he removes the chamber again, once again opens it, and with a tweezer, begins removing small, brilliantly colored fragments. Like gems they glitter in the uncertain light at pincer’s end.
He is dissatisfied: always dissatisfied.
• • •
My mother, for her part, hasn’t noticed the loss of these, Thomas Argument’s purely sentimental gifts. It is the missing pearl earrings she pursues, down on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor. They, after all, are germane to a secret project of her own. As for the others . . .
• • •
They don’t matter to her. But I believe she feels their loss. She just doesn’t know it. Instead, what she feels is a reduction in her self. Something’s gone. But she doesn’t know what’s missing. She’s groping for it without knowing what she’s groping for. Finding a pearl earring. Yet feeling, still, the gap, the lack, the fissure. The missing piece.
• • •
As for me, I’m growing up in the gap between their two secret, separate worlds—at the juncture of their mutually averted eyes. For all the childish length and breadth of me, I’ve managed to slip between them, unnoticed by either. Nobody bothers to look for me where I’ve been dropped. And so I remain, shining, quietly, in the dark, increasingly mysterious to myself, as, too, I am sure, to them. I lie in my trundle bed—the little bed that has become, over time, too small, my self (that mystery) projecting, feet and ankles, over the low drawer that supposedly contains me—lying there, hearing, while it is still dark, the first noises of the morning—the single, cawping gull, then the many; rumble of early cart wheels, clatter of hoofbeats; footsteps on the cobbles; shutters opening, a quarrel starting up early in the house next door; my parents turning, beside and above me, so near and yet so distant, my mother’s soft, inscrutable, warm murmurings in sleep; and I, the eavesdropper, aware, always, of the growing mystery, my self, under the rough sheet, the blanket, atop the prickling straw mattress; everything a mystery—swelling breast buds a mystery, my skin a mystery with its unexpected pink blushes, the sudden scrawny, startling growth of red bush at my pubes and the twin tendrils, smaller, in my armpits, all this a mystery to me, all new; I feel myself growing, being built, as it were, piece by piece, expansion of blood, bone, sinew, and also of mind, there beneath the roof of the Birdcage, which it seems sometimes will hardly hold me, so quickly am I growing, and so large—