The Glass Ocean (21 page)

•   •   •

She imagines herself on the water, navigating by the stars.

•   •   •

She has forgotten other aspects of the journey. Such as the heat. The stink. The poisonous vapors. And the getting lost.

(But that, after all, was just part of the plan—Felix Girard’s plan.)

•   •   •

Mary! Go out to the shed and fetch me my bags! The small one, with the buckle! And the big one, with the strap! Go on! Why are you lolling, you lazy creature! I’ve asked you to fetch me my bags—and my trunk—bring my trunk too, while you’re at it, you lazy, creeping, good-for-nothing—!

The girl-of-all-work,
cap askew, grumbling, makes her way reluctantly out into the yard and then more reluctantly still into the shed, where my mother’s salt-stained luggage resides among the swaying dis-ease of stacked crates shipped from London and other “parts (and ports) unknown.” Mary loathes the collected goods and chattels of Felix Girard,
Gives me the willies it does, that stuff, all kind of dead things rotting, a great rotting dead bird I found in one o’ ’em boxes once, and a seal’s flipper in another—that’s right—just the flipper—it had fingernails an’ all just like we do—appallin’ I tell you!—and I thought, well, what’s next—the hind end of a giraffe?—a camel’s pizzle?! And pah! What a stink!
But she goes into the shed; what choice has she got? If she needs her job (and she does), she must go. And there she will find, in addition to my mother’s small bag with the buckle, large bag with the strap, and water-warped old trunk, the grinning stone head of a Persian
div—Staring straight at me it was, right out of the box, sticking out its tongue, very familiar and all, as if it knew me!

Maybe it does know you, Mary,
her sister Susan will say;
Yeah, and
maybe I ought to quit that job
, Mary will say,
and that house full of evil things
; and someday she will; but not today. Instead, with much grunting and groaning and panting, she will drag the trunk and the two bags upstairs, while my mother sits on the sofa, dreaming over her Papa’s map:
Idling her day away as usual, and me like a dog, around and around and up and down them stairs with milady’s boxes and bundles and bags . . .

All right, you silly girl, you can leave them.

The bags drop at the center of the parlor rug.

Does madam wish to pack her things?

No—
sharply this time
—I said to leave them.

The girl, grumbling under her breath about the obscenely out-thrust tongue of the
div—evil things in this house, evil things!—
disappears back down the corkscrew stairs into the kitchen.

Of course my mother will not pack directly. She isn’t ready yet. There is much that she will need—so much that she can hardly think of it all. Clothes. Shoes. Maps. A ship. Advisers. Money.

A very great deal of money.

She contemplates her suitcases.

It will take time. For the moment, it is just a dream. She has accomplished the easiest part of the dream, summoning the bags, then sliding them underneath the bed, where my father will not see them. There they will wait, like a promise. Sometimes a promise can be enough. My mother is aware of those bags, hyper-aware. There is not a moment that she spends on or in or around the bed that she is not conscious of the bags beneath it, waiting, patiently, until she is ready. Sometimes she wants to laugh, thinking about them; but she does not laugh.

Instead she grows very silent. She goes to Lars Kiersta’s in Flowergate and has a dress made. It is the first of what she will need. My father curses when he receives the bill, thinking the worst. So little imagination! Because of my father’s negative response, my mother has the next bill sent to Thomas Argument. He will pay for the next dress—
With pleasure
. And for the boots as well. His Vesuvius is making him rich. He can buy enough dresses to pack my mother’s entire trunk. He will also buy, before my mother is done, corsets, camisoles, petticoats, cotton hose, and a dozen nice cambric handkerchiefs, all of which my mother will fold carefully, reverently even, into her suitcases. Thomas Argument has no idea why Clotilde wants so many clothes; he has less imagination even than my father. Women want new clothes, therefore she shall have them. It may occur to him, once or twice, to wonder why he never sees her wearing what he has bought; he supposes he has forgotten which ones he paid for, and which her dear Papa bought her in Paris, back before
the disappearance
(he assumes Leopold hasn’t bought her any, which is very nearly true); but he never goes so far as to imagine those suitcases hidden beneath the bed.

Nor could he imagine that she has obtained the schedule for the steam packet
Emerald Isle
(departing the pier, Wednesdays to London, Mondays to Stockton; John Barritt, agent), which she has also folded up, and keeps among her underthings, along with her Papa’s map, in her trunk.

•   •   •

She is such a delicate creature. Incapable of planning.

•   •   •

It is true she hasn’t purchased her ticket yet.

She is waiting.

She already has a few coins tied up in one of those cambric handkerchiefs, and each week she will stealthily extract a single coin more from my father’s pay packet and hide it within that tight cambric knot.

So she is a thief, too, in her own way, and with her own justification.

My Papa is alive!

But he must be in trouble, or else he would return to me. I have to find him. I have to help my dear beloved Papa.

•   •   •

It is not very likely that my mother will succeed. She knows, herself, how unlikely it is. Yet she manages to continue the dream, hiding it in a particular space in her mind, where it is safe. In this space, the dream can be real to her, and also not real, and both at the same time. She does not, must not, look too closely. It is in the background, in the periphery. She sees it out the corners of her eyes. It is a bright flash of color, a flash like the flash of a wing.

Look directly and it is gone.

She needs the dream very much. Therefore she slips, each week, another coin into the cambric handkerchief, and continues forward, straight ahead, looking neither left nor right.

•   •   •

It would be so easy for my father to stop her.

•   •   •

It will take her a long time to save that money. And in the meantime, there are obstacles that she will face. She will be slowed immeasurably by one inconvenience, then another. There will be many opportunities for Leopold to intervene. But he will not intervene.

The trouble is that he has no imagination.

He becomes aware, for example, that money is missing. It takes time, but he notices a stricture in the domestic budget, greater than that caused by his own waste of material and time at William Cloverdale’s glasshouse. He notices, and quickly forms certain assumptions about what it is that Clotilde is doing with the money. Not long afterward he finds, because he looks for them, already assuming their existence, the suitcases underneath the bed, and this discovery bolsters his confidence in the assumptions he has already made.

•   •   •

He is too much of a gentleman to look inside the suitcases. He recoils from this—out of respect? Discretion? Fear? So he does not find the map on which Felix Girard has marked
Isla Desterrada:
22'49" N, 89'70" W.
Nor does he find the schedule for the steamer
Emerald Isle
. Left to his own devices, he cannot imagine these things. He imagines only the usual things, all of them distasteful, many of them involving his rival, Thomas Argument.

•   •   •

Missing money. Suitcases brought out of storage. And there are other things, other signs. For a period my mother’s spirits seem to rise. She sends Mary out to the shed to search for her old sheet music, and when, despite the menacing
div
, it has been found, she sits, for the first time in a very long time, at her little spinet. It is hopelessly warped now and out of tune, this dear instrument bought for her by her Papa; but Clotilde persists in playing, and she does not complain of its poor sound. She plays as if oblivious, simply for the pleasure of touching the instrument that she has not touched in so many months.

My father thinks (because he cannot imagine the dream that has lifted her spirits, the fragile dream that balances, precariously, in a place inside her that is hidden from him),
She is leaving me for Thomas Argument. Therefore she is happy.

So little imagination! And so wrongsighted.

Even Thomas Argument knows better than to imagine this.
Especially
Thomas Argument. He is busy with his magic lantern—too dazzled by his own special effects to be planning any radical moves with my mother. Though he still comes to visit at the Birdcage, of course; and he still brings gifts—except now, he brings corsets instead of music boxes.

•   •   •

My poor mother. I feel sorry for her sometimes. So much looked at, gazed upon, devoured, even, by them both, yet so little seen. Transformed by them, always, into something other than herself. Her happiness, such as it is, so fragile. She is about to face the first, and greatest, obstacle to her dream.

•   •   •

Mary!
she cries
, you’re hurting me! Don’t tie my corset so tight, you terrible creature!

La! Blame me?
It’s not my fault, is it, that madam’s got so fat—?

Shut up,
you horrible, lazy, impudent girl! Leave it! Get away!

•   •   •

This is the beginning: my mother clinging to the bedpost, her gold curls loose and in disarray around her shoulders, Mary tugging bravely at the corset laces. She can tug no further.
La! It’s not my fault, is it, that madam’s got so fat?

How unhappy it makes my mother, this remark of Mary’s. She frowns, not with anger, but with a misery so profound that it frightens the servant, who runs quickly away.

•   •   •

Mary, help me move the mirror out of the closet.

It is the afternoon of the same day. My father, as usual, is not home.

Really, madam?
Incredulously.
Mr. Argument’s big mirror?
Are you certain?

•   •   •

It is the one gift of Thomas Argument’s that my mother has banished: a large mirror in a gilt rococo frame on a cherrywood stand—the only full-length mirror she has ever owned.

Yes, you little fool, of course I’m certain. Why would I say I wanted it if I didn’t?

Of course, madam. I’m sorry, madam.

It takes both of them, huffing and puffing mightily, to dislodge the mirror from the back of the closet where, together, they’d jammed it a year ago, wedging it between a stuffed anteater with great hooked foreclaws posed on a tree stump, and a lacquered incidental table inset with ebony, belonging to Marie-Louise Girard. Back then, a year ago, my mother couldn’t bear the sight of the mirror; now she regards it coolly, evenly, like an enemy she means to face down.

It’s very dusty, madam.

That’s all right.
Now
get out.

Yes, madam.

The door shuts behind Mary’s bustling and bowing skirts; my mother, left alone, stands quite still, at an oblique angle to the mirror, its unruffled silver depths outside her line of vision, which rests, instead, on the bed with its white, nubbled bedspread. Beneath the bed, like stones beneath the sea, lie her trunk and her travel cases, but she can see these no more than she can see her own reflection.

She waits a moment, during which the only sounds are the chiming of the clock, downstairs in the parlor, and, farther away, muffled, here, on the third floor, the hollow, echoing boom of the river, whose vibration carries up through the bones of the house into the soles of my mother’s feet.

Quickly, then, she begins to undress, removing, first, the petite leather boots bought for her by her Papa in Paris; then, unpinning it from the bodice, the navy blue skirt, which falls around her feet; then the bodice itself, low necked, with tight, short sleeves, is unhooked and cast aside; then the petticoats—there are four—the long one with the flounce—the short white one—the petticoat bodice, with its buttons, embroideries and frills—then the ornamental petticoat, expensively laced; then she rolls her black stockings down and off, kicking them aside; then the white cotton camisole, tightly fitted at the waist; then the corset, which she unhooks from the front before reaching around behind to loosen the laces; and then at last, the heavy white chemise, which she slips up and off over her head, her arms tangling in it for a moment before, bending forward sharply at the waist in a gesture of impatience, she casts it, too, onto the floor.

Finally naked, she steps before the mirror.

She has never seen herself this way before, the entire pink and white and gold of herself unclothed. She surveys herself critically—wincing slightly as she cups her breasts in her hands, weighing them, considering the dark flush of the aureoles, then turning slowly sideways to look at herself in silhouette. She unpins her hair, lets it fall. She is a beautiful woman; she has known this; now she sees it. She places her palm against her belly, just above the luxuriant blond bush of pubic hair. Behind her, in the mirror, she can see reflected the sea, grey blue, frothy with whitecaps, protecting all its secrets, framed in her bedroom window.

She does not linger long. This new being, her naked self, is not, for her, an object of admiration or of desire. She dresses again, rapidly, twists her hair up into a thick, glossy coil, which she pins neatly into place. A few renegade curls hang loose at the nape of her neck.

•   •   •

I wonder, does she miss her own mother now? Or is it still her Papa she thinks of—Marie-Louise Girard nothing but a ghost: unsought, unwanted.

•   •   •

She tries and when she cannot move it herself, carefully covers the mirror with a sheet she unfolds from the linen chest at the foot of the bed, making certain that each flounce of the rococo frame is fully hidden.