The Glass Ocean (25 page)

•   •   •

He will not work today. He has lied to my mother. Even he cannot acquiesce all the time.

•   •   •

Instead he is headed down the hill, toward the Scaur.

It is a place Leo seldom visits now. He doesn’t know that my mother and I visited it often, a certain number of months ago, in our frantic efforts to be rid of each other.

It’s difficult to say what he’s looking for there. A trace of his childhood self, perhaps, the mark of his own ancient bootheels on the uptilted, striated rock. But it’s impossible to leave a mark on the Scaur. It takes a million years to make a mark there. My father, traversing it again, will not find himself there, if it is his self that he is seeking.

Whatever he is looking for, he descends determinedly toward it through the warren of streets, disappearing between the whitewashed walls, then reappearing where the bends of the road open out toward the sea. He marches, his back stiffly upright in the too-old, too-shiny, too-warm suit, too-tight collar chafing just beneath his ears; weaves in and among and past the shop fronts and fishmongers’ carts, through shouts of bakers’ boys and potboys, past sweet shop and Punch and Judy, is among but not of it, removed by his demeanor (absorbed, distant, off-putting) and his clothes (strangely formal, yet in disrepair). He has taken on the general aura, which has now become typical of him, of wanting to be left alone.

I don’t know if it’s really what he wants. Or merely what he conveys.

But he
is
left alone. He descends, unharassed, to Harbour Road, then turns sharply right, onto the Scaur. Though it is a hot clear day, the heavy, green sea exhales coldly upon him, breath reeking rot of tide. His feet remember, instinctively, the twisted spine of rock. Despite the constrictions of suit cuffs and collar he climbs the rough stone ably, sure-footed as ever, eyes cast automatically, habitually, downward. Instinctively searching.

•   •   •

The Scaur is the same but also not the same. The rock itself is unchanged, though new cliff-falls pock the cliff face, exposing striated layers of sandstone and marl, seams of jet, seams of bone. But there are bathers here now, in their frilly costumes, and among the jetties on the cliffs: fossil hunters with picks and hammers, pith helmets, bulging bags, the instruments of amateurism. This is different.

This is Felix Girard’s doing. It has been like this ever since Felix Girard excised the Whitby Beast from the face of the cliff called Black Cap. Whitby has become a destination. Wealth in a new form now mounts upward, from the seafront, into the town.

My father, though, is not particularly interested in this. His gaze is downward, his focus myopic, his stride, even on that rough ground, is purposeful, if slow. He is heading toward the Black Cap. Occasionally he pauses, stoops, reaches. He is gathering ammonites, their shells, just as he remembers from his boyhood, turned to brilliant amethyst, garnet, pyrite, smoky quartz. He thrusts them absently, almost automatically, into the pockets of his not-quite-shabby suit. It is almost like he is a child again, exercising the habits of his childhood: to stoop and to search, to gather, to collect. To hoard.

In this way he progresses slowly along the Scaur, pockets bulging with rocks. He in his rusty old suit, with his abstracted air.

He’s trying to distract himself. He doesn’t want to think about me. That’s difficult, of course. I am omnipresent, although I do not yet exist. I am paradoxical in this.

When he reaches the foot of the Black Cap he stops. And for the first time in many years, dares to look up.

•   •   •

The old wound is still there—the wound he could not bear to look at, when he was a boy—the gap where the cliff face came down. The wooden stage is still there, too, long abandoned now, where Felix Girard gave his first lectures on the Whitby Beast. The beast itself, of course, is gone: surgically excised, taken away to London. Leaving behind a massive scar on the face of the Black Cap. A scar within a wound. Sliced out of the slick, dark rock.

My father gazes upward, at the place where the tree roots still dangle, exposed, black, snaking arteries, the still-living trees green and precarious but still clinging to the cliff’s edge. That is the churchyard up there, St. Mary’s; the coffins that were also unearthed, and hung exposed like ragged rotting teeth, are gone now—rescued—replanted somewhere safer.

•   •   •

This is where my parents met. Not so very many years ago. But also a lifetime ago. She up on a scaffolding with her darling Papa, assisting in the excavation of the Whitby Beast; Leo down below, in the rocks, with his pencil and sketch pad, watching. Her golden hair. And her mocking cry.
Papa! Who is that ridiculous bo-oy?

•   •   •

My father bends down, hefts a rock, despite the unhelpful constrictions of his suit throws it at the cliff face, watches, with silent satisfaction, the cascade of shale produced thereby. Then disgorges, from within his right front pocket, a small ammonite, the coil perfect, of fool’s gold. Turns it over in his palm. Admires this, the living tissue turned to stone. Stopped in time.

If only I could make them in glass.

Petrels fumbling moodily in the updraft.

•   •   •

Meanwhile I, who have been approaching for many pages, am about to arrive.

•   •   •

In an act of fateful serendipity, my mother is no longer lying on the sofa. She has gotten up; she has even, in my father’s absence, put on a frock; has even, for the first time in a month, hefted herself awkwardly down the stairs, this a major endeavor for her as she cannot, in fact, see past the vast planet of her belly even so far as her feet—so she feels for the stairs, first with her toes, then with the ball of the foot, then the heel, her palms braced against the walls for balance; edging me sideways past all those belongings of her father’s, past the rolled-up carpets and the specimen trays, the taxidermied alligators and the ocelot, those lifelike, no-longer-living things that occupy so much of the Birdcage’s limited space. She edges and inches until she reaches the fragrant nether realm of the abandoned kitchen, which she prefers not to see or to think about, and then maneuvers herself, with great effort, out, into the yard. Glancing surreptitiously at the shed, into the street. Upon the edge of which she stands, like a beacon, hugely.

Passersby do not pause, but they do stare a bit.

•   •   •

I’d like to say that she emerged because she knew I was coming—that, prompted by a premonitory pang, she sought help for us both, in the fast-approaching hour of our mutual extremity.

But this she did not.

No. It was rather that she happened to spy, out the window, a figure, tall, dark, slightly stooped, passing along the brow of Bridge Street; and this figure she wished to pursue, in spite of, or perhaps
because of
, her bulging belly.

In the time it has taken her to edge us down the stairs, though, the object of my mother’s desires has disappeared, up the brow of Bridge Street and into the town. Whether turning to right or to left: unknown.

My mother is not perturbed.

She begins—not to run, that is impossible for us now—but to trot, very swiftly, with a sort of rolling motion, a sideways motion, none too smooth, her vast prominence balanced carefully in her palms, hair loose, frock flapping. Thus we make our way together, she and I, on one of our final excursions of the sort, to the corner of Bridge Street and Grape Lane, where my mother, sensing or, perhaps, even
scenting
her man, with that uncannily acute perception her pregnancy has granted her, correctly chooses the right-hand turning.

We arrive just in time to see a tall, stooped figure hovering at the entrance of the Custom House tavern.

Tom! Tom!
my mother calls. There is an urgency in her tone, so much so that Himmelfarb the old-clothes man looks up sharply from beneath his many hats, the acrobats tumbling on their carpet under the Custom House awning pause in their tumbling, Punch misaims his whack at Judy, and Thomas Argument (if indeed it is he), apparently failing to hear, recedes all the more quickly through the tavern door.

Tom!
cries my mother.
Tom!

Angrily this time. There’s an edge to her now.

She would willingly follow him in—she has already begun trotting again, gaining momentum, palms beneath belly, the entire street crew of onlookers urging her forward—
That’s the way! You tell him, missus!
—except that now comes the sudden, warm, wet gush between her legs. All at once, abruptly, like a folding chair collapsing, my mother sits down in the street. Under her breath she mutters, so softly that only I can hear it:
Beast!

And then:

Quick
, she says, from her apparently helpless position,
somebody fetch Mrs. Marwook!

It is a credit to my mother that even in this, her most abject moment—big bellied, tear streaked, her frock soaked in amniotic juices, ignored by her lover, down on her nates in the middle of Grape Street—mercilessly kicked, in short, both from within and without—she is still beautiful—more than that—she is compelling. Nor has she lost her presence of mind.
Mrs. Marwook!
she cries,
on the double!
And the butcher’s boy, feeling himself commanded by beauty of irresistible aspect, immediately drops his tray of steaks and dashes off to fetch the deft-fingered crone who will, very soon, usher me into the world.

•   •   •

I will not dwell on the details of the birth—the extended battle between me and my mother, lasting the better part of eighteen hours, fought in the big bed in the small pentagonal bedroom on the third floor of the Birdcage—nor mention how it galled her, in the thick of it, to feel beneath her thigh, through the scrawny mattress, the hard jabbing edge of the traveling trunk she never got to finish packing. I think that even then, even as I was making my struggling, strangling, stumbling way down the birth canal, my mother was mentally packing that trunk—
six dresses, two corsets, three petticoats, five pair of stockings, gloves, evening gloves, blue hat with an egret feather, black hat with a maroon lace, cambric hankies, dress boots, waterproof boots . . .
No surprise that there developed, during certain moments in the struggle, a controversy as to whether she was trying to keep me in, or thrust me out—
Push, missus! Ye’re distracted!
—which Mrs. Marwook, prodding sharply with words and hands, urged her to resolve as quickly as possible, and in the right direction.

•   •   •

My father, coming up from the Scaur with his pockets full of fossil ammonites, hears the screaming, and retreats to his shed. He will spend the entire night there, nervously sketching sea urchins in nearly impossible detail—the fragile test, the inching tube feet, the purple anus, the mouth (
Aristotle’s lantern
), the hollow black spines, pinching pedicellaria—occasionally thrusting his head out the door, then ducking just as quickly back when he hears her: screaming still.

•   •   •

I must emerge, of course, in the end, despite my mother’s reluctance. When I do arrive, finally, noisily, at around half past eight in the morning, I am grasped by the head, tumbled brusquely upside down by the capable Mrs. Marwook, dabbed in every pit and orifice, and swiped between all my digits with a rough wet cloth, then swiftly wrapped in swaddling clothes. Thus properly cleansed and restrained I am set to nurse, despite the warning in my mother’s hostile eye.

It’s a large barne
, Marwook says, not entirely without sympathy, pulling the swaddling clothes tighter, as if by binding she can shrink me.
A girl.
Ginger hair.

Clearly Marwook does not entirely approve of ginger hair or large girls, together or singly, but neither does she disapprove—not entirely—or so her tone, one of mild restraint, implies.

Put it in the cradle,
says my mother, wearily. She does not bother even to glance at whatever is upon her breast. Maybe she is afraid to look. Then, too, she can still feel the edge of her traveling case through the mattress, pressed hard against the back of her thigh, and she isn’t too tired, yet, to resent it.

So Mrs. Marwook takes me up, and lies me down.

•   •   •

It is only later, when all has been silent a while, that my father deems it safe to enter the bedroom and examine me.

It resembles Felix Girard,
he says contemplatively, laying his index finger gently upon my tightly swaddled chest. My mother, sleeping, does not hear him. Which is unfortunate, since it might have been a consolation to her to learn that I did not resemble somebody else.

As for me, I am unconcerned. I know that I resemble nobody but myself, that I am the eating, sleeping, shitting, screaming center of the universe—
Carlotta
omphalos
.

•   •   •

Red! Over here, Red! Walk my way!

•   •   •

Except that I’m not. The universe being larger, and more complicated than I can, at this moment, comprehend.

•   •   •

I express myself—a first, tyro’s effort—and from my mother receive no reply.

I think it needs to be fed
, my father says, removing his finger from among my swaddling in response to certain noises I have made.

It is a first time, but it will not be the last, that it is my father, not my mother, who responds to my utterance. My mother never seems to hear, or maybe she cannot understand me. It is only after my father has applied his Rosetta stone to my vocal hieroglyphs and produced an interpretation (
It is hungry—it is wet—it is tired—it is bored
) that my mother acknowledges my efforts with a grudging
Very well
, and presents her breast, which is not the less beautiful—pink as it is, warm, and engorged with milk—for being begrudged.

(In one of those odd inversions that she manages so well, my mother seems to move farther away the closer she comes, so that when I am placed at her breast I suck, along with the milk, the hollow sensation, unidentifiable as yet by me, that presages not her living presence, but her impending absence; and not knowing what it is that I have swallowed, I am lulled to sleep with uneasy dreams of things I have never yet experienced: the weirdly elongated shadow of a pheasant perched on a stile at sunset in a silent empty field; the dead carapace of a crab, tossed and tangled with seaweeds; a chair abandoned in a cobbled yard, with a single glove resting on its seat.)