The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker Page B

yard, the jet works, the privies, the mines. My mother, in the house above the river, is puzzled, perhaps, after so many months at sea, to find that, though cast ashore, she still hears water rushing beneath her all the time; still smells it; still feels the damp of it everywhere, permeating everything, the furniture and food and clothes and bedding, the sheet music that she so seldom touches now, even herself, her skin, her hair, all rich and damp with the unwelcome oily scent of the river, the scent both of life and of death, which no amount of washing will ever remove. Through leaded windows that cry out upon rusty hinges of their own she observes when she so chooses, and also sometimes when she does not, the edge of the harbor, one arm of the breakwater, the cold North Sea beyond. These are dangerous objects—shards of glass upon which she may cut herself if she is not careful.
    •   •   •
    And my Papa?
    •   •   •
    Very often my mother turns her back upon the sea. She dislikes it in all its moods, its grey wintry indifference, its boiling infuriated white and green, its bright icy dissimulating blue. She cannot help but sense, no matter what is on the surface, the dark that lies beneath.
    My Papa . . .
    She cannot think about him. She cannot think about anything else. She cannot think.
    His things, of course, are all around her—those, at least, that Petrook, ever calculating his profit and his loss, knew he could not sell. They are her inheritance and her dowry, shipped north from London in a series of packing crates and bundles, crowding now each of the five corners of each of the three rooms of the Birdcage, and rendering more precarious by their presence the screw-tight turning of the two staircases, both down and up. These are her old friends, her playmates, the splayed and grinning confidantes of her girlhood—the elephant’s skull, the stuffed orang-utan, the snakeskins and skeletons, the gaily patterned venomous cone shells, the butterflies and moths askew on their pins, her father’s prized
Morpho telemachus
, his
Attacus atlas
, his box of rotting silkworm pupae, the jar containing a mysterious object labeled “Mermaid’s hand,” the heads and arms, the broken-off chins and noses and fingers of stone idols neglected and fallen—even a single large crate containing nothing but the skins of birds Girard had been interrupted in the process of preserving, shedding now their feathers of crimson and violet and indigo, their delicate beaks shattered, packed in obvious haste, without care. Her father’s hummingbirds arrived in a cage, all dead but one. The single survivor, emerald green above, ruby red beneath, batters itself all along the crooked ceilings, buzzes like a trapped fly in the casements, never resting. Hovering in place it drinks sugar water from a glass that my mother has set out for it, then darts away up the stairs, or tangles itself among the last, dying filaments, cold nipped, of Felix Girard’s remaining orchids, or dodges between the rotting, rolled-up Turkish carpets leaning in the corners; or zooming downstairs makes Mary, the girl-of-all-work, scream aloud when its wing (moving so fast that it does not seem to move at all), grazes her cheek or her hair. For days at a time the hummingbird disappears completely, until some slight motion—a vibration among the white lace of a curtain, perhaps—reveals it; and then it is gone again, until next time.
    Señor El Galliñazo is intact, though balder than before, it is true, and rests now upstairs in the bedroom, on top of the chest of drawers, along with a snaggletoothed cayman that used to perch on the shelf above my mother’s bed in Bury Place. Her family gone, these corpses make Clotilde feel at home; she will not throw anything away. What does not fit inside the house is piled, still boxed, in the shed out back where Leopold struggles against the cold to make his studio in an ever-dwindling space, surrounded