The Glass Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page B

lighted window. There are so many lighted windows in this city, curtains drawn, a scrim descending, shutting out, shutting in; and so much is going on behind them, who knows what. Vertiginous thought. Best look away. These two are done anyway, for now.
    Such an awkward parting.
Perhaps I shall see you again. Perhaps
. One toward Mayfair, the other, God knows.
    •   •   •
    Of course they will sail, in the end. Despite all doubts. They haven’t any choice, not really.
    •   •   •
    My father has decided already, on the strength of a certain blue glance. This is foreordained. The other will dither for a while, finally read
Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak,
find it brilliant, say he is sailing on the strength of it, when really prompted by boredom. Ambition. Rebellion. Because his father prefers him to pursue the clove trade, while he prefers not. Hence: dislike of hearth and home. Restlessness. Dissatisfaction. And something else he cannot name. Will not.
    Such is
her
influence.
    Like a planet, she draws her acolytes.
    Not that she does it on purpose. Misunderstandings that might arise are never her fault. She’s innocence in a tower, guarded by dragons, plaiting her golden hair.

    Of course she, too, will sail. This is her desire. Regardless who may disapprove: and many shall. But she’s willful, my mother, and fiercely attached to her father, the bear.
    •   •   •
    Papa will stay with Clotilde always. Papa will never go away again!
    •   •   •
    She is a child, sitting on his lap, poring with him through books containing exotic colored plates of faraway places. He has just completed his own book,
Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak
, after years holed up in the attic in his father-in-law’s house with his fossils spread out around him on two long, scar-topped, spindle-legged tables. All day and all night he spent there, in those two cramped, inconvenient rooms, writing; my mother as a baby crawled among his loose and discarded papers on the floor, as a tot leaned on his shoulder while he wrote, contaminated his inkwell with spiderwebs, whirled like a dervish through all his accumulated research until she finally collapsed, exhausted from her games; then he read aloud to her from his work. She was too young to understand much, but what of it? It is the voice that matters, and all these years later she still recalls the sound of it, her father’s voice, intoning:
In the distant steppe, the camels stride . . .
Wherever she was, curled up at his feet on the floor, or against the wall among the piles of discarded papers, dropping into sleep with his words in her ears, the simple line,
In the distant steppe, the camels stride . . . ,
like an invocation, heavy with the fragrance of the unknown.
In the distant steppe . . . the camels
. My mother is in her father’s arms. She is asleep, and sleeping, dreams of the things he has seen, of which he has written and then read aloud to her, of the bazaars of Khuree, of swift, small horses and of courageous horsemen whose boots curl up at the toes, of fantastical sandstone buttes weirdly shaped by fierce desert winds, of the skeletons of dragons he has carved single-handedly out of the stone; dreams, until it seems as if she has seen these things herself, has been there with him, with her father, the bear.
    •   •   •
    But then it all is over, the book is finished, the manuscript wrapped up in plain paper, and mailed to London. He begins to think, once again, of travel.
    •   •   •
    Papa will not go away. Papa will stay with his Clotilde always
. One babyish hand on his cheek, the other buried in the luxuriant ginger beard.
Papa will never go away again.
Attempting to extract, in the unguarded moment, a promise she can use against him later.
You know I’d like that, Tildy. Better than anything else in the world. To be always and ever with my Tildy!
And reaching into one of his pockets, he pulls out a sweet