Read Online Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) by Sam Savage - Free Book Online Page B

stand in little clusters nudging each other and grinning up at him whenever they heard him start up. He wore the hat day and night, because it was comfortable, he said, though it was really because he did not want people seeing how bald he had become. People who got to know Clarence at that time could not have had the slightest inkling of what he was like before, how extraordinary he was in certain respects. By saying “what he was like before” I have now made it sound as if some dramatic thing happened at some point and after that “he was not his old self,” as the saying goes. I suppose some people reading this will think, “Well, before what exactly?” Well, in this case, in the case of Clarence, it was before nothing—when I say how extraordinary he was before, I just mean before a dozen more years of being Clarence.
    I had a birthday party, and Mama failed to show up. We all stood around a long time, just waiting, and then Papa whispered something angry, making the parlor maid’s face redden, and they brought the cake in anyway, and it was an angel food cake. The party was just me and the servants, plus Papa for a few minutes. I refused to blow out the candles, so Nurse blew them out for me, kneeling behind me with her head next to mine as if we were blowing them out together, though I knew that I was not blowing out anything. She explained that Mama was not there because she was caught up in the social whirl. It was, Nurse said, impossible for Mama to get away, no matter how much she wanted to. I must have been quite upset, because I remember that later in my room when Nurse brought me another piece of cake, I just ate the icing off and crumbled the rest and pushed the pieces down into the heat vent. Days later I saw ants going in and out of the vent, and the gardener came up and sprayed something down inside it. When I thought of the social whirl in those days, I pictured an enormous vortex. It looked a lot like the Maelstrom whirlpool in one of my picture books, but instead of swirling water it was made out of swirling people, men and women in evening clothes whirling round and round, arms and legs flailing wildly as they struggled to escape by scrambling up the nearly vertical walls of the vortex in order not to be sucked down into the bottomless hole at the center. Later when I was grown I several times had the same image in nightmares, except then I was the only person in the whirlpool. I think Papa, being a genuine sportsman, was sorry I was not a boy, and Mama also was sorry, and for many years they tried to engender one, but they never engendered anything. I imagine the effort made Papa feel better, but Mama told Nurse that it made her feel pummeled, told her while I was sitting there. Not just Nurse and Mama but other people also were in the habit of talking as if I were not there, because I was a girl, I suppose, or because they thought I was lost in my own world and not taking in what they said. After a few years Mama had had enough, apparently, and began locking the door to her bedroom. Papa, however, being a man and, I imagine, quite virile, had not had enough. After a long while, after many meals with Mama off in the far distance making silence and throwing it at him, while I sat in the middle distance with my head down stirring mashed potatoes into muddy pools, and after he had tried the door many times, whispering hoarsely and rattling the knob, he finally understood that this was a habit she had fallen into, and then he also had had enough; and at those times, having had enough of the one and not of the other, he would retire to the study after supper and drink brandy until his face was red. The study was a comfortable room, a person could sit in it and not have her shoulder blades jabbed, so anyone who wanted to sit anywhere in our house for very long always sat there, except Mama. When Papa drank he sat there a long time, as I recall. It had leather chairs, a leather-topped table,