Glimmering

Jack smiled in spite of himself. He slung his hands in his pockets—it was always cold at Lazyland—and nodded as Mrs. Iverson bustled past him. He had this, at least: loving grandmother and faithful retainer, guarding him in his castle from the storm outside. In the middle of the entry room he paused, listening to make sure Mrs. Iverson had not fallen. Her health was more precarious than Keeley’s, though at eighty-nine Larena was a full decade younger. Then he walked to the broad curving staircase.

At its foot he paused. To one side of the stairs loomed Lazyland’s grandfather clock. The grandfather clock, so called to distinguish it from the dozens and dozens of other clocks that Jack’s grandfather James Finnegan had collected. Grandmother clocks and case clocks, gallery clocks and shelf clocks, cottage clocks and tourbillion watches. A clock with a white mouse that ran down its side when it struck one. A gold- and velvet-encrusted clock that had been made for the Shah of Turkey. An Athenian water clock. They filled the house not with staccato ticking but with a gentle undercurrent of sound like waves upon a beach. Jack usually did not notice them at all, any more than he noticed the sound of his own breathing or the even beating of his heart.

But it was difficult to ignore the huge grandfather clock, especially if you were standing at the foot of the stairs. James Finnegan used to joke that he would like to be buried in it. In fact it would have swallowed him, with room for his Irish setter Fergus, too. The clock dated from the early nineteenth century, but its face had come from an eighteenth-century astronomical clock he had found in a wooden box of oddments purchased at Christie’s in 1937. The main dial had dragon hands to tell the hour, tiny golden salamanders on the twelve concentric hour-position dials, sun and moon effigies, moonballs, indicators to indicate the hours of light and darkness, the month and day and year, mean and solar time, and a Julian perpetual calendar.

There was also, just beneath the clockface, a holy-water font that had been in the same box. Jack’s grandfather (with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, save that manufactured a sentimental nature; he was a famous weeper at weddings) decided the clockface had come from the High Court Monastery in Vienna during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa. Sadly, the immense clock itself had not worked for some years now. Jack’s best efforts to keep Lazyland’s clocks running could not duplicate the love that James Finnegan had lavished upon them. Their gears rusted, their levers warped, without his nimble, nicotine-stained fingers to soothe them.

The font was quite old, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Italian, of very fine blue-glazed porcelain aswarm with adipose cherubim and small flowers like violets. When his grandfather was alive, it was always filled with holy water from Sacred Heart up on Broadway. Whenever he visited Jack would take some and flick it onto his forehead; not from any sense of spiritual devotion but because it was such a heady novelty, to be in a house that had holy water. Back then Lazyland was always filled with priests, their shouting laughter from his grandfather’s study and their marvelous smell, frankincense and cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey, the crisp retort of their street shoes on the highly polished wooden floors. Whatever private sorrows and torments they endured, they had never shown Jack or his brothers anything but kindness and how to throw a football so it soared.

But then they had failed to save his grandfather during his brief final illness. After that there were no more priests at Lazyland, except for old blind Father Warren. Grandmother Keeley drove them away, Jack’s mother said. Jack always thought of the picture of Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple: Grandmother wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails, as myriad black-clad figures fled out onto North Broadway.

So, no more holy water. For years a fine film of dust had clung to the ancient porcelain, and Jack had been able to invoke the ghost of a scent from his childhood. Now even that was gone. Still, he couldn’t resist probing the font with a fingertip.

Nothing, of course. He smiled wryly and began the long ascent up curving staircases to his room on the third floor.