Glimmering

“I can’t sell these!” he fumed. “Glass! Mr. Finnegan, what were you thinking?” He kicked angrily at a carton, then turned a red face upon his employee. “I have no use for them. Send them back.”

“He—he won’t take them, sir.” Myles swallowed. “It was the agreement we made, we would take them at this price—”

“We? We? ” roared Longfellow Stevens. “We agreed to nothing! As of this week your employment is terminated, Mr. Finnegan!”

Myles stared at him, too stunned to be angry. But when Mr. Stevens began talking of withholding his wages to pay for the shipment, Myles spoke.

“I’ll take them, then. The Christmas boxes.”

“You will not.”

“In place of my wages.” He was already bending over the cartons, light as the egg panniers that came daily from Flatbush. “I’ll take the Christmas dressings.”

And he did. Late in November he took them in a borrowed wagon to Getty Square, and hawked them to the well-dressed shoppers along South Broadway. In two days he had sold them all, and returned to Brooklyn for more, and then again a week later for the rest of the importer’s stock. By January of 1881, Myles Finnegan was well on his way to being a rich man. By January 1882, after the first of his many visits to Lauscha, where the glassblowers who supplied Sonneberg lived, he was a rich man. And by the following year he was very rich indeed, having purchased Stevens’s Variety and renamed it Finnegan’s: the flagship store of what was to become a vast American retail empire, built upon blown glass and candlelight. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Finnegan’s first Sparkle-Glo factory opened on Long Island, mass-producing Christmas balls; but by then the family fortunes were well in place.

While he was still in high school, Myles’s great-grandson Jack could look out from the attic window at Lazyland, across the Hudson to the Palisades, and read atop the cliffs there the defiant legend emblazoned on the abandoned factory, like a thought untethered from a dream—

SPARKLE-GLO

Lazyland belonged to Jack now, even though his grandmother Keeley—Myles’s only child, who had been born there in 1899—still held formal title to the house. Upon her death the mansion would pass to Jack. The thought made him almost unbearably sad, even though his grandmother had only a few months ago celebrated her ninety-seventh birthday, and Jack himself had never expected to see forty.

“Hey, Birthday Boy.”

Jack turned, smiling, and raised his champagne flute. “Hi, Jule.”

“I wondered where you were.” Jule Gardino, Jack’s oldest friend and sometime legal advisor, ducked as he passed through the doorway. “Hey, nice night, huh?” He propped his elbows on the balcony beside his friend, blinking at the muzzy violet light, then pointed in mock excitement. “Peter! I can see your house from here!”

Jack laughed: the tag line from an old joke. “Here—”

He grabbed the bottle of Veuve Clicquot from beside his feet and handed it to Jule. Jule swigged from it, wiped his mouth, and took another gulp. “Whooee! Thanks—”

“Everyone behaving downstairs?”

Jule shrugged. “Leonard dropped trou and showed Grandmother his apadravya again.”

Jack took the bottle from Jule and refilled his glass, laughing. “I guess I better get back down, then.”

“No hurry.” Jule draped an arm around his friend and stared out across the sloping lawn. “Mmm. Daffodils?”

Jack nodded, gesturing with his champagne. “And hyacinths. And lilacs. And the apple trees are budding.”

“Wow. Amazing.”