Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

Authenticity, condition-condition-condition, line and color. Fritz had been doing this for a long time. I was a neophyte, but as the auctions, the books, the stories, and the pop quizzes accumulated, I could feel my Louis Comfort knowledge building. It wasn’t always the easiest feeling, but there were compensations, bits of information that just fit, like a piece of glass into its slot.
Louis Comfort found out that the most boring glass was the purest. Taking out the impurities gave you window glass: nice to look through, useful because you didn’t notice it. Like people, I guess. What made the glass wasn’t the glass ingredients: silica sand, soda ash, potash, limestone, lead oxide, borax and boric acid. It was the stuff that could have gotten into the batch by daring or design: Iron oxide, manganese oxide, copper, gold, cobalt, coal. Fritz told me more than once that the Nash men had a magic room where they puttered with their secret formulas, banks of drawers of ingredients, not a few of them labeled “poison.”
It’s what made the glass impure that made it beautiful.
This theory failed to explain the grandkids, who also turned out to be 99% less than pure. Less than desirable I already knew, from the way Fish Eyes thinned her mouth when she mentioned them. One day I managed to extract more information.
“Tell me about the grandkids. Have they always been like this?” Oblivious to germs and flour, I had slung up against the counter where Fish Eyes was turning out pumpernickel bread dough.
“I wouldn’t know.”
I didn’t believe her. Fish Eyes could have been stirring her cauldron with a fingerbone, and she would have been right in character. “So they haven’t always been despicable,” I led her on.
She slung the dough with enough force to flatten it on the counter.
“What did they do? When did you first know about them?”
“They used to squash caterpillars so they could drive the Tonka trucks to their play hospital and pretend to sue the other driver.”
“I’m sorry, but all kids are mean to bugs. Then their consciences kick in, and they grow up to be kind adults.”
“These didn’t.”
“Okay, so what did they do that was so bad?”
“The day after they graduated out of law school, they got my granddaughter convinced that if she turned her trust fund into cash and gave it to them, they could double the money in two months.”
“Oh.”
“She gave it to them.”
“Oh.”
“When she needed some of the money for a down payment on a car go to work, they said they never heard of any trust fund, any money, or any company like the one they talked to her about.”
“Oh.”
“Fritz put back the money in her account. He doubled it.”
Illegal and scam artists Fish Eyes could testify to. Vandals and unscrupulous I was going to experience by myself.