The Chandelier Maker.

My Bohemian mother and my Venetian father began my training in prisms and soda glass when I was too young to realize how dangerous refracted light could be -- poisonous like mercury or antimony. When you look into too many bent rays of light all at once, common sense is replaced by hubris.
But when that doleful knowledge finally came to me I still pursued my fatal course. You can judge for yourself from my narrative if I really had any choice in the matter.

Both my parents were artisans with Mussehl and Westphal, the chandelier company in Neenah, Wisconsin. You have heard of the company, even if you think you haven't. Besides chandeliers, they made glass ashtrays -- almost all the glass ashtrays that Americans used from 1899 to 1977. Heavy and square, with beveled edges, those ashtrays are indestructible and feature in many domestic violence cases. President Eisenhower gave them to every Ambassador in Washington for Christmas each year during his long and prosperous administration. I have one that I keep filled with sand in the kitchen. It has a tiny flaw in it -- an embedded bubble. I'm told it's worth more than a Rembrandt.

Neenah was a wonderful town to grow up in. My immigrant parents never really got the hang of English, but I grew up speaking it perfectly, had a deeply freckled face and a bicycle, and reveled in the endless green lawns and avuncular shade trees that lined the streets, spaced in military order. I drank milk and ate apples. My teeth outshone the whiteness of a ballistic missile. 
In his spare time my father made stained glass windows for the town's Lutheran churches. I helped him deliver them. We were a close-knit family, the three of us, and as soon as I graduated from high school I began working at Mussehl and Westphal, bending and polishing the ormolu pins used to hold the crystal prisms together. 

My mother wanted me to get out of the business. She created beveled facets on the finest of Bohemian crystal and Murano glass -- which caused her laughing blue eyes to turn pensive, and then muddy and sad. She begged my father to send me to West Virginia to work with my cousins in the Marble King factory. Marbles were safe, she said; they did not corrupt the light. My father's only reply was "He must hang his own chandelier first -- then he can go where he pleases."

When my mother went blind my father took her on a long visit to her hometown of Blatna, where she bathed her eyes in lake water until they turned green. When they returned I had become head foreman of the plant, and I made them retire with full pensions and benefits. 

When the royal family of Oudh ordered a five ton chandelier for their palace in Kashmir I laughed out loud with joy. I would supervise the building of it, the world's largest chandelier, and then I would retire from Mussehl and Westphal, a hero, to live in a cottage on the banks of the Fox River, and fish for sturgeon to feed to my mother. She longed for sturgeon the same way Rapunzel's mother longed for lamb's lettuce.

But then I met the daughter of the royal family of Oudh, Sakina. She had a beaky nose and imperious eyes. Her breath smelled of pandan. She came to the factory in Neenah to pay for the work with rubies and small bars of gold. She watched me and my workmen place each beveled crystal in a mathematical progression that was five hundred years old, until all five tons were dangling in front of her dirty face -- for she never washed, but kept her features swathed in kohl tattoos. She was proud and haughty, and I hated her. And then I loved her. I had the workers disassemble the five ton chandelier and pack it in crates stuffed with excelsior to ship to India. And when the crates were put on board the ship, I was there with Sakina. Sakina was in my arms, and, as soon as the captain married us, in my bed. When we arrived at her palace in Kashmir she was already pregnant with our first child. 

There were no competent craftsmen in all of Kashmir to help me put up the chandelier, so I had to train a dozen palace lackeys -- it took two years before I dared start on hanging the chandelier in the palace reception room. We had only just started with the base tier of crystal prisms when fighting broke out on the border. All of my skilled workers were sent to the front, and killed. I couldn't face training a new crew, so the chandelier, the five ton chandelier that was to be the wonder of the world and my ticket to fame, remained a half-constructed shambles. Then the monsoon came with terrible wind and malignant water, collapsing the roof of the reception room, burying my chandelier under plaster and lathe. Sakina sneered at my grief, calling me a tradesman who could never be a prince. So I left Kashmir and went back to Neenah, to banish the soft, insidious, tropical air from my lungs, and breathe in the crisp, clean, scent of pines again.

While I was gone my mother regained her eyesight; she and my  father then moved to West Virginia to design toothpaste marbles. I could have gone to join them, but who wants to fiddle with taws when you can build dazzling pyramids of crystal and light several stories high that cost millions of dollars? My name would be on each glittering pendant, as it already was in the ruins of the palace of Kashmir where my wife and children were patiently picking out bits of crystal to sell as diamonds in the local bazaar.
I'm still waiting for another prince from Muscat or some plutocrat from Nob Hill to commission something colossal. This time I will make it with Ciocca glass. This time Sakina will come back to me and admit she was wrong. This time . . . this time . . . 
There is no 'this time,' for I am going blind, like my mother.