Chapter 25 #2
And so it was that, for perhaps the first time in his undercover life, Laurie became almost completely useless.
He hadn’t seen Chary fire up the furnace at Berryfield, but even if he had, he’d imagined it as a solitary endeavor. A furnace shop was anything but.
There were roughly fifty shops across all of Wright Glass, and every shop, Chary explained, had one or two blowers, and three to four gathering-boys.
Each had its own rhythm of work but the same essential steps.
Gather, blow, press, blow, away for finishing and annealing, repeat.
It went nonstop until the hour meal break, four and one-half hours through.
And that consideration only due to very recent legislation and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While in service, Laurie had felt often that the constant sense of being pending, being on call to another’s whim and bell-ring made him want to scream. But he at least had been able to sit down.
Chary occasionally sat, for he was provided a bench, but not often. The boys never. They endlessly ran. Crouched and ran.
The cycle went like this.
A boy brought Chary molten glass on the end of a long, skinny tube.
Chary whacked it on a flat slab of steel and rolled it for an indeterminate amount of time, some animal judgement; he tipped the tube and blew a little.
Then, with unerring accuracy, he plopped the neon glob of taffy glass into a mold.
A boy pressed the mold shut, and Chary blew again.
The boy opened the mold, strangled that new bottle’s neck with a pair of jacks—a kind of sharp tongs—and Chary cracked it off swiftly from his blowpipe.
Another boy took the blown bottle, or jar, or cup, already clear and hard, elsewhere; and by this time, Chary had already taken another bit of molten glass from the first boy and begun again. On and on and on.
Laurie knew this rote, had seen it many times before, had accomplished it a few times himself.
It was the same as the field worker’s toss of cabbage into another’s arms, from theirs into another’s who stood in a rumbling cart and stacked it, all down the row without skips or halt.
It was the cotton weaver’s shuttle and pedal, their forward-back rock; the slaughterer’s hooking knife.
The rhythm of work. Muscle memory. Either you learned it and it sank into your bones until you dreamed it and woke up tasting it, or you didn’t earn, didn’t live—or, worse, your children didn’t.
Each shop’s productivity and speed depended on its blower, and Chary’s shop ran like a machine.
Unthinking, graceful, interconnected in a way that was hard to look away from.
Laurie watched him keep count as each piece was taken away.
Ten thousand a day, he’d said, for the whole factory.
He wondered if he was keeping count for himself or the boys.
It came out to six dollars a week, on average, for Chary, a mere sixty cents for them.
Did he want to take the count out of his father’s soul?
Laurie did.
If he’d thought he felt bad watching Chary go in and out of Wright Glass, this was worse. Laurie’s face burned to be standing useless. But he folded his hands behind his back and observed and sweated.
It was hot as hell. Hotter than a Florida field on a July noon.
Ninety degrees, perhaps a hundred. Hundred ten.
The furnaces were continuous-burn, bringing streams of molten glass never-ending.
The boys who ran everywhere and faced the furnace, back and forth, again and again, became so soaked with sweat, their hats lay limp and their hair turned stringed and sticky and their shoes squeaked beneath them.
Chary fared a little better, but sweat guttered down his red face, through the fake beard, into his shirt.
And it wasn’t… it wasn’t really attractive, played out in flesh.
Not like Laurie’d thought it would be—Chary at the continuous furnace, the molten-red heat glow upon his face, sweat falling down the curve of his neck.
It was surely competence and skill and practice, long fingers strong around the blowpipe.
It was also wrung-out exhaustion, shaking shoulders for a bit of relief, hoarse singing and the gritted-teeth breath of sheer endurance.
Sometimes, the hacking cough of silicosis, like Irving’s.
Chary didn’t have it—by some miracle, thank god—but Laurie heard others like a chorus around them, short repressed coughs of the too-damn-busy-for-this.
At times, Chary’s apprentice—an older white boy who could’ve been Irish or Italian or Polish or Russian, and Laurie couldn’t tell because what little he said carried only the accent of a New York orphan—would take the reins, like trapeze artists switching bars.
Then Chary would crack his back with long fingers, take the place of the boy pressing the mold, and watch his protégé carefully as he blew.
When they switched back, the apprentice boy took the place of a different one. He switched out every forty minutes or so: for the gatherer-boy, the mold tender, the snapper-up, the running-boy. Chary remained steadfast and irreplaceable.
Was this what he wanted Laurie to see? That the boys made the place go on but that they were merely worn-tooth cogs?
At eleven-thirty, the lunch bell sounded. Laurie was numb from his knees down and had more questions than ever. First and foremost was: why?
Chary wiped his face with his shirt. The glory hole was shuttered. The boys disappeared, and the workers enmassed themselves outside to the streets.
The first thing Laurie said was “You’ll take my lunch pail and not a goddamned word about it.”
Chary winced, nodded, and walked on. He brought them to the waterfront space between two plain piers—a less-popular spot for a break than Laurie would’ve figured, probably because it was pitch-black and dangerous-feeling—where he folded himself up into sticks and cloth, legs pretzeled, and sat.
The East River gleamed darkly before them.
Sleepy ferries and schooners with closed-up sails bobbed at anchor.
Behind them, the city was still lit up with life.
To the south, the Williamsburg Bridge’s suspension cables were hung with points of starlike electric illumination.
The Times had called them “Necklaces of Pearls” in a column mention when they’d been installed three years earlier, and they looked the same now.
Chary bit into his sandwich.
Laurie sat. “I’m sorry.”
Chary only raised eyebrows. Didn’t even stop chewing.
“I called you cuckoo,” Laurie said, “but… how long have you been doing this?”
Chary seemed oddly wary, or like he didn’t seem to like to talk much in this persona. Little wonder.
“You weren’t wrong. I am a cuckoo. I don’t belong.”
“But you must’ve been a boy,” Laurie pressed. “Precisely like one of those boys. Running and running. Nobody works like you do without years of doing it. Nobody, much less a man raised to leisure.”
“I was fourteen. Almost technically too old.” Suddenly, Chary looked much younger, the fake beard prominent and obvious. Only because Laurie had placed it on him; he could see the man beneath.
“Don’t think I had no choice in it, please,” Chary said. “I certainly did.”
“But why?”
Chary shrugged. “The usual adolescent rebellion. I had the aptitude for blowing, and my father forbade it of me. Isn’t that enough?”
It seemed to be the truth, but he’d learned that Chary, like Laurie himself, was very good at telling bits of truths that didn’t make up the whole story.
Not quite the whole tapestry. You could see the path of it and what it was meant to be; but to come close, you’d find it’d been embroidered lightly, gaps in the weave beneath.
And forty, forty-eight hours a week was a lot of hard factory work just to spite one’s dead father. One would’ve thought the hobby furnace sufficient.
“Sure,” Laurie said. “Now tell me the rest of it. Tell me why you made that choice.”
Chary looked to the ground. He swallowed.
“Two things. The first is penance, I suppose. It is a lifelong endeavor, you understand, for a Catholic. Even as a very young boy, I never felt entitled to my father’s wealth.
Not a penny of it. I’d worked for none of it; it wasn’t rightfully mine.
And I didn’t understand why until I’d seen who had worked for it.
Not my father. The men I’d seen through a glass partition, on the first and only visit to the glassworks. They had. They were the righteous.
“Some boys dream of being born princes; I wanted everything I had to be wrought from my own sweat. I wanted to work for it, to be purified by it. I did fall for the success literatures, I suppose you could say, and hard and fast. All the pamphlets and posters. What could be more virtuous for a boy than work and toil? To be leisurely was sinful.”
Laurie nodded. “Yeah.” This wasn’t an uncommon sentiment among the rich, even if Chary had taken it a bit to extremes and put it into effect.
After all, a rich boy could safely dream of being independent and self-sufficient whilst he still had the security of wealth to fall back upon.
Whilst he didn’t know what it was to hunger.
To be denied a home and then denied employment because one had no home.
To wait in line for hours for bread in the hours one was supposed to be sleeping (in the home he didn’t have), and then be too tired after getting it to work anyway.
“The second is that I knew I was queer very early on. And there was enough precedence in my father’s behavior”—before he’d been disinherited, Laurie thought—“to know that I wanted some kind of shield against… fairyness.”
“A hiding place.”
“Yes. I don’t see it like that anymore. Not as such.”
“You meet enough actual fairies…”
“Indeed. Most of my education was paper-bound, you have to understand. It still is; you saw that. It has its failings.”
Laurie laughed. “Yeah, it does.”