Chapter 4 #3
“Cake? Coffee?” Laurie nodded thanks, and Raberding paused to pour before trying again. “I should think our preference for men is not at all interesting, newsworthy, or… hm, relevant, to August’s death. Yes?”
Laurie would be the judge of that himself, thank you. But…
“I don’t out queers.” Even rich ones. “Everything else about them, sure. Not that.”
“There cannot be so many queers to expose in industry, anyway.”
“No kidding.” Laurie had thought it himself, half-joking: three glassworks heirs, all queer, it defied statistics.
What the hell had been in the water the glass-baron sires had drunk, twenty, twenty-five years before?
The city supply came from Croton, he’d thought.
Maybe the elite imported some other kind—bottled?
(Obviously, the water had nothing to do with it.
Laurie was from farther upstate. Grown on well water.)
“Is that to do with being an anti-capitalist?” Raberding said curiously, leaning in. “Some kind of free-and-moral prerogative?”
“Um.” Laurie swallowed the cake. “No. It’s to do with being human.” And having an editor with an actual moral code that mostly aligned with his own—though he was beginning to wonder.
“Oh.” Raberding seemed nonplussed. “Then you must consider more than a few of our fellow men as beasts.”
“You could say that. Especially when you’ve seen what I have, Mr. Raberding.”
“Hmm.” He didn’t seem particularly interested in that. “No, no, please. Call me Tjo.” Tee-oh. He blushed faintly. “A ridiculous name, I know—a mouthful. Arthurian, the original European pronunciation. I daresay you got the better literary reference between us, Mr. Tulley.”
Very pointed. But there was no escaping it now, was there? Mutually assured risk.
“Call me Laurie. My ma liked Alcott better than Malory, I guess.” A lie. In fact, his mother had never even learned to read.
Raberding frowned slightly. He nibbled on a biscuit. “Der Pleier,” he corrected, “not Malory.” Then he smiled. “Laurie.”
“Right.” Specific. Obscure. Very obscure. Laurie sipped his coffee. “So, tell me about your ‘friendship’ with August Wright.”
“Oh, pretty August. Well.” He sighed. “What to say? You want the truth, Laurie? Unvarnished?”
“Please.”
Raberding put down the biscuit. “August was a thief, a liar, and a whore,” he said primly. “I put a prick and a face before my better senses and nearly destroyed Father’s company for it.”
Laurie frowned. Hadn’t it been the other way around?
Raberding looked oddly triumphant. “I’ve been dying to tell someone all of it, in fact. But I couldn’t. Not the police, not the reporters. They wouldn’t care about minutiae of his death. They’d make it into scandal and caricature, at best. At worst…”
At worst: destruction of reputation, persecution, arrest, asylum. Queer existence wasn’t on-the-books illegal, but amongst the poorest, the vice committees were testing out stretching their scope beyond prostitution. Amongst the richest… there were many ways for society to skin a cat.
“He’s dead,” Laurie said sympathetically. “You’re not.”
“Yes. But even were I on my deathbed, you see. I couldn’t do it to his memory, no matter what he’d done.”
But, Laurie thought, you are speaking to me.
“Did you love him?” What did he do? was a question for later.
“Oh, how Victorian. I suppose so. Yes!” he said stubbornly. “Despite him. I won’t say I expected a lasting thing, going into it. You know how we often go our separate ways—necessity, ennui, expectation…”
Laurie nodded. He himself was so itinerant for most of the year, he’d never bothered trying anything long-term with a man. Had never been tempted. New York held plenty of men wanting to fuck him but few with whom he’d repeat the experience. Not to worry; there was always another.
“But it ended up so. And then death?” Raberding teared up. “He was twenty-four. He was snatched from me.”
Laurie hated a stiff collar. It rubbed when he swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
Raberding looked down to compose himself, sipping agitatedly at his tea, blowing off steam, sucking it back.
“What happened?” Laurie asked. “How did it begin between you?”
“August simply appeared.” Raberding laughed.
“Practically in a ray of light. From nowhere. He came into society as an unknown. And when I say that, I mean it. Unknown. The Wrights are new money but came into it a generation back or two; they rubbed elbows with Astors nonetheless, if you can believe it. All the glassware at the Waldorf-Astoria is theirs, you know.” This was said, surprisingly, without bitterness.
But then, the man had been romantically involved with his industrial rival.
“Wright Senior’s mother was minor nobility across the Atlantic.
” Raberding waved. “It was known they had a son late in life”—Just one?
Laurie thought. Did Raberding know about Chary and what had happened to him?
—“but he had been educated abroad. An English preparatory school, supposedly, with his grandmother’s people. ”
“Supposedly?”
“I got beneath that pretty skin, you understand. August spoke French, sure, but like a street rat or a Canadian.” He wrinkled his nose playfully, acknowledging his own snobbishness.
“No Latin nor Greek. And his penmanship! No; wherever he was educated, it wasn’t what was implied.
I suspect the Wrights went quite cheap with it. ”
Huh. The Wrights cheaping out on the golden-boy, second-chance heir? When Chary, the discard, still retained his cut-crystal speech from their first try at procreation? Strange.
“I didn’t care; it made him that much more charming. I do like them a little rough.” The flirt was brief, a glimmer, there and gone across Laurie’s form. Keeping him close. Pending. Laurie couldn’t entirely blame him. If the man hadn’t been a millionaire, it’d have been mutual.
“Brilliant with numbers, though—the classical mechanics”—wistful this time—“but anyway. No, no one knew him at first. He was fresh meat. Unproven. Untainted. Eligible. Beautiful.” Raberding sighed.
“He hadn’t an idea what to make of Fifth Avenue, but after a week, one couldn’t tell. Everybody adored him.”
Surely, not everybody. “Through your good influence?”
Raberding looked up through his lashes—not hard to do with eyes like that.
“Me? Why, no. He was the competition. Wright Glass is the established New York glasshouse and Brooklyn Glass the intruder. I am rich but nobody. And I wish I could say I had been altruistic enough for overture, but I’d my own bridges to build, and fast.”
In society or in industry?
“Ah. He won you over?” Timelines, timelines. August’s arrival had caused ripples of sensation, and T. F. Raberding had clung on to him from the beginning. Would he admit it?
“Oh, fairly immediately. Me, as everyone. More so. He was a charmer. An angel. Enemies closer and all that; he succeeded.” He smiled, sad and conspiratorial. “He couldn’t have read it, do you think? I didn’t find out about the French until we were well into it, emotionally.”
As deceptions went, mere bilingualism—or not having read The Art of War—seemed hardly villainy. Not worth killing a lover for.
“You called him a liar. Why did you feel deceived by him?”
“Well.” There was a long pause. “It was mostly…” He paused, restarted again. “This is… embarrassing to admit. It was nothing serious.”
Laurie sipped more coffee, keeping his gaze steady. It was true the man was embarrassed; he could hardly look at Laurie.
“I… It is truly the silliest thing. I don’t think he ever returned my feelings.
He said so, but… there were others. Not just the beards.
Other men. I know there were. I don’t find it to be a necessarily exclusionary thing, being with others and loving one—monogamy strikes me as very normal—but then… ”
There was whore. Laurie said softly, “Then he died.”
“And then he died! And I shall never know if he loved me.” He looked up. “It feels very good to say it aloud to someone; you have no idea.”
Laurie bet it was cathartic. So was flinging names at a former lover who’d abandoned you. A dead lover. Liar, whore, thief. What was thief?
He leaned in. “I might have an idea.” Not that he’d ever told a man he loved him before, but he was very good at being sympathetic.
Raberding gave him a shaky smile. He mirrored Laurie’s lean.
“Of course. Of course. As normal as you look… That’s why I’ve let you into my apartment; you understand.
It’s hideous to have to conceal one’s true grief, isn’t it?
And then to be hounded by all the rags…the regular folk wanting to be paid to witness…
a witness to what? A lone tear in my eye?
I couldn’t even wear mourning—too out of character.
I’ve never cursed my love of a stripe more. It isn’t fair.”
Laurie dealt with inequality and unfair things every day. This unfairness wasn’t something he could give a scare headline to. He wished he could.
“When did you find out he’d passed away?”
“When? Don’t you know? Oh, Laurie.” Tears welled up and overflowed. “I’m the one who found him.”
Raberding had been by August’s side in the hotel for most of the night he’d died, gaming and drinking and putting on the usual normal show.
He’d been unaware August was using opiates—that night, at least—and it was far from unusual for him to retire with two girls on his arms. “He never had actual relations with women,” Raberding confided.
“He had a terrible fear of syphilis.” Laurie refrained from comment.
Raberding didn’t know if it was pills or pipe or hypodermic needle that’d killed him. He hadn’t seen anything of the scene but August, faceup: his blue, hypoxic lips; his limp limbs being tugged by his two distressed—female—bedmates. The ice-cold, purple fingertips, briefly brushed by his own.
He’d staggered from the room, called down for the porter and police, and then been sick in a cigarette bin by the elevators.