Page 92 of By Any Means

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.”

“And I do like glassblowing,” Chary said earnestly. “I like it. It’s exhausting, but it’s precise, and I don’t have to think. It makes me feel useful. At the end of it, it’s done.”

At the end of it, he was still a millionaire with a mansion awaiting him.

“All right… so, that’s why. But nobody found you out? Working at your own father’s factory?”

Long gone were the days of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian industrialists, who would keep their heroic hands in their business on the daily. Nowadays, the truly rich ones wanted to be gentlemen, divorced from cotton fluff and coal soot and track-laying; Wright Sr. wouldn’t have overseen anything of the actual warehouses. And of course, he wouldn’t have noticed Chary was gone, either. Not if he’d put him out of the house years earlier.

“I was one of very many. Faceless. The laws weren’t the same then,” Chary said. “Only affidavits of age were needed at the time, and nobody asked me for one.” His voice had gained r’s again, dropped into the same New Yorker cadence that he’d had in the boxcar. As though it was easy. “I looked older than I was.” Chary gestured to his face, then took a huge bite. “Wha’bout you?”

“Me? It wasn’t like this.”

Chary gestured him on.

“Ah… I hopped a train outta the mountains at seventeen. Pa was makin’ noise about marriage, settlin’ down. It was time.”

“Your face wasn’t helping you,” Chary said thickly.

“No.” Laurie laughed. “No, it wasn’t. But aside from that, my father’s a populist. I wanted books. University. Not to run a dairy farm with no brothers to help me, right?”

Chary nodded.