Page 13 of By Any Means

“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.”