Thoreau in Love (41 page)
Authors: John Schuyler Bishop
“I’ve never been in such a crowd,” said Ellery.
“There must be thousands,” said Henry. The young woman jamming their left giggled, “Many thousands.” Caught up in the joy, Henry scrunched into Ellery, held him tight and rested his head on Ellery’s shoulder. Energy electrified Henry, making him shudder, and they laughed at their inability to move. The crowd pushed, tilting them sideways. Henry worried that they would crush the young couple to their left, and then the crowd pushed back and Henry and Ellery were straightened up. They laughed in relief and excitement. Fleetingly, Henry thought, Ben would have loved this. And then Henry felt Ellery’s buttocks push into him, and then gyrate so Henry’s cock was between Ellery’s butt cheeks. Henry tried to create space, but then the crowd pushed and jammed him into Ellery, who turned his head, smiled and wriggled his butt. Henry whispered, “Are you doing that on purpose?” Ellery smiled coyly. Under his breath, Henry admonished, “Stop that.” Innocently, Ellery said, “Stop what?” He pumped his butt into Henry.
“What are you doing? Ellery? Don’t do that.” Henry’s cock swelled.
“Mmmm. That’s what I thought,” said Ellery. Henry tried to remove his arms from Ellery’s torso, but he was jammed in so tight he couldn’t. “Come back to Concord, Henry.” Ellery wiggled his butt.
“Ellery, stop. I’m serious. I’ll scream.” The more Henry got upset the more Ellery enjoyed it.
“I’m serious too. Come back to Concord.” Ellery pushed his butt into Henry’s now tumescent cock. “I won’t stop till you say you’ll come back.” All around the crowd yelped.
“I’ll scream. I will.”
Ellery pushed back into Henry and screamed, “Scream! Scream! Nobody cares! Don’t you get it, Henry, nobody cares!” Ellery squeezed his hands back and pulled Henry hips.
“You’re insane,” said Henry, happily.
“Insanely happy,” said Ellery. “Say you’ll come back!”
“I’ll come back. All right? I’ll come back.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. I promise.” Henry was giddy.
“Whoa, here we go,” said Ellery, and they stumbled onto the ferry. Immediately the crew shoved off and they chugged across to Hoboken.
The Buffalo Hunt was a great joke. The so-called wild buffalo were the scrawniest creatures anyone had ever seen, and rather than terrifying the crowd, they cowed in fear. The Indians couldn’t lasso a post, much less a terrified buffalo. When the crowd began to hoot and holler and laugh and jeer, the buffalo panicked and broke through the jury-rig fence. And ran for their lives. In the papers the next day it was reported that the whole escapade was the work of P.T. Barnum, who was in cahoots with the ferry company, which that day transported 24,000 people to Hoboken and back.
Ellery and Henry laughed the whole trip back to Manhattan, the first good laugh Henry had had in ages, and as they’d decided during the hunt, Ellery returned to Staten Island with Henry. Because it was the last day of August, it was already dark when they arrived. Ellery suggested they walk along the beach, which they did. As they followed the white sand path through the dark, Ellery went on about this and that, trying to persuade Henry to return to Concord as soon as he could easily get away from the Staten Island Emersons. Henry listened intently, but his thoughts often veered to Ben, how much he missed him and how much his life had changed because of him. When they came upon the log Henry and Ben had sat on the last time they were together, Henry smiled wistfully and said, “I’ll return as soon as possible. I’m tired of running from who I am.”
“That’s my Henry,” said Ellery, grasping Henry’s arm. “Let’s consecrate the ground.”
“No.”
“Why not?” said Ellery. “You know you want to.”
“I don’t want to,” said Henry. “I want to go in the water.”
“Are you insane? You can’t see a thing. Who knows what’s out there?”
“Last one in is a rotten egg.” Henry tore off his clothes and, terrified but alive, splashed into the black water. Phosphorous glowed all around him. “Look! It sparkles! And it’s warm!”
“I’m coming in too,” cried Ellery. He pulled off his pants and jumped in the water with a whoop, splashing sparkles in a great semicircle. Henry turned to the horizon, splashed out a bit farther and then, as if he were one of the sleek cormorants he’d so often seen right where he was, he took a breath, dove under the water and swam, feeling the soft warmth of the water everywhere on his body. When he broke the surface, he heard Ellery anxiously calling his name. He shook the sparkly salt water out of his hair, wiped his eyes and saw Ellery and the shoreline far in the distance. He reached with his toes but couldn’t touch bottom.
“Swim in, Henry. You’re scaring me.” But Henry wasn’t about to swim in. And as he watched in the beautiful dark the sparkles Ellery splashed in the shallows, kicking and paddling gently to keep his head above water, Henry knew that something had happened, that something in him had changed. “I am totally naked,” he said to the night. And it felt so good to be in the warm black water, and he knew the shore wasn’t nearly so far as it seemed, and he knew he could take care of himself, that he was no longer afraid, no longer at sea but in the sea, naked and fully alive. And thinking of the fears that had held him back for so long, he said, “Sea fright is all it was.”
Epilogue
Thoreau soon gave up Staten Island and returned to Concord, where, not two years later, he went to live at Walden Pond
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Among those Thoreau met while in New York, Henry James’s sons William and Henry went on to their own fame, though Henry James Sr. wrote to Emerson that he thought Thoreau the most conceited young man he’d ever met. James Harper, whom Henry gave a piece of his mind to, ran for mayor of New York City at the urging of his friends, who said he not only knew how to run a business but also had a vision for their city the rest of them lacked. He won the election and brought New York City into the modern age, establishing a police force, trash removal and street cleaning; however, his first act as mayor was to ban cows anywhere below 14
th
Street
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Thoreau spent the rest of his life in Concord, living with his family, writing, passing time with friends. He never spoke of Ben and never heard from him again, but he kept his letters with him always. Nearly every day he and Ellery Channing walked through the fields and woods surrounding Concord, to private places only they knew about, and “consecrated” the ground. Whenever in an evening of socializing a song was called for, Henry sang “Tom Bowline” with a sorrow that was commonly attributed to the sadness he must have still felt because of the death of his brother. He cloaked well what was in his heart
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Afterword
Years ago, thinking I’d use Thoreau as a minor character in a play I was writing, I read what were then definitive books about him, and it struck me, rather hard, that the authors took great pains to show that Thoreau was straight. For example, in Henry Seidel Canby’s
Thoreau
, published in 1939 and still considered a go-to biography, Canby seeks to explain Thoreau’s love poem to his student Edmund Sewell as a prelude to Thoreau’s loving a woman. When in his journal Thoreau wrote, “There is more than maiden modesty between us . . . I have no feature so fair as my love for him,” Canby glosses: “There is little doubt that ‘her’ was meant . . . There are, indeed, many passages . . . where Henry’s emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns.” Little doubt?
In doing further research, I discovered the 250-some pages missing from Thoreau’s journal for his time in New York. No one knows if Thoreau did the ripping, or if, more likely, the pages were removed and destroyed after his death by Ellery Channing, the literary executor of his estate. In the 19th century it was common practice for a literary executor to destroy material that might tarnish the deceased’s—or his own—reputation
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank stalwarts old and new for getting me through the good and bad times, and for their sage advice: David Arthur-Simons, Jack Banyar, Floran and Ginny Boland, Chris Bram, Townes Coates, David Daniels, Bob Dunn, David Dorin Fratkin, Hank Glaser, Joyce Goldstein, Michael Goodwin, Hannes Hosp, Nicholas Kantor, Harold Rabinowitz, Geoffrey Rodgers, Kris Sebastian, Draper Shreeve, Mignon Smith and Dave and Nancy Weber. Add to them the Brooklyn Bridge gang and my dear brothers, Chip, Peter, Chris, Tim and Nick. For their great editing, Ian Britain, Patrick Merla, Karen Heuler and Nancy Schwerner, also great friends. And thanks to Alex Hoyt, who persuaded me to make what I had into a novel.
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