Page 19 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
Patrick grins. “You’d be surprised.”
Nathaniel’s quiet for a moment. “Surprise me, then.”
“Off the top of my head—Moby Dick?The Great Gatsby? Those are gay on the page. No fancy interpretation required. You don’t even need to work hard. And if you include poetry, there’s Whitman, of course.”
“I have noticed you have a fair amount of Whitman,” Nathaniel says, in the world’s most egregious understatement.
When it comes to rare editions of a handful of nineteenth-century American writers, Patrick is one of the city’s experts, at least if you employ a flexible definition of bothrareandexpert. But when it comes to rare editions of Whitman, Dooryard Books gets named by anyone who knows what they’re talking about.
Patrick first read Walt Whitman in eleventh grade English class. The assigned text had been “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” but Patrick, at that stage, wasn’t stopping at the assigned texts. He knew he couldn’t ask his aunt and uncle for college tuition, so he was going to need a scholarship. Not that it mattered, in the end, since he dropped out before graduating. After that, college was never going to happen.
In any event, he’d gone to the school library to find more Whitman. When he pulledLeaves of Grassoff the shelf, it opened on its own to “I Sing the Body Electric.” The significance of that wouldn’t occur to him yet: the book’s spine broken at that exact spot, proof that he wasn’t the first boy hiding in the stacks, reading the words “you linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side,” wondering if it could possibly mean what he thought it meant.
He put the book back, face red and heart pounding, like he was about to get caught shoplifting, and shoved the entirety of Whitman into the mental file labeled Things Never to Think About, a file that was already too full to manage.
He’d gone back two days later, taken the book off the shelf, read it again. This time: “a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand.” There was only one way to interpret that, right? Or was Patrick taking something normal and innocent and infecting it with his own perversions?
But someone had taken a sharp pencil and used it to underline five words in that poem: love, hold, content, happy, together. If Patrick was seeing things, he wasn’t the first one. Hewouldn’t be the last one, either. Even if he were laboring under the influence of a dangerous perversion, it seemed increasingly likely that Walt Whitman had written all these poems under that same influence. And Whitman was someone they read in school, so he couldn’t bebad. He made wanting men sound like something noble.Andhe was from Long Island.
Two years later, Patrick had a job working for the city’s preeminent expert on what collectors unironically refer to as Whitmania. An entire floor of the old Fourth Avenue location was devoted to Whitman. There were letters from Whitman, letters to Whitman, brittle yellowed newspaper clippings of stories and essays by Whitman, tintypes, telegrams, two draft manuscripts, postcards, a hat that Mrs. Kaplan was able to claim with a straight face Whitman had once worn, and—of course—multiple copies of several editions ofLeaves of Grass.
It took less than a month of working at Dooryard Books for Patrick to realize that peopleknewabout Whitman. They knew back then. They know now. There were lovers. There wereletters. There was even a photograph. At no point in the past century has any of this been a terribly well kept secret. There’s one review, circa 1870 or thereabouts, that basically said “so you’re all going to take this pervert seriously?” and apparently the unanimous answer had beenyes.
Granted, Patrick will never underestimate a person’s ability to look away from an unsavory fact, but still. Whitman’s probably the most regarded American poet of his century and peopleknowabout him.
“The Kaplans started collecting Whitman before I was born,” Patrick tells Nathaniel now, “but, yeah, the fact that he was gay maybe makes me like my job more.” When Patrick took over as manager, he kept acquiring Whitman. He regularly checks in with collectors, in case they have a whim to sell. He goes to auctions. He lists Whitman and Whitman-adjacent titles ina catalog that a consortium of rare book dealers puts out every now and then.
“Thefactthat he was a…homosexual?” Nathaniel almost stutters over the word. Patrick gets the feeling he’s never said it aloud.
“I don’t know how a person can readLeaves of Grassand come to any other conclusion,” Patrick says.
“Well,” Nathaniel says, a little faint.
“Let’s find you something else to read,” Patrick says, figuring the middle of the night isn’t the time to cite every egregiously gay line inLeaves of Grass. One in the morning is not the time for a conversation that requires footnotes. Nathaniel, like everyone who’s ever worked in a bookshop, sometimes reads on the clock, but Patrick can’t remember what books he’s seen in Nathaniel’s hands. He seems to flip through whatever’s lying around. “What else do you like?”
There’s a long moment before Nathaniel speaks. “I don’t know anymore.”
Patrick doesn’t know what went wrong for Nathaniel, what brought him to Mrs. Kaplan, but he can see the shape of a life divided into before and after, and he knows how hard it is to figure out what you still have in common with the person you used to be. Maybe that’s why Nathaniel fits in here. Maybe all three of them are dealing with the kind of grief that slices your life into clean pieces, the sharpest knife.
Patrick’s had it before, that kind of existence-cleaving loss. First, his parents. Then, everything that happened when he left home. The different Patricks on either side of the cut are barely acquaintances. It’s one thing for that to happen to him, but Susan? He’s been thinking she’ll get better, but even if she hasbetterin her future, it won’t be the same. She won’t be the same. She’ll have lost whoever she was. Patrick’s eyes get hot and prickly.
He pinches the bridge of his nose, because he isn’t doing this, not now. It must be obvious what’s going on, because Nathaniel gets him a glass of water. Patrick needs to squeeze his eyes shut, because there’s nothing worse than kindness. He drinks the water, thinks about how he needs to pay the gas bill, needs to hire an electrician to figure out why the Valdezes keep blowing fuses, and really should go to the grocery store to pick up some fresh fruit and vegetables. Susan’s going to get scurvy.
When he trusts himself, he turns to Nathaniel, who’s barely pretending to read the book that’s open in his lap. The flashlight isn’t even trained on the page.
“I’m sorry about whatever happened to you,” Patrick says, sounding exactly like someone who’s trying not to have a middle of the night breakdown.
Nathaniel shakes his head, fast, like he doesn’t want Patrick’s words any more than Patrick wanted that glass of water. “Whatever crosses I have to bear, I’m not sitting around in the dark, crying in my undershirt. And neither are you. Let’s have some dignity, for heaven’s sake.”
Patrick snorts. “Let’s find you something to read, then,” he says, even though he already said it a minute ago. He slaps his thighs, brisk, like he has things to do, and those things don’t include crying in the dark or making anybody else cry.
“Right, then,” Nathaniel agrees, equally brisk.
“The thing with books is that there’s always something. I mean, if you like reading, you’ll find something else,” Patrick says, like he’s here from the Books Tourism Council, like his job is to sell Nathaniel on the benefits of better living through books. “Want to go downstairs and look?” Nathaniel spends hours a day in the shop. Why does Patrick think he wants to spend even more time there when he’s off duty? Nobody has ever made him act this dumb, he swears it.
There’s no reason to whisper when they go downstairs, no reason to turn only the one light on, no reason to stick together like they’re worried about getting caught. He’s hit with the memory of sneaking around with Susan their last year of high school—breaking into her dad’s liquor cabinet, sneaking into the biology lab, Patrick always ten seconds away from a cardiac episode, his hand over Susan’s mouth to keep her from giggling, Michael just as bad.
“Just give me some books that you enjoyed,” Nathaniel says.
