I had been brave, testing myself, to have come back to Boston for my year's sabbatical from Yale University. In earlier days I had come here as a history instructor at Boston University, straight out of Dartmouth, and I'm afraid I sowed my oats a bit too openly and with male students at the university, which won me an inglorious retreat to the Midwest for more than a decade until memories cleared.
A young, vulnerable eighteen- or nineteen-year-old male student had become my fetish. I was barely twenty-four at the time myself, so the age difference wasn't as great as it would be now, coming back to Boston. But I can't say that I had ended my fetish or didn't feel it particularly tempting now that I was back here. A nineteen-year-old boy hit my sweet spot--a small boy of stature, preferably, who was perfectly formed, willowy, lithe, flexible, yielding, but who was sweet, only beginning to ponder his sexuality and preferences. It was a risk coming back to where I had started with this, but I was an American Revolutionary War scholar and historical fiction novelist. There was no better place to do that than here in Boston, at the Massachusetts Historical Society near the Back Bay on Boylston Street.
I thought I was up to the challenge to curb my desire for young men. But perhaps I came here because I wanted to fail.
My days were spent in one of the reading rooms at the society's building, where I had obtained privileges to peruse original sources for a novel I planned to title "Howe's Retreat," the next in a series of novels I was writing on the siege of Boston by the British in 1775. The series would conclude with the lifting of the siege when General Washington managed to bring in artillery under Henry Knox to take the high ground on Dorchester Heights, forcing a British retreat under British general Howe in 1775.
So, my days were being spent in the society's reading room and my evenings spun out at the apartment I'd rented across the Back Bay Fens park area in the Boylston Apartments close to Fenway Park. It was a lonely--but I told myself a satisfying--life. To get from one to the other, a distance of several blocks, I usually walked through the Boylston section of the park.
I told myself I walked through the park, it being the most direct route, but not the only one I could have taken, to take in the beauty of nature. But I suspect I really did it for the temptation. The park was used by homeless men, many of them young men. I was propositioned each time I walked through the park. I didn't succumb to the temptation, priding myself on my ability to resist, but I didn't stop putting myself in the position to be propositioned by young men, many of them eighteen or nineteen from the look of them. Somehow, they had perceived my sexual interests. I kept assessing them on how well they'd clean up, which, in itself, indicated my resolve wasn't all that solid.
I had reached my late thirties, but I hadn't let either my looks or my body go. I had always had sufficient attraction in those areas to easily hook up. Perhaps it was the flash in my eyes when they appeared before me and made their pitch.
Although there were a few homeless women in the park, they generally didn't approach me after my initial nonresponsiveness to them. Soon after I had established my twice-daily walk through the park pattern, the homeless women had stopped offering themselves to me for pay--but the men hadn't.
On the day in question, the week after Thanksgiving, the day my resolve dissolved, Boston was already deep in winter weather, although that season wouldn't officially arrived for another two weeks. It had started to snow in the morning, while I was walking to the historical society. The snowfall initially was light, but it promised to pick up later in the day. I was wondering whether I would be walking home or taking a taxi because of the snow when I walked through a group of young men on the pathway. As usual, some of them touched me on the sleeve and made suggestions to me, but, smiling, I passed through them, giving them a look of regretful demur. Perhaps my wistfulness at turning them down kept them hopeful and assuming that I did have some interest in man-on-man action. One young man, though, a beautiful blond youth, stood at the edge of the group, smiling at me, but not offering himself. Because he wasn't forward with me, he, of course, was the one I had in mind when I settled in my usual, out-of-the-way table in the research room of the library.
A stack of books and copies of documents were delivered to me, and I immersed myself in the sometimes bloody toing and froing of the American and British forces on the fringes of Boston in 1775. My novels were very masculine depictions of battle and living conditions at the time, emphasizing how raw life was for both sides. My latest novel had been on Henry Knox's effort to bring his artillery to the Dorchester Heights. The one I was researching would be on Howe's retreat to take up a longer siege of New York City. The novels had become quite popular, popular enough that I'd settled on that period for my writing career and had found a lucrative home at Yale University, where students flocked to my less-academic classes on the subject. Having a novel rather than a textbook as the key text for a class was a win-win situation for college students.
I was so embedded in my fantasies of the British retreat and in imagining plots, characters, and plot twists that I didn't realize for some time that I wasn't alone at the table. I had picked such a remote spot in the room that was sectioned off by bookshelves so that I usually would have the table to myself. But not today. I was surprised when I looked up to see a young man--the blond I had passed and briefly had eye contact with in the Back Bay Fen park that morning--sitting across and down the table from me. He had his nose in a book. I couldn't resist speaking to him and not because of his looks, age, or that I'd seen him with the soliciting homeless in the park that morning.
"Do you really find that book interesting?" I asked. I could clearly see the title,
Henry's Guns
.
"I have just now picked it up for the first time," the young man answered. He gave me a nice smile, so I hadn't disturbed him by asking. There was no one else around close enough to be disturbed either as long as we spoke in low voices.
"What made you pick that book to read?"
"I was looking down the shelves and it caught my eye," he said. "My name is Hank, which is short for Henry, so I was drawn to this book. I've heard of Henry Knox. Colonial times, I think."
"Did you come in the library to read a book--that book--or to get warm?" I asked. I really wanted to ask if he'd come in to follow me. If so, he was more persistent and clever than his homeless friends in the park were. And I found him intriguing as well as arousing.
The young man shrugged. "I don't know whether I'll like the book. I just picked it up. But I don't mind reading while I'm getting warm."
"It's rather a coincidence, you know," I said.
"How so?" he asked.
"As it happens, I wrote that book."
"I know," he said, flashing me a winning smile. "Your photo is on the jacket. I read that far while I was standing at the shelf. I took the book from the shelf because of the title, but I kept it for reading because of your photo on the jacket, Mr. Berkley. Or is that your real name? Not a pen name?"
"Yes, that's my name." So, now he knew my name. He'd gotten that off the book too. Somehow that brought him closer to me.
"You came in because of the snow?" I asked. "Is it snowing harder out there?"
