#williamharrison

Forêt de Fontainebleau by William Harrison, The Met's Photography Department

Medium: Carbon print from glass negative

Gift of Alain Paviot, in memory of Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., 1987 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Forêt de Fontainebleau by William Harrison, The Met's Photography Department

Medium: Carbon print from glass negative

Gift of Alain Paviot, in memory of Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., 1987 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Thomas Jefferson, William Harrison, 1801, Smithsonian: National Portrait Gallery

Size: Image: 11.4 × 9.6 cm (4 1/2 × 3 3/4") Medium: Stipple engraving on paper

George Washington, William Harrison, 1800, Smithsonian: National Portrait Gallery

Size: Image: 11 x 8.2cm (4 5/16 x 3 1/4") Medium: Stipple engraving on paper

Thomas Jefferson, William Harrison, 1801, Smithsonian: National Portrait Gallery

Size: Image: 11.4 × 9.6 cm (4 1/2 × 3 3/4") Medium: Stipple engraving on paper

Henry Blake certainly didn’t look like the type of kid who would steal his father’s brand new Hermès gloves. At least he didn’t yet—he was only eleven years old.

 Henry had first noticed the gloves when his father returned home from the train station after taking the 4:52 out of Manhattan. Mr. Blake was a shy man, but he took to whistling when he was so moved, and that day Henry could make out the tune of “Maple Leaf Rag” as his father opened the front door. There was no mention of the gloves that evening, though Henry did notice his father admiring them for a brief moment after dinner. Mr. Blake was peering down at them and vaguely grinning as if he were looking upon two small puppies. Then he adjusted his round glasses that had begun to slide down his rakish nose and went upstairs to his study.

  To be fair, Henry didn’t take the gloves right then, in that moment of their initial allure. But he did walk over to the side table where they were resting to give them further examination. First he was struck by their rich mahogany color—they seemed to be letting off a faint radiant hue. Then he picked one up. It was very soft. When Henry traced his finger along the fuzzy grain of the glove it left a darker streak that could be wiped away if he reversed his path’s direction. Suddenly, he realized that he had been stroking the glove for quite some time, and feeling a bit startled, he put it back down on the table and went up to his room. 

It was early November then, and growing colder every day, so each morning Mr. Blake would leave for work wearing the gloves. After he got home he would leave them on top of the side table next to the coat rack. But one day—it may have been unseasonably warm, or perhaps it just slipped his mind—Mr. Blake forgot his gloves, and they remained in their place of honor when Henry got home from school.

It’s hard to say what exactly moved Henry to do what he did. Maybe it was because he was made fun on the playground since he was no good at football and didn’t know what “second down” meant. Maybe it was because he wasn’t sure his father really noticed him and he just wanted some attention. Maybe it was because he’d just read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at school and saw a whole lot of white picket fences in his own suburban reality, but felt no sense of adventure. Either way, Henry decided to pluck the gloves from their perch on the side table and finally try them on. They were a bit big on him, quite floppy in the fingers, but immediately he felt the intoxicating effect of the cool leather’s smoothness on his hands.

  While many of Henry’s peers had developed a taste for spirited games of tackle football at recess, he couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for such violence. As he followed the rest of his class outside he poked Charlie Yeats on the arm.

“Hey, follow me, I have something I wanna show you,” he whispered to Charlie, who was also pretty small for his age and was one of the other kids who didn’t fit in on the playground. So instead of willfully subjecting themselves to another fifteen minutes of physical embarrassment, the two of them ambled towards a small stream that skirted the edge of the schoolyard.

“What are we doing back here, man?” Charlie asked, “We going fishing?”

“Come on Charlie,” Henry replied. “You know there aren’t any fish in there.”

“Oh please, you just aren’t looking hard enough. They’re small fish. It’s a small stream.”

“That’s not why we’re here,” responded Henry, trying his best to sound serious. “I wanted to show you these.” He pulled the gloves out of his jacket pocket. It was a gray morning, making the faint glow of the gloves all the more luminous. Immediately, Charlie grabbed the gloves from Henry and began to study them.

“Her-mese,” he said, fingering the label on the inside of the right glove. “Like the Greek god. They must be fancy, huh?”

“It’s air-mez,” corrected Henry, imitating the pronunciation he’d heard from his parents. “Yeah, they’re pretty sweet, right?”

“Yep, these boys are mint. They make me wanna strut around, show off a bit. They kinda look like the type of gloves a getaway driver would wear in the movies, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” Henry replied, though his thoughts were drifting off suddenly.

“Yeah, these babies make me wanna drive.”

  The first time Henry took his mother’s Buick for a spin, things went pretty smoothly. Relatively speaking, that is. When he sat down in the driver’s seat he realized that the car was designed for a person much bigger than him. He was short enough that in order to reach the gas he had to peer through the steering wheel just to see the road. But he had paid close attention to all the action movies he’d watched on late night T.V., and sure enough when he jammed the key into the ignition and twisted it forward, the engine growled. Henry eased the car down the block, gloved hands gripping the wheel. He didn’t see any of his neighbors outside so he sped up quickly, turning sharply onto Monroe Street. Immediately, he realized that in his excitement he’d almost clipped the Stop sign with his mirror, but he quickly guided the car to the center of the lane. Nonetheless, the incident colored his outing. All in all, the experience was a mesmeric cocktail: equal parts terror and ecstasy.

That night, lying in bed, Henry thought about whether or not he should tell Charlie about what he’d done. On the one hand, he relished the thought of describing what had happened, and he knew Charlie would be eager to hear about his secret in detail. But on the other hand, he was aware that this was exactly the problem: Charlie would enjoy his story so much that he would try to convince Henry to replicate it and take the car out again. Henry was also worried about the gloves. Had his father realized that they were missing? Surely he had; he wore them every day. For a moment, Henry was comforted by the fact that his father hadn’t said anything to him about them. But then again, the two of them didn’t say much to each other in the first place, so how could he be sure? Henry contemplated his next move and stared at the dimly smoldering greenish-yellow stars on his ceiling until he fell asleep.

  “C’mon man, why can’t I drive?” Asked Charlie as Henry slid into the driver’s seat.

“’Cause I got the gloves,” Henry responded. “And since it’s not your car. Hell, it isn’t mine, either.”

Another day of school was over, and that afternoon Henry’s mother had gotten picked up by her friends to play tennis at the Club, leaving the family’s dusty emerald-green Buick free to the boys’ disposal. After starting the engine, Henry backed out of the driveway even more cautiously than the day before, and when he came to Monroe Street he maneuvered the car gingerly around the bend. By the time they’d reached the center of town, he was feeling confident and began to accelerate past smeared versions of local landmarks: the post office, the dry cleaner’s, the gas station where all the kids loitered in the parking lot. As they passed by the blinking sign out front of Skip’s Burgers, Charlie begged Henry to stop, but Henry merely stared straight ahead and kept driving.

“Aw man, you’re no fun,” Charlie groaned. “We already took the car, right? What are you scared of?”

“I just don’t want to be seen, that’s all,” Henry responded curtly.

“Enough of this creeping around—I wanna go fast. When’s the next time we’ll have a chance like this?”

Henry didn’t really see what Charlie was so anxious about. He’d taken the gloves and then the car—at this point wasn’t it thrilling enough just to drive? But what the hell, he’d take them to a bigger, faster road—it was a simple request. He took a left down Sheridan Avenue past the undulating green lawns of the Orchard Hills Golf Course towards the Franklin Parkway.  When they came to the entrance he merged into traffic fluidly, accelerating quick just like he knew he was supposed to. For a few moments, he stayed pace with the convoy of cars that surrounded him, hovering a ways behind a navy blue sedan. Suddenly, with a low and alluring rumble that made both Henry and Charlie turn their heads, a cream-colored Cadillac zipped by them on the left.

“Follow that guy,” Charlie breathed. “Goddamn, he knows how it’s done.”

Perhaps feeling the force of the gloves again, Henry shifted into the left lane in pursuit of the racing Cadillac. Eventually, he pulled up behind it and moved back into the right lane to try to pass by. But as he attempted to pull out in front, the driver of the Cadillac, a portly man with thinning hair and thick glasses, sped up in an attempt to hold them off. Henry looked left in frustration, trying to find some means of maneuvering his way by. At first he didn’t see the car in front of him, a beat-up Ford truck that was crawling forwards. Braking hard, Henry swung the wheel to the left, successfully avoiding the truck but skidding sharply.

Moments later, Henry found himself in the driver’s seat of a stationary car. They were on the strip of asphalt next to the median, tilted towards the metal divider at a sharp angle. Now Henry knew why people talked about accidents or near accidents the way they did—in the moment of panic that immediately followed his loss of control, time had an elastic quality, as if the awareness of potential damage had led to a heightened focus on the present. Rising out of his shock, Henry jumped from the car and realized that, miraculously, it had no visible damage, or that at the very least, it had enough bumps and scratches already that no new ones were apparent. Before starting the car again he yanked the gloves off of his shuddering hands, suddenly feeling silly for wearing them at all. Henry drove off before anyone could report what had happened, and he and Charlie headed home in stunned silence. As soon as he got to his room, he angrily flung the gloves into his closet and tried his best to forget about them.

  Years later, on a cigarette break from work, Henry was daydreaming. He hated the warehouse and everyone who worked there, hated that he’d let himself fail out of school, hated the giant ceiling fans like helicopter blades and the long aisles of metal shelves that he had to walk down every day picking up identical parts to put in identical boxes. Ringing in his ears was the incessant and maddening beeping of the barcode register that he used to scan each part to make sure he’d picked the right one from the right location and put it in the right box. When he chose the right part it made a friendly, though nearly intolerable beep. If he accidentally scanned the wrong barcode even though he was aiming at the correct one, the scanner would make an infuriating, angrier beep. He hated this beep. In the past few weeks, as a means of distraction, he’d tried to blot out his feelings by focusing on sorting parts as fast and efficiently as possible. Not only did this strategy help pass the time, but it had also made him the most statistically productive “picker” in the warehouse. But today Henry didn’t feel like being productive, he just wanted to enjoy his cigarette and mope.

Maybe it was this desire for distraction, for anything that would at least temporarily remove his mind from the warehouse, that made Henry remember his father’s gloves. Were they still in his closet? Almost certainly—his father had been too acquiescent to bring up the issue, and probably thought that he’d been pick-pocketed or had dropped them on the train one morning. Henry’s head throbbed with a sudden rush of excitement, and as soon as five o’clock came around he raced home.