The Forger's Daughter

by Bradford Morrow

  “This is different,” said Meg elliptically, without shooting our daughter the petulant look I fully expected, but raising Sophie’s eyebrows a little. “I know Will’s the expert here, but may I see the signature?”

  “It’s your book,” I said, under my breath, right away wishing I had simply done as she asked.

  When Meghan took the Tamerlane in her hands and scrutinized the handwriting on the title page, I stood beside her, silent, marveling at its outward legitimacy. Whatever I thought of Slader, it was a masterstroke on his part to have signed with an almost weightless touch, using not ink but the dulled tip of a graphite pencil, maybe a carpenter’s pencil. A counterintuitive gesture, one that would surely be noticed by Poe experts. Debated, certainly, but which, if proven to be a forgery, would not ruin the integrity of the pamphlet itself as much as, say, ineradicable ink would have. If the time ever arrived when I could congratulate him on this clever gesture, I would do so. Though I hoped that time might never come.

  “In early books like this,” Sophie said, “when the author’s name isn’t printed on the title page, many times an owner will just write it there. We have a fifth edition of A Tale of a Tub upstairs, originally published anonymously, in which some owner from the eighteenth century wrote in ink By Dr Swift, beneath the title. Happened all the time.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “Swift’s first major book. But I don’t think this is that.”

  As I uttered those words, Meghan leafed through the pamphlet and, withdrawing a small folded letter on thin paper that was laid inside, made the second important discovery of the day. Warily, she unfolded it twice and read aloud Poe’s brief missive to Theodore Johnston, while Sophie and her colleagues marveled, Cal whispering an all-purpose expletive.

  “Can I have a look?” I asked unnecessarily, given she was already passing it over to me. For a moment I was sure Meg must have misread the addressee. So flawless was the forgery Nicole had produced that I might have been holding her letter to the fictional Thomas Johnson—so unimpeachable was the holograph, so credible the paper. Even the creases from the folds had been faultless, aged by my daughter and me using a bone folder to impress the antique stock first one way, then reversing the fold to press it from the other side. This procedure ensured that the fibers, unseeable by the naked eye, were properly broken. With a lightly moistened Q-tip, we’d barely dampened the crease edges, then placed the paper in the studio nipping press, screwed it tight, and by morning it had been deprived of its natural tendency to spring back open. But this letter in my hands was no forgery. Instead, I was holding the genuine, unrecorded handwritten note to Theodore Johnston from Edgar Allan Poe.

  “And?” Sophie nudged.

  “Nothing here physically suggests to me, at least at first blush, that this is anything other than Poe’s original letter to this critic Johnston, hoping he’d review the book,” I said.

  Meghan then finally weighed in, her tone of voice more exasperated than exhilarated. “Until we decide what to do, we’re going to need to put these in a very safe place. Will, are you absolutely certain the book itself is correct?”

  “I’m less sure about the signature than the book. Have you ever come across Joseph Cosey? One of the most notorious and successful forgers of all time, and a specialist in American historical documents. His stuff was so convincing, some of it’s still in circulation.”

  “He did Poe?”

  “Ben Franklin, Lincoln, Jefferson, your Twain right there,” I said, pointing at the Huckleberry Finn on the table. “And, yes, Poe.”

  “You think this could be a Cosey?” Nicole asked, her forehead knotting.

  “In a lesser book, possibly,” I said, aware that she was slyly helping me muddy the waters. “Cosey was more into forging letters and documents, and, besides, if he’d somehow had the good fortune to come upon a first edition of Tamerlane, he could have retired rather than getting caught and sentenced to prison again and again. The letter would be more in Cosey’s wheelhouse.” Though Cosey, of course, had died many years before Slader put a pencil to this pamphlet.

  “We’ll deal with the letter. Right now I’m asking you about the book itself,” Meghan prodded.

  “Over the years, as you know, there have been a number of facsimile editions printed, usually in limited editions. Columbia University Press did one back in the forties with a detailed introduction by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. There’s the 1884 George Redway, which I’ve never seen. William Andrews Clark Jr. had one printed up by John Henry Nash in the twenties. Couple of others, too. The Ulysses Bookshop in London issued one in 1931 that’s a pretty accurate reproduction, right down to the stitching and tea-colored wrappers, though they’re a little too gray and light.”

  “We’ve handled a copy of that,” interjected Sophie. “It’s stamped ‘Facsimile’ in red ink on the last page.”

  “Yes, and if you’ll recall, the ink didn’t bleed too much into the paper. It could probably be removed with judicious use of a bleaching agent. I imagine more than one gullible collector’s been tricked into buying it as an original.”

  “But, Will, what about this copy?”

  “This looks right to me, Meg,” I said, firmly looking directly at her. “Right age, right feel, right heft, right everything.” The faintest hint of dismay crossed her face and vanished.

  When Sophie asked what it was worth, I realized that if ever there was a time for me to feign ignorance, rather than continuing to pour forth with all the lore about Tamerlane I had gathered during the past two weeks, this was that time. I realized I’d gone on too long about Cosey and facsimile editions. True, I already carried around a surfeit of bibliographic arcana in my memory, but these gentlemen with their three-name names, the Mabbotts and Clarks of history, not to mention their literary hero himself, would never have been so readily at my disposal had I not recently been immersed in all things Poe.

  “Who knows?” I answered. “Small fortune.”

  “Six figures?” she asked, the import of her discovery becoming clearer to her.

  “At least,” I told her. “That said, I think Meg would agree that it needs to be carefully collated, photographed, and examined, not just by us but by outside experts after we’ve gone over it with a fine-tooth comb. I wouldn’t feel comfortable assigning it any value, even for insurance purposes, until we’ve done our due diligence.”

  “Also,” Sophie continued, “we’ll need to think about how to go about properly presenting it to the world.”

  “Maybe auction might be the best way to go,” I said, studying my wife, who looked at both our daughters, then at me with an uninterpretable expression on her face, arms crossed. “I think it’s the only real way to let the world decide what it’s finally worth. But it’s Meg’s call.”

  Sophie pulled her long blue-black hair into an unruly ponytail on the top of her head, like a fountain of ink, adding, “If we price it and it moves too quickly, we’ll always be haunted by the fear we undersold it. Price it too high, the excitement of the find sinks into a slow-boil tar pit of grousing and grumbling by other dealers and collectors.”

  Her point was well taken, though I knew that a private sale to an institution might be the simplest way to proceed, and by far the quietest. Price it strongly, then negotiate down to a figure all can agree on. I could easily think of a dozen candidates, places with means, that would love to have Tamerlane in their holdings.

  Cal asked, “We have clear ownership of everything in this collection, right, Meg?”

  As if startled from slumber, my wife responded, “What? Yes, we do. I don’t know whether you noticed when we were there, but the estate attorney insisted I sign a contract stipulating that the books were sold in their entirety and as is. Of course, he never expected one rarity might be hidden inside another.”

  “Onus was on him, though,” said Sophie, snatching the words out of my mouth.

 
I knew it was the right moment for me to intervene. Accepting how events were supposed to unfold, if every­one involved here was to survive, I said, “Onus was really on both sides. If we’d gotten the books back here and realized the shop had grossly overpaid, it’s not like Meg could go running back to Tivoli demanding a refund. A done deal’s a done deal. But now, if nobody objects, I’d like to sit down and let’s examine this thing”—I remembered Slader’s admonishing me for using that word—“together.”

  And so we did. With Nicole and Maisie and the others looking on, all silent in their different ways, I went page by page through all twenty of Tamerlane’s leaves, rectos and versos, gingerly observing the same text Nicole and I had meticulously gone through in our studio upstate, worried that Slader might have further sophisticated the book with more contemporary faux-Poe forging. Who knew but that he might’ve got it in his head to correct, in Poe’s early hand, some of the printer’s errors, such as “crash” for “crush” to rhyme with “rush” on page 8. Or later, “lisp” for “list” and “wish” for “mist.” Perhaps such a restrained hoax might even have passed muster with certain scholars, speculating that Poe, who never in fact corrected proofs of Tamerlane, would possibly have made such edits if given the chance.

  Fortunately, this was a conceivable wrinkle that would never need ironing. Slader had left the interior text alone. The pages were as Calvin Thomas had printed them, every error in its rightful place, untampered with. We further compared ours with copies pictured online, and everything checked out.

  Meg, who had been unwontedly quiet during this procedure, now spoke up. “I think we all need to keep this to ourselves until we decide what to do”—an opinion that oddly echoed my own when I showed the book to her and Maisie upstate not two weeks earlier. “Let’s put the letter and book in the safe. I can move them to our bank box later.”

  Everyone concurred that Tamerlane was a shop secret for the time being, although I couldn’t help adding that Sophie should rightfully be credited as the discoverer, much as a beat cop is ascribed her collar, to which every­one assented, never suspecting this was one more way of legitimizing the thirteenth copy’s new history in the world. Speculation as to where the deceased collector might have come upon it could run rampant, I thought. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t scouted every book barn in the northeast, as I understood it. Or perhaps he never even realized it was concealed inside the Mark Twain. Stranger things have happened

  Work on the books continued over the course of the day in an atmosphere charged with dueling emotions. Sophie and her colleagues were electrified by the find, one which, once the gag order was lifted, would afford them a lifetime of bookish bragging rights. On the other hand, it was clear to me that Meghan was anxious, uncertain, even angry. Nor could I blame her, especially given my role, inadvertent as much of it was, in essentially entrapping her into buying and now selling the Tamerlane. It briefly occurred to me that she could, by way of getting the monkey off her back, donate it. The Poe Museum in Richmond didn’t own a copy. Neither did the Morgan. There were many worthy repositories that would be perfect for such a gift. But the other silent partners in this scheme hadn’t gone to such lengths only to remove the copy from one place and simply give it away to another. No magnanimous idealists were involved in our troubled confederacy, no book-hugging utopianists. Myself, regrettably, included.

  Early that afternoon, Nicole and I went out to pick up sandwiches for everyone at a deli several blocks from the store. The neighborhood was teeming with busy shoppers and shopkeepers, kids skateboarding, dogs being walked. Sun was out, filtered by high cirri that swirled above in long wispy hairlike strands. A mash-up of sounds—laughs, prattle, cries—streamed around us while we passed a vintage record store, a head shop, a butcher. Setting aside concerns about Tamerlane for a moment, I was musing about how good it felt to be back in the city when Nicole broke in on my reverie.

  “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you,” she not quite asked.

  I not quite answered, “Yes and no.”

  “What’s the yes part?”

  “Atticus insinuated the original would end up back with me, one way or another.”

  “By original, you mean the stolen one?”

  This question I chose not to answer. Instead, I queried her, “Do you think it might be better if your mother sold it privately, skipped the fanfare, just got it out of our lives?”

  “What does Atticus say?” she asked, without affect, without an accusatory note.

  Nicole, I then realized, knew exactly who I was. She had read me like a child’s primer, a transparent ABC. All these days, weeks together, our entire lifetime as loving father and daughter, as mentor and mentee, she had known me down to my marrow, had deciphered all my soft-clay truths.

  “Atticus gave no clues about it one way or the other. Slader insisted on auctioning it.”

  “Since when do you listen to what he says?” We’d stopped together on the street. “Slader, I mean.”

  “I don’t, any more than he listened to what I said.”

  “His Poe signature’s pretty impressive, is it not?”

  “Impressive is one word for it. Harebrained is another.”

  Nicole laughed, then stopped me with a gentle hand on my forearm. “I need to make a small confession—”

  Those few words made my heart sink. Though I badly wanted to interrupt her, tell her to stop right there, I knew I couldn’t.

  “How he got my cell number, I’m not sure, but I spoke with him before we went to Rhinecliff that day. I don’t know where he was calling from; it was noisy in the background.”

  I hesitated. “And?”

  “And he asked if I’d be willing to make the signature. Told me he knew I was the one who’d written the letter, and that he was impressed.”

  “Does the bastard have no shame?” I queried no one in particular, seething in silence, feeling at once furious and helpless that he dared intervene, come between me and my daughter.

  “You know he claims to have dirt on you, evidence you committed a crime that would send you to prison for the rest of your life.”

  “He doesn’t, though,” I countered, scarcely believing I was having this conversation with my daughter.

  “Well, he was insistent on the point.”

  “But was he persuasive?” I asked, holding my breath as I awaited her response.

  “I’m afraid he was,” she said, looking away in the direction of a small child, who had, whether intentionally or by mistake, released a cluster of silver balloons into the air. Watching them rise above the treetops and brownstones, she added, “And that’s my confession.”

  Was there no end to Slader’s intrusiveness, his reckless encroachments into my life and that of my family? In the wake of her revelation, no possible logical response came to mind, so I changed the subject, hoping she’d forgive my reluctance to make any outright confession of my own. “I wonder,” I said, “if we could carefully remove the Poe signature without abrading the paper?”

  “Maybe use a Staedtler or Hi-Polymer eraser,” she proposed, following my blatant deflection away from Slader while no doubt fully aware I was still speaking about expunging the truth, blotting out the past, rubbing out misjudgments. “But I don’t think erasing it, no matter what’s used, would pass muster with the others.”

  “The signature’s damned convincing, I’ll admit,” I told her, glancing over to see that one of the balloons had strayed from the others and gotten tangled in a tall spindly ginkgo. “But can we agree that’s the last time you’ll do any such thing? I don’t care how compelling your reasons were.”

  “I’m my father’s daughter, lest we forget,” she said, with a frown more magnetic than most people’s smiles. “What’s good for the pater is good for the filia.”

  A heartwarming concept, under other circumstances. To hear her say it in so many words
, though, made my heart ache. I forced a smile, surely not magnetic because laden with regret, however fleeting. “Then we’re done with this business after getting out from under Tamerlane.”

  “Done,” she said, extending her hand, which I took in both of mine, never feeling more fortunate for being her father than at that moment, deeply unworthy as I was.

  When Maisie and I were driving home with books from the handsome Victorian near Tivoli, she had asked out of the blue if I might ever discover a copy of Tamerlane in one of the collections we bought for the shop. This was the afternoon before she was to go sailing with her friends. Smiling, I assured her, “You and the Bancroft twins would have a far better chance of walking on water from the boat launch in Rhinecliff across the river to Kingston.”

  That made her laugh.

  “Not, mind you, that you better try,” I’d added.

  Less than a week later, the answer to her guileless if prophetic question would be a simple “Yes.” Now it was I who seemed to be expected to walk on water, uncharted and dangerous water. Not to mention contaminated. How Slader had orchestrated everything from the opening note of Maisie’s scream to Sophie’s reprise in the shop, a kind of leitmotif of shock, I wasn’t sure. But having tried at every step to avoid involvement with his Poe machinations, indeed to resist them, I still ended up at the center of it all.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” was Will’s initial response to my confession about having witnessed the body being dumped out of a powder-blue Chevy that was similar to, or more likely the same as, the one Henry Slader had been conveyed in when visiting—make that plaguing—us at the farmhouse. Before I could answer, he said, “What possessed you to lie to those cops about it?”

  “Detectives,” I corrected him, just as I myself had been chastened by one of them for the same mistake.

  “Cops, officers, detectives, the fuzz—who cares? They weren’t accusing you of anything, is my point. You could have leveled with them about what you saw,” he insisted.