Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “Master Wedge.” It was the voice of Jacob Jones.

  “Yes, sir,” he said over his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” The footfalls came toward him.

  What was he doing? He should have left the book in place. But he was committed now. With his left hand, he took Corporei Insectii and slipped it into the little space between the bottom shelf and the floor. There would his grandfather’s secret be safe, at least until he knew how to dispense with it.

  “I’ll ask again. What are you doing?” Tutor Jones stood over him.

  But it was done. Benjamin was standing, smiling, a copy of a Latin text in his left hand, while with his right hand, he slipped his knife back into his sleeve.

  “What am I to do with you, Benjamin Wedge?” asked President Leverett.

  Benjamin tried to speak, but his father spoke first. “May I ask you, sir, what punishment the tutors threatened when my son was discovered playing the fairy Puck?”

  “Rustication,” said Leverett, “if he played anything else.”

  John Wedge looked at his son.

  Benjamin looked down at his hands.

  The meeting was held in the president’s office, in the front room of Leverett’s house, where once the home of Reverend Thomas Shepard stood.

  Leverett was in his sixties, and the work of governing had aged him. An unhealthy puffiness filled his face, and his lower legs appeared like sausages in white-stocking casement.

  John Wedge admired Leverett’s ability to balance himself between the Congregational clergy who saw the college as their seminary and those of the wider population who saw wider purposes for Harvard. Presenting himself in a fine black velvet coat and green waistcoat of grosgrain silk, out of respect to Leverett’s office, John had resolved to do nothing to make Leverett’s job harder. But he had also resolved to advocate for his son.

  Such advocacy was difficult, however, considering the unrepentant demeanor with which his son presented himself. The boy did not even wear his academic gown.

  “I am loath to rusticate anyone,” Leverett said sadly, “especially a young man whose grandfather died in my arms.”

  “In your arms?” said Benjamin, and for a moment, he dropped his defiance.

  “Yes,” said the president. “He died berating ignorance. Nevertheless . . .”

  “Ignorance prevails?” said Benjamin.

  John said, “Quiet yourself.”

  “’Tisn’t ignorance,” answered Leverett. “’Tis the tutors, who bear a heavy burden, maintaining discipline amongst a hundred lively young men. I must support them. Then there’s Reverend Mather, an overseer who has attended but one meeting in all my presidency, so strong is his animus against me. He’s issued a report that damns students for doing no more than reading plays. This inspires Judge Sewall to prepare a visiting committee to look over my shoulder, to see if students are depraved or not.”

  “And so,” said Benjamin, “I am to be sacrificed on Reverend Mather’s altar?”

  “Quiet yourself,” snapped his father. “You were warned against this.”

  “You tell me that I should think for myself,” said the boy, and he was a good enough actor that he could set his jaw, but he could not hide the hurt in his eyes.

  “Benjamin,” said Leverett, “too many saw you dressed as Puck. Too many heard the tutors promise rustication. The punishment must be carried out. Do you have anything else to say before the sentence?”

  Without hesitation, Benjamin asked, “Why is it that you allow Shakespeare to be read but not played?”

  “Be quiet,” said the boy’s father.

  “No,” said Leverett. “’Tis a fair question. We live in the colony of Massachusetts. We are funded by the colony. We must fulfill the public trust. And the proscription against theatrical performance is a powerful tradition.”

  “You have not answered the question,” said Benjamin.

  “Quiet,” repeated John Wedge.

  “No,” said Leverett. “He’s young, and the young must say their say.” Then the president looked at Benjamin. “The clerisy could not forever keep plays from being read. The day will come when they cannot stop them from being played, either.”

  “Perhaps we should usher in that day,” said Benjamin.

  “And perhaps we should leave it for others.” Leverett put his hands on his table and lifted himself to his feet. “We have so much else to do. Don’t you agree?”

  “He does,” said John.

  Benjamin looked down at his hands again and nodded.

  “Then ’tis done,” said Leverett. “You’ll go to Reverend Bleen’s in Sudbury, where you will work for your room and board while completing the prescribed course of study under his supervision. After Christmas, you’ll make a public apology during morning prayer and be readmitted as a member in good standing.”

  A father and son walking across the Yard: they could have been John and his own father on John’s first day at Harvard, or on the day when they argued over the presence of Satan in Margaret Rule. John had enjoyed arguing with his father, and even now, he wished they could have one more go at a thorny issue. John could argue with Abraham and know that it was all part of the father-and-son debate. But with Benjamin, it was different. They did not argue because they enjoyed the challenge of testing their ideas. They argued because they were different.

  “I shall accompany you to Sudbury,” said John.

  “No,” said the boy. “I’ll go myself.” And he quickened his pace.

  “That will take you a day or more on foot.” John walked a bit faster.

  “Why did you not stand by me?”

  “But I did.”

  “You stood by, not by me. Had they tried to rusticate Abraham, you would have moved heaven and earth to keep him here, with his Philomusarian Society and his holy airs. But I wish to do things that are different.”

  “And so you should.”

  The boy stopped and looked at his father. “Then why did you not say it?”

  “Because of your deceit. If you are to do things differently, do them forwardly.”

  The young actor allowed the shock to play across his face.

  “Now then,” said John, “about the book of bugs . . . Corporei Insectii? ’Twas your grandfather’s deceit and defiance.”

  “You needn’t worry about it. . . . ’Tis hidden, hidden better than Grandfather hid it.”

  “The day will come when it must be revealed,” said John. “Not now, but in time.”

  “In time?” Benjamin could not suppress a smile. “When that time comes, I shall do it forwardly, then.”

  John put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I’ll hold you to it, and stand with you.”

  And together they walked across the Yard.

  iii

  Two weeks later, John Wedge received a letter:

  Dear Father:

  Reverend Bleen works me as hard as he works his slave, Demetrius. Yet he expects me to expostulate daily upon Bible passages, deliver the solutions to a dozen mathematical problems, and report upon all of the readings that would have been assigned at the college. He is an unsmiling man who whips Demetrius and threatens to whip me. But I will do my best to serve my time.

  John wrote back:

  I once rusticated myself, after surrendering to weakness. I likened my time in the country to our Lord’s forty days in the desert. I returned a more understanding man, one who could accept weakness in himself and others. See your own rustication in the same way. By your connection to the elemental life of the farm, you learn that pride and self-conceit have no place in life. You will be better for it.

  Benjamin read this letter on a straw pallet in the loft of Reverend Bleen’s barn, in the thin gray light of dawn. He did not read at night because Reverend Bleen would allow no candle for reading anything but what was assigned, and no reading at all in the barn, where a flame might produce a conflagration.

  So Benjamin read now, and read again, and yet again, his anger festering. How
he yearned to bask in a bit of pride and self-conceit, to partake of a little of the joy he had known in reading and performing those plays that now seemed like dreams. And when anger and yearning all but overwhelmed him, he went to a corner, to the place where two beams were notched together to hold up the loft. He reached under the rough boards, into the notch, and withdrew his commonplace book from its hiding place.

  Reverend Bleen had prohibited commonplace books, saying he would not “allow rusticated boys to fill pages with unholy aphorisms and commentary from scribblers who feel no fear when they write the name of God.” He had also decreed that Benjamin would have ink to write no more than one letter a week to his parents, for “there was little in a boy’s head worth writing.”

  What ignorance, thought Benjamin. And he wrote as much now, using a quill and ink also hidden in the notch. He wrote of his anger and frustration. He wrote of the chores he hated doing. He wrote of the sound of a whip, for Reverend Bleen was at that moment in the barnyard, beating his slave.

  Then he wrote: I long to read a play again. I long to play a role, for a play, well played, may take us to the far towers of Araby and show us at the self-same time the truth within our own hearts. And he liked the rhythm of those words so much that he was taken with a small bit of inspiration, and he scrawled five lines of verse about the last play he had read, Love’s Labours Won. Then he realized that the cock was crowing.

  “Benjamin Wedge!” cried Reverend Bleen from the barnyard. “Benjamin!”

  “Just a moment, Reverend.”

  “Not just a moment. I have told you that if you are not in the yard before the first cock crow, you’ll be punished. I’m up. The nigger is up. And the cock is up. Why are you not up to join us in a morning prayer?”

  “I’m up. I’m up.” Benjamin went scurrying to the corner and replaced the commonplace book and hid the ink.

  Then he climbed down the ladder and stood before the reverend. And in the gray light, a small slip of white paper in a pocket stood out like a lit candle in a dim room.

  Reverend Bleen, of sallow complexion, as skinny as a rake and with less warmth, looked at the pocket and said, “You have been reading. What have you been reading?”

  “A letter, sir.”

  “You have broken a rule. You are no better than my slave. Take off your shirt.”

  A few nights later, a message arrived at the home of John Wedge, beckoning that he come to Reverend Mather’s.

  There was a rumor that Mather’s wife had moved out of the house, leaving him in misery. John would not be surprised, for she was utterly without constancy and had moved out more than once. So he hurried through the streets and found Mather sitting in the darkness of his library, a shadowed figure, head in his hands.

  The shadow raised its head: “My father dead six months, and now this.”

  “Your wife again?” whispered John.

  “No. My son. My poor Creasy. Dead. Gone to the bottom of the sea.”

  John Wedge had comforted friends before in the face of loss. But he could think of nothing to say, so he sat in the chair next to Mather and put an arm around him.

  Mather turned, his eyes rheumy and bloodshot, his hair and beard a fringe of gray bristles. “Do you know that the Lord has now seen fit to take thirteen of my fifteen born children? Why? Why?”

  “The Lord’s ways are past knowing.”

  A sob burst from Mather. “Do you know what I wrote in my diary when I sent Creasy to sea? I wrote that a gracious God wonderfully made up in Samuel what I missed of comfort in his miserable brother. Why would a man write such a thing of his son? Why?”

  Man’s ways, thought John, were past knowing, too.

  He stayed the night with Mather, praying, talking, and sitting by as his old friend cried. In the morning, Mather’s wife returned. Only then did John feel he could leave.

  Stepping into the sunlight, he was gripped by a powerful need to see his own sons. So he stopped at the stable and ordered that his horse be saddled. Then he went home and told his wife that he was going to see their boys. “I would tell them that I love them. It is good for the soul.”

  Knowing what had befallen Mather, Samantha understood.

  John Wedge made first for Sudbury. He went by the Post Road, then went through the old village where the famous Indian massacre had begun. Crossing the river, he could see the Haynes garrison and, beyond, his father’s fields, owned now by a man who still wrote letters complaining that he spent more time plowing up the devil’s rocks than God’s good earth.

  He rode along the back slope of the hill where Englishmen had fought Indians a generation before. And he came at length to the farm of Reverend Samuel Bleen.

  It struck him that he had never been to a farm in September that was so quiet. The acreage behind the house was planted in corn, and from what John could see, it was ready to pick.

  The house was a fine one. The people of the parish had seen to the comfort of their minister. There were six-over-six windows on both floors, carved pilasters around the doorframe, a roof covered in slate, walls covered in shake. A house, thought John, built to last, with a fine barn out back.

  He realized that this was not a place to sit his horse and halloo like a bumpkin. So he dismounted and went up to the door and knocked. It was a Dutch door, and the top half was opened, allowing him to peer in at the wide-board pine floors, the English paper on the walls, the mahogany furniture in the dining room.

  His son, he decided, was living better here than he had at college.

  “Hello! Reverend Bleen!”

  A woman appeared from the back of the house. She was skinny, middle-aged, wearing a black dress and a clean white apron. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Benjamin Wedge’s father.”

  “Just a minute.” The woman went away and came back with a sack, which she handed to John. “My husband said for you to take your son’s things if you came. And if he don’t catch up to your son, he’ll be comin’ to see you.”

  “About what?”

  “Your son run off with our slave. That’s stealin’, which is a sin against the Sixth Commandment.”

  “Run off? To where?”

  “If we knew, we’d have ’em both by now. Heard they run for the Connecticut. Once they reach that river, they could go anywhere, ’specially if they play master and man. And that boy of yours, he could fool a London barrister, he’s so good at deceivin’. Made us think he was innocent as a flower. Then he run off.”

  “But why?”

  The woman just shook her head. “Hard to say. Took nothin’ more than a good, honest beatin’.”

  Chapter Twelve

  PETER FALLON carried a Widener stacks pass in his wallet. It was a good deal. A hundred dollars a year for access to some 14 million volumes. If you couldn’t find it in the Widener system, you couldn’t find it.

  But Peter didn’t want a book. He was looking for Assistant Professor O’Hill. After tracking him all morning by telephone, he had him targeted.

  At the circulation desk, Peter showed his pass and stepped through the turnstile into another world. His heels echoed. The smell of the books—not of dust or mildew but of paper and cloth and glue—was strong and strangely comforting. So was the embrace of the books. And the low ceilings made him feel as if he were in a maze where he could lose himself for hours and never feel lost. But he had business. He moved along narrow aisles, past a narrow elevator, to a narrow staircase.

  On level four, he found O’Hill’s small research office. Senior faculty and some junior faculty rated such rooms in the stacks so they wouldn’t have to haul so many books around. And the door was open, an invitation to students who might come by for office hours.

  O’Hill didn’t seem surprised to see Peter. “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

  “Word travels fast through the English Department.”

  The room was only about six by eight, with a desk, a bookcase, and an extra chair taking up most of the space. O’Hill locked his
hands behind his head and put his feet up on the desk. At six-four, he just about fit the room.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I wanted to ask you a little more about those commonplace books.”

  “I wrote my dissertation on them.” O’Hill gave Fallon a little here-and-gone smile. “I’ll give you the call number if you want to read it.”

  “What do you know about the commonplace book of John Wedge?”

  O’Hill started to click his feet together. Either it was a nervous twitch, or O’Hill knew it was as annoying as hell. “A big book hunter like you, and you’re asking me?”

  “Commonplace books are usually not my line of work.” Fallon knew the story by then. Orson had dug it up. But talking about it might get O’Hill to open up.

  “The Wedge book appeared for sale in the catalog of a London bookseller called Wiley’s, about six months ago. Don’t you read the catalogs?”

  “Not every item jumps out or stays with me.” That was the truth.

  “Well, the Wedge commonplace book was part of a collection of books bought in Northumberland, of all places. The books came out of an old English estate, Townsend House, and were offered as a single lot at auction. The buyer gave the commonplace book to the Massachusetts Historical Society and kept the good stuff—a signed Dickens, a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels with uncut pages—for himself.”

  Peter leaned against the doorjamb, as if to seem a little more casual, maybe a little more friendly. “Probably took a tax write-off.”

  “Write-offs aren’t something that assistant professors worry about,” said O’Hill. “Anyway, the librarian at the MHS knows of my interest in these books, so he called me.”

  “And you contacted Dorothy?”

  “It’s part of my job to direct students to good sources.”

  “Was Dorothy your student before you knew about the commonplace book?”