Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  The hundreds who crowded Appleton Chapel leaned a little closer. A few had heard of a “small gift of majestic proportion.” Most had no idea what Theodore was talking about. But all considered it a strange way to begin a eulogy.

  “The gift was my sister herself,” he said, “and her commitment to the education of the gentler half of humanity, a commitment learned from Aunt Lydia.

  “Today, at the midday class change, you may follow professors from their morning lectures, across the Common to Appian Way, where they lecture again to bright young women. But as my sister often said, she was only one of many who made this possible.”

  Theodore’s vision was clouded by cataracts, so he had memorized both his speech and the places where certain people were to sit. He turned now to the ramrod-straight figure in the front pew. “She counted President Eliot a friend and a man of his word who promised female education, ‘if not in the immediate future, in good time.’”

  The figure nodded in polite appreciation. Eliot was now the most famous educator in America, the man who modernized Harvard, expanded its curriculum and endowment, and, with the help of brilliant professors, enhanced its reputation.

  “And there are so many others.” Theodore looked at them in turn. “Mr. Gilman, who suggested a school where professors could make extra money teaching female students . . . The professors themselves. Charles Eliot Norton . . . William James . . .”

  He turned to a row of women. “They called you the Radcliffe Eight, the committee that came together in 1879 to provide the bedrock upon which this new college would rest. Dorothy was proud to count herself in your number.” Several of the ladies nodded their thanks.

  “And President Agassiz.” He looked at the gray-haired woman who sat across the aisle from Eliot, a force of gravity in her own right. “When it became clear that Harvard would co-sign diplomas but would not absorb the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, commonly called the Harvard Annex, the school was incorporated with the name of one of Harvard’s first benefactors, Lady Mowlson, Anne Radcliffe. My sister, however, wanted to name it after the woman who has guided it since its inception. She wanted to call it Agassiz College.”

  Many in the pews nodded. A few applauded. Mrs. Agassiz smiled and made a small gesture of her hand, as if to deflect further compliment.

  So Theodore looked toward Heywood and Amelia. Though Heywood had brilliantly managed the company’s recovery, Theodore had barely spoken to him since the Great Fire. But Amelia had become a strong supporter of female education and a good friend to Dorothy, and that day, Theodore was speaking for his sister.

  “Dorothy expressed great pride in the family that you raised together—a fine son and two fine daughters. She was grateful that you sent your girls without hesitation to the school now known as Radcliffe. And the nation is grateful for the service of your son. We pray that as he sails for war in Cuba, he will be safe and serve honorably. As President Eliot once said, the Harvard man must seize the highest honors in peace and lead others into the murderous thickets in war.”

  These last comments Theodore directed at Heywood Wedge Jr., ’87, who wore the uniform of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, and to the nine-year-old boy at his side. The boy, named Victor, was gazing at his father with a mixture of pride and concern, as if he could imagine both the excitement and danger a man faced when he went off to war.

  “Dorothy often said that with a father like Heywood Sr. and a son as bright as little Victor, Heywood Jr. was a man well placed in time, for such a father and son demonstrate both the reliability of the past and the promise of the future.”

  In preparing the speech, Theodore had written the term heroism of the past but had crossed it out, for he had never seen anything heroic in his nephew. Now he saw Heywood’s gray head nodding in approval, and he concluded that even reliability was too positive a term to bestow upon him.

  He was glad that he was almost done. “Like the generations spread before us, like the college itself, Dorothy looked toward the future and borrowed the best of the past. And she oft paraphrased my mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘If a man—or a woman—stand on their principles, the great world will come round.’”

  Theodore died not long after his sister, at the Bunting family cottage in Nahant.

  He had been keeping a journal off and on for many years, and he had saved his most important entry for the very last:

  I wish that in my eulogy I had made further allusion to the “small gift of majestic proportion.” But I think I put it best. Besides, our knowledge of it was lost in the Great Fire, and none of us shall live to see Harvard’s tercentenary. I asked Dorothy so often what the gift was that, finally, she forbade me to speak of it. And I did not, for my sister was one of the most formidable people I ever knew.

  But I have my speculations, which herewith, I set down: it is a book of some sort. That much was I able to discern from conversations that unfolded between Grandfather Caleb and Great-Aunt Lydia. I believe further that Lydia’s tombstone inscription suggests a work by Shakespeare. I believe that someday, it will be found, once the gilt-edge envelope in the Bicentenary packet is opened. And then will it be over.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  PULIGNY-MONTRACHET ’96. A whole case, sitting right there in the office. He could almost taste the French white, with its layers of flavor and its fine finish.

  There was no name on the case, but Peter knew where it came from, and why. Peter had said nothing about Jackie Pucks, and Jackie Pucks had not showed his face. And for a week, no one had tried to kill him on the river or anywhere else. Of course, that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone watching him and telling Keegan—or somebody else—about every move he was making.

  And Will Wedge called him every other day to ask if he had figured out anything more beyond the Copley portrait.

  He hadn’t.

  So, for one day, he was trying to tell himself he didn’t care. He was taking a day to get back to his routine, which started with coffee and book catalogs.

  Like everyone else in the rare-book business—everyone who’d survived more than five years, anyway—Peter had a list of titles that he always watched for. They might be arcane things such as Anglorum Praelia for Professor George Wedge Drake. Or they might be simple things that always produced a profit, like James Bond.

  A first edition of Casino Royale, bought for a hundred dollars a few years ago, now sold for $325. No big score, but you chipped away every day, or you went hungry waiting for the big deals. And even they could be disappointing. In London, he had once stumbled across a first edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in three volumes, each volume signed by Thomas Hardy. He bought it for two thousand, held it a year, and offered it for ten in his catalog. He ended up selling it for six.

  There was a pyramid in the rare-book business. At the bottom were the thousands of people who’d pay up to $15,000 for a rare book. Above them were hundreds who would spend up to a hundred and fifty thousand. And at the top was that small number who would pay anything for what they wanted, a very precise and constant group—wealthy people like Mr. Charles Price with his Shakespeare obsession.

  For the really big ones, you might have to move fast, or you might have to sit patiently and wait and not watch the pot you were hoping would boil. Right now, he was waiting and wishing he could go out and dig up Lydia and ask her what she meant by “a century turns.” Did she mean 1900 . . . or something else?

  He sipped his coffee and imagined a wide plain, like something Salvador Dalí would have painted. Time as a place, as real as Harvard Yard. Across this plain, where decades and centuries sometimes pooled and sometimes ran together, there were old buildings and new buildings, men in tricornes and women in miniskirts, all meeting and mingling. Over there was a meetinghouse where people were listening to Reverend Thomas Shepard, and over there, someone was restoring a Copley portrait, and Lydia Wedge was writing a poem in a house on Brattle Street, and Charles William Eliot was announcing that women needed
to spend a few more generations in the kitchen, while Dorothy Wedge Warren and Mrs. Agassiz were discussing a name for the new women’s college. . . .

  It had all happened and was all happening. Shepard’s meetinghouse sat on the spot where J. Press now sold suits. Maybe the people in the meetinghouse were straining today to hear a sermon over the sound of the traffic on Mount Auburn Street. Or maybe the salesmen were puzzling over a linen waistcoat with brass buttons, hanging among the Harris tweeds. Or maybe . . .

  Peter looked into his cup and wondered what Bernice was putting in the coffee.

  The simple fact was that the trail had gone cold. As long as nobody was trying to kill him, and it seemed that Bingo Keegan had taken care of that, he could afford to do a day’s work. After reading the catalogs, he had phone calls to make, copy to write for his own catalog, a private library to appraise in Chestnut Hill, and—

  The phone rang.

  It was Evangeline. “You have to come and see this.”

  The Massachusetts Historical Society was one of the great repositories of America’s past—the papers of the Adams family, the personal correspondence of Jefferson, the table from which Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural, the gorget that Washington wore in the French and Indian War, rare books and manuscripts, daguerreotypes and photographs, portraits, paintings—all housed in a deceptively prim-looking double bowfront on the corner of Boylston Street and the Fenway.

  Peter Fallon was a fellow of the society and sometimes an adversary. More than once, he had found himself bidding against the society for some rare book or manuscript, and individual buyers were usually more willing than institutions to spend that extra money for a cache of letters from Wendell Phillips or that very fine copy of Bail’s Views of Harvard to 1860. But Peter had also seen to it that a few of his clients had bequeathed libraries to the MHS, so he was always welcome.

  He signed in and found Evangeline in the reading room overlooking the Fenway. Portraits of old Colonials looked on curiously as Evangeline transcribed notes onto her laptop.

  “What’s so important?” he said.

  “Good morning to you, too.” She gestured to the folders. “I’ve found the journals of Theodore Wedge, an assistant librarian at Harvard.”

  “I thought you were researching Dorothy Wedge Warren.”

  She gave him one of her looks. “Theodore was her brother.”

  “I know, but so what?”

  “His journals have been misfiled for ninety-seven years.”

  “That’s rich.” Peter laughed. “The guy could keep thousands of volumes straight in the Harvard libraries, and he couldn’t get his own writing cataloged.”

  “Somehow, his journals ended up in the papers of Edward Bunting, Class of 1870. Bunting was a munitions manufacturer and art collector. Had a big stake in the Watertown Arsenal. Made a fortune in government contracts. Endowed a chair in art history at Harvard. Left three boxes of family papers to the MHS in 1922. They were accessioned, cataloged, and forgotten.”

  “So”—Peter thumbed a few pages—“what’s the Bunting-Wedge connection?”

  “In the Artemus Pratt letter from Gettysburg, a Confederate named Hannibal Wall asks for Douglass Wedge and Jason Bunting. Then Artemus talks about elms and old men weeping in Harvard Yard. The old men were Theodore and Samuel Bunting.”

  “You know,” said Peter, “for someone who insists she’s doing her own book project, you keep finding ways to get into mine.”

  “Yours keeps getting in the way,” she said.

  “It’s fate.” He sat down across the table from her.

  “We’ll see about that,” she said. She turned back to business. “In her letters to Theodore, Dorothy would often write, ‘Say hello to Mr. Bunting,’ or, ‘It was a pleasure to have you and Mr. Bunting stay with us. . . .’”

  “So, they were gay?”

  “I found this in the back of one of Theodore’s journals.” She slid a letter to him. “It’s from Theodore’s nephew, Heywood.”

  Peter picked it up. “‘Dear Edward—’”

  “The munitions manufacturer. He and Heywood probably knew each other.”

  “All those old Brahmins knew each other,” said Peter. “‘Dear Edward, Thank you for the offer of my uncle’s papers, which you have found amongst those of your own late uncle Samuel. My condolences on his death, but I have little interest in my uncle’s writings, as he and I had little to do with one another. His friendship with your uncle was, as you know, a somewhat “unconventional” one.’”

  “Unconventional,” said Evangeline.

  “Code for gay.”

  “Which itself is code,” she said.

  Peter continued reading: “‘It is a relationship that I do not care to embrace, so as not to indicate approval of it, especially in the eyes of my grandson Victor. Since the death of his father in Cuba, I have become a father to him. I wish to raise him with the same strong sense of masculinity that invested his father, the sense of sacrifice my generation learned on the battlefields in our youth. Keep my uncle’s papers with those of your own uncle. If they are commingled, perhaps they will reproduce.’”

  “So,” said Evangeline, “a wonderful chronicle of Harvard life ended up as a file in the Bunting family papers, not cataloged, never read.”

  “Unless you follow that trail.” Peter flipped through the books. “Look at this stuff . . . Emerson’s Divinity School speech . . . Eliot’s inaugural . . . the birth of Radcliffe . . . football . . . and hello—”

  “You’ve come to one of his speculations about the book?”

  Peter read: “. . . ‘the fate of a book I sometimes hear them argue over. They never bring up this subject in my presence and brush it away when I enter . . .’ And nobody saw this?”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” She flipped to a page she had marked, near the end.

  Fallon began in a read-to-yourself mutter, but his voice rose quickly to “‘But I have my speculations, which herewith, I set down: it is a . . .’” He flipped the page and said, “Shit.” Right out loud.

  So, who tore out that last page? And when?

  “Someone who had access,” said chief librarian James J. Fitzpatrick, Harvard ’72, a skinny bachelor with an explosive laugh and an encyclopedic knowledge of . . . well . . . just about everything in the collection.

  Peter had never been able to stump him. That was why it was surprising that the Theodore Wedge Papers had been buried for so long. Peter and Evangeline were sitting in Fitzpatrick’s office. On the wall was the original of Burgess’s View of Harvard, an antique engraving from 1759, another treasure.

  Evangeline said, “Wouldn’t it have been someone who had access to the papers and knew enough about the family to know what he was looking for?”

  “Right,” said Fitzpatrick. “To find the Wedge diaries, you have to access the Bunting Collection. There’s the further complication that the Bunting Collection was cataloged under Edward, not Samuel.”

  “In short, only someone who knew about Theodore and Samuel Bunting could figure this out.”

  “Or someone very lucky,” said Fitzpatrick. “But stories like this abound, particularly with papers that were accessioned in a more”—he searched for a word—“gentlemanly era. Fortunately, we have records.”

  “Records?” said Evangeline. “Of what people read? Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?”

  “Some librarians think so, especially these days,” said Fitzpatrick. “In certain collections, your call slip is destroyed as soon as you return the book. But in other libraries, records are kept. Harvard’s Houghton Library keeps call slips forever.”

  “Please tell me that’s what you do here,” said Peter.

  “Please don’t,” said Evangeline. “Patriot Act or not.”

  “I’ll please you both and disappoint you. All of our call slips from 1936 to about 1982 are on microfilm. Since then, we keep call slips for two years, so that if something turns up missing—”

  “I don’t
think I like this,” said Evangeline.

  Fitzpatrick picked up a sheet of paper. “Do you want this information or not?”

  “We’ll worry about the ACLU later,” said Peter. “Just give us the names.”

  “Only because you might help us apprehend a book vandal.”

  “Apprehend?” said Evangeline. “That makes us sound like cops.”

  Fitzpatrick said, “I wish the cops—and the courts—cared a little more about the theft or defacing of material like this. It’s cultural vandalism.”

  “Agreed,” said Peter. “But the Bunting Collection?”

  Fitzpatrick said, “It’s been requested half a dozen times, but you’ll find these two names of interest: in 1969, Harriet Webster Wedge requested the file. And last September, William Wedge asked for it.”

  “Are you sure?” said Peter. “Will Wedge? Did you see him?”

  “He’s a fellow of the society, so he’s around often enough.”

  “So you saw him. So you’re sure he saw this material?” asked Peter.

  “I didn’t see him, but” . . . Fitzpatrick showed them the slip. Signed: William Wedge.

  “Shouldn’t we call first?” asked Evangeline.

  “And miss a golden opportunity to catch Will Wedge unawares? I’m going to see him right now, and you deserve to be in on it.”

  She stopped in the middle of the Boylston Street sidewalk. “A lightning strike? Like we were TV reporters? Don’t you ever get tired of all this?”

  “Yes, a lightning strike. No, not like reporters, like intrepid historical detectives. And no, I never get tired of it.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “And now that you’ve had a taste of it again,” he said, “I think you’re enjoying it, too. Otherwise, you’d be back in there, reading old manuscripts.”