Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “That’s a little spooky,” she said. “It sounds like you.”

  “But if you backtrack from the painting in 1780 to the fire in 1764, you arrive again at the premise we had in the fall—if there was a manuscript, it burned in the fire. Unless Burton Bones got it first.”

  “So, do you want to quit or not?”

  “When a man tells me that I don’t really know what’s going on, I have to find out what’s going on.”

  About an hour later, Peter was cooking a little dinner. He’d found two boneless chicken breasts in the freezer, some prosciutto, a little wedge of Parmesan.

  “I don’t eat much,” said Evangeline, “but I eat well.”

  While Peter defrosted the chicken breasts in the microwave, he sautéed some garlic in olive oil. Then he flattened out the chicken breasts with the back of a wooden spoon, layered the prosciutto on the chicken, grated the Parmesan onto the prosciutto and sprinkled it all with rosemary and oregano, then rolled the chicken breasts and put them in the skillet and dropped a box of gemelli into boiling water.

  “The most I have for a salad is some wilted spinach,” she said.

  “Any sesame seeds?”

  “Not exactly an item you normally find in a Cambridge pied-à-terre,” she said.

  “Not many people around here use the term pied-à-terre, either.”

  “But I like buying spices in Cardullo’s, so—here.”

  He heated more olive oil and threw in a handful of sesame seeds and the spinach.

  Once the chicken was done, he threw half a can of black olives into the skillet and made a little sauce for the pasta. And they sat down with a bottle of Alsatian Riesling.

  While they ate, they tried to talk their way through the events of the past six months. When they were done, she got a pile of three-by-five cards and began to write down the events. “This is the way I organize things. Let’s try it here. Where does the story start?”

  “Talking to Ridley. Then the football game.”

  She wrote down each of his sentences on a separate card. “Who did you meet at the game?”

  “Harriet, the mother . . . Will Wedge . . . that old professor, George Wedge Drake, and his old lefty girlfriend— Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “Drake wanted me to track down a book, something called Anglorum Praelia. We did a few searches, found out that it was only worth a few hundred bucks, but . . .” He went to her computer, and navigated his way to the Harvard website that contained the 1723 catalog. And there it was, one of the books in the original John Harvard library: Anglorum Praelia.

  So he called Orson, who was having a quiet night at home “with E. L. Doctorow and a nice ’ninety-six port.”

  Peter asked him, “Do you remember selling a book to Professor George Drake a few years back?”

  “An edition of Chapman’s Homer. An English translation.”

  Peter scanned the 1723 catalog. “There it is. Chapman’s Homer. One of the titles in John Harvard’s library. Have a sip of that port to congratulate yourself, Orson. I think you’ve pointed me toward someone who knows more than he’s telling.”

  “Another one?”

  Fallon tried contacting Professor Drake the next day, first by phone, then by e-mail.

  The e-mail prompted an answer:

  Hi, Peter. Relaxing with Olga here in Barbados. If you have the Anglorum Praelia, I’m interested. Otherwise, we’ll be back Monday. Come for lunch next Tuesday, 12:30.

  Fallon wrote back: “See you for lunch.” Any conversation with the old professor should take place face-to-face.

  While he waited, there were books to sell, buyers to contact, a business to run, and calls to take, starting with the daily call from Will Wedge:

  “How did things go with Charlie Price?”

  “Oh, he’s convinced,” said Peter. “Convinced there’s a manuscript.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Ever since you came looking for me on the river, you’ve been pointing me toward commencement. It’s almost here.”

  The voice was injected with false jocularity. “Will you be joining us on the Committee for the Happy Observance, after all?”

  “Will . . .”

  A long pause, then: “This June, the Wedge Charitable Trust liquidates. My grandfather set it up under rules of perpetuities, which means the trust must vest—or liquidate—twenty-one years after the death of the last interested party.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”

  “I told you what I thought you needed to know. If you know more, you might tell my brother what I’m planning.”

  “Let me guess. It’s you and your brother who get to decide how the trust liquidates, which charities and nonprofits get what, and you disagree.”

  Another long pause. Then Wedge said, “Commencement is June fourth. We’re having our annual family trust meeting the night before. If you uncover any information between now and then, it will help determine what happens to the trust.”

  “Is any of the money going to individuals?”

  “My grandfather knew how uncertain the world was. His descendants might need money. He constructed the trust so that the principals could take up to twenty-five percent upon liquidation. But the rest has to go to charity.”

  “How much is the trust worth? Millions?”

  “Tens of millions.”

  “But not enough for . . . whatever it is you are planning with Charles Price?”

  “By commencement, Peter. My brother wants to dribble this out to a hundred charities, mostly left-wing. I want to do one grand thing.”

  “I can’t prove a negative. And I think that’s what you want.”

  “Negative or positive, it doesn’t matter to me, as long as there’s proof. And I have to inform you . . .”

  What was coming now? wondered Peter.

  “I don’t care where I get my information. You, Bertram Lee, my daughter’s tutor, Mr. O’Hill. The truth is that I even bought the locket from Bertram Lee.”

  “How much?” asked Fallon.

  “Thirty thousand. He said that if we did business on the locket, he’d come to me first when he found the ‘small gift of majestic proportion.’”

  “Did he use that phrase?” asked Fallon.

  “Word for word,” said Wedge.

  “Where do you think he heard it?” asked Peter, though he had a few suspicions.

  “He does his research, too.”

  There were five weeks left when he had lunch with Professor Drake.

  Peter’s first thought when he saw the professor and his girlfriend: he hoped that he looked as good at their age. Fit, bright-eyed, plus Barbados tans that said screw skin cancer and die with a healthy glow.

  Peter’s second thought: when he saw the photograph of Robert Oppenheimer, ’26, and Harvard professor Kenneth Bainbridge on the wall, he knew that he was in for an interesting lunch. Where there weren’t bookcases, there were framed certificates, awards, and photographs of some of the famous faces of science.

  And above the mantel hung a portrait of Dickey Drake in a navy blue three-piece suit.

  “Yes,” said the old professor. “My father, partner to Victor Wedge. He guided the company into the fifties, when Victor’s son Ned took over. Then came Will. Unfortunately, I am the last of the Drake line.”

  “Not my fault.” Olga came in with a bottle of Chablis and poured three glasses.

  Peter looked around at some of the photos. Prof. G. with Harvard biology professor George Wald; a group of young men in shirtsleeves standing in front of a barracks on some barren hillside in the forties; and, yes, a nuclear explosion in a desert.

  Then Peter’s eye scanned the bookshelves.

  Prof. G. said, “Go ahead. Look them over.”

  Peter got up and opened one of the cases.

  There was a quarto of a play called Roxana, by an obscure Elizabethan playwright named Alabaster. Editions of John Calvin and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Some were in
very fine condition, covers clean, pages uncut, leather as tight as a teenager’s skin. And some showed the flaws that an honest bookseller mentioned when he offered something for sale—the cracking, the flaking, the rub marks, and all the rest.

  The old professor said, “You didn’t really think I wanted Anglorum Praelia because I was a fan of obscure sixteenth-century Latin verse about the glories of England, did you?”

  “You’re competing here with Houghton Library.”

  “I am re-creating the Ur of American knowledge, John Harvard’s library. Houghton has been doing the same thing, but they are bound by more scholarly requirements.”

  “Such as?”

  “They seek the exact editions and titles, based upon the earliest catalogs. I may interpret more liberally, because it’s the intellectual value of the collection that matters most. What Harvard was reading tells us who he was, what he thought, so that we may understand him better and perhaps understand ourselves in the process. It’s said that a man will be known by his books. So will a society.”

  And Peter asked him, very casually, “What are you doing to track down the work by Shakespeare that was supposedly in the library?”

  “There was no work by Shakespeare,” he said, just as casual, just as false. “There was a thing called Corporei Insectii, however, by an author who never existed. I’ve hired a researcher to look into that.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “I think you met him in Florida,” said Prof. G. “Back in September, he tracked down the papers of a Harvard librarian named Theodore Wedge, which had been filed with someone else’s at the Massachusetts Historical Society.”

  There it was, thought Peter, information he wasn’t even looking for. Franklin Wedge had been the last one to see that diary, as he suspected. Franklin knew what Theodore Wedge had written on the last page. “Where’s your research assistant right now?”

  Prof G. looked at Olga. She said, “Franklin’s like the wind. He could be in Cambridge, interviewing potential student agitators for some labor demonstration. He could be firebombing SUVs in California. Buying land from paper manufacturers in Maine so that he can donate it to the Nature Conservancy. Who knows? The next time we can be sure to see him is just before commencement.”

  “The family meeting?” asked Peter. “Do you go?”

  “Always. My father actually ran the meetings after Victor died. We all get a vote, though Will and Franklin get two. This year, there will be great contention over Will’s grandiose schemes.”

  Peter almost asked what the schemes were, but he sensed that if he kept quiet these two would talk themselves right into it.

  The old professor said, “As far as we know, Will hopes to give Harvard the money. Franklin, he wants to . . . to . . .”

  “Save the whales,” snapped Olga. “One brother loves Harvard and always has, the other distrusts it and always has.”

  “And I view it with the kind of ambivalence that an intelligent man always has in the presence of power,” said Prof. G., “even a power as benevolent as Harvard.”

  “Benevolent.” Olga laughed, but she wasn’t amused.

  Peter said, “Your books are like Harvard. They prove that knowledge is power.”

  “My books are like atoms, each controlling its own little corner of a leatherbound universe, each a controlled little universe of its own.”

  “And John Harvard was the controlling intelligence that brought them all together?”

  “People are always looking for a controlling intelligence.” The professor sipped his wine. “It’s why Harvard has such a hold on the public imagination. Did you know that in a given year, Harvard is mentioned more times in the national news media than all other American universities combined?”

  Olga waved her hand. “Harvard said this. . . . Harvard-educated whosis said that. . . .”

  “But it’s true,” said Prof. G. “Whenever some Harvard professor, laboring deep in the bowels of a library or lab, emerges with a new theory about the human genome or the identity of Shakespeare or the positive values of taking LSD, for God’s sake, the world treats it as though the whole Harvard community had a part in it, as though one big throbbing brain had excreted this idea into a great bin marked with a crimson H, and the rest of the world should take note.”

  “So . . . you’re saying there’s no controlling intelligence?”

  The old professor looked around at his books. “These volumes inspired our ancestors at a time when science was mostly superstition and the study of faith was a science. Today, quite the opposite holds true.”

  “Then you’re collecting Harvard’s books to show how far we’ve come?”

  “Either that or”—he glanced toward the photo of the nuclear blast—“how little we’ve learned.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  1945-1969

  GEORGE WEDGE Drake peered across the desert toward a spot on the horizon some ten miles away. A hundred-foot tower had been built there, and atop the tower had been placed a device called simply the Gadget.

  George could not see the tower. But in his mind’s eye, he could see the Gadget, sitting there, waiting, silent and sullen. Would it go off? Would it pop and fizzle? Or would it start a chain reaction that could not be controlled? No one knew for certain.

  Thunderstorms had blown through earlier, postponing the test from 4:00 A.M. It was now 5:29:15 on the morning of July 16, 1945, and there was a remote possibility that in fifteen seconds, the world might come to an end.

  Professor Kenneth Bainbridge looked at J. Robert Oppenheimer, ’26, the civilian director of the project. Oppenheimer nodded, and Bainbridge pushed a button.

  George Drake pulled heavy welder’s goggles over his eyes, turned away from the view slit in the bunker, and put his back against the concrete wall, all as instructed. So did Oppenheimer, Bainbridge, and the others around them.

  Then a voice called out, “Zero minus ten . . .”

  At similar stations around the Jornada del Muerto Valley, men prepared themselves. Some may have been thinking, as George was, of all that had brought them to this moment. For many, the journey had begun at Harvard. President James Bryant Conant was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. Chemistry professor George Kistiakowsky had worked on the detonating device. Bainbridge had helped build the Harvard cyclotron, the first atom smasher. And five brilliant Harvard undergraduates, the youngest men on the project, had been brought to Los Alamos to act as human calculators.

  “. . . nine, eight, seven . . .”

  George had arrived at Harvard with his class in the fall of 1941.

  He had tried to ignore the worries piling up around them all that autumn and had focused instead on his studies, taking the most challenging courses available in mathematics and physics. And he got all A’s.

  But on the night of December 8, 1941, he attended a mass meeting in Sanders Theater and heard President Conant say, “In every preceding ordeal of battle Harvard has stood in the forefront of those who toiled and sacrificed that liberty might survive. There can be no question that in the days ahead this university and its sons will bring new honors to justify the expectations of ten generations of Harvard men.”

  Filled with patriotic fervor and a sense of pride in his own ancestry, George walked to his parents’ home on Brattle Street after the meeting.

  He could not remember that they had ever looked quite so worried. Dickey Drake and Doris were not people who worried. They went to parties in the middle of the week. They went to Florida in the middle of the winter. They worshiped at Christ Church on Sundays and dined at the Harvard Club on Fridays. They enjoyed their lives. They were well-off. But what did all that matter now?

  George sat with his father in the library and said that he was thinking of enlisting.

  Dickey Drake was silent just long enough for George to think he was giving serious consideration to an answer that he had probably prepared beforehand, then he said, “The best thing you can do is study. Science wil
l be one of the weapons of this war. And you’re in a place where you might make a difference.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know Conant. He’s a scientist. He’s working with the government. And your skills have been noticed.”

  It was what George had hoped to hear. He said he didn’t want to leave school anyway.

  Then his father seemed to relax, as if he, too, had heard what he hoped for. He said, “So . . . have you been to any club parties yet?”

  “Parties? Dad, this isn’t exactly a time to be thinking about parties.”

  “It’s never too early to be thinking about the Porcellian Club.”

  “Dad—”

  “I was a Porcellian.”

  “Dad—”

  “Your grandfather, too. And—”

  “Dad, I don’t care about final clubs.”

  “Don’t care? You’re not some kind of socialist, are you?”

  George loved his father and hoped to please him, but he was not much like him. George did not play golf, though his parents were members of the Country Club. George had not had a date in his life, while his parents loved to joke about the Lothario that Dickey Drake had been. And George had worn the same tweed sport coat and black knit tie every day of the semester, though his father kept telling him to go to the Coop and buy himself a Harvard tie and a blue blazer and “some of those stylish saddle shoes, and then the girls will flock like starlings.”

  Saddle shoes.

  No. The study of physics was enough to occupy George. That and dreams of a young woman sitting on his lap and pressing her lips to his.

  So he said, “Clubs are not what they were in your day, Dad.”

  “Yes. Lowell took care of that. Go and study and stop thinking about enlisting.”

  “. . . six, five, four . . .”

  George Wedge Drake followed his father’s advice so well that by the fall of 1943, he wasn’t just studying physics. He was teaching it. Most of the physics faculty at Harvard had gone off to work in government projects, so the teaching of it had fallen to retirees, volunteers from other departments, and, as the Alumni Bulletin added, “even three undergraduates and a woman.” And there was much debate over which was more shocking, that an undergraduate could teach a course in physics . . . or a woman.