Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “I’ll take it.” Detective Scavullo came down the steps from the Hicks bedroom, pointed his 9-millimeter at O’Hill, and as he brought his walkie-talkie to his lips to call in the backup, O’Hill shot him in the chest. He slammed back against the wall, then forward onto Fallon, knocking the box from Fallon’s hands.

  O’Hill grabbed it and ran, out of John Hicks’s ancient foyer, through the sitting room, past the librarian’s desk in the old kitchen.

  Fallon heard another gunshot as O’Hill fought his way past the officer who had been hiding off the kitchen. They had drawn him out, but now he was getting away.

  Scavullo was screaming, “Man down!” into his mike. Evangeline was kneeling to help him. And Peter Fallon was racing after O’Hill.

  He ran through the library, past the wounded officer, down the C-entry corridor, out into the courtyard, and there was O’Hill, walking fast toward one of the caterers, an older guy with white hair wearing a white coat. Bingo Keegan.

  “Hey!” shouted Fallon. “Stop!”

  At the same moment, the assistant superintendent and two university policemen appeared in the archway that led from Dunster Street. While Jackie Pucks was appearing at the gated archway—always locked—that led onto JFK Street.

  Keegan tried to take the box from O’Hill, and suddenly O’Hill seemed to change his mind. He pulled the box back. Then he began to run again, sprinting up the stairs and into the Kirkland House dining hall.

  Fallon didn’t have a second to consider it, but here was one of the strangest tableaux that ever had been seen at Harvard. In the beautiful bright sunlight, with the tablecloths and Harvard pennants fluttering, two men in morning coats chased each other, followed by a man in a white coat, followed by the police.

  Fallon leapt up the stairs and into the dining hall, worried that O’Hill might start shooting again but determined to get that box.

  This had been the house where O’Hill had been a tutor, so he knew it well. He raced through the serving area, pulled open a door, knocked two or three workers aside, and rushed down the stairs.

  Now, they were in the long corridor that ran from the central kitchen beneath Eliot House all the way to Leverett House.

  There were people working everywhere, the subterranean world of Harvard, preparing for the commencement luncheons in all the houses. And O’Hill just ran.

  He knocked people aside, sending a huge vat of salad splattering onto the floor.

  “Stop!” shouted Fallon. “Stop him!”

  Someone grabbed at O’Hill, but O’Hill pushed him away and kept going.

  And from behind him, Fallon could hear Bingo Keegan shout, “Hey, hey, you waiters, grab those two fuckin’ guys.”

  Keegan looked as though he belonged down there, not like the other two, so someone grabbed at Fallon, but he kept running.

  They ran under the Winthrop House kitchen, then headed for Lowell House.

  Then a door opened to O’Hill’s left, and a custodian stepped out. As he turned to close the door, O’Hill went barreling into him. The custodian flew, his keys flew, the gun in O’Hill’s hand flew, but he held on to the box, and he went through the door.

  Fallon grabbed the door before it locked behind O’Hill and stepped into one of the famous steam tunnels that ran from the river to the Law School, like a great circulatory system.

  Even in summer, the pipes lining the sides of the tunnels carried steam for cooking and power. And this looked like one of the main corridors, running north under Plympton Street, a straight shot all the way to the Yard. So Fallon started after O’Hill, who was twenty feet ahead with the tails of his morning coat flapping.

  Then Fallon heard the sound of a gunshot behind him. Keegan was armed, and he didn’t have time to fiddle with the lock, so he shot it off.

  And now three men were running along this starkly lit tunnel, with one firing his pistol at the other two while somewhere in the bright sunlight above, a commencement was beginning.

  O’Hill had a good lead, and he took a turn after sprinting about thirty yards.

  Keegan fired at Fallon and missed.

  Fallon reached the corner that O’Hill had just taken. He raced around it, and O’Hill smashed him right in the face with the box.

  Fallon flew back, smacked off a big steam wheel and landed unconscious, but only for an instant.

  When his head cleared, he heard a brief conversation between O’Hill and Keegan.

  “The world has to see this,” said O’Hill.

  “Fuck the world,” said Keegan. “Give me the box.”

  “Put down the gun.”

  “The cops are right behind us. Give me the fuckin’ box.”

  Fallon could see that it was a strange kind of standoff. Keegan had a gun, but O’Hill was holding the handle of a vent valve.

  “I won’t let you hide this again,” said O’Hill.

  “Then fuck you, too,” said Keegan, and he fired. The bullet went right through the box.

  As O’Hill fell, he spun the release valve. A jet of steam shot into Keegan’s face from somewhere, and he fell backward, screaming. Fallon saw that O’Hill was unconscious, so he grabbed the box and ran, with Keegan firing blindly after him.

  A few minutes later, a family who had traveled all the way from India to see their son graduate, but who had arrived late and so had taken seats at the very back of Tercentenary Theater, on the driveway beside Weld, were shocked when the mother looked down to see a man peering up at her.

  Peter Fallon lifted the manhole, which he had unlocked from below, excused himself, and stepped into the sunshine.

  They were all waiting for him, as planned, in the alumni tent on the other side of Weld, in the old Yard. And they all knew by then what had gone on underground.

  Evangeline threw her arms around Peter’s neck and whispered in his ear.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Scavullo?”

  “He and the officer will be all right. He said to tell you he liked your plan to draw them out, until O’Hill started shooting.”

  “Well, O’Hill’s half dead,” he said. “Keegan half cooked.”

  And Franklin tapped the box that Fallon still held in his arms. “Have you looked in that?”

  “Not yet. I’m glad O’Hill had a change of heart, but”—he slipped his finger into the bullet hole—“I’m not optimistic.”

  They put the box down on a table set up for a general alumni spread, which would follow the commencement speeches.

  Peter Fallon wiped his hands on the front of the morning coat, looked at the others craning their necks—Will, Price, Franklin, Harriet, Prof. G., Danny—then he turned the key and opened the box. And it was empty.

  “Oh, no,” said Wedge.

  “Looks like there’ll be no Wedge House,” said Franklin.

  “Not exactly as planned,” said Will. “And no club to beat over Harvard’s head, either.”

  Then Peter took an envelope out of the box. It was dated September 17, 1936. It read:

  Congratulations. You now know the truth: two things are always new: Youth and the quest for knowledge. So continue the quest until 2036. Attend the opening of the 1936 Tercentenary packet, and see the hand of Shakespeare himself, put to a play that no one has read in four centuries. Rest assured. Shakespeare will endure till then. So will Harvard. Lydia Wedge Townsend hid this manuscript because she dreamed of a better society, a City on a Hill, like those who first dreamed of a college in the cow yards. The contours of the dream have changed, as the Yard has changed. But a society will be known by its books and its dreams. So we must continue to dream. Indeed, the dream may be of greater value than its fulfillment. So let us dream for another century. And when we’re done, and all songs sung, we cry, Love’s Labours Won. Victor Wedge

  Epilogue

  PETER FALLON thought of something from Ecclesiastes: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

  It was the third Sunday of September, moving day, the only day
of the year when you could drive into Harvard Yard. Another father was taking his kid to college.

  This was less bittersweet for Peter than for most parents. It probably meant that he would see more of his son, rather than less. More lunches, an occasional lecture, track meets.

  They drove through the Johnson Gate and pulled up on the brick sidewalk in front of Hollis Hall, one of the oldest dormitories, opened in 1764, the year that Harvard Hall burned.

  “Emerson and Thoreau lived here,” said Peter to his son.

  “Cool.”

  “In the Revolution, there were something like ten soldiers to the room.”

  “Cool.”

  Peter pointed to dents in the brick sidewalk. He was about to say that they were left by cannonballs that fun-loving Minutemen dropped from the windows. But he knew it wasn’t true. And he was talking too much.

  So he lifted out a laundry basket full of towels and bed linens and brought it upstairs to the back room on the fourth floor.

  Jimmy’s roommate had already arrived, a big black kid from Brooklyn named James Wilson. They were laughing about something. That was good. James Wilson gave him a firm handshake and called him Mister Fallon.

  The room was typical for Hollis. It was huge, and what a view. The back windows looked out on Holden Chapel and Harvard Hall, eighteenth-century Harvard. The window by Jimmy’s bed gave him a view all the way to the tower of Memorial Hall, built in the nineteenth century, magnificently restored in the late twentieth.

  Peter tried to stay cool about it all. He didn’t want to embarrass the kid. But how could anyone get any work done with so much to look at? But how could anyone want to do anything but work, considering how much knowledge there was in that course catalog that was splayed open on James Wilson’s bed?

  He envied those kids, but he didn’t say so.

  “Any advice, Dad?” asked Jimmy.

  Peter knew his son was just looking for a way to ease Dad out. He understood. Who’d want Dad around when you had all these new people to get to know?

  So Peter said, “When you’re done in four years, you should feel satisfied, and mature, and well taught, but most important, you should feel tired.”

  “Tired?”

  “Burn the candle at both ends. Never tell yourself there’s no time to direct a play or sing in a choral group or play rugby. Take a course in gene-splitting if you’re an English major. If you major in biology, take a course in short-story writing. Study Chinese. Learn statistics. Get drunk at least once.”

  The boys laughed at that.

  “But remember university policy against drugs.”

  That said, he shook both their hands and left. On the second floor, he passed a pretty girl going into a room. Hollis was a coed dorm, as all the housing at Harvard was coed. He wondered what Charles William Eliot or Cotton Mather would think of that, or better yet, Mrs. Agassiz.

  Outside, he stopped for a moment and took it all in. The older he got, the more sacred this space felt to him. It had been here, literally, since the beginning.

  He walked past the old college pump and made for John Harvard’s statue.

  Evangeline was waiting for him there in the gathering dusk.

  “I’m starving,” he said.

  “Me, too.” She had an envelope under her arm.

  “What’s in that?”

  “A couple of things I found in the back of the first family Bible, the one from the 1600s. Katharine Nicholson Howell’s Bible.” She gave Peter the envelope. He opened it. Inside were two pieces of paper. The first that he pulled out was an ancient copy of Quaestiones.

  “Wow,” he said. “This looks like it’s from the first Harvard commencement. The program of disputations. This could be worth a lot of money, Evangeline.”

  “Look at the other thing.”

  He carefully slid the Quaestiones back into the envelope and pulled out a small sheet of paper in exquisite condition, with not a tear or watermark. It was signed at the bottom by Charles Nicholson, June 5, 1638. “I hereby swear, as a Freeman of the Colony of Massachusetts . . .”

  “My God,” said Peter after he had read a bit more. “Do you know what this is?”

  “No. What?”

  “The Holy Grail of American antiquaria. The Oath of a Freeman. The first document printed in the New World. Printed on the first printing press, printed right here in Cambridge.”

  After a moment she said, “How much?”

  “Evangeline,” he said. “You can’t put a price on something priceless.”

  “Try.”

  “Three million . . . maybe more. Do you want to sell it?”

  “If you want to broker the sale.” She slipped her arm into his.

  After a moment, he kissed her. “I guess now I can pay that Harvard tuition. We’d better get this to someplace safe.”

  Arm-in-arm, they started across the Yard.

  After a moment, Peter said, “Do you hear them?”

  “The voices?”

  “They’re always loudest at dusk,” he said. “The Yard echoes with them.”

  She looked at all the kids carrying suitcases and cartons into the dorms. “I wonder if these freshmen hear them.”

  “Not yet,” said Peter. “But they will. They will.”

  And from his pedestal, John Harvard watched them go.