by Jim Lehrer
“The Ross family has said it’s fine with them,” said Wes. “We have twelve members on our board, and I’ve talked to all but two of them. So far, it’s fine.”
“Good . . . that’s good.”
“What kind of price is your buyer talking about?”
R. took a breath—a thought—and said, “Even more than I expected. Twenty-one thousand dollars.”
“Oh, my God!” Wes Braxton was almost squealing. “That’ll do it—it’s a deal! I know the other two board people will go along.”
R said that was terrific, and they both added a few more words of mutual congratulation.
Then Wes asked, “Who is the buyer, if I may ask?”
“As a matter of fact, he wants to remain anonymous,” said R. “He will pay me, and I will send you my personal check for twenty-one thousand. OK?”
“Great. This may do it.”
“Do what?”
“Get me the director’s job—or put me on the search list at the very least. It proves I can raise money too.”
R said he was glad to be of help.
Then he walked on to the administration building and upstairs to the second-floor office of Elbridge Clymer. The time had come to deal with the BFU offer.
But Clara was right once again. Elbow was gone—out of town for the day. His secretary, a woman in her fifties, expected R, however.
“President Clymer said you might be coming by, Dr. Taylor. He said if you did I should give you this.”
She handed him a sealed white envelope. There was a large R in blue on the front, Confidential down in the left-hand corner.
R took it back outside to his bench and opened it.
R:
Clara told me you might be coming up today. I feel terrible about what I have to tell you—and about having to do it in a letter—but I’m not going to be able to pull off the Wally institute deal after all. I am sick about it because of what I said to you. In the wake and emotion of Wally’s death, I simply spoke too soon. It turns out that I was on the short list for the presidency of another quite major university. I had no idea I was going to get the job, so I continued going about my business at BFU with the assumption that I was not. That is why I spoke to you about the new Franklin research institute possibility. Well, I have been offered the other presidency. It is a position I simply cannot refuse; I am sure you will agree when it becomes public in the next few days. The formal offer came just yesterday. It means I will be leaving BFU and thus will be unable to provide resources needed to create the Franklin study institute. I am so sorry.
I look forward to speaking to you in more detail about this in person.
And—who knows—an opportunity for something similar for you could in fact develop at my new university home. Clara has agreed to keep Wally’s ship afloat on an interim basis here until all matters shake down. She has turned out to be quite a find.
My best,
Elbow.
R folded the letter, returned it to the envelope, and went off in search of a taxi to take him back to 30th Street Station.
• • •
Once again, R went to the Quiet Car, which was just behind the engine on this particular Metroliner. He had no desire to talk on his cell phone or listen while anyone else talked on theirs. As a courtesy, he had called Clara from the taxi to tell her he was returning to Washington. She didn’t seem surprised.
Obviously she and Clymer were in a high state of—to use Elbow’s word—finding each other.
The Quiet Car was barely half full. R found a double seat all to himself, planning to sit silently by the window, meditatively watching the Eastern Corridor world of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland pass by.
The train began moving.
He felt the presence of a person in the aisle by his seat. The conductor, an attendant . . .
It was Harry Dickinson!
“I know we can’t talk here,” Harry whispered. “Come with me back to the Café Car.”
R moved his head to the left, to the right, to the left, to the right. If head movements could kill, Harry Dickinson, famous editor, would have been a dead man.
“Seriously, R. We have a crisis.” Harry’s face, at least the part R could see, did have an uncharacteristically grim look.
He had no choice. So he went with Harry through a regular Business Class chair car to the Café Car, which was also not crowded. They sat down across a brown Formica-topped table.
“First, I want to know how you knew I was on this train,” R said.
“I saw you go downstairs to the track,” said Harry. “I didn’t tell you I planned to join you because you might have caused another scene.”
He had that right, thought R. There was no telling what kind of reaction just the sight of this world-famous editor might have triggered.
“Clara, the ashes woman—that Ph.D. scholar, superb serious human being, whatever—told me just a few minutes ago when I called that you were on your way to catch a train.”
R remembered a recent movie where two guys threw one of their mothers off a speeding train—or tried to.
Harry moved on to the crisis.
“After we talked there at Thirtieth Street Station, I stayed in the lounge and made some telephone calls to my office and elsewhere while waiting for the next Acela back to New York. Rebecca Kendall Lee has declared war, R. That’s the crisis.”
R held up his right hand. “I have taken care of the problem. There will be a little something in The Washington Post in the morning. I’ve headed her off. She can’t touch me.”
“It’s not you, R. It’s one of the other committee members.”
“Sonya Lyman said she’ll be fine, too. We can survive Rebecca. What Rebecca did was pure unambiguous plagiarism. Neither Sonya nor I are guilty of anything even remotely similar.”
Harry was looking off to the right. All there was to see were the oil refineries and storage tanks along the Delaware River.
“It’s not her either, R. It’s John Gwinnett.”
R couldn’t believe he heard right. John Gwinnett!
Harry went on quickly, excitedly. “I’m John’s editor. We have been working on his Patrick Henry opus for eleven years. The book is nearly eight hundred pages long, including graphics and footnotes, a masterpiece of research, the crowning achievement of a distinguished career. It’s set for publication next year, at the top of our fall nonfiction list. First printing probably a quarter of a million, who knows. What I can tell you, R, is that it really is a terrific book. Every detail of Patrick Henry’s life is there. It’s a fascinating story, one that’s going to awaken interest in Henry like nothing ever has before. John got access to every scrap of paper most everybody in the world has, pertaining to Henry, and wrote it beautifully. He didn’t really need me much, to tell you the truth. Some of his descriptions of life in Virginia, particularly during those critical days in Williamsburg, would make a Tory-lover cry.”
Were those tears in Harry’s own eyes? Yes. I didn’t know he had tears in him!
R said, “Coffee or something, Harry?”
“Great, yes. A glass of white wine. Thanks, R.”
R walked to the center of the car to the service counter and returned in a few minutes with two small twist-cap bottles of white wine and two plastic glasses.
In silence, each fixed his own drink and took a couple of long swallows. The train was now in the familiar northern outskirts of Wilmington.
“Rebecca Lee called me. She said she found an article John wrote thirty-seven years ago for a small historical review published in Georgia by Emory University. The subject was how the introduction of tobacco changed life forever in the South. There were some sentences in it that Rebecca matched to a Ph.D. thesis written by a University of North Carolina professor twelve years earlier. Rebecca says if John’s ARHA committee takes any public action against her, she will spill the beans on John.”
There was the derelict bus again. The train was nearing the Wilmington station.
“How many sentences are involved?” R asked.
“Three.”
“How close are the matches?”
“Identical—almost.”
“How almost?”
“All but a couple of words are the same.”
R just shook his head. He couldn’t believe this. Not John Gwinnett.
“I know, I know,” Harry said. “There’s no excuse.”
“If they just weren’t identical. Nobody accidentally uses somebody else’s sentences exactly. It’s impossible. You know that as well as I do. Paraphrasing can be done innocently. That’s what she claims she caught me doing. But not identical sentences.”
“I know, I know.”
The train came to a halt at Wilmington station.
R said, after it started moving again, “What’s on the table—you know, if anything—as to what to do about this?” R couldn’t believe he had just used the phrase you know! First it was cop talk; now he was reverting to high school jock talk.
Harry lowered his head. R read this as a sure signal that Harry was not proud of what he was about to say. “Your committee—John’s committee—issues a statement that says something . . . I don’t know . . . that the evidence about Rebecca Kendall Lee is inconclusive and that further research and investigation needs to be done. Then it’s forgotten in the course of time.”
“Did John Gwinnett ask you to talk to me about this?”
“No, no. God, no. All he did when I passed on Rebecca’s threat was laugh.”
“Laugh? He sees the prospect of being accused of plagiarism funny? Is he all right?”
Harry just shook his head. “Do you think Sonya Lyman could be persuaded to back off for a while?”
“Probably,” said R. Definitely, he thought.
“I’m not his editor—but we publish Joe Hooper’s stuff.”
Harry looked back out the window and so did R. Neither wanted to have eye contact with the other on the real meaning of what Harry had just implied. If it became necessary, Green Tree Press had the means to get Hooper to go along, although based on his statement about not lynching Rebecca, it would probably not be a major problem.
Soon the train was on the long bridge over the water of the Susquehanna River where it flows into Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore was not far away.
“Three little sentences, thirty-seven long years ago, R,” Harry said. “With the exception of murder and treason, most other crimes have statutes of limitations.”
“Fine, but what you’re suggesting is giving in to the crime of blackmail by Rebecca Lee now,” R said. “She’ll get away with really blatant plagiarism scot-free.”
“Maybe it’s a worthy trade-off. Otherwise, for three sentences she’ll ruin John’s reputation, his legacy, his life, his everything—never mind the Patrick Henry book.”
“She wouldn’t be the one who did that, Harry. He did it to himself—if that’s what finally happens. Just like she did it to herself in that awful Reagan book.”
“Forget her. Think of John. Thirty-seven years. Three sentences. Think about what you’re saying, R. A good man commits plagiarism in the heat of youth, and you will permit this vicious woman to ruin his life thirty-seven years later? Clearly, he hasn’t even come close to doing anything like that again or she would have found it.”
A conductor came through the car. “Baltimore. Next stop Baltimore.”
R welcomed the interruption. His mind was racing. He needed no more turn-on words from Harry Dickinson.
Then, several seconds later, came a male-voiced public address announcement that said Baltimore was now only three minutes away. “Please watch your step when exiting the train. There is a space between the train and the platform. . . .”
“What’s your verdict?” Harry asked.
“I’ve got five days. That’s when, according to an e-mail I got yesterday, we’ll have our big confrontation with Rebecca in Williamsburg.”
“Fine.” Harry stood up.
“Where you going?” R asked.
“I’ll get off here in Baltimore and catch the next train back to New York. Thanks, R. One more thing.”
R could do without one more thing from Harry Dickinson.
“Rebecca Lee also dropped a line about how she always suspected that somebody other than Wally wrote Ben Two. Maybe R Taylor? That’s a direct quote. She reminded me that she was still a member in good standing of the Ben Crowd at the time. She said she might have some expert do a style comparison between Ben Two and your writing. I told her to be my guest.”
“You what?”
“Relax, R. She’s bluffing. I’m the only one who is expert enough to prove anything like that, and obviously I’m not available. Only three people knew the secret. one of them, Wally, is dead and that leaves only you and me.”
Before R could throw out Ben’s line about secrets between two people, the Bush was gone.
R was struck by the fact that Harry Dickinson, famous editor of famous books, had spent most of this particular workday in the vineyards of American literature riding trains up and down the Northeast Corridor.
He finished his wine and returned to the Quiet Car to curse Rebecca Lee in silence and recall and consider what Ben had said to him in London about choices.
• • •
There was a voice mail at home from Samantha, maybe the happiest and best she had ever left him at any time in their five years together.
Oh, R, it’s finally happening. I’ve got Mr. Hancock right where I want him. I get him and he gets me. We talked for hours last night. He’s not a jerk after all. The words are flowing. So are the ideas. I never ever thought it would happen but it is, it is, it is! I feel like David McCullough must have felt when he was really into John Adams. I’ll bet he talked to Adams. Didn’t you say you thought he did? I feel the way Wally must have when he was writing Ben One—and Ben Two.
I love you.
Oh, dear Samantha. If you only knew what the man you say you love has been doing the last few days: talking to Ben’s naked ghost in the parlor at 36 Craven Street, turning down a million dollars, considering going along with a blackmail threat from a young plagiarist to protect an old plagiarist. . . .
Oh, my God, if you only knew that Ben had said all Hancock deserves is an aphorism.
And if you only knew what the man you say you love—me—is going to do right now.
R went to his desk in the study, unlocked the top right drawer, and removed his checkbook. On a blank check, he put the date and made the check out to The Eastern Pennsylvania Museum of Early Colonial History; wrote after AMOUNT, Twenty-one thousand dollars; and, on the FOR line, Eighteenth-century papers. He signed the check, placed it in an envelope, and addressed it to Wes Braxton at the museum in Eastville.
It was only after he had sealed the envelope that he realized he had forgotten to include a note of some kind. Something handwritten and as brief as Thanks, yours in Early American History, R, would have been enough. He considered tearing it open and doing everything again except the check but decided against it. The money—less than a third of what he had in his savings and checking accounts together—was enough of a thank-you. The important thing was that the sealed envelope meant that the twelve pieces of paper from the cloak were now his. They belonged to him. They were his property. He could do with them whatever he pleased.
Now for the very last to-do.
From a small briefcase he had kept locked in another desk drawer, he removed those twelve pieces of paper as well as his written summary of the stories they seemed to tell.
He laid them all out in front of him on the desk as he had that first day at Eastville and again at Wally’s. He wanted to look at them one more time.
R had never been much for ceremony and ritual, but he was suddenly overcome with a desire to perform this with some panache—something that fit the specialness of the occasion.
Only one way came to mind.
He went into the kitchen and came back with a box of long
wooden matches. Then he took the papers and the matches to the empty fireplace in the living room. As a tiny little effect, he went back to the library for an eight-by-ten framed print of David Martin’s famous 1766 Renaissance Man portrait of Ben. Dressed elegantly in a velvet coat and a powdered wig, his silver-rimmed glasses down on his nose, he is sitting in a gilded chair at a table, his right thumb under his chin, reading some papers. A white marble bust of Isaac Newton is off to the right.
Now all was ready. . . .
No. One more thing. R went back to the study for a copy of Ben Two, the advance one Wally had signed and given to him—with a wink—fresh from the publisher long before official publication. Wally’s inscription was:
To R—
I really couldn’t have done it without you.
Wally
R placed the book on the mantel too, after resisting the temptation to possibly involve it in this ceremony in a more significant way. . . .
One by one, he set afire and dropped into the fireplace each of the twelve pages of what may—or may not—have been Joshiah Ross’s notes of a historical meeting about horrendous crime and nonpunishment involving the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.
He was careful to make sure each sheet of paper was fully burned before lighting another match and doing the next.
Maybe he should have put on some music. But what? “America”? “For He’s a Wally Good Fellow”? “Seventy-six Trombones”?
Maybe he should have said something, raised a glass of calvados in a toast. And said what? Maybe something like, To Ben, may the celebration of the tricentennial of your birth be great! And free of phony hoax-driven controversy about murders!
R’s own notes were the last to disappear into flames.
Once it was gone, R used a heavy brass poker to spread the ashes around on the bottom of the fireplace until they were, like Wally, only dust.
Now it was impossible to tell what they had once been or to ever put them back together so what was written on them could be read.
R felt good about what he had just done. As a professional historian, he had made a decision—yes, a choice of Honor—to prevent the unwarranted smearing of Benjamin Franklin, our First American.
