by Jim Lehrer
R motioned for her to sit down and cool it. He really was trying to help her, if she would let him. Continuing his dramatic mood swing, he was feeling some sympathy—and mercy—for Rebecca. She had been a brilliant student and an honorable member of the Ben Crowd before branching out to do her own thing.
Rebecca, defeated, took her seat again. “Yes, Dr. Hooper, I am guilty, not of direct premeditated plagiarism but of something equally awful. My only defense is that I did not pay close enough attention to what my researchers and writers were doing. I didn’t consciously decide to steal certain lines, paragraphs, ideas, and themes from other authors. My staff—sometimes toward the end of getting the book done there were five or six of them—simply didn’t bother to transform other people’s work into different words for me, and I was too busy to pay attention to what they were doing.”
“What about the book galleys?” Joe Hooper asked. “Why didn’t you catch it once it was set in type?”
“I was traveling when the galleys came to my office. The publisher wanted them back in a week. I had somebody on the staff do the proofreading. I never looked at them.”
“This is outrageous, inexcusable, and monstrous,” Gwinnett said.
“I know it, OK?” Rebecca stiffened again. Her face came back to life. “So I guess this means no mercy—no act of forgiveness—is possible?”
Gwinnett turned to Stockton. “Patrick, what was it you said in your Christian Forgiveness speech?”
Stockton laid down the ballpoint pen with which he was taking notes at one end of the table. He straightened himself in his chair and said, in a voice clearly designed to sound like Patrick Henry, “ ‘Our mild and holy system of religion inculcates an admirable maxim of forbearance. If your enemy smite one cheek, turn the other to him. But you must stop there. You cannot apply this to your country. As members of a social community, this maxim does not apply to you.’ ”
Gwinnett, turning back to Rebecca, added, “I think it goes without saying that we, the members of this committee, are functioning as members of the social community, not as individuals.”
“So ye shall smite me, is that it?” said Rebecca. “Well, say I, smite me in the courts of law or public opinion, and I guarantee there will be returning smites that you—none of you—will enjoy.”
Oh, God, thought R. Here she goes again. He wanted to yell at Gwinnett to calm down, be a good winner. It was his turn to cool it.
But that was not to be.
“You have more criminality up your sleazy sleeve?” Gwinnett said in a snarl that was most unlike a Virginia gentleman.
Rebecca was back on her feet. “As a matter of fact, I do have one more shot in my gun, one more arrow in my quiver—one I had about decided I would not deploy.”
She turned toward R.
“I’m sorry, R, but I have no choice. If you and your fellow mob members move against me, I will be ruined. I will become the disgraced historian, permanently scarred by the scarlet letter P for Plagiarist on my forehead. There will be no more book or magazine contracts, no more lectures, no more television appearances—no more good life as a public historian-cum-commentator. I will be history. So please understand what I must do is not personal about you and Wally. It’s personal about me. It’s you and Wally or it’s me. I have chosen to survive.”
R was struck by only one irrational thought: Where was that lethal statuette of Ben when he really needed it?
Rebecca stepped away from the table and, much as she had done at the first Cosmos Club meeting, prepared to make a rehearsed address. She even cleared her throat.
“I hereby charge, as God and R are my witnesses, that the late Wally Rush and the present R Taylor conspired together to commit one of the largest literary hoaxes of its kind ever perpetrated. There is strong circumstantial evidence that these two distinguished men of American history and letters—”
R rose.
“Stop it, Rebecca!” The words came out in a cold shout, as if directed to an unruly crowd at the other end of a football field.
Now, with the help of Stockton and a cane, John Gwinnett got to his feet. So did Sonya and Joe. R saw it as their way of rising to what was clearly going to be an occasion.
“What’s this all about, Dr. Taylor, if I may ask?” Gwinnett said.
Rebecca didn’t let him answer. “It’s about the fact that I believe and can convince anyone that R wrote Ben Two for Wally Rush.” she said. “You can’t call it plagiarism, but it may be something even more wrong: fraud, possibly? Fraud on the American public, on the Pulitzer Prize committee, on the worlds of American history and letters. If what I did was a misdemeanor, what they did was—is—a felony, may I say, of the highest order.”
She returned to the table for her briefcase and purse, headed for the door, and turned dramatically. “Go public with your charges against me, and I will go public with mine about Ben Two. The choice is yours—and so are the consequences.”
Her words had an instant paralyzing effect—on her and on the others. She went motionless instead of rushing on to finish her dramatic exit. Everyone else was quiet too.
“Is it true that you wrote Wally Rush’s book?” John Gwinnett asked R, finally fracturing the stillness.
FIFTEEN
A telephone call from Harry Dickinson had actually started the whole thing.
“Every morning I wait with a glow of high anticipation about what the man from FedEx has brought me from Gray House in Philadelphia,” Harry had said to R. “And every morning I am disappointed.”
“I’ll put Wally on the phone. He’s still upstairs.”
“In a minute, R, in a minute. First, you tell me how he’s doing on the masterpiece.”
R had so wanted to believe Wally was working hard on Ben Two on his own, late at night or on weekends, and simply had failed to mention it. But that was a delusion. Wally did everything, including his writing, in full view and sound of most everyone—particularly R, his most trusted aide and helper. “My right arm, leg, and brain” was what Wally called him.
Until now, until Harry pressed the point, R had tried to ignore both the obvious and his accompanying concern about Wally, his employer, friend, mentor—hero.
“I’m sure it’s coming along just fine,” R said to Harry as smoothly as he could manage. “He simply doesn’t want to talk about it right now.”
“Where I come from, they would say your response has the texture and fragrance of pure fantasy,” said Harry.
When Harry Dickinson spoke of “where I come from,” he meant mostly Harvard and the West Side of Manhattan after a childhood in Baltimore.
R had made no reply to Harry’s put-down of his speculation about Wally. He just transferred the call to Wally’s extension in the second-floor master bedroom. R had left Wally there a hour ago, still in bed reading The Inquirer. On some mornings now, even after R arrived for work, Wally spent nearly two hours reading the paper. R had begun to wonder if Wally was meticulously going through the classified ads as well as the news stories. . . .
“Harry says he’s coming down here a week from tomorrow to personally pick up whatever I have done on Ben Two.”
Wally was standing in the doorway of the library. Obviously, the call from Harry had been completed. R noticed for the first time that Wally’s torso, still covered in pajamas and a robe, was broadening and his hair was still gray but it needed a cut. It was down over his ears already. Earlier, R had observed that Wally had begun to flatten the pattern and inflections of his words, but R had not yet made the connection with any of this to Ben. Wally was already seventy-five, so R had attributed the speech, the heft and the hair, as well as his growing lack of energy and mental acuity, simply to part of the aging process. Seeing Wally every day as he did, R had not added up the symptoms of Wally’s morphing into Ben—not yet.
“What have you written on Ben Two, Wally?” R asked.
“Only the title page.” Before R could get out a response, Wally added, “Will you help me, R? I can’
t write the book. I want to, I’m desperate to, but I can’t. Help me, please.”
“Of course,” R said, without a split second of thought—or doubt.
There could be no other answer. Wally Rush was the man who had taken R’s love of early American history, triggered first by a marvelous high school teacher and two undergraduate professors, and transformed it into a profession, a way of life.
R—then “Ray” to one and all—had entered high school in Griswold, Connecticut, as a left-handed football quarterback and baseball pitcher, a student body leader who seemed headed nowhere in particular afterward. He graduated with academic as well as athletic honors with his mind aglow about history because of Olivia Huntington. She was a tiny, shy, single Briton who had fallen in love with the Berkshires as a tourist and gone back there to live after retiring from a thirty-two-year career as a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Griswold schools jumped at the chance to have her teach history, something she did with a quiet gusto that switched on in R a passionate curiosity about the past. With her help, he got a full academic scholarship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, a quality small school in southern Connecticut. That was where he met Wally, who came to lecture one evening on “Benjamin Franklin, the First American.” R was captured, not only by Wally but also by Ben, and decided that evening that he would do his graduate work at BFU. Again, he did so on full academic scholarship and a job as Wally’s graduate assistant. That led to an MA, a Ph.D., a decision to be called R rather than Ray or Raymond, and appointment as assistant professor of history and Wally’s chief assistant.
R spent the rest of the day and all night going through Wally’s outline for Ben Two and the notes and sources that had been gathered for each potential chapter and section. R knew the basic material because he had been in charge of the three-person research team hired to assemble the material for Wally.
It wasn’t until early afternoon the next day that the real work began. R had taken a four-hour break to return to his own apartment for a quick nap, a shower, and some clean clothes.
Then he went back to Gray House, sat down before the empty screen of Wally’s desktop computer in the study, and typed PART ONE—THE LONDON YEARS.
There were no security problems because the four other people who worked full-time directly for Wally—a secretary and three graduate assistants, including Rebecca Lee at the time—stayed at Wally’s departmental offices on the BFU campus. Only R and Wally knew what was going on at Gray House.
R stayed at the computer all that night and remained there, with only occasional breaks for food and brief naps, for the next week, each day ending with his submitting what had been written to Wally for approval. Wally, as engaged as it was possible for him to be, always had some edits and suggestions—most of them helpful and constructive.
Harry History Channel showed up on the eighth day as he had promised, coming down on the train from New York to retrieve whatever had been done.
The manuscript delivery was made over a jolly lunch of rare roast beef, lobster bisque, small wheat wafers, and a French cabernet savignon at Café William, a musty twenty-table place two blocks from Wally’s house, where he routinely ate either lunch or dinner half a dozen times a week.
The occasion was jolly because there were 125 double-spaced manuscript pages in the manila envelope Wally handed to Harry as the three men sat down. R was as comfortable at Café William as Wally. It was decorated casually in what passed for Old Philadelphia Tavern style. The china and the silverware, as well as the food and drink, were heavy. The walls were covered with a mix of drawings and prints of people and events from eighteenth-century Philadelphia, including several of Ben.
Harry, before looking at a menu or putting a napkin in his lap, whipped the pages out of the envelope and began reading.
R remembered precisely what Harry said as he read the first two pages.
“Good . . . really good . . . nice . . . really nice. Terrific beginning.”
Then R, who was sitting opposite Harry, watched the famous editor from New York skip ahead ten or fifteen pages. He read two, three, four more consecutive pages.
“Well done . . . yes . . . that works.”
Harry continued to move through twenty or so pages at a time, reading and then proclaiming or mumbling his pleasure with what he saw.
Finally, he tapped the pages against the table a few times to even them out and replaced the heavy rubber band around the manuscript.
“It’s one helluva beginning,” he announced to Wally. There was a slight trace of a smile on his face. “Frankly, I’m surprised—most pleasantly so.”
Neither Wally nor R said anything. This was definitely Harry’s show.
“I didn’t believe you had done a damned thing on the book, to tell you the absolute truth,” he said to Wally. “On Ben One, you couldn’t wait to get me something to look at. This time, silence. I had assumed that nothing meant there was nothing. My apologies, Wally, for my rank suspicions and awful thoughts about you. I was beginning to work on the manner and timing of asking for the return of your advance.”
“Accepted,” Wally said quickly, and motioned for the waiter to come take their orders.
“When can I expect another delivery?” Harry asked.
“That depends,” said Wally, looking directly at R through the black horn-rim glasses he was still wearing back then.
“Three . . . maybe four months?” said R to Wally. “At the rate you’re going, that would be my estimate. What do you think?”
Wally grinned and looked back at Harry. “Three, maybe four months. Right.”
They sealed the promise by clinking and then emptying their wineglasses. And it was on with lunch.
It was also on with Ben Two.
The next 135 pages were delivered to Harry in New York via FedEx three and a half months later.
That prompted a call to R from Harry.
“It’s his best work yet,” said Harry. “The writing’s superb, and so are the narrative drive and the organization.”
R said, “Thank you. On behalf of Wally, thank you.”
“I didn’t know he had it in him, to be honest. It’s such a glory and a pleasure to read this stuff. It really does sing, in a way—well, in a way far superior to anything in Ben One, I must say. I don’t have to tell you that this is exactly what happened to Ben himself. His prose, like Wally’s, ripened and blossomed with age.”
R did not have to be told that. Ben went from a composer of heavy-handed political tracts to an elegant wordsmith whose writings were among the very best of his time. Among the Founding Fathers, possibly only Thomas Paine in Common Sense could be said to have turned a better phrase than Ben. Not Jefferson and certainly not Adams or even Madison. And Washington, of course, wrote with a thud that matched his personality.
“If we publish it well and—I promise you we will—and get a few major reviewer breaks, we might really get that Pulitzer this time,” said Harry. “We could send Wally out on a book tour. He really is beginning to act a bit like Ben, isn’t he? That long hair, the developing paunch, the speaking manner. When he replaces those horn-rims with wire specs we’ll know he’s a goner. Maybe that’s what’s helping him write so magnificently about Ben, who knows? Who cares? Whatever, he’s writing a masterpiece.”
R hadn’t yet fully focused on Wally’s Ben transformations. Right then his mind was stuck on what Harry had said about the masterpiece and the Pulitzer possibilities for Ben Two.
Then Harry, clearly having realized the dangers in what he had said, came back to add, “For God’s sake, don’t quote me on that possible Pulitzer to Wally. I don’t want to raise his hopes again.” And R promised not to breathe a word.
In fact, he and Wally exchanged few words over the next months about anything other than the book itself. R kept writing as fast and well as he could, involving Wally in the process as reader, editor, and consultant. R would take a stack of finished manuscript, thirty or forty pages at a t
ime, for Wally to read; Wally always ended each reading with a quiet “Thank you, R” or “Well, done, my friend.”
R continued to send off the completed sections to Harry, usually in 125- or 150-page hunks, each received with increasingly estatic rave notices.
The drain on R’s physical and intellectual energy was enormous. On the day he actually typed THE END on the last page of what ended up being a 535-page manuscript, not counting footnotes and bibliography, the emotional toll also kicked in.
Following the pattern, he sat at the desk in the Gray House library while Wally, having been summoned by R, sat on the other side, reading the final words R had written for him.
Strange as it might seem, R did not want to smack his hero Wally Rush across the face, scream “You’re pure bullshit!” at him, grab the manuscript from him and throw it in the fireplace, or race with it to a third-floor window and toss it to the Philadelphia winds. To yell “I wrote this, not you!”; to sob; to laugh hysterically.
“You have written a magnificent book, R,” Wally said.
“We did it together, Wally,” R replied.
“Thank you, but what you have given me is the ultimate gift. You have given me your talent, your intellect, your creative being. I can never thank you adequately, I know that. But I can do one thing—whatever financial rewards come from this book will be shared by us equally. I will instruct Harry to automatically divide all royalties half and half.”
Wally pulled something from his pocket and tossed it across the desk. “This is a check for one hundred and thirty thousand dollars—half the advance Harry paid me for Ben Two.”
R’s family were small-town New Englanders; his father was a minister, his mother was a homemaker and volunteer. Checks for this much money were not part of his life, either growing up or as a historian and professor. Franklin at Craven Street had sold barely 7,000 copies on a $3,500 advance; Ben and Billy, only slightly more.
The check lay there between Wally and R, who made no effort to take it.
“You must, R. If you don’t, then—well, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
