Franklin Affair (13 page)

R had been through this lament with her once before. That was six months ago over just the simple act of signing a contract with the University of Massaschusetts Press to write the Hancock book. She was confident of her information but had debilitating doubts about her ability to produce a worthy book. He had encouraged and even railed at her to at least give it a try. How would she ever really know until she forced her bottom on a chair long enough to see if she could do it?

R knew that he would sense when she wanted him to say something. She wasn't there yet. He just continued to pat, caress, hug, and kiss her while she talked.

“I thought for a full day it wasn't my fault. It was John Hancock's. I said to myself, R and Wally are right. He's not much, really. I thought maybe I was trying to take a nobody worth two pages and stretch him into somebody worth three hundred. A guy whose number one achievement was to sign his name larger than anybody else. He had nothing to do with writing the blessed Declaration of Independence or any of the incredibly important ideas that went into it. His wealth and position came from an inheritance. He was no Ben. No Jefferson or Washington or Madison. He wasn't even an Adams.

“By the way, the more I read about Hancock and his friends in Massachusetts, the more I got to liking Adams. I know what you Ben lovers think about him, but maybe you're wrong. Ben was no picnic either, as I don't have to tell you. Sometimes I think, in fact, that nobody has really figured him out yet—not even Wally.

“The other problem with Hancock was that I don't like him. He was a jerk. At least, that's what I got to thinking. Maybe I was imagining it. I knew I was in trouble when I couldn't talk to him. I remembered what you and Wally always said. Until you know your guy well enough to have a conversation with him—the way you said you did with Ben—you can't write about him. The more I knew about Hancock, the more I grew to despise him. So for a while I blamed him.
I can't write a coherent sentence because of you, John Hancock! You jerk!
”

Samantha looked up at R and smiled. R laughed out loud. He couldn't help himself. Samantha Louise Middleton was one very funny woman. Except when they were fighting, which unfortunately was much too often, or like a while ago when she was crying, just the sight of her made R grin. There was something about the flounce in her walk and her other movements, her salty language—picked up at home, she claimed, from an ex-marine father—and her very strongly delivered opinions that tickled him, lifted him.

That had been pretty much the case from their chance beginning. They happened to sit next to each other at an ARHA symposium on whether Jefferson really was the father of Sally Hemings's children. It was held in a meeting room at Georgetown University, where Samantha was an associate professor of Early American History. Out of professional curiosity, R simply walked over to the campus from his house to hear the discussion. There were experts of various kinds on the panel, and they were evenly split—two against two—on the validity of the DNA testing and other evidence. When the meeting broke up, R, not consciously on the make, said to the magnificent-looking woman on his left, “All this is another great lesson in the basic truth that history never ends.” She agreed. They introduced themselves and exchanged current stations and interests in life. “I have always admired Dr. Rush and would give anything to meet him sometime,” Samantha said. R remarked that Wally was, in fact, due in Washington in a couple of weeks for a meeting of some historical commission and he—R—would be delighted to arrange something. A few minutes later, he suggested that they continue this conversation at the bar at 1812, a restaurant just off campus. They had been mostly together ever since, and Samantha moved in with R nearly a year ago with a loose agreement to get married soon.

“Did you have your way with that Wally assistant the other night in Philadelphia?” she asked now.

“No, I did not.”

“Maybe just a little intellectually based physical affection between Franklin scholars?”

“No!”

“Well, then, what did you do with her?”

R told her about what he ate for dinner at the Brasserie Perrier and the ceremony for Wally, with Clara being the one in charge of the ashes. He did not tell her that he had offered Clara a job or even about the proposed new institute. This was not the time. Right now, it was all about Samantha—and their future together.

“Do you honestly believe you can and will be faithful to me, R?” she said.

“How many times have we been through this?”

“You weren't at all faithful to your first two wives, were you?”

“Neither of them was you!”

And then, like a bell at the end of time on a TV quiz show, the telephone rang.

R moved to disentangle himself from Samantha.

“Let it ring,” she said.

“I can't. It's a conference call about Rebecca Lee.”

He picked up the telephone receiver on the desk with one hand and grabbed the FedExed Rebecca papers with the other. He tossed them to Samantha with accompanying body language that said to help herself to an interesting read.

“Yes, this is Taylor,” he said into the phone, as he sat down at the desk. “Sure. I can go ahead now if everyone else can. . . . Let's go then. Hello, John . . . Sonya . . . Joe. Are you all there?”

They were all there.

• • •

“I have asked my chief assistant, Alexander Stockton, to join us—we call him Patrick around here, of course,” said John Gwinnett. “Alex will make a verbatim transcript of what we say—and, possibly, decide—that can be forwarded to the ARHA office. I trust that meets with everyone's approval?”

There were no objections, just a smattering of hellos and acknowledgments to Stockton, who presumably was sitting somewhere in Williamsburg with John Gwinnett. Gwinnett's field was Patrick Henry, but R had no idea why Stockton would be called Patrick.

“Dr. Taylor, before proceeding, let me say that I thought the farewell events for Wally were perfect,” Gwinnett said.

“I agree. Wally got a good sendoff,” said R.

He glanced over at Samantha on the couch, still reading the Rebecca report. She looked up and rolled her eyes at him. He knew what she was saying with that: “The goods” were indeed the goods.

R wished he had had a chance to discuss with Samantha Rebecca's blackmail threat: Save me, R, or I take you down with me on phony charges. He had kept Rebecca's written charges and the specific
Gotcha!
threats. But there hadn't been an opportunity yet to show or tell her anything. So be it. He was on his own, and he hoped he knew exactly where he was going.

“I must say—just to begin the discussion—that it's about as open-and-shut a situation as I have ever encountered,” Gwinnett said. “Shockingly so, if I may add that comment.”

“Amen,” said Sonya. Or at least R assumed it was Sonya. Her voice was so soft it was hard to tell. But she was the only female involved in this meeting.

“I agree, but I assume we will now give Rebecca Lee an opportunity to respond to these specific allegations?” It was Joe Hooper. No lynchings, please, remained his message.

There was silence for a count of two—three—four. R knew it was his turn to speak and everyone was waiting for him to do so. He was thinking. Joe Hooper had raised a good point. But so had John and Sonya.

“There can be no defense for such blatant plagiarism,” Gwinnett said.

“Amen,” said Sonya.

R had expected more words—more passion and force—from Sonya. Here, finally, she had in the crosshairs a person she detested, despised, abhorred. An enemy, politically and personally. Why was she only saying quietly to Gwinnett, “Amen”?

R decided to push her a bit. “
Amen
means what, exactly, in this context, Sonya?”

“That the evidence is strong.”

“Stockton forwarded a full copy of the report to Dr. Lee as well as to each of you,” said Gwinnett. “She knows the exact nature of the damning evidence against her.”

“Yes, but, as Joe says, aren't we obligated to hear her defense, no matter how puny and insufficient it may be?” asked R.

He couldn't help noticing Samantha. She shook her head and then raised her right arm above as if it was holding a hangman's noose. She closed her eyes and slumped her head over to the side.
Hang her!

R had to suppress a laugh.

“I believe we have no choice but to have a face-to-face meeting with her,” Joe Hooper said firmly. “That is the only fair and responsible thing to do.”

“I agree that we probably should, but I'll leave that to the rest of you to decide,” mumbled Sonya.

There was an eerie silence on the conference-call line.

“What's wrong, Sonya?” R finally said.

“Nothing.”

“Has she been after you?”

Sonya said nothing, and neither did anyone else for a few seconds.

“As a matter of fact, she actually threatened
me,
” R said. There, he did it. He had not intended to say this, but there it was.

Samantha was off the couch. She came up behind him and put her arms around his neck and down onto his chest.

“Me too R,” said Sonya, still barely audible. “She claimed she had evidence that I had stolen something in my first Abigail Adams book. I checked her citations. She's wrong. Yes, I read a lot of prior material, but I gave full credit and had everything directly quoted between quotation marks. She said she found a time or two when there could have been better attributions. I told her that was absurd. She told me to ‘tell it to the judge'—a committee like our very own that she would insist be formed.”

“That woman is dangerous,” Gwinnett said.

Said Hooper, “I saw her in Philadelphia at the ceremony for Dr. Rush. All she said was that she sure did appreciate my speaking up for treating her fairly. I took it to be a bit of blatant—shall we say—caressing of a particular part of my anatomy.”

“She came my way at Philadelphia but I walked away from her,” said Gwinnett. “Even before I knew she was a first-class plagiarist, I knew she was a first-class fool for equating Reagan with the Founding Fathers.”

R agreed with Gwinnett about the Reagan comparison, but he stayed on the real subject. “Rebecca's ammunition against me has to do with an op-ed piece in
The Washington Post
last week. I let some ideas from a twenty-five-year-old Timothy Morton essay linger too long in my brain before writing my piece. She admitted it wasn't anything serious but said I would be smeared anyhow in the process of trying to explain myself. Same as she said to you, Sonya. ‘Tell it to the judge.' ”

“This is an outrage!” yelled Gwinnett. “I say we throw everything we have at her!”

Again, there were a several beats of silence. No one joined in to shout,
Right on, John!
The clear unspoken message was, instead,
Maybe not so fast, John.

Joe Hooper finally said, “As a matter of fact, what is the ‘everything' we can actually throw?”

R had wondered that a time or two himself in the last few days. But with so much else going on in his life, he hadn't bothered to check any ARHA booklets or ask anyone.

Gwinnett said, “We can recommend the ARHA censure her publicly—condemn her and her actions in strong words shouted from housetops. We can urge her university or college employer to reprimand or even dismiss her. We can urge her publisher to withdraw the book in question from print. We can ask that any awards or prizes she may have received for the book be rescinded. And we can strip away her membership in the ARHA”

Hooper was the first to laugh. “Except for the public accusations, that's pretty much nothing.”

“That's true,” said Sonya. “She doesn't teach anymore, for one thing. And I can't believe that awful Reagan book won anything but a kiss from a right-wing book club.”

“Her publisher might defend her—and love the publicity,” R added, his mind targeted on Harry Dickinson's conduct and example.

“Then it boils down to a confrontation,” said Gwinnett, remaining very much in charge. “I am still unable to travel because of my knee, so that will make it necessary for us to meet here in Williamsburg. Is that a problem for anyone?”

No one had an objection. R, for his part, considered visits to the historic area of Colonial Williamsburg to be the single most pleasurable part of his life as an eighteenth-century historian. There were many sites to study American history, but CW was the only one where one could sense, feel, and experience it. There was nothing he enjoyed more than strolling the streets, sipping a cup of apple cider, listening to the music from the taverns, exchanging exaggerated greetings with the interpreters, in their eighteenth-century dress, and trading exaggerated dialogue with the several skilled actors who regularly portrayed such major colonial figures as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

“I will have Dr. Lee contacted to pursue possible dates with her and with each of you and then firm up the arrangements,” said Gwinnett. “I must give some thought to what would be the most suitable Williamsburg setting for the occasion.”

“Let's put her in the stocks alongside the old courthouse,” Sonya said, in full voice.

• • •

They went for a walk, going out to 31st Street and then left two blocks up to R Street, west by the famous Oak Hill Cemetery and Montrose Park toward Dunbarton Oaks and Wisconsin Avenue.

Neither looked at much of anything on either side of the street. Mostly Samantha was listening to R recount the events that led up to the Rebecca conference call. She had only heard his end of the conversations up to now and had paid very little attention to R's ARHA committee assignment, except to blindly defend Rebecca because she was a woman.

When he finished, Samantha said, “I'm sorry about what I said on the phone the other day. That was uninformed, stupid, silly. If there was capital punishment for plagiarists, Rebecca deserves the rope—or the needle; whatever. Fried, even.”