Franklin Affair (18 page)

“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.

Yes, Ben fathered an illegitimate child named William. The whole world knew that. But, no, that son did not come from Ben's having impregnated a child, possibly as young as twelve.

And, no matter any of his other possible sins, he certainly didn't commission someone to have William's mother stabbed to death and her bloody body stuffed in a gunnysack and tossed into the Delaware River.

R was sure of it.

THIRTEEN

Then, late morning four days later, Clara called from Philadelphia.

“I have more on that day in 1788,” she announced with an urgent and pleased rush in her voice.

R took a very deep breath.

“Remember what I said about James Madison, that I hadn't been able to come up with anything about where or what Madison was doing that day?”

R mumbled something to acknowledge that he did remember.

“Well, my friend at the Madison Papers archives at U-Va called me back. She said a huge mystery had arisen as a result of my original inquiry. She said Madison kept daily precise notes about everything he did. But get this.”

R felt a sudden certainty that he did not want to get this.

“His notes from September seventh of that year and from the days before and after—September sixth and eighth—are missing. My friend said it was possible they somehow were misplaced through the years but—and I quote—'It's also possible somebody, Madison himself even, intentionally destroyed them. Who knows?' End quote. That got me to wondering.”

R was breathing again but only barely. A touch of nausea was forming somewhere down near the bottom of his throat.

Clara continued. “I went back through each of the rundowns I had on the other Founding Fathers and did some more work with each of their papers—through various Web sites and CD-ROMs as well as colleagues. Guess what?”

R declined to guess.

“First, it turns out that the big bank meeting Hamilton supposedly attended in New York on September eighth was actually a week later. His archivists at Columbia now have some second thoughts about where he was on the seventh and eighth. He may not have been in New York after all, and maybe somebody played with the diary entries. They're going to get back to me once they sort it out.

“Second, Martha Washington, in a letter to her sister dated two weeks after September seventh, said, and I quote: ‘George travels away from Mount Vernon much, much too much to suit me, and, I fear, his health. He still labors for his country. He departed on a trip several days ago in the middle of the night, would not tell me his destination, and upon his return asked that I forever keep secret his absence. I can only assume he was doing work on behalf of our new and great nation. Bless his heart and his soul.'

“Third, Franklin was seen at a friend's house in Philadelphia the evening of September sixth, so he was definitely not confined to his bed during that whole week, as a notebook from his doctor had said. The doctor, as I'm sure you know, was a close friend of Franklin's and would not be resistant to requests from Franklin to change something. There is good solid evidence that the doctor often covered for him on a number of other earlier occasions for numerous other reasons, including those of a different kind of bed.”

Yes, but that hardly proved anything, thought R, grateful for even a tiny opening for a possible challenge to what was clearly developing. Ben was Ben. . . .

“Fourth, the Adams papers at the Massachusetts Historicial Society show a direct conflict between the records of John and Abigail. She said John was ‘away from us and our hearth' on September sixth, seventh, and eighth, while John, in a letter that appears to experts from the shakiness of the handwriting to have been written later, talks of ‘good talk and food among family and friends' those days in Quincy. Most important, there are a few lines that turned up in another letter that Adams wrote to Madison in late September of 1788. Shall I read them?”

R grunted a reluctant affirmative.

“ ‘It was most wise of you to suggest that we leave no carriage tracks, so to speak, no lingering odors from our recent gathering. I have seen to it. I trust that our colleagues have done the same.' ”

Oh, my God.
R remembered Johnny Rutledge talking years ago about a reference to Ben's saying something about Madison and a “difficult situation.” R had put it out of his mind until now—or, most precisely, until it popped out while he was sitting on the parlor floor at 36 Craven Street several days ago.

“It's all adding up, isn't it?” said Clara.

R made a sound. He was sick to his stomach. He thought he might throw up. He thought he might faint. He thought he might die.

He knew he had to lie to Clara.

“Good work,” he said, trying his best to sound sincere, serious, strong. “Thank you.”

“Thank
you.
Now will you tell me? Now will you tell me why September 7, 1788, is so important?

“I can't do that.”

“What were they covering up, if that's what this is all about? Is that it, our nation's first Watergate cover-up?”

“All I can say is what I said a moment ago, Clara. Thank you. Now I have to go.”

“What's going on? Go where?”

To my destruction as a historian and as a person of honor and purpose!

“To the bathroom,” he said.

It was almost the truth. R hung up the telephone, put his head on his desk, closed his eyes, and experienced the opening thoughts and scenes of a nightmare that, he was certain, would be with him, and in him, for the rest of his life. . . .

Eventually, he rose from his desk, but instead of going to the bathroom, he went to the front room, to the fireplace where, just a few evenings ago, he had turned to ashes those twelve sheets of paper from the Eastville cloak.

He so wanted to look down and find that, through some miracle, the ashes had re-formed into what they had been: a coded account of what very well may have been a most historic meeting of Founding Fathers at a Pennsylvania farmhouse more than two hundred years ago.

No such miracle had occurred.

• • •

There he was. And there was Ben, standing eight feet tall in dirty white marble atop a pedestal that was nearly ten feet high itself.

The statue here at Twelfth and Pennsylvania Avenue really was stunning. The
Post
letter-to-the-editor writers were probably correct in complaining that R should have at least mentioned it in his op-ed piece.

Ben was wearing an open long diplomatic coat with huge buttons and fur collar, a waistcoat, a frilly tied neckpiece, and matching fluffy shirt cuffs coming out the end of the coat sleeves, tight breeches to the knee, with stockings over the legs down to his shoes. His build was solid except in the middle, where his potbelly pooched out, the buttons on the waistcoat clearly straining to keep it contained. His bald forehead gave way to long hair dropping over his ears and—when viewed from the rear—down his back. He was not wearing glasses.

His right hand and forearm were raised; his mouth was closed. There was a book in his left hand down by his side. Three more books, one open, the other two closed, were stacked behind his right foot. His legs were apart, his right slightly ahead of the left.

His face was animated, pleasant. He was busy. Was he about to speak?

FRANKLIN
was written at the top of the gray granite pedestal in six-inch raised letters. The sculptor's name was engraved above that, underneath Ben's left foot. Below were four words in the granite, one on each side:
PATRIOT, PHILOSOPHER, PHILANTHROPIST, PRINTER
. Farther down the base was a brass plaque that said the statue was erected on January 17, 1889.

The statue and the pedestal sat in the center of a round step-up slab, one foot high and twenty feet in diameter, that was made of concrete and brick.

R recognized this man on the pedestal. It was Benjamin Franklin, all right. And, it occurred to him, this statue could probably also pass for Wally Rush if it were on its back in an open casket.

From a nearby plaque, R read that the statue had originally been at Tenth and Pennsylvania in front of what was then the
Washington Post
building after it was “Presented to the National Capitol” by the
Post
's publisher. It was moved here in the 1980s to adorn the entrance to the towered structure that was once the headquarters for the U.S. Post Office Department. It was still owned by the government but was now called the Old Post Office Pavilion and was mostly leased out to small tourist shops and cafés downstairs, with various government agency offices on the floors above.

The post office–Ben angle certainly made sense. As deputy postmaster general for the pre-Revolution colonies under the King, Ben launched the first real mail service in America. And that was just one item of hundreds on the extremely long list of this remarkable man's achievements.

The thought reaffirmed to R the correctness of his original impulse to turn those Eastville papers into ashes. This man, this incredible human being and Founding Father, flawed though he may have been, did not deserve to have his reputation smeared now over some accusations that appeared to be part of a hoax.

But . . .

Probable hoax or not, I am a historian, a pursuer and teller of the truth.

But . . .

Probable hoax or not, how dare I play God with those twelve sheets of history?

But . . .

Probable hoax or not, wouldn't it have been more professional, more ethical, more everything to have simply locked them up someplace rather than destroy them?

But . . .

Probable hoax or not, what would I have done if they told terrible tales about Adams? Or Jefferson? Or even Washington?

But. But. But.

It's done. The papers are no more. Forget it.

• • •

After the message from Clara, he had rushed outside and started walking. He went down to M Street and kept going east, taking the fork onto Pennsylvania, until forty-five minutes later he was here, looking up at Ben.

R figured it was one thing to speak with Ben the Naked Ghost across a London parlor; it was quite another to chat with Ben the Statue amid the heavy pedestrian traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue.

R slowly walked once around the statue. Then a second and a third time. He stared at Ben from the front for a good two minutes and then from the rear. Then from one side and the other. This angle and that angle.

The statue needed a good cleaning. There were signs of gross marble deterioration in several spots, particularly up on the back of Ben's coat. R made annoyed note of that. But he had no idea what he was really looking for, even what he was doing here. Was he hoping for inspiration? Wisdom? Affirmation?

You did the right thing, young man. I thank you for your choice of Honor.

Maybe that's what R wanted to imagine he heard from Ben.

If so, it hadn't happened.

There were people all around the statue, walking in and out of the building, up and down the street. Some were tourists, others workers from the various federal office buildings in the neighborhood. This was the Federal Triangle, one of Washington's busiest downtown areas.

R wondered what book the sculptor had in mind when he put that one in Ben's right hand. Why were those other three on the ground—the top of the base of the pedestal—by Ben's right foot? What's the message, the symbolism? That Ben was a man of the written word? That books were important to him—to who and what he was?

Fine. Yes. That must be it.

R was suddenly aware of a putrid odor coming from his right. It had the fragrance of spoiled food, dead animals, urine, garbage—human body stench.

He dared to look in the direction of the smell. There was a man standing there, barely two feet away. He was also looking up at Ben. He appeared as filthy as he smelled. He was wearing a dark-blue knit hat full of holes, a parka that once must have been olive drab but was now covered with dark and varied stains. His trousers, baggy and brown, were folded up several times at the cuff. His white and blue sneakers were cracked and dirty. He wore no socks, his ankles were black. How old was he? It was hard to tell. His hair seemed red; so did his beard.

“Did you know that Dr. Franklin was the first person on earth to notice there was a Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean?” the man asked.