Harvard Yard (9 page)

“Documents
and
books,” said Fallon.

“Yes,” said Wedge, all the good cheer gone, “it’s good to bring the past to light.”

Peter saw a nasty look pass between Wedge and Ridley, but an old classmate was calling to him, so Will plastered his grin back on his face, gave out with a loud greeting, and went off through the charcoal smoke.

“What’s his problem?” said Peter, not taking his eyes from Will Wedge.

“I’ll tell you later. First, let me introduce you to—”

Harriet Webster Wedge, carrying a plate of shrimp. “These are what a treasure hunter would enjoy,” she said.

“Thanks.” Peter dipped a shrimp. “I haven’t been called a treasure hunter in a long time.”

“Oh, but you are. And I’ve always wondered . . . That Revere tea set that you found years ago. Didn’t you save a piece?”

“The sugar urn. By accident. Sold it to pay for the damage I did finding it.”

“You blew a hole in the subway at Copley Square, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Peter no longer reddened with embarrassment at the old story.

“Amazing the things we’ll do for money,” she said.

“I did it for history,” he said.

“Oh, bullshit on that. Say you did it for the money and we’ll get along. But I’m too old for stories.” And off she went with her cigarette dropping ashes in the cocktail sauce.

“I didn’t call it ‘the Full Wedge’ for nothing,” said Ridley.

“I could be having lunch with my son,
alone.
Tell me again why you invited me.”

“At the game. First, come and meet the famous Pacifist Physicist.”

That was tweedy old George Wedge Drake, Harvard professor of physics (emeritus), eighty years old and known to everyone as Prof. G. He was with Olga Bassett, retired journalist, in her late seventies, still looking good in slacks and camel-hair blazer.

They had done business with Fallon and seemed genuinely glad to see him.

“We read the Fallon Antiquaria catalog all the time,” said Olga.

“Yes,” said Prof. G. “Right now we’re looking for a book called
Anglorum Praelia
—”

“By Christopher Ocland,” said Olga, “printed in 1582.”

“Sounds rare,” said Peter. “Could be expensive.”

“We’re very interested,” said Prof. G. “And what brings you here, Mr. Fallon? Rare books or football?”

Fallon shifted his eyes to Ridley.

And Ridley said, “Peter’s mixing business with pleasure right now. He’s networking with you.” Ridley guided Peter away from the professor. “Now, let me introduce you to the most important Wedge of all.”

As they moved through the crowd, Peter felt the eyes of Will Wedge tracking him . . . like a trout, or a golf ball, or maybe a duck, depending on Wedge’s hobbies. Fallon expected to be hooked, clubbed, or shot any second, because Ridley was introducing him to a girl with good Wedge height and firm Wedge features and loud Wedge laugh: Will’s daughter, Dorothy.

“Dorothy’s a senior,” said Ridley. “Her boyfriend is playing today. Halfback.”

“He ran rings around Dartmouth last year,” she said.

“Dorothy just started her honors thesis,” said Ridley.

“It’s game day, Uncle Ridley. Let’s not talk about work,” she said.

And a woman in her forties came ambling over: Dorothy’s mother, thought Peter, given the resemblance. She said, “Dorothy, the teams must be on the field by now. Shouldn’t you be getting inside?”

“But we’re waiting for the lobster,” said one of Dorothy’s roommates.

“What will Chad Street say if Dorothy isn’t there to cheer him in his last Dartmouth game? If he’s worrying over her, Harvard might lose. So, girls, get into the stadium, and I’ll see that they save some lobster for you at halftime.”

Then, Rebecca Wedge introduced herself to Peter and assured him, as she glided back to her guests, that Cousin Ridley would take care of him.

Ridley whispered: “A nice way to say they don’t want you talking to Dorothy.”

“What about?”

“A term paper. This all began with a term paper.”

Harvard Stadium: the first major structure ever built of steel-reinforced concrete, as modern as the electric light when it opened in 1903, yet designed to resemble a Roman arena, with Colosseum-like arches ringing the exterior and a colonnade around the inside, lending an air of classical dignity to the controlled violence on the field below.

Peter and Ridley sat under the colonnade, while Jimmy sat in another section with one of the pretty nieces he’d met.

Ridley took a sip from his flask and gestured toward Jimmy. “Let me reverse myself again. The apple
doesn’t
fall far from the tree.”

“He’s smarter,” said Peter. “I just wish I got to spend more time with him.”

“It’s all we have . . . time.” Ridley looked out at the field. “Do you remember the production of
Oedipus Rex
I directed here one spring? Greek drama the way the Greeks had seen it . . . stage in the south end zone . . . amphitheater seating in the stands . . . masks, buskins, actors declaiming without microphones . . . Professor Alfred loved it.”

“
Untrained
actors without microphones . . . you couldn’t hear a thing.”

“So, once in a while”—Ridley took another sip—“ambition exceeds talent. After all, I was the guy who thought Broadway was ready for
King Lear, the Musical
.”

“With a cast of stars from a Fox sitcom?”

“So Lear was only twenty-nine . . . I was going for a younger audience.”

Harvard took the kickoff and moved to the Dartmouth forty in three plays.

“I bet you were after a younger girlfriend, too,” said Peter.

“My Cordelia . . . That was temporary. So was my financial backing. And once the bank foreclosed on my co-op, which I mortgaged to keep the show up, so was the roof over my head. Now, I’m living in the old family manse in Rockport . . . alone.”

A roar went up as Chad Street, boyfriend of Dorothy Wedge, took a handoff on a draw play and ran forty yards to the end zone.

Ridley toasted with his flask, “Fight fiercely, Harvard!”

The band began to play “Yo Ho!”

Fallon took the flask, swallowed, and said, “What about this term paper, and ‘something from the antiquity of the Wedge family’? And why are these Wedges so suspicious?”

Ridley looked around at the fans under the colonnade, then whispered, “Dorothy Wedge is an English major, writing her senior thesis on the Puritans.”

“Not exactly a fresh topic.”

“She started developing it last spring, in a class in early American literature. She wrote a paper about Thomas Shepard, the first minister of Cambridge and one of Harvard’s first overseers. He’s pretty obscure today. But—”

“She came across something in his writings?”

Ridley slipped the flask from Peter’s hand. “References to one of her ancestors, Isaac Wedge, and ‘a play.’ So she came to me. She thought the cousin who comped her whenever she wanted to see a Broadway show might know something about Puritan theater. Of course, there was no such
thing
as Puritan theater.”

“They hated the theater, didn’t they?” said Peter.

“Because they knew how seductive it was . . . For a hundred and forty years, if you tried to put on a play in Massachusetts, you were run out of the colony. And in 1767 the Colonial fathers got around to making a law against theater. There was not a legal public performance of a play in Massachusetts until after the Revolution.”

On the field, Dartmouth tied the score, and their fans brought out handkerchiefs and waved them at the Harvard side. Another old tradition. Better, thought Peter, than giving the finger.

“So,” he asked Ridley, “were you able to help Dorothy?”

“I need an expert opinion. How about reading her paper? Look at her references to Isaac Wedge and ‘a play,’ read the Shepard diary, too. I’ll e-mail it all to you. We can talk over dinner. Tomorrow night.”

“You’re a pain in the ass, Ridley.”

“Why?”

“Because this is one of those Ridley Riddles. You know more than you’re saying, but you won’t say what you’re thinking.”

“That’s because I never gave an actor a line reading in my life.” Ridley capped his flask. “The performances are truer if they discover the truth of the characters themselves.”

“I’m no actor.”

“‘All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.’” Ridley stood. “‘They have their exits and their entrances.’ And this is my exit. I’m auditioning a young actress in an hour.”

“But you’re broke, and you have no show.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

Harvard won the game, 20-17, on a last-minute field goal.

Afterward, Peter and his son had dinner at Grafton Street, Peter’s favorite Harvard Square haunt, now that the venerable Wursthaus had been closed to make way for yet another chain-store T-shirt outlet. They talked about the game, about the Boston Latin cross-country team, about the Wedges, too.

It was a good evening.

Then Peter drove Jimmy back to the house on the West Roxbury Parkway where the boy lived with his mother and stepfather.

And as always, the conversation dried up as they pulled into the driveway.

Peter didn’t mind that he had paid the mortgage on the Colonial with the big lawn. He didn’t even mind that another man now lived there. At least the accountant who’d married his ex-wife was no deadbeat. He paid the bills, he’d freed Peter from alimony, and he treated Jimmy well. It was just that Peter had saved some of the hardest things he’d ever said to his son for that driveway, starting with “Jimmy, I’m not coming in tonight. Your mother and I are separating.” The boy had been twelve at the time.

Quick exits were now the best, for father and son both, so Jimmy said, “See ya, Dad,” as soon as the car stopped.

“We’ll go on a campus tour next week,” said Peter. “And Jimmy—”

The boy stuck his head back into the car. “Yeah?”

“Remember . . . some guys never get over the fact that they didn’t get into Harvard, and some guys never get over the fact that they
did
. I don’t want you to be either kind.”

Peter Fallon—trustee at local museums, regular at charity events, featured face in a
Boston
magazine article titled “Most Eligible Divorcés in Town.” Such a big deal should have had something better to do on a Saturday night. A late party, maybe, or dinner with a model.

But there he was, cruising the Back Bay, looking for nothing more exotic than a parking spot. On weeknights, he could usually find one in four and a half minutes. But on a Saturday night, it might take fifteen.

He’d been looking now for ten, and there’d been a guy on his tail the whole time, as if he was looking for the same spot, as if this was some kind of game, which it was.

Peter lived on Marlborough Street, in the block between Clarendon and Berkeley, so he usually began the hunt on Marlborough, then moved to Arlington.
No spots.

He noticed his competition when the guy tried to pass him on a turn. But rule number one of Back Bay cruising: never let anyone behind you jump ahead, because he might get a spot that you didn’t see. This wasn’t too hard, because the other guy was driving an old brown Toyota, and Peter was in his BMW 325i.

The first block of Commonwealth was resident-only parking, but every spot was taken, all the way to Berkeley Street. So Peter gunned the engine, shot up to the corner, then turned right onto Berkeley. The Toyota came around the corner a moment later.

Berkeley usually carried two lanes of traffic, even though it had been laid out in the era of the horse and buggy. Peter cut from the right lane to the left, but he didn’t signal, which would have showed weakness. Horns blared, and fingers rose in the Boston salute, but he made a left onto Beacon just as the light turned red, trapping the Toyota.

And . . . success. Peter found a spot. His BMW was slick enough that he was able to snap right in without pulling forward and backing up: a major tactical advantage in the parking wars of Boston.

As the Toyota cruised past, the driver glanced at him, and Peter noticed the yellow and white of a Boston Bruins cap.

“You lose,” muttered Peter. He got out and pushed a button on his key ring. The car whooped. System armed.

He glanced up Beacon Street and noticed that the Toyota had found a spot on the next block. But only the passenger was getting out. The guy in the Bruins cap stayed in the car.
Strange.
But strange things happened on Saturday nights in the Back Bay.

Peter scuffled along through the leaves and turned onto Marlborough. That was when he noticed the passenger from the Toyota turning the corner and coming along Berkeley, too, head down, hands in his pockets.

Peter’s condo was halfway up the Marlborough Street block. He quickened his pace, reached the stoop and pretended to fumble for his keys.

A streetlamp threw a pool of light onto the sidewalk, so Peter expected he’d get a look at this guy, but all he could see was gray hair, black raincoat, scally cap. Whoever the guy was, he went right past, didn’t even glance at Peter Fallon.

Peter watched him walk up to the corner of Clarendon, then turn back toward Beacon. Back to the Toyota? Was this guy casing the house? Or Peter? Most people might wonder a bit and let it go at that. A coincidence.

But not Peter. He lived in the Back Bay and drove a BMW and sold rare and beautiful objects for a living, but he came from a part of town where you never backed down. It had been bred into him. So he moved quickly off the stoop, went along Marlborough, across Clarendon, and onto Beacon. He looked up the block, but the black raincoat was gone and the Toyota was disappearing in the traffic.

So . . . if people were watching Peter, what were they after? A book that he had? It wouldn’t be the first time. Or did this have something to do with Ridley and the Wedges? He had the feeling at the football game that he was sticking his nose into something a lot more complicated than it first seemed. And it wouldn’t be the first time for that, either.

In his condo, Peter kicked off his shoes and flipped on the radio. “Strictly Sinatra” on Saturday nights. That should relax him. And he had an open bottle of ’63 Fonseca port to finish, so he poured a glass and checked his e-mail:
three messages.