The Forgers

by Bradford Morrow

  Was it fair of me to think the document could be a forgery, albeit one of preeminent execution, solely because of its source? Probably so. Was it wrong of me to declare it the real article because it betrayed not a single flaw that I could see in the brief time I had to examine it, and thus provided me with nothing to point to as evidence of fakery? Probably not. This was a gnarly problem, one that left me perched on a very uncomfortable fence.

  It takes a lot of truth to tell a lie. Truth must surround the pulsing heart of any lie for it to be convincing, believable. A pack of lies, like a house made from a pack of cards, will never remain standing. But a gracefully designed construction built on both visible and underlying truths had every chance of passing muster, of passing the test of time. As I used to do, Henry Slader might well be covering up his forgeries by handling legitimate works, first offering one and then the other to his clients, in a slow-motion sleight of hand. A wise way to proceed if less profitable. I realized I should have asked Atticus about provenance, just to see if he might not trip up and give me information I could use to cobble together the birthplace of this material. But, at the end of the day, I understood that provenance was every inch as moldable as the document itself. Give me a few hours and I will provide letters of authentication that might easily lift the questionable into the bright, hard light of sterling repute. History is subjective. History is alterable. History is, finally, little more than modeling clay in a very warm room.

  One other matter perturbed me beyond my failure to be dead certain about my friend’s documents. I had to admit to myself—since no one else would understand, with the possible preposterous exception of Slader—that I felt, how to put it, left out. Irrelevant. Here was my nemesis, actively engaged in a world with which I had always felt such an affinity, even in the darkest days when its populace temporarily exiled and loathed me. Now I was on the sidelines, a reluctant observer who was, as time passed, likely losing dexterity, muscle memory, and a thousand little refinements necessary to the art. Yes, I reminded myself, this was my choice. A good and sane choice at that. The magnificent woman asleep on my shoulder, in whose womb rested what society would view as my most meaningful creative accomplishment, was my guiding star. Any move other than to go with her to Kenmare would have been suicidal. And ridding myself of the Baskerville archive only underscored my determination to get out and stay out of the business, childish moments of feeling irrelevant aside. To continue to hang on to my last great forgery would have been like an alcoholic keeping a bottle of Dom Perignon in an otherwise empty wine cellar. What was more, I perversely liked the idea of sticking it to Slader, not that he would necessarily ever know. It was in many ways Slader’s forgery, misattributed to Meghan’s brother, that contributed to Adam Diehl’s wrongful death. Best be rid of the hexed pages, especially in light of the fact that I knew Atticus would be safe selling them.

  As the train pulled in to Penn Station, I gently woke up Meghan, feeling better, as if I had somehow dodged an existential bullet. I recalled the cautionary phrase popular in the world of recovering addicts—be careful of people, places, and things. Thanksgiving afternoon had confronted me with all three relapse triggers. I was grateful to push them aside.

  Much as I wished otherwise, there was no avoiding a visit to Adam’s grave. Feeling self-assured and as full of life as I’d ever seen her, Meghan proposed another field trip as well. “I can’t believe in all these years I’ve never seen your parents’ house in Irvington.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it myself. For all I know, it’s gone through more than one set of owners and looks completely different from the days I lived there as a kid.”

  “One way to find out,” she said. “Plus, aren’t your parents buried near there? I think it would be lovely to go pay our respects before we head back overseas.”

  I have no idea why I hesitated. Her desire to visit my childhood upstate house and the cemetery that quartered my parents’ remains was entirely thoughtful and typical of Meghan.

  “If you prefer not, I’ll totally understand—”

  “No, no. It’s very much the right thing to do.”

  “You’re sure,” she asked, which made me wonder what kind of look I had on my face.

  “I’m all for it,” I told her.

  Montauk was first on the agenda. Meghan and I discussed whether or not it would be useful for us to try to meet with Detective Pollock.

  “Makes sense,” I said, having known for days this was inescapable.

  “On the other hand, what could he tell us that we don’t already know. Maybe we should make the visit just a family affair and not stir up bad memories.”

  “Myself, I wouldn’t be sure what more to ask him, at this point,” I offered.

  “You’re right,” said Meghan, with conviction. “He knows where we are if he needs to reach us. Let’s pay our respects to Adam, walk the beach a little, and get back to the city.”

  We rented a car for the weekend after Thanksgiving and drove out to Montauk after breakfast at the hotel. How to describe Adam’s grave as having a “lived-in look” without sounding insensitive or glib? Obviously, these words never left my mouth, but unfortunately they were what came to mind as we approached the leaf-strewn, very slightly sunken plot. Someone had placed roses at the base of the headstone. They were very defunct now, and blossoms that appeared to have been pink once were now a brownish copper color. Meghan removed them and laid a dozen fresh white ones where they had been.

  “I wonder who?” she whispered before starting tearlessly to weep.

  “Could be anybody,” I said softly, kneeling down next to her and placing my palm at the center of her softly heaving back. “Good Samaritan, I guess.”

  Together we hand-collected a couple of fistfuls of leaves strewn on the grass, stuffed them in the plastic bag we’d used to carry the fresh bouquet, and returned to the car. Meghan said that on Monday before we caught our flight back she wanted to call the cemetery folks and ask if Adam’s grave could be regularly tended in our absence. “It should be better taken care of. I’ll happily pay whatever fee they charge.”

  Seeing that her deep frustration over the open-endedness of the murder investigation manifested itself in dissatisfaction with the cemetery management—in fact, the graveyard was, overall, handsome, tidy, and not at all disrespectful toward its necropolites—I kept quiet. Our walk on the beach was brisk and I could tell that Meghan’s thoughts were every bit as stormy as the clouds that were piling up, nor’easter-like, along the purple horizon. It was rare that my wife ever stayed for long in a black mood. Whenever she was low, I had learned over the years, it was best to leave her to her own thoughts. She had ways of working through issues that I knew I would never comprehend, nor was it useful to try to push the wave faster toward shore. At lunch, while a light rain commenced, Meghan’s usual demeanor returned. Over a couple of down-home lobster rolls, she did pose one disconcerting question, though.

  “Who do you think that was back by the shore?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, setting down my roll on the paper plate.

  “You didn’t see him? Guy about your height, maybe a bit taller. Really short hair, pale, on the thin side?”

  “What about him?”

  “I’m surprised. You’re usually the observant one,” she said. “No, I’m just saying he seemed to be watching us, or you. I thought you might be friends.”

  I took a sip of water and glanced around the room to see if my friend had followed us here while he was at it. “Sorry, but I didn’t notice him. I was more concerned about you, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, if he was a friend he’d have come over to say hello.”

  “Maybe he thought you were famous,” she teased. “Lot of famous types out here on the East End, actors and financiers and the like.”

  “Famous is just about the last thing in this world I would want to be. Maybe you got all this wrong and he was staring at my beautiful wife. That�
��s a far more likely scenario.”

  On the drive back in, I found myself wishing I had seen Slader, if Slader it was. My inclination would have been to toss caution to the wind, walk over to the man, and give him a piece of my mind. Fortunately, that opportunity didn’t arise, as I could only believe that by provoking him I would bring further trouble upon myself. But how did he know we were here? Had Atticus inadvertently mentioned that I looked over his Conan Doyle materials at Thanksgiving and so tipped him off? It wouldn’t have been a difficult stretch to guess that Meghan and I might visit Adam’s grave, and with patience and nothing better to do I suppose he might have gotten some perverse pleasure in staking me out. To what end, I had no idea. More and more, the man seemed unhinged.

  Our Sunday morning excursion up to Irvington—“headless horseman land,” Meghan quipped—was less fraught, although we did have to drive past the exit that I once took on my first attempt to confront Slader in Dobbs Ferry. A nightmare I’d had right before waking up also hovered like a faint skein of mist around me. All that I remember of the dream were the words Henry slayed her. I dismissed the whole business, in part because if it had been Henry Slader on the Montauk beach the day before, I have little doubt he would have sidled up to us and said whatever he had in mind. He may have been unhinged but he was never shy about making demands. Anyway, the man owed me a thank- you letter if he had forged that brilliant “The Cardboard Box” material. Hadn’t I proclaimed it to be authentic?

  The old house looked surprisingly good. A classic brick Tudor whose upper story was fashioned of white stucco with traditional wooden crisscross decoration, the house had the same lead glass windows of my childhood, fronted by noble trees in orange, red, and gold autumn glory. Resembling a pen-and-ink drawing by the wonderful British illustrator Jessie M. King, it was grander than I remembered. Whoever owned it now had taken care of it admirably.

  “Shall we knock on the door?” Meghan asked.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Come on, nobody would mind.”

  We did walk up the snaking path to the door and ring the bell, but no one was home.

  “That’s for the best,” I told her, as we headed back to the car. “Too many ghosts better left alone.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, as we set off for the cemetery.

  She wasn’t necessarily right but I suddenly felt an urgency to get this visit over and done with. The family mausoleum housed my father’s parents and other ancillary relatives I never met nor honestly much cared about. Interesting that I could write out from memory fairly detailed ancestral family trees for some of the authors whose letters I had forged most often but my own skeleton crew I barely bothered with. We didn’t stay long, and as for the rest of our trip, it ended quietly with dinner for two in our hotel room.

  The phrase When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere cycled around in my head during our flight back to Shannon. Whoever wrote that—I looked it up when we were back in Kenmare; Jimmy Breslin, a writer I had never read but recalled my father liked a lot—I appreciated the sardonic if heartfelt whimsy that informed it; the hometown narcissism that fed it; the Gotham greater-than-thou philosophy that underscored it. But for me, my embrace of the idea was of a different sort. I both wanted to leave New York and had no interest in going anywhere. Truth of it was, I had already been to more than enough anywheres for a lifetime. I was done with anywhere and longed to the core of my soul, assuming such a thing resided in me, for the great solace of a workable nowhere.

  TO BE BACK IN THE COTTAGE was to be back home. That was my first thought when I woke up, a little jet-lagged but eager to vault back into my life here, comfortably narrow as it was. Even the nostalgic sights of my upstate childhood house and the familiar streets of New York couldn’t hold a candle to the quasi-tranquility I experienced in my adopted Kenmare, hand-grinding coffee in our quaint cottage kitchen, putting on my casual clothes to go back to work at the stationer’s, consulting with Meghan where we should get together for lunch that day, should we order peat bricks, or rather turf, for the coming winter now that the November weather was turning nicely foul. Simple things like that.

  Mr. Brion Eccles, owner of Eccles & Sons, Stationery and Print, knew of my proficiency with calligraphy even while he knew nothing of its dangerous incarnations in times past. No doubt it was one of the reasons he hired me, as early on in my tenure I was put to work executing handwritten wedding invites, baby shower announcements, citations, diplomas, whatever required a fancy script on some dull-as-dishwater document. I did these because I was asked to and because I think Meghan viewed the exercise as a positive use of my skill, if not a kind of rehabilitation. Although it was akin to asking a concert pianist to bang out “Chopsticks” on an untuned spinet, I diligently went about my business with nary a complaint. Having no nefarious scheme in mind, no thought of any future activity that might carry me back into my former hidden life, I did my best not to give in to schoolboy whimsy and scribe, say, a fiftieth wedding anniversary party invitation in King-Emperor Edward the Eighth’s hand. I figured if Edward could abdicate his god-given calling for love, so could I.

  It was, then, with restrained excitement on my part that Eccles pulled me off one of these somewhat galling calligraphy projects and asked if I could give it a try at working the Vandercook proof press he used for printing pamphlets, broadsides, and the like. He said his shoulder was aching, and because the press obliged the operator to crank the heavy roller holding the folio of paper across the type bed, back and forth, back and forth, he wasn’t able to make a job deadline without help.

  To say I took to it like a duck to water would be to employ a cliché—a lame duck of a cliché, at that—while understating an unimpeachable truth. I adored the smell of the viscous ink and tang of machine oil; adored the heft and smooth movement of the handle and roller; adored the repetitive sound of type lightly biting the skin of the paper. Above all, I adored seeing sheet after sheet of sharply printed leaves pile up. The textual contents of what I was printing became absolutely secondary to the act itself. I was reminded of my first writing lessons under my mother’s tutelage, a watershed experience.

  When Mr. Eccles thanked me for doing such a nice job, saying, “You’re a quick study,” I thanked him right back for the opportunity of running his press and offered to do it any time he needed me to in the future. “I may well take you up on that,” he responded.

  At home I announced, “I have news.”

  “Talk to me,” Meghan said.

  “Eccles had me run the Vandercook for the first time today.”

  Without a hint of sarcasm or irony, she marveled, “Apprentice no more. We have a Gutenberg in the family.”

  “Well, hang on. I doubt Gutenberg ever printed a four-up wedding invitation.”

  “‘Four-up’? Listen to you, mister. You already sound like an old-salt pressman.”

  “He threatens to ask me to do more. Even said he’d be willing to teach me how to set and lock the type, clean up the press, from soup to nuts, if I was interested.”

  “Seems like you are.”

  “To be honest, I think it’s a little bit of a childhood dream come true. As I’m afraid we both know all too well, the handwritten word’s my first love—”

  “Bad mistress more like.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, so nodded before going on to say, “But typography and typefaces, my dad tried to teach me a little about them. He had sets of Print, a quarterly journal that was all about graphic arts and type, and another called The Colophon, from the thirties, just chockablock full of color illustrations, beautiful designs, and type treatments. Other kids had their picture books of Dr. Seuss and Babar and the rest. Me, I had something like four dozen hardcovers of The Colophon.”

  “Come on, you read Cat in the Hat and things like that.”

  “Only because of my mom. My father and I had loftier illustrated texts to concern ourselves with,” I said, laughing along with Meghan.
“Point is, I got to love those fonts. Bodoni, Caslon, Gill Sans. We even had a cat named Bembo. And old Eccles has trays and trays of this kind of type. I feel like a kid in a candy shop.”

  “You’re a character. A true nerd.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, right?”

  “I wouldn’t love you so much if you weren’t,” she said, but then threw me off a little by adding, “Just don’t go printing up any rare nineteenth-century poetry broadsides by Poe or Keats or something.”

  “Not funny,” I shot back, with probably a far more snarling tone of voice than her comment had invited. What point would there be in lying to myself about the fact that this very idea had crossed my mind the first moment I set eyes on Eccles’s proof press? Or, at bare minimum, printing up facsimile bookplates of collectible authors—an E. M. Forster or Edgar Rice Burroughs, say—to glue to the front pastedowns of others’ books, thus making them into more valuable association copies given their estimable provenance. And yet just because I had expertise in one kind of forgery didn’t mean I could, let alone should, attempt to learn another. Great painters don’t necessarily make great sculptors, apples are not oranges, and so forth. I struggled to soften my tone. “Been there, done that. Or, I mean, been near there, done something like that.”

  “Done and forever finished with that, too, right?”

  “Meghan, drop it,” I warned her, immediately ashamed of myself for being so cross. I was defensive, of course, and she was simply behaving like the protective, decent wife she was, one whose concerns about her husband were more than justified. Imagine what a dog’s life mine might have been without her. For her sake, for our child’s, I needed to stay on the path of probity as best I could, needed to be not just a loving but a forthright, honest man. So easy to say those words to myself and at the same time so difficult, I knew, to live up to such standards. I got up from where I was sitting, walked over to her, and kissed her, saying in little more than a whisper, “I’m sorry, Meg. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. You don’t deserve it, god knows.”