Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “Will Wedge”—Orson dabbed tomato sauce from his mustache—“another tenth-generation Yankee floating in a gene pool without tributaries. Loves to play Harry Harvard—”

  “So do you,” said Danny through a mouthful of pizza.

  “I play Orson Lunt, retired antiquarian, bon vivant, and man about town.”

  “Give me more about Wedge,” said Peter.

  Orson lifted another piece of pizza from the box. “Runs the family brokerage, Wedge, Fleming, and Royce. Serves on the boards of prominent financial and cultural institutions. . . .”

  “You can make it sound like the social page,” said Peter.

  Danny gave out with a “shit” as the Patriots fumbled.

  “You know, Dan,” said Peter, “that’s why Mom stopped Dad from watching the games at home. It’s why we’re here on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “So let me swear.”

  “Yes,” said Orson. “Let him swear. It passes for conversation. Now . . . Wedge isn’t all social page. He has a brother, an old radical who’s still living the rebel’s life.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Franklin. I once heard their mother, Harriet, say that however straight Will was, that was how far-out the brother was.”

  “Far-out?” said Peter.

  “Come on, Peter,” said Danny. “Even I know what that means. It means he’s a pinko commie dope-smokin’ hippie.”

  “Where does he live?” asked Peter.

  “Officially, somewhere in Vermont. He has a teaching appointment at a college up there. But from what I hear, he just follows the revolution. One week, he’s riding rafts for Greenpeace, and the next, he’s in New York, picketing trade conventions, and so forth. . . .”

  “Sounds more interesting than Will,” said Peter.

  “Not if you’re in a line of work like ours,” said Orson. “Now why this interest in the Wedge brothers?”

  “Will’s daughter wrote a paper about a Puritan preacher named Thomas Shepard.”

  “What are you onto? Shepard’s Confessions? I thought the Mass. Genealogical Society owned the manuscript.”

  “It’s what’s in the Confessions and the diary.”

  And from out on the warehouse floor came the sound of shouting.

  Through the office windows, Peter saw a burly guy in a Boston Bruins jacket hurrying along a row of crates with Bobby Fallon calling after him, “Hey, you!”

  The hockey fan reached the front door and kept going, as if he didn’t hear a thing.

  Now Peter and Danny were out of the office, moving across the floor. Bobby reached the front door and shouted another “Hey, you!”

  The Bruins fan pointed at himself: Who? Me?

  “Yeah! You!” shouted Bobby. “I know you . . . Jackie Pucks.”

  “Jackie McShane’s my name. Want me to spell it for you?” And before Bobby could say more, Jackie McShane was driving off . . . in his brown Toyota.

  “What’s going on?” Danny asked.

  “He came in just after Uncle Peter . . . poked around, worked his way to a crate of faucet handles by the office door, picked up every one, looked ’em over, and kept peekin’ in the office the whole time.”

  “Maybe he was interested in the football game,” said Danny.

  “Looked to me like he was snoopin’,” said Bobby.

  Peter watched the Toyota spinning away. “Do you know him?”

  “He’s a bum,” said Danny. “Works for Hanrahan Wrecking. He hangs out at the Risin’ Moon. They call him Jackie Pucks because he likes hockey. They say he breaks legs for Bingo Keegan.”

  “Bingo Keegan,” said Orson, “South Boston’s latest self-styled Robin Hood.”

  “Big trouble,” said Danny. “Drug dealin’, loan sharkin’, fencin’ stolen laptops—”

  “Art theft, too,” said Orson. “A lot of people think Keegan was behind the robbery at the Gardner Museum years ago.” Orson shook his head. “Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, gone forever.”

  “Keegan would be about fifty-eight now, wouldn’t he?” asked Peter. “Five foot nine, gray hair, favors a scally cap and a black raincoat?”

  “Have you done somethin’ to piss him off?” asked Danny.

  “I don’t know. But I know who to ask.”

  “Bingo Keegan?” said Ridley Royce. “Who’s he?”

  “Trouble. Hanging around me since I started hanging around you. Why?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Ridley.

  They were having dinner at a sushi bar near Harvard Square. Ridley was drinking saki, Peter a Sapporo tall.

  “I’m guessing,” said Ridley, “that ‘Bingo’ isn’t his given name.”

  “His mother named him James. But when he was a kid, he got caught rippin’ off the bingo game at Gate of Heaven. They say the nickname irritates the hell out of him. And he’s not someone you want to irritate.”

  “Should we order some spider rolls?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Peter. “What does some local thug have to do with this? And why do you think that a play by Aeschylus is worth so much?”

  “If I knew the answers, I wouldn’t have called you in the first place.”

  “I called you. What’s going on, Ridley?”

  “I’m just putting it together myself, Peter. This Keegan guy is a new wrinkle.”

  Peter sat back. “All right. What have you put together? What do you know?”

  Ridley sipped at his saki. “I don’t think the play is by Aeschylus.”

  “Why not? Shepard said it was by Aeschylus.”

  “But he also talked about a ‘modern’ play, a play that John Harvard had owned.” Ridley took another sip of saki, studied the cup for a moment, like an actor playing a scene. “Who were the ‘modern’ playwrights of that time, Peter? Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare.”

  “But—”

  “Have you ever been to Stratford-on-Avon?”

  Peter took a deep breath. “Ridley, the words Stratford-on-Avon to a rare-book dealer are like the word Yahweh to an old Hebrew. Not to be trifled with.”

  “But you’ve been there? You’ve walked from Shakespeare’s birthplace to the house where Katherine Rogers was born? John Harvard’s mother?”

  “It’s right up the street. They call it Harvard House. It’s a museum.”

  “And you’ve been to London? To St. Saviour’s, the Southwark Cathedral, where they have the statue of Shakespeare and the chapel where John Harvard was baptized?”

  “You have my attention, Ridley. Enough with the travelogue.”

  “Peter, the Harvards and the Shakespeares were neighbors in Stratford, and they probably did business in Southwark. The English make a big deal of it.”

  “But John Harvard was a Puritan,” answered Peter. “And Dunster told Nicholson that no modern play came back in the trunk of books Isaac Wedge sent ahead. It’s right in the diary, printed by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.”

  “Go with me on this, Peter.” Ridley leaned closer. “Harvard’s parents weren’t big Puritans, just God-fearing English folk. What if they had a play by their friend Will, a quarto, maybe, and it ended up in their son’s collection? And then someone, for some reason, decided to steal it before the Puritans who ran the college destroyed it—”

  “Rank speculation.”

  “Maybe . . . but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Speculate?”

  Peter couldn’t deny it. Ridley might be drinking too much saki. And he talked so fast that he could barely keep up with himself. And in the overhead light of the sushi bar, his hair plugs looked as ridiculous as tufts of grass growing out of his forehead. But he was right. Speculation was at the heart of the business.

  “All right,” said Peter. “Let’s assume for a minute that it’s a Shakespeare quarto—and not Aeschylus.”

  “Quartos are pretty rare, right?”

  “Right,” said Peter. “A folio was printed on one large piece of paper folded once to make four pages. A qu
arto got its name because there were four leaves, to make eight pages, then the pages were cut. The book was much smaller, from six-by-six inches up to six-by-nine. So someone could carry it around, almost like a paperback. Books like that don’t last. So rare is the word.”

  “So if there’s a quarto out there, it’s worth . . . what?” Ridley threw back a shot of saki. “A million bucks?”

  “Hold on, Ridley. You’re getting ahead of yourself. Let me look a little more, ask a few more questions. Starting with this: Why are you bothering my old girlfriend?”

  “I don’t want to steal her from you.” Ridley chuckled. “It’s just that Evangeline descends from the Howells. And Katharine Nicholson, Isaac’s girlfriend, married a Howell. I want to look into that gene pool.”

  “Under the heading of ‘no stone unturned’?”

  Ridley took his chopsticks out of their paper wrapping, split them, rubbed them together. “We turned over a few stones at the game, didn’t we? I watched what went running. Will Wedge went running right up to your boat this morning.”

  “I figured you were using me yesterday. I’m not surprised.”

  “I’m a producer. I use everybody. And I wanted you to meet the rest of the cast.”

  “Including the mystery guest who followed me home?”

  “He’s a mystery to me, too.”

  Then the meal came, and they turned their attention to tekka maki and maguro and brain-steaming wasabi.

  They had both parked on Mount Auburn Street. Peter made sure that no one followed them. No guys in Bruins jackets. No Bingo Keegans. He also made sure that Ridley could drive, despite the saki.

  “The sushi soaked it all up,” said Ridley.

  “You ate enough to bait a longline.”

  “Speaking of which, I’m going fishing in the morning. Want to join me? Nothing more fun than chasing stripers in my Grady White.”

  “No, thanks. I’m on another kind of fishing expedition now.”

  Ridley got into the car, then rolled down the window. “Peter, I’ve been failing for ten years . . . at everything. If fishing’s all I have to get me out of bed in the morning, I’d rather sleep with the fishes. Help me find that play.”

  Peter leaned closer to him. “This didn’t start with a term paper, did it?”

  “It did for me. I think it did for Will’s daughter, too. But I get the feeling that there are other people after this thing, too.” Ridley took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Peter. “This is from the commonplace book of John Wedge, Isaac’s son. It’s some kind of quote. This is what really got me interested.”

  Peter looked at the quote, three lines of blank verse and beneath it, a parenthetical remark, all in a tight little scrawl. “Where did you get this?”

  But Ridley was already driving off. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  On Sunday night, Peter found a parking spot right away. No one followed him home. And there were no surprising e-mails waiting for him. But there was still some port to finish and enough questions in his head to keep him awake.

  First, he sent Orson Lunt an e-mail:

  Come to the office in the morning. I want to pick your brain about commonplace books and Shakespeare in Puritan New England.

  Then he went to a bookshelf and pulled down a volume of Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, a series of short biographies of all Harvard men up to 1775. If he was going to start this quixotic search by investigating the Wedges, Sibley might point the way. So he turned to Isaac Wedge, member of the Class of 1642:

  Born, 1620, d. 1693. A veteran of the English Civil Wars, a minister to the Indians west of Boston. Married Rebecca Watson, daughter of Indian minister, 1648. In 1656, he became tutor in the Indian college opened in Harvard Yard. But the college failed. So he moved to Sudbury and took up farming. In the year 1674, he became one of the first alumni to give another generation to the college. . . .

  Chapter Seven

  1674-1682

  THE WORDS were written in Ecclesiastes and were imprinted on the soul of Isaac Wedge: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

  The season was summer, and the purpose was a journey from a farm on the banks of the Sudbury River to a college on the banks of the Charles.

  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A father and mother stood in the cool dark of their house, preparing for a parent’s small death in their son’s departure, while a son saddled the horses and prepared to be born into manhood. The journey would cover some twenty miles, the plucking up to be done in the morning, the planting to be completed before dark.

  “I shall miss him sorely,” said Rebecca Watson Wedge, her eyes steady on the square of light pouring through the front door. “Would that the Lord had seen fit to send us another child to ease this pain.”

  “Thank the Lord for what He give,” said Isaac as he filled a sack with books. “One son be gift enough when he’s a son like John.”

  “And those books,” she asked, “be they gift enough for John?”

  “A man will be known by his books,” answered Isaac.

  “So you say . . . Reason enough to keep no book of plays in your house.”

  Isaac cast his eyes at the floorboards beneath which Love’s Labours Won was hidden in a wax-sealed lead box.

  “Isaac, you promised you’d take the play to the college when you took our son.”

  “’Twas my hope that ministers and magistrates would have grown more liberal in their thinking by now,” he answered, “but still I mistrust ’em.”

  “I be but a plain minister’s daughter and true minister’s wife—”

  “You’re no minister’s wife anymore. Raisin’ corn and cuttin’ marsh hay satisfy me more than preachin’.”

  “Be that as it may, keepin’ a play under our roof be blasphemy.”

  “Breakin’ an oath to a friend be blasphemy, too,” answered Isaac. “’Tis my duty to keep the play safe till changes in England make their way here—”

  “What greater change do you need?” she asked. “The king is restored. The Anglicans are in the ascendance, the Puritans in retreat—”

  “There may again be Christmas masses in London churches and new plays in London theaters,” he answered, “but our colony and its college keep to harder standards.”

  “Do you not mean higher standards?” she asked.

  To that he gave no answer. He had never doubted that he should have stolen the play from Eaton, who had stolen it only to sell it when the price was right. But should he not have returned it more openly? Should he not have forced the magistrates to confront their prejudice in public?

  But in Massachusetts, prejudice remained powerful. And in Rebecca’s correspondence with Cousin Katharine, it still echoed. Isaac could not change it, any more than the Reformation had stopped Catholic peasants from placing offerings before the tombs of saints. A play might reveal for man his vanities, his passions, and his appetites, but not in Massachusetts. So it had fallen to Isaac to protect a small shard of knowledge, to keep the play safe until such time as his Puritan brethren were ready for it.

  Still, it pained him that he could not keep his word to Rebecca. It pained him whenever he disappointed her, because, quite simply, he loved her. He loved her as he had from the moment he met her in the college library.

  She had been beautiful then, slender and smiling and filled with simple faith. And she had offered him that faith and her love through all the years that he served in her father’s ministry. And when the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had asked him to teach at the Indian College in Harvard Yard, she had gone with him willingly. But the Indians had hardly gone at all. And Isaac had soon concluded that they no more wished to know the white man’s God than the white man’s books. So he had brought his family to this farm on the banks of the Sudbury, and here had they stayed some ten years.

  Rebecca was heavier now and smiled less, but her faith was still simple
and strong, and she said, “Plays be the devil’s work, Isaac. There be imps in that box you’ve hid ’neath the floorboards.”

  “They’re called characters, dear. Dramatis personae.”

  “Don’t play the educated fool with me. They be imps. Some nights, I come awake, and I can hear ’em scuttlin’ about the great room.”

  “Do they perch on the mantel?” he asked. “Or the table?”

  “They be spectral things. As spectral as the devil himself, walkin’ the dark woods, enlistin’ the Indians to do his work.”

  Isaac did not dispute that. Puritans believed in Satan, especially in his presence among the unconverted Indians. Having preached to the Indians, Isaac saw them simply as human beings in whom ignorance rather than evil resided, little different from the benighted Papists of Padua worshiping the remains of their saint.

  “Isaac,” she demanded, “what will you do with the play?”

  He gestured to the floorboards. “Keep it safe, where ’tis.”

  “And leave it for our son? Force him to wrestle with Satan after us?”

  “Wrestle with Satan?” In the doorway appeared a gangling boy with a few tendrils of black hair covering the blemishes on his chin. “When do I wrestle him?”

  “We all wrestle with him, John,” said Isaac. “Every day. But today, you begin to gain such learning that Satan will never take the field against you.”

  “I hope only that I’m worthy, if he does,” said John Wedge.

  And those humble words, uttered with such sincerity, brought from Rebecca a cry of love and loss familiar to every son who has taken leave of his mother. She threw her arms around his neck, and both parents forgot the business of the play, for there were other matters at hand.

  First, Isaac presented John with a blank book of a hundred leaves. “A commonplace book,” he said, “to be filled with your favorite passages, with lines of verse that strike you as well phrased, and with your ruminations upon them.”

  Then Rebecca gave him a sack containing a dozen cornmeal muffins and a clay pot of blackberry preserves sealed with wax. “To nourish you in your ruminations.”