Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  Both were lying, and while they could not be certain of their grandfather’s gullibility, they were not surprised to see each other on the Cambridge Common just after dark.

  Caleb and three friends were coming out of a tent where people were selling rum. Lydia and Sally were standing in front of a fruit stand, eating fresh peaches sold from a bushel basket by a Rhode Island farmer. And brother and sister both were giddy.

  Fresh peaches could do that to a thirteen-year-old girl. Rum could do it to a sixteen-year-old boy. And the excitement of commencement eve could do it to anyone.

  There was fiddle-and-pipe music coming from the dancing tent, loud cheers coming from a gambling tent, war whoops and shouts rising from a tent where local Indians challenged farmers to contests with bow and arrow, laughter rising everywhere, and hundreds of people hurrying from one tent to the next.

  “Caleb!” Lydia called to her brother. “Do I smell rum?”

  “You do.” He burped. “And I taste it.”

  “Would you like to walk with us, girls?” asked one of the other boys.

  “Where to?” asked Lydia.

  “To the end of the tent row, to see the play. It starts in five minutes.”

  “And once the constable hears,” said Caleb, “it won’t last five minutes more.”

  Lydia looked at Sally and shrugged, as if to say that they had been disobedient enough already. What further harm could they do? And off they went with the boys, down the torchlit “street” that ran through the center of the tent village, a thoroughfare of straw, watermelon rinds, peach pits, and trash.

  At the end was a platform in front of a wagon on which a rainbow-hued canvas had been raised as a backdrop. A handsome sign proclaimed BURTON BONES AND CO., PLAYERS OF THE MASQUE, and beneath that, more crudely lettered, TONIGHT, 7:30, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, BY WILL. SHAKESPEARE.

  An old slave was beating a drum in front of the platform while a young man wandered through the crowd, playing a flute. When the crowd had grown large enough, the young man left off playing and cried, “Good gentlefolk, a prologue to our play. Give heed to Burton Bones!” And he swept his arm toward the platform, where there was a loud bang, a flash of light, and a puff of smoke.

  People jumped. Others cried out. Still others went hurrying toward the noise.

  As if by magic, an actor in the robes of a Venetian gentleman stepped through the smoke, executed a bow, and proclaimed, “Your honor’s players, hearing your amendment, / Are come to play a pleasant comedy; / For so your doctors hold it very meet, / Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood / And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy: / Therefore they thought it good you hear a play, / And frame your mind to mirth and merriment, / Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”

  What a fine sentiment, thought Lydia.

  From behind the curtain stepped two actors. One said, “Tranio, since for the great desire I had / To see fair Padua, nursery of arts, / I am arrived in fruitful Lombardy . . .”

  Padua. Lombardy. Italy. Lydia could not imagine the beauty and romance of such places, but standing there in that field of tents, in the midst of that cow pasture, on the edge of the civilized world, she tried.

  Then she noticed Selectman William Brattle go bustling away as if he had seen enough. And that, she knew, was a bad sign.

  How could his grandchildren be so deceitful? How could they be so depraved? The old reverend hurried through the village, the constable’s messenger at his side. With every step, he jabbed his walking stick like a rapier and asked himself again the hardest question of all: How could they be so stupid?

  And how could any group of actors be so stupid as to think they could display their filth on Cambridge Common, whether at commencement or in the dead of winter?

  At the edge of the Common, William Brattle was waiting with the constable and three deputies. Though educated at the college, Brattle was known as “a man of universal superficial knowledge.” He had never trained as a doctor and yet had treated the students and people of Cambridge for years. He had served no legal apprenticeship and yet had become a judge. He had never fired a shot in anger and yet had gained the rank of brigadier in the Massachusetts militia. He was prosperous, pompous, and, by virtue of his belly and rank, perfectly fit to bear the nickname “Brigadier Paunch.”

  “We would have chased them off,” he announced to Abraham, “but there’s no written law ’gainst the masque, so best we put God’s law on our side.”

  “Trust that it is,” said Reverend Abraham.

  “And be warned,” said Constable Henry Hull, a hard-eyed little man, “your grandchildren is standin’ ’fore the stage, listenin’ like ’twas one of your own fine services.”

  “I thank you,” said the reverend, though he sensed irony in Hull’s words, for no man had fallen asleep more often or snored more loudly during Wedge’s services.

  “We’ll chase ’em off,” said Hull as the group made its way onto the Common. “Better, though, if we had a written law, like what they made in Providence last year.”

  “Indeed,” said Brattle. “Give them a stiff fine and these dress-wearing actors’ll damn soon take their filth elsewhere.”

  “Dresses? What play is it?” asked Abraham.

  “Something about a shrew,” said Brattle.

  “Shrews?” said the constable. “They can be nasty little beasts.”

  “This shrew is a woman,” said Brattle.

  “Oh,” said the constable, “they can be nasty little beasts, too.”

  People made way as this contingent marched toward the end of the tent row and came up to the platform stage, where three actors—one in a dress and woman’s wig—held the audience transfixed.

  The old actor said, “Now, Signior Petruchio, how speed you with my daughter?”

  “How but well, sir? how but well? / It were impossible I should speed amiss.”

  Having grabbed torches of their own, Constable Hull and Selectman Brattle were now pushing their way toward the front of the crowd, while Abraham looked for his grandchildren amid the shadows.

  The old actor turned to the one in the dress and said, “Why, how now, daughter Katharine! in your dumps?”

  “Call you me daughter?” was the response, in a high, put-on, angry voice.

  The audience roared, as much at the voice as the words.

  And Abraham Wedge, who believed in the power of God and the truth of John Calvin, could not believe his own eyes. For in looking at the stage, he thought he saw his own father, long dead and gone to his reward. Except that his own father would never have worn the robes of a Venetian gentleman.

  Then the harsh voice of Henry Hull cried, “Burton Bones! I command you to stop, under penalty of the law.”

  And Burton Bones stepped out of the role of Signior Baptista, father of Kate, and shouted, “We bring joy to New England! He who stops us is an enemy of such.”

  Brattle shouted, “Cease and desist!”

  By now, Caleb and Lydia had seen their grandfather, and both were moving to the edge of the crowd, putting distance between themselves and the reverend.

  “There is no written law against the masque in Massachusetts,” shouted Burton Bones, “and never has there been. So by whose authority do you stop our play?”

  “By the authority of the Congregational Church!” shouted Abraham Wedge. “Planted on these shores by the grace of God, anno Domini 1630.”

  “And who claims this authority?” answered Burton Bones.

  “Your own brother!”

  A gasp went through the crowd.

  The eyes of Caleb and Lydia met, each face mirroring the other’s shock. Caleb mouthed the word “brother?” Lydia pointed to the stage and said, “Our great-uncle?”

  Brattle, who moved with all the grace of a loose-rolling barrel, swung his whole body—shoulders, wig, belly, and torch—toward Abraham and said, “Brother?”

  “Brother!” boomed the actor who called himself Burton Bones. Then he pulled off his wig an
d said, “If your name be Abraham Wedge, then ’tis so. I am Benjamin Wedge, returned to Massachusetts to bring joy.”

  “Joy? Joy?” Abraham Wedge seemed staggered by a mingling of emotions—shock, surprise, but, above all, fury. “You do not bring joy. You bring the depravity of a man dressed as a woman, the waste of idle entertainment. The—”

  “Fire!” shouted Demetrius the slave. “Fire! It’s the fat one with the torch!”

  “Fire? Where?” Brattle looked frantically left and right, then looked above him as the flames from his torch chewed into the canvas overhanging the little stage. “Fire!”

  The actor in the dress leapt off the platform and shoved Brattle and his torch away. The other actors tore at the flaming canvas.

  Some in the crowd ran for water. Some ran in panic, for nothing could spread as fast as a fire in a tent city. And some stood by, laughing and shouting as though all of it were part of the show.

  Brattle cried for the constable to arrest the actor who struck him.

  Burton Bones cried for water. So someone hit him in the face with a bucketful, which brought more laughter from the crowd and curses from the actors.

  “Let it burn,” shouted Abraham, “as punishment to you and warning to others that true joy is never brought by . . . by men in dresses!”

  “Out of the way, Grandfather!” Caleb Wedge nearly knocked Abraham down, bulled through the crowd, and delivered a bucket of water to douse the flames.

  “You may stay the night,” said Abraham a few hours later. “I am a Christian. I would not turn out a stranger, or a brother, or one who is both.”

  “Thank you.” Benjamin Wedge sat in the wing chair by the fireplace, sweated and sooted, and sipped a glass of port.

  “Be thankful I spoke for you,” said Abraham, “or the constable would have had you before the magistrate in the morning.”

  “It would not be the first time,” said Benjamin.

  Abraham stood over his brother, his shock having worn down to the anger beneath, a lifetime of anger at a brother who had fled a Sudbury farm and left a family that loved him. Abraham jabbed a finger at him and said, “But you are to leave here in the morning, you and all your players.”

  Benjamin looked at the children, who sat on the seraph in the middle of the room.

  Lydia was taking in every word and nuance of this reunion. Caleb was holding his hand against his mouth as if to hold in all the rum he had drunk.

  Benjamin said, “I was hoping to show the children the wonder of the theater.”

  “Precisely why you leave in the morning. If you are not on the road by daybreak, heading again for New York, where these things are permitted, I shall have you arrested.”

  “On what charges?” asked Benjamin.

  “Assault upon a selectman, creating a nuisance inimical to good order, theft.”

  “I’ve stolen nothing.”

  “That slave. He’s the one who ran off with you, is he not?”

  “One cannot steal what is not property.”

  “I do not believe in slavery,” said Abraham, “but I believe in the law, which requires me to tell the descendants of Reverend Bleen that their property has been returned to the province.”

  Benjamin looked at the two young people. “Children—”

  “You have nothing to say to them”—Abraham glanced at his grandchildren—“though I do.”

  Lydia ignored the anger in her grandfather’s voice and said, “I abhor slavery, too. And I thought the play was wonderful . . . what I saw of it.”

  “Good night and go to bed,” said Abraham. “The both of you.”

  Caleb stood slowly, as if to keep the contents of his stomach from sloshing, and crossed the room to offer Benjamin his hand.

  Benjamin looked the boy up and down. “You have the family height. I can see the family intelligence in your eyes. And the smell of rum shows you’re a lad with some curiosity about the world.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Caleb burped.

  And Lydia spoke up. “Caleb is among the best mathematics students at the college. He went with Professor Winthrop to Newfoundland and used scientific instruments.”

  Benjamin nodded. “A Wedge . . . a man of science. The world is changing.”

  “Indeed it is,” grumbled Abraham.

  Then Benjamin asked Lydia: “And what do you wish for?”

  Lydia realized it was the first time that anyone had asked her the question. She was so surprised that for once, she was speechless.

  “She is to be a wife and mother,” said Abraham, “to some unfortunate soul.”

  “I would also be a poet,” she said.

  “I should like to read your work,” answered Benjamin.

  “Grandfather thinks my poems are whimsical and childish,” she said.

  “So are Shakespeare’s comedies,” answered Benjamin. “Till you think on them. Then they become a map of the human heart.”

  “See, Grandfather”—she turned to the old man—“just what I’ve said to you.”

  “And I said, ‘Good night,’ to both of you,” said Abraham.

  The two old men listened as the children went into the foyer and mounted the stairs. One set of footfalls went all the way up, but the heavier seemed to stop halfway, then come stumbling down again. The front door was thrown open, and a moment later, the sound of retching could be heard in the bushes.

  Benjamin said to his brother, “Raising children must be a hard proposition.”

  “Harder than you can imagine, especially for the second time.”

  Benjamin said, “’Tis good to see you, Brother.”

  “’Tis good to see you, however you are seen. But why? Why now? Why so late?”

  “I could not die without seeing this world again,” answered Benjamin. “And without doing what Father once urged me—to step forward and stand in the open.”

  “You broke their hearts, you know. Father and Mother both.”

  Benjamin looked down at his hands. “Once set upon the road with a runaway slave, there was nothing else for me to do.”

  Abraham removed his coat and put his wig on the stand. Then he and his brother talked far into the night.

  The next morning dawned bright and clear, as it always did on the day of the Harvard commencement.

  In the Wedge barn, where Burton Bones and his players had spent the night, the actors packed their wagon, then downed gallons of tea and pounds of bread and jam served by the housekeeper, Mrs. Beale. Then Benjamin called for the green velvet suit he had worn into Cambridge the day before.

  “No need to be puttin’ on your fancies,” said Demetrius. “We’re leavin’.”

  “Not quite yet,” said Benjamin.

  “We’s supposed to go at dawn,” answered Demetrius. “And I’m nervous enough as ’tis. That constable, I think he’s thinkin’ to send me back to Sudbury.”

  “Aye,” said one of the others. “And that selectman may yet press charges.”

  “I missed my own commencement,” said Benjamin. “I’ll see this one. Besides, the roads be so choked now, we’ll never get out. So stay here and stay out of sight.”

  In the village square, the crowds were gathering for the “great and last day.” The spectacle was beginning with the arrival of the governor’s mounted entourage, preceded by the constable and six deputies. Waiting for them in the courtyard before Holden Chapel were portly old President Holyoke, the tutors, the Corporation, and all the candidates in their black gowns.

  Benjamin Wedge had no use for the ceremony, except as a distraction that allowed him to slip unnoticed into Harvard Hall.

  Inside, the college steward was directing preparations for the commencement banquet. The long tables were covered with linen. China plates clattered politely in a place where students ordinarily used pewter. And the Great Salt of 1650, the oldest piece of silver in the college inventory, sat in its place of honor before the president’s chair.

  A scene full of ancient tradition, thought Benjamin, all grandly
symbolic and theatrical, in a province where theater was prohibited. Such a place did not deserve the fine work secreted in the library above the Great Hall.

  So he took the stairs, levering himself with his walking stick, as if he were far older and weaker than he was. Once at the top, he moved quickly to the library door.

  He knocked but heard neither answer nor footfall, so he slipped the handle off his cane, revealing a long, thin blade, perfect for probing locks. He bent down and—

  The door was pulled open.

  Benjamin stood up so quickly that he was certain he’d raise suspicion.

  But the young man on the other side of the door seemed too startled. He looked Benjamin up and down and said, “The library is closed, sir.”

  Benjamin slipped his cane back together and bowed. “I beg your pardon, Mr.—”

  “Spurgeon. Tutor Spurgeon.”

  “You’re the keeper of the library, then?”

  The young man nodded. He wore an academic gown and a harried expression, for he was clearly late to the ceremony.

  “Beggin’ your indulgence”—Benjamin put on his oldest voice—“I be but an ancient graduate, back to see the school. Many’s the happy day I spent in the library. So—”

  “That voice—”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re the actor, the one who played Signior Baptista.” Tutor Spurgeon closed and locked the door behind him and said, “You were ordered to leave Cambridge. What are you doing here?”

  Benjamin looked down at his hands, his favorite gesture of contrition. “My story is true. I’ve just come back to see the library.”

  “Well . . . not today. And if your intent is to find some play to put on here—”

  Just then, the meetinghouse bell began to peal.

  “I am late,” said Tutor Spurgeon. “So I’ll thank you to be on your way.”

  And there was nothing Benjamin could do, except to calculate, as he went down the stairs, that it would be at least a year before Tutor Spurgeon left his position and an old actor could walk into Harvard Hall, lift the bottom shelf in section twelve, and retrieve an ancient play. But it would only be a few minutes before Spurgeon took his place in the procession. Then an old actor might take his advantage.