Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “Even you must agree on that,” whispered Victor.

  “He’s got it wrong, as usual,” said Dickey. “Increase Mather hanged witches.”

  “It was Cotton Mather who hanged them. The son of Increase.”

  “So the son didn’t learn from the father,” said Dickey. “There’s a lesson in that.”

  “Yes. We must take care that our children develop consciences.”

  iv

  A few weeks after the reunion, Victor sat down with Barbara to discuss that very topic—the development of their sons’ consciences. He could not have anticipated where the conversation would go.

  It was one of those glorious October days when it seemed that there could be no place more beautiful than New England. Husband and wife were out by the saltwater swimming pool, which filled when the tide rose, was warmed by the sun, and drained when the tide went out. The perfect Yankee filtration system, Victor called it. And out beyond the patio, the blue Atlantic shimmered.

  Victor was reading the Wall Street Journal.

  Barbara was stirring martinis. “How much did we make this week?”

  “We did well. You married an equities genius, my dear.”

  She gave him a martini and sat in the lawn chair next to him. Then she touched her martini glass to his. “To money.”

  He laughed.

  Then she picked up the book that had arrived in the mail that day, about the size of Life magazine, with a red spiral binding: John Harvard’s Tercentenary 1636-1936.

  “They must love you,” she said. “There are two pictures of you at University Hall, when they opened the Bicentenary packet.”

  He did not look up from the Journal. He had already seen the pictures, but he was curious about her impression. “What am I doing?”

  “Shuffling papers, it looks like.”

  “That’s me, paper pusher of the Alumni Association.” He lowered the Journal. “Barbara, I’ve been thinking about the boys—”

  But she was flipping through the book. “Not a single woman.”

  “When Radcliffe is here for three hundred years, they can have a tercentenary.”

  “Where are the female scholars, the women who fought for education, the honorary degree recipients who do their work even when they have hot flashes, the—”

  “Is that why you didn’t go to any of the events? You were angry that there were no women honored?”

  Barbara put down her drink, squinted a bit in the sun, which lit up her wrinkles and the gray hair advancing relentlessly, and said, “Victor, there’s something I’ve been thinking about, ever since the boys went off to school.”

  “I’ve been thinking about something, too.”

  “Victor—”

  But he kept talking. “We’re worth four million dollars now, you know.”

  “Yes, I know, but Victor—”

  “We’ll never spend this money in our lifetime. I want to use some of it to establish the Wedge Charitable Trust.”

  “Victor, that’s very nice, but—”

  “The objective will be to find ways to combat ignorance and build the meritocracy.”

  “Victor,” she said.

  He did not hear the tension in her voice or see it in her face. His mind was spinning and his eyes were focused on the blue horizon. “It will be great for the boys and great for us. But we can’t be sure about where the family will be in two generations, so we’ll make it a trust rather than a foundation. Run it under rule of perpetuities statutes, so that twenty-one years after our sons pass away—”

  “Victor!”

  “Death is something we all have to face. . . . Twenty-one years later, their heirs will make final decisions about the money, all within parameters we establish.” He finally looked at her. “What do you think?”

  “I want a divorce.”

  He sat up so quickly that he knocked his glass onto the patio and it shattered. “What?”

  “I sit up here all day, all alone, painting watercolors of the ocean and wishing my boys were little again.”

  “But . . . divorce? Have you gone crazy?”

  “I will go crazy if I don’t get one.” She stood. “I want to go to the Southwest and paint like that Georgia O’Keeffe. I want to go to France and paint like the Impressionists. I want to go to Russia and paint like Miró.” And she walked toward the house.

  “But Barbara—”

  She stopped in the doorway. “What?”

  “You couldn’t paint the walls of our bathroom without leaving streaks.”

  “Stay here tonight. By tomorrow, have your things moved into the Harvard Club.”

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have made that bathroom remark.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  BY THE time Peter Fallon reached the Class Report for 1941, he thought that he understood Victor Wedge, and he liked him:

  The shades have darkened since last we met, in both our private life and the public scene. Some of you may have heard that Barbara and I divorced a few years back, a ghastly experience. I do not recommend it. My sons have offered solid companionship, however. Jimmy lives in Kirkland House, Ned in Lowell. At home football games, you will find the three of us dispensing good cheer at the tailgate of our ’34 beach wagon, which we affectionately call the Wedge Woody.

  But these days, good cheer is like thin oil floating on a deep lake of concern. At the Tercentenary, FDR saw what was coming and reminded us “to stand for the freedom of the human mind and to carry the torch of truth.”

  I tried to keep those words in mind when I established the Wedge Charitable Trust, which my boys and I administer. We have provided scholarship money, supported charities in Boston, and sought other ways to overcome the ignorance around us. Our gifts are not large, deriving from the interest of the trust itself, but I pray that in time, they will be looked upon as “small gifts of majestic proportion.”

  That term was coined by an ancestor who promised Harvard such a gift. She did not specify it, but she wished us to strive for it, as though she anticipated the words of President Lowell: “Two things are always new—youth and the quest for knowledge.”

  Her gift a hundred years ago was to pass to Wedge generations a spirit of the quest. I pass it to you. As we age, if we would keep our youth, we should continue the quest in our own lives.

  So . . . had he found that small gift of hers? Had he sold it to establish a trust? Or had he given it to the college in 1918? This much was certain: whatever Lydia had said about her gift, Victor Wedge had given it a meaning of his own.

  Peter turned to the Class Report for the thirty-fifth reunion of 1911:

  *Victor Wedge died July 9, 1944. He served in Lafayette Escadrille and Ninety-fourth Pursuit Squadron during World War I. He became a principal in Wedge, Fleming, and Royce, a firm specializing in equities and investment banking. At the time of his death, he was serving in the Office of Budget and Management. He was on a flight to England when his plane crash-landed in Iceland. At Harvard, he played football and was a member of the Harvard Aeronautical Society and the Porcellian. He also served in several capacities in the Alumni Association. He leaves his two sons, James, ’41, and Edward, ’44.

  Peter copied the seven installments of Victor Wedge’s life and felt a twinge of disappointment—it could almost have been called grief. He had been looking forward to reading more, but Victor had already told him plenty.

  Then he headed for Houghton Library, home to Harvard’s collection of rare books and manuscripts. Not surprisingly, security was tight there.

  The scholarly value of, say, Hawthorne’s manuscript of The House of the Seven Gables was immeasurable. And the dollar value would be incalculable. Likewise the value of almost any book in the rooms housing the personal libraries of individual collectors, or any of the stacks containing contributions from men such as William Augustus White, ’63, who set out to gather as much Elizabethan literature as possible, in the hope of providing an intellectual context and a cultural explanation for Shakespeare’s ge
nius.

  Whenever Peter went into Houghton, he wanted to dip his finger in a font of holy water and bless himself. Instead, he did a mental genuflection before the glass case where John Harvard’s only surviving book, Christian Warfare, was displayed, a folio-size volume open to an engraving of Satan wrapping himself around a text. Behind it were first editions of many of the other volumes that had been destroyed in the 1764 fire. Harvard had been collecting replacements for years, but it was a measure of how fragile all books were, of how susceptible to time, use, and mildew, of how miraculous it was when they survived, that some of the Harvard library might never be replaced.

  In the card catalog, Peter found what he was looking for: “Shakespeare, William, Love’s Labours Lost. 1598 quarto. Gift of Victor Wedge, given in Memory of Lieutenant James F. Callahan, November 5, 1918.”

  Peter filled out a call slip and was asked if the facsimile would be sufficient. Standard practice at a place like Houghton, and usually the facsimile was enough.

  Peter explained that his interest wasn’t in the content but in the binding and endpapers. Soon he was slipping on white cotton gloves to examine one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, street value of about a million dollars. He didn’t take long with it. The binding was the same red vellum as that on the book in the portrait. And written on the endpapers were two names: “Burton Bones,” and beneath that, “Ex libris Lydia Wedge Townsend.”

  Then there was a note from Lydia: “We leave this gift, left to us by an old actor born Benjamin Wedge, as thanks for your hospitality. Your loving American daughter-in-law, Lydia.” Then there was an inscription from Lady Townsend, signing the book over to Victor Wedge.

  Peter called Will Wedge once he was outside and told him what he had discovered.

  “It would seem that Benjamin Wedge, under the name of Burton Bones, came back for the book. Somehow it went to Lydia Wedge Townsend. And she brought it to England. Copley painted it on the table in front of her. Victor brought it back and gave it to Harvard in the name of a classmate.”

  After a long pause, Will Wedge asked, “So . . . case closed?”

  “There are still plenty of questions,” said Peter. “Plenty of things we’ll never fill in. Like . . . how did this Benjamin Wedge become Burton Bones, and why doesn’t Lydia tell us anything about him—”

  “But,” said Will, “on the matter of a Shakespeare manuscript . . .”

  “Case closed,” said Peter. But there were still plenty of questions to answer, about Ridley’s death and Bingo Keegan and an attack on the Charles River.

  “Can you put your opinion in writing?” asked Will Wedge. “Send it to Charles Price, and we’re done.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you and Price are engaged in.”

  “Negotiations are delicate, but if things work out, the Wedge Charitable Trust will invent a scholarship for Boston Latin track stars who go to Harvard. And your son will go to the top of the list.”

  Peter decided to deliver the news in person to Charles Price.

  Two hours later, he was in an office park above Route 128, the six-lane semicircle of concrete that hemmed Boston, “America’s Technology Highway.” The high-tech industry had been born along 128 in the fifties, when all the local university brain factories started pumping out young engineers and scientists like molecules of smart gas. By the nineties, high tech had also made it “America’s Traffic Highway.”

  Price Research occupied a two-tiered building with glass walls, set into a hillside above a Waltham reservoir. There was soft rock playing in the foyer, computers humming everywhere, lots of smart molecules bouncing around, all of them dressed for casual Friday, even though it was Monday.

  The secretary brought Peter to the corner office and offered him a sparkling water. The only decoration was a bust of Shakespeare on a bookcase lined with programming manuals. The view was across the reservoir to the highway.

  Charlie Price strolled in wearing a nylon warm-up suit. “Not bad for a computer geek from Cleveland, eh, Fallon?”

  “If you were ever a computer geek,” said Peter, “it was back when computers were as big as minivans.”

  “I used a slide rule.” Price sat at his desk. “Slide rules and stationary horses.”

  “Stationary horses?”

  “Gymnastics. My life at Harvard: math, gymnastics, politics . . . and Shakespeare.”

  “So, were you a Young Republican?”

  “Hell, no. I was a long-haired hippie radical. A much better way to get laid.” He tapped a computer key and glanced at his e-mail while he said to Fallon, “You didn’t drive all the way out here to trade old college tales.”

  “I was wrong about that Shakespeare play. It didn’t burn in Harvard Hall.”

  As Price scanned an e-mail, he said, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Harvard owns it.”

  Price looked Fallon in the eye. “Tell me more.”

  Peter crossed his legs. “Not until you tell me what Will Wedge is up to.”

  “I don’t discuss private business,” said Price without a trace of irritation, as if dropping his jocular tone was enough. “Now . . . either you can tell me more about this, or I’ll give Bertram Lee a call.”

  “Sometimes I wonder why you do business with Bertram Lee when—”

  “When I could do it with you? Bertram’s my wife’s uncle. I keep it in the family, like the Wedges with that Shakespeare manuscript.”

  “No,” said Peter. “The Wedges gave it to Harvard in 1918.”

  And Price laughed out loud. “You’re not talking about that quarto of Love’s Labours Lost, are you? The one signed by Burton Bones and Lydia?”

  “You know?”

  “I’ve looked at every quarto in Houghton. I saw that one ten years ago. It is not what we’re after here.”

  Peter tried to keep from showing surprise, so he just angled his chin a little bit and said, “Victor Wedge went to England, brought it back, and—”

  “Yeah . . . yeah . . . Will Wedge’s grandfather gave it in honor of an ancestor of—” Price caught himself.

  “Who? Whose ancestor?” asked Peter.

  Price sat back and picked at his mustache, as if he was considering how much to tell. Then he said, “Now I know why I do business with Bertram Lee.”

  “The guy’s name was Callahan. Who was his descendant?” Peter persisted.

  Price ignored the question. “Imagine it, Fallon, a Shakespeare manuscript and a lost play to boot. You dug up the proof: ‘Written in the bard’s own hand . . . we cry Love’s Labours Won.’ Benjamin Wedge wrote that. Later on, his alter ego found a copy of Love’s Labours Lost and wrote his name in it.”

  “Sibley doesn’t tell us anything about Benjamin’s alter ego.”

  “Sibley did great research, but somehow, Burton Bones fell through the cracks. And Sibley didn’t have the internet. Burton Bones and his troupe were chased out of every colony in New England in the 1760s. Last seen at the Harvard commencement six months before Harvard Hall burned.”

  Peter uncrossed his legs and crossed them again and hoped he didn’t look too stupid. It never paid to look stupid. “So, you think he came back for the play?”

  “I thought that before I met you. I thought that after you came and told me that the manuscript had been lost in the fire. And I think it now. I’d much rather think it’s out there than not. It makes life more interesting.”

  “If it comes to light, Harvard will lay claim to it. You’ll have to fight their lawyers, and you could lose.”

  Charlie Price looked around his office, looked out at the reservoir, then at the bust of Shakespeare, and said, “I never lose.”

  Peter stood and said, “You still haven’t told me what Will Wedge is after.”

  “Negotiations are going nowhere, so don’t worry about it.”

  At the door, Peter stopped. “You didn’t say whose ancestor it was . . .”

  And Price laughed. “You really don’t know what’s going
on here, do you?”

  Peter wasn’t about to admit that. “I know that a friend of mine is dead. And someone tried to kill me a few weeks ago. And after a little conversation with a Southie thug, people stopped trying to kill me, at least for now.”

  Price shrugged. “Then you know some things that may or may not matter. Just know this. You’re in a race. And the winner gets a treasure worth a lot of money.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Peter picked up Evangeline on the eight o’clock shuttle from New York and took her back to her apartment. By the time they got there, he had told her all that he had discovered about Victor at Houghton and the Harvard Archives. She told him about the Tercentenary book that she’d found in the New York store that afternoon.

  “And you paid forty bucks for it?” he said.

  “A bargain when you see it.” Before she had her coat off, she was opening it. “There he is—Victor Wedge, palming papers while all the other guys busy themselves with signatures and conversation.”

  “Except for the photographer,” said Peter.

  “‘And the Bard will applaud as the century turns,’” said Evangeline. “I think Lydia meant the Tercentenary. I think Victor thought so, too.”

  “Either that or he was just shuffling papers,” said Peter, looking more closely.

  “Bread crumbs, Peter.” Then she laughed. “I’m sounding more like you, and you’re sounding more like me.”

  “Then we’re both improving.”

  “If Victor Wedge was just sitting at a table with a bunch of papers,” she said, “I wouldn’t look twice. But this happens ‘as the century turns’ for Harvard. Maybe he’d been following bread crumbs, too. He knew about Lydia at President Quincy’s levee promising ‘a small gift of majestic proportion,’ the headstone, these photos.”

  Peter had to agree. “In his last Class Report, he wrote about that ‘small gift of majestic proportion’ long after he had given Harvard the quarto of Love’s Labours Lost. He said he wanted to do what Lydia had done—pass on a spirit of the quest. He actually wrote that to ‘keep our youth, we should continue the quest in our own lives.’”