Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  “So much for your theory, Jonas,” Theo muttered, “about never running into anybody from Cavendish. There’re two right there.”

  Still spasming from his efforts to row on the Harvard crew while seated in a lounge chair, Marsh looked where Theo was pointing. “Oh. Who are they?” he asked.

  “Herbert Crawford and Maude Fletcher, dammit.”

  “Know of him. Don’t know her.” (Marsh was not a campus socializer.) “He looks youngish to have written eight books.”

  “Eight? Crawford’s written eight books?”

  “Brilliant, frankly. The four I read.”

  “Well, that’s just fantastic,” sighed Theo.

  Almost worse than Maude and Herbert’s presence was the evident delight in their waves when they recognized their col-league in the crowd. Gently depositing the old couple in adjoining chairs, they hurried over. Maude even kissed him on the cheek.

  “Well done for our side!” beamed Crawford, referring apparently to Harvard’s victory. All American colleges were the same to him?

  “Sky Masterson!” Maude also beamed. “What a great surprise! Jorvelle wrote me you were over here!”

  “Yes, I am. I didn’t know you were. Hello, Herbie.”

  “Pal!” Crawford gave him a palm-first, tilted handshake, presumably (like his accent) radical activist in nature. “’Aven’t seen you since we rocked ’em and socked ’em, Ryan, in the great dark days of the strike h’again the Tyrant Tupper.”

  Maude nudged him. “Oh, Herb, you saw him in Guys and Dolls!”

  “H’i never saw a soul on that stage but you, love,” grinned the despicable man. (He still hadn’t gotten his teeth capped.)

  Theo introduced Jonas Marsh, and the four exchanged Cavendish news for a bit. Buddy Tupper was still in the wane and Claudia Pratt the ascendancy in the aftershock of the Bleecker Strike. The English Department had hit No. 10 in a national poll. As a result, Jorvelle Wakefield had gotten (another) raise to keep her from going to Yale. They reminisced about Guys and Dolls and about the strike. Jonas Marsh had ignored both at the time, and did so now.

  “So what brings you two here to Henley?” Theo asked, thinly smiling. “Planning to organize a vendors’ strike?”

  “We probably should,” Maude said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Observing the scene,” Theo said. “The privileged at play.” He looked pointedly at Crawford’s pink tie. “Leander Club?” he asked.

  “Can you believe it?” Maude laughed. “Herb actually rowed once upon a time. I’m serious.”

  “So I just heard from a former crewmate of yours, Charles Blickers.”

  Herb shrugged off his old skill, or his exposure as one of the hated upper class, with an apologetic grin.

  Maude hugged Crawford’s waist. “They say he was pretty good, skinny as he looks.”

  Theo couldn’t stop himself. “Oh, is that why you need such a long lap pool in Rome, Herb? Keep your oar in?”

  “Ya bastard!” Crawford punched his shoulder with a playful poke. “We hall ’ave our stinkin’ pasts to live with, right? Surprised you know old Blickers. Man boasted he never set foot in the Bod his whole time at university. Bloody believable, too. Good fellow, though.”

  “Certainly impressive drinking habits. So, Maude?” Theo turned to her. She looked a little thinner, the hair longer, black curls behind her ears. “Plans for next year yet?”

  Crawford answered for her. “Yah knew her rotten department and the Bone-Cruncher gave her the boot? Sod ’em all. Well, we showed ’em what the workers can do, didn’t we, Maudie?”

  “You showed them.” Maudie smiled at him with unmistakable affection, if not adoration.

  What the “worker,” Herbert Crawford (endowed chair of History at a six-figure “salary”—apparently redundant), had done was to tell the Cavendish administration that Reverend Dr. Fletcher stayed or he went: “They put Maudie back, or I’d bloody well go to Santa Cruz at twice the pay and the sun on my face. Not renewing a woman’s bleedin’ contract because of ’er political principles! A woman already with a book in print, damn decent reviews, and those dim-wit snooze-os in Religious Studies couldn’t muster a fuckin’ monograph among ’em.”

  “Good for you, Crawford!” suddenly shouted the traitor Jonas Marsh, swinging his straw boater wildly. “If Cavendish threw those cretinous fundies back in the benighted ooze they crawled out of, maybe our redneck youth could learn that while they did descend from the apes, they are not required to stop there!”

  Crawford stared at the handsome, twitching Marsh, then he slapped him on the back of his blazer. “Right!” he bellowed. “Well said, mate!”

  “Bugger Tupper!” Marsh added for good measure.

  Crawford now grabbed Marsh’s hand and shook it. “Let’s all go have a drink together to buggering bloody Tupper. I’ll just tell the Ma and Da.” And off he went with high, loose-gaited steps to kneel beside the meek old couple, who nodded obediently at everything he was saying to them.

  “Could I speak to you, Maude? Excuse us, Jonas.” Theo practically yanked her aside and walked her along the river’s edge. Then, staring at her, he shook his head. “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked honestly puzzled.

  “Coming over here with him. He’s married.”

  Now she looked not only puzzled but offended.

  “Do you know what you’re getting into?”

  Her cheeks pinkened. “Just a second, Theo, okay!”

  “I’m sorry, Maude, but I feel like, from the play, we got to know each other pretty well, and I like you a lot. I know it’s none of my business what you do, but…” He gave out and stared at her.

  “Oh, Theo.” She looked up at the tall young man so long and so seriously that he lowered his eyes. Finally, she said, “Herb’s wife’s in the process of divorcing him.”

  “Ah.”

  “I love him. Okay?”

  Theo looked out over the Thames, then back at her. “Okay,” he said. Inside him, he heard her singing on the stage back in Rome: “I’ll know, and I won’t stop to ask, is it right, am I wise…” Because this certainly didn’t look particularly wise. “Well, I hope it works out.”

  “Me too.” She smiled. “You know, a lot of guys I dated before Herb were either scared of me because I was a priest—like I was a witch or something—or they actively disliked any woman being a priest, or they wanted to get into sort of sicko things because I was a priest. But Herb doesn’t care one way or the other. It’s just my job to him. He’s an atheist. It’s kind of a relief.”

  “A Marxist and a priest?” Theo said. “What are you gonna do, try to convert each other?”

  “Well, I know I’m going to try.” She grinned.

  “Look…” Theo rubbed his neck, then his head, then made an effort to return her smile.

  Her voice brightened. “So, how ’bout you? You look great. ’Course, that’s the first thing I ever heard about you, before I even met you: Theo Ryan, best-looking eligible man at Cavendish.”

  “Fat lot of good it did me with you.”

  “I’ll take that remark as a great compliment,” she said, and squeezed his hand. Then she leaned around him, calling, “We’ll catch up!” Crawford was standing beside Jonas, waving her over. The historian did a silly jig, and blew her a kiss with both hands outstretched. Maude took Theo’s arm. “You were looking for Ford last time we talked. Did you ever find him?”

  “No,” Theo said. “I guess you heard.”

  “That he left Rhodora? Yes. Jorvelle told me.”

  “Supposedly he and Jenny Harte are in Cornwall together.”

  “What about Rhodora? What do you hear from her?”

  “She’s got a record out.”

  “Really! That’s wonderful. I keep feeling like I’ve met Rhodora. Y
ou and Ford both talked about her so much. You think they’ll get back together?”

  “I hope not. And God knows what’s going to happen to Jenny. Or already has.”

  Maude tapped his arm. “You worry about a lot of people, Theo.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess!” Drawing him back toward the others, she gave his hand a swing. “Let’s talk about Guys and Dolls. I think we were good.”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Pretty damn good. I had a postcard from Bill and Joel; they said Iddy’s thinking of Hello, Dolly! for January.” She stopped and turned to him. “Theo, it’s going to be a rough year for me, coming back this way with Herb, well, railroading them, and with us living together. My department’ll treat me like I’ve got a scarlet letter sewn to my breast. I can just see them scurrying past, hugging the opposite wall. So, I’m counting on you and the Spitz gang to pull me through. Can I?” She brushed a black curl behind her ear. “Friends?”

  Theo made a wry face. “Well, it wasn’t what I had in mind.”

  “I know.” She took his hands and smiling up at him, sang a line from their duet, “But—” And she sang it: “You’ll know when your love comes along…et cetera, Sky.”

  He pressed her hands together, then let them go. “All right, Sister Sarah. You can count on protection from the civilians.”

  “Civilians?”

  Together they headed back toward the bright pink-striped tents. “That’s what show-biz people like my parents called everybody who wasn’t in the ‘business.’ ‘Civilians.’ And anybody who was, was ‘family.’”

  Chapter 24

  Accepts a Favor

  Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

  —Sheridan, The Rivals

  Back in London, the heat wave had been swept off by rain, and the blue English summer sky rolled with billowy clouds. Theo found Brown’s Hotel both the most pleasant and the most expensive place he’d ever stayed. “Don’t worry about it,” counseled Jonas Marsh. “Put it on tick. I’ll advance you the money.” “Advance on what?” Theo fretted, but Jonas just wagged his finger impatiently and said, “Give me your idiotic play, then leave me alone.”

  Late the following afternoon, in black tie and dinner jacket, Marsh walked into the hotel bar where Theo sat nervously twisting shreds of cocktail napkins into a chain. Marsh dropped the script of Foolscap on the table, slapped it, and glared without a word at his colleague.

  “Well?” Theo asked.

  Marsh snatched at his bow tie as if to yank it off. Then he jabbed both fists into his cheeks, pushing out a raspy sigh.

  “What? Jonas, come on!”

  “It’s possible,” said Marsh, and sat down.

  It was one of the best compliments Theo had ever received. Marsh cut off his attempts to say so by adding, “What isn’t possible, Ryan, is for you to sit in Mole’s box at a Royal Performance wearing that corduroy suit. Execrable! Have you no evening clothes?”

  “None.”

  The dapper Marsh spluttered noisily. “God is so goddamn perverse. He sends Walter Raleigh to the scaffold wearing ruff and cloak, velvet waistcoat, satin doublet, silk stockings, and taffeta breeches. And then He gives the gift not only of Raleigh’s looks but of Raleigh’s voice not to a man like me!” He made a sweeping gesture down the black silk and satin of his suit. “But to a whoreson creature like you who doesn’t even own a dinner jacket! Well, quick, you’ll have to rent one.”

  “But can you do it, Jonas? Can you fake the manuscript?”

  Marsh stared at his elegant long fingers as if he were furious at them. “That puny gift,” he said, “I do have.”

  “Great!”

  “More accurately, I should say that Mole and I can do it.”

  “Mole? You want to tell Mole Fontwell?”

  “I’ve told him already. We’ve been discussing it at length.”

  “You have? Jonas, you should have asked me. Can you trust him?”

  Muscles twitched in Marsh’s handsome face. “In fourteen years, I’ve seen no reason not to.”

  Theo thought this over. It had become clear to him when the three of them had driven back to London in the yellow Bentley, that Marsh and Fontwell knew each other well. Not only had Marsh obviously been a frequent visitor to Fontwell’s home in Kent (where the “private scholar” seemed occasionally to live with his mother and three sisters), but they reminisced together about past junkets up the Nile and down the Rhine and across the Aegean, and also mentioned plans for an upcoming barge trip in the Loire Valley. In addition, Marsh was now sharing Fontwell’s suite (which appeared to be of a rather permanent nature) at Brown’s Hotel. It had naturally passed through Theo’s mind that the two men were (in Tara Bridges’s phrase about fellow thespians Bill Robby and Joel Elliott) “more than best friends, if you know what I mean.” Nothing was ever said or done by Marsh or Fontwell to confirm this possibility, and it struck Theo as sad and impressive that they’d sustained the relationship over such a long distance for so many years and under the limits of summers and holidays. At least, he’d never seen Mole in Rome, North Carolina. But then no one had ever seen the inside of Jonas Marsh’s home either, and perhaps that was the reason why. Not that anyone would care, Theo was thinking when Marsh stood up and curtly remarked, “Together, or not at all, Ryan.”

  Quickly, Theo nodded. “Oh, of course, if you think so. It’s fine. But he should understand that there probably won’t be any, well, money in this. I mean, we won’t own Foolscap. If we pull it off, I suppose it will end up belonging to Newbolt, with, I hope, some bequest going to Miss Throckmorton. In fact, Jonas, I can’t pay you either.”

  With a scratch of his luxuriant hair, Marsh smiled. “With your writer’s eye for detail, it can’t have entirely escaped your notice that poverty is not one of Mole’s virtues. Or mine. We wouldn’t do it for money. We’d do it to see if it can be done.” He tapped the script. “You, of course, have your own reasons. Now, give us a while to study this line by line. You’ll have to make changes. Once we’re sure of the internal evidence, then we’ll come up with a plan for the external. Your research about placement, et cetera. This is going to take time, you realize that? The faked takes even more time than the original. At least successful fakes do. Of course there was the Frenchman who forged a letter from Mary Magdalene in a snap, but he did it in French, on French paper, and even the bloody Frogs smelled a rat.”

  Theo wasn’t sure if he should ask, but he did, “Jonas, please don’t be insulted. But have you ever done anything like this before?”

  Marsh whipped a handkerchief out of his coat breast pocket so violently that Theo thought he might be going to slap him across the face with it. But all the thin man did was blow his nose with an explosive high sneeze.

  “God bless you.”

  “I’ve caught a blasted cold in that damnable rain!”

  Hurriedly, Theo added, “It’s just that you seem to know so much about literary forgeries.”

  Marsh twisted his nose angrily in the handkerchief. “I know a very great deal about literary everything. It’s my profession. And it appalls me that most of our cretinous Cavendish colleagues are disgustingly unaware that it is a profession! Why, Vic Gantz just told me on the phone, last week at the Joyce Conference they passed out a questionnaire, to joyce specialists, asking how many of them had read, quote, ‘some part of’ Finnegans Wake! The bloody Mick only published three novels in his drunken life, and joyce specialists are being polled about whether they’ve managed to read part of one of them!”

  “Well, Jonas, I have to confess that—”

  But Marsh was on his feet and had the mesmerized attention of two middle-aged ladies at a corner table. “When the dolts in Ludd Hall have skimmed the major texts in their field, they consider themselves well ahead of the game. By god, if a dentist knew as little of teeth as most literary critics
know of literature—leave scholarship aside, as that’s gone the way of the dodo—why, I’d never let that man inside my mouth! acheww!” Another twist to his nose, and Marsh sat abruptly back down, jabbing the handkerchief in his pocket.

  “God bless you,” Theo said again. “Could I get you maybe a brandy?”

  “No.” Marsh thrummed his fingers on the script. “Now, do we do this or do we not?”

  “Then you think we can do it?”

  “Think we can successfully deceive Dame Winifred Throckmorton?”

  Theo frowned into his empty beer glass. “You don’t have to put it like that. She wants more than anything in the world to find this play.”

  Marsh jerked his hands in an impatient flurry. “She wants to find Raleigh’s play. There is a considerable difference that you would prefer to forget. Forgery is an art, Ryan, not a delusion. True, Chatterton went off the deep end and swilled arsenic at seventeen. But he was caught. I do not want us to be caught. Nor to expose ourselves by vulgar boasts. When Michelangelo fobbed off his Sleeping Eros on Cardinal Riario as an ancient Roman masterpiece, he could not resist bragging that he’d done it. That’s pride, Ryan. Forging artists can never own their art. If your pride requires the authority of authorship, then give this up right now.”

  “I don’t want to be caught.”

  “Of course you do. You and Mole both do, and don’t, want Dame Winifred to see through this. From my point of view, it’s unambivalent challenge. May the better scholar win. And I intend to do this with my point of view the commanding one. Now, let’s call ’round and see if we can find you some decent rags. Allow me.” Marsh dropped a handful of coins on the table. “I don’t suppose you brought evening pumps along on this trip, did you? Or even black shoes?”

  •••

  Thanks to Jonas and Mole, life in London in the week following Henley was proving far less lonely. During the days, while they pored over Foolscap in their suite (Jonas wrapped in a blanket with a vaporizer beside him), Theo kept himself hard at work in his own room. He was revising his draft of the Rexford biography. In this effort, he was spurred on less by guilt than by the lure of the second half of Mahan and Son’s advance. Another practical motivation was the suspicion (heartily agreed to by Jonas) that if Norman Bridges had said his promotion to full professor might depend upon his producing a second book, then under the new Thorney regime, he’d probably need the whole Rexford trilogy, if not the Pulitzer Prize, to avoid teaching remedial reading at 8:00 a.m. on Saturdays for the rest of his career.