by Jason Fagone
MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES
COMEDIES,
HISTORIES, &
TRAGEDIES.
Publifhed according to the True Originall Copies.
LONDON
Printed by Ifaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.
Elizebeth later wrote that seeing the Folio gave her the same feeling “that an archaeologist has, when he suddenly realizes that he has discovered a tomb of a great pharaoh.”
One of the librarians, a young woman, must have noticed the expression of entrancement on her face, because now she walked over to Elizebeth and asked if she was interested in Shakespeare. They got to talking and realized they had a lot in common. The librarian had grown up in Richmond, Indiana, not far from Elizebeth’s hometown, and they were both from Quaker families.
Elizebeth felt comfortable enough to mention that she was looking for a job in literature or research. “I would like something unusual,” she said.
The librarian thought for a second. Yes, that reminded her of Mr. Fabyan. She pronounced the name with a long a, like “Faybe-yin.”
Elizebeth had never heard the name, so the librarian explained. George Fabyan was a wealthy Chicago businessman who often visited the library to examine the First Folio. He said he believed the book contained secret messages written in cipher, and he had made it known that he wished to hire an assistant, preferably a “young, personable, attractive college graduate who knew English literature,” to further this research. Would Elizebeth be interested in a position like that?
Elizebeth was too startled to know what to say.
“Shall I call him up?” the librarian asked.
“Well, yes, I wish you would, please,” Elizebeth said.
The librarian went off for a few moments, then signaled to Elizebeth. Mr. Fabyan would be right over, she said.
Elizebeth thought: What?
Yes, Mr. Fabyan happened to be in Chicago today. He would be here any minute.
Sure enough, Fabyan soon arrived in his limousine. He burst into the library, asked Elizebeth the question that so bewildered and stunned her—“Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me?”—and led her by the arm to the waiting vehicle.
“This is Bert,” he growled, nodding at his chauffeur, Bert Williams. Fabyan climbed in with Elizebeth in the back.
From the Newberry, the chauffeur drove them south and west for twenty blocks until they arrived at the soaring Roman columns of the Chicago & North Western Terminal, one of the busiest of the city’s five railway stations. Fabyan hurried her out of the limo, up the steps, between the columns, and into the nine-hundred-foot-long train shed, a vast, darkened shaft of platforms and train cars and people rushing every which way. She asked Fabyan if she could send a message to her family at the telegraph office in the station, letting them know her whereabouts. Fabyan said no, that wasn’t necessary, and there wasn’t any time.
She followed him toward a Union Pacific car. Fabyan and Elizebeth climbed aboard at the back end. Fabyan walked her all the way to the front of the car and told her to sit in the frontmost seat, by the window. Then he went galumphing back through the car saying hello to the other passengers, seeming to recognize several, gossiping with them about this and that, and joking with the conductor in a matey voice while Elizebeth waited in her window seat and the train did not move. It sat there, and sat there, and sat there, and a bubble of panic suddenly popped in her stomach, the hot acid rising to her throat.
“Where am I?” she thought to herself. “Who am I? Where am I going? I may be on the other side of the world tonight.” She wondered if she should get up, right that second, while Fabyan had his back turned, and run.
But she remained still until Fabyan had finished talking to the other passengers and came tramping back to the front of the car. He packed his big body into the seat opposite hers. She smiled at him, trying to be proper and polite, like she had been taught, and not wanting to offend a millionaire; she had grown up in modest enough circumstances to be wary of the rich and their power.
Then Fabyan did something she would remember all her life. He rocked forward, jabbed his reddened face to within inches of hers, fixed his blue eyes on her hazel ones, and thundered, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear, “Well, WHAT IN HELL DO YOU KNOW?”
Elizebeth leaned away from Fabyan and his question. It inflamed something stubborn in her. She turned her head away in a gesture of disrespect, resting her cheek against the window to create some distance. The pilgrim collar of her dress touched the cold glass. From that position she shot Fabyan a sphinxy, sidelong gaze.
“That remains, sir, for you to find out,” she said.
It occurred to her afterward that this was the most immoral remark she had ever made in her life. Fabyan loved it. He leaned way back, making the seat squeak with his weight, and unloosed a great roaring laugh that slammed through the train car and caromed off the thin steel walls.
Then his facial muscles slackened into an expression clearly meant to convey deep thought, and as the train lurched forward, finally leaving the station, he began to talk of Shakespeare, the reason he had sought her out.
Hamlet, he said. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, the sonnets—the most famous written works in the world. Countless millions had read them, quoted them, memorized them, performed them, used pieces of them in everyday speech without even knowing. Yet all those readers had missed something. A hidden order, a secret of indescribable magnitude.
Out the train window, the grid of Chicago gave way to the silos and pale yellow vistas of the prairie. Each second she was getting pulled more deeply into the scheme of this stranger, destination unknown.
The First Folio, he continued. The Shakespeare book at the Newberry Library. It wasn’t what it seemed. The words on the page, which appeared to be describing the wounds and treacheries of lovers and kings, in fact told a completely different story, a secret story, using an ingenious system of secret writing. The messages revealed that the author of the plays was not William Shakespeare. The true author, and the man who had concealed the messages, was in fact Francis Bacon, the pioneering scientist and philosopher-king of Elizabethan England.
Elizebeth looked at the rich man. She could tell he believed what he was saying.
Fabyan went on. He said that a brilliant female scholar who worked for him, Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup, had already succeeded in unweaving the plays and isolating Bacon’s hidden threads. But for reasons that would become clear, Mrs. Gallup needed an assistant with youthful energy and sharp eyes. This is why Fabyan wanted Elizebeth to join him and Mrs. Gallup at Riverbank—his private home, his 350-acre estate, but also so much more.
Genius scientists lived there, on his payroll, working in laboratories unlike any on earth. Celebrities made pilgrimages to get a glimpse of projects under way. Teddy Roosevelt, his personal friend. P. T. Barnum. Famous actresses. Riverbank was a place of wonders. She would see.
After they’d been riding west for ninety minutes or so, traveling thirty-five miles across the plain, the train began to slow, hissing as it came to a full stop. Fabyan opened the door and he and Elizebeth walked down the length of a platform and emerged into a handsome waiting room of dark enameled brick with terra-cotta flourishes. They continued out the front door, into the main street of Geneva, Illinois, a village of two thousand. Originally settled by a Pennsylvania whiskey distiller, Geneva had swelled with foreign immigrants in recent years, Irish and Italians and Swedes leaving crowded Chicago for the open spaces of the prairie. Whiskey still accounted for a good portion of Geneva’s commerce, grain from the fields mixing with the sweet water of the Fox River, which bisected the town north to south.
To Elizebeth’s amazement, a limousine was waiting for her at Geneva Station—not the one she’d ridden in an hour ago in Chicago but a second limousine with a second chauffeur. She climbed in with Fabyan and was carried south along a local road known as the Lincoln Highway for a bit more than a mile, until a long, hi
gh stone wall appeared to the left. Then a gate.
The limousine slowed. It pulled off the highway, to the right, across from the wall and the gate, and came to a stop in front of a two-story farmhouse with a wide front porch.
The Lodge, Fabyan announced. Elizebeth would be staying here tonight.
CHAPTER 2
Unbelievable, Yet It Was There
Elizebeth Smith and George Fabyan at Riverbank, summer 1916.
(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)
A naked woman was living in a cottage at Riverbank. This was the story going around town in Geneva. The woman was said to be young, in her late teens or early twenties. Above the entrance of the cottage hung a sign that read Fabyan.
The story mutated as it passed from teller to teller. The cottage at Riverbank was stocked with attractive women, kept by Fabyan to satisfy his lust. They had been seen disrobing. Five women, ten.
Rumors about Fabyan and his strange laboratory were always spreading through the small farm towns surrounding the estate. The grounds were private and only open to the public at particular times. A stone wall protected part of the 350 acres, patrolled by Fabyan’s guards, and at night the lighthouse on the island in the river broadcast a continual warning to intruders in code: two white flashes followed by three red ones, signifying “23-skidoo,” meaning “keep out.” Sometimes, on Sundays, he opened Riverbank to local residents as a gesture of goodwill, a benevolent king allowing his people to roam the castle grounds. The electric trolley operated by the Aurora-Elgin and Fox River Electric Company, which usually ran past the estate without stopping, was permitted to stop by the river. People tumbled out and wandered in awe through an elaborate Japanese Garden. And then Monday came, and the trolley did not stop at Riverbank anymore, and people once again had to guess from afar what might be happening there.
They heard loud noises from the direction of the estate, things that sounded like bombs exploding. They saw what looked like warplanes buzzing around the buildings and making an incredible racket. The press often called him “Colonel Fabyan” or simply “The Colonel.” It seemed obvious that Fabyan was performing military research, but the townspeople did not know exactly what. They gleaned clues from newspapers and magazines. Fabyan was always inviting journalists and professors to tour the laboratories, under controlled conditions, and their reports spoke of Riverbank as a wonderland, a place almost beyond earthly reckoning. Visitors called Riverbank, variously:
A Garden of Eden on Fox River
Fabyan’s colony
a wonder-working laboratory near Chicago
one of the strangest and, at the same time, most beautiful country estates in America
As for George Fabyan himself, visitors described him as:
one of the greatest cipher experts of the world
one who has achieved triple success in three distinct fields of activity, those of business, letters, and science
the man of a thousand interests
the lord and master
Chicago inventor
multi-millionaire country gentleman
the seer of Riverbank
the caliph on a grand scale
Guests of Riverbank went away telling two main types of stories. On the one hand, the visitors spread bizarre rumors and anecdotes of Fabyan’s personal behaviors, portraying him as a mad king: “Credible persons,” one newspaper reported, “say that a pair of sprightly, highly groomed zebras dash down with a station wagon to the Geneva station . . . to meet him mornings and evenings.” These tales of bacchanalia were mingled with incredible stories of scientific experimentation at the laboratories, hints of anatomical investigations, and tales of secret cipher messages divined from old books.
Before he built the laboratories, Fabyan had often appeared in the Chicago newspapers in connection with more conventional tycoon activities: donations to political figures, board meetings of the stock exchange. People thought they knew his story. The black sheep of a prosperous New England family, he had dropped out of boarding school at age sixteen after repeated clashes with his father. He ran away from home and wandered the West for several years in the 1880s, making a living by selling lumber and railroad ties. Later, moving to Chicago, he reconciled with his father, and when the old man died, George inherited his $3 million fortune—equal to almost $100 million today—along with the reins of the family business, Bliss Fabyan & Company, one of the largest fabric companies in America. George used his gift for salesmanship to grow the company. After a Bliss Fabyan textile mill in Maine started making a type of striped seersucker cloth, he christened it “Ripplette,” a wonder fabric that required no ironing and resisted stain, undyed white bedspreads staying white after repeated washings, “white and clear as the driven snow . . . the name ‘Ripplette’ on a bedspread is the only sure indication of Ripplette quality. . . .”
Fabyan never claimed to be an altruist. “I ain’t no angel,” he said once, “and there are no angels in the New England cotton textile business, and if there are, they will all be broke.” But in one part of his life he did strive toward some kind of greater good, and he wanted people to know it. In his free time, for his own amusement, he had made himself into a man of science. The steel magnates of Pittsburgh collected paintings, old and contemporary masterpieces. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst would soon build a 165-room castle in California full of marble statues. Fabyan was thinking bigger. “Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living, but they all get satiated,” he said. “That’s why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can’t afford. You can never get sick of too much knowledge.”
The atom had not been split in 1916. The structure of DNA was undescribed. There were no antibiotics. Aspirin, vitamins, blood types, and the medical uses of X-rays had all been discovered in the last twenty-one years. Einstein’s theory of general relativity was only a year old. According to Einstein, space and time were one and the same, related by the universal force of gravity, and people did not know what to make of it. They came to Riverbank knowing that major scientific discoveries had emerged from the private laboratories of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, so they were primed to believe that a new age of wonders was just over the next hill. And Fabyan gave them a peek. He paraded them from lab to lab, marvel to marvel, a former teen runaway and dropout showing off his Eden of science.
There seemed to be experiments happening everywhere, even inside his own house, known as the Villa. A man from the Chicago Herald was shocked to notice a swarm of bees flying through the Villa’s open window. Fabyan laughed. “Those bees are just going into the music room to deposit their honey,” he said. “You see I didn’t trust that particular bunch of bees, so I had their hive placed inside the [Villa] and had it glassed in so we could watch them and see that they didn’t cheat. . . . It’s made honest bees out of them—this constant supervision.”
A correspondent from the Chicago Daily News visited on a clear spring morning. Fabyan asked him, “Do you ever think? No, I don’t think you do. Ninety-nine percent of the people don’t, so why should you? I can make you think. We’re all thinkers out here. Yes-siree, every one of the 150 souls in the Riverbank community.” Fabyan, wearing a bowler hat, a lavender scarf, a tailored vest, and a frock coat with his French Légion d’Honneur rosette pinned to the lapel, added that he himself was “just a worker” like all the others, that there were no bosses at Riverbank, no time clocks, no iron regulations. Then he removed a gold-tipped cigarette from a cigarette case, snapped it in two, and lowered the halves toward a nearby monkey enclosure. The monkeys took the cigarette halves from Fabyan’s outstretched hand, peeled off the paper, and jammed the tobacco into their mouths.
“Yes,” Fabyan continued, “a community of thinkers.” He took the reporter to the farm and explained how his scientists were taking cows and pigs and sheep and freezing them with rocks of ice and then slicing them thin as salami, to study
their anatomy; he showed off the statues of the duck and the Egyptian thrones next to the Villa and pointed out with glee that they weren’t made of marble or stone but of concrete, which lasts longer than stone and can be carved like stone; he pointed to the Dutch windmill and bragged that it was fully functional, that he used the mill to grind flour and bake fresh loaves of bread for the workers. He invited the reporter into the Acoustics Laboratory, built around an ultraquiet test chamber where the buzz of a stray mosquito seemed as loud as an air siren, and a pencil writing on paper sounded like a dozen people coughing. Fabyan said that experiments here would someday make cities more livable by eliminating the “racket ogre” of machines and crowds.
“Look through this telescope thing,” boomed Colonel Fabyan proudly. He struck a tuning fork. The visitor squinted, and saw a flickering light, like a gas flame in a wind. “That’s the sound made by this tuning fork! Sure, you’re seeing it!”
And all through the tour, Fabyan kept circling back to the primary mission of the laboratories, the glimmering idea at the bottom of it all: immortality. Extending human life. Each person could live to be one hundred or more, he said. The thinkers of Riverbank had sequestered themselves in this lush, remote location to learn how not to die.
“Over there in that hothouse, they’re trying genetics on nasturtiums, orchids, roses, and tulips,” Fabyan told the Chicago correspondent, jabbing a finger in the direction of Riverbank’s greenhouse. “What for? Why, look at the average human being. A mighty pitiful contraption of flesh and bones. If we of the Riverbank community can improve the human race by experimenting first with flowers and plants—say, won’t that be a wonderful thing?”
Some experiments veered into ethically dubious territory. A journalist visiting from Philadelphia stopped and asked for directions from “a pretty girl, clad in blue overalls,” with a “slim young figure—one of Colonel Fabyan’s colony crowned with a head of bobbed blonde hair.” Fabyan told the reporter that he had enrolled a number of young women in a series of studies to correct their defective posture. He recruited these human subjects from a boarding school adjacent to the Riverbank property, the Illinois State Training School for Delinquent and Dependent Girls at Geneva, really a low-security juvenile prison in the countryside, a place where judges across Illinois sent “wayward girls” deemed mentally deficient or sexually promiscuous. The founder of the Training School ordered the girls beaten with rawhide whips and thought society should force them to be sterilized: “When they begin to grow and attain some size the blood that runs in their veins will begin to tell and the incorrigible girl is the result.” The school housed a rotating population of five hundred women ages ten to eighteen, and some lived in a cottage built with a donation from George and Nelle Fabyan. This was the cottage that townspeople gossiped about. The donation explained why the Fabyan sign hung above the door, and the posture experiments explained the rumor of nudity; the girls were required to undress for physical examinations. “The results of our experiments on the girls at Geneva have been marvelous,” George Fabyan boasted. “Their so-called ‘debutante slouch’ has disappeared. They are learning to stand erect and not like anthropoid apes just learning to walk. I am trying to improve the human race, to discover what’s wrong with the female figure. What will the next generation be like if all the women have hollow chests?”