The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  The Philadelphia reporter also revealed that “in his effort to impress on the young women the terrors of crooked spines,” Fabyan maintained a laboratory at Riverbank that he called “The Chamber of Horrors,” containing actual human skeletons with grotesquely deformed spines, procured through methods that Fabyan never explained. Multiple Riverbank employees later told an Illinois historian that Fabyan “collected from hospitals and cemeteries numerous unclaimed cadavers that his scientists would radiate, cut, probe, and dissect, and then bury the remains in secret graves around the estate.” At night in the laboratories “the beams would creak and the chairs would seem to move,” and several staffers “recalled looking out the windows into the dark yard and seeing running girls with flowing white trains.” Opinions about these visions differed: some staffers thought they were seeing “wayward girls” from the Training School escaping momentarily, and others believed in ghosts.

  One summer a science journalist visited. Austin Lescarboura was a professional debunker, a man who had once partnered with Houdini to prove that fortune-tellers were liars and frauds. George Fabyan led Lescarboura into a darkened room in one of the laboratories. “The staff in charge moved about like so many Egyptian priests of old guarding the darkest secrets,” Lescarboura later reported in Scientific American.

  To deepen the mystery still further, a pretty girl was brought in. We were ushered into a small booth with dull black curtains for walls. It reminded us strongly of our psychic experiments back in New York, when we exposed one of the leading mediums after three sittings. At the command of the Colonel, the demonstration got under way. In a few minutes, we were astounded by what we were witnessing. It seemed unbelievable, yet it was there, in plain black and white. We had been brought face to face with certain facts regarding the human mechanism which we would hardly dared to have surmised in the absence of such a convincing demonstration. We were shown how—well, at this point we can go no further. Colonel Fabyan made us promise that nothing would be said about the nature of this investigation until some later date, when the experiments have progressed further.

  What he was seeing was a woman standing behind an X-ray screen, the structure of her bones illuminated by the penetrating energies of $750,000 worth of radium. X-rays had been discovered in 1895, so they were hardly new technology by the time Lescarboura arrived at Riverbank, but the aura of mystique at Riverbank was so thick, the range of scientific experiments so wide, that even a trained skeptic like Lescarboura could not necessarily distinguish between the real and the fantastic. “Every so often the world reaches a point bordering on stagnation, because everything seems to be fully developed,” he wrote. “But the scientist, pegging away at the secrets of nature, sooner or later breaks down existing barriers, opens the way to a new field, and we are soon confronted with brand new opportunities for exploration.”

  Twenty-three-year-old Elizebeth Smith climbed the stairs of the Lodge to the porch, opened the front door, and found herself in a warm, spacious drawing room. The walls were lined with double-paned casement windows that looked out across a grassy field on one side and back toward the road. There were people milling about.

  In a brusque, hurried way, Fabyan introduced Elizebeth to a pair of magnificently dressed women, then disappeared, leaving her with these strangers.

  The aristocratic appearance of the women was so incongruous that Elizebeth looked them over a few times to be sure they were real. They were sisters. The first, an older woman, wore a dark dress and a necklace that glittered with jewels. Her gray hair was tied in a bun and escaped in wisps that framed a delicate face. It seemed as if a French duchess had been teleported to the prairie, and her voice dripped with learning. Her name, she said, was Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She ran the Riverbank Cipher School. The other woman was her younger, darker-haired sister, Miss Kate Wells.

  Young Elizebeth gathered from this brief conversation that Mrs. Gallup and Miss Wells lived and worked here at Riverbank in this very building, which also contained quarters for the cooks and servants who fed and catered to the sisters and to the other scholars and scientists who worked on the estate.

  The sisters informed Elizebeth that dinner would soon be served here at the Lodge, and that she would be dining with the two of them and some of the scientists as well. Mrs. Gallup and Miss Wells suggested that she head upstairs and freshen up in a certain spare bedroom where she would be sleeping. Elizebeth did as asked, and some minutes later, when she descended the stairs, she saw that Fabyan had returned, in striking new clothes: riding pants, a billowing shirt with a riding collar, and a big, broad cowboy hat. He looked ready to jump on a horse and gallop away. It didn’t make sense to her at the time, given that he was about to eat dinner; later she would realize that Fabyan simply enjoyed dressing up as the ideal of a country squire. She would never once see him wearing a traditional business suit at Riverbank.

  People began streaming into the Lodge in ones and twos, walking up the steps to the porch in the fading prairie light. Elizebeth sat on the bannister of the staircase, looking out across the Lincoln Highway, listening to crickets chirp and cicadas sing, watching the guests arrive. They all wore semiformal clothes with a country feel, except for a slim man in a pinstriped shirt and pants, a neat bow tie, and sparkling white buck shoes. He had short, dark hair parted in the exact middle of his head and pomaded to each side, and his ears were pointy; he seemed like the youngest of the arriving guests, and by far the best dressed, as if he were attending a society dinner at some mansion in the city. The young man reminded Elizebeth of Beau Brummell, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fashion icon who polished his boots with champagne and peach marmalade.

  They sat down to dinner at a long communal table covered with fine china and linens. Swedish and Danish servants appeared in crisp white uniforms and brought heaping plates of meat and vegetables from Riverbank’s working farm. To keep food costs low and to satisfy his own taste for meat, Fabyan kept the farm stocked with chickens, ducks, sheep, and turkeys, and his wife, Nelle, bred prize-winning livestock here. Mrs. Gallup sat at the head of the table, flanked by the other guests, all of them lured here by Fabyan to investigate different pieces of the world. Elizebeth spoke little and tried to get a sense of who these people were and what they were doing here. A sweet-seeming man in his fifties introduced himself as J. A. Powell, president of the University of Chicago Press and the top public relations man at that university; his job there was to “cause the University of Chicago to be known as well in Peking as in Peoria,” the Tribune once put it. Another dinner guest was Bert Eisenhour, Riverbank’s chief engineer and builder of structures, a short man with a ruddy complexion who struck Elizebeth as a country bumpkin.

  Then there was the well-dressed man with the white buck shoes. He smiled shyly at Elizebeth and introduced himself as William Friedman, head of the Genetics Department at Riverbank. He worked here studying seeds and plants, breeding new strains of corn, wheat, and other crops, trying to infuse them with desirable properties.

  Altogether it was a curious bunch of characters. Elizebeth couldn’t see an obvious thread that connected them. Literary scholars, an engineer, a geneticist. Perhaps Fabyan was the kind of rich person who collected people in addition to banknotes and stocks.

  The dominant personality that night was Mrs. Gallup. As the smell of meat and the noise of clinking silverware filled the room, and the servants whisked away the empty plates, Mrs. Gallup told stories of her travels while researching Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, staying in the homes of wealthy patrons around the world, in France and in England, who believed in her theories and had sponsored her work. When she spoke about the details of her investigations and findings, no one interrupted her to ask skeptical questions. It was obvious to Elizebeth that people here were used to treating Mrs. Gallup with great deference, that she was an important person at Riverbank, and that dinner conversations like this had probably happened many times before, with Mrs. Gallup holding court and the other
s nodding and smiling. Elizebeth got the sense that “Mrs. Gallup had dwelt only among those who agreed with her premise and that she had little personal contact with the viewpoint of those who did not believe.”

  After dinner, the guests went their separate ways. Fabyan gave Elizebeth a set of men’s pajamas to wear to bed, telling her they would have more to discuss in the morning, and wishing her good night. She went upstairs to her room and found that a pitcher of ice water had been left on her bedside table along with an enormous bowl of fresh fruit, plus knives to carve it up.

  On Elizebeth’s second day at Riverbank, after she woke in the Lodge and got dressed, Fabyan found her and said she ought to see the rest of the estate. He assigned an employee to give her a short tour.

  Fifty or sixty yards along the highway from the Lodge was a smattering of buildings known collectively as Riverbank Laboratories, where many of the scientists worked. Elizebeth was told that a new laboratory was under construction for the study of sound waves, designed by the top acoustics expert in the country, Professor Wallace Sabine of Harvard University, who would move to Riverbank when the new lab was complete. Adjacent to Riverbank Laboratories was the ordnance building, a low concrete hut where Fabyan and several scientists tested bombs and mortars for potential use by the U.S. military.

  Elizebeth wasn’t shown inside these buildings but instead was led across the highway to an iron gate she had seen yesterday while riding in the limo. She walked through it. A short, curving driveway led down a gentle slope to Fabyan’s personal residence, known as the Villa, a long, low two-story house in a cruciform shape with a heavy roof and thin clapboard siding that seemed to press the house downward into the hill. Originally a far smaller farmhouse, it had been expanded in 1907 by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who produced a mansion for Fabyan that looked like a peaceful part of the countryside. Strange objects dotted the lawn: a concrete wading pool, a concrete table and concrete semicircular bench carved with elaborate Egyptian hieroglyphs, a concrete chair whose front legs were sphinxes, and a concrete duck the size of a human eight-year-old.

  Inside the Villa the walls were paneled with squares of dark walnut, and the sun shone through a series of thin slats that Wright’s builders had carved in the hill-facing wall and that decorated the opposite wall with rhombuses of light. Elizebeth was amazed to see that the chairs and divans in the living room and drawing room and even the beds upstairs were suspended from the ceiling on chains—no chair or bed legs anywhere to be seen. She had no idea what to make of this. Fabyan and Nelle each had their own private bedchamber. It was unclear whether they slept in the same room. On a wide veranda that looked down to the river, another piece of furniture swung on chains, a wicker chair with arms woven from thick reeds.

  Taxidermized animals stared out from walls and glass display cases inside the house, beasts that Fabyan or his wealthy friends had killed and stuffed: a buck, an alligator, a Gila monster, a shark, birds of all kinds (grouses, owls, hawks), and hundreds of bird eggs, speckled with blue, yellow, and pink. There was also a valuable work of art in the Villa that had once been displayed to millions at the White City: a life-size marble statue of a naked woman petting a lion, her right hand falling across the lion’s mane, the lion looking calmly to the side. The statue was called Diana and the Lion, or Intellect Dominating Brute Force.

  The mastery of Nature. This appeared to be Fabyan’s preoccupation.

  Back outside, Elizebeth walked down the steepening hill toward the Fox River until it leveled out a hundred yards from the water. A curving path took her through a Shinto arch of wood and into a pristine garden ringed by buildings, benches, and lanterns of Japanese design. She was told it had all been devised by one of the emperor’s own personal gardeners. Flowering trees were aflame with pink and red and blue and orange blossoms that breathed their reflections onto a circular pool at the garden’s center, the surface of the water like a painter’s palette smeared with color. A half-moon footbridge spanned the pool. Every leaf and flower, every plank of wood and drop of water seemed designed for maximum tranquility, except for the low concrete structure to the right of the pool, shaped like a hexagon, protected by heavy black iron bars. It was a bear cage. Fabyan kept two pet grizzly bears inside. Their names were Tom and Jerry.

  The river lay beyond, a placid silver width flowing southward, from left to right, away from the center of Geneva. Elizebeth could see a small island in the middle of the river, connected to the near shore by two bridges, and on the far bank, an impressive Dutch windmill, a giant X spinning against the sky. It was explained to her that Fabyan had bought the windmill in Holland and transported it here, piece by piece.

  Later that day, after the tour, Elizebeth sat down with Mrs. Gallup in the Lodge to discuss the work they might do together if Elizebeth were to accept the research position. They talked for two or three hours, not long enough for Elizebeth to grasp the full nature of the project but sufficient to get a sense of Mrs. Gallup’s immediate needs and her personality.

  Unlike Fabyan, Mrs. Gallup spoke in a restrained, careful manner, the tones of a scholar. There was nothing hucksterish about her at all. She illustrated her explanations with oversize sheets of paper that were curled up like scrolls. She rolled them out to their full length to show Elizebeth, and placed weights on the ends to prevent them from curling up again. The sheets were beautiful and full of hand-drawn letters of the alphabet in subtle variations, lowercase and uppercase, roman and italic:

  (New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division)

  Mrs. Gallup said she had drawn these letterforms from photographic enlargements of the Newberry Library’s First Folio of Shakespeare, and the drawings had helped reveal the secrets that Francis Bacon had woven into Shakespeare’s plays. In some way Elizebeth didn’t understand yet, the hidden messages were embedded in the shapes of the letters themselves, in small variations between an f on one page of the Folio and an f on another.

  According to Mrs. Gallup, she had already discovered these messages. She knew what they said; she was certain they existed. The problem, as she saw it, was that some literary experts disputed her method and doubted that the messages were really there. So Elizebeth’s job at Riverbank would be twofold. First she would use Mrs. Gallup’s method to reproduce her existing results, providing scientific confirmation and silencing the critics. Then Elizebeth would assist Mrs. Gallup with new investigations. Mrs. Gallup believed that in addition to authoring Shakespeare, Bacon also secretly wrote works commonly attributed to Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and other major figures of the age. Together Elizebeth and Mrs. Gallup would rewrite the history of seventeenth-century England—and by extension, the history of all English literature.

  George Fabyan popped in briefly, to see how the women were getting on, rolling out one of Mrs. Gallup’s scrolls and regarding it with evident satisfaction.

  It was a lot for Elizebeth to process. Over the last twenty-four hours she had been accosted by an eccentric tycoon, dragged to his hall-of-wonders laboratory in the countryside, introduced to a merry team of scientific experts, told about a secret cipher embedded in the heart of the First Folio, and invited to assist them in turning history upside down.

  That evening Elizebeth returned to her room in the Lodge to find a vase of flowers and another bowl of fresh fruit by the bed, filled to abundance. She lay awake for a time, thinking about all she had seen and heard, stunned and a bit jangled by the weirdness of Fabyan’s kingdom, yet impressed with Mrs. Gallup’s erudition and quiet confidence. To be sure, their theory was unconventional, but what if it was correct? If there was even a chance that Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup were on to something here, how could Elizebeth pass up a chance to join an effort of such magnitude? The next day, when she rode the Union Pacific back to Chicago, she was buzzing with “a mixture of astonishment, incredulity, and curiosity.”

  On the morning of June 7, around the time Elizebeth Smith had first arrived in the city to look for a job, five t
housand women marched toward the Republican National Convention, being held at the Coliseum, to demand the right to vote. The wind and rain shoved the women this way and that by the handles of their increasingly useless umbrellas. Dye from their yellow sashes streamed down their legs. Reaching the convention hall, the women surged through the entryway. Water poured from straw hats, hems, and sleeves, pooling at their feet in a spreading puddle. Many held rain-blurred signs. “We want to be citizens. Do we look desirable?” The protesters demanded that the GOP support a constitutional amendment granting women the vote, but after debating the issue, the delegates decided that an amendment would violate “the right of each state to settle this question for itself.”