by Jason Fagone
In the late summer of 1916 he began to lean on Elizebeth for help. He had already realized that when she spoke, even though she was only twenty-four, people listened to her—her good looks caught the eye of men and her precision and earnest intelligence held attention. He started to let her know that Professor So-and-So from Such-and-Such College was coming to learn about the cipher discoveries and Elizebeth needed to persuade this person that Riverbank’s approach was correct. “We’ll get along fine,” Fabyan told Elizebeth. “We’ll see if we can induce him to stay.”
The academic would come, all expenses paid. There would be a lot of food, a lot of wine. Fabyan usually delivered a presentation on the ciphers using lantern slides, square photographic negatives printed by William Friedman and projected onto the wall of a darkened room through a curved piece of glass. He had contempt for what he saw as the timid and conformist mind-set of literary intellectuals while at the same time wanting to win them over, and took pains to present himself as the sort of careful and factual man he felt they would be likely to respect. While displaying slides of the Folio and Mrs. Gallup’s lovely drawings of biformed alphabets she claimed to find within, Fabyan explained that he did not care about the “useless Bacon-Shakespeare controversy” of who wrote Shakespeare; that he only cared about getting to the bottom of the cipher contained in the plays; that he and his Riverbank colleagues had no use for anything but “hard, cold facts”; that the existence of the cipher was such a fact; that it had passed careful tests; that no one at Riverbank was making any money from these investigations; and that they were doing it for the benefit of humanity, committed to sharing their discoveries with the world. Who could object? The combination of his gravelly voice in the shadows and the delicate letters on the wall tended to disorient the guest and lull him into a state of increased charity toward the Riverbank view. Heads, ever so slightly, began to nod. Jaws to relax. And Elizebeth played her part. If a visitor grew sick of listening to Fabyan and turned to Elizebeth, asking what she thought, she said she was convinced that the work was solid, that the messages were really there.
Privately, though, she was beginning to doubt. Skeptical visitors made arguments difficult to refute. The head of the English department at the University of Chicago, John Matthews Manly, an authority on Chaucer and an amateur cryptologist, stayed at Riverbank for a time and concluded that it was all bunk. Manly was already famous in his field, didn’t need money or anything else Fabyan could offer, and he took delight in pointing out the holes in Mrs. Gallup’s method, like a boy in a roomful of red balloons, stomping them flat one by one. Fabyan asked Elizebeth to “wrassle” with Manly for a weekend, and she found him a pompous ass. At one point during an argument, Manly’s voice rising sharply, Elizebeth staying calm but arguing back, Manly pushed her on the shoulder, baffled and upset that anybody might challenge the great John M. Manly—she never forgot it. “Oh, my! That was too much to take. Ahhh!”
But there was substance to what he and other skeptics were saying, a stubborn logic that tugged at the hem. Mrs. Gallup’s technique depended on discerning small yet consistent fluctuations in letterforms in books made long ago, with the technology of a more primitive era. It strained credulity to think that the printers, setting the type by hand in 1623, could have duplicated these minute fluctuations across hundreds of copies of the First Folio, and in fact the variations between different Folio copies were sometimes larger than the variations Mrs. Gallup thought she saw in a single book.
Another skeptical argument moved Elizebeth. It was the literary case against Bacon’s secret messages. There was no kind way to put it: the messages were badly written. Francis St. Alban, descended from the mighty heroes of Troy, loving and revering these noble ancestors—was this tedious author the same one who gave such light and supple voice to Romeo’s desire for Juliet? See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek. To believe Mrs. Gallup’s theory, you had to believe that the plays, these warm-blooded, ravishing beasts, had been conceived almost as an afterthought, as mere envelopes for a stilted memoir about a guy whose mom was the queen. It made no sense. It would be like God creating a galaxy simply to tell a knock-knock joke to some distant deity, enciphered in the shapes of stars.
The big question then became: If the secret messages discovered by Mrs. Gallup weren’t really there, what was she seeing?
Elizebeth never once suspected that Mrs. Gallup was a fraud. Deception was not in her. The only possibility was that she had been somehow deceiving herself. Humans are so good at seeing patterns that we are often able to see patterns even when they aren’t really there. Mrs. Gallup must have been altering the rules of her method to fit the desired result, changing the all-important assignment of letters to the two baskets (a-form and b-form) until she saw words that made sense. Decades later Elizebeth and William would describe what they thought was happening with Mrs. Gallup, in a book they wrote as coauthors:
She could go through the texts extracting from them what she unconsciously wished to see in them. . . . With each successive letter deciphered she had a choice—limited but definite—of possibilities; and so, as she went on, there would be a kind of collaboration between the decipherer and the text, each influencing the other. Hence perhaps the curious maundering wordy character of the extracted messages, very like the communications of the spirit world: with some sense but no real mind behind them, just a sort of drifting intention, taking occasional sudden whimsical turns when the text momentarily mastered the decipherer.
This was the clarity of hindsight. In the moment, at Riverbank, Elizebeth didn’t know what to do with her doubt. She saw how her bosses responded to criticism. Mrs. Gallup restated her conclusions in combative letters and articles, denying that it was all a figment of her imagination and comparing herself to Galileo: “The idea that the earth moves, was once thought an illusion.” And Fabyan doubled down on publicity. He released a picture book for children, Ciphers for the Little Ones, that taught the story of Bacon and his biliteral cipher. He printed business cards alleging that Bacon was the bastard son of Queen Elizebeth and added at the bottom:
ALL INQUIRIES REGARDING THE SOURCE OF, AND AUTHORITY FOR, THESE HISTORICAL, BUT HITHERTO UNKNOWN FACTS, WILL BE PROMPTLY ANSWERED FROM
RIVERBANK LABORATORIES
Geneva, Illinois.
When people did inquire, Fabyan replied with a form letter describing the cipher project:
Riverbank Laboratories are a group of serious, earnest researchers, digging for facts. It is supported by Colonel Fabyan at his country home in Geneva, for his own information and amusement. . . .
A pressure was building in Elizebeth’s chest. It was the old scalding sensation she remembered from college when she realized people valued politeness more than truth. For now she kept her doubts to herself. She doubted her doubt. Who was she to declare that she was right and everyone else was wrong? Was it her vanity telling her that? How would she prove her case if she did speak up? Would she lose her job? Would anyone stick up for her? She was twenty-four. She was a nobody here. She was a nobody anywhere.
During conversations in the Lodge she looked around the room at the faces of her colleagues, trying to tell if they really believed or if they were just pretending. She sometimes met the eye of William Friedman. She wondered what he was thinking.
Lately they’d been talking more and more. William carried his camera everywhere, a black box that hung from his neck. Elizebeth was becoming his favorite photo subject. He would ask her to stand in a garden or on a square of grass, and he would hold the camera at chest level and look down at the image of her face in the glass.
She was learning more about him, where he came from and how he got here. His family was Jewish, originally from a town in Russia called Kishinev, where he was born with a different name, Wolfe. His parents changed it to William when they sailed to America a year after his birth, escaping a famine in Russia and the anti-Jewish laws of the Czar.
They settled in Pittsburgh.
William said his father was a serious, bookish man, fluent in eight languages, a student of the Talmud. In Russia he had been a postal clerk but had trouble finding a good job in America and resorted to selling Singer sewing machines door-to-door. His mother worked as a peddler for a clothing company. So William and his four siblings grew up poor in Pittsburgh, poorer than Elizebeth’s family in Indiana.
He went to Cornell on a scholarship and chose to study genetics because it was a young field that “seemed to offer great possibilities for research and ingenuity.” He earned his degree and stayed on to teach a few courses as an untenured lecturer. That was when the unsolicited letter arrived from Fabyan in the general mailbox of the biology department. William didn’t know who Fabyan was. He said he ran a private research facility in Illinois and needed an expert in heredity to launch a genetics department and supervise experiments in the breeding of crops and fruit flies. William wrote back, introducing himself, and over the next three months, Fabyan courted him by mail, promising a life of intellectual freedom and adventure: “I am not looking for an agricultural expert, the woods are full of them; and I am not looking for a man to duplicate work that is being done at every agricultural station in the country, and at every advanced school and university. . . . If I should hear of something anywhere this side of Hell that I thought would do us any good, I might want you to go there and find out about it; in other words, I don’t want to go backwards.”
William replied with deference, formality, and gratitude: “I realize the value of the opportunity you are giving me to make good and I hope that our future relations will be mutually agreeable and profitable.”
There were hints in this exchange that Fabyan would be difficult to work with. William, cautious by nature, asked about salary. Fabyan responded with a vague, long-winded riff: “I want to get some practical level-headed fellows that will carry themselves, and a community which is asking no favors and yet having the best there is, where people will have to come for what we have.” William asked what he raised on the farm at Riverbank. Fabyan said he raised hell. His analogies were beautiful and bizarre. Writing of his desire to breed a new strain of wheat that would thrive in dry climates and help feed the hungry, Fabyan told William, “Here is a problem that has come up in my mind, that I want you to work on. I want the father of wheat, and I want a wife for him, so that the child will grow in an arid country.” He added that “one of my wealthy Jewish friends” was also working on the problem, but “if I can beat him to it, he will foot the bills, and be damned glad to. . . . This may seem impractical and improbable, but I have seen impractical and improbable things accomplished.”
Eventually Fabyan offered to pay William a hundred dollars a month, on top of free lodging, and William accepted. It happened to be an old yearning of his to live on a farm, a dream wrapped up in his Jewish identity. As a kid he’d heard stories from his parents of the pogroms in Russia, mob violence against Jews that they barely escaped, and by the time he got to high school he realized that anti-Semitism was spreading in the United States, too. Popular American magazines portrayed Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe as a “Jewish Invasion,” a threat to the jobs of whites, with the Russian Jew said to be especially conniving thanks to his “nervous, restless ambition.” Concerned and wanting to protect themselves, William and some of his high school classmates fell under the spell of the “back-to-the-soil” movement, a homespun brand of Zionism that encouraged Jewish kids in America to resist anti-Semitism by tilling the land, making themselves strong and self-sufficient. William took this idea seriously enough to enroll in some courses at a Michigan agricultural college. When he actually tried farming, he realized that everything about it, from the physical labor to the grit in his clothes, made him miserable.He went to Cornell instead.
Now, at Riverbank, he found himself on a farm again. Of sorts.
Elizebeth had never gone for shy men. But she liked William, and so did her elder sister, Edna, who visited Riverbank to see how Elizebeth was getting along. Edna’s dentist husband had recently died, leaving her a widow, and the dapper geneticist left an impression. She wrote William two flirty letters. Edna informed him that her sister was growing fond—“I think E[lizebeth] cares a very great deal more for you than she lets herself or anybody else believe”—but also implied that perhaps she, Edna, the mature and responsible sister, might make a better mate for William than younger, flakier Elizebeth. Edna wrote to William, “My idea of real love-making is sort of the Lochinvar kind”—Lochinvar, the hero of an old Scottish poem: So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war / There never was knight like the young Lochinvar. “Him riding up furiously, sweeping his bride up before him with one hand and riding away.”
Although Elizebeth found William attractive, she was drawn at first to his way of carrying himself, his scrupulous precision about words and facts and clothes, his modesty—qualities that made him George Fabyan’s opposite. She liked checking in with William after spending hours in the blast zone of Fabyan’s hype cannon. It felt healing, like drinking a glass of cold lemonade after a long walk. And what a mind he had! Talking to most people, Elizebeth felt like she could see the rough carpentry of their thoughts, the joints and tenons that never quite fit, but with William, ideas emerged smooth and whole, as if from a workshop. And he was so playful about it all, unlike Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup. Science to them was about results: defeating gravity, rewriting literary history, finding the secret to eternal life. Huge, epic, shocking, revolutionary ends. William never used such words. He didn’t care about the answers so much as the questions. He enjoyed science because it was an interesting way of being alive.
He had a feel for ciphers thanks to his work with Mrs. Gallup, and also a youthful fascination with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug.” The plot of the story revolves around a cryptogram whose solution points to a buried treasure chest full of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and gold coins, placed there by a murderer. Poe wrote articles about codes and ciphers, bragging that he could solve any cryptogram and daring readers to stump him, and for decades to come, Americans associated codebreakers with the sunken-cheeked, disreputable figure of Poe. William took a more whimsical approach to ciphers. He liked to blend them with his knowledge of botany to make jokes and works of art. At Riverbank he drew a sketch of a long-stemmed plant with many fine veins in its leaves; although from a distance it looked like an ordinary botanical illustration, closer examination revealed patterns of notches in the roots and leaves and petals that spelled out the words “Bacon” and “Shakespeare” in the biliteral cipher. He captioned the drawing, “CIPHER BACONIS GALLUP,” “A MOST INTERESTING AND PECULIAR PLANT, PROPAGATED AT RIVERBANK RESEARCH LABORATORIES.”
The autumn weeks burned away. The temperature dropped and Elizebeth experienced her first Riverbank winter, a gray duration of pitiless wind that scraped across the plains unbroken and slammed into the estate. The sky threw down a tarp of pale blue light. Your breath crystallized in the air like clouds of cigar smoke, and the cold groped into your lungs. The cottages and labs burned coal all day and the dark gray smoke rose from the chimneys. Elizebeth and William were growing closer. She didn’t know what to call it—more than friends, less than lovers. William would perch in a rocking chair sometimes and she would sit on his lap as he pushed the chair forward and back, his thin arms around her thin waist, the chair creaking in a steady rhythm, neither of them saying much at all.
It took a while for her to get up the courage to share her doubts about Mrs. Gallup’s work; she worried that William would look at her strangely, would think she was wrong and think less of her. But Elizebeth’s mind wouldn’t let it rest, and eventually, she asked what he thought. Wasn’t it strange how Mrs. Gallup could see these things that no one else could see?
To her enormous relief, William said he had been wondering the same. Sometimes a thought floated to the front of his mind, the deepest heresy at Riverbank: There are
no hidden messages in Shakespeare.
The idea rang in the air between them like a broken chime. Ugly, dissonant notes. Elizebeth and William exchanged a look. For the first time, but not for the last, each gathered strength from the other, and the notes resolved into a chord: There are no hidden messages in Shakespeare.
What if everyone involved in the Bacon work was crazy, except for the two of them?
CHAPTER 4
He Who Fears Is Half Dead
and then begins step step leap
she continues these leaps
scramble the code scramble uphill scramble eggs
and without premeditation but in full arc if possible
have a good time.
—ANNE CARSON
The intercepted and decoded telegram burned its way from hand to hand, from junior diplomat to senior diplomat, first in London and then in Washington, producing involuntary noises of surprise and bulging eyes. It was obvious that the president himself needed to see it. At 11 A.M. on February 27, 1917, the U.S. secretary of state, Robert Lansing, carried a copy of the intercepted telegram to the White House and showed it to Woodrow Wilson. The president read it and grew uncharacteristically angry: “Good Lord!” he said. “Good Lord!”
The telegram had been sent from Germany to Mexico on January 16, traveling by three separate telegraph routes and encoded as a series of number blocks: 130 13042 13401 8501 115 3528 416 17214. The British had intercepted the message, and a small team of civilian codebreakers toiled for a month in a secret office inside Whitehall to scrub away the grime of code and make the plaintext visible. What they saw, to their shock, was nothing less than a conspiracy plot against the United States.
Written by Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, the telegram proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico: “We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you.”