Franklin Affair

by Jim Lehrer

  “No, no, no,” said Clymer. “Sorry, Bill, but no small and private.”

  Bill Paine now said, “R knows—knew—Wally as well if not better than most of us. He can certainly vouch for the fact that when Wally wanted something, particularly when related to Ben, he was adamant.”

  R nodded, to vouch for Bill Paine’s assertion about Wally’s adamancy.

  Paine added, “I know Wally did not want a public funeral, because he said so forcefully and directly when we discussed specifying that in his will. We talked about every detail, including how he would be dressed this evening at Gray House.”

  Wally’s wonderful eighteenth-century three-story frame home was called Gray House because an early Philadelphia family named Gray had built it and because it was painted gray.

  “I can confirm the character trait but not the no-funeral request,” R said. “I had no discussions with Wally about that.”

  Clymer said to Paine, “Wally was a man of flourish, ceremony, and precedent. I don’t get it.”

  But R did. “It has to do with the size of the crowd, doesn’t it, Bill?” he said.

  “I’m afraid so,” Paine said, clearly grateful that he was not going to have to say the embarrassing words himself.

  “More than twenty thousand people came to Ben’s very public funeral two hundred and thirteen years ago,” R said, “and unless Wally’s could reach something like the same number, forget it. Is that it?”

  Bill Paine nodded. That was it.

  “Then the answer, quite obviously, is to make damned sure at least twenty thousand mourners attend,” said Elbridge Clymer. He was bouyant, lit, ready for the challenge. Little shots of heat seemed to be rising up from between the short spikes of his dark-brown hair, reminding R of a New York Times line in its story on Clymer’s BFU appointment. “As a white male, the only diversity history his hiring makes is that he will be the first president of an elite East Coast university to wear his hair in a crew cut.”

  R figured that, to match Ben’s funeral turnout, Clymer would have to promise straight As to the entire BFU student body in exchange for attending, as well as coerce City Hall into ordering every city employee—including police and firemen—to be there.

  Wallace Stephen Rush, Ph.D., was not a Philadelphia Philly, Eagle, or 76er. He wasn’t a native hero, like Sylvester “Rocky” Stallone or even Bruce Springsteen from neighboring New Jersey. He was a historian, a professor, a teller of stories, a wit who had devoted his life to Benjamin Franklin. He was responsible for five books about the man some hailed as the First American, including Ben One and Ben Two, which taken together were considered by most experts to be the definitive work. “There’s probably nothing more to know about Benjamin Franklin,” said the Washington Post reviewer of the Pulitzer-winning Ben Two. Ben One had been a Pulitzer finalist five years earlier.

  Dr. Rush appears to have run down every scrap of information there is about Franklin. It seems likely there are no more sources, no new places for future researchers to go, no angles or perspectives, no revelations of information or opinion to bring to the man, the accomplishments, the legacy of Benjamin Franklin.

  R enjoyed those words at the time, but he knew better. The search for what is new and revelatory is the grist of all history. There is never an end. Look at the recent new material from Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Joseph Ellis on that whole revolutionary period. And what about Ellis’s previous book on Jefferson, David McCullough’s enormously successful work on Adams, Paul Nagel’s before that on John Quincy Adams, and even the most recent books on Franklin by Wood, Claude-Anne Lopez, H. W. Brands, James Srodes, Edmund S. Morgan, and Walter Isaacson? The curiosity and new information about the events and people of our national beginnings will never cease.

  There had indeed been considerable publicity about Wally through the years, and he had hosted several Franklin specials and discussion programs on WHYY, the local public television station. His most important national exposure was as one of a dozen on-camera experts interviewed on a recent four-hour PBS miniseries on Ben. But he was not the kind of celebrity whose demise would draw 20,000 people. Most likely, thought R, not even a service for Stallone or Springsteen would do that. Three hundred or so for sure and possibly as many as a thousand, but that was it for Wally, who clearly knew this also; thus his desire to skip a public event that would appear puny compared to Ben’s.

  “What do you think, R?” It was Bill Paine. “Do we ignore Wally and let Elbow try to top twenty thousand?” Elbow was Elbridge Clymer’s nickname, one that had been with him since high school. The origins, he had told R, were an understandable wish not to be called Elbridge and his agressive use of elbows when he played basketball. The subject of nicknames had come up a few months previous at a BFU alumni dinner in Washington. Clymer asked R why he went by an initial, to which R responded with his now tired line about hating his first name, Reginald, more than even Raymond, his second.

  R had never been good at meetings. A low regard for them was one of the reasons he enjoyed his mostly solitary work as historian and writer. He found meetings among his own kind to be mostly a means for exchanging hostilities and inanities under cover of an atmosphere that encouraged witticism over wisdom, show over substance. And yet, counting the Rebecca adventure, here he was attending the second of two high-octane meetings in one day.

  “What do you think, Harry?” R said, throwing the funeral-size ball over to Harry Dickinson, Wally’s longtime book editor. Harry, nearly seventy in age but under thirty in energy and vigor, had come down from New York this morning. Harry was known by his friends as the Bush because most everything about him was bushy: his graying brown hair, his eyebrows, his checked sport jackets and flannel slacks. He also seemed to shuffle sideways, rather than walking straight ahead, as a bush probably would—if it could.

  “I think Wally wouldn’t mind as long as the twenty-thousand number was reached,” said Harry.

  “Fine,” said R, “but it can’t be done.”

  “We can do it!” Clymer said.

  R looked around at the others. There was no we here, only silence from Clara Hopkins, Wally’s current top assistant representing Wally’s staff and looking even better than he had remembered. Not a word from two of Wally’s most ancient colleagues in the BFU history department or an equally ancient cousin of Wally’s childless and long-dead sister. Only polite grins from Caesar McKean, a long-time drinking buddy of Wally’s who owned Philadelphia’s classiest and most famous Italian restaurant, and Joyce Carter, a retired Broadway and film actress who was long rumored to be Wally’s girlfriend. R knew, however, that there was nothing between them but great affection and fun. Wally’s wife, Gertrude, had died twenty-five years ago in an auto accident on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the main artery across the Delaware River from Philadelphia to New Jersey. Wally took her death as some kind of signal or omen because it happened on the bridge named for Franklin and because Ben’s wife, Deborah, had preceded him in death by many years too.

  R’s attention remained on Clara Hopkins, seemingly much leggier than the last time R had seen her. Her hair was bright blond and her skirt was way too short. Her legs, exposed on the other side of the low coffee table, seemed longer than ever. Maybe her legs hadn’t grown any and it was only that R was seeing more of them than he had before. Had she always been this beautiful?

  “I can do it and I will do it,” said Clymer, who was taking quick glances at what was visible of Clara Hopkins below the table as well.

  So. Despite his wishes, there would be a very public service for Wallace Stephen Rush that would be attended, it was hoped, by at least twenty thousand people.

  A major agenda item of the meeting having been resolved, Clymer leaped to his feet as if he needed to spring into action now, immediately, from this room.

  “I leave it to the rest of you to begin preliminary planning for the service, which I am sure will go down in Philadelphia history as the most striking, monumental, and unforgettable mem
orial since the one for Ben himself,” said Clymer. “My immediate mission is to assemble the mourning crowd.”

  He said he would see everyone this evening at Gray House and gave cursory farewells to the others. But he gestured for R to come with him. It was the time-recognized—and annoying—signal for saying, I need to talk to you about something too important and too sensitive for the ears of these lesser beings.

  • • •

  There was another person with a private message for R. Bill Paine took R by the arm and guided him away from the flow with Clymer and gently halted him against a hallway wall.

  “Wally has made you his literary executor, R,” Paine whispered.

  That was not a surprise. Wally had talked to R about it, and R had even discussed the probability with Samantha, his historian fiancée—of sorts—who was away at the moment on her own writing project about John Hancock.

  “I’m honored,” R whispered back.

  “Another thing Wally did does more than just honor you,” Paine added. “He upped your share of the royalties on Ben Two from the current fifty percent to a full hundred percent. As you know, there are already more than three million copies in print, in twenty-three languages, and more to come.”

  “That was very generous of Wally,” R said, trying his best to hide his surprise at the news. This was something he had definitely not discussed with Wally.

  Then Paine reached inside a breast pocket of his suit coat, extracted a white envelope, and handed it to R. “Wally asked that I give this to you upon his death.”

  R took the letter and put it in his own coat pocket without looking at it, except to notice the seal. There was a dab of red wax, the size of a quarter, over the pointed part of the envelope flap. Wally was either playing historian games or wanted to make damn sure nobody else read what was inside.

  “Brace yourself for seeing Wally tonight, R.” Bill Paine gave a wave and departed before R could comment. Why should he brace himself? He’d seen dead people before.

  • • •

  Moments later, R was behind a closed door with Elbow Clymer.

  Still radiating heat and excitement, Clymer said,”I hereby officially offer you a tenured position at your alma mater, Benjamin Franklin University. This involves a newly created chair and an institute dedicated solely to research on Franklin and named for Wally. The recent new public interest in Ben—Time and Newsweek magazine covers and all the rest—that will climax with a crescendo in 2006 with the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, make it a perfect time to establish this institute. Everything you want goes with it. I will personally raise the money to fund whatever research and whatever staff and resources you desire. Write your own ticket, and I will take it at the door and punch it, like a dutiful train conductor.”

  A little earlier today on the Metroliner from Washington—now an analogical coincidence of the first order—it had occurred to R that Clymer might make such a pitch. R’s long relationship with Wally, the university, the American Revolution, and Franklin scholarship made it a natural. But he had put such thoughts aside for the ninety-minute train ride to concentrate on what he was going to do about Samantha. She was away working on her John Hancock book, but when she returned he was going to have to come to grips with his pre-separation belief that God may not have intended them to be man and wife after all.

  “You not only have the university’s permission but also its encouragement to appear as a commentator on television,” said Clymer. “If it will make it easier, we will construct a television studio and satellite uplink for you and your colleagues right in your offices. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the world will be at your fingertips.”

  “I don’t do much TV,” R said.

  “You will now,” Clymer responded.

  R was ready to quote John Gwinnett on historians speaking on television much too often about things they knew much too little about. But this wasn’t what really mattered.

  “The main thing is, I don’t do tenured professorships,” said R. “I don’t like the structure, the politics, the malice, the games, the chains, the meetings—”

  “But don’t forget the unforgettable: the need for a healthy steady income,” said Clymer. “I can assure you that the compensation package we organize will make you very happy.”

  R smiled. It was the polite—and expected—thing to do. He could not say to Elbow that the news he had just received from Bill Paine about the Ben Two royalties might make it unnecessary for him ever again to do something just for the money.

  Elbow Clymer raised his right hand. “Just agree to think about it, R. That’s all I ask for now.” He lowered his hand as if signaling a subject change. “That young woman in there who worked for Wally—what’s her name?”

  “Clara Hopkins.”

  “That’s a pretty name: old-fashioned, steady. My ex-wife’s name is Myrtle. We divorced last year.”

  Clymer disappeared and R rejoined the others in the library—to work out the details of what would happen at the striking, monumental, and unforgettable funeral for Wallace Stephen Rush and to admire the legs of the young woman with the pretty name.

  • • •

  R waited until he was back in his room at the nearby Chestnut Hotel before breaking the wax seal and removing Wally’s letter from its envelope.

  His was immediately overcome with a feeling of profound sadness. There were three folded pages of lined schoolboy notebook paper, and Wally had clearly tried with much difficulty to keep his writing between the lines. R could feel the hurt, the extreme agony it must have put the old man through for him to do this. Wally’s handwriting, once precise, firm, and almost as clear as his typing, was on these pages faint in places, loopy, erratic, and shaky, similar to that found in a sloppy first-grader’s penmanship workbook.

  There was no date at the top of the first page. Because the writing got progressively worse with each few paragraphs, it was obviously not written in one sitting. R couldn’t even imagine how many hours and days of painful writing it must have taken Wally to do it.

  R read:

  My dear friend:

  Forgive the way this looks. I’m embarrassed that I can barely hold a pen in my hand and make it move the way I want. But I had no choice but to do it this way because it could not go through a computer, a tape recorder, or, even more important, a secretary or any other person. Only your eyes, mind, and sensibilities can be exposed to what I have to say.

  But before I get to the hard part, I’ll bet anything you and my other friends are not doing what I wanted about sending me off to the heavens—or wherever. I’m right, aren’t I? People always think they know what is best for the corpse better than the deceased himself. Tell everyone I will come back as Aaron Burr and fire a big fat hole into anyone who screws with my wishes. The big issue for me is the cremation and private service. I want no report in the Inquirer that Wally Rush had a huge public funeral and nobody came. Forget Burr. Use Adams instead. Tell them I’ll return as John Adams and lecture them to death.

  But that is not the purpose of this letter.

  As you know, I have left instructions that you be appointed my literary executor. Decline and I’ll not only do Adams and Burr, I’ll add the deadly weapon of Jefferson in coming after you. Your epitaph would read: “Here lies R. Raymond Taylor, smitten dead by a ghost armed with the self-righteous imperiousness of Thomas Jefferson!”

  Yes, it is important for me that you be my executor because I’m not keen on others messing around in my papers for reasons that are certainly well-known and understood by you. But there is much more to it than that.

  R, I need you, Ben needs you, and history needs you to do the most important work any historian of the American Revolution could be asked to do, now or at almost any other time. I am not exaggerating.

  Something was dropped in my lap several months ago. It was very hot, too hot to tell another soul about. Certainly not anyone on my current staff or in our larger scholarly world. I decided against telling even
you until now. As Ben said in one of his Poor Richard maxims: “Three may keep a secret if two of ’em are dead.” In this case, there will be two keeping this secret—and one of ’em, me, is dead.

  My secret, now yours and yours alone, concerns twelve handwritten pages that turned up last year. They were found sewn in the lining of an exquisite man’s cloak that had been contributed to the Eastern Pennsylvania Museum of Colonial History, a very small institution in Eastville. The cloak was among the perfectly preserved personal effects of a Pennsylvania gentleman of the Revolution and had been recently contributed to the museum by the man’s descendants. There is no question that the cloak is an authentic garment of revolutionary American vintage.

  In the process of examining the coat for exact dating, the museum people felt, found, and extracted twelve pieces of paper from within the cloak’s lining. The paper and the writing appeared to be eighteenth-century, but the words, while in English, made no obvious sense. The sentences were fragmentary; the phrases were disjointed. The only thing they could determine for certain was that Ben was the principal subject of the writings because his name—or obvious references to him—dominated the script. There were also mentions of Washington and Adams, among other founding stalwarts, but because Ben was the main subject the Eastville people asked me for help. Would I try to make heads or tails of this? they asked. I, of course, agreed and spent several hours in Eastville going over the writings. When I finished, I declared the scribblings to contain nothing of importance. I said they seemed to be the diary of someone who was unidentifiable and thus of no historical value. The museum people thanked me, made plans to put the cloak on display, and locked up the papers in a safe, where, as far as I know, they remain out of sight and unstudied further.

  What I said to the Eastville museum people was a lie.

  Those papers, if I deciphered them correctly in my hurried and difficult state, point to the possibility of treachery and savagery by Ben of a magnitude quite beyond what anyone, even the strongest Franklin haters among the Adams and Jefferson crowds, could have imagined. They appear to be the account of a meeting to consider serious charges against Ben. The accusation, bluntly put, is that he had a woman murdered: the mother of William, the subject of one of your previous professional obsessions. The best I could tell from the notes is that Ben disposed of the woman because she was threatening to go public with her claim of motherhood in a way that would damage Ben’s hard-won reputation as a hero of the Revolution, Knowledge, and Mankind.