Franklin Affair

by Jim Lehrer

  Samantha looked up at R and smiled. R laughed out loud. He couldn’t help himself. Samantha Louise Middleton was one very funny woman. Except when they were fighting, which unfortunately was much too often, or like a while ago when she was crying, just the sight of her made R grin. There was something about the flounce in her walk and her other movements, her salty language—picked up at home, she claimed, from an ex-marine father—and her very strongly delivered opinions that tickled him, lifted him.

  That had been pretty much the case from their chance beginning. They happened to sit next to each other at an ARHA symposium on whether Jefferson really was the father of Sally Hemings’s children. It was held in a meeting room at Georgetown University, where Samantha was an associate professor of Early American History. Out of professional curiosity, R simply walked over to the campus from his house to hear the discussion. There were experts of various kinds on the panel, and they were evenly split—two against two—on the validity of the DNA testing and other evidence. When the meeting broke up, R, not consciously on the make, said to the magnificent-looking woman on his left, “All this is another great lesson in the basic truth that history never ends.” She agreed. They introduced themselves and exchanged current stations and interests in life. “I have always admired Dr. Rush and would give anything to meet him sometime,” Samantha said. R remarked that Wally was, in fact, due in Washington in a couple of weeks for a meeting of some historical commission and he—R—would be delighted to arrange something. A few minutes later, he suggested that they continue this conversation at the bar at 1812, a restaurant just off campus. They had been mostly together ever since, and Samantha moved in with R nearly a year ago with a loose agreement to get married soon.

  “Did you have your way with that Wally assistant the other night in Philadelphia?” she asked now.

  “No, I did not.”

  “Maybe just a little intellectually based physical affection between Franklin scholars?”

  “No!”

  “Well, then, what did you do with her?”

  R told her about what he ate for dinner at the Brasserie Perrier and the ceremony for Wally, with Clara being the one in charge of the ashes. He did not tell her that he had offered Clara a job or even about the proposed new institute. This was not the time. Right now, it was all about Samantha—and their future together.

  “Do you honestly believe you can and will be faithful to me, R?” she said.

  “How many times have we been through this?”

  “You weren’t at all faithful to your first two wives, were you?”

  “Neither of them was you!”

  And then, like a bell at the end of time on a TV quiz show, the telephone rang.

  R moved to disentangle himself from Samantha.

  “Let it ring,” she said.

  “I can’t. It’s a conference call about Rebecca Lee.”

  He picked up the telephone receiver on the desk with one hand and grabbed the FedExed Rebecca papers with the other. He tossed them to Samantha with accompanying body language that said to help herself to an interesting read.

  “Yes, this is Taylor,” he said into the phone, as he sat down at the desk. “Sure. I can go ahead now if everyone else can. . . . Let’s go then. Hello, John . . . Sonya . . . Joe. Are you all there?”

  They were all there.

  • • •

  “I have asked my chief assistant, Alexander Stockton, to join us—we call him Patrick around here, of course,” said John Gwinnett. “Alex will make a verbatim transcript of what we say—and, possibly, decide—that can be forwarded to the ARHA office. I trust that meets with everyone’s approval?”

  There were no objections, just a smattering of hellos and acknowledgments to Stockton, who presumably was sitting somewhere in Williamsburg with John Gwinnett. Gwinnett’s field was Patrick Henry, but R had no idea why Stockton would be called Patrick.

  “Dr. Taylor, before proceeding, let me say that I thought the farewell events for Wally were perfect,” Gwinnett said.

  “I agree. Wally got a good sendoff,” said R.

  He glanced over at Samantha on the couch, still reading the Rebecca report. She looked up and rolled her eyes at him. He knew what she was saying with that: “The goods” were indeed the goods.

  R wished he had had a chance to discuss with Samantha Rebecca’s blackmail threat: Save me, R, or I take you down with me on phony charges. He had kept Rebecca’s written charges and the specific Gotcha! threats. But there hadn’t been an opportunity yet to show or tell her anything. So be it. He was on his own, and he hoped he knew exactly where he was going.

  “I must say—just to begin the discussion—that it’s about as open-and-shut a situation as I have ever encountered,” Gwinnett said. “Shockingly so, if I may add that comment.”

  “Amen,” said Sonya. Or at least R assumed it was Sonya. Her voice was so soft it was hard to tell. But she was the only female involved in this meeting.

  “I agree, but I assume we will now give Rebecca Lee an opportunity to respond to these specific allegations?” It was Joe Hooper. No lynchings, please, remained his message.

  There was silence for a count of two—three—four. R knew it was his turn to speak and everyone was waiting for him to do so. He was thinking. Joe Hooper had raised a good point. But so had John and Sonya.

  “There can be no defense for such blatant plagiarism,” Gwinnett said.

  “Amen,” said Sonya.

  R had expected more words—more passion and force—from Sonya. Here, finally, she had in the crosshairs a person she detested, despised, abhorred. An enemy, politically and personally. Why was she only saying quietly to Gwinnett, “Amen”?

  R decided to push her a bit. “Amen means what, exactly, in this context, Sonya?”

  “That the evidence is strong.”

  “Stockton forwarded a full copy of the report to Dr. Lee as well as to each of you,” said Gwinnett. “She knows the exact nature of the damning evidence against her.”

  “Yes, but, as Joe says, aren’t we obligated to hear her defense, no matter how puny and insufficient it may be?” asked R.

  He couldn’t help noticing Samantha. She shook her head and then raised her right arm above as if it was holding a hangman’s noose. She closed her eyes and slumped her head over to the side. Hang her!

  R had to suppress a laugh.

  “I believe we have no choice but to have a face-to-face meeting with her,” Joe Hooper said firmly. “That is the only fair and responsible thing to do.”

  “I agree that we probably should, but I’ll leave that to the rest of you to decide,” mumbled Sonya.

  There was an eerie silence on the conference-call line.

  “What’s wrong, Sonya?” R finally said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Has she been after you?”

  Sonya said nothing, and neither did anyone else for a few seconds.

  “As a matter of fact, she actually threatened me,” R said. There, he did it. He had not intended to say this, but there it was.

  Samantha was off the couch. She came up behind him and put her arms around his neck and down onto his chest.

  “Me too R,” said Sonya, still barely audible. “She claimed she had evidence that I had stolen something in my first Abigail Adams book. I checked her citations. She’s wrong. Yes, I read a lot of prior material, but I gave full credit and had everything directly quoted between quotation marks. She said she found a time or two when there could have been better attributions. I told her that was absurd. She told me to ‘tell it to the judge’—a committee like our very own that she would insist be formed.”

  “That woman is dangerous,” Gwinnett said.

  Said Hooper, “I saw her in Philadelphia at the ceremony for Dr. Rush. All she said was that she sure did appreciate my speaking up for treating her fairly. I took it to be a bit of blatant—shall we say—caressing of a particular part of my anatomy.”

  “She came my way at Philadelphia b
ut I walked away from her,” said Gwinnett. “Even before I knew she was a first-class plagiarist, I knew she was a first-class fool for equating Reagan with the Founding Fathers.”

  R agreed with Gwinnett about the Reagan comparison, but he stayed on the real subject. “Rebecca’s ammunition against me has to do with an op-ed piece in The Washington Post last week. I let some ideas from a twenty-five-year-old Timothy Morton essay linger too long in my brain before writing my piece. She admitted it wasn’t anything serious but said I would be smeared anyhow in the process of trying to explain myself. Same as she said to you, Sonya. ‘Tell it to the judge.’ ”

  “This is an outrage!” yelled Gwinnett. “I say we throw everything we have at her!”

  Again, there were a several beats of silence. No one joined in to shout, Right on, John! The clear unspoken message was, instead, Maybe not so fast, John.

  Joe Hooper finally said, “As a matter of fact, what is the ‘everything’ we can actually throw?”

  R had wondered that a time or two himself in the last few days. But with so much else going on in his life, he hadn’t bothered to check any ARHA booklets or ask anyone.

  Gwinnett said, “We can recommend the ARHA censure her publicly—condemn her and her actions in strong words shouted from housetops. We can urge her university or college employer to reprimand or even dismiss her. We can urge her publisher to withdraw the book in question from print. We can ask that any awards or prizes she may have received for the book be rescinded. And we can strip away her membership in the ARHA”

  Hooper was the first to laugh. “Except for the public accusations, that’s pretty much nothing.”

  “That’s true,” said Sonya. “She doesn’t teach anymore, for one thing. And I can’t believe that awful Reagan book won anything but a kiss from a right-wing book club.”

  “Her publisher might defend her—and love the publicity,” R added, his mind targeted on Harry Dickinson’s conduct and example.

  “Then it boils down to a confrontation,” said Gwinnett, remaining very much in charge. “I am still unable to travel because of my knee, so that will make it necessary for us to meet here in Williamsburg. Is that a problem for anyone?”

  No one had an objection. R, for his part, considered visits to the historic area of Colonial Williamsburg to be the single most pleasurable part of his life as an eighteenth-century historian. There were many sites to study American history, but CW was the only one where one could sense, feel, and experience it. There was nothing he enjoyed more than strolling the streets, sipping a cup of apple cider, listening to the music from the taverns, exchanging exaggerated greetings with the interpreters, in their eighteenth-century dress, and trading exaggerated dialogue with the several skilled actors who regularly portrayed such major colonial figures as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

  “I will have Dr. Lee contacted to pursue possible dates with her and with each of you and then firm up the arrangements,” said Gwinnett. “I must give some thought to what would be the most suitable Williamsburg setting for the occasion.”

  “Let’s put her in the stocks alongside the old courthouse,” Sonya said, in full voice.

  • • •

  They went for a walk, going out to 31st Street and then left two blocks up to R Street, west by the famous Oak Hill Cemetery and Montrose Park toward Dunbarton Oaks and Wisconsin Avenue.

  Neither looked at much of anything on either side of the street. Mostly Samantha was listening to R recount the events that led up to the Rebecca conference call. She had only heard his end of the conversations up to now and had paid very little attention to R’s ARHA committee assignment, except to blindly defend Rebecca because she was a woman.

  When he finished, Samantha said, “I’m sorry about what I said on the phone the other day. That was uninformed, stupid, silly. If there was capital punishment for plagiarists, Rebecca deserves the rope—or the needle; whatever. Fried, even.”

  They crossed Wisconsin and continued walking west through a row of fairly new town houses. R pointed to one. “Somebody told me Meg Greenfield lived in that one.” Greenfield had been the editor of the Washington Post editorial page and a Newsweek columnist before her death a few years ago. She was a good friend of Mrs. Graham, once her neighbor down R Street.

  “Question,” said Samantha. “Did you intentionally buy that house of yours because it was close to R Street?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “It only now just struck me.”

  “The answer is no. I loved the house and the neighborhood. It’s possible that its faint Georgian resemblance to Ben’s old house on Craven Street had an effect too.”

  “You should tell people that R Street is named after you.”

  R laughed. Maybe now was a good time to bring up John Hancock and Samantha’s writing problem. He wanted to know more about the specifics, the particular scenes or insights or whatevers that were causing her trouble.

  She waved him off with a friendly but tight “I’m not ready to talk about that” and brought the subject back to him. Was anything else exciting or monumental going on his life besides the Rebecca drama and, of course, the death of Wally?

  “Not really,” he said. It was a reflex answer. He wasn’t quite ready to bring Samantha into any of his other truly monumental crises: the Eastville papers, Ben Two and the possible Three, or even running a Wally-Ben center at BFU. He had been thinking about telling her everything. He knew he needed some counsel, some wisdom, some reactions—some help. And to his mind at this moment, there was nobody else but Samantha from whom he could get it. He was almost ready—but not yet. She also really did have to deal with her Hancock problem.

  They had been holding hands. Now he put his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “Speaking of names as we were a moment ago, I assume you’re not planning to take my last name?”

  She stopped, twisted away, and look up at him. “Do you really still want to marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Please tell me why?”

  “Because I love you—enough even to stay faithful to you.”

  She moved back under his arm. Without another word, they turned around as one and hurried back to his house.

  • • •

  Afterward, still in bed and sipping chardonnay R had poured for them, they would talk some more about marriage and their lives together. Maybe, thought R, he might even bring up one or more of his other crises.

  That thought reminded him that while he had checked his mail and his telephone answering machine, he had not booted up his computer and gone through any e-mail that might have come since he left for Philadelphia.

  When was that anyhow? This is Tuesday. Wally died last Thursday. Good God almighty! Look at all that has happened to me—look at all the trucks that have hit me—in just five goddamn days!

  With Samantha’s permission, he detoured into the study to his desktop.

  There was only one e-mail of consequence. It was from Clara Hopkins in Philadelphia.

  r, dear boss:

  no record of either a roger or “button” nelson in colonial census, medical, military, or tax records. nothing about either in any newspaper from the time. thinking of other places to look. are you sure they existed?

  some good information on melissa anne harrison wolcott: born here in 1744, daughter of prominent Quaker family. married jonathan david wolcott in 1763, had four children. died in philadelphia in 1794. all of this confirmed from more than one source.

  now will you tell me why you wanted to know this stuff?

  hope all is well. look forward to your return.

  your obedient servant,

  clara h.

  R, with a pencil on a notepad, did some fast adding and subtracting.

  The Melissa Anne Harrison Wolcott in Clara’s records could not be the same one in the Eastville papers or in Johnny Rutledge’s records. She would have been twenty-two years old when Ben met her, and already married.
And she would have still been alive years after Ben supposedly hired the Nelsons to kill her.

  A Prophecy situation after all?

  But what about Carter Hewes’s fairly solid take on the dating of the pages and the writing? Unless they were a forgery. Joshiah Ross and his cloak certainly were real. Johnny Rutledge seemed sure about his data on Melissa Anne Harrison being a kid too. Unless. . . .

  What now? What next? There was so much of this to check and recheck. There was also the farmhouse meeting. Is it even possible that Adams, Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, as well as Ben, could have conceivably gathered on that particular day in 1788? Their diaries and personal papers should be able to pinpoint where each man was on that date.

  He chose not to discuss any of this with Samantha. So, once in bed, they talked about getting married: possible wedding dates, locations, size and style. Samantha said she’d call her mother in Kansas tomorrow. Her father, the marine she claimed had taught her how to cuss, had died two years earlier of lung cancer.

  “This is the number-one wedding for me—and for my mom and my family,” said Samantha. “You’ve had some practice.”

  R acknowleged that simple truth. His first wedding, to a wonderful woman who was meant to live with a Wall Street broker rather than a historian, took place on a small mountainside near Great Barrington, just a few miles over the line in Massachusetts from his Connecticut hometown. Two hundred people came in dark suits and long dresses, danced to a large orchestra, ate and drank well, and were merry under a large white tent. Trish had hated life in Philadelphia as the wife of a graduate assistant. Fortunately, there were no children.

  His second wedding with a Methodist preacher friend officiating, was held in his own Philadelphia living room with only a few other friends present. Maggie, also a wonderful woman, loved campus life and its professors, instructors, and graduate assistants. She had trouble being with only one at a time. Fortunately, there were no children with Maggie either.