by Jim Lehrer
Yes, Ben fathered an illegitimate child named William. The whole world knew that. But, no, that son did not come from Ben’s having impregnated a child, possibly as young as twelve.
And, no matter any of his other possible sins, he certainly didn’t commission someone to have William’s mother stabbed to death and her bloody body stuffed in a gunnysack and tossed into the Delaware River.
R was sure of it.
THIRTEEN
Then, late morning four days later, Clara called from Philadelphia.
“I have more on that day in 1788,” she announced with an urgent and pleased rush in her voice.
R took a very deep breath.
“Remember what I said about James Madison, that I hadn’t been able to come up with anything about where or what Madison was doing that day?”
R mumbled something to acknowledge that he did remember.
“Well, my friend at the Madison Papers archives at U-Va called me back. She said a huge mystery had arisen as a result of my original inquiry. She said Madison kept daily precise notes about everything he did. But get this.”
R felt a sudden certainty that he did not want to get this.
“His notes from September seventh of that year and from the days before and after—September sixth and eighth—are missing. My friend said it was possible they somehow were misplaced through the years but—and I quote—’It’s also possible somebody, Madison himself even, intentionally destroyed them. Who knows?’ End quote. That got me to wondering.”
R was breathing again but only barely. A touch of nausea was forming somewhere down near the bottom of his throat.
Clara continued. “I went back through each of the rundowns I had on the other Founding Fathers and did some more work with each of their papers—through various Web sites and CD-ROMs as well as colleagues. Guess what?”
R declined to guess.
“First, it turns out that the big bank meeting Hamilton supposedly attended in New York on September eighth was actually a week later. His archivists at Columbia now have some second thoughts about where he was on the seventh and eighth. He may not have been in New York after all, and maybe somebody played with the diary entries. They’re going to get back to me once they sort it out.
“Second, Martha Washington, in a letter to her sister dated two weeks after September seventh, said, and I quote: ‘George travels away from Mount Vernon much, much too much to suit me, and, I fear, his health. He still labors for his country. He departed on a trip several days ago in the middle of the night, would not tell me his destination, and upon his return asked that I forever keep secret his absence. I can only assume he was doing work on behalf of our new and great nation. Bless his heart and his soul.’
“Third, Franklin was seen at a friend’s house in Philadelphia the evening of September sixth, so he was definitely not confined to his bed during that whole week, as a notebook from his doctor had said. The doctor, as I’m sure you know, was a close friend of Franklin’s and would not be resistant to requests from Franklin to change something. There is good solid evidence that the doctor often covered for him on a number of other earlier occasions for numerous other reasons, including those of a different kind of bed.”
Yes, but that hardly proved anything, thought R, grateful for even a tiny opening for a possible challenge to what was clearly developing. Ben was Ben. . . .
“Fourth, the Adams papers at the Massachusetts Historicial Society show a direct conflict between the records of John and Abigail. She said John was ‘away from us and our hearth’ on September sixth, seventh, and eighth, while John, in a letter that appears to experts from the shakiness of the handwriting to have been written later, talks of ‘good talk and food among family and friends’ those days in Quincy. Most important, there are a few lines that turned up in another letter that Adams wrote to Madison in late September of 1788. Shall I read them?”
R grunted a reluctant affirmative.
“ ‘It was most wise of you to suggest that we leave no carriage tracks, so to speak, no lingering odors from our recent gathering. I have seen to it. I trust that our colleagues have done the same.’ ”
Oh, my God. R remembered Johnny Rutledge talking years ago about a reference to Ben’s saying something about Madison and a “difficult situation.” R had put it out of his mind until now—or, most precisely, until it popped out while he was sitting on the parlor floor at 36 Craven Street several days ago.
“It’s all adding up, isn’t it?” said Clara.
R made a sound. He was sick to his stomach. He thought he might throw up. He thought he might faint. He thought he might die.
He knew he had to lie to Clara.
“Good work,” he said, trying his best to sound sincere, serious, strong. “Thank you.”
“Thank you. Now will you tell me? Now will you tell me why September 7, 1788, is so important?
“I can’t do that.”
“What were they covering up, if that’s what this is all about? Is that it, our nation’s first Watergate cover-up?”
“All I can say is what I said a moment ago, Clara. Thank you. Now I have to go.”
“What’s going on? Go where?”
To my destruction as a historian and as a person of honor and purpose!
“To the bathroom,” he said.
It was almost the truth. R hung up the telephone, put his head on his desk, closed his eyes, and experienced the opening thoughts and scenes of a nightmare that, he was certain, would be with him, and in him, for the rest of his life. . . .
Eventually, he rose from his desk, but instead of going to the bathroom, he went to the front room, to the fireplace where, just a few evenings ago, he had turned to ashes those twelve sheets of paper from the Eastville cloak.
He so wanted to look down and find that, through some miracle, the ashes had re-formed into what they had been: a coded account of what very well may have been a most historic meeting of Founding Fathers at a Pennsylvania farmhouse more than two hundred years ago.
No such miracle had occurred.
• • •
There he was. And there was Ben, standing eight feet tall in dirty white marble atop a pedestal that was nearly ten feet high itself.
The statue here at Twelfth and Pennsylvania Avenue really was stunning. The Post letter-to-the-editor writers were probably correct in complaining that R should have at least mentioned it in his op-ed piece.
Ben was wearing an open long diplomatic coat with huge buttons and fur collar, a waistcoat, a frilly tied neckpiece, and matching fluffy shirt cuffs coming out the end of the coat sleeves, tight breeches to the knee, with stockings over the legs down to his shoes. His build was solid except in the middle, where his potbelly pooched out, the buttons on the waistcoat clearly straining to keep it contained. His bald forehead gave way to long hair dropping over his ears and—when viewed from the rear—down his back. He was not wearing glasses.
His right hand and forearm were raised; his mouth was closed. There was a book in his left hand down by his side. Three more books, one open, the other two closed, were stacked behind his right foot. His legs were apart, his right slightly ahead of the left.
His face was animated, pleasant. He was busy. Was he about to speak?
FRANKLIN was written at the top of the gray granite pedestal in six-inch raised letters. The sculptor’s name was engraved above that, underneath Ben’s left foot. Below were four words in the granite, one on each side: PATRIOT, PHILOSOPHER, PHILANTHROPIST, PRINTER. Farther down the base was a brass plaque that said the statue was erected on January 17, 1889.
The statue and the pedestal sat in the center of a round step-up slab, one foot high and twenty feet in diameter, that was made of concrete and brick.
R recognized this man on the pedestal. It was Benjamin Franklin, all right. And, it occurred to him, this statue could probably also pass for Wally Rush if it were on its back in an open casket.
From a nearby plaque, R read that the statue had
originally been at Tenth and Pennsylvania in front of what was then the Washington Post building after it was “Presented to the National Capitol” by the Post’s publisher. It was moved here in the 1980s to adorn the entrance to the towered structure that was once the headquarters for the U.S. Post Office Department. It was still owned by the government but was now called the Old Post Office Pavilion and was mostly leased out to small tourist shops and cafés downstairs, with various government agency offices on the floors above.
The post office–Ben angle certainly made sense. As deputy postmaster general for the pre-Revolution colonies under the King, Ben launched the first real mail service in America. And that was just one item of hundreds on the extremely long list of this remarkable man’s achievements.
The thought reaffirmed to R the correctness of his original impulse to turn those Eastville papers into ashes. This man, this incredible human being and Founding Father, flawed though he may have been, did not deserve to have his reputation smeared now over some accusations that appeared to be part of a hoax.
But . . .
Probable hoax or not, I am a historian, a pursuer and teller of the truth.
But . . .
Probable hoax or not, how dare I play God with those twelve sheets of history?
But . . .
Probable hoax or not, wouldn’t it have been more professional, more ethical, more everything to have simply locked them up someplace rather than destroy them?
But . . .
Probable hoax or not, what would I have done if they told terrible tales about Adams? Or Jefferson? Or even Washington?
But. But. But.
It’s done. The papers are no more. Forget it.
• • •
After the message from Clara, he had rushed outside and started walking. He went down to M Street and kept going east, taking the fork onto Pennsylvania, until forty-five minutes later he was here, looking up at Ben.
R figured it was one thing to speak with Ben the Naked Ghost across a London parlor; it was quite another to chat with Ben the Statue amid the heavy pedestrian traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue.
R slowly walked once around the statue. Then a second and a third time. He stared at Ben from the front for a good two minutes and then from the rear. Then from one side and the other. This angle and that angle.
The statue needed a good cleaning. There were signs of gross marble deterioration in several spots, particularly up on the back of Ben’s coat. R made annoyed note of that. But he had no idea what he was really looking for, even what he was doing here. Was he hoping for inspiration? Wisdom? Affirmation?
You did the right thing, young man. I thank you for your choice of Honor.
Maybe that’s what R wanted to imagine he heard from Ben.
If so, it hadn’t happened.
There were people all around the statue, walking in and out of the building, up and down the street. Some were tourists, others workers from the various federal office buildings in the neighborhood. This was the Federal Triangle, one of Washington’s busiest downtown areas.
R wondered what book the sculptor had in mind when he put that one in Ben’s right hand. Why were those other three on the ground—the top of the base of the pedestal—by Ben’s right foot? What’s the message, the symbolism? That Ben was a man of the written word? That books were important to him—to who and what he was?
Fine. Yes. That must be it.
R was suddenly aware of a putrid odor coming from his right. It had the fragrance of spoiled food, dead animals, urine, garbage—human body stench.
He dared to look in the direction of the smell. There was a man standing there, barely two feet away. He was also looking up at Ben. He appeared as filthy as he smelled. He was wearing a dark-blue knit hat full of holes, a parka that once must have been olive drab but was now covered with dark and varied stains. His trousers, baggy and brown, were folded up several times at the cuff. His white and blue sneakers were cracked and dirty. He wore no socks, his ankles were black. How old was he? It was hard to tell. His hair seemed red; so did his beard.
“Did you know that Dr. Franklin was the first person on earth to notice there was a Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean?” the man asked.
R nodded.
“Did you know that Dr. Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, came up with ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ in the Declaration of Independence?”
Again, R moved his head up and down.
“Dr. Franklin also invented the armonica, a beautiful instrument for making the most beautiful music,” the man said to R. Each now turned to face the other.
The guy was definitely Caucasian but the once-white skin of his forehead and cheeks was stained with streaks of what appeared to be a combination of grease and common dirt. How long, dear God, had it been since this man had been anywhere close to running water, to soap, to being clean?
He was between fifty-five and sixty-five years old. That was R’s guess after seeing his face. There was no way to tell more precisely.
“Yes,” R answered. He saw no need to tell the man that he had actually played an armonica one afternoon—very much in private—at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
“He took the little boy’s trick of rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a water glass to make music and turned it into an instrument,” said the man.
R nodded, breathing only through his mouth.
“Both Mozart and Beethoven wrote pieces for Dr. Franklin’s armonica,” said the man. “Did you know that?”
Yes, yes, R definitely knew that too. He had been so taken aback by the man’s odor and appearance, he only now focused on the voice and the manner of speech. This was an astonishingly well-spoken, articulate person. What in hell was his story? Where did he come from, how did he end up like this? Could he be a disgraced or retired historian of the American Revolution scraping along by teaching on the streets? Move over, buddy, I may be joining you soon.
“He was also an expert at chess,” the man, whatever he was, continued. “He wrote an essay about it that is full of wisdom—and more than chess.”
R was most familiar with that essay. He particularly remembered the opening words: “The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the court of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it.”
The smelly man said, “I have always been particularly taken by what he said in the essay about getting out of difficult situations.”
• • •
R didn’t run the thirty-five blocks back to his house in Georgetown, but he walked as fast as he probably ever had in his life.
It seemed like only a blur of minutes before he was in the library with Ben’s 1,200-word essay on chess before him.
The apt phrases leaped out at him.
If you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position . . . you must abide by all consequences of your rashness.
One so frequently, after contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one’s self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty.
The most wrenchingly relevant one was:
No false move should ever be made to extricate yourself out of a difficulty or to gain advantage; for there can be no pleasure in playing with a man once detected in such unfair practice.
R went immediately to his desk. The words of confession came careening out of his mind into his fingers onto the computer keys like heat-seeking rockets. Never had he written so fast, so emotionally, so furiously.
It was ninety minutes before he stopped for a break.
By then he had, in rough note form, recounted how he had burned the Eastville papers and lied to Wes Braxton.
After going to the bathroom and gulping down a bottle of sparkling water, he tried to re-create the situation and recount every detail he could remember from the burned-up papers. But he also made the point as strongly as he could that he still was not convinced that Benjamin Franklin did, in fact, t
rigger two murders, especially that of the woman who bore him an illegitimate son while she herself was a child. The whole thing could be a cleverly perpetrated hoax. His own sin was that by destroying the Eastville papers he had made pursuing the truth more difficult. But it still had to be done. History demanded it. Benjamin Franklin’s reputation, no matter the truth of the murder accusations, would survive because his accomplishments would ensure his proper and permanent place in history. Tricentennial planners and other Ben lovers could relax.
His points came out in a steady flow, because R was doing exactly what he knew he had to do. He was dealing with what Ben the Essayist called “the consequences of [his] rashness.” He was implementing what Ben the Ghost might have labeled, in upper case, a second, even more important choice of Honor.
He was writing a statement of confession—but for what purpose? To send to a magazine, to put in a press release? To read aloud at high noon in front of Ben’s statue? A book? Could it even end up being the beginning of a book? One thing at a time. Whatever, he was surely writing a long-form suicide note, because once this was read both within his profession and by the outside world, he would be dead. His reputation, his very being as a man of history, scholarship, and principle would be no more.
He too would be ashes, impossible ever to be re-formed into anything of value.
So be it. In the parlance of Law & Order, he was ready to do the time, even if it meant dirty clothes, no baths, and hanging out near statues of Ben.
His only pleasure was deciding that, if there ever was a book, he would send the finished manuscript to Johnny Rutledge at BFU Press rather than to Harry Dickinson. Eat your heart out, Harry!
R had a further whiff of fun when he thought about using Harry’s suggestion, Ben Three, as the title anyhow.
All foolish flights of fancy came crashing down once he focused on the fact that he had to make a real confession directly to Wes Braxton, the sooner the better.
And there was still—also the sooner the better, probably—another confession he had to make.