by Jim Lehrer
And he had to go to Williamsburg in the morning.
FOURTEEN
R waited until he was thirty minutes out of Washington on I-95 South on the road to Williamsburg. Then, with great reluctance and dread, he dialed the number for the Eastern Pennsylvania Museum of Colonial History in Eastville.
He could put it off no longer.
Wes Braxton answered. It jarred R at first, because he had been unconsciously hoping, like the schoolboy waiting to see the principal, for a few more seconds of time before he had to confess his terrible sins. But, of course, acting directors of small museums have no secretaries, no assistants to answer the telephone for them.
R simply began talking to Wes. He had not worked out exactly how he was going to tell his story because he could not bear to relive what he had done any more times than absolutely necessary. The words, unprepared and unpracticed, just came.
“Wes, I’m sorry to say that I have been guilty of a serious breach of professional ethics. Those papers from the cloak may have been much more important than either Wally or I said. It’s not certain, but they may very well have contained an account of a historically important and dramatically significant meeting among some of our Founding Fathers—”
“I know that. Dr. Taylor. I know.”
At first, R. wasn’t sure he had heard Wes’s interruption correctly. “You know? You know what, Wes?”
“What you just said. That they could be very important.”
“So . . . well, I’m a bit confused.”
“I spent some time researching those scattered words and phrases even before I called Dr. Rush,” said Wes. “I wasn’t able to decipher them completely but there was enough there for me to pick up a real smell—of malfeasance on the part of Benjamin Franklin and of some authenticity.”
R was trying to keep his cell phone at his ear with his right hand, guide his car around three trucks in the slow lane with his left, and at the same time come to grips with what he was hearing.
“Are you still there, Dr. Taylor?” Wes said finally.
“Right, you bet,” said R. “I’m on a cell phone in the middle of traffic on I-Ninety-five at the moment.”
“I know why you and Dr. Rush did what you did, if that’s your concern.”
R was now past the trucks and again reasonably clear in the heavy traffic, but he decided to remain silent anyhow. This kid, clearly even smarter and more clever than R had first noted, was in no need of any unnecessary prompting.
“Both of you were interested in protecting the reputation of the great Benjamin Franklin. I assumed that about Dr. Rush, and you pretty much said as much when you brought up the Prophecy. You really do have to be vigilant against hoaxers and debunkers. That is as much the mission of serious historians like you and Dr. Rush as finding, revealing, and analyzing new information and insights.”
Wes paused. R had to say something now. “I appreciate your understanding,” was what he said.
Then he sucked in his breath and confessed.
“The worst thing is that the papers—the originals I purchased from you—are no longer available for anybody to do any further research on or about. I did a most foolish, stupid, and unforgivable thing—”
“Please, please, Dr. Taylor. There is nothing to forgive.”
Again R’s sense of self-preservation, his desire to avoid the principal’s punishment as long as possible, caused him to shut up.
“I thought it might be possible you would find a buyer for the papers that would take them out of circulation or out of access to future scholars,” Wes said, “so I took the precaution of making several very clear high-definition copies. I have them locked up in our safe. They will always be available—to you or to anybody else who comes along: tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century—to pursue the accuracy of the story they tell.”
R almost rammed a gray Toyota SUV in front of him. He swerved to the right to avoid rear-ending the vehicle and its passenger load of what looked to be five or six small kids. There was a rest area ahead; he quickly exited.
“Dr. Taylor, did you hear me? Boy, cell phones still are not as reliable as they should be.”
“I hear you, Wes. I have pulled off and parked.”
“I hate driving on I-Ninety-five. The police, for reasons that escape me, have yet to figure out how to keep all those trucks from traveling so fast and so recklessly.”
R chose to leave the subject of dangerous trucks on I-95 for a future conversation. “What about being able to do further work to determine the age and authenticity of the paper and the ink?” he asked. “That certainly can’t be done from copies.”
“Well, sir, I’m pretty sure about the dating. Several months ago some friends and former colleagues in the documents section at Colonial Williamsburg did a complete workup for me as a favor. I have their report, also in the safe.”
“For the record . . . what does it say exactly?”
“There’s a seventy-five to ninety percent chance the paper was manufactured in the eighteenth century, a sixty to eighty percent chance on the ink.”
R had no more questions. Nothing more to say to the prin-cipal.
Wes went on. “So, like I said, not only do you not have anything to regret or apologize for, Dr. Taylor, you have my gratitude.”
Gratitude? R didn’t say a word. He waited.
“I was appointed the real director of the museum last week. I was the unanimous choice of the search committee, thanks to you, sir.”
Thanks to me?
“It was the twenty-one thousand dollars you got for the papers that did it. I will always be in your debt, Dr. Taylor.”
R turned the key in the ignition of his car. “I’m glad I could help,” he said.
“Where are you driving now, if I may ask?”
“To Williamsburg, as a matter of fact, for a meeting.”
“That is a wonderful place for people like you and me and everyone else who appreciates the eighteenth century.”
R said he agreed with Wes.
“Have a great time, sir.”
R said he would certainly try.
• • •
They were in a chapel-like conference room in William and Mary’s 300-year-old Wren Building, supposedly designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the great British architect.
R would not have been surprised if a man in a long coat and breeches had banged an ornamental mace against the floor and loudly proclaimed: “Here ye! Here ye! Here ye! This proceeding in the matter of the Good People of History versus Bad Rebecca Kendall Lee is now in session! God save the United States of America and the American Revolution Historical Association!
But John Gwinnett offered no official call to order. He simply laid papers—the goods—out in front of Rebecca much like a dealer putting cards out for a game of blackjack.
“Here are the official results of our investigation, Dr. Lee,” he said. “This, of course, is the same material that we forwarded to you earlier.”
With the smack of paper on the long polished table came the message: Here now, You Cursed Accused, is the evidence against you.
“I have read it all, thank you,” said Rebecca.
Gwinnett might have been expecting her to be intimidated by the setting he had created for this confrontation. If so, it wasn’t working. There was nothing here she couldn’t handle, her body language announced.
“This does not add up to plagiarism,” she said, without looking at the papers.
She and Gwinnett were seated across the table from each other. Sonya Lyman and Joe Hooper were on Gwinnett’s left, R on his right.
“I most assuredly think it does,” said Gwinnett, as calm and self-assured as Rebecca.
Officials at William and Mary called the Wren Building the soul of the college because of its age and its location at the west end of Duke of Gloucester, the main pedestrian street that runs the length of Colonial Williamsburg’s historic area. R had observed the eighteenth-century furniture and the large portraits of past Wi
lliam and Mary presidents and Colonial Virginia dignitaries, but only now did he note the smell of antiquity that filled the room. He had a sense that even the air in this place was old and preserved. The atmosphere, obviously as Gwinnett planned, oozed history, importance, gravitas.
Here now, in the presence of the great Patrick Henry himself, were serious people gathered to consider serious business.
Yes, Patrick Henry, alias Alexander Stockton, Gwinnett’s chief assistant, was the sixth person in the room. He was all dressed up in white knee socks and lace collar, tight green breeches, and a long dark-brown coat with gold buttons down the front.
“You can see why we call him Patrick,” Gwinnett had said in introducing Stockton, who would take notes of the meeting. “He is an accomplished actor, so as an escape from his serious work for me and the college he regularly plays Patrick Henry for Colonial Williamsburg events. He has such a date later in the day, so I said it was fine for him to come here as a properly clothed and ready Patrick.”
R had seen many oil portraits and sketches of the famous Virginia radical, the man who created the revolution’s major battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Stockton, in his late thirties, definitely bore a resemblance, with a similar sharp nose and facial features and an unwigged head of long curled dark-brown hair worn down his back in a ponytail. Of course they called him Patrick.
“We have gathered here for you to present whatever evidence you may wish in your defense,” Gwinnett said to Rebecca.
“We, a jury of my peers?”
“I would say we’re only at the grand jury phase right now,” interjected Hooper.
After an annoyed I’m-in-charge-here glance at Hooper, Gwinnett said to Rebecca, “Terminology aside, our preliminary finding is that you have committed plagiarism, the writer’s most mortal sin. Do I not speak for us all?”
Gwinnett then turned first to R, then Sonya. Both nodded in agreement. Joe held up his right hand: Not yet, not until I’ve heard the defense, was the message.
“Thank you, Dr. Hooper,” said Rebecca. “I am delighted to find at least one open mind in this lynch mob—sorry; on this distinguished ARHA committee.”
Rebecca had yet to make real eye contact with Gwinnett, Sonya Lyman, or Joe Hooper. She had given a stunned and then amused look at Stockton as Patrick Henry, but only R had had the benefit of a direct stare. That came in a whisk when she entered the room, silently and with no mutual acknowledgments. Hers was a look of comfort. If she was afraid, you couldn’t read it in her eyes.
R saw John Gwinnett’s calmness as just as unusual, considering the potentially explosive nature of this event for him as well. Maybe the presence of Patrick Henry raised the comfort level.
R himself was neither calm nor comfortable. He had spent most of the two hours of his post-Braxton drive sorting through concerns about most everything that had already happened to him and that would—could, even should—happen now.
“Maybe this distinguished committee would like to observe a demonstration of what I think of this evidence against me?” Rebecca asked.
It was not a real question.
In a stunningly swift and deft series of moves, she reached out and grabbed the documents from the table, stood up with them held before her like they were smelly garbage, took five long fast steps, and crashed the papers down into a large leather eighteenth-century trash receptable to her right.
“Now I’m ready for your questions,” Rebecca declared, her legs slightly apart, her hands on her hips. At that moment, she could have passed for an attack dog at a breached security checkpoint.
R, without consciously doing so, was on his feet. It had been a reactive move. Joe and Sonya remained seated, along with Gwinnett, the man with a new right knee, and his costumed assistant, Alexander Stockton.
Seconds clicked by. Soon this still life had to end. Somebody was going to have to say or do something.
R acted first. “Sit down, Rebecca.” The words came out of his mouth like a spontaneous bark, an uncontrolled air horn. “Now!” he shouted, when Rebecca didn’t immediately move.
She blanched. She actually moved her head backward as if she had been hit by something. The comfort was gone from her eyes, but it was replaced more by wonder than by fear.
R had no idea how the others were reacting. He kept his eyes on Rebecca Kendall Lee, the Cursed Accused.
He sat back down. In silence, Rebecca slowly returned to her seat across from Gwinnett. She lowered her head and did not look at R or at anybody else.
His voice low, uncharged, almost friendly, R said, “Rebecca, those papers you just trashed contain iron-clad proof of blatant acts of plagiarism on a massive scale in your Reagan book. As you know, there were more than seventy instances of direct copying of material and another hundred or so that range from nearly identical or similar to indirect. I began to wonder, frankly, if there’s an original line or idea in the whole damn book.”
Her head shot up. “I don’t give a damn about what you wonder, R.”
“You are a disgrace!” Gwinnett said. “You are a criminal as common as the lowest thug on the streets . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence but stopped talking and watched, along with the others, as Rebecca pulled several sheets of paper from a small briefcase and threw them down on the table, one at a time, in front of each of them, beginning with Gwinnett.
“Lectures about plagiarism I do not take from you, O Distinguished Patrick Henry Historian-slash-Scholar,” she said to Gwinnett. “Read it and weep. Your faux Patrick Henry there beside you can wipe your eyes.”
R knew something like this was coming; it was inevitable. But now that she had actually counterattacked John Gwinnett, an even stronger rush of anger toward Rebecca began to rise within him.
Gwinnett was laughing. Laughing! Harry Dickinson had said the man had laughed inexplicably when told of Rebecca’s coming attempt to blackmail him. Maybe there was something wrong with his mind as well as his right knee. Stockton was also laughing. Whatever the joke was, he was in on it too.
Now Gwinnett, still chuckling, slid the paper back across the table at Rebecca. “Whatever weeping I do, Dr. Lee, will be from having been brought to tears by uncontrollable merriment. I may laugh until I cry, but there is nothing on that paper to trigger any other emotion.”
“It proves you committed plagiarism,” said a defiant if obviously confused Rebecca. “You stole word for word what that other guy wrote, the same thing you accuse me of doing. I warned you, all of you. Let he—or she—who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The room was absolutely silent. Even the antiquated eighteenth-century air wasn’t moving.
With a huge smile still on his face, John Gwinnett reached his right hand, palm up, across and in front of Stockton.
On cue, Stockton handed Gwinnett a smooth white stone the size and shape of a large lemon drop.
Gwinnett scooted it across the table to Rebecca. The stone stopped perfectly, four or five inches from her. R was reminded of the coin ceremony at Christ Church Burial Ground for Wally.
Rebecca looked down at the stone as if it were radioactive.
“Dr. Lee, I have news for you that is going to cause you great disappointment,” said Gwinnett.
She was listening—and staring. So were R and the others. Stockton, however, was smiling in anticipation of what was to come.
“The John Gwinnett who wrote that piece thirty-seven years ago for the Emory University historical review called Southern Perspective was not me, Dr. Lee. Strange as it might seem to you, there were, at that time, two John Gwinnetts in the field of early American history: John P. Gwinnett and John T. Gwinnett. We were not related. I am the P. The other, the T., was a specialist in tobacco farming in the early colonies who died fourteen years ago after suffering a heart attack while lecturing at a small college in southeast Oklahoma. Or maybe it was central Kansas—or northern Nebraska maybe? One of those places out there, was it not, Stockton?”
> “Yes, sir,” said Stockton. “It was, in fact, Emporia State College in Emporia, Kansas, in the central part of the state.”
R, acting spontaneously, clapped his hands together a couple of times. Sonya joined him. So did Joe Hooper a few seconds later.
“All right,” said Rebecca. “You got me.”
Rebecca Kendall Lee, defiant attacker, was suddenly no more. Her face, tense and on edge before, had fallen. She put her elbows on the table and thrust her head down into her hands.
“Go ahead, ruin me,” she said, in a near whisper.
“You ruined yourself, Dr. Lee,” said Gwinnett, in a voice reminiscent of a lecturing criminal court judge on television. “We reap what we sow—”
R interrupted. “Rebecca, it’s time to help yourself. Are there any mitigating circumstances that you believe we should know about?”
She dropped her hands and looked over at him. “I got too busy, R, that’s it, pure and simple. I decided I could have it all: give lectures from one end of the country to the other, appear on all the television networks, and still write my articles and books. When time and schedules got tighter and tighter, something had to give. Nobody could fill in for me on the lecture circuit or the TV gigs but they could do my books, so that’s what happened. I hired a team of researchers and writers, made them sign unto-death confidentiality agreements, and put them to work writing my stuff.”
R thought he saw tears forming in her eyes. In all the years he had known Rebecca, he could not recall a time when she had cried. Many of the men he was around at BFU, including Wally, teared up more than she did. It was truly a serious moment in this woman’s life.
“So, to put it directly, you are admitting to the crime—offense, whatever—of plagiarism?” It was Joe Hooper.
“It is indeed a crime in most states of the union,” said Gwinnett. “I had Stockton check. It’s been a while since anyone has been formally charged or sent to jail, but it is a misdemeanor in thirty-five states—including Virginia.”
Rebecca stood and put her hands in front of her. “Cuff me and read me my rights. I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”