Franklin Affair Read online

  My lie was motivated by a knee-jerk instinct to protect this reputation. As you know, it has taken years for historians, both serious and popular, to give Ben his due. He is finally coming into his own as an equal to Washington and Jefferson; he is no longer that fat lecher in granny glasses who made up cute little sayings, played with kites in thunderstorms, and lusted after everything in a skirt. All of us Ben folks have been excited about the additional attention to his real accomplishments that should come in 2006, as his 300th birthday is celebrated. Now here was this awful development. Charges about his having been accused of murdering the mother of his illegitimate son would not only rain on his tricentennial parade, they would damage his place in history irreparably. I didn’t want that to happen. So I lied.

  Then, several weeks ago, the prospect of dying focused my mind—and my professional conscience. I could not go without telling somebody what I had done and ask him to study those papers and the story they tell. History demands it, whatever the truth might do to Ben’s place in history.

  That, R, must be your only real labor as my literary executor. I have made an adjustment in my will that should help make it possible for you to clear your calendar and make it work for you financally.

  I would caution you on the obvious. I might very well have misread those papers. My mind, once among the brightest stars, is now the dimmest of nightlights. Also, the whole thing might be a setup or a hoax perpetrated by the anti-Ben crowd. They tried to turn him into a British spy, don’t forget. And there was also the Prophecy. If it had not been for our efforts, there is a good chance that the false and idiotic charge that Ben made an anti-Semitic speech at the Constitutional Convention might have taken on new, maybe permanent, life.

  I beg your forgiveness for putting you in such a position. But, as I said, I grew to know I had no choice. The papers must be studied, and you are the only one on the face of this earth who can do it the right way, in a fair, discreet, and credible manner.

  I urge you to go about your work in complete secrecy. You don’t have to tell Wes Braxton, for instance, why you want to see those papers in his safe. He’s the kid in charge of the museum at present. Just tell him I mentioned them to you and there was an outside chance they might relate to your research—something like that. It would be a shame if information about your investigation became public and it then turned out to be baseless. Ben and his tricentennial would be hurt for nothing.

  Thank you for doing this, R. I fervently hope that my initial readings and impressions of what is written in the papers are wrong and that Ben continues to soar.

  Good luck. And God’s speed.

  Yours for Ben,

  Wally

  Wally. The name was written in the manner of Ben’s signature, complete with his ornamental lines below.

  Yours for Ben.

  Always, Wally; always for Ben. Certainly, I will do what you want about the Eastville papers. Haven’t I always done what you wanted? It shall be done . . .

  Wally. Ben. Wally and Ben. Ben and Wally.

  Wally had always insisted that everyone, including students, call him Wally the way he and most other Franklin scholar/worshippers referred to their man simply as Ben. Wally loved contrasting that with the Jefferson acolytes, who spoke reverently in hushed voices of their hero as “Mr. Jefferson”—as if he were God. Wally took pleasure in saying the distinction also fit the contrasting personalities of Common Man Franklin and Imperial Man Jefferson. “Could you ever imagine books about Jefferson with the titles, Tom One and Tom Two?” he would ask.

  THREE

  R arrived early at Gray House, hoping to spend some private time with Wally before anyone other than morticians and caterers were around. But whoever came in person, R knew there would be no escaping the varied presences of Ben as well as Wally.

  A Philadelphia Inquirer feature story once described Wally’s personal collection of Benjamin Franklin memorabilia as giving Gray House “the appearance of a museum—almost.” From R’s perspective, the look was a mix of theme junkyard and cheap curio shop—almost.

  But as he mounted the front steps, R figured Wally had the right, even in his deteriorated state of mind, to do what he pleased. Why shouldn’t Ben’s leading biographer and worshipper be surrounded in death by likenesses of Ben himself?

  True, the images were many and varied: on painted plaster death masks; on a multitude of plastic, brass, bronze, chrome, lead, glass, and wood busts of all sizes; and on a variety of cloth, leather, bobble-head, traditional, Smurf, and commemorative costumed dolls as well as salt-and-pepper shakers, lamps, lanterns, typewriter ribbon tins, cream and sugar sets, coffeepots, beer mugs, chess sets, teakettles, wind-up toys, medals, firefighting equipment, pennants, flags, money clips, stoves, bookends, Avon bottles, lightning rods, door knockers, walking-stick knobs, wax seals, oilcans, nutcrackers, tip trays, cuff links, whiskey flasks, syrup cans and bottles, switch-plate covers, pewter and bronze statuettes, flashlight batteries, kites, computer mouse pads, cell-phone covers, paperweights, wooden whirligigs, toy printing presses, piggy banks, Christmas tree ornaments, watch and clock faces, armonica sheet music, cast-iron doorstops, telescopes, chemistry sets, binoculars, and publicity photos of Pat Hingle, Robert Preston, Lloyd Bridges, George Grizzard, Richard Widmark, Melvyn Douglas, Howard da Silva, Richard Easton, David Huddleston, Dylan Baker, and other actors portraying Ben onstage, or in movies, television, and radio.

  These things were all over the house but particularly on shelves and tables and windowsills in the main parlor, where the funeral director’s people had laid Wally out for viewing.

  There, in the center of the room amid curios, white silk, and red roses, in a polished mahogany casket, was the embalmed body of the man who had been the single most important person in R’s professional life—his mentor extraordinaire. Here lay the now-spent force that had opened R’s mind forever to the wonders of the Revolution, the Founding Founders, and Benjamin Franklin.

  Here lay a man whose corpse could pass for Franklin’s.

  Wally’s paunchy body was dressed in a long collarless chocolate-brown coat with matching breeches. White stockings were on his legs below the knee; white lace showed from a shirt at the top and at the cuffs. There was a modern-day necktie arranged loosely around the neck, but everything else was pure Ben. Wally’s long brown hair was even combed straight back off his pudgy face and forehead and arranged on his shoulders just behind his ears. His square wire-rim glasses were in perfect place. He really was the spitting image of Benjamin Franklin.

  “You did it, Wally,” R said out loud. He stood alongside the casket, which was raised waist-high on a bier decorated with greenery and small flowers. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  R remembered when Wally changed his signature slightly to resemble Ben’s flourishes and began to walk like Ben, even using a cane although he didn’t need one. He switched from wearing heavy black horn-rimmed bifocals to a pair in Ben’s distinctive style and commenced to overeat so he would have a Franklinesque paunch. Then he let his gray hair grow and dyed it brown, in a near match with some contemporary descriptions of Ben’s hair. Once a full-throated and precise speaker, Wally even moved to a quiet flat-speaking manner—again patterned after well-documented descriptions of his hero.

  Bill Paine had had no need to tell R to brace himself for what he was going to see. R was not surprised by Wally’s final morphed appearance in the coffin. It was clearly the final touch, along with the April 17 death date and eighty-four-year-old death age. Ben and Wally. Ben/Wally.

  “Well, whatever, there you are, Wally, you blessed man,” R said. He leaned down into Wally’s face, which had been fixed in a slight smile and made up with rouge and powder to appear robust. “You could pass as Ben in any Law and Order lineup—in appearance as well as in spirit and intellect. I honor you, my friend. I cherish you. I will miss you. And I will go to Eastville.”

  R’s father, a Presbyterian minister in a small Connecticut town, had s
poken and prayed frequently about death as something terribly sad but perfectly normal. The message: This will happen to everyone, including you, so get used to it. From the age of seven, when an uncle died, R had been expected—required, actually—to keep himself together while participating fully in the passing rites of family and friends, which included looking at their laid-out corpses. As a result, he was not ill at ease around the dead. His study of history had even raised his comfort level. How could you wonder about the lives and times of those who had gone before if you were uncomfortable with their remains?

  Suddenly R’s eyes fixed on Wally’s necktie.

  Damn! It was one of those hundred-dollar-bill ties. Some Italian entrepreneur had put them out a few years ago, despite objections from the U.S. Treasury Department, among other concerned parties. The guy had used a simple photocopy process to replicate a real $100 bill on a heavy silk material, putting Ben on the front side of the tie and Independence Hall on the back—just as on the bill itself.

  This really was too much. R reached down to snatch the tie.

  “Please, sir, let’s not disturb the departed,” said a man in a black suit, who appeared seemingly out of nowhere on the other side of the coffin.

  “That tie is tacky and out of place,” said R. But he did remove his hand from inside the casket. “I am R. Raymond Taylor, his friend and literary executor, and I have the right to remove it.”

  The man was young, black, and large. “I don’t question your authority, sir. But I am sure that we have prepared Dr. Rush in exact accordance with his wishes. As a matter of fact, I personally worked with Dr. Rush before his death in choosing and acquiring all the clothing he wished to wear today—including the tie.”

  “He looks silly with that awful thing around his neck.”

  The young man smiled. R had to fight off a laugh himself. What could be sillier than a man dressing up like Benjamin Franklin for his viewing? Then R remembered something else—another item Wally had somewhere in his collection. It was a white T-shirt with a small portrait of Ben on the left chest and the Ben saying LOST TIME IS NEVER FOUND AGAIN lettered across the back. At least Wally didn’t chose to wear that as part of his death costume. He also didn’t swaddle himself in another possession, a huge piece of cotton fabric that was covered with colored mementos of Ben’s life: a printing press, a Poor Richard’s Almanack cover, the Treaty of Paris, Independence Hall, the Declaration of Independence, his birthplace in Boston, the Liberty Bell, a Franklin stove, a kite, a lightening rod, a horse-drawn fire wagon, and the Craven Street house in London.

  R decided to be grateful for little things and move on.

  “There are refreshments in the library,” said the young mortuary attendant. “Go through that door up to the second floor and down the hall off the landing.”

  R knew where the library was. He had spent some of the best years of his life in that room with Wally and his books, his ideas, and his enthusiasms.

  He had to travel a long hallway to get to the library. And on the walls everywhere were more pieces from Wally’s collection. R had already been stunned by the sight of a gigantic—6-by-6-foot—plastic-coated poster that greeted everyone on entering the front hall. It was a black-and-white computer-generated portrait of Ben that resembled the one on the hundred-dollar bill. Wally supposedly bought it on the Internet from somebody in California, who claimed it had been used at a Republican Party fund-raiser at Balboa Park in San Diego. Having seen the item, R had no trouble believing the claim.

  There were also other smaller framed drawings and paintings of Ben on the walls, not only in the foyer but in all the halls. Some were legitimate engravings and copies of real oil paintings; others were financial, insurance, stove, and other commercial advertisements, mostly from magazines. Some of them were accompanied by one of the thousands of Ben’s sayings from Poor Richard’s Almanack and his other writings.

  The first one that caught R’s eye on the way to the library was in an eight-by-ten-inch picture frame. It quoted Ben in old English script superimposed over a blue sepia reproduction of the well-known drawing of Ben flying his kite in an electrical storm: Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to prosper. Next to it was a Saturday Evening Post ad for a washing machine that carried Ben’s quote about liberty: “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” R was unable to tie that to washing machines, but he had no trouble doing so to present-day Washington, D.C. R was a libertarian on matters of privacy and civil liberties and remained outraged by the words and deeds of some since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In R’s opinion, these people completely misunderstood the history of freedom and individual rights in their own country.

  He passed by the dining room. The last time R had been in there, Wally had a “Benjamin Franklin” 22-caliber air rifle tacked on the wall over the hutch. There had once been a full line of BB and pellet handguns manufactured by the Benjamin Franklin Firearms Company of St. Louis. But at least the room also contained a fine collection of eighteenth-century Staffordshire plates depicting either Ben or one of his sayings, as well as a full 130-piece set of Benjamin Franklin sterling silver flatware made by Towle in 1905.

  Finally, the library. This was R’s favorite place in the house. Yes, there was some schlock stuffed into the floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered all four walls of the 25-by-40-foot room. But there were also more than a hundred editions of Ben’s famed autobiography alone, one going back to the late 1700s, considered even by Ben-haters to be one of the finest pieces of early Amercan writing of any kind. Wally also had several original copies of Poor Richard’s Almanack and some pamphlets that Ben had written or printed on his own press in Philadelphia. That was in addition to the many biographies and other Ben books that began with children’s coloring and comic books of all vintages, plus postcards, monographs, and a full collection of the various stamps that had been issued in his honor by the U.S. Post Office through the years. Ben had been one of the key founders of the postal service in colonial America.

  “You are looking at one of the most complete private collections of printed material by and about Benjamin Franklin in the world,” said a female voice from behind one side of the giant partner’s desk in a far corner.

  It was Clara Hopkins. R’s eyes reflexively glanced downward toward her legs, but they were hidden by the desk.

  Two young men in white coats and black ties were setting up a bar in the opposite corner of the room. R gave a bow in Clara’s direction.

  “At last count,” she said, with a wink, “two thousand four hundred and fifty-six different books of varying sizes and purposes have been written about the life, accomplishments, and legacies of Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia. They include works of fiction and nonfiction for both children and adults, scholarly and popular, political and scientific, personal and professional. There have been more books about Dr. Franklin than about any other Founding Father, including George Washington of Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson of Monticello. The comparative number for John Adams of Quincy, for the record, is a pitiful four hundred and fifty-eight.”

  R laughed. Clara had done an exact recitation of Wally’s favorite opening spiel for visitors to his library.

  “Did Wally cheat to make it happen yesterday?” R asked her.

  “Probably, but who will ever care enough to find out?” she said.

  “Pills of some kind?”

  “Most likely, but I doubt that they performed a sufficiently complete autopsy on this eighty-four-year-old man with a failed liver to find out, even if he is Wally Rush.”

  Clara stood.

  “Wally told me he was making you his literary executor. Maybe we should have a bite to eat later and go over things.”

  “Let’s do that,” said R. “Brasserie Perrier at seven?” And he turned to greet the first of the by-invitation-only guests, President Clymer of Benjamin Franklin University.

  “The public ceremony i
s a full go,” said Clymer, as he rushed to shake hands with R. Then, dropping his voice to a secretive whisper, he added, “I have some good news and some bad news on another matter. Bill Paine told me Wally left the university this house. That’s the good news.”

  “And the bad?” R asked.

  “We have to keep all his stuff in it—as is.” Clymer shook his head and so did R, and then they both turned to the others now entering, two and three at a time. Bill Paine and Harry Dickinson from the planning committee were among the first arrivals. Behind them came former Wally students and assistants, prominent citizens of Philadelphia, and the Crowd: Franklin scholars from Penn, Yale, and elsewhere.

  Then there was Rebecca Kendall Lee. R refused eye contact and moved quickly in the opposite direction over to Harry Dickinson.

  “What are you working on right now?” Harry asked R. The editor had a vodka on the rocks in his right hand.

  “A book on the early presidents—Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—and how they affect the way the presidency functions to this day,” R said.

  “Oh, yes, that’s right,” said Harry, turning away quickly and moving on.

  R was more amused than offended. Harry was known as a finder, developer, and editor of prize-winning books, fiction as well as nonfiction. He was especially celebrated for his ability to help authors get early American history on the page in a way that sang—and sold. Once, in a C-Span Book Channel interview, he had even referred to himself jokingly as Harry History Channel. But for Harry, clearly “The Opening Three Acts of the Presidency,” R’s working title, didn’t make the grade.