Franklin Affair Read online

  In twelve hundred words of clear and direct prose more than twenty-five years ago, Morton had made the case for Ben’s rightful place in history that was only now being recognized.

  How could he improve on what Morton had written? That was a familiar and sometimes paralyzing question of self-doubt for those historians following in the wake of others who have already churned through the same seas. That was a good analogy. He scribbled it down in a notebook he had next to the computer.

  Then he caught a flicker of the familiar Law & Order opening on the TV set and grabbed the remote to raise the volume. The deep-voiced male announcer finished proclaiming that the criminal justice system was dependent on the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorney, who prosecutes the criminals.

  From his desk, R watched transfixed as a New York garbageman found the body of an attractive blond researcher who worked for a best-selling novelist.

  He remained seemingly frozen in place as it was revealed that she was murdered by a hitman hired by the novelist, a philandering married man. The motive: fear that the researcher was about to go public with the claim that she had not only researched, she had either written most of her boss’s latest best-selling novel herself or stolen it from other writers.

  The writer, while the jury was out deliberating his fate, killed himself by throwing himself down in front of a New York Times delivery truck.

  “So if the press doesn’t get you one way, they get you another,” said District Attorney Adam Schiff—played by actor Steven Hill—to his prosecutor colleagues Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Abby Carmichael (Angie Harmon), just before the final credits rolled.

  • • •

  Three hours later, R was awakened from a dead sleep by the taste of skate-tasting secretions in his mouth.

  Soon he was wide awake. He went back to his laptop and, in less than an hour, finished his op-ed piece and then, with a push of a key on his computer, sent it off by modem directly to The Washington Post.

  FIVE

  The twelve pieces of thick yellowed paper lay on the table in front of him. Did they contain information—an indictment—that would justify looking seriously at a charge that Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest of all Americans, was party to the murder of his son’s mother?

  R was sitting with Wes Braxton, acting director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Museum of Colonial History, in a tiny conference room on the second floor of the museum in Eastview. The building, located on the town square, had once been a small dry-goods store. The museum’s public display rooms were on the ground floor, its offices and storage facilities up here on the second.

  Wally had it right in his last letter. This was not going to be easy, R concluded, after examining and touching these dozen pages for twenty minutes.

  It was a perverse thought, but the immediate scene reminded him of his Grandmother Taylor’s at Christmastime. She would always put out a huge jigsaw puzzle—sometimes a yard square—on a table in her living room. R, then called Raymond by one and all, and the other grandchildren were to contribute time and energy to finding pieces and placing them in their proper places. The idea was to have the puzzle complete and ready for full viewing by Christmas Day. She bought a new puzzle for each Christmas, most of them large scenes from the American West: Grand Canyon, Pike’s Peak, the Golden Gate Bridge, Indian pueblos, cowboys riding bucking broncos. As a good woman of New England, she must have seen the puzzles as a way to broaden the horizons of her grandchildren, all of whom lived in the East.

  “You’re sure of the age?” R asked Braxton.

  “Yes, sir, we’re pretty confident about the dating,” said Braxton. “What do they look like to you, Dr. Taylor?”

  R was uncomfortable being called doctor, as he often was, particularly when he was teaching at BFU. He hated the way some people with Ph.D.’s went around insisting that every spoken or printed reference include Dr. before their name. So you went to college longer than most people and wrote a dissertation about some obscure subject? It was one of the reasons he was so happy he didn’t have to be a college professor, though he should at least give some serious consideration to Clymer’s offer to return to BFU.

  On the two-hour rental-car drive out from Philadelphia this morning, R had gone over and over how living in Philadelphia would go down with Samantha, assuming living anywhere with her was still in the cards. While working on the Hancock book, she had been spending as much time in Massachusetts as she had in D.C. anyhow.

  “They definitely have the feel and appearance of the period, but I’m no expert on revolutionary artifacts,” R replied, fighting off a tendency to be condescending when offering such answers. “My concentration is on the people, the ideas, and the events.”

  Braxton’s cheeks seemed to turn a suitable pink. “Certainly. Yes, sir, Dr. Taylor.”

  Braxton was just a kid, a tall, thin, bald, nervous kid barely thirty years old. He told R he had gone directly from getting a double bachelor’s degree in museum management and early American history at Boston College to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. He worked there first as a costumed interpreter in the historical area and then as an associate director in the education department. Eastville was his first curator’s job. Then the man who’d hired him, the director, left for the Smithsonian in Washington. With only one remaining professional, the museum board had made Braxton acting director while a search committee looked for a replacement. “They said I was too inexperienced as a fund-raiser to be a serious candidate,” Braxton had said. “We’re pretty broke right now. If we don’t find some money soon we could close.”

  R reached over and picked up one of the ragged-edged pieces of paper. Each was rectangular, roughly eight by nine inches, and covered with a multitude of words and symbols that had been handwritten in tiny script—in a style commonly used in colonial America. Wally was correct about their incoherent appearance. None of the writing seemed arranged in what could be called a pattern, much less a full sentence.

  “Are you aware of the great Prophecy hoax that was pulled on Ben Franklin?” R asked.

  Braxton said nothing, moved nothing. He must have slept through that particular lecture at Boston College, assuming there was one.

  Whatever, in his old college lecture manner, R whipped through the story of the phony diary of a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention that turned up suddenly in 1934. It included the text of a virulent anti-Semitic speech titled “Prophecy” that Ben supposedly had delivered during their secret deliberations. It said Jews depress morality and commercial honesty and thus should be constitutionally banned from living in the new United States of America. “I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews forever, your children and your children’s children will curse you in their graves,” Franklin was quoted as saying. Historians of the time were slow to react, but eventually they proved beyond any doubt that there was no diary, there was no speech, and the whole story was the creation of an American Nazi Party leader.

  “A few years ago, Wally Rush and I had to set the record straight again after some speaker at an Arab youth meeting quoted from Ben Franklin’s so-called Prophecy,” said R. “The anti-Semitic Web sites still throw it around today, as if it’s true.”

  Braxton had given R his full attention during the storytelling, but now, at the ending, there was a puzzled look on the young man’s face.

  “What has that got to do with these papers, Dr. Taylor?” he asked. “Dr. Rush said there was nothing in them that meant anything. Are you suggesting he was wrong and that they charge Benjamin Franklin with something awful?”

  R had made a calculated decision about Braxton. He had decided that this inexperienced kid was at least wise enough to have looked closely at these twelve pieces of paper himself and smart enough to have seen something that, no matter what Wally said, aroused some suspicion. The words wanton killing appeared more than once. So did the initials B.F., among others.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” R said, as nonchalantly a
s he could. “I told the story mostly as an out-loud reminder to myself to keep the Prophecy story in mind, particularly when dealing with something that suddenly turns up after hundreds of years.”

  Braxton nodded his head, twice. He got that, and he seemed to accept it. But he went on. “Do you see something here that Dr. Rush didn’t see?”

  R chose only to shrug and say, “It’s too early to say anything definitive. My interests, as you know, are in the diaries as diaries.” R’s cover story for coming here this morning had been that Wally had told him of the diaries, which were of special interest to R for possible inclusion in a book of diaries from the American Revolution.

  “Those references to B.F.,” Braxton persisted. “I thought at first they had to be referring to Ben Franklin, but Dr. Rush didn’t think so. And what about J.A., maybe for John Adams? Dr. Rush pointed out that there could be millions of people with those particular initials. Did you read the McCullough book on Adams?”

  R said he did.

  “It’s a great book by a great man about a great man, isn’t it?”

  R said he agreed with Braxton, at least two-thirds of it. He was not one of those so-called professional historians who resented the success of “popular” historians like David McCullough, a man R very much admired. From R’s point of view, the resenters were mostly jealous academics who claimed to be writing only for scholarly reasons but would kill to have a book on the best-seller lists. R also enjoyed reading McCullough’s book on Adams. The problem was Adams himself. R, along with Wally and most other Ben scholars, could not forgive or forget Adams’s contempt for Franklin. Adams thought Ben was personally immoral, professionally corrupt, and diplomatically and sinfully in the pocket of the French, among many other things. R, Wally and Company dismissed Adams’s attacks, as apparently Ben himself did at the time, as symptoms of Adams’s own character defects, which included rabid envy, paranoia, and profound rigidity. Ben once wrote that he considered Adams to be an honest, wise man who meant well but occasionally acted “absolutely out of his Senses.”

  But R said none of this to Braxton, who was still talking about these twelve pieces of paper.

  “Reads like somebody did somebody in, doesn’t it?” he said. “A woman, maybe, was the victim?”

  “Could be, yes,” said R. Braxton was as smart as he had thought, and this was not a conversation he wished to have right now. “We’re a long way from even having such discussions.”

  R stood. He was ready to get on with what he had come to do—which was take temporary professional possession of these newly discovered papers.

  With Braxton’s assistance, he carefully placed each sheet between larger pieces of cardboard and then slid them in a large manila envelope, which was then fitted inside a large hard-cornered briefcase.

  “I will examine them in detail, have whatever tests run that are needed and have them back to you within a few weeks,” R said.

  Braxton, proving again that he was no fool, had agreed enthusiastically to R’s suggestion but with the request that R sign a detailed receipt, which he now did.

  “I would like to see the cloak before I go—if that’s all right?” R asked, once the packing and signing were completed. He had barely looked at it on the way upstairs. His focus was then on seeing the papers.

  Braxton took the cloak down from the display frame. R could tell at a glance that here was truly an article of beauty and substance, fully prepared to exist for another two hundred and fifty years.

  It was a heavy single-breasted greatcoat, made of stiff, tightly woven navy blue worsted wool. The inside was lined with a softer red wool, the sleeves with white linen. An attached cape, large enough when turned up to almost cover the head, had red plush wool sewed on its outside. There were quarter-sized covered buttons down the front and on the sleeves.

  R was struck by the cloak’s majestically permanent feel and look. Only men of substance in America wore them. This particular coat was clearly designed for a husky man, one with broad shoulders and a height of nearly six feet.

  “I assume there is no question on the dating of this,” said R.

  “None at all. The chain of possession is clear. A Pennsylvania colony man, identified unmistakably as Joshiah Ross, had it made in London in 1754. The condition is remarkably good, so he must have been a man of means and property and probably had more than one such cloak. It was passed down through his family, with a record we have upstairs in our files, until it was given to us last year just before I arrived. I can make you a copy of that record, if you like.”

  R said he would appreciate it. “Who found the papers in the lining?”

  “I did myself,” said Braxton, with a flash of pride. “At first, I thought it was simply a thick lining. But then, the more I felt around, I could tell there was a bulge; something was in there.”

  R ran his fingers along the lining on the side that had obviously been sliced open to retrieve the papers. “It must have been difficult to decide to cut into this.”

  “It was, it really was. It scares me now to think about it. I probably should have sent it to Colonial Williamsburg or the Smithsonian or someplace like that and let them do it. But I was so excited I just went ahead myself. I cut along the seam so no damage was done . . . as you can see.”

  Yes, R could see that. He also said a short silent prayer of thanksgiving. It was more than possible that, if the cloak had gone to experts, the Ben-as-murderer story, if in fact these papers suggested it, would have already been on the front pages and the talk shows.

  Assuming, of course, that the suggestion was serious—and credible. Having spent less than an hour with the papers and their words and symbols, R was not yet prepared to assume anything or rule out anything—including the very worst.

  Braxton disappeared to make copies of the papers about Joshiah Ross and the greatcoat while R continued to study and admire this remarkable piece of clothing. Whatever the validity and significance of the papers in its lining, this cloak itself was quite a find.

  On the way out several minutes later, Braxton suddenly asked R, “Do you know a Clara Hopkins at BFU?”

  R stopped. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “She called this morning and asked about these same papers. She said she worked for the late Dr. Rush, and he had mentioned coming over here to examine them. She wanted to know what he had found; she could locate no record in his files of what he might have concluded.”

  “What did you tell her?” R was barely breathing.

  “I told her he had found nothing of significance.”

  “Did you tell her I was coming to look at them?”

  “Oh, no. It was a very short conversation.”

  Relieved, R let it drop.

  “My condolences to you about Dr. Rush,” said Braxton. “I know the two of you were very close. The funeral is Monday?”

  “It’s not really a funeral. A public commemoration would be the best way to describe it. He’s already been cremated—I witnessed that this morning before driving out here, as a matter of fact.”

  • • •

  Bill Paine had insisted that R be present for the reduction to ashes of Wally’s body at a South Philadelphia funeral home. State law now required that there be a “valid witness” in attendance to represent the deceased’s family or estate for all cremations. That followed a scandal just across the Delaware River in a Camden, New Jersey, suburb where a near-bankrupt mortician had hidden bodies in freezers and various other spots around his place while providing ashes to his customers that were actually a combination of burned leaves and dirt.

  “Do you want him dressed or undressed?” asked one of the morticians; it happened to be the same young man who had been on coffin-watch duty at the viewing.

  Wally was laid out on a table that had wheels like a hospital gurney. His face was grayer—clearly the makeup had begun to wear off—but he was still in his full Ben outfit, tacky tie and all.

  “Dressed,” said R.

  Th
e young man frowned. “Quite some time and expense was expended in securing those clothes, sir. We most often have requests that the clothing be saved as part of the remembrance mementos of the deceased—”

  “Dressed,” R repeated.

  The young man was silent.

  “Farewell again, my friend, hero, and saint,” R had said to Wally.

  Then he watched, his revulsion turning to fascination, as the young mortician and three colleagues lifted the Ben-dressed body of Wallace Stephen Rush up off the table and stuck it head first into the flames of a small red-hot oven.

  R had expected there to be a terrible odor of burning flesh and bones. But the only smell resembled that of charcoal in an outdoor grill.

  • • •

  Whatever the awfulness of the details, thank God for that cremation, R thought now. He might have had difficulty facing even Wally’s grotesquely costumed corpse after what he had just seen in this first cursory examination of the twelve pieces of paper from the cloak.

  As he pulled out of the small parking lot behind the Eastville museum building and headed for the Philadelphia highway, he said, several times out loud, “Remember the Prophecy. Remember the Prophecy.”

  That helped only a little bit.

  SIX

  R watched from a window in the administration building as the mourners gathered on the campus green for the beginning of Wally Day, so proclaimed by Benjamin Franklin University and the City of Philadelphia. The weather was perfect, sunny with temperatures in the mid 60s, but with less than a hour left before the ten o’clock start time, there didn’t seem to be more than a few hundred people outside. And most of them, it appeared to R, were BFU students, presumably enticed or coerced into showing up.

  “I’d say you have roughly nineteen thousand four hundred and thirty more to go, Elbow,” R said quietly to Clymer, when he joined R at the window.

  “Fret not, sir,” said Clymer, with an air of good humor and confidence that so far did not seem justified. “I understand they’re already assembling at the burial ground at Fifth and Arch, and along Third and Fourth, and on Market to see our little procession.”