Franklin Affair (2 page)

R nodded in the affirmative.

“Has the time, place, and form been set?”

R shook his head. “That will be worked out later today.”

“Whenever, it will surely be a major gathering of our hallowed trade—most particularly the Crowd,” said Rebecca.

She meant the Ben Crowd. That was what Benjamin Franklin scholars were often called. Wally Rush had been their informal leader.

That thought could have triggered Rebecca's departing hit. “As a matter of passing and most relevant fact, R, there were some of us lowly grad students around at the time who questioned whether Wally, may he rest in peace, really wrote all of
Ben Two.
”

R remained absolutely still.
Ben Two
was the second volume of Wally's premier Franklin biography. It had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Moments after she was gone and the door closed behind her, Gwinnett said, “In response to Dr. Lee's insanities and threats, I have only to say—borrowing a phrase from Franklin Roosevelt—'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' ”

There were sighs and smiles and shrugs from Joe Hooper and Sonya Lyman but no words. R couldn't get a read on whether fear was indeed all they had to fear.

One could have well been thinking,
I have only to say—to borrow a phrase from Priscilla Alden—“Speak for yourself, John.”

As they got up to go, Gwinnett, Hooper, and Sonya confirmed to R that each would definitely be in Philadelphia on the twenty-first to pay their respects to Wally Rush.

“Meanwhile,” said Gwinnett, “an independent research firm retained by the ARHA has almost completed its check of Dr. Lee's Reagan book. The results—the goods, shall we call them—will be dispatched quickly to each of you. I am about to have a right-knee replacement operation, but I would think we should be able to resolve this by conference call in relatively short order.”

All this seemed to R to be going awfully fast. But quicker really was better if “the goods” were, in fact, the goods and not, as Rebecca claimed, fewer than a handful of examples.

TWO

Wally Rush had left no doubt about what he wanted done with his body and the other remains of his distinguished life. But by the time R arrived in Philadelphia, there was already talk of ignoring the old man's major wish concerning his funeral.

“No public service?” said Elbridge Clymer, Benjamin Franklin University's young president. “That's ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous or not,” said Bill Paine, Wally's lawyer and legal executor, “he was most firm on not wanting either a public funeral or a memorial service.”

This give-and-take was happening among several of Wally's best friends. They were sitting in eighteenth-century chairs around a corner coffee table amid the high ceilings and bookshelves of the library in the president's house on the campus of BFU, one of the many Philadelphia institutions that had founding ties to Ben Franklin.

“There must be a celebration of the largest and most generous proportions that suits his place as America's leading authority on Benjamin Franklin and one of our institution's most distinguished and honored presences,” said Clymer.

“The only real celebration he wants is a full-dress viewing at Gray House the night after his death—tonight—for invited guests only,” said Paine. He was a sixtyish, steady, white shirt/wine-tie liberal Republican who handled legal matters for Wally as well as most everything historically civic in Philadelphia.

“I say, on behalf of his great university, request denied,” Clymer declared.

Forty-three and known for his energy and his crew cut, Clymer was a BFU alum who had returned as president two years ago after teaching computer mathematics and serving as provost at Lafayette, Chicago, and Princeton.

Paine added, “Wally's only other specific request was that his body be cremated and his ashes tossed to the winds in a small private fashion at Christ Church Burial Ground four days later—on the twenty-first, of course.”

Of course. Wally had died yesterday, April 17, in his bed on Settlement Street at the age of eighty-four. Ben, also eighty-four, had died in his bed on April 17, 1790, a few blocks away on Market Street. Ben was buried on April 21 at Christ Church Burial Ground.

R knew the coincidences were no accidents.

Wally, suffering for the last eighteen months from an untreatable liver disease, had often spoken of his intention to time the day of his death to coincide with Ben's. “Jefferson and Adams pulled it off on the exact same day in the same year, which is not possible in my case, obviously, but I may be able to do something in that vein,” he had said, referring to the remarkable fact that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died of natural causes within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, at their respectives homes: Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts; Jefferson at Monticello outside Charlottesville, Virginia.

R could only guess what unnatural assistance Wally used to make the April 17 timing work for him.

Paine said there might be a problem with the burial ground people on the ashes toss, but he was already talking with them about a compromise. “If we keep it small and private, I'm sure we can work it out.”

“No, no, no,” said Clymer. “Sorry, Bill, but no small and private.”

Bill Paine now said, “R knows—knew—Wally as well if not better than most of us. He can certainly vouch for the fact that when Wally wanted something, particularly when related to Ben, he was adamant.”

R nodded, to vouch for Bill Paine's assertion about Wally's adamancy.

Paine added, “I know Wally did not want a public funeral, because he said so forcefully and directly when we discussed specifying that in his will. We talked about every detail, including how he would be dressed this evening at Gray House.”

Wally's wonderful eighteenth-century three-story frame home was called Gray House because an early Philadelphia family named Gray had built it and because it was painted gray.

“I can confirm the character trait but not the no-funeral request,” R said. “I had no discussions with Wally about that.”

Clymer said to Paine, “Wally was a man of flourish, ceremony, and precedent. I don't get it.”

But R did. “It has to do with the size of the crowd, doesn't it, Bill?” he said.

“I'm afraid so,” Paine said, clearly grateful that he was not going to have to say the embarrassing words himself.

“More than twenty thousand people came to Ben's very public funeral two hundred and thirteen years ago,” R said, “and unless Wally's could reach something like the same number, forget it. Is that it?”

Bill Paine nodded. That was it.

“Then the answer, quite obviously, is to make damned sure at least twenty thousand mourners attend,” said Elbridge Clymer. He was bouyant, lit, ready for the challenge. Little shots of heat seemed to be rising up from between the short spikes of his dark-brown hair, reminding R of a
New York Times
line in its story on Clymer's BFU appointment. “As a white male, the only diversity history his hiring makes is that he will be the first president of an elite East Coast university to wear his hair in a crew cut.”

R figured that, to match Ben's funeral turnout, Clymer would have to promise straight As to the entire BFU student body in exchange for attending, as well as coerce City Hall into ordering every city employee—including police and firemen—to be there.

Wallace Stephen Rush, Ph.D., was not a Philadelphia Philly, Eagle, or 76er. He wasn't a native hero, like Sylvester “Rocky” Stallone or even Bruce Springsteen from neighboring New Jersey. He was a historian, a professor, a teller of stories, a wit who had devoted his life to Benjamin Franklin. He was responsible for five books about the man some hailed as the First American, including
Ben One
and
Ben Two,
which taken together were considered by most experts to be the definitive work. “There's probably nothing more to know about Benjamin Franklin,” said the
Washington Post
reviewer of the Pulitzer-winning
Ben Two. Ben One
had been a Pulitzer finalist five years earlier.

Dr. Rush appears to have run down every scrap of information there is about Franklin. It seems likely there are no more sources, no new places for future researchers to go, no angles or perspectives, no revelations of information or opinion to bring to the man, the accomplishments, the legacy of Benjamin Franklin.

R enjoyed those words at the time, but he knew better. The search for what is new and revelatory is the grist of all history. There is never an end. Look at the recent new material from Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Joseph Ellis on that whole revolutionary period. And what about Ellis's previous book on Jefferson, David McCullough's enormously successful work on Adams, Paul Nagel's before that on John Quincy Adams, and even the most recent books on Franklin by Wood, Claude-Anne Lopez, H. W. Brands, James Srodes, Edmund S. Morgan, and Walter Isaacson? The curiosity and new information about the events and people of our national beginnings will never cease.

There had indeed been considerable publicity about Wally through the years, and he had hosted several Franklin specials and discussion programs on WHYY, the local public television station. His most important national exposure was as one of a dozen on-camera experts interviewed on a recent four-hour PBS miniseries on Ben. But he was not the kind of celebrity whose demise would draw 20,000 people. Most likely, thought R, not even a service for Stallone or Springsteen would do that. Three hundred or so for sure and possibly as many as a thousand, but that was it for Wally, who clearly knew this also; thus his desire to skip a public event that would appear puny compared to Ben's.

“What do you think, R?” It was Bill Paine. “Do we ignore Wally and let Elbow try to top twenty thousand?”
Elbow
was Elbridge Clymer's nickname, one that had been with him since high school. The origins, he had told R, were an understandable wish not to be called Elbridge and his agressive use of elbows when he played basketball. The subject of nicknames had come up a few months previous at a BFU alumni dinner in Washington. Clymer asked R why he went by an initial, to which R responded with his now tired line about hating his first name, Reginald, more than even Raymond, his second.

R had never been good at meetings. A low regard for them was one of the reasons he enjoyed his mostly solitary work as historian and writer. He found meetings among his own kind to be mostly a means for exchanging hostilities and inanities under cover of an atmosphere that encouraged witticism over wisdom, show over substance. And yet, counting the Rebecca adventure, here he was attending the second of two high-octane meetings in one day.

“What do you think, Harry?” R said, throwing the funeral-size ball over to Harry Dickinson, Wally's longtime book editor. Harry, nearly seventy in age but under thirty in energy and vigor, had come down from New York this morning. Harry was known by his friends as the Bush because most everything about him was bushy: his graying brown hair, his eyebrows, his checked sport jackets and flannel slacks. He also seemed to shuffle sideways, rather than walking straight ahead, as a bush probably would—if it could.

“I think Wally wouldn't mind as long as the twenty-thousand number was reached,” said Harry.

“Fine,” said R, “but it can't be done.”

“We can do it!” Clymer said.

R looked around at the others. There was no
we
here, only silence from Clara Hopkins, Wally's current top assistant representing Wally's staff and looking even better than he had remembered. Not a word from two of Wally's most ancient colleagues in the BFU history department or an equally ancient cousin of Wally's childless and long-dead sister. Only polite grins from Caesar McKean, a long-time drinking buddy of Wally's who owned Philadelphia's classiest and most famous Italian restaurant, and Joyce Carter, a retired Broadway and film actress who was long rumored to be Wally's girlfriend. R knew, however, that there was nothing between them but great affection and fun. Wally's wife, Gertrude, had died twenty-five years ago in an auto accident on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the main artery across the Delaware River from Philadelphia to New Jersey. Wally took her death as some kind of signal or omen because it happened on the bridge named for Franklin and because Ben's wife, Deborah, had preceded him in death by many years too.

R's attention remained on Clara Hopkins, seemingly much leggier than the last time R had seen her. Her hair was bright blond and her skirt was way too short. Her legs, exposed on the other side of the low coffee table, seemed longer than ever. Maybe her legs hadn't grown any and it was only that R was seeing more of them than he had before. Had she always been this beautiful?

“I
can
do it and I
will
do it,” said Clymer, who was taking quick glances at what was visible of Clara Hopkins below the table as well.

So. Despite his wishes, there would be a very public service for Wallace Stephen Rush that would be attended, it was hoped, by at least twenty thousand people.

A major agenda item of the meeting having been resolved, Clymer leaped to his feet as if he needed to spring into action now, immediately, from this room.

“I leave it to the rest of you to begin preliminary planning for the service, which I am sure will go down in Philadelphia history as the most striking, monumental, and unforgettable memorial since the one for Ben himself,” said Clymer. “My immediate mission is to assemble the mourning crowd.”

He said he would see everyone this evening at Gray House and gave cursory farewells to the others. But he gestured for R to come with him. It was the time-recognized—and annoying—signal for saying, I need to talk to
you
about something too important and too sensitive for the ears of these lesser beings.

• • •

There was another person with a private message for R. Bill Paine took R by the arm and guided him away from the flow with Clymer and gently halted him against a hallway wall.