Franklin Affair (7 page)

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.

The 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.”

R had assembled with the dozen or so other members of the official party in Clymer's large second-floor office. These were the people who would speak or otherwise participate, either in the first event here at BFU or the second one at Christ Church Burial Ground. There were coffee, tea, and juices and trays of Danish, doughnuts, and low-fat muffins for everyone. It had the feel to R of a platform party robing at a college commencement.

A major difference, of course, was the fact that only one person was the object of this attention. Wally was present in the form of a mug-sized “Benjamin Franklin” Wedgwood sugar bowl that was filled with his ashes.

They were carried downstairs and out to the platform by Clara Hopkins for the ceremony.

“In keeping with the beliefs of the man we honor here today, we will open this service with a minute of silent prayer,” said Clymer, the master of ceremonies for the occasion. Neither Ben nor Wally were churchgoers or believers in much of anything religious, but since BFU had begun its life with the support of many important Quakers of Philadelphia, R and his fellow planners had deemed a Friends' moment of silence an appropriate way to begin.

A small group from the BFU band—in blue jeans and similar clothes rather than uniforms—blared out “Seventy-six Trombones” from Meredith Willson's
The Music Man.
R could not recall ever having been present when Wally listened to any kind of music. Neither could anyone else on the planning committee. Somebody suggested playing a song from
1776
but R had quickly scotched that idea. So the Willson song was chosen, mostly in the hope that its Pied Piper effect would inspire mourners at the green to join the procession. The idea of trying to add some glass-made music to the band, in honor of Ben's invention of the armonica, was scrubbed when neither suitable instruments nor players could be located.

Only the participants on the platform had seats. The mourners below had to stand. This was done for space reasons—the green was small—and also to faciliate the seven-block march afterward to Christ Church Burial Ground.

R could tell from their reactions that “Seventy-six Trombones” was not a well-known piece of music among the students. But there were several familiar BFU and professional historian faces—including that of Rebecca Lee, unfortunately, as well as those of John Gwinnett, Joe Hooper, and Sonya Lyman—out there in the crowd. He avoided eye contact with Rebecca, but he smiled and nodded at several others while the band played.

Samantha had left a message at the hotel that she was not coming today because she could not risk letting “my Hancock work get cold.” It was just as well. R had to get to work immediately and intensely on those Eastville museum papers. There would be no time to play or even to make up once again with Samantha—if either party even wanted to. Goodbye, Samantha?

Clymer had given the four speakers strict instructions to be brief, to speak three minutes or less. Remember, he said, that everybody out there has to stand, and we want everyone to hang in for the procession and the second event.

Philadelphia Mayor George Rodney, the first speaker, immediately broke the rules. He talked for almost five minutes, barely mentioning Wally or Ben except to express the hope that the coming Franklin Tricentennial would bring millions of “fresh pilgrims to our mecca of U.S. and Benjamin Franklin history.” Then he went off on the need for Philadelphians to come together to fix their public schools. It was the mayor's albatross and obsession.

Tom Middleton, who spoke next, came in right at three minutes. He was a president emeritus of the university and the man who had brought Wally to BFU from Yale. They were never close friends but they had had a healthy, respectful relationship that helped them survive many disagreements. The most long-lasting and enjoyable one was over whether Benjamin Franklin really deserved to be called a scientist. Middleton, a distinguished physicist, didn't think so. He saw Franklin as an extremely talented dilettante who followed his burning curiosity about electricity, the Gulf Stream, and a long list of other mysteries to discoveries that were those of a fortunate amateur. Middleton and Wally loved to debate the issue in private and, once or twice, even did so before small discreet campus groups. (Tom Middleton, as president of a university named for Benjamin Franklin, felt he had to refrain from expressing himself on the issue in public. It would be bad for fund-raising, if nothing else.)

The name of the university itself was another source of friction between Wally and Middleton. When Middleton came in the early sixties, the school was known either as BFU or Franklin University. Some students, in the spirit of those times, found a way to make mischief by dropping the
B.
Alumni and parents did not appreciate the humor, and finally Middleton proclaimed that the university, in keeping with its treasured heritage and in deference to its founder and namesake, would forevermore be known as Benjamin Franklin University in all matters formal and informal, and its initials would always be BFU. Items containing “designations designed to distort the university's name for profane purposes” would be confiscated by campus security, and persons “involved with their dissemination or display” would be subject to disciplinary action. The issue triggered a small storm with some free-speech protest and debate on campus that was chronicled by mostly good-humored publicity in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Can anybody think of a more appropriate fight to have in Ben's name?
Wally asked in an
Almanack
story. The statement brought him a private rebuke from Middleton, but the storm around the profanity quickly passed with the times, and the school had been solidly Benjamin Franklin University and BFU ever since.

“When it comes time to tally the score of
my
life as we are doing for Wally Rush today, it is my hope that foremost on the scoreboard will be the fact that I brought Wally to Benjamin Franklin University,” was Middleton's major statement in his remarks at the memorial. He was a spare man but vibrant and strong, despite, by R's calculations, being over eighty years old.

Then Evelyn Ross-Floyd stepped to the microphone. She was a tall handsome woman in her sixties who was as dedicated to Ben as Wally was. She had worked for years on the Franklin papers at Yale and produced two beautifully written books about Ben, mostly from the personal angle. Wally and Evelyn had exchanged thousands of words and ideas about their man through the years. R always believed that Wally was in love with Evelyn, something Wally never denied or, as far as R knew, ever acted upon. Both were happily married to others and there was also no sign that Evelyn was interested in anything more than an exchange of Ben material and thoughts with Wally.

During her three minutes, Evelyn said, “There have been some great American pairings through the years. George and Gracie, Dean and Jerry, Tom and Jerry, Chet and David, Maris and Mantle, Ginger and Fred, Merrill and Lynch, Barnes and Noble, Rodgers and Hammerstein, franks and beans. I would submit that on the master list should also go Ben and Wally. They were two of a wonderful kind, two men with brains and humor, two geniuses of the real world—and, to be most personal, two of the most important men in my life.”

R was the fourth and last speaker. He took only two and half of his three minutes, using mostly paraphrased lines from his
Washington Post
op-ed piece to proclaim the long-awaited coming of Benjamin Franklin's turn to be appreciated. He gave Wally much credit for spearheading this effort and said, “Ben lives now because Wally lived.”

Then Clymer shouted to the crowd, “Onward to Christ Church Burial Ground!”

The band struck up “Seventy-six Trombones” again and, with Clymer and the platform group walking five abreast in front of the band, the procession stepped off for the last act.

Leading the procession was Billy Heyward, Philadelphia's popular faux Ben Franklin, a local actor who made a living dressing up and playing Ben Franklin for civic, student, and tourist groups. He had also done some recordings of Ben's writings and, though he was not of Pat Hingle's caliber as an actor, R thought he was a serious person. There had been some spirited debate among the planning committee about using Billy this morning. A Quakerlike consensus finally concluded that, considering Wally's own dress-up exit, such a thing would have appealed to him. Billy might even help draw a crowd.

But it hadn't worked.

As best as R could tell from glancing behind, most of the folks on the green did fall in for the walk. But that was about it, except for people who were out on the streets anyhow and the cops who were stopping traffic at the intersections.

R's attention and thoughts went immediately beyond what was there in the present. That's what always happened to him when he walked in Philadelphia, on London's Craven Steet, or anywhere else where he knew the history well. It went with being a historian, particularly one trained by Wally Rush. “You must not only be able to see and read history,” went the Wally mantra, “you must also feel it, smell it, hear it, speak it.”

Now, as they moved west on Market, a major downtown street, R did not really see the stoplights or the cars, the office supply stores, banks, and restaurants. Instead, he saw a narrow brick and dirt roadway teeming with horse-drawn carriages and gentry in long coats and skirts. He saw Ben making his way from his print shop, passing by the home of the Reads, most particularly Deborah Read, who became Ben's common-law wife. R considered calling out to him, “Hey, Ben, how's the day going?” At the peak of his own research and particularly at Craven Street, R often had conversations with Ben.

Now Ben turned into the courtyard halfway between Third and Fourth to the house a couple of hundred feet off Market where he, Deborah, and various members of their extended family lived. The house was destroyed in the early 1800s, but the Park Service had constructed an underground Franklin museum and other tourist structures on the site. R imagined the real thing, the way the house and the courtyard looked when Ben was there.

Then, when the procession turned up Fourth, there came into R's imagined sight pairs of wigged, arguing men on their way south toward the State House, later called Independence Hall, for debate on the Declaration of Independence.

About the time they got to Arch Street and turned back west toward the burial ground, R realized that he had not said more than a few words to his march companions, Clara Hopkins, who was carrying Wally's ashes on his left, and Evelyn Ross-Floyd on the right. If it had been a Georgetown dinner party back in Washington, he would have been in trouble for not talking to the ladies in proper alternating order.

“I loved what you said about Wally,” R said to Evelyn.

“Thank you, R. You were right in saying Ben is finally getting the attention he deserves. I blame most of what happened before on Adams and Jefferson, don't you? They poisoned the well, and it's taken us this long to clean it up.”

R agreed and turned to Clara.

“Don't drop it,” he said, nodding toward the bowl she was holding tightly with both hands against her stomach. Clara was given the honor of carrying the ashes after Harry Dickinson had argued that it was poignantly fitting for a pretty young woman to perform that duty; Elbow Clymer had then persuaded everyone that Clara was the perfect particular young lady.