Lydia placed the painting on the desk, supporting it with her grandfather’s old wig stand, and she told them to close their eyes. Then she tore away the canvas and revealed a perfect likeness of her grandfather and herself. They were seated against a background of heavy crimson drapery and dark shadow, and light poured onto their faces. The artist was so skilled that one could feel the polished texture of the table at which they sat, taste the grapes in the bowl on the table, read the words in the book open before them.
“Grandfather wanted you to have this,” she said.
“It looks like the work of Copley,” said Christine, who had an eye for such things.
“Yes. Another exile. He spent time with the Townsends and decided to paint us. There is little background, because an exile has little behind him.”
Caleb went closer to the painting. “And the book on the table?
Love’s Labours . . . you can read no more.”
“Grandfather came to enjoy Shakespeare more and more. Aside from his old commonplace book, which I read to him because it reminded him of his youth, he enjoyed Shakespeare more than anything.”
Caleb said, “Grandfather was a minister. He should be shown with a Bible.”
“But he laughed most heartily when I read Shakespeare’s comedies to him, and he was seldom one to laugh at all.”
“He liked plays?” said Christine. “He wrote a law to ban them.”
“He changed,” said Lydia.
“Did you read him
Love’s Labours Won?” asked Christine.
Lydia looked at Caleb. “You revealed our secret?”
“I’m his wife,” said Christine. “It is now my secret, too.”
“Where is the manuscript?” asked Caleb.
“It will be accounted for,” said Lydia.
“Is it in England?” asked Caleb. “It belongs to the college, you know.”
“When women are educated at Harvard,” said Lydia, “Harvard shall have the benefit of
Love’s Labours Won,
and we all shall laugh . . . most heartily.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“Caleb,” said Christine, “don’t sputter, or we shall laugh heartily right now.”
A few days later, Lydia visited a neat white house on Water Street. The slate roof was tiered in the Dutch style. The trimwork was simple. The clapboards showed no sign of rot. It was the house of John Hicks. And while he might not have been a rich man, he had sited his house on two acres at the edge of the Charles River marsh.
Lydia knocked on the door and looked out at the yellows and reds of autumn spilling across the marsh, at a view that changed by the day and yet was changeless.
The widow Hicks, a heavy woman with drooping eyes, welcomed the author of “John Hicks and Other Heroes” as though she were royalty. For a time, before grander heroes and better poets had come along, Lydia’s poem had rallied Massachusetts. “Oh, noble is the man who dies to save his fellow man . . .”
That morning, the two women drank tea and talked about John Hicks.
“Such a fine poem you wrote for him, and such a fine craftsman he was,” said the widow. Then she brought Lydia into the tiny foyer to show her the turned stairwell and the pendant acorns that decorated it. “Such a fine craftsman, but never able to quiet the creaking of the third tread. ‘The telltale tread’ he called it.” She put her weight down on the tread, which emitted a loud creak.
Then she told Lydia of the night her husband sneaked off to the Boston Tea Party. “He climbed out our bedroom window, since this was supposed to be a secret gatherin’. But when he come home in the middle of the night, he couldn’t climb back in. He had to come up by the stairs, so he took off his boots and tried to sneak up. But I heard the tread creak and came thundering down on him, for why had my husband been sneaking about in the middle of the night?”
“And what did he say?”
“He just showed me his boots. They was filled with loose tea leaves, so I knew he hadn’t been doin’ anything but the work of the Lord and Massachusetts.”
“He saved my brother’s life,” said Lydia. “We shall always be in his debt.” Then Lydia glanced at the tallboy clock and said, “Nearly eleven. I must go.”
“Can you not stay longer?” said Widow Hicks. “Gentle company is a pleasure.”
“I’ll come again and bring a copy of a poem I shall call ‘The Telltale Tread.’ And perhaps something else. But my brother is delivering a lecture on the female anatomy this morning. I hope to peer through a crack in the door of old Holden Chapel, so that I might see the first appearance of a woman in a Harvard classroom, even if it is a cadaver.”
P
ETER AND
Evangeline were hurrying across the Yard, side by side, though not arm-in-arm. It was one of those March evenings when the lingering light promised spring, but the air was as cold as February, and January still whistled in the wind.
They had been talking regularly on the phone, and they’d had dinner at New Year’s in Manhattan. Now she had come to Cambridge for a few weeks of research on her book.
Peter was telling her that after three months, he was still mad at Harvard.
“So your kid didn’t get in early,” she said. “He might be accepted in April, right?”
“The odds drop.”
“He’s still a legacy. I hear that legacies have a five-to-one rate of acceptance, while everyone else has a nine-to-one.”
“We’ll see. But right now, I’m doing no more phone calls for Harvard.”
“After what happened last time, I’m surprised you’d even think about it.”
“Well, I still wonder what really happened to Ridley.”
“Anybody bothered you since?”
“No. No Bingo Keegan. No conversations with Will Wedge. Not even a Christmas card. Nothing until Wedge sent me the invitation to this exhibition.”
The Fogg Art Museum held most of Harvard’s paintings, a better collection than you could find in most medium-size cities. A banner outside proclaimed the new show:
FACES FROM THE PAST. TREASURES OF THE HARVARD PORTRAIT COLLECTION.
“Nice to get a little preview,” said Evangeline.
“Well, those old families thought it was nice to give Harvard their paintings,” said Peter. “They got all the write-offs and their ancestors got spots on the walls. The Winthrops gave a dozen portraits, just as long as they were all enshrined in the Winthrop House library.”
They went up the stairs to the second floor of the museum, turned, and there it was, the centerpiece of the show, displayed so that it could be seen even before you entered the gallery.
Peter recognized the work of John Singleton Copley at a glance. It was all there . . . the confidence with which the subjects inhabited their space, the powerful light, the sense of realism that invested every detail and gave the painting psychological reality, too. Before he knew their names, Peter knew that the old man had been tough-minded and unyielding, and the young woman had inherited those qualities, adding a skill for making herself a general pain in the ass.
“Reverend Abraham Wedge and his granddaughter, Lydia,” said Evangeline.
They walked into the gallery, which was full of Harvard professors, a few students, and a lot of descendants sipping champagne and admiring their gene pool.
Looking down from the span of Harvard history were two dozen faces, and as many opinions on the meaning of education, of society, of God Himself . . . or Herself. There was the stiff, primitive portrait of William Stoughton, unrepentant judge of witches . . . the magnificent full-length Copley of John Winthrop and his telescope . . . Anne Mowlson, Lady Radcliffe . . . Dorothy Wedge Warren, one of the Radcliffe Eight, in an oval portrait from the 1830s . . . official portraits of Harvard presidents. . . .
Peter grabbed a glass of champagne and walked up to Abraham and Lydia and the tall guy admiring them. “Evening, Will. I like the little half smile on Lydia’s face.”
“Why do you think she’s smiling?” said Will Wedge, not even turning to Fallon.
“Maybe it’s the book on the table,” said Evangeline, stepping closer.
Peter inclined his head to read the title. “I’ll be damned.”
“It used to be a Bible,” said Wedge. “All my life, it was a Bible. Now . . .”
The book looked to Peter like a quarto. It was open to the title page on which were written the words
Love’s Labo . . . before the image trailed into the fold.
Evangeline went over to a display panel just far enough away not to distract from the portrait, but close enough to draw the viewer’s attention. The caption read, “Restoration Renders Surprise.” Beneath it was a photograph of a conservator touching a brush to a crudely painted Bible in front of Reverend Abraham.
“They restored most of the portraits for the show,” said Wedge, through clenched teeth. “Patched cracked frames, X-rayed, in-filled, and cleaned. And they found the play. It seems that someone had decided that a man who sponsored the anti-theater laws of 1767 should not spend eternity reading a play. So they painted a Bible over it.”
“They did that sort of thing a lot back then,” said Peter.
“I wish they hadn’t,” said Wedge.
“So,” said Evangeline, “is it
Lost or
Won
?”
“I think we have to find out,” said Will Wedge. “Charlie Price will want to know, once he sees this. He’d be here tonight but he’s off on vacation. Hawaii or someplace.”
A young woman came up to them, a reporter for the
Boston Globe
. She explained that she was doing an article on the show, and she was interested in visitor opinions.
Peter could have refused, but it was easier to offer some vanilla remark, the kind she wouldn’t bother to use, once she talked to someone more interesting. So he said: “A restoration like this shows you just how interesting the past can be when you give it the attention it deserves. Our history is alive and kicking.”
She wrote it down, asked his name, then went wandering off.
Wedge said to Evangeline, “Back to your question—
Lost
or
Won
?”
Peter said, “Do you see how, beneath the title, Copley has put in a dramatis personae, just for a little more detail? I recognize some of the names but not all of them.”
“And on that basis you conclude . . . what?” asked Evangeline.
Will Wedge said, “I conclude that you quiet down. Old Prof. G. and Olga just came in. He’s going to have plenty to say about this as it is.”
Peter turned and shook Prof. G.’s hand. “How’s the book collecting, Professor?”
“Slow and pleasant, as always.” The old man looked at the painting. “My . . . my. I haven’t seen this in years. Very interesting.”
While the old man went over and read the article, Olga asked him, “Mr. Fallon, have you had any luck with that
Anglorum Praelia
that we asked about back in the fall?”
“I know that Orson has been looking into it,” said Peter. “He’s—”
“My God,” said Prof. G., almost as though he couldn’t keep the words from escaping. “It’s . . . it’s true.”
“What?” asked Peter. “What’s true?”
The old professor looked at Fallon and the others and gave out with a little laugh. “Who could imagine that Copley was such a jokester, putting a play in front of old Reverend Abraham.”
“Oh, yes, a jokester,” said Will, and he added one of those big, honking laughs of his own.
Afterward, Peter and Evangeline went to Rialto, an upscale restaurant in the Charles Hotel.
“Try the
soupe de poisson,
” he said.
“In our day,” she said, “we got clam chowder at Cronin’s. No
soupe de poisson.
”
Peter looked out at the white lights on the trees in front of the hotel. “No Rialto, either. And no Charles Hotel . . . God, we sound like old farts.”
“Late forties is old-fartdom to most of the kids in Cambridge,” she said. She was wearing a black turtleneck and a touch of red lipstick, which brought out the blond highlights in her hair. She looked to Peter like anything but an old fart.
He smiled across the table and said, “Tonight I got an infusion of youth.”
“The painting?”
“If
Love’s Labours Won
made it to 1780, we are back on the trail. You saw how Will Wedge was acting, how surprised that old professor seemed.”
“Peter, it’s more likely
Love’s Labours Lost,
and when Copley painted in a dramatis personae—which he didn’t intend you to read as if you were going to play one of the parts, by the way—he made up a few names.”
“Considering what it would mean, and how much it would be worth, I think we should proceed as if it’s
Love’s Labours Won
.”
She sipped her water and looked at him.
“So,” he said after her look hung there for a moment, “are you going to help?”
“I’m starting a book about the Radcliffe Eight, Peter. That nice oval portrait of Dorothy Wedge Warren, I can see that on the cover. That’s my focus right now. But . . .” She took another sip of water. “But the holidays did make me feel awful old.”
“The first Christmas after your divorce is a bad one,” he said.
“You got that right.”
The wine arrived just in time, a Jean Brocard Chablis. Peter toasted, “To keeping our youth.”
“To finding it again.” Evangeline sipped her wine. “Of course, Lydia Wedge was young in that painting. Now she’s up in the Old Burying Ground.”
Peter whistled softly. “If researching the lives of dead Wedges is going to do this to you, go back to researching villas in Tuscany or bars in Key West.”
Evangeline drank a little more wine. “I can’t do a lot to help you, you know.”
“Just do your research,” he said. “Every forty or fifty years, the Wedges drop a clue, like Hansel and Gretl dropping bread crumbs. That painting was like a whole loaf.”
“After the grandfather died, Lydia came back and lived another fifty years,” said Evangeline. “She left a few more bread crumbs. I’ll show you one after we eat.”
“Another appetite whetted,” he said. “I’m feeling like I’m back in my twenties.”
“So”—she opened the menu—“let’s eat like we were in our twenties.”