Harvard Yard (40 page)

“You mean red meat?” asked Peter.

“Actually, I was a vegetarian in college.”

“Maybe that’s why you feel old. Have a steak.”

When they were filled and satisfied and just a little drunk, they went for a walk. The wind had settled into one of those gentle snowfalls that deadens the traffic noise, even in Harvard Square.

They strolled along Brattle Street, past the century-old Brattle Theater, where the Humphrey Bogart cult had been born in the fifties. Next door, separated by a narrow alley and dwarfed by the theater, was a yellow clapboard house with white trim and black shutters, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

“This was William Brattle’s house,” said Peter. “Once, his gardens reached all the way to the river. The Brattle Theater, the Charles Hotel . . . all part of Brattle’s spread. He was exiled in the Revolution, like Abraham Wedge.”

“At least his house survived,” she said.

“A thread in the tapestry of time. You find a lot of those around here.”

A little farther along, they came to what was called Architects Corner, where Walter Gropius and José Luis Sert had left their mark. The famous Design Research building shimmered in four stories of glass and golden light.

“This was where the Wedge house was,” said Peter. “What do you think Lydia would say now?”

“Maybe we should ask her.” And Evangeline led Peter up Church Street.

Soon, they were slipping into the ancient burial ground beside the Unitarian Meeting House. The traffic growled in the street, but the graveyard was shadowed and dark, something from another time, with a core of silence that let them hear the snow falling, almost flake by flake, on the granite slabs and headstones.

With the little flashlight she carried in her purse, Evangeline led Peter to a far corner of the cemetery and a simple headstone:
LYDIA WEDGE TOWNSEND, 1750-1842.

“I was here this afternoon. I should have my head examined for showing you this, but”—Evangeline pointed her light at the stone—“another bread crumb.”

Fallon read the inscription. “Seek truth through the years, but seek it for all, / Bestow knowledge freely to those who may call / Make this your goal till a century turns, / And the Bard will applaud as humanity learns.”

“‘The Bard,’” she said. “When it’s capitalized, it means Shakespeare, doesn’t it?”

“I think Lydia is telling us to keep looking.”

They came out of the Old Burying Ground, feeling younger all the time.

She slipped an arm into his. “I’ve rented a studio on Memorial Drive . . . for when I come up to do research.”

“A studio in Cambridge, a co-op on the East Side . . . sounds like you won your divorce.”

“Nobody wins a divorce. You know that. But no more divorce talk,” she said.

She’d sublet a place in a big stone building across the river from Harvard Stadium. Except for an air mattress in the corner, there was not a stick of furniture, not even a lamp.

So Peter flipped on the overhead light in the little kitchen and an educated Cambridge cockroach went scuttling.

“Put that out,” she said. “Come over and look at the river.”

The snow was dancing in the orange streetlights and the headlight beams and in the bright lights of the athletic complex across the river.

She took off her coat and put it on the windowsill. He threw his onto the mattress. Then he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Promise me one thing,” she said, without turning around.

Before she could say any more, he leaned forward and kissed her neck.

She took a sharp breath and inclined her head so that he could kiss a little higher, the way he used to kiss the places he knew she liked, and he liked, too.

As he kissed, he inhaled Shalimar. She had been wearing it when they first met, and it intoxicated him now as it had when they were in their twenties.

And then she turned, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.

Soon enough, their clothes were dropping onto the floor and they were falling together onto the air mattress.

“This is yours, right?” he asked.

“Yeah. I slept on it last night.”

And that was all they said until they had completed a little tour of youth.

When it was over and they were returning to reality, she said, “Falling into bed was not part of the plan.”

“It wasn’t a bed. It was an air mattress. And . . . you wanted me to promise you something.”

“Don’t push me further than I want to go, Peter. I left you once because I thought you were crazy. We’re not even together now, but I’ll leave you again.”

“Honey”—he pulled her on top of him—“we may have eaten like we were in our twenties, and played like it, but if you think I’d risk my life like I did when I thought that finding a lost tea set was the road to salvation, forget it. I’m older and wiser.”

“Are you?”

“Well, maybe not. But I’m a father.”

“Detective?” said Peter Fallon. “I didn’t know Harvard had detectives.”

It was the next morning. Peter had come into the office feeling better than he had in months. Now there was a detective outside. What could
he
want?

Bernice ushered him in. He was about five-eight, with dark eyebrows and a Robert De Niro mole on his cheek. Beneath the bomber jacket he showed the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a power lifter. He flipped his badge and introduced himself. “John Scavullo.”

Peter invited him to sit. “I thought university police just sent kids back to their rooms when they drank too much and kept people from parking in the Yard.”

“Uniforms do that,” said Scavullo. “I’m in the criminal investigation division.”

“I didn’t even know they had one. There’s crime at Harvard?”

Scavullo smiled. He did not look as if he laughed much. “Anytime you bring a lot people together in one place, you’ll have crime, no matter how smart they are. We enforce laws and university policy on drugs, thefts, assaults, vandalism. . . .”

“Like the tradition of kids pissing behind John Harvard’s statue?”

“Tradition to some, misdemeanor to others.”

“Misdemeanors I can understand. But felonies?”

“There aren’t a lot because we’re good at what we do. But bad things happen, sometimes. And sometimes in the libraries. Book thefts, for example.”

Fallon sat back and folded his arms. He saw where this was going. He decided to let Scavullo do the talking.

“Our security in the library is excellent, but over the years, we’ve had thefts by students who wanted books so that they could underline them instead of taking notes . . . thefts by students who wanted the best books for themselves so they would get the only A’s . . . thefts by people who know that a book of engravings is worth more if it’s cut up and the engravings are sold separately . . . thefts by people who erased library marks on rare volumes, so that an honest bookseller like yourself would buy it.” Scavullo looked into the outer office. “You may have bought stolen books you don’t even know about.”

“There’s no stolen property in those cases,” said Peter, keeping his tone flat neutral, saving indignation for later.

“We know you’re honest. And you made good on the stolen Second Folio you bought a few years back.”

“At great hardship . . . so, what do you want with me?”

“You have some interesting friends.”

“It’s an interesting business.”

Scavullo took an envelope from his inside pocket, took two photographs from the envelope, and placed them in front of Fallon. “Look at those.”

First was a photo of Fallon going into Ridley’s house.

“That,” said Scavullo, “would be on the day you went poking through his computer. We were watching Ridley’s house.”

“Because you think he was murdered?”

“No. State police said it was an accident. But they also looked over his computer and found the names of people we suspect of stealing and fencing books.”

“Such as?”

“Assistant Professor O’Hill, for one. And O’Hill has dealings with a bookseller named Bertram Lee.” Scavullo handed Fallon a photo. “Here you are, moments after Lee and O’Hill have parted company, meeting Lee on the steps of Widener.”

“Do you always have people taking the tours, in case I come by with my son?”

Scavullo said, “We weren’t watching you. We were watching Lee.”

“This was taken in October,” said Fallon. “It’s March. What took you so long?”

“We thought we’d just keep an eye on you. Study your catalogs, just to see what you’ve been selling.”

For the second time, Fallon decided to say nothing.

Scavullo took out three more photographs. They had been taken by a telephoto lens. They showed Bertram Lee, on a city street, in heated conversation with a man in a black raincoat, scally cap, and dark glasses. In one, Lee was holding up a locket.

“These were taken this week,” said Scavullo. “We don’t know what’s going on here, but that’s Bingo Keegan, as you know. We think he’s the distribution point for a lot of stolen material—art, Oriental carpets, rare books. In his world, everyone pays cash and nobody pays sales tax.”

“A denizen of what some have called the booksellers’ underground.”

“Right,” said Scavullo. “So . . . when we see him in conversation with Lee, it gets our attention, and we begin to work back.”

“To me?”

“I don’t know how good your computer skills are, but we looked at the deleted files recovered from Ridley Royce’s computer. In one, he tells Lee that he’s thinking of using an ‘old friend from Eliot House’ as his broker for ‘the maps.’ A set of maps in folio from County Roscommon in Ireland were stolen out of Widener last fall.”

“And you think I sold them?”

“Ridley also lists some other things.” He handed Peter a printout. It included the titles of a dozen books of engravings, including William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
and
Experience
and an Audubon portfolio.

“You know,” said Peter, “the Audubon is thirty-six by thirty-six. And it contains seventy-five hand-colored copperplates of Audubon’s birds. It’s so heavy you couldn’t smuggle it out of a library with a forklift, let alone a briefcase.”

“But,” said Scavullo, “if you slice the paintings out and sell them individually, they’re worth more than the book. And strangely enough, we have an Audubon at the Museum of Natural History recently damaged.”

“And you think Ridley did it and I did the selling?”

“I know you’re clean,” said Scavullo. “I’m just trying to save Harvard’s treasures. And you should be wondering who is stealing these books and subtly laying the blame onto you.” He took out his card. “If you think of anything, give me a call.”

Peter was still trying to figure that out when his son arrived, ready for lunch and an argument. The remnants of Peter’s good mood had burned off like a fog.

Jimmy had already told his father that he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to Harvard, now that Harvard had turned him down once.

Peter had already imparted the best wisdom he knew: No matter what decision Harvard or Jimmy made, in a year, Jimmy would be happy with his school, as long as he was happy with himself. He knew that Jimmy didn’t believe it. But it was true.

Today, despite the distractions of a police visit, Peter wanted to give the kid another pep talk: “Just think of all the giants who began their growth at Harvard, of the rebels who began their rebellion there, of the great pioneers, the great novelists, the presidents, the scoundrels. But while Widener is the greatest library in the world, it’s not where they
keep
the books that counts, Jimmy. It’s what’s in them.”

Then he showed Jimmy all the books behind all the locked cases in his office. He said that few of those books were written by people who went to Harvard.

“Maybe they didn’t want to,” said Jimmy.

“Some did,” said Peter.

“Yeah? Who?”

Peter went to the case where he shelved his poetry and pulled down the 1842 edition of
New England Reveries,
by Lydia Wedge. “She wanted to go to Harvard, but they wouldn’t let her in. She wrote her poetry anyway.”

He flipped through the book. “Here’s ‘John Hicks and Other Heroes’: ‘Oh, noble is the man who dies to save his fellow man, / And noble are the men who stand on honor’s noble span, / So noble was the man named Hicks, who fought that desperate day, / And stood resolved, as bullets flew, to neither fall nor sway . . .’”

“No wonder they didn’t let her in,” said Jimmy. “That sucks.”

“It served its purpose back then.” Peter flipped through the book. “Or the one about the Harvard Bicentenary.”

“Don’t you mean bicentennial?”

“Bicentennial . . . bicentenary”—Peter shrugged—“either way, it was an amazing accomplishment for an institution to have survived for two hundred years.”

Chapter Seventeen

1836-1841

A
NCIENT HANDS
wrote a poem that ended: “And that is where to find
Love’s Labours Won
.” The hands slipped the poem into an envelope made of fine rag bond paper edged in gold leaf. Though the hands belonged to a woman, they sealed the envelope with the stamp of man, “CW,” Dr. Caleb Wedge. Then they slipped the envelope into a larger one, addressed to “President Josiah Quincy, Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.” This was left on Dr. Wedge’s desk for the next day’s post.

On a cloudy September morning a few weeks later, Dr. Caleb Wedge leaned on his cane in Harvard Yard, but he did not lean heavily. He had reached the age of eighty-nine firm in the belief that a man stood straight and stepped forward, even a man with a wooden foot. So none of the seven hundred graduates gathered for the Bicentenary would see him slouch now, not on one of the greatest days in the history of the college.

It had been two centuries since the first students studied under Nathaniel Eaton; 128 years since John Leverett became president and Puritan influence began to wane; six decades since Lord Percy forced Harvard men to take a stand; a quarter century since a Unitarian minister named John Kirkland had become president and the faith of their fathers had made room for a new religion.

Unitarianism, as one of Caleb’s grandchildren had phrased it, was the faith of the future. Caleb said that he was born Congregationalist and would die that way. But he could not deny that the college of his youth was running fast toward the future.