Harvard Yard (54 page)

“But a good safe is supposed to be fireproof!” cried Theodore.

And a row of windows blew out right beside them.

Samuel Bunting screamed in fright, and the others all dropped to their knees as though a Confederate battery had just opened up.

And Heywood brought his big, drooping mustache close to Theodore’s face. “Tonight, nothing is fireproof.”

“For certain not that wooden leg,” answered Theodore. “So don’t go into that building.”

“Then who will?” Heywood looked down at Bunting. “This old poof?”

“I’ll do it,” said Dan. “I been in tighter scrapes.”

Just then, the roof of Bunting’s bowfront fell in with a tremendous crash that sent flames leaping into the sky and Samuel screaming toward his house.

“No!” cried Theodore, and he ran after his friend.

Dan went to follow them, but Heywood grabbed his arm. “Let him go. Let the old poof burn. Burning is all that men like that have ahead of them, anyway.”

“But, sir . . .” Dan wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked hard into Heywood’s eyes. “He’s a human man, just like me or you.”

“He can’t be saved.”

“I saved
you,
sir,” said Dan, “when they told me you couldn’t be saved.”

For a moment, Heywood Wedge seemed to soften. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words were blown away with the row of windows that exploded out of the W.F.R. Block. Then Heywood pointed Dan down the street. “Now, you must save my papers.”

By the time they had gone another block, the gold-leaf lettering—
WEDGE, FLEMING, AND ROYCE
—was beginning to bubble.

“Here.” Heywood shoved a piece of paper into Dan’s hands. “This is the combination to the safe. Open it, fill the carpetbags, and get out fast.”

Meanwhile, a big fireman had grabbed Samuel Bunting and pushed him back to Theodore, shouting, “Save your friend. There’s nothin’ we can do for his house.”

Theodore wrapped both arms around Samuel and wrestled him into the middle of the street, where Samuel collapsed in tears. Then Theodore looked down the street and saw Heywood giving a slip of paper to Callahan.

The Irishman glanced at it, looked up at the burning building, took a deep breath, and ran inside.

Few Bostonians slept that night. In the tenements of the North End, on the rooftops of South Boston, and along the avenues of the Back Bay, people watched the sky to see which way the sparks might blow. But only the city’s commercial heart was devoured. And just as they would never know how the fire started, they did not understand why it stopped about seven o’clock on Sunday night, with so much more yet to burn.

But it had burned enough, and Monday’s dawn revealed a panorama of destruction. Almost everything from Washington Street to the waterfront, from Summer Street to Liberty Square, was gone. Here and there, a wall stood starkly, its windows framing broken columns, or mounds of smoking brick, or ash heaps of burned goods—china, cutlery, fabrics, footwear, carpet, furniture, books, hand tools, harpsichords, all the manufacture of a modern society—all of it, for sixty acres, all utterly gone.

In the brokerage houses, men calculated the chances of survival for the city’s insurance companies. On the streets, they said that Boston’s business district now resembled Richmond after the siege.

The fire never reached State Street and the offices of Harvard’s treasurer, but the midnight ride of Charles William Eliot instantly became part of college lore.

And the efforts of Dan Callahan became part of the Wedge family lore, though the fire took him and the family papers both.

On that bright and sunny Monday afternoon, Theodore and his sister went down Summer Street, through the devastation, toward the W.F.R. Block.

There were guard units about, keeping order, and steamers were still pumping water onto smoldering rubble, and the stink of melted metal and baked stone hung heavy in the air. But the business of cleaning up had begun.

On one side of the street, men were removing coffins from the crypt of Trinity Church. On the other, scavengers hunted for melted silver in the ruins of Shreve, Crump, and Low. And in the middle of the street, a man had set a large camera on a tripod. As Theodore and Dorothy stepped around him, he asked if they would stand in the middle of Summer Street, so as to give scale to the disaster. They kept walking.

They found Heywood with several others, including Amelia’s father, the rotund Augustus Fleming, watching workers pick through a mountain of granite debris and rubble that had been the W.F.R. Block.

When Heywood saw his aunt and uncle, he stepped away from the others and came up to them. “Why are you two here? There’s nothing to be done.”

“Amelia told us you were trying to find your safe,” said Dorothy.

“Better to find the body of the man who died opening it,” said Theodore.

Heywood ignored his aunt and said to his uncle, without a trace of true sympathy, “How’s your friend?”

“Mr. Bunting is at my home,” said Dorothy. “Recovering.”

“Good,” snorted Heywood. “Keep him there. Half the city is digging out of the ruins, and poor Mr. Bunting is indisposed.”

“That’s very unkind,” said Theodore.

“Unkind or not, I don’t want him living in any property of mine.”

Theodore Wedge said, “If you mean the house on Brattle Street—”

“I do,” said Heywood. “Given our losses here, I may be forced to sell it.”

“Sell it?” sputtered Theodore. “Where will I live?”

“You and Samuel both can live with me,” said Dorothy. “This long-
mustached
Napoleon holds no deed on my house.”

Heywood ignored them both, because half a dozen men had tied a rope to a large safe and were hauling it out of the rubble. He stepped closer and asked, “Is that it?”

“’Fraid so,” said one of the workmen. “Looks like the combination was worked.”

And sure enough, the great safe had been opened.

“My man must have gotten it open before the roof fell in,” said Heywood.

“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” said Mr. Fleming. “I thought the safe in my office was fireproof, too, but when I opened it and reached inside, a thousand dollars in cash turned to green powder in my hands. Fire just plain baked it.”

Theodore stood beside his sister and whispered, “A small gift of majestic proportion . . . will we ever know what it was that Lydia left us?”

“You and I won’t. Not now. Not after this. But we are not freed from the responsibilities Lydia left us.” Dorothy turned on her heel and started back up Summer Street. “Come along, Theodore. We have work to do.”

iii

“It has taken me most of my life,” said Theodore Wedge on a rainy March afternoon twenty-six years later, “to understand what the gift was that my aunt Lydia promised to Harvard at the Bicentenary.”

The hundreds who crowded Appleton Chapel leaned a little closer. A few had heard of a “small gift of majestic proportion.” Most had no idea what Theodore was talking about. But all considered it a strange way to begin a eulogy.

“The gift was my sister herself,” he said, “and her commitment to the education of the gentler half of humanity, a commitment learned from Aunt Lydia.

“Today, at the midday class change, you may follow professors from their morning lectures, across the Common to Appian Way, where they lecture again to bright young women. But as my sister often said, she was only one of many who made this possible.”

Theodore’s vision was clouded by cataracts, so he had memorized both his speech and the places where certain people were to sit. He turned now to the ramrod-straight figure in the front pew. “She counted President Eliot a friend and a man of his word who promised female education, ‘if not in the immediate future, in good time.’”

The figure nodded in polite appreciation. Eliot was now the most famous educator in America, the man who modernized Harvard, expanded its curriculum and endowment, and, with the help of brilliant professors, enhanced its reputation.

“And there are so many others.” Theodore looked at them in turn. “Mr. Gilman, who suggested a school where professors could make extra money teaching female students . . . The professors themselves. Charles Eliot Norton . . . William James . . .”

He turned to a row of women. “They called you the Radcliffe Eight, the committee that came together in 1879 to provide the bedrock upon which this new college would rest. Dorothy was proud to count herself in your number.” Several of the ladies nodded their thanks.

“And President Agassiz.” He looked at the gray-haired woman who sat across the aisle from Eliot, a force of gravity in her own right. “When it became clear that Harvard would co-sign diplomas but would not absorb the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, commonly called the Harvard Annex, the school was incorporated with the name of one of Harvard’s first benefactors, Lady Mowlson, Anne Radcliffe. My sister, however, wanted to name it after the woman who has guided it since its inception. She wanted to call it Agassiz College.”

Many in the pews nodded. A few applauded. Mrs. Agassiz smiled and made a small gesture of her hand, as if to deflect further compliment.

So Theodore looked toward Heywood and Amelia. Though Heywood had brilliantly managed the company’s recovery, Theodore had barely spoken to him since the Great Fire. But Amelia had become a strong supporter of female education and a good friend to Dorothy, and that day, Theodore was speaking for his sister.

“Dorothy expressed great pride in the family that you raised together—a fine son and two fine daughters. She was grateful that you sent your girls without hesitation to the school now known as Radcliffe. And the nation is grateful for the service of your son. We pray that as he sails for war in Cuba, he will be safe and serve honorably. As President Eliot once said, the Harvard man must seize the highest honors in peace and lead others into the murderous thickets in war.”

These last comments Theodore directed at Heywood Wedge Jr., ’87, who wore the uniform of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, and to the nine-year-old boy at his side. The boy, named Victor, was gazing at his father with a mixture of pride and concern, as if he could imagine both the excitement and danger a man faced when he went off to war.

“Dorothy often said that with a father like Heywood Sr. and a son as bright as little Victor, Heywood Jr. was a man well placed in time, for such a father and son demonstrate both the reliability of the past and the promise of the future.”

In preparing the speech, Theodore had written the term
heroism of the past
but had crossed it out, for he had never seen anything heroic in his nephew. Now he saw Heywood’s gray head nodding in approval, and he concluded that even
reliability
was too positive a term to bestow upon him.

He was glad that he was almost done. “Like the generations spread before us, like the college itself, Dorothy looked toward the future and borrowed the best of the past. And she oft paraphrased my mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘If a man—or a woman—stand on their principles, the great world will come round.’”

Theodore died not long after his sister, at the Bunting family cottage in Nahant.

He had been keeping a journal off and on for many years, and he had saved his most important entry for the very last:

I wish that in my eulogy I had made further allusion to the “small gift of majestic proportion.” But I think I put it best. Besides, our knowledge of it was lost in the Great Fire, and none of us shall live to see Harvard’s tercentenary. I asked Dorothy so often what the gift was that, finally, she forbade me to speak of it. And I did not, for my sister was one of the most formidable people I ever knew.

But I have my speculations, which herewith, I set down: it is a book of some sort. That much was I able to discern from conversations that unfolded between Grandfather Caleb and Great-Aunt Lydia. I believe further that Lydia’s tombstone inscription suggests a work by Shakespeare. I believe that someday, it will be found, once the gilt-edge envelope in the Bicentenary packet is opened. And then will it be over.

Chapter Twenty-two

P
ULIGNY
-M
ONTRACHET
’96. A whole case, sitting right there in the office. He could almost taste the French white, with its layers of flavor and its fine finish.

There was no name on the case, but Peter knew where it came from, and why. Peter had said nothing about Jackie Pucks, and Jackie Pucks had not showed his face. And for a week, no one had tried to kill him on the river or anywhere else. Of course, that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone watching him and telling Keegan—or somebody else—about every move he was making.

And Will Wedge called him every other day to ask if he had figured out anything more beyond the Copley portrait.

He hadn’t.

So, for one day, he was trying to tell himself he didn’t care. He was taking a day to get back to his routine, which started with coffee and book catalogs.

Like everyone else in the rare-book business—everyone who’d survived more than five years, anyway—Peter had a list of titles that he always watched for. They might be arcane things such as
Anglorum Praelia
for Professor George Wedge Drake. Or they might be simple things that always produced a profit, like James Bond.

A first edition of
Casino Royale,
bought for a hundred dollars a few years ago, now sold for $325. No big score, but you chipped away every day, or you went hungry waiting for the big deals. And even they could be disappointing. In London, he had once stumbled across a first edition of
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
in three volumes, each volume signed by Thomas Hardy. He bought it for two thousand, held it a year, and offered it for ten in his catalog. He ended up selling it for six.

There was a pyramid in the rare-book business. At the bottom were the thousands of people who’d pay up to $15,000 for a rare book. Above them were hundreds who would spend up to a hundred and fifty thousand. And at the top was that small number who would pay anything for what they wanted, a very precise and constant group—wealthy people like Mr. Charles Price with his Shakespeare obsession.