Franklin Affair by Jim Lehrer Page A

puzzle for each Christmas, most of them large scenes from the American West: Grand Canyon, Pike’s Peak, the Golden Gate Bridge, Indian pueblos, cowboys riding bucking broncos. As a good woman of New England, she must have seen the puzzles as a way to broaden the horizons of her grandchildren, all of whom lived in the East.
    â€œYou’re sure of the age?” R asked Braxton.
    â€œYes, sir, we’re pretty confident about the dating,” said Braxton. “What do they look like to you, Dr. Taylor?”
    R was uncomfortable being called doctor, as he often was, particularly when he was teaching at BFU. He hated the way some people with Ph.D.’s went around insisting that every spoken or printed reference include
Dr.
before their name. So you went to college longer than most people and wrote a dissertation about some obscure subject? It was one of the reasons he was so happy he didn’t
have
to be a college professor, though he should at least give some serious consideration to Clymer’s offer to return to BFU.
    On the two-hour rental-car drive out from Philadelphia this morning, R had gone over and over how living in Philadelphia would go down with Samantha, assuming living anywhere with her was still in the cards. While working on the Hancock book, she had been spending as much time in Massachusetts as she had in D.C. anyhow.
    â€œThey definitely have the feel and appearance of the period, but I’m no expert on revolutionary artifacts,” R replied, fighting off a tendency to be condescending when offering such answers. “My concentration is on the people, the ideas, and the events.”
    Braxton’s cheeks seemed to turn a suitable pink. “Certainly. Yes, sir, Dr. Taylor.”
    Braxton was just a kid, a tall, thin, bald, nervous kid barely thirty years old. He told R he had gone directly from getting a double bachelor’s degree in museum management and early American history at Boston College to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. He worked there first as a costumed interpreter in the historical area and then as an associate director in the education department. Eastville was his first curator’s job. Then the man who’d hired him, the director, left for the Smithsonian in Washington. With only one remaining professional, the museum board had made Braxton acting director while a search committee looked for a replacement. “They said I was too inexperienced as a fund-raiser to be a serious candidate,” Braxton had said. “We’re pretty broke right now. If we don’t find some money soon we could close.”
    R reached over and picked up one of the ragged-edged pieces of paper. Each was rectangular, roughly eight by nine inches, and covered with a multitude of words and symbols that had been handwritten in tiny script—in a style commonly used in colonial America. Wally was correct about their incoherent appearance. None of the writing seemed arranged in what could be called a pattern, much less a full sentence.
    â€œAre you aware of the great Prophecy hoax that was pulled on Ben Franklin?” R asked.
    Braxton said nothing, moved nothing. He must have slept through that particular lecture at Boston College, assuming there was one.
    Whatever, in his old college lecture manner, R whipped through the story of the phony diary of a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention that turned up suddenly in 1934. It included the text of a virulent anti-Semitic speech titled “Prophecy” that Ben supposedly had delivered during their secret deliberations. It said Jews depress morality and commercial honesty and thus should be constitutionally banned from living in the new United States of America. “I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews forever, your children and your children’s children will curse you in their graves,” Franklin was quoted as saying. Historians of the time were slow to react, but eventually