Franklin Affair by Jim Lehrer Read Free Book Online Page A

wanted,” said R, trying to avoid touching her left knee with his right. She had moved it up to his under the table. “I haven’t decided for sure whether I will accept it. I have so much on my plate right now.”
    How old is she anyhow? Not even thirty?
    â€œYou do so much, you really do. Books and articles and op-eds, lectures and speeches here and there. I don’t know how you do it.”
    â€œI feel an obligation to Wally, though,” R said.
    If she’s only twenty-five I’m almost fifteen years older than she is.
    â€œWally was worried deeply about something he had been working on concerning Ben,” Clara said. “I’d bet almost anything his letter to you concerns that.”
    Even if she cries and pleads with me.
    â€œNo comment,” said R.
    â€œYou have just confirmed it.”
    â€œI have confirmed nothing.”
    â€œI’d give anything to know what Wally was worried about. He struggled so hard to write that letter. I offered to let him dictate it to me, but no. He carried it around with him even when he slept, as if it were the secret to the atomic bomb. It must have been really important.”
    â€œForget it, Clara,” said R. “I have nothing to say about that letter.”
    â€œI
know
Wally’s concern seemed to begin after he went over to a museum in Eastville to look at some papers. But he said there was nothing in the papers, nothing at all. Still, that must have had something to do with it. He was already losing it mentally and, I guess, physically as well. Maybe that was what was happening and not the papers. What do you think?”
    R kept his eyes and attention on his food and drink. It was crucial to give away nothing—not a hint that she was close.
    â€œEnough about Wally and me,” he said, in his best charming move-on manner. “I understand you plan to devote yourself to Deborah Franklin. That’s an interesting passion.”
    â€œI know, I know,” said Clara, smiling right into R’s face—into, it seemed, the DNA of his skin, eyes, eyelids, nose. “The conventional wisdom is that she was a boring woman whom Ben ignored for good reason.”
    R grinned knowingly and nodded. That was it exactly. No historian in his or her right mind would devote more than ten minutes to finding out anything about Deborah Franklin. In comparison, John Hancock was George Washington. This young woman’s decision to probe the life of Deborah Franklin flowed directly out of a growing trend among historians to find new, newer, and newest narrow angles of historical figures and events over which to obsess. That’s why Samantha went for Hancock: He was available.
    â€œI plan to work on Deborah Franklin’s story, but not to give my whole being to her,” said Clara, still smiling right at R. “I plan to save my passion for living persons of the present, not dead ones of the past—even if they were married to Ben.”
    R was struck by how beautifully blue Clara’s eyes were. They reminded him of the summer sky over his parents’ retirement house in the Berkshires near Great Barrington. His dad’s parishioners had hired the great architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen to design for them a white and glass delicacy of a house on a mountainside that seemed to invite the sky into every room.
    The waiter came to remove their first courses. R welcomed the interruption. He whipped his captivated brown eyes from her beautiful blue eyes down to the plate where once had been a thinly sliced tomato carpaccio. Clara had put down her spoon after having sipped half of her bowl of French onion soup.
    â€œShould I assume you’re going to take Wally’s place on the faculty and in the world of BFU?” whispered Clara.
    â€œAssume nothing,” said R, in a voice only slightly above a whisper. “That’s always the best policy, particularly for those of us involved in historical