The Forger's Daughter Page 10

  To my relief, no powder-blue car was parked anywhere near the farmhouse. Will and Nicole were still back in the studio working as I entered the kitchen, removed my note, and threw it away. When Maisie came flying down the stairs two at a time, my queasiness returned. Was she about to confront me? Had she somehow seen me or even Slader drive by the Bancroft house?

  “Maisie, there you are,” I said, numbly smiling.

  “Meghan, there you are,” she teased. “Oh, look what you brought home. What, no raisins?”

  “They only had plain today.” I felt my pulse beginning to slow again, now that I was back in this familiar world of daughters, cookbooks, apples and oranges in a yellowware bowl on the granite counter—the ordinary, everyday, mundane things we surround ourselves with in the hope they’ll somehow protect us from different, harsher worlds. “What’s doing with the Bancroft twins?”

  Picking up one of the apples and taking a healthy bite, she said, “They’re going out on the water this Saturday with their dad, sailing down to Pollepel Island to see the ruins of Bannerman Castle. And I’m invited. OK for me to go?”

  I nodded, told her yes, so long as the weather held and she promised to wear a life jacket as always. Life jacket, I thought. How immoral, how illicit of me was it to realize, just then, that the poor fellow with the wiry hair who lay lifeless on the side of that deserted road seemed, for a brief moment, to be so far away as not to exist at all?

  Ripley had been missing for a full week by the time Nicole and I began printing finished sheets of our Tamerlane on the Vandercook press. My daughters had ventured with me out beyond the tall grass surrounding the house, well past the verge of woods, absurdly calling her name and making various tongue clicks and kissing sounds to catch her attention. Being half feral and very much not a dog, she didn’t respond. While I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that Slader’s abrupt entrance into our lives and Ripley’s equally abrupt exit weren’t coincidental, I was damned if I’d give him the satisfaction of accusing him. I remembered all too well how he’d mistreated a poor hound back when he was bedeviling me in Ireland. Besides, maybe Ripley had, as strays sometimes do, just moved along to freeload elsewhere. Or perhaps she’d fallen prey to a coyote. Still, I found myself glancing out the windows, hoping to catch sight of her as she skulked in the green, altogether aware that Saturday was only a few days away and other, more urgent matters needed my undivided, undistracted attention.

  Despite my promise to Meg, I hadn’t found the courage to come clean with my unsuspecting daughter. Hours passed as Nicole and I, like surgeons hovering over a patient, checked and rechecked plate placement and ink distribution on the rollers, and held our breath as blank sheets of chaste paper rode the cylinder and emerged with Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry impressed, with perfect imperfections, on their surfaces. It was as if we were superintending a time machine, ink-smudged ­demigods—the idea made us smile, me guiltily, she with delight—fashioning not something new from old, but old from new.

  Now and again, I had Nicole retrieve the fragile original for side-by-side comparisons of this or that page. Immodest or not, we both thought the likeness to the Fletcher copy was very strong, though we had to wonder if any two of the dozen, or rather baker’s dozen, copies were identical matches to their siblings. I strongly doubted it. But to find out would take a small corps of amenable rare-book librarians to bring their individual copies of Tamerlane, along with the two privately owned ones, to an agreed-upon bibliographic bunker where they could be set side by side and painstakingly compared. Imagine the logistics of such a scene, imagine the scholarly jockeying. Imagine the insurance costs and white-gloved guards. Like a convocation of the forty-three surviving Fabergé eggs, if nowhere near as visually alluring, nor as astronomically pricey. Point was, any differences between our Tamerlane and the one Calvin Thomas published in June or July not quite two hundred years ago were, to my mind, of little consequence. One could not fully cast the other in doubt, I believed. And unless our copy was scrutinized in the bowels of a cyclotron, which would probably never happen once it was tucked safely back into the obscurity of Mrs. Fletcher’s solander case, I felt certain it could withstand close examination.

  Nicole had mixed a perfect iron gall ink. Slader had provided impeccable plates and paper. The print job went swiftly without a hitch—I’d long since learned how to work the press with one of my hands maimed—once we had everything readied. And though we used all the available cover stock in order to get one that was more than respectable, that piece of the puzzle had fallen into place as well. Time had come to bind our book.

  “We can guesstimate the binding thread,” I told Nicole.

  “It’s not visible to the naked eye anyway,” she agreed, running her silver-ringed fingers through her choppy pageboy hair. “Just have to go with the right weight and a natural off-white color. Line up the three stab holes and sew it with this stitch I found online from the period. Shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll handle that myself like we do with other books.”

  “Our Achilles’ heel here is the paste,” I ventured.

  Nicole disagreed, and as she explained that recipes for glues and pastes had hardly changed in centuries, I was once again reminded that, notwithstanding my every effort to steer my gifted daughter clear of the precincts of forgery, she possessed more of the counterfeiter’s mental and physical tools than perhaps even I did. Fortunately, she seemed not to have developed the dark and essential frailty that all forgers share

  Hubris. All these years I thought I’d finally shaken it, as one shakes a nasty flu. But it had been a revelation to me, working on this Poe project—look, even that white-collar terminology has about it the tangy scent of hubris—how deeply embedded it was in me, how there was no shaking such an alluring demon. Yes, alluring. Because the hubris I refer to is imbued with a kind of dark joy, a joy that comes from the admittedly amoral satisfaction of hornswoggling so-called experts, of beating the system. But amoral or not, I had been doing my best to hide my bleak yet real happiness while laboring beside my daughter, all the while hoping she would read my passion as having to do only with being together, teaching and learning, working at our craft in a good cause.

  We would have Tamerlane ready to deliver on schedule. The letter was another matter. While I felt dirty after my every encounter with Henry Slader, this was a rare instance when I wished I knew how to contact him so we could talk about not just the letter but his intention to present the only known signed copy of Poe’s first book to the literary world. It was, I’d come to believe, hubris taken one step farther. Indeed, over the precipice. Credulity abounds, especially among the greedy. But it must be stretched with care, not bent so much that it risks being broken. While a heretofore unknown autographed copy would generate a lot of excitement, it would also beg for skepticism, especially in a book this desirable. Poe himself hadn’t allowed his name to be printed on the cover, instead choosing coyly to assign authorship to an anonymous Bostonian.

  While Boston was indeed his birthplace, why had Edgar done this? I had come to learn that conjectures were plentiful. Creditors from unpaid gambling debts needed to be dodged, as did Poe’s foster father, who was furious with him for the gambling losses he’d racked up before leaving the University of Virginia. Even joining the army was, for Poe, a cloaked affair. Lying about his age and name, he enlisted as twenty-two-year-old Edgar A. Perry a month or two before Tamerlane was published. Nor is it certain the printer Thomas ever knew the poet’s real name. Poe’s twofold desire to remain anonymous while at the same time seeing Tamerlane enjoy critical and public acclaim, or at least notice, was problematic, to say the least. No, the unsullied Tamerlane was sufficient for our cause. Were it up to me, I’d revel in the discovery and leave it at that.

  Being charged with forging a letter and faking a signature was preferable to being charged with a far graver offense, however. Feeling every bit a character out of one of Poe’s tales of rati
ocination—I was missing only a meerschaum and tapers that might throw “the ghastliest and feeblest of rays”—I slipped out of bed around midnight on Thursday and crept downstairs to the studio. Door locked behind me, I retrieved my box of nibs and pens from a high shelf and began scribing, on modern paper, trial runs of the master’s hand.

  A forger’s calligraphy has much to do with confidence, which encourages the proper flow necessary to mimic the original, and muscle memory, which gives the practiced forger the ineffable ability to inhabit, if you will, what’s going down on the page. Consider an amateur pianist, who must think about notes, scales, time signatures, and fingering. The handful of true players, by contrast, have so mastered these mechanical aspects that they become the very music they play. All that’s left is to imbue it with life and soul, to expound upon the composer’s intentions while bringing one’s own storytelling genius to the keyboard. This is why Meg loved the Goldberg Variations when played by Glenn Gould or Murray Perahia, but didn’t care for performances by other renowned pianists. The notes were the same but the accounts differed. Similarly, with literary forgeries, the shapes of letters, impress of nib, tint of ink, were essential building blocks. But wizardly forgers, the rare virtuosos among our small community of misfits dead and alive, had to inhabit the writer at hand so fully that they truly, for magical minutes, became the author.

  My muscle memory was intact, it seemed. While Poe had not been my forte in the past—Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats had that questionable distinction—I’d studied his handwriting carefully and even launched inscribed copies of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque into an unsuspecting, quite welcoming world, where collectors snatched them up. I even had the audacity to autograph the Pym in both Edgar’s and fictional Arthur’s hands—Poe purportedly forging the latter on a lark—which should have been a tip-off but wasn’t. The book is out there somewhere even now, treasured by its proud owner, who may or may not know that, with the exception of a single authentic one the author inscribed to a mysterious Mary Kirk Petrie, there are no recorded copies of Pym actually signed by Poe, Pym, or, for that matter, Roderick Usher. Cheek and whimsy I didn’t lack in my prime.

  Confidence, now, was another matter. It had been twenty long years since I’d penned anything in the hand of somebody other than myself. When I swore off producing forgeries, I’d made a pact not only with Meghan but with myself. I was alone in knowing just how much I managed to get away with during my active years, and, like any disciplined gambler, I was wise enough to leave the table at the top of my game, cash in my chips, and turn my back on the business altogether. Tonight, in order to save my hide, I was forced, as it were, to put my skin back in the game. While admittedly I had enjoyed the printing aspect of the job, as I sat at my drafting board, with my gooseneck lamp trained on its surface, I felt nothing akin to the joyful self-assurance I used to feel when holding an illicit pen—assurance I badly needed to write this short missive in the master’s early hand.

  The house was quiet as a sepulchre, as Dickens put it, though it might as well have been Poe. My window was cracked open to let in the rich nocturnal air. Every so often, an unseen creature or errant wind rustled, sounds that would normally arouse curiosity but which this night merely chafed my already frayed nerves. Time passed—how much, I didn’t know since I kept no clock in the studio—as I shifted on my stool, assaying again and again certain lines of text that I found problematic.

  “—. . . I will wait anxiously for your notice of the book in the hope it pleases—” I found difficult, for instance, to reproduce in part because of the lovely complexity of Poe’s pl ligature. His p initiates simply enough on a gently curving upstroke, followed unbroken by a longer stroke below the baseline and back up to the apex, yet not tracing the exact route of the downward line. Then, without pausing at the looping stroke that doesn’t quite connect with the stem, a slightly thickened cuplike curve moves off to the right and slants upward to form part of the l, which is completed by another downstroke that resembles a kind of needle’s eye. What took young Poe less than a wink of time to dash off, thinking only about what he was writing, not how, took me three dozen attempts to replicate even half convincingly.

  Anxious and discouraged, I noticed my hands and forearms had become clammy, which didn’t help matters. I laid down my pen, walked over to the back door, and descended a few stone steps to stand barefoot under the stars and cool off while massaging a cramp in my thumb. The night sky, Poe’s “sable divinity,” was cloudless. The Milky Way was a brilliant frosty brushstroke across its dome. In times past, I would have felt soothed by Ripley’s gentle rubbing against my calves as she purred. But I was, I thought, very much alone. When I rubbed my palms against my sweatpants, took several deep breaths, and turned to go back inside, I was startled to see Nicole standing in the doorway.

  “What’re you up to, burning the midnight oil?” she asked in a low voice, stepping aside as I entered.

  “Are the others awake?” I asked her.

  “No, I don’t think so. I couldn’t sleep. Thought I saw light on the grass downstairs coming from the studio windows, so I came down to investigate.”

  I walked over to my stool, sat, and scrutinized my most recent effort.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  In her words, I could hear her mother. While I’d always felt close to Nicole and knew we had a bond solid as steel, I needed to remember she was also Meghan’s daughter. Not to mention, I might add, her own person.

  “There’s one last part of the Poe project I need to finish,” I admitted, trying and failing to fathom some way of getting around telling her the whole dirty truth. “He wants a letter to be replicated to go with the facsimile.”

  She pursed her lips, blew out a small, scoffing burst of air. “No big deal, right? That ought to be a cakewalk for you.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but Poe’s not the easiest to render. More to the point, I don’t seem to be on my game tonight.”

  Joining me at the drafting table with a sympathetic frown, Nicole removed her tortoiseshell glasses from their perch on top of her head, put them on. “What’s supposed to be copied?”

  To confess that my heart sank on hearing her request would be to oversimplify my reaction. I had taught my daughter the venerable art of calligraphy from her earliest days, and by the time she was nine or so, she was already trying her hand at Gothic, Chancery, and Humanist script, as well as more modern styles such as those used by the great William Morris, father of the British Arts and Crafts movement, who, I told her, revered calligraphy as an expression of the humanity of the craftsman and truth of his materials.

  “You mean, humanity of the craftswoman and truth of her materials,” she amended.

  She had learned from the beginning how to cut reed and quill pens, developed her nib vocabulary to include terms like shoulder and shank, which had nothing to do with cuts of meat. Around the age of ten, she graduated to copying the handwriting of famous authors and statesmen, scientists and movie stars, and could also make damn good knockoffs of old Garfield and Peanuts comic strips. Did I make a point of telling her that we did these copies for practice, and never for the purpose of hoaxing or deceiving anybody into thinking they were genuine? Emphatically, I did. And did Meghan underscore that decree even more often than I? A foregone conclusion.

  All this being said, I secretly basked in her gifts, marveled at the subtleties of her prowess, and was somberly relieved when in her teens she turned more to plastic arts, to painting and printmaking. Not that forgers don’t lurk in the shadows of those disciplines too—indeed, for every faker of literary artifacts there must be ten score fine art forgers. A hundred score. But I always believed Nicole would not follow this path.

  Now, the rueful, pitiful fact was, I needed her help. Whereas Poe seemed to have been right-handed, I was a lefty. This wou
ld never have impeded my ability to make a persuasive forgery in times past, as I’d developed a surgically precise method of replicating the writing of all manner of authors, including such famous lefties as Lewis Carroll and H. G. Wells, along with your basic Western canon of righties, without smudging the wet ink with the side of my trailing hand. My practice attempts tonight were botched by smearing. Much as I hated to admit it, I no longer believed myself up to the task. At the same time, though I cringed inwardly at breaking my promise to Meg, I also needed to conceal from my daughter what the purpose of the letter truly was. My mind darted in every direction, trying to formulate a valid excuse to involve her, even as I showed her the original Poe letter and quietly pointed out what were, to my mind, the gnarlier issues that had to be surmounted. Any relief I felt that Nicole could make this forgery—like it or not, the word was back in my private lexicon now—while remaining blind to its meaning was matched by dismal guilt as I watched her practice her strokes and produce first drafts that were, I thought, frankly better than mine.

  Still circling around the point, I told her that in his later years Poe sometimes copied his own wording in business letters. Once, in 1842, when he was trying to sell “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” he pitched it to magazine editors in Boston and Baltimore at the same time—­although at different prices—and a paragraph in each of his cover letters was almost verbatim. Both Joseph Snodgrass at The Visiter and G. Roberts at The Notion rejected the story. William Snowden at The Ladies’ Companion in New York finally agreed to run it, and while the cover letter Poe presumably sent is lost, who knows but that it wasn’t identical to the others?