The Forgers Read online

  My mother saw to it that every impediment to an early mastery of the calligraphic arts was removed from my path. Any true portrait of the artist as a young forger would have to include her as my teacher, my prompter, my consoler, with the obvious proviso that never in a million years would she have wanted me to become what I became. She was a mentor, not a prophetess. As a mother, she gave her boy tools with which to build secular cathedrals, not elegant outhouses, as she would surely have viewed the forger’s enterprise. That I preferred outhouses, to continue the metaphor, was never her hope nor her fault. I found my way to that proclivity all on my very own.

  I remember my first lessons from her as she encouraged me to try my hand at forming letters in chancery cursive script while sitting next to her at the kitchen table of our upstate farmhouse. As always, I began by doing doodle exercises to warm up, drawing parallel S-curves that resembled abstract waves or thick straight verticals that looked like a bamboo fence or, and this was perhaps what astonished her most, forming perfect circle after perfect concentric circle. But doodles weren’t chancery cursive any more than a classic stick figure is a da Vinci pastel nude. At first I found the whole business foreign and frustrating. But I liked being near her—I was admittedly something of an asocial fellow at school, prone to either sulk through classes or get myself into physical altercations that resulted in suspensions—and so I persisted. Whenever the principal barred me from class for days or weeks after I’d found myself in a fistfight, I far preferred the tutoring I got at home to anything I learned formally in the school system. Without ever admitting it to the authorities, my parents, or even to myself at the time, my motivation for getting into trouble had less to do with striking back at a bully or roughing up some kid who rubbed me the wrong way than that it afforded me a chance to spend more time with my mom.

  I must have been around twelve years old when I surpassed her in technical skill. I could replicate most every writing style reproduced in her calligraphy manuals and history books—oh, there were some hoary scrawls such as the earliest Magna Carta, scribbled with iron gall ink on parchment, that I had no interest in bothering with—matching word for word what was on the page and signing my own name in all manner of various hands. Rather than compete, though, she only urged me on.

  When she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, she put a brave face on it and continued to work with me as long as she was physically able. Having run out of handwriting samples for me to copy, we turned to my father’s collection for inspiration. In retrospect, she must have been fully aware he would disapprove but went ahead with our exercises anyway. We kept it secret from him that I soon excelled in copying out respectable facsimiles of some of his Conan Doyle letters and manuscripts. Did the potential ethical issues that might surround our then-innocent activities disturb her? I have no idea, but doubt it. These were not forgeries I was producing, after all, because I wasn’t even attempting to replicate the paper or even the exact color of ink the master had used, nor did either of us ever consider defrauding someone by offering them for sale as originals. No, it was just the size, shape, form, and figure of the words that interested me. Obsessed me, really. And made her proud. When I finished copying a warm personal epistle to one of the author’s friends, for instance, a part of my soul merged with Doyle’s, or so I fancied in my greenhorn naivete.

  When my dear mother Nicole died at thirty-six—seven long years younger than I myself am now—my father’s response was, at least to my teenage mind, inconceivable and frightening. Rather than mourning her as I did, instead of crying or seeming to miss her at all, he charged forward with his lawyering and bought, as far as I could tell, more expensive books than ever before. My admiration remained strong. He was all I had. But he confused me nonetheless. Looking back, he was obviously suffering greatly. His brother, a civil engineer, and sister, a homemaker, as women used to be called who worked impossibly hard to keep a household and family running, were neither of them very close to him. Indeed, after they dutifully attended the funeral, each returned home to California and Wisconsin, respectively, and other than occasional Thanksgiving phone chats and Christmas cards our families didn’t indulge in much contact after that. As it happened, my uncle never spoke to me again after he heard about my arrest and conviction as a forger. I never cared for the man, who lived off the fat of his self-esteem but hadn’t a tenth of my father’s drive, talent, instincts, or success. And as for my aunt, I haven’t heard from her in years and have no idea whether or not she or any of her wearisome brood are still denizens of the same planet as I.

  For all his stiff-upper-lip demeanor, my father aged pretty swiftly after Mom died. There weren’t enough trials to win or bibliographic rarities in the world to buy that might fill the gaping void his beloved Nicole left behind. Still, in the interim before I went off to college—Yale, his alma mater—he did at times reach out to me in the one way he best knew how, through a shared world of books. While being a pathetic ruffian at school and obsessively focused on evolving my calligraphic skills at home, I read book after book. Novels, histories, poetry, drama, biographies. Every volume that wasn’t deemed off limits in my father’s library, as well as many that were, I devoured like some starveling who lived for his next meal. The last page and paragraph of one book led, often within the same several gestures and minutes, to the first paragraph and page of the next. Nor did I mix up any narrative with another. My memory was not eidetic, but it was as sticky as a fly trap. I went out of my way not to let others see this side of me, especially when I was young, as it is mysteriously clear to children that reading too much and remembering too well are often key to social disaster—especially if you prefer your mother’s company. Not that I was by any means a social success. These skills did help me fly through college, though, and aided me in my earliest efforts as a legit book scout as well as inchoate forger.

  When my father reached out, I reached back. He loved pulling down one of his treasured books and showing me precisely what distinguished it, what made it unique. His triple-decker set of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, his Emma in original boards, his six-volume Tom Jones in contemporary speckled calf—each of these was in superb condition and, as he liked to say, “Fresh as the day they were born.” Especially poignant to him was a book that looked just as it did on publication day decades or centuries before. Looked just as it did when the author held it in his or her hands for the first time. To possess a pristine copy was to share the author’s experience, to virtually exist in another era as a time traveler might, and to join in communion with all those owners down the years who had protected it against time’s depravities. That to him was the virtue of condition. Nor did his love of signed and inscribed copies have much to do with ordinary fetishism or pure market investment value, although he was both a good investor and surely a fetishist of sorts. Again, it had to do with proximity to the author. That the writer’s flesh-and-blood hand had touched this title page or that piece of foolscap brought an immeasurable significance to the whole object. Made it distinctive and exceptional, yes, but, perhaps even more important, personal and even intimate. Authorial DNA, the scribed phrases and tender inscriptions, lifted even the commonest works into a higher category of value, not just monetary but, if you will, spiritual.

  Some of our finest father-son moments had nothing to do with Little League baseball or going camping in the Adirondacks together, but rather took place whenever he got something special in the mail from London or Edinburgh or Paris. He would slowly unwrap the parcel with a look of both boyish excitement and mature satisfaction and then, after inspecting the rarity with ginger care, hand it to me. This was a little ceremony we both enjoyed, as well as an act of tremendous fatherly trust, I knew. I honored that trust by examining it with the deep shared interest of a newcomer learning from a master, before passing it back to its new owner.

  “Book collecting,” he memorably told me, though at the time I couldn’t fully grasp his theory, “is an act of faith. It’s all ab
out the preservation of culture, custodianship, and that’s why when I add a book to the collection I’m taking on the responsibility of keeping it safe. And then there’s also the joy of the chase, of striving to find a copy of a book that helped make me who I am. But not just any copy—the copy, the most historically interesting and finest copy you can find. Most of all it’s about something I’ve never quite been able to put into words. There’s a line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—have you read that poem yet?”

  I shook my head, sorry I hadn’t since I knew this was an important moment between us, one that I had better remember the rest of my life.

  “Well, we’ll read it together later. It’s a line near the end that goes, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ Books make us feel alive, and though we obviously won’t live forever, they make us feel as if we might. These walls of books in this room? They stand between us and the unknown. And that’s why I feel the safest and happiest and most alive right here. I suppose collecting anything is like that. Tin trucks, teddy bears, teapots. Things our ancestors made. We shore them against our ruins and they give us poor mortals comfort and joy just like religion does. Books are my religion, I guess you could say, Son. Not only the scripture but the religion itself.”

  I asked him, “What makes a book rare, Dad?”

  “If I haven’t seen it,” he said, at first serious, then giving me one of his singular, warm smiles.

  I was sixteen, my mother recently deceased, when he acquired what would prove to be a great triumph for him and a great temptation for me. Neither a book nor a manuscript but one of Conan Doyle’s own pens that had come up at auction in London. Its provenance was indisputable; it was a thing of beauty. The pen, earlier than the Parker Duofolds Doyle famously used from the early twenties forward, instantly became one of my father’s favorite items among the thousands in his collection. As he did with many of his acquisitions, he opened up the parcel in my presence and regaled me with details about what made it so special. But unlike so many other items that emerged from a carefully wrapped box, he didn’t want me to handle this one.

  “Look but don’t touch.” I remember his exact words and cautioning tone of voice.

  I didn’t understand, felt left out. It wasn’t the most expensive piece he had ever bought, not by far. “Why? I thought you trusted me.”

  “I do. But we understand books, letters, manuscripts, and such. This is something different, like an excavated artifact from Mesopotamia, let’s say, destined for a museum. We don’t understand its fragilities and I don’t want us taking any risks. Is that clear?”

  “I won’t touch it, promise,” I lied, smiling up at him, studying the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes as they flexed like courtesan’s fans while he turned the lovely pen over and over in his large hands.

  There are many moments, horrible ones and good as well, that I experienced with my father after we were left to our own devices, but this is one that I identify as a crossroads. I never liked lying to my mother because I loved her with such an open heart that deception, falsehood of any stripe, seemed not merely wrong but purposeless. My dad I venerated almost to the point of fear, on the other hand, at least throughout my early years and into my teens. So lying meant a promise of harsh consequences. Whenever I was suspended from school and I tried to blame the other guy for starting things, he would have none of it. To him, the inviolability of the truth, the authentic—both in his work and in his collecting—was paramount. In his practice, the man swam daily the polluted rivers of prevaricators, tricksters, perjurers, big fat liars.

  “I don’t want to come home to the same filth,” he warned me.

  It was a warning I mostly heeded—until the pen arrived from England. The idea of copying out or even composing a letter written by Arthur Conan Doyle using one of the author’s own writing implements was too seductive, too provocative, and even lewd, if you will, for me to avoid. The indiscretion of the act only made it more desirable.

  As if born to the task, I set about my innocent-enough betrayal with what in hindsight was something of a stroke of, well, genius might be too strong a word for it. Presumptuous ingenuity, let us say. Knowing my father’s autograph archive backward and forward, I remembered there was an extra leaf at the end of a manuscript from the mid-1890s on which Conan Doyle had written only a number. He had, it seemed, finished the draft a page earlier than anticipated but left the final, mostly blank leaf where it was. This suited my purposes to a tee. Not only would I not be mutilating any of the author’s original creation, but with the master’s pen and a piece of paper he himself had touched, a vintage canvas, as it were, I could come as close to being Conan Doyle as anyone might.

  Conveniently coming down with a cold on the same day that my father had to be in court, I found myself alone in the apartment for a goodly stretch of hours. I removed the spare leaf from the fancy leather portfolio that housed the manuscript—it was not attached with a pin or clip, fortunately—and set it before me on my mother’s desk, where she and I had spent so many hours side by side in happier days. Painstakingly, I filled the master’s pen with Waterman sepia and, on fresh bond, set about doing my practice doodles before signing “A Conan Doyle” a couple of dozen times. My hand was loose and confident. A kind of excitement the likes of which I’d never experienced rose in my chest, my pulse racing like a crazed metronome.

  The next question was this. If I were to be Arthur Conan Doyle, it would never do to simply copy out something he himself had written. No, I needed rather to channel his voice, his ideation, his spirit. A sometime spiritualist himself, he would have admired this notion, so I told myself. I decided to write a brief letter on his behalf. It had to be simple, I knew, as I didn’t have the necessary expertise to attempt a more complex text and have any chance at success. And what did I mean by success? I doubt I spelled it out to myself in as many words at the time, but the gist of the answer was plausibility. A plausibility of authenticity so strong that the document would convince even an expert as seasoned, hawk-eyed, and mistrustful as my hawk-nosed father.

  After all of the possessions I divested myself of, I still own the fountain pen as well as this, my first forgery, and must confess I am as proud of it now as I was that snowy day years ago as a teenager in Manhattan. The letter was dated 1897, a year I chose after careful consideration. Written to the author’s only brother, Innes, it begs off joining him for dinner—a banal background conceit that would ground my more intriguing addition, or enhancement, to the writer’s life. The reason Doyle could not dine with Innes that evening was not because he had conflicting plans or had taken ill but rather because he had just met and fallen in love with a woman not his wife, and was in such a disquieted state that he felt it impossible to be seen in public. Her name was Jean Leckie, although in my letter Doyle guardedly gives his brother only a first name. She was beautiful beyond description. Young, vital, and of course altogether impossibly desirable. Although he desperately hated to say so, he confessed to Innes that should his wife, Louise, ever “slip the surly bonds of Earth”—my sole anachronism, and a fatal one had I ever tried to sell my forgery, as the line was written in 1941 by one John Gillespie Magee Jr., alas—he intended to ask Jean to marry him.

  Our apartment library contained a number of biographies about Sherlock Holmes’s inventor—indeed, we owned many books that weren’t collectibles, dog-eared paperbacks and underlined reference books that were also well loved—and I was careful in my research to get my facts right such that the letter would not be encumbered by historical error. And but for that Achilles’ heel of an exception, the inclusion of a flight of fancy phrase that would be a dead giveaway to any scholar who might study the letter for mistakes outside the realm of Conan Doyle’s personal life, I succeeded. Writing out a draft on worthless modern paper, I then redrafted it twice more before setting nib—his once and now mine—to antique leaf, its wire-and-chain lines singing like lyre strings beneath the flowing words. After giving thought t
o how I might handle that page number, the one mark on the document that was in Conan Doyle’s hand in fact, I decided simply to score the top half inch of paper with a razor blade, and then meticulously tear it away so the edge had a very slight fray. By rubbing the edge on the carpet of my father’s study, I antiqued it with a hint of soil, aging the border just so. The small scrap with the number? I flushed it down the toilet along with my practice drafts, duly torn into postage-stamp-sized pieces. What else could I do with the incriminating thing?

  Heart hammering, I looked at my little masterpiece in every different kind of light the apartment afforded—natural, fluorescent, filament bulb—and to my young eye it looked amazingly good. There, I thought. That wasn’t so hard now, was it? I flushed and cleaned the pen before replacing it in the handsome leather box that housed it, a custom case lined with plush purple silk regal enough that it might have been suitable to the underdrawers of Queen Victoria, so luxurious and elegant was the fabric. Careful as could be, I returned it to the locked drawer where my father kept it and afterward replaced the skeleton key where he had hidden it—from others perhaps, but not from his watchful son.

  I then needed a place to hide the forgery, for that’s what it was, I proudly reminded myself. Hide it in plain sight, I thought, after looking around in my bedroom for a suitable spot and finding nowhere it might safely be stowed. Back in my father’s library, I tucked it into the second folio volume of his set of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. No one, not even my father, would ever bother to look there. And, I figured, if someone did, well then, they would be delighted to discover a lost letter by Arthur Conan Doyle. Who knows but that it might even suggest that Doyle himself, or his doomed brother, Innes, once owned the book? It was, after all, perhaps the greatest dictionary ever written by a single individual, and in 1897 the committee-produced Oxford English Dictionary was not even halfway finished.