The Footnote

The textbook weighed four pounds and three ounces. Sam had weighed it in January, on the scale in the post room, because Frederick had said it was the heaviest thing he had ever been asked to carry up a hill, and Sam had wanted to know if that was true.

It was called A Realm of Many Crowns: The United Kingdom of America since 1865, third edition, by two professors at King’s in New York, and it had a photograph on the cover of the river at New Westminster in the snow, and eleven hundred and four pages, of which Ashby had set them twenty-two for Wednesday.

At nine on Tuesday night Frederick was on the bed by the window with it open on his knees at the Ford ministry, and Alexander was at the desk by the door with the Charter and Brennan’s reading for the morning, and the pencil, and the lamp. The room was at sixty-eight. Nobody had set it. It had been at sixty-eight since August.

He read the page about Nixon’s resignation, which he knew, and the page about the confidence consultations, which he knew from Brennan, and turned over to six hundred and twelve, and read the paragraph at the top about the repair ministry and the disqualification of every member of the Nixon Cabinet, and then the paragraph about the pardon, which was short and fair and said that it had consumed much of the trust Ford’s accession had created. There was a small raised number at the end of it.

He went down the page to the footnote.

He read it, and went back up to the number, and down again, and read it a second time.

On the desk by the door the pencil stopped.

“You have stopped turning pages,” said Alexander, without looking round.

“There’s a footnote.”

“There are always footnotes.”

“This one’s wrong.”

Alexander put the pencil down, parallel, and turned his chair round.

“Read it.”

Frederick read it.

“Ernest V personally pardoned Richard Nixon on 8 September 1974.”

There was a silence in 312. Somebody down the corridor was playing music, not loudly. The building hummed.

“Which word?” said Alexander.

“Personally.”

“Then it is one word.”

“It’s the whole sentence. The whole sentence hangs off it.” Frederick looked at the page. “Take it out and it’s true. Ernest V pardoned Richard Nixon, if you’re being lazy, because it was in his name. But he didn’t do it. He couldn’t. Ford advised it. The Governor-General completed it. Chisholm. In his name. On the eighth.” He heard himself, and stopped. “That’s Brennan. That’s week nine.”

“It is also correct.”

“I know it’s correct.”

“Then why are you angry?”

Frederick looked at him. Alexander was sitting with his hands on his knees, upright, in the buttoned shirt, with the face he wore in Brennan’s back row when he had asked a question he already knew the answer to and wanted to hear it said.

“I’m not angry.”

“You have closed the book on your finger,” said Alexander. “You do that when you are angry. You did it in December with the statistics.”

Frederick looked down. He had.

---

“It’s my father,” he said, after a while.

“Yes.”

“Eleven hundred pages. Two professors at King’s. Third edition. And in the third edition, at the bottom of a page, in small type, it says he did a thing he never did and couldn’t have done. And it’s the thing that everybody remembers about Ford.” He opened the book again and looked at the number. “Nobody reads footnotes.”

“Everybody reads footnotes,” said Alexander. “Nobody checks them.” He considered it. “Mama says that the part nobody asks about is where the trouble is.”

“Aunt Caroline says that?”

“Every year. To every new secretary. She says she was taught it at eight, at the palace in London, on a Saturday, by her brother, who had a box open on the desk and let her sit under it while he read.” Alexander turned the pencil a little on the desk, and squared it again. “She says he told her to read every document all the way to the bottom, including the parts that nobody would ask her about. She says she has never once found trouble anywhere else.”

Frederick looked at the footnote.

“He taught her that.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s in a footnote about him.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I thought you would like that.” He turned his chair back to the desk, and picked up the pencil, and found his place in Brennan’s reading. “Will you say so? Tomorrow?”

“It’s a footnote.”

“It is your father,” said Alexander, to the reading, and turned a page.

---

The History building was the brick one with the ivy, at the north end of the mall, the oldest classroom building on the campus after Old Main, with a wooden staircase that complained at every step and a radiator in every room that had been painted over so many times it looked like a cake. In February the ivy was bare, and the brick showed through it in long red lines like the ribs of a hand.

HST 110 met in a room on the first floor with forty seats, in rows that went up in shallow steps to a window at the back. Frederick sat in the third row, on the aisle, because he had sat there in August for the first lecture of 109 and Ashby had seen him there and it had become, by the second week, the seat of the witness.

Ashby came in on the minute with a canvas bag and the textbook and a sheaf of notes he did not look at, in a tie that was too tight, a dark green one this week, which had been knotted by somebody in a hurry, possibly himself.

He was about thirty. He was the newest in the department, and had said so on the first day of 109, as though it were a thing the room was entitled to know before deciding whether to listen to him; and he knew more about the Four-Year War than anybody Frederick had ever met, including the tutors at Columbia Palace, and was frightened of almost everything else, including the room. He had been less frightened in January. He had been less frightened every week since.

“So,” said Ashby. “Um. The seventies.”

---

He did the resignation well. He did it standing still, with his hands at his sides, which he did when he forgot to be nervous: the scandal and the cover-up, Goldwater’s resignation from the Cabinet on the sixth of August, the private counts, Nixon at Government House on the ninth, and Chisholm accepting it in the ordinary manner and commissioning Ford in the same hour, in Ernest V’s name, with no vacancy and no acting ministry and no reserve power, because none had been needed.

“And that’s, um, that’s the thing to hold on to,” said Ashby. “That nothing extraordinary happened. That’s what’s extraordinary about it. It was a constitutional crisis, and the constitution just, it just kept going.”

A girl in the second row wrote that down and underlined it.

“Then Ford,” said Ashby, and his hands came up, and he started walking. “The repair ministry. Every Nixon minister disqualified. Kissinger out on the first day. And then, a month in, the, um. The pardon.”

He turned to the board and wrote 8 SEPT 1974, and under it, MERCY, and stood looking at it.

“Ford’s pardon,” said Ashby, to the board. “As it’s, um, as it’s usually called.”

Frederick put his hand up.

---

Ashby turned round, and saw it, and his face did what it always did when the third row on the aisle put a hand up, which was to brighten and to panic in the same moment, like a man who has been handed a rare book and told not to drop it.

“Mr Hanover.”

“Page six hundred and twelve,” said Frederick. “The footnote.”

There was a sound in the room of forty people finding page six hundred and twelve in a four-pound book, all at once, which was like a flock of something getting up off a field.

Ashby found it last. He read it. Frederick watched him read it, and watched his lips move on the fourth word, and watched him go back up the page to the number and come down again, as Frederick had done on the bed the night before.

“Ernest V,” read Ashby aloud, slowly, “personally pardoned Richard Nixon on 8 September 1974.”

The room was quite silent.

“It’s wrong,” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said Ashby, at once, and then, as though he had been surprised by how fast it had come: “Yes. Strictly. Um. Strictly it’s wrong. The instrument was the Governor-General’s. Chisholm completed it, in the King’s name, on Ford’s responsible advice. The political responsibility was Ford’s. The textbook is, it’s compressing.”

“It says personally.”

“It does say personally.” Ashby looked at the word. “That’s not compressing. That’s, um. That’s a different sentence.”

“He couldn’t have,” said Frederick. “He wasn’t allowed. He was in London.”

Ashby looked up from the book.

He looked at Frederick for a long moment across two rows, with his tie too tight and the textbook open in his hands; and Frederick saw the panic go out of his face, all at once, and something else come into it, which he had seen in Ashby’s face in October, in the lecture on the Four-Year War, when the third row had said that the family said George III had read the Olive Branch twice. It was the face of a historian who has been given a thread and cannot help pulling it.

“Um,” said Ashby. “Could you, would you mind. What does your family say?”

---

The whole room turned round in its seats.

Frederick did not look at them. He looked at Ashby, and at the board, where it said MERCY in Ashby’s small sloping capitals, and he heard the answer before he gave it, because he had heard it all his life, at dinners, at Christmas, at the long table at Windsor and the round one in London, from people who were older than he was and had it from people older than them: an aunt, a lady-in-waiting, a man from the Household who had been at New Westminster in the seventies and was always seated at the end; said in the tone in which families say a thing that is a little bit funny and a little bit a grievance and is not to be examined, because examining it would spoil it.

“That my father was never told,” he said. “That he read it in the papers.”

The room was silent.

“The next morning,” said Frederick. “In London. That somebody brought him the papers with his breakfast and it was on the front, and that was the first he knew. That he’d pardoned a Prime Minister in his sleep.” He heard it as he said it, the family’s tone, the little laugh in it, and did not like it in his own voice. “That’s what we say.”

Ashby did not write anything down.

“Is that,” he said. “Um. Is that a source?”

“It’s what we say.”

“Who says it?”

Frederick thought about it.

“Everybody,” he said. “I don’t know who said it first.”

Ashby looked at him for a moment longer. Then he looked down at the book, at the footnote, and up again, and his voice when it came was very quiet, and not nervous at all.

“Then we should check what you say,” said Ashby.

---

A boy in the front row put his hand up without waiting to be asked, and then took it down, and then said it anyway, because he was eighteen.

“Can’t you just, like.” He looked at Frederick, and at Ashby, and back. “Ask him?”

The room went quiet in a different way.

Frederick looked at the boy. He was a freshman, in a Sun Devils cap, with a pen in his mouth, and he had asked it the way Tyler had once asked what a King did, because he wanted to know, and for no other reason in the world.

“He doesn’t have a lot of words,” said Frederick. “Since the accident. He has some. They take a while.”

The boy took the pen out of his mouth.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry, man.”

“It’s all right. It’s a good question.” Frederick looked at the footnote. “It’s the obvious one.”

Ashby cleared his throat.

“It’s, um. It’s the right one, actually,” said Ashby. “It’s the first thing you do. You ask the people who were there.” He looked at the board. “And then you check what they say against what they wrote down, because people who were there are, um, very often the least reliable, because they were there.” He picked up the chalk, and put it down again. “Carter,” he said. “Nineteen seventy-seven. Page six hundred and thirty.”

The room found page six hundred and thirty.

---

Ashby caught him on the wooden staircase afterwards, coming down two steps at a time with the canvas bag banging on his hip and the tie, Frederick saw, loosened at last.

“Mr Hanover. Could you. Would you mind. A minute.”

Frederick stopped on the half-landing. Below them the stream of HST 110 went on down and out into the light, and three of them looked back up the stairs as they went.

“I didn’t mean,” said Ashby. “In there. To, um. To put you on the spot.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did, a bit.” Ashby shifted the bag. “It’s a bad habit. My adviser in graduate school used to say I treat everybody in the room as an archive.” He looked unhappy about it. “You’re not an archive.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You should mind a bit.” Ashby took a breath. “Look. Um. The Goldwater papers.”

Frederick waited.

“They’re here. In the building. Not this building. The library. Top floor. Special collections.” Ashby was talking faster now, the way he did when he was nearly at the Four-Year War. “Goldwater opposed the pardon. Publicly. He’d resigned from Nixon’s Cabinet a month before, he’d turned down Ford’s, and he and Ford were friends, real friends, through all of it, despite the pardon. And Goldwater kept everything. Carbons of everything. It’s one of the great collections, it’s, um, it’s enormous. If anybody outside Government House wrote down who was told what in September 1974, it’s going to be a man who was angry and kept carbons.” He stopped. “I’ve been meaning to go through the seventy-four correspondence since I got here. I just. Never had a reason that was, um. Urgent.”

“Is it urgent?”

Ashby looked at him.

“It’s a footnote in a textbook that forty people are going to be examined on in May,” he said. “And it’s wrong. And the correction is a family story, and I don’t know if that’s wrong. So.” He considered it. “It’s urgent to me.”

“Can I come?”

“I was going to ask if you would.” Ashby looked relieved and frightened at once. “The seventy-four series is on request. They need two weeks’ notice, for the boxes, and there’s a form, and a reading-room appointment. I could ask for a Thursday. Thursday the twenty-second?”

“Thursday mornings are fine.”

“In your, um.” Ashby stopped. “In what capacity should I, um, put you on the form?”

“Student,” said Frederick.

“Student,” said Ashby, and took a small notebook out of the canvas bag, and wrote it down, there on the half-landing, as though it were a source.

---

Alexander was at the desk by the door when he came in at four, with the box open and the pencil, and he did not look round.

“Well?”

“I said so.”

“And?”

“And he asked what my family says. And I told him.”

The pencil went on.

“And he asked whether that was a source,” said Frederick. “And I said it’s what we say. And he said then we should check what we say.”

The pencil stopped. Alexander laid it down, parallel to the edge of the desk, and sat for a moment looking at the paper in front of him, which was something from the Bundesrat with a seal on it.

“That is a good historian,” he said.

“He’s frightened of the room.”

“Good historians usually are,” said Alexander. “It is the people who are not frightened of the room who write the footnotes.”

---

His father’s birthday was on Friday. He was eighty-eight.

Frederick rang at six in the morning, on the step under the narrow window on the landing, in the jumper, with the window open an inch and the morning coming in cold off the car park, because six in Tempe was one in the afternoon in London, which was after lunch and before his father slept, which was the best of the day now, his mother said, since January.

She answered.

“He has had the song,” she said, before he could say anything. “At six this morning, at the end of the bed. I sang both verses. Ebba timed it, and I am allowed to tell you that it was faster than yours.” A pause. “He did one of the cheers. The first. Then he looked at me, and I did the other three, and he said that was correct.” Another pause. “He is in the study, in the green chair. Brannigan has lit the fire, which we do not need, because he likes to look at it. Do you want him?”

“Yes.”

There was the sound of the house in London: a door, the corridor, the clock in the study, which he knew, the small brass one with the loud tick, and then the fire, and then his father breathing, close to the telephone, in the way he breathed now when he had been handed it and was getting ready.

“Yes.”

“Dad. It’s me. Happy birthday.”

There was a silence on the line from London. It was the looking kind. Frederick heard his father go along the corridors of the house of himself, opening doors, a long way in, slower than last year, because of January; and he did not fill it. He sat on the step with the textbook on his knees, which he had brought out with him without deciding to, open at page six hundred and twelve, and waited.

“Eighty,” his father found. A breath. “Eight.”

And then, before Frederick could say anything, he said it again, all of it at once, with immense satisfaction, as though it were a score at cricket and the side had batted well:

“Eighty-eight.”

Frederick laughed on the step. He could not help it. He heard his father hear it, in London, and be glad, and breathe out in the short pieces that were his laugh now.

“That’s a lot,” said Frederick.

“Lot,” his father agreed.

Frederick looked down at the book on his knees, and at the footnote, and at the word in it.

He had the question ready. He had had it ready since Tuesday night, on the bed, with the book closed on his finger. Were you told? Three words. His father could hold three words, if he was given time, if nobody filled the space; and the fire was lit, and it was the best of the day, and he was eighty-eight and pleased about it.

He did not ask.

“I’ll ring on Sunday,” he said.

“Sunday,” said his father. A breath. “Good.”

The telephone went across the table, and his mother came back.

“You were going to ask him something,” she said, in Swedish, quite low.

“How do you know?”

“I am your mother. And you breathed in, and then you did not use it.” A pause. “Is it important?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then ask him on a day that is not his birthday,” said his mother. “He will like that better. On his birthday he likes to be eighty-eight. On a Sunday he likes to be asked things.” Another pause. “Puss, Fredde. Go and eat something. Not eggs.”

---

He sat on the step for a while after, with the window open an inch, and the car park going from grey to gold beyond the concrete fin, and the thermometer on the landing saying seventy-nine, as it always said, whatever the weather was doing.

Then he took the pencil out of his pocket, a soft one, kept sharp, and in the margin of page six hundred and twelve, beside the footnote, small, in the top corner of the space, where you initial a thing to show you have read it, he wrote:

Chisholm. On advice.

He looked at it. Under it, smaller, he wrote:

Told?

He did not write anything in ink.