The Map Thief (14 page)

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SMILEY FARED BETTER
with his other major client, Larry
Slaughter, who became more serious about his map collection after his retirement in 1988. A quiet and private person who rarely spoke about his map collection even to friends, Slaughter appreciated Smiley’s diffident formality. Using what Mick Tooley had taught him, Smiley showed Slaughter
how he could assemble a collection that could tell stories about how the mid-Atlantic area had been settled. By now, that was easier said than done. A decade of interest in rare maps had dried up the market and driven up prices. By March 1990,
The New York Times
had taken notice, interviewing map dealers, including Smiley, for a feature story on the popularity of maps in home décor. “The problem for dealers is not so much selling as
finding the really nice things,” Smiley said.

One source Smiley found for new material was
Howard Welsh, a New Jersey textile magnate and longtime patron of the New York Public Library, who had assembled a collection of a thousand maps and a hundred globes over forty years. Smiley originally met him at B. Altman; now as he got older, he began using Smiley as his agent to start selling off parts of his collection, with the proceeds going to support his family. When Welsh died suddenly of a heart attack on November 9, 1990, however, his children decided instead to sell the collection through Sotheby’s, concluding the deal within a matter of weeks.

Smiley showed up at the auction along with other dealers the following June,
acquiring
among other maps the John Seller map of New Jersey that Alice Hudson had picked for the Mercator Society book. But he watched as
another buyer picked up a group of four books of
The English Pilot,
including
The Fourth Book
from 1713—the same edition Smiley said was stolen from his studio—and the only copy of it sold at auction in decades. He did
buy a pair of maps of Washington, DC, by Andrew Ellicott, including a rare map of the original survey of the District of Columbia
before
Washington—printed in an unusual diamond shape rather than the familiar square.

In the following months, he picked up other treasures for Slaughter as well, including a rare 1787 book by President
Thomas Jefferson containing a map he’d made of Virginia. Jefferson’s father, who’d previously mapped the state, had died when Jefferson was only fourteen, leaving him his surveyor tools. Jefferson taught himself how to use them, becoming an amateur mapmaker—and after becoming president, he updated his father’s map for a book he wrote about his state.
Smiley purchased a copy in 1991,
adding it to three others in Slaughter’s collection.

In October 1991, he purchased a beautifully intact first edition of
The English Pilot, The Fourth Book
from 1689 for $45,000 in a sale at Christie’s of the map collection of the Du Pont family. In 1993, he bought a
first-edition copy of Seller’s
Atlas Maritimus
from 1682, the only copy in the United States, at auction at the Christian Brothers Academy for $6,500. And in 1994, he finally acquired a copy of the
1713 edition of
The English Pilot, The Fourth Book
from an auction at Sotheby’s London.

At the same time Smiley was helping to build the collection for Larry Slaughter, he was also continuing to work on his scholarship. With the help of his assistant, Ashley Baynton-Williams, he began work on a book,
The Printed Charts of New England 1614–1800: A Carto-bibliography
, that would trace the mapmaking of New England through forty-seven sea charts, starting with John Smith’s 1614 map of New England. He approached the curator of the map department at Yale, Barbara McCorkle, who wrote an introduction to the book, and appealed to the Mercator Society to publish the work, which he envisioned as the first in a series that would trace the
carto-bibliography of North America. With the enthusiastic support of Slaughter and Alice Hudson, the society solicited bids from printers and tentatively agreed to help raise $8,000 to print it.

According to Alice Hudson, however,
Smiley and Baynton-Williams got into a dispute about who deserved credit for the writing. Baynton-Williams had prepared the intial text, but Hudson said later that Smiley thought his descriptions were poor and had to be rewritten; Baynton-Williams, however, believed he’d done the lion’s share of the work and Smiley had only come in at the end to polish it. When the two were unable to resolve their differences, Hudson put the manuscript into a file drawer in the NYPL Map Division, where it remained.

Despite the new income from his sales to Slaughter, Smiley’s financial difficulties continued. He continued to owe thousands of dollars in back taxes to both the state and federal governments—with the
IRS filing a lien for $21,000 in 1992 and another for $25,000 in 1994. Even as he was paying off creditors, however, he was spending lots of money to rebuild the house in Sebec.

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BACK IN THE 1800S,
logs crowded so thick around the milldam on Sebec Lake that a person could walk across the lake on them. From there, they were floated to the City of Bangor in rafts down the river or, in winter, carried on a special steam train outfitted with skis. At its
height in 1870, Sebec was the
largest town in Piscataquis County, with a
population of more than a thousand people (
Figure 9
). Since then, however, its fortunes have ebbed as the lumber business has dried up and gone to Canada and the population
dropped to only six hundred. Now Piscataquis is the
second-poorest county in Maine and one of the
most sparsely populated areas east of the Mississippi.

Still, the town has retained a sparse beauty, with wooded hills rising over the lake, and dozens of historic homes clustered around the village center. Among the residents are summer visitors who own homes—still quaintly referred to as “camps”—on the lakeshore. Their children join the local kids jumping off the milldam bridge into the lake and running through the surrounding woods. The house Smiley bought overlooking the dam in 1989 conforms to the New England farmhouse rhyme: “
Big house, little house, back house, barn.” A
five-over-five Colonial saltbox, it features two fireplaces bisected by a central staircase. Attached to it is a smaller carbon copy with kitchen and pantry, servants’ quarters that have since been converted into a garage, and finally the big red barn. Smiley put Adirondack chairs on the front lawn and cleared a path through wildflowers and smoke bush down to a grassy area that gave way to a small wooden dock.

He spared no expense on the house itself, digging out a new foundation for the kitchen and installing new cabinets and an antique stove. He put a slate sink in the back pantry, beside ingenious cabinets to hold spices. Downstairs, he laid flagstone tiles and installed a pool table and beer fridge. In the main house, he jacked up the floor and laid new two-by-six stringers to support it, and he rebuilt the chimney.

Lisa’s job, meanwhile, was to decorate the home. She chose a
rustic, country aesthetic that harkened back a half century. She painted the kitchen bright yellow, installing a long table flanked by rattan chairs. In the dining room was another long wooden table, with matching wooden benches. Off the main hall, a children’s playroom was filled with antique toys—a hobbyhorse, a stuffed bear, and a dollhouse. And in the corner was Smiley’s office, where he retreated to look at maps and installed shelves for blues records and his father’s gardening book collection after he died in 1994. The only map hanging in the house was one that was there when they bought it—a
map of Sebec Lake done for the Dover-Foxcoft Chamber of Commerce in 1962 that hung over the dining room table.

Starting the year after he bought it, Smiley and Lisa began coming up to the house every summer as a refuge from the city. Smiley bought two antique wooden speedboats and drove them across the lake to where one of his best friends from college, Bennett Fischer, began renting a home. In the early 1990s, Scott Slater and Paul Statt began bringing their families up as well. A
video from August 18, 1993, shows sun streaming through the window as Smiley and Slater sit together at the table beneath the map of Sebec.

“How are your pancakes?” Lisa asks, coming in from the kitchen. Smiley is sitting at the end of the table in a red-checkered shirt. “Oh, very good indeed. We’ve started our Sebec feeding frenzy,” says Smiley. They talk about a house Slater is planning on buying in Harpswell on the Maine coast. “We can . . . visit Forbes and Forbes can visit us on the coast,” Slater says. “All summer long, while we’re eating.” Smiley chimes in: “In between meals. We can have breakfast here and lunch in Harpswell.”

The film cuts to a scene later that night, with Smiley coming out of the kitchen with Slater’s daughter Felicity, lit by candles on a cake he had made from scratch for Lisa’s birthday. “Where did you get this great cake?” Lisa asks. Felicity squeals excitedly, “He didn’t get it; he made it.” Smiley demurs in his baritone. “Okay, I frosted it, Felicity and I frosted it.” Cut to a few minutes later, jazz music playing as Forbes and Lisa slow-dance together by themselves in the dining room.

—

EVEN BEFORE HE HAD
a child of his own,
Smiley doted on the children of Fischer, Slater, and the other friends who came to stay with him in Maine. He carried the kids on his shoulders on hikes around the property, and he towed them on inner tubes from the back of his speedboat. As they got older, he began spearheading more elaborate activities for their visits. One night at the dinner table, the kids were lamenting how they couldn’t catch the larger frogs in the middle of the lake. The next morning, they awoke to find “Uncle Forbes” constructing a raft out of large logs. He went with them that afternoon, helping maneuver it with a long pole while the kids grabbed up the frogs.

Another time, it was a moose sculpture that the kids built out of spare wood, which graced the back garden for years afterward. Another time, Smiley helped the kids turn the barn into a haunted house,
complete with an elaborate maze of booby traps. To the children, Smiley seemed like a magician who could make anything possible. “It was like entering another world,” remembered Felicity Slater of the magical summers she spent up in Maine. “Every night we’d go wild with speculation about what we wanted to do the next day.”

When Felicity’s brother Gordie said he was into King Arthur’s knights, Smiley disappeared into the barn for an hour. He emerged with a wooden suit of armor, complete with shield and sword with beveled edges. When Gordie was later stricken with a rare form of cancer that confined him to a wheelchair at age fourteen, Smiley continued to include him in activities, bringing model airplane kits to the cottage and helping him in and out of the speedboat for private rides.

The fantasy world for the kids wasn’t without its rules. They couldn’t just help themselves to snacks, for instance. When they were hungry, Uncle Forbes or Lisa would prepare platters of cheese or fresh-picked berries with fancy crackers, placing them on the table next to a vase of wildflowers. There were other rules too; for example, no one was allowed to touch Smiley’s records or disturb him in his study. “When he was ready to engage with the kids, he was totally there and super-jovial,” remembered Felicity. “But if you ran into his study, no way.” That just, in her mind, added to his mystique—that this magician had his own private workshop where he performed work they didn’t understand.

At night, Smiley held court on the front porch, overlooking the lake, where the rushing sound of the waterfall from the milldam was soon joined by the bass thrum of bullfrogs along the shore. Fireflies winked in and out of the trees while Cassiopeia and the Summer Triangle wheeled overhead. Felicity remembers falling asleep to the sound of blues music while her father and Uncle Forbes continued to sit with big glasses of beer, laughing and telling stories into the night.

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IN SEPTEMBER 1993,
Smiley invited Slater and Statt to Sebec for the weekend, and the three spent hours drinking beer and whiskey and bullshitting about literature and history, kids and marriage. The next year, they repeated the outing on Columbus Day Weekend, inviting Bennett Fischer as well. After that, the
Boys’ Weekend became an annual tradition, with the four of them taking long hikes on logging roads, on
the lookout for moose, or taking freezing-cold dips in the lake. Smiley brought up special bottles of scotch and cases of craft beer, and eventually their college friend Dick Cantwell, who ran a brewery in Seattle, started sending a special keg for the weekend (though he didn’t attend himself). After a few years, Slater’s brother-in-law Bob von Elgg began joining them to make it five.

Smiley handled the cooking, pulling out his two favorite French and Italian cookbooks. He started roasting a turkey in the antique stove upon arrival, filling the house with smells of roasting meat and butter and providing pickings throughout the weekend. He’d follow it up with Provençal beef stew, potatoes with poached codfish and cream, smoked ham, or bread and tapenade—sometimes all at once. After dinner on Sunday, the group moved into the living room for annual readings of humorous clippings in front of the fireplace. Sipping scotch and port, they regaled each other with favorites from
The New Yorker
’s “Shouts & Murmurs” or
Harper’s
“Readings,” or excerpts from Ian Frazier or Martin Amis. As dawn neared, they’d close with “Auld Lang Syne” led by Fischer, a fan of Robert Burns.

Throughout the weekend, Smiley played music nonstop, bringing obscure 78s of blues musicians he’d had shipped from London. Von Elgg, who counted himself a blues aficionado, had barely heard of most of them. Smiley explained their importance to the genre as if he were describing a rare map, noting records that existed in only five or six copies. Eventually the rest of the guys began teasing Smiley for his newfound love of blues—which they’d been listening to since college.

No matter how much they protested, Smiley insisted on paying for everything whenever his friends came to Maine. He carried around a bankroll in his pocket, peeling off hundred-dollar bills to pay for groceries and liquor. The habit bugged Slater, who continued offering to pay his share, until he eventually just gave up. He started mockingly calling Smiley, “the Squire,” envisioning him as an English lord in a manor house, benevolently caring for his village. Something about the way Smiley choreographed their weekends, however, began to bother him.