Man With a Squirrel (5 page)

They'd seen to the kids' last-minute departure for their school buses and were drinking a final coffee, standing at the kitchen sink, looking out at the yard. Red birds, a brand of finch, on their way north, were congregated around Molly's feeder for the flax seeds.

“What worthy cause calls for money at eight
A.M
.?” Fred asked.

“Not money. It's that Cover-Hoover woman, finally making contact by surprising me at breakfast. She says all she wants is to get acquainted.” Molly rinsed her cup and put it beside the sink. She'd leave before Fred did. Fred could wash up. “Fred, nothing's going to steer that woman's wagon now that she's opened it up to the cult theme. The crazies are going to be shouting directions and meanwhile there's no place to go.

“It used to be you had the oppressors and the oppressed, and everyone understood. Now everyone wants to be a minority. It provides self-justification and identity. So the rich kids push the poor out of their slums and take their clothes and music, and white kids become black, since black kids became cool, and everyone pretends to be a brutalized Indian or gay person, though you can't say ‘Indian,' or at long last you can be a benighted female or an oppressed cross-dresser or the invisible victim of suppressed invisible child molesting. Done by a perpetrating parent victim. You should hear them talking at the PTA. With the power of darkness thing, Cover-Hoover opens the field as wide as the universe, since there's no boundary to the imagination, is there?

“You can't find the victim because everyone with clout and money and happy expectations in life is pretending they are it.”

“You should join Cover-Hoover's campaign,” Fred said. “She needs you.”

Molly was in her red wrapper, and on the point of starting the spinning rush that would clothe her and take her out the door in one continuous, sinuous movement. The phone rang and Molly motioned Fred to pick it up.

“I didn't give you my number,” said a smooth female voice on the other end.

“That's fair,” Fred told it.

“I was speaking to someone at this number,” the voice said. “Mrs. Riley.”

Fred made a sign to Molly that meant, It's the same person calling back. Molly shrugged and headed for the stairs, making a sign to Fred that meant, You handle it, OK?

The pause on Fred's end continued.

“Hello?” said the voice.

“Hello,” said Fred.

“I thought you were bringing Molly Riley to the telephone.”

“She's not available.”

“I was talking to her,” the voice said.

“Even so.” Fred took a sip from his coffee in the mug Molly had inscribed for him with her idea of a morning wake-up motto:
DEATH BEFORE DISMEMBERMENT
.

“Will you take a message?” the voice asked.

“If it will bring this to a conclusion.”

“This is Eunice Cover-Hoover,” the voice said. “Please take my number.”

Fred made the sounds of looking for a pencil and something to write on. Molly spun through the kitchen, wearing a red corduroy jumper with her purple cardigan, brushing at her tight brown curls as she flew and waving a kiss at Fred that didn't reach him until after the back door had banged shut.

“Are you there?” Doctor Cover-Hoover asked. The voice was sweet.

“I am,” Fred said.

Cover-Hoover said, “My telephone number is unlisted. Directory assistance will not reveal it.” She gave the number. “What is your name?” she continued. “Mr. Riley? May I rely on you to permit this information to reach Molly Riley?”

“What may I rely on?” Fred asked. The doctor gave up.

*   *   *

Fred parked in Harvard Square and walked over to Harvard's Fine Arts Library, glancing around him at the continually changing display in the streets. What had come over the world, this teeny piece of it at least? There was a poster ad depicting Picasso's satyr at work, a pirated reproduction without attribution, inviting attendance to an evening's exposition of short films and discussion entitled Call It Rape. Beside that, a green flyer attached with masking tape to a light pole invited one and all to an evening of “sharing” with a Dr. Goldmirth, under the banner Circumcision: Breaking the Silence; the fine print suggested that your present male-female or male-male relationships might have been harmed by the suppressed trauma caused by “this particularly violent form of genital mutilation.” Another flyer, fringed with detachable telephone numbers, began, “We are three nonsmoking caring vegetarian women seeking…” A Xeroxed scrawl from Somerville announced a “men's group forming” in somebody's garage, so “bring your drum.”

Fred went into the library's big reading room to think.

He was distracted. The painting fragment he had purchased clamored for his attention, but he could not focus for the intervening image of a dead man taken from the river. The body he imagined was old and gray and bloated but still gaunt. So few bottom feeders could survive the cold river that the features were well preserved, although Fred could not see them.

7

Each of us encompasses our own corpse. He'd seen so many in his day; that didn't bother Fred. What caused the rising of objection in his gorge was the old man's isolation and anonymity. It is a bleak thing to finish life with a cinder-block necklace as your dog tag of identity. As an unpleasant but naked young woman had put it once to Fred, “Everyone's an island, you know?”

Fred riffled through glossy art periodicals in the library's reading room, using them as a mental screen between his interest in Copley and the phantasm of the dead man. It's an old blind alley in your own bad habit, Fred, he told himself. The man without responsibility is a derelict, as far as your inner wisdom is concerned. Let it go.

Living with Molly and the children, he'd begun to cultivate a layer of respectability to insulate him from his native horror of having no one to depend on him, or notice how he died.

The new library wing at Harvard's Fogg Museum was quiet. You could count the patrons and figure to yourself, That's 750,000 bucks per person they spent on the construction.

Harvard's policy is to make its library facilities available to all alumni—and, nudged by its worldly-wise development office, it extends alumnus status to include those like Fred whose Harvard careers were brief and catastrophic, who may use the library for a premium reduced to the level of near charity.

Fred indulged a nonexistent taste for German art photography, putting off the moment when he might face incontrovertible evidence that
Squirrel with Attendant Feet
was no more than a daring flight of fancy by such a drudge as Reuben Moulthrop. The periodical room Fred sat in still smelled new, as if someone sprayed canned newness into it every Wednesday morning: new shelving, new glossy magazines. Even the few students, entering or reading, wafted strains of shampoo and designer coffee freshly brewed.

The thing about the fragment he had purchased, that had attracted him as much as the quality of the painting's workmanship, was the contrast between the old canvas—dirty and honest—and the new slash of separation from its matrix: the presence of staples where tacks should have been, and the cut-rate inadequacy of both the stretcher bars and frame. The contrast shrieked, Something is wrong here—like a man otherwise in business dress wearing sneakers and no pants, or the feral pig carrying a child's head, trotting through dappled woods.

It was the juxtaposition that grated. In Fred's experience, you wanted either to follow the money and see where it flowed, eddied, and guttered, or to watch carefully the points where juxtapositions were awry.

Fred realized he was staring at a particularly Mapplethorpean German exercise in black and white involving, it appeared, twinned melons and a flamethrower in dirty weather. He rose, tossed the magazine, stretched, and went down the new but brightly dismal staircase to poke in the stacks and think about Copley. The desks around the stacks had a feeling of panic: Christmas on death row. The intellective energy seemed caused more by anticipation than by thanksgiving. To begin with, the place smelled like a hamper. Homemade paper signs warned users away from certain of the carrels, reminding clients of persistent drips from plumbing overhead. One empty desk was covered with pleas scrawled in Magic Marker on the backs of 8½-by-11-inch flyers: “Help! I am studying for my generals. I need these books. Please!!! If you must use them, put them back.” Not a volume remained. The user had already, Christmas morning, been led to execution. Fred pulled an armload of books on Copley out of the stacks and sat at the victim's desk.

Perhaps people existed somewhere who could look at the stockings on the man's legs in Fred's painting and announce, That's prime Worcester worsted, woven in 1763 by Dame Hannah Trimble and dyed by her in an iron cauldron using buckthorn and oak bark. Perhaps the shoes or their buckles, to a seasoned eye, would divulge age and place of origin—the shoes no doubt of local manufacture, and the buckles either imported or inherited (they would pass from one pair of shoes to another, being silver and precious), or made by Paul Revere.

Fred started looking at the accessories in the reproductions of early Copley portraits, as if the dull, flat effigies of three-dimensional paintings were advertisements from old Sears catalogs, showing the satisfied users of the gateleg table (cat. #1763-a) or the china import plate (cat. #567-c) heaped with overstuffed clingstone peaches (see Garden section).

The gold chain on the squirrel might have considerably more market value than a Negro Man, being offered for sale below the reproduced fragment from a newspaper advertisement announcing the removal of Copley's widowed mother, together with her tobacco store, from Boston's Long Wharf to Lindel's Row, against the Quaker's meetinghouse …

“If I'd ever finished college,” Fred told Molly later, over a selection of books he was carrying with him to study at home, “or gotten a Ph.D. in art history, or found myself teaching a Copley seminar to a passel of grad students, I'd make them take all the portraits he did between 1760 and 1774 and compute the fair replacement values of the accessories shown—not the architectural motifs, which are wish-fulfillment fantasies on the part of the sitters, but the necklaces, tables, chairs, pots, books, rugs, clothes—and figure Copley's social rise in terms of purely crass materialism.

“It's how the human killed the painter in him,” Fred said. “Success leads to gilding, which is no more than fat with sunlight on it.”

“Did you say gilding or gelding?” Molly asked. Fred had stopped in at the public library and was failing to persuade Molly to come out in the rain for lunch. “And if you are trying to trick me into eating with you,” Molly said, “it would be tactful not to mention fat. I am working for lean and mean.”

The reading room at the public library looked like death row after a long-postponed general amnesty has been proclaimed: the few inmates left seem bemused by a sudden relief that might, in time, lead to their generating a purpose in life.

“You're not forgetting the thing at Sam's school?” Molly asked.

“Seven-thirty,” Fred said. “I'll eat lunch for us both.”

“Meanwhile I was going to have a look at Cover-Hoover's book, the first one,
Culture of Abuse,
” Molly said. “But it's always out, and there's a waiting list. Can you get me a copy out of Harvard's Widener?”

“You can't call Cover-Hoover and ask her for a copy,” Fred said. “I failed to record her secret number. Come have lunch.”

“Can't. I have work to do. There's a student coming in at three looking for ancestors.”

“Send him to the New England Historic Genealogical Society,” Fred suggested.

“I don't think she's got those kind of ancestors,” Molly said, “any more than I do. As far as yours go…”

“Mine went as far as they could,” Fred said. “To Iowa, where people don't write books. Too busy stamping on grasshoppers.”

*   *   *

Fred wandered toward the T stop. As long as he was in the vicinity, he'd stick his nose into Bob Slate's. That was the warmest trail he had to follow concerning the squirrel—except for maybe the cheesy Mexican frame. He paused at the first pay phone he encountered and telephoned Oona. “Hold that frame for me, would you? I've decided I can use it.”

Whoever had stapled the old canvas to the stretcher bars had gone into Bob Slate's—one of the two in Harvard Square, or the one at Porter Square. Fred came first to the Mass. Ave. branch, across from the forbidding entrance to Harvard Yard at Widener Library. He located the bins where stretcher bars were offered—the twenties in between the eighteens and the twenty-twos—and became no wiser.

Fred found his way to a desk in back where he waylaid an individual wise in the ways of the world, with special knowledge of inventory control. “Suppose I found a Fredrix stretcher bar with a Bob Slate sticker on it reading
TAR
6020? What would the sticker tell me?”

The individual wise in the ways of the world scratched a honey-colored chin, brushed crumbs off a checked shirt, and told Fred, “Not a whole lot. “The ‘TAR' is short for Tara Distributing Inc. The ‘sixty' likely means it's for a stretcher bar, which you say you already know, and the ‘twenty' means it's a twenty-incher. Why?”

Fred dodged a frantic young man smelling strongly of second-hand smoke who pressed through the aisle carrying stacks of cardboard meant to be folded into boxes so that when you moved, everything you owned would be the same size.

“I wonder if, starting from the label, we can work back to which of the three stores the stretcher bar came from,” Fred said. “The particular one I have.”

The individual shook a head whose wealth of reddish curls moved in counterpoise. “Everything comes through Porter Square,” the individual said. “Before it's here it's there. But that doesn't mean the person who bought it bought it there. They could as easily get it here or in the Church Street store. Do you need one?”