Man With a Squirrel (7 page)

“Anyway, ‘Just talk to Eunice,' Pheely says. ‘Please? For me?' God. She's done so well with the Learning to Love the Body You Have series. I can't imagine Ophelia Finger's really got designs on the mystic realm now, do you?”

“Most everything mystifies me. I spent half my day looking at a captive squirrel and thinking about a dead man's feet.”

“Dead feet?”

“The ones in the painting. Since it's over two hundred years old, I figure my guy croaked.”

“Good. All this cult talk,” Molly said. She kissed the top of Fred's head—the bristle of dark hair he kept short so it needed no brushing. “I started seeing dark woodses and dancing divils. I'm going upstairs. I thought you meant the old person Blanche Maybelle Stardust found by the river.”

“No, I was talking art,” Fred said. “Nothing but good old art.”

*   *   *

“That goddamned Ophelia,” Molly said later, curled into Fred in her bed. “I'll tell you what I hate, Fred.”

Fred became more awake. Molly's house was far enough from Spy Pond so you couldn't see water, except from the roof peak. Nonetheless, tonight watery darkness lapped against Molly's bedroom windows. There was no star- or moonlight, only a furry dusk that allowed Fred to make out Molly's dresser and the mirror over it; the open door to the new bathroom, which had once been a closet or a borning room; the bedroom walls, papered with cornflowers and pinks in vertical swags. Fred's presence in the house was betrayed only by his bulk in Molly's bed and the clothes he kept in the smaller of Molly's two clothes closets.

Fred put a palm on the warm round of Molly's knee where it pushed against his stomach. She was wearing the white shirt he'd taken off. “What do you hate, Molly?”

“The stories were all about how these grown-ups were betrayed in childhood by their minister or their parents or the head of the PTA.”

“There are hideous people in the world,” Fred said.

“I gather the new book is full of them—but I'm not so impressed by the stories,” Molly said. “Though a tale about how a fifty-year-old woman was almost sacrificed to death on an altar of sin by her father, the respected symphony conductor who's been dead twenty years—and who would have guessed he had that much spare time for a hobby?—it suggests an interesting tide of revisionism.”

“And may be hard on the old man,” Fred observed. “Except he's deader than my guy's feet.”

“No, what I hate,” Molly said, stroking a hand absently down Fred's chest and fingering a nipple, “is that all of it sounds like the wisdom of the four-year-old, with heavy guns backing it up.”

“Mm,” Fred said.

“I remember Sam convinced, at about four, that his mother—that was me—had been replaced by a witch who looked exactly like me. Imagine if at that point he'd had the benefit of a kindly chorus gathering around him wearing capes and chanting, ‘You're right, kid.'”

They listened to a spasm of rain attacking the windows and crossing the roof. “I know it's only March, but if something green doesn't happen out there pretty soon,” Molly said, “I'm not going to be responsible.” Her questing fingers rested on the scar under Fred's left shoulder. She was getting used to his scars, telling him he was battered like any old tree that doesn't know to stand farther from the driveway. “It feels like another nipple,” Molly said.

“A witch's tit,” Fred said.

“I was amazed,” Molly said. “For all I've railed and raged against organized religion, I have to say it beats the disorganized kind.”

“I'll tell you, Molly,” Fred said, sliding his hand along Molly's fragrant-feeling back, under the wilted shirt, “I am beset by a sense of duality, because our mutual body language belies the content of our conversation.”

“We'll stop talking,” Molly suggested.

*   *   *

“Tell you what,” Molly said, turning efficient after the expiration of the moral equivalent of twenty-three pages.

“What,” Fred said drowsily.

“I keep remembering you running out naked into the snow that night.”

“What?” Fred asked, almost sitting up.

“The night you caught the man watching my house.”

“I put my pants on,” Fred protested.

“That's irrelevant,” Molly said. “What I
remember
is my man naked as Adam's off-angel, with knobs on, standing in a scurry of snow in the middle of the dark street—the snow in the streetlight makes a halo of white feathers around you, Fred. That's what I remember. As if it was yesterday.”

Fred stared into the room's muddle of darkened forms.

“You were on your way to meet the other witches,” Molly said. She went to sleep.

9

Oona, in her front window, beckoned to Fred as she saw him passing, carrying a large container of espresso from Chico's. Jesus, that's fast, Fred thought, pushing the door open and listening to its bell ching. They came in again? It was not yet ten o'clock. Oona shouldn't be open.

“Fred Taylor, I'm in love,” Oona said. She blushed. She was in black watered silk, which set off the blush. She clasped her rotund hands, beaming like a farm wife pleased by productivity on the part of her gang of chickens.

“I'm glad for you,” Fred said. He dodged a collection of andirons, stepping aside to let Oona get to her street door and lock it.

“No, not like that,” Oona said. “My little thing rests on its laurels. But nevertheless, Fred Taylor, this confirmed widow is in love.”

Oona had never entrusted anything remotely confidential to him. Fred took a sip of his coffee, black and bitter.

“I have slivovitz to put in that, Fred Taylor,” Oona offered.

“Thanks, maybe not,” Fred said.

“Mr. Clayton Reed, the man you are working for,” Oona whispered, leading Fred toward the back room. “He came in yesterday pretending to be someone else, in order to trick from me my secret of the squirrel, and I am in love. I had not dreamed such a man could exist outside of fiction. He is—he is, I do not know which, the Wooden Prince or the Miraculous Mandarin?”

Fred sat next to the desk while Oona installed herself behind it, where she could see to the street. The desk was covered with china salt-and-pepper shakers in the forms of birds and animals. “It's a collection I bought,” Oona said. “Mostly American, mostly 1950s, but people like them.” She shrugged.

“How about Wooden Mandarin?” Fred suggested. “As a compromise. For Clayton Reed.”

“You are making fun,” Oona said. “It was love at first sight. Immediately I knew him, strutting like a stork who has just swallowed a fat frog filled with eggs and does not wish you to guess what pond he fished it in. And he was whistling an air from Szekelyfono, which not everyone can do, Fred Taylor—not on purpose, as he did it, in order to win my heart with a Magyar melody. I wept.” Bright tears even now stood in the corners of Oona's eyes, and broadened their normal brilliance. “For Kecskemét is also my hometown.”

Oona sighed and gazed past Fred toward distant Hungarian fields just the other side of Charles Street.

“I must tell you I am partially bewildered,” Fred said.

“Naturally,” Oona said magnanimously. She began marking prices on paper labels and sticking them onto salt-and-pepper shakers, which she coupled with rubber bands.

“Seven-fifty?” Fred exclaimed, looking at one of the labels for a set of lurid post-Impressionist tortoises.

Oona winked. “If you price them what they are worth, people think they are junk,” she said. “This reassures them they are not making a mistake. They can trust their eye, which tells them to like this. What can I do?”

Fred had a drink of his coffee. Oona was taking her time.

“And,” Oona went on, “not only did we speak together of the great Hungarian composers Jenö Hubay and Ferenc Liszt, Bartók, Kodály, and Dohnányi, but the painters Szinyei-Merse and Béla Iványi-Grünwald, and István Czók…”

“Jesus!” Fred said.

“Not just Mihály Munkácsy, who everyone knows because he tried to pass for French.” Oona spat into an elephant leg lined with china: an umbrella stand.

“You took to Clay then, did you?” Fred said. He finished his coffee and, with permission from Oona's nod, tossed the cup into the same elephant leg.

“We spoke of Gyula Krúdy, whom Mr. Reed compares favorably to Proust,” Oona said, putting a price on the head of a gaping china sparrow with salt holes in its throat. “We became great friends, although he did not care to leave his name. Fred, I am smitten. Whatever I have is his for the taking, as long as he will pay my price.”

*   *   *

“Gyula Krúdy, huh?” Fred said to Clayton on the house phone. “Plenty of people have compared me favorably to Marcel Proust, but I don't go on about it.”

Clayton made a Hungarian sound—word or expletive. “I suppose I must go to Holland.”

“Oona is smitten,” Fred continued. “But she can control herself. You don't have to interpose the whole Atlantic between your bodies.”

A clinking from Clay's end was his pencil point bouncing on the Wedgwood plate he kept on his upstairs desk for that purpose. “I don't know what you are going on about, Fred,” Clay said. “I cannot leap the gap between your synapses.”

“Holland?” Fred prompted.

“Unless I ask you to go in my place,” Clay said. “But I suppose I should execute this errand myself.”

Fred groaned. “You've thought of something Molly's mother would call another wild blue herring, haven't you, Clay?”

“Again, I am not following the zoological references, Fred.”

Fred looked across his room at the pinned fragment with the squirrel. Big bright eye on the animal. “You found another excuse to stall on the Vermeer,” Fred said. “When all we need to do is easy as taking it to the dentist for an X ray.”

“I'll not have people shooting rays through my painting,” Clay proclaimed. “It alters cells.”

Fred hung up. Indulging in argument on this subject would lead inevitably to fury. The issue of the Vermeer could come between them, as lasting and contentious as a messy divorce. Some time before, Fred and Clay—their paths of investigation crossing—had purchased at auction a nondescript study of salt-marsh haystacks painted, it was generally agreed, by Martin Johnson Heade. Clay's research suggested that a nineteenth-century North Shore widow, careless of posterity's shifting taste, had given Heade a painting by Vermeer, which she disliked, to paint over.

The hope and expectation was that Fred, acting for Clay, had purchased a painting that, if one cared to think of it in such terms, was worth millions when the Vermeer was laid bare. But once he owned the picture, Clay refused to initiate direct examination of the possibilities. The one thing Clay and Fred agreed on was that both canvas and chassis were too old, and of the wrong origin, to be consistent with Heade. Clay wouldn't have it tested and he wouldn't have it looked at. It sat in the racks, uncleaned and unhousled.

“He's like someone who's so excited anticipating the prospect of finding what's below his or her belt,” Molly said, “that he won't look to see if he or she is a boy or a girl.” Or, as Clay put it, “I prefer, Fred, to rely, in the fullness of time, upon my own connoisseurship.” Fred was exhausted with the whole business. He sat to look at the day's mail, saving the auction catalogs for last.

Clay came spiraling down the circular staircase, cordovan shoes first, followed by lime-green socks, a suit designed to make a virgin dove ashamed, and a silk tie of green to echo, and rebuke, the socks while teasing them with orange spots. “Ah, Fred,” Clay said, as if surprised to see him. “I shall make a pilgrimage to examine the known Vermeers. I wish to become expert upon their supports, so as to make structural comparisons with my own.”

Fred said, “Interesting sale coming up in Detroit. Three studies by Gérôme.” He held the flyer out for Clay to see the illustrations. “You want me to telephone for the catalog and transparencies?”

“Gérôme is pornography. Like French chocolates,” Clay decreed.

“It's not harems,” Fred pointed out. “These are still-life studies of what the decorators call accessories.”

“Nonetheless,” Clay said, glancing briefly at the photograph of Gérôme's rendition of a large clay pot, “you know what the man is thinking.” Clayton tapped his right foot. “What will be their response at the Gardner if I ask to see their file on
The Concert?
”

“Bells and sirens. And a lot of attention you don't want, for a long time,” Fred said. “You will wish you were in Holland.”

Boston's only known Vermeer had been among the cream of Isabella Stewart Gardner's collection—a choice, Clay loved to point out, not of Berenson but of the painter and socialite Ralph Wormeley Curtis. However that might be, it was among the paintings stolen some years ago, along with Rembrandts, pastels by Degas, and a wonderful Manet. The stolen pictures had not been traced or recovered or heard of again.

“My painting is exactly the same dimensions as the Gardner's,” Clay observed.

Fred said, “We've been over that. And fractions of an inch away from Beit's
Lady Writing a Letter
in Blessington, Ireland; and easy spitting distance from London's
Lady and Gentleman at the Virginals.
So what? There may be reasons to go to Dresden and the Hague, Clay, but you are playing games.”

“It would be so much easier if I could go straight to Director Hawley,” Clay said.

“And put all your cards on the table,” Fred reminded him, “as you are wont to do.”

“If only I could conceal my identity,” Clay mused.

“Clay, everyone always knows you,” Fred said. “With the exception of one airplane stewardess who mistook you for George Plimpton. You don't disguise well.”