Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “You were the one upset,” Molly said. “You should have brought him inside, so we could call his family.”

  Fred, having already classified the guy as a potential menace, and knowing Molly was afraid of him, wasn’t going to bring the old boy into Molly’s house.

  Molly said, “Poor fellow. I’ll see tomorrow if I can locate anyone in his family: the daughter he’s lost, or a wife, son—something.” Fred had looked in the Cambridge phone book and found too many listings under Martin. “I’ll check our cardholders to see if we have somebody in his family. Common name, though.”

  Fred shouldn’t have let him go. He didn’t like to leave such things unexplained. “Rats,” Fred said, and they went back to bed.

  Next day Molly spent some time on the telephone, but failed to find a Martin that fit their visitor. Molly had a wide acquaintance in Cambridge, which stretched even into the police force. No one could place him.

  “Could be his first name,” Molly said. “That would broaden the field.”

  3

  “Look at this,” Fred said to Molly, pointing at the front page of the Globe.

  “I’ve seen them before,” Molly said. “I believe you’ll find those are lighter than air.” Molly was barely sitting at the kitchen table, where Fred was drinking coffee. She dunked a piece of dry toast in her coffee, and looked at it with displeasure. Her idea of a healthy breakfast conflicted with anyone’s idea of a good breakfast.

  “I don’t mean the picture,” Fred said. The Globe had gotten Blanche Maybelle Stardust to re-create her acrobatic start of alarm, on the bank of the Charles River, beneath the cherry trees still looking like winter, showing how she had responded to the realization that her dogs had struck a corpse, which was described as dead and white and male.

  Blanche Maybelle Stardust’s start of alarm had a flavor of well-rehearsed rah-rah to it. But it showed energy and goodwill, and the eagerness to please that encourages photographers.

  On this rainy March morning, her dogs had ruined the run for Blanche Maybelle Stardust, who was seeking to maintain a figure that left little to be imagined in the way of unrealized perfection. It ruined the morning’s run, but it got her in the paper, wearing a jogging outfit that also left little to the imagination.

  According to the article, her matched set of golden retrievers had discovered the corpse, naked and wearing a cinder-block necklace, on the bank of the Charles River, on the Cambridge side, where he’d been washed up by the passage of the spring’s first pleasure boats. The body’s former occupant had not yet been identified. But the Globe appeared more than satisfied to discover Blanche Maybelle Stardust, who was as alive as she was photogenic. The John Doe, in the water for several months, was presumed to be a derelict.

  Blanche Maybelle Stardust, it was revealed, had come from Arkansas a couple of years ago, semiattached to a test pilot stationed at the Hanscom Air Force Base. Her real name was not Stardust, she told everyone. She had recently become detached from the pilot in the interest of furthering a career in entertainment, the same reason her morning run regularly took her in front of WBZ-TV’s offices.

  “My idea,” she told the reporter, “is that the weather could use a Vanna White. Which could be me.”

  “Even stark naked and chewed by bottom feeders,” Fred said, “the old boy can’t compete with youth and beauty. But that isn’t what I was pointing out, Molly.”

  “If it isn’t Blanche Maybelle’s matched dogs or breasts, what are you showing me?”

  “This doctor. Eunice Cover-Hoover is in the news. Isn’t she the woman who’s been leaving messages on the machine?”

  Molly jerked the paper out of Fred’s hands to see the paragraph pointing toward an article inside: “Cover-Hoover To Give Talk Outside Boston.” Molly dropped her toast onto the white Formica and slipped the Metro section out of the paper.

  “I’ve heard the name, but wasn’t paying attention. What’s this woman’s game?” Fred asked.

  Molly looked up. “Division and destruction,” she said, “in the name of healing. Ophelia wants me to talk with her, get the inside dope on what she’s like: the person behind the science. According to what I’ve picked up, Cover-Hoover’s coming out of feminism, and wants to change the patriarchal foundation of our thinking about the human mind and social institutions.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Except what was theory once has turned into a goddamn crusade,” Molly said. “Therefore it can’t be either fair or right, much less reasonable or intelligent. Also, in the new book she adds religion to the mix. She’s a practicing shrink, going for tenure at Holmes College, and has two books out, both based on the simple, catchy theme that civilization is designed to prey upon women and/or children, but mostly women, and her proof is, ‘Just look at civilization!’”

  Fred said, “Power of Darkness. That’s her new book, yes? I saw the Times review a couple weeks back, but failed to take it seriously enough to read.”

  “Power of Darkness, but don’t forget the subtitle: The Myth of Satan in Twentieth-Century America. She looks academic and scientific and balanced,” Molly said. “The first book, Culture of Abuse, gathered five years’ worth of serious discussion from professional journals. In every one of them you find the line—I don’t care whether the article is pro or con—‘No one denies that this abuse is widespread and common.’”

  Molly dropped the paper on the table and stood up, about to charge into her routine of waking and dressing the kids. She and Fred had risen early in order to have time together. “The new book says that the revived myth of Satan is a flagrant gesture by the culture of the male, designed to offset feminism’s gains by asserting male dominance of the female psyche.”

  “Is there a revival of interest in Satan?” Fred asked.

  “Better to call it the power of darkness,” Molly said. “It’s more acceptable in PC terms, and leaves room for the discussion of the age-old struggle between the powers of darkness and of light. Cover-Hoover’s interested in power. She’s ambitious enough to be looking for popular support now that she’s got establishment backing. If she’s willing to move toward the talk-show circuit, the theme of satanic cults would come in handy. Cover-Hoover is building a movement to go with her reputation. That’s where Ophelia comes in, because Ophelia knows the medium, and Cover-Hoover is thinking in terms of a TV presence. Ophelia’s stuck out west for the time being, but she’s talked to the Doctor on the phone. ‘Just see what she’s like,’ Ophelia says, ‘before we start talking ways and means.’ I’m leery of the whole business, so I’ve been dodging the Doctor’s calls. Whenever my sister asks my opinion she has some hidden agenda.”

  Molly went upstairs to get the day moving.

  * * *

  Fred left his car at the Alewife subway station and took the Red Line toward Boston. He got off at Kendall, across the river. There was a sting in the air as he came up from underground, surrounded by the new wilderness of tall office buildings. He stepped out onto the ratty old bridge called the Pepper Pot. The slouched low skyline of the “real,” old Boston on its hill, complete with gilded State House dome, stood out in silhouette against the new Boston.

  The river was broad and dirty above the dam. The body had been discovered several miles farther upstream, not far from Harvard University, probably not that far from where it had taken its last dive. It would be a nasty body of water for the dead white male to lie down in. The Charles is a small river. Fred, if asked, would have advised a person wishing to dispose of a corpse to choose another place.

  Fred watched the river, where a few intrepid sailors strove to keep their little boats erect. Red Line trains clattered behind him. He wasn’t in the mood for Clayton’s nervous puttering, which became more trying the less there was to do. This was a good morning, therefore, to check Charles Street. For about four blocks, Charles Street, running parallel to the river on the Boston side, supported a sequence of antique shops where paintings occasionally arrived. Works of obvious qualit
y tended to surface first on Newbury Street, at which point Clayton Reed normally lost interest in them; but occasionally something of not-obvious quality turned up on Charles Street, mixed in with the Bavarian glass, armchairs made of horn, and stereopticon photographs of dead families.

  Fred’s job with Clayton Reed had never been defined. It was quite well paid and subject to endless redefinition, according to what was happening. Basically, Clay was as much a collector as Fred was a noncollector, and Clay didn’t pick things up; so Fred did a good deal of lifting and kept his eyes open for paintings that might appeal to Clayton.

  It was standard practice that if Fred saw something he thought interesting and that might otherwise escape, he should grab it for Clayton’s account, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. If Clay didn’t think much of it, they’d ditch it later.

  Clay had disposed of a few things Fred still regretted; but Clay had never once faulted Fred’s choice. Clay’s tastes in painting were so broad, and his personal foibles so particular, that Fred had a twenty percent chance of choosing something that actually stayed in the collection when he did haul in a painting on his own.

  In general, especially when a large expenditure was involved, they had plenty of time to confer before a commitment was made. Clayton loved the period of deliberation, because it allowed him to perfect his foibles.

  Once over the Pepper Pot, Fred crisscrossed the street, finding nothing to hold him until he came to Oona’s. Oona was sitting in the back of the shop behind her big table, which was cluttered as always with breakable objects.

  “Come on back, and watch your feet, Fred Taylor,” Oona called. She was busy gluing price tags to a row of unmatched cut-glass liqueur goblets.

  Oona was in her mid-sixties, a comfortably fat woman who boasted that she had kept a shop on Charles Street since shortly after Noah’s Flood. She knew everything there was to know about any human artifact made between A.D. 1700 and 1940. After 1940 she lost interest and proclaimed, It’s all junk. She was as honest as she was ruthless. Fred had never found anything he wanted to buy for Clayton from her shop. If he bought jewelry for Molly, though—which must not be expensive or Molly would refuse it—he would get it from Oona.

  Oona today was wearing a dark green dress that looked like a surplus tent, with many silver pins attached to it. Her hands fluttered around the crystal, seeming to hypnotize it so that it moved from place to place without her actually touching it.

  “Something I want you to see, Mr. Fred Taylor,” Oona said, groaning as she rose to her full five feet, and started for the back room. It wouldn’t be unusual for her to have the best things out of sight, reserved for preferred customers or being kept from the light of common day.

  Fred followed Oona between cases where china and glass swayed; against these were stacked portfolios of prints and drawings that he could go through later.

  “A painting just came in,” Oona said, opening the door to the room in back, which looked like a small version of the one they had just left, packed with furniture, glass, china, books, and portfolios. A square canvas leaned against the legs of a small desk, representing a man’s feet, in shoes with buckles, shrouded in greasy dirt. The man was wearing stockings, and all around the feet was a smooth darkness. The thing was nailed clumsily into a frame, and Fred winced, seeing how the heads of the nails had scratched the canvas. Slowly he realized that this was the back of something, the back of a framed picture. Oona turned it around.

  “The frame is Woolworth’s,” Fred said. “Or the next class down.”

  Oona puffed slightly, holding the painting. “You take it, Fred Taylor,” Oona said. “What do you think?”

  The thing was almost two feet square and, behind the dirt, quite interesting. The bell on the shop door clanged and Oona stood in the back room’s doorway, to keep her eye on the newly entered client.

  The picture that the frame displayed represented a squirrel, half life-size; a common gray squirrel sitting in a patch of sunlight on a floor, with a little collar from which a chain—gold, and done with great care (if one could read correctly behind the dirt)—extended upward through the gloom to the top of the canvas. The chain seemed to come out of the frame, one of those Mexican things, real wood carved to look poured, like plastic. Beside the squirrel, on the floor, was an acorn. The floor was laid out in a pattern—either marble or wood painted to resemble marble. Most of the floor was in shadow, like the background of the feet on the other side.

  “Tell me your story,” Fred said.

  4

  “I’m crazy,” Oona said. “I bought it from some people this morning. I just like it, crazy as I am. I know nothing of paintings.”

  “It’s interesting,” Fred said.

  “I know, but what is it?”

  “A squirrel,” Fred said. Oona was asking, What is the painting? but Fred wouldn’t bite. If she was selling and he was buying, why should he tell her what she had?

  “Why don’t I take it out of the frame?” Fred suggested.

  “Be my guest. Tools in the top drawer.” Oona went into the shop to wait on a customer, closing Fred into the back room. Fred cleared a space on the desk and laid the frame on its face, to examine those shoes with the buckles. Almost dissolved in shadow behind them appeared the legs of a piece of furniture, round, curving feet in back of the human feet and legs, and a central shaft of wood that should support a round tabletop. The vandal who had nailed the picture into the frame had scarred the canvas in back with the hammer and scored it with the heads of the nails.

  Fred found diagonal pliers and slipped an index card behind the nails as he removed them so as not to cause more damage. Then he lifted out the canvas. It had been cut out of something larger. This length was bent around a cheap new stretcher and stapled, so that the squirrel was made the subject of an exclusive portrait, the legs and feet of its human companion folded away. Staples had been fired through the painted surface around the stretcher’s top and sides. Only the bottom edge was where the artist had intended. Even more of the painting had been bent over at the top, cut off brutally just below the man’s knees. That cut was fresh. This was a living fragment of a thing recently destroyed.

  Fred took the staples out carefully. It was a job more properly done by a conservator, but in an emergency the brave bystander must attempt the appendectomy. The canvas, when he had gotten the whole thing off, was heavy and quite dark with dirt and age. It looked to be from the eighteenth century.

  It was the relic of incredible vandalism.

  Fred laid the fragment across the desk. The paint, for all the dirt and the abuse it had suffered, was in reasonable shape. The artist had not used bitumen, and so the darks were not severely crackled. What appeared on Oona’s desk, once the fragment was freed of its stretcher, was about two by three and a half feet: an image, stitched up and down with the holes the staples had made, in which the gentleman’s buckled shoes were on the left, and pointing off left, and his squirrel was on the right and facing to the right. The top edge of the fragment had been cut, with a knife or a razor blade. Hesitation marks were hacked at the edge and where the blade had run off-square and done extra cutting across the man’s shin.

  When Oona came in, Fred said again, “It’s very nice. It was. What a mess. What a crime. It’s ruined. Still, at least they folded it instead of chopping out the squirrel and gluing it on a board, which they could have done.”

  The marks on the top looked so fresh that if it had been a human body cut that recently, the blood would still be oozing, wet, not yet settled to scab.

  “Oona, what can I say?” Fred said. “Except I like it. It’s been destroyed. Wrecked. It’s a disaster. I’ll buy it.”

  “I paid a lot for it,” Oona said. “Because I’m crazy, Fred Taylor. I like the squirrel more than the feet. It’s better without the feet. Overcome by the squirrel, I paid them too much money. It had cardboard over the back. I didn’t understand it was cut from a bigger picture. The rest was damaged maybe?”
/>   “How much?” Fred asked.

  “It’s not for sale. I paid too much,” Oona said. “So I have to charge you too much.”

  “Tell me what you want,” Fred said. “I’m in your hands. If you paid too much, you’ll want too much, and I’ll pass.”

  Oona thought for a minute. They stood on either side of the dismounted canvas. Fred studied the stretcher. It had a paper inventory sticker from Bob Slate on it, as well as the Fredrix brand name burned in. The vandals were local talent. Fred knew of three Bob Slate locations in Cambridge. Slate himself, recently dead, was a legend of Cambridge entrepreneurial success and stability. The size of the stretcher bars was stamped on them too: twenty by twenty inches.

  “How does five thousand dollars sound?” Oona asked.

  “Jesus!” Fred said.

  “Hmm,” said Oona.

  “Can I see the cardboard that you took off it?” Fred asked.

  “Nothing on it,” Oona said, shaking her head. “Just cardboard from a box.”

  The door’s bell clanged, with the mailman entering, and again, departing. Fred strolled toward the front of the store and looked at the portfolios of prints, indicating that his interest in the transaction was dwindling. Oona went back to her table and sat there, writing prices and fluttering them onto the crystal, indicating that if Fred didn’t want to bite, plenty of other people in the world would.

  “The thing is, Fred Taylor,” Oona said, “they may come again, with something better, as long as I buy the first time, for which reason I pay too much. In case they have something good next time.”

  “Have you seen them before?” Fred asked.

  Oona shook her head and kept shaking it, falling into a different key, adding, “I always lose money.”

  Fred said, “How about a thousand?”

  It was not possible that Oona had paid more than five hundred, tops, to someone coming in off the street with this vandalized object in its ludicrous frame. But she knew quality when she saw it—and her own opinion could only be reinforced by Fred’s interest.