Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “People who want things fast don’t want good work,” Roberto said, “I’ve noticed.”

  * * *

  After they’d taken care of the few dishes, Fred pulled out his Rothenstein and sat on the couch in Molly’s living room. The lad was a social prodigy; inquisitive, persistent, and omnipresent in his chosen venues of London and Paris. Rather than reading, though, Fred was trying to grapple with the question of how to proceed. Molly came in from the kitchen, where he had half-heard her first taking the side of homework versus Sam and Terry, and then talking with what must be Ophelia on the telephone.

  “Fred, do you know a painter named Byron Ponderosa?” Molly asked. “That’s Pheely’s Denver discovery. He does tennis, cowboys, and historical romance, she says.”

  “Can’t say I know him,” Fred said. “But I can imagine.”

  “I can too,” Molly said. “A flat Fasanella with everyone on a diet and no hang-ups about breasts.”

  “And guns instead of swords.”

  “I got Cover-Hoover’s unlisted number from Pheely,” Molly said. “If you want it.”

  “You’re going to call her?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t plan to. I mention it in case you want to ask her about that painting.”

  “The framer’s the one to talk to,” Fred said. “If I can figure out how to approach it. But just the same…”

  Molly wrote the number on a From the Desk of Mom memo pad Fred had guided Sam to last Christmas. She tore the pink slip off for Fred.

  12

  “I shall not go to Holland,” Clay announced. He sounded like Caesar standing naked on the bank of the Rubicon and noticing how cold and wet it seemed. He had called Fred on the house phone Monday morning after he heard Fred come in. “There is a show at the Metropolitan I must see,” Clayton continued, “although it means traveling to New York.”

  “There is?”

  “Flemish paintings. Earlier than Vermeer but pertinent nonetheless. Incidentally, Fred, where is the Copley?”

  “With Roberto,” Fred said. He listened for the explosion. From the earpiece of his receiver he heard the measured tap of graphite on dull blue china activated by raised white Greeks in decorous activity.

  “I would have advised against it,” Clay said. “But I suppose it is your project.”

  Fred listened to the pencil tap. “I shall find a noon train,” Clay said, “and stay at the Carlyle. The exhibition is said to go into the methods of the Flemish painters.”

  “Never put off tomorrow what you can put off the day after,” Fred said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A maxim of Molly’s mother’s,” Fred told him.

  “I have not had the pleasure,” Clayton said. His pencil tapped. “I shall look at the Vermeers of the Frick and the Metropolitan with renewed interest.”

  “Let me know when you get back. For the hell of it, take a peek at the Christie’s East European sale. There’s a little Zorn…”

  “It is on my list,” Clay said.

  Oona’s call did not come until after noon. “Fred Taylor?” she asked.

  “Right. Wait. Is that Oona?”

  “Don’t come before ten, but if you come after ten I might have something.”

  “The same people?”

  “Come at ten o’clock, Fred Taylor. Tonight.”

  Molly called during her lunch break and Fred let her know he might not be back tonight. Depending what developed with Oona, he could decide to sleep on the office couch.

  “I got Cover-Hoover’s new book from the library,” Molly told him. “Power of Darkness. We’re not supposed to, but I jumped the line. It’s the sort of book you can follow by reading the chapter titles and subheadings. It’s full of graphs and statistics, which nobody will pay attention to, and footnotes nobody will read. It looks very academic until you get to the junk food, which is what’s selling the book—the confessional illustrations. If you’re fast you can have it after me.”

  “That’s OK,” Fred assured her.

  “Speaking of popular culture, we also have the best-loved works of Byron Ponderosa,” Molly said. “For this there is no line. It just came in. Ophelia sent it, and it’s not cataloged yet. Ophelia wants to know your opinion of the art, which I promise you can give her sight unseen.” Fred heard a hesitant note in Molly’s voice: the note she used when she was keeping something from him.

  “I might as well tell you, Fred. Ophelia is definitely thinking of going into production with Cover-Hoover.”

  “It figures,” Fred said.

  “It’s why she’s been pestering me to talk with the Doctor. I made her come clean after the meeting I went to. I know Ophelia well enough to see how her mind’s moving.”

  Given the Copley fragment’s absence, Fred had hung a Watteau sketch for Gilles (now called, by the refurbished Louvre, Pierrot)—in which the clown was nude—where he could look at it. Ass’s head coming up from behind a hill following a naked man in pudgy middle age: one of the nicest things Clay had. Clay had the misfortune to let himself believe sometimes that painting was about stories or emotions, rather than about demonstrating or flouting physical laws. The Gilles study concerned the tendency of flesh to defy gravity. Clay could neither see nor understand that.

  “Ophelia wants to join the powers of light?” Fred prompted.

  “She definitely sees a TV series in it,” Molly said. “Cover-Hoover is more photogenic than Jesus to start with, and she has a compelling presence. She has the backing of the wise and the scared, as well as a ready appeal to what Ophelia calls popular wisdom. Fox Twenty-Five could do great things with Cover-Hoover. Run her around the country with stops in Buffalo, Topeka, Missoula. Ophelia sees it in a tent, like a revival meeting or Chautauqua. Cover-Hoover yells, ‘Approach, all ye possessed,’ and the wretched folk crawl out, weeping and groaning and delivering themselves of prurient witness. It’s a natural, Ophelia says. It’s all sex.”

  “Safe sex,” Fred said. “Puritan, backward, smoldering, repressed, bewildered, retroactively fantasized sex. And nobody gets wet.”

  “Right,” Molly said. “Sex for the Moral Majority. The hell of it is, I can’t make Ophelia see the damage it can cause. The fallout from the entertainment—Ophelia doesn’t understand we’re not just nailing imaginary villains here; we’re talking real people.

  “Whether or not Cover-Hoover’s sincere in the doing-good department, that doesn’t make her any less vicious in her effect. She’s scary, and I’d say she’s evil, if you can judge from the testimony of the wasted families she brags about, which she leaves groveling in her wake.

  “So I’m stalling and looking for a way to keep Ophelia from adding the benefit of her talents and making the Doctor’s crusade into a landslide.”

  * * *

  Just after ten o’clock, Fred walked along Charles Street, which was only mildly festive on a Monday night. The shops were closed long since, but revelers worked at gaiety in the bars, and diners in the restaurants lingered over dessert, attended by impatient servers.

  Oona’s was dark and locked. Fred pressed the buzzer next to the door. He looked through his sizable, plain reflection in the window. The temperature was forty degrees or so, but he hadn’t bothered to put a coat on over his jacket for the short walk from Mountjoy Street.

  His reflection fell between a stuffed ostrich and carved wooden screens against which leaned primitive farm implements. His square face under its short bristle of hair surveyed him. The eyes of his reflection were black and said, She’s late.

  He waited half an hour. There was neither life nor light in the shop, nor in the upstairs apartment where she lived. Fred went back to his office and dialed the shop’s number, and listened to it ring. At eleven-thirty, wearing a coat now, he walked over again; and again at one-fifteen.

  * * *

  The telephone woke him at four-thirty. He’d left a light burning on his desk, and wasn’t really sleeping so much as visiting with demons. He lifted the receiver, telling it,
“Fred Taylor.”

  “Please come.” The voice was hoarse and foreign, but not Oona’s. It was Oona’s voice the demons had been telling him to expect. The demons were wrong.

  Fred said, “Where shall I come?”

  “Oona’s. Come to the shop door. I will admit you.” It was, Fred thought, a young man’s voice. Dismay trickled like sweat down his shoulders and chest. The voice had serious trouble in it. “I am Marek, Oona’s nephew,” the voice told him. The Hungarian color in his syllables was much stronger than in Oona’s. “Oona has been visited by a grave accident.”

  “I’ll come now. Should I telephone for help?”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Marek said, blurting the denial through the agony of a young man’s tears. “She is beyond help.”

  Fred was pulling on his socks as he talked, having gotten his khakis on one-handed already. “Three minutes,” Fred said.

  * * *

  Oona’s was still dark, but a darker shape moved toward him at his quiet knock. Dawn light, not visible in the cold, overcast sky, reflected up from the river that lay a long block behind the shop. It made a luminous fog eddy around Fred’s ankles while he watched the young man approach. He was dressed like a waiter, in modified tuxedo, but with white tie. Fred watched him through the door, fumbling with the locks. The bell chinged. Marek reached up to silence it, closing Fred inside with him.

  “Oona is dead,” Marek said. He was the shockingly handsome young man Fred had noticed several times walking along Charles Street or drinking coffee at Chico’s, or, once, talking to Oona in Hungarian in the shop doorway. But Fred hadn’t known Oona had family. “Is she here?”

  Marek led Fred through the dark shop into the back room, where a lamp burned. He closed the door, sat on the table, and motioned Fred to take Oona’s leather chair.

  “I work late,” Marek said. He rubbed his hands together, warming them. His black hair was longer than a waiter’s needed to be. “You are Oona’s friend.”

  Fred nodded. He’d let the boy pace this as he must, within reason, but if a corpse lay upstairs in the bathroom, they shouldn’t delay the next step too long. Fred noticed a nice piece of silver on the desk, a cylindrical container with a hinged top. Tea caddy. Engraved shield on top.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Marek said. His face, round and well formed, was wan. “This note was on her desk.”

  He held up the square of white paper on which Fred had written his number at Clayton Reed’s, in red ballpoint, with the message “Telephone. Fred Taylor.”

  “As if she had a presentiment; because I will not believe she did this to herself,” Marek said.

  “Marek,” Fred said firmly. “What happened? Where is she?”

  Marek put his head in his hands, shook, and wept. “She is my mother and my lover,” he said. Fred reached and rested a large hand on the young man’s knee. Marek sobbed. Fred looked around the room. He saw no sign of disturbance, though the timbre of Marek’s grief was mingled with the shock that should accompany violence, for instance an armed robbery that went wrong. Fred put the note Marek had held out into his shirt pocket.

  “I live upstairs,” Marek said. “She gives me the third floor. When I came home after almost midnight, the police were calling.”

  “She’s not here, then,” Fred said.

  “In Cambridge. What must we do, Fred Taylor?” Marek took his hands from his face and looked at Fred before he wiped his eyes with a white handkerchief he pulled from his left sleeve. “What does she want us to do?”

  “Marek—what happened?”

  “She is crushed by a train,” Marek said. He shuddered and shook. “At ten-seventeen. The police know the time exactly. I was at that very moment playing Chopin’s Scherzo number Two in b-flat minor, opus thirty-one, for my second encore. Jesus, Jesus. Suddenly all I can hear is a great roar. I think it is more applause, too soon. Or a stroke making the blood rush in my ears and I must die. But it was the train I heard, crushing her gallant spirit from her body with tons of iron.”

  Fred said, “I’ll drive you to Cambridge.”

  “I have been to Cambridge already. I identified her poor body,” Marek said, “by recognizing the earrings she was wearing. She is disgraced. Her head, her poor head…” Marek shook his head and moaned. “Now all my future is a black chasm filled with thunder.”

  “How can I help?” Fred asked.

  Marek stared. “Her message says telephone you. That is her last wish.”

  “What did the police tell you?”

  “They think she is drunk. They will cut her apart to prove it. They say she leaped or fell in order to be destroyed by the train rushing toward Concord.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Oh, the disgrace! The idea of Oona drunk! What was she doing in Cambridge? Slivovitz in her coffee, yes, I admit, always.”

  “Where in Cambridge?” Fred asked.

  “There is a Kentucky’s Chicken,” Marek said. “The road is named after one of your writers. A bridge.”

  Fred said, “Yes?”

  “They take me past the place. I see her car. Oh, Jesus, her poor car. She cannot leave it there.” Marek trembled and wept into his white linen. “What will become of her car?” Marek spread his arms and stared hopelessly around Oona’s back room. “I cannot be responsible. Was that not the meaning of her note? Fred Taylor? That you will be responsible?”

  “It is a terrible thing,” Fred said.

  “She believed in me,” Marek said, tucking the handkerchief back into his sleeve. “She pays for me to come to your country. She bought my instrument. She supported my lessons. She is to pay for my debut.” Marek shook his head, rose from the table, and stood near the door, tearing his hair with supple fingers strong as vines. “She cannot destroy herself,” Marek said. “She had everything to live for.”

  Fred said, “Sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow if you want.”

  Marek said, “I shall go upstairs but I shall not sleep again. Never.”

  Fred put a hand on Marek’s shoulder.

  “Never,” Marek said. He opened the backroom door and let Fred into the dusky shop. Crystal shivered on its shelves. “Take this with you,” Marek said.

  He handed Fred a large shopping bag with hard internal corners, and with one of Oona’s squares of paper stapled to the top. “Hold for Fred Taylor.” The irony that is the sole spiritual essence owning certain immortality, chuckled.

  “What is this?” Fred asked. His flesh crawled.

  “There will be lawyers and police and the tax bandits and I do not know who else comes in your country after the person dies in such disgrace,” Marek said. “This has your name on it, so take it. It is between you and Oona. Settle it with her, Fred Taylor, if you are her friend.”

  Fred said, “Marek…”

  “Find who killed her,” Marek demanded. “She is no strip-teasing acrobat to leap from bridges or balance along railroad tracks at night in—Oh, the shame of it—in her underwear!”

  “In her underwear?” Fred exclaimed.

  “You see exactly why I shall believe nothing they say,” Marek announced. “Oona was never in her underwear!”

  “Walden Street,” Fred guessed, as Marek opened the street door to the tolling of the bell announcing movement of the customer.

  “Yes, yes,” Marek said. “A bridge over the tracks. Walden. Henry Walden, your most famous author. I knew I would remember his name.”

  “Lock the door and sleep,” Fred said. “I’ll talk to you later, Marek. Later today. I am sorry about Oona.”

  “Sorry, yes,” Marek said. “You may be sorry. I, I am destroyed.”

  13

  Before he looked into the bag, Fred locked the door between his office and waking Mountjoy Street. The triumph of expectation warred against the sinking knowledge, It’s too small.

  “Like Clayton on a monument,” Fred complained against himself, “smiling at Greeks bearing gifts, as Molly’s mother would say.”

  He
tore the bag open at the staples. He’d already felt the profile of the familiar Mexican frame, and knew what he would see in that respect; and he was not disappointed. The canvas, backed by gray shirt cardboard, showed a tabletop in shadow—wooden top, round table—the canvas buckled and bent around the stretcher, and bunched under the cardboard. On the table’s surface was a calm still life: what Fred would say was a silver inkwell; several papers on which the inverted writing could not be deciphered; a quill pen; and a china cup. Behind this was darkness. The visible fragment was smaller than the first, but Fred had no doubt it belonged with the squirrel. Again, more painting existed here than showed in the frame. The way the cardboard had been stapled into the back covered the nails holding the mounted canvas in. It bulged. There was too much bulk folded in there.

  * * *

  Fred had breakfast at a New Bedford diner—linguica and eggs and blueberry muffins laid open and fried on the same grill. He’d driven straight down, not touching the new fragment, not even to take the cardboard off the back, or remove the canvas from the mocking frame. Roberto Smith’s habit was to start working early, but Roberto wouldn’t want to see anyone unexpectedly. Fred drank coffee and looked at the paper until eight-thirty, when he called Roberto.

  “I will put coffee on,” Roberto said. “This is a nice surprise.”

  Roberto’s studio smelled strongly of coffee and solvents. “I cleaned the squirrel yesterday,” Roberto said. “That is your reward for not being in a rush.” He lifted a cardboard sandwich from a table near the hanging instruments and, keeping it horizontal, brought it to the big worktable in the window, lifting the upper cardboard to show Fred the surface he had worked on. There was color now: not observed color (that wouldn’t come for another hundred years), but carefully modulated and justified heraldic color, emphasized by the turnings of the forms as realized in a language growing out of the vocabulary of the engraver—black and white.

  “Some yellow in the highlights on the squirrel’s fur,” Roberto said with pride. “A lot of people would clean that off, because it’s a glaze. Stripping the varnish from a painting where the artist suspended a series of pigments in varnish glazes—that’s when your heart is in your mouth, Fred.”