Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “Ah,” Fred said. “You feel hesitation is justified?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That must be reassuring.”

  * * *

  Fred took his list of Oona’s clients to the Cambridge Public Library, stopping at the reference desk to tell Molly what he was doing. Molly was busy with an older man in jeans and denim jacket looking for guidance on how to locate articles published in car-oriented periodicals in the 1950s. She was looking unusually severe in a black suit.

  “What’s the occasion?” Fred asked her.

  “Howdy, stranger,” Molly said. “Fred, talk to the kids and tell them how come you moved out.”

  “Moved out? For God’s sake, Molly, it’s been two days.”

  “I can’t make Terry stop asking, ‘How come Fred moved out?’”

  “What are they thinking?” Fred asked.

  “You think I know what they’re thinking?”

  “I assumed you would explain…”

  Molly closed a reference book in a thorough manner.

  Fred said, “I’ll call. Can you tell me if you recognize any of these people? Clients of Oona’s from Cambridge.”

  Molly said, “It’ll have to be tonight.”

  Fred checked his Timex. “You got a lunch date?”

  “Someone to meet,” Molly said. She glanced over the page of names and addresses. “Nothing leaps out,” she said.

  “I’m going to drive around and look at the houses,” Fred said. “Just to get acquainted. I’ll get back to Arlington this evening or tonight, I hope, Molly; or if not I’ll call and talk to the kids. I want to pick up Manny at Kwik-Frame and do a better job tailing him this time.”

  “I’ll see you when I see you,” Molly said.

  * * *

  Fred had taken seventeen names and addresses from Oona’s Rolodex. Because of her system, it was impossible to judge which were new additions, since not all had notations and the notations were not dated. He didn’t expect results—Oona’s client with the squirrel had, he believed, been a new walk-in who probably remained anonymous, at least until the second visit; on the second visit he might have left a name.

  Of the addresses he had chosen, none fell in the immediate vicinity of the triangle that was the center of his focus—the area between Kwik-Frame, Bob Slate, and the Walden Street railroad bridge.

  I might as well see these places, Fred thought.

  * * *

  He found occasion to walk past Kwik-Frame and, looking in, saw that the discouraged woman at the desk was holding down the fort. He stepped in and asked, “Manny not here today?”

  “His day off,” she said. “We work Saturdays. You know Manny?”

  “I was passing by.”

  “You decide to bring in that piece of fabric?”

  Fred told her, “You know how it is. I decided to do it and then forgot. Isn’t that the way it goes every time? Got all the way here and then remembered, ‘I forgot it.’”

  “No rush,” the woman said.

  Fred said, “Give me your card. I’ll put it on my dash so I don’t forget next time.” The card said KWIK-FRAME, with the address and phone, no names. Manny was still just Manny.

  * * *

  The weather Arlington had chosen for today was cold but almost dry. Fred found Terry and Sam at the park. Sam was shooting baskets with a couple of taller friends and Terry was throwing pop flies for herself to try to catch. Sam saw Fred get out of his car and continued shooting baskets. Terry came over. The wind from the pond, on the far side of the playing fields, blew directly at them.

  Terry’s face was red, her hair matted and awry. She wouldn’t close her outsize orange parka. She looked like an orphan. “You want to play catch, Fred?” she asked.

  “Does the Pope chew tobacco?”

  Terry tossed the ball to him with exaggerated mildness.

  “Did your mom tell you why I was away the last couple days?”

  “Someone died?” Terry said.

  “And I’m helping her nephew out. He’s the only one she had.”

  “That’s what Mom said.”

  “You want high balls or fast balls or curve balls?”

  “Curve.”

  They played catch a while. It was getting toward six. Sam’s friends took off with the basketball.

  “Yo, Sam,” Fred called.

  Sam wandered over. He picked his glove up from the fence where he had hung it, next to the parking lot. “We ought to get back,” Sam said. “Can we ride with you?” Sam’s face and hands were red. He wore his old black parka open. The new (last winter) down jacket Fred had given him had now become, by default, no one’s but Molly’s. Fred closed his door and started the car, prepared to take no side in the scuffle over who would sit next to him in the front seat. Sam and Terry both climbed in back.

  “We could use some spring,” Fred told them.

  * * *

  Molly heated franks and beans, which they ate together. Molly hadn’t changed out of her black suit. Instead she put an apron over it that boasted “Gloria Flour” in red script on a white field. She was distracted while she put supper together and presided over it. Fred tried to start general table conversation about where in the world people would like to travel if all things were equal.

  “Maybe Charlestown,” Sam said, mumbling it into his plate.

  Silence followed until Fred said, “I’ll take you some time.”

  Sam looked at him. Terry looked at him. Molly looked at him.

  “I’ll wash up,” Fred said. “You kids have homework.”

  The kids upstairs, Fred exploded. “Listen, Molly, whatever you want. You want me out of the house, just say the word.”

  Molly went white. “What’s going on?”

  “Exactly my question. You in the funeral suit, and the kids—who put them up to that, making snide comments about my place in Charlestown?”

  “I don’t know how they even heard about it,” Molly said. She put a kettle on for coffee. “As far as the funeral suit…”

  “And you all three act like I’m cavorting with strange women,” Fred said. “My work takes me away, Molly, for God’s sake. That’s not too hard for you to explain to them, or to understand yourself.”

  Fred put the dishes into hot water. Molly took out cups and instant coffee deliberately, not speaking but arranging two cups. “You want some?” she asked. Fred nodded. Molly went on evenly, “As far as the funeral suit goes, I chose it for my meeting with Cover-Hoover, and the meeting shook me. I’d like to tell you about it. Over coffee. In the living room. After I get the kids settled at the kitchen table with their homework. After you’re through.”

  “Right,” Fred said.

  “As long as my rival is a painting,” Molly said, “or poor Oona Imry, I am content. As for the kids, that’s between you and them.”

  * * *

  Fred waited in the living room for Molly, drinking his coffee while it was hot. Molly liked hers lukewarm or on the cold side. Molly came in and closed the door to the kitchen, carrying her coffee and still wearing the suit. She looked like a bank examiner with bad news. “Ophelia did not tell me everything,” she said.

  “She couldn’t tell you everything and also retain her identity as Ophelia,” Fred said. “Molly, I’m sorry I blew up. I always remember I’m a fucking foreigner.”

  “Yes, you remember that more than anyone else does. In the meantime, I went to … Fred, you haven’t described the second part of the squirrel painting.”

  Molly’s 180-degree midair change in direction threw Fred off balance. She was zigzagging across the field fast, heading for friendly thickets of razor wire.

  Fred said, “Terry complains I don’t have any stuff.”

  “They worry about that. It makes you seem not real when you’re gone. Nothing left to bump into except Fred’s sneakers and a few clothes in my closet—maybe the library book you’re reading next to my bed, and your Copley books. But none of that is where they trip on it.”

 
; “I can’t stand having stuff,” Fred said.

  “Even if that’s reasonable, Terry and Sam don’t think so, and they don’t trust it.”

  If they didn’t trust it, they didn’t trust it, and arguing with Molly wasn’t going to change that. Fred described the second Copley fragment and made a rough sketch of what the two parts represented and how they fit together. On the same page he drew a blank third segment and explained, drawing with his pencil, how he inferred the painting might conclude.

  “So whoever took it apart—it’s like drug dealers, strangers to each other,” Molly said. “They have to match the parts of this thing in order to trust the strangers who show up somewhere and say, ‘I’m your new partner.’

  “For the sake of argument,” Molly said, getting up from the couch where she had been sitting next to him and crossing the blue mass-produced Chinese rug to sit in an armchair, “how much would the complete painting be worth if it is a Copley?”

  “If it’s complete? And before it was damaged, and if it’s not hot, but not signed? Also I have to tell you that we haven’t found a record of it,” Fred said. “So it’s a thousand problems in one basket even if I find the rest of it. Given all that, before it was cut apart, maybe a quarter-million bucks.”

  “Hm,” Molly said.

  “If the sitter’s an important man—a George Washington, say—then commercially the issue involves a tussle between the fact Copley’s historically important and the fact that nobody wants a portrait, especially if it’s a picture of a guy. The trade is driven by fat old men who crave paintings about their lost youth, those sunny days when they were fawned over by pretty young virgin women whose underwear you know came from a place so nice you and I never heard of it.”

  “Made by contented spiders,” Molly added.

  Terry put her head in the door. “Dee on the phone, Mom,” she said.

  Molly sashayed into the kitchen. Fred considered her idea of the painting’s being divided in order to provide mutual identification to three strangers. How had two portions found their way to Oona’s? Molly came in from the kitchen and handed Fred a slip of paper with a phone number and, in her Catholic-school handwriting, the name “Bookrajian.”

  “Dee says that’s the detective assigned to the Oona Imry killing.”

  “Killing?”

  “Her very word. Dee says call in the morning, after eight,” Molly said. She sat stiffly in her chosen chair in her chosen corner. “He’s at a game tonight.”

  Fred, standing in the center of the room, testing the wind, which seemed to be blowing simultaneously from five directions, remembered, “Tell me about Cover-Hoover.”

  17

  “I thought I was saved by the bell,” Molly said.

  Fred said, “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

  “Given a chance, there’s not much she wouldn’t get to,” Molly said. “You wouldn’t know she’d gotten inside until she started expanding, and it would be too late.” Molly took a sip from her mug of cold coffee, brushed imaginary crumbs off her breasts, and shifted her hips in the armchair. “I didn’t know how badly Ophelia set me up.” Molly shuddered. “It wasn’t so goddamn awful,” she said. “But the woman got under my skin like one of those egg-laying insects, and the larvae are already crawling everywhere, looking for where they’ll bore their openings to get air.”

  “God, Molly.” Fred walked toward her but Molly waved him off, gesturing toward the couch, his usual place. Her normal post was at the other end, using the other lamp.

  Molly said, “Part of it is I’m so upset with Ophelia.” She folded her hands in her lap and started. “My first plan was, especially when your interest had bumped into this operation, to make a fair evaluation for Ophelia, the way you, in your place, might go so far as to examine an original painting by Byron Ponderosa if you had a sister contemplating doing serious business with him.”

  “Byron Ponderosa?” Fred asked, and then recalled the name from earlier conversation. “Sorry, I remember.”

  “Then I heard the woman, and had a look at her book, and frankly, Fred, I concluded, unless she could convince me otherwise, however sincere and well motivated she may be, Cover-Hoover is carrying a potent, deadly virus, and she should be stopped.

  “So I called her unlisted number early this A.M. before work. Eunice—she prefers to be called Eunice—wanted to know right off why I had resisted her initially.

  “I told her my reason for holding off was I was in denial. That term, in denial, is generally used to cover those who do not agree with the program. I said I wanted to consult her professionally but I had not been able to bring myself to admit it. Her little ears pricked up. You could almost hear them on the phone, pop, pop, one after the other.

  “‘I’ll make time to see you,’ she said, and gave me two hours at lunch. That’s where I was going when you stopped by.”

  “So your initial contact was as a prospective patient? Where’s her place?” Fred asked.

  “She’s got an office right in Harvard Square. In her business the ideal client group comes from among the fortunate. She’s got a third-floor suite, more or less above Nini’s Corner, the newspaper and candy bar and dirty-magazine place.”

  “I know Nini’s,” Fred said. “It’s where a lot of us did most of our studying while I was at Harvard for about five minutes.”

  Molly put her mug down. “That’s Andy Warhol’s line, isn’t it? Everyone gets to be at Harvard for five minutes?” She had a potted poinsettia struggling on that side of the room, making an odd red note in a blue room. Terry screamed at Sam about something in the kitchen.

  Molly continued. “I walked over, cutting through Harvard Yard. Yesterday and this morning I’d done some research—it doesn’t take much, her own book gives you the guidelines. That’s the advantage of having case histories. I prepared enough symptoms to get through an hour I figured, as long as I added some confused stalling. I planned on winging the second half.

  “Her suite’s a two-room deal with its own john and a sign on the door, brass plaque, giving her name and the initials she professes; and another, paper, sign asking you to ring. You stand in the hall waiting for her to talk through the intercom and buzz you in, at which point you are in an empty room. There’s nothing but a gray carpet, two chairs; no magazines of ancient news, fashion, or exploration. The room is fifteen feet square. Not even a window. No place to put your coat. Aside from the door you entered, there are two other doors, closed. You can’t help thinking it’s a test. You are supposed to guess which door.

  “Immediately you feel watched. It’s a genius setup to put the client at a disadvantage. A voice has let you in, and there’s no person. It’s like finding yourself in midair. Not knowing which way you are supposed to fall, you fail even to fall. You lose substance. You look at the two doors, you look at the two chairs, and you think, I’ll choose the wrong chair. You think, She’s spying from somewhere, sizing me up; you eenie-meenie and sit on Mo, the winning chair, and wait, making a bet with yourself which door is going to open.

  “Suppose, like most of the poor goofs coming in, you are already disoriented or emotionally hard-pressed? That’s the method-acting approach I had worked up. I was planning to play the scene like, maybe, Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.”

  Molly was no actress. But if she were, Fred would advise her to try for something closer to where she started from, like Holly Hunter in Miss Firecracker or Broadcast News.

  “I must have sat five minutes,” Molly said. “The room was lighted from the ceiling, and otherwise, except for cleaning fluid from the carpet, the place was a sensory-deprivation chamber. The walls were bleached beige, the doors wood painted white. Not a sound got into the room. No sound in, no sound out.

  “So I sit with my bag on my lap, rehearsing my part, until a door opens and Cover-Hoover strides across the room toward me. She’s dressed in a plain, nice blue silk dress with white spots, no big deal, just a pro, the Doctor.

  “‘You are safe here,�
�� she says. That’s the opening gambit. I must say I respond better to a frank, ‘What’s up?’

  “Her office looks out on Brattle Street. Big windows full of sun and geraniums, her desk with a phone, and papers, and serious dark books, and a nice vase from a place, with thirty-five bucks’ worth of fresh flowers. You stand there feeling sick and shabby and filled with envy at the way this woman has gotten everything together. You are ashamed you come from a blank room with nothing in it but gray carpet and two chairs you can’t choose between. It’s genius.

  “Eunice showed me a place on a small couch to sit, and before she sat down on a chair four feet away and slightly higher than mine, she offered to close the blinds. ‘It will make you feel safe.’

  “Thinking it would help my act, I mumbled, ‘Please, close them, close them.’ She reached up and did that. She has a gorgeous body, good breasts—like the vase of flowers, something you are supposed to notice, study, want, and envy.” Molly fumbled her hands together in her lap. She smiled at Fred, looked down at her perfectly adequate and pleasant bosom, and shrugged.

  “Say something,” Molly demanded.

  Fred said, “I’m afraid I’ll break the spell.”

  “OK,” Molly said. “Thanks. So this fucking woman sat waiting for me to open my fool mouth, until I did. I told her, ‘I came to your talk the other night and I was moved. I have been resisting you. I am afraid. For years I have struggled with a memory that has no shape, only a weight—nothing to see. And it’s been growing.’”

  “That’s good,” Fred said. “It’s ominous and vague and offers her room to be the smart one.”

  “The person who defines the force,” Molly said. “That was my thinking. So I told her what I had prepared—chronic trouble sleeping and, when I do sleep, waking and experiencing the strong sensation of another person, or a strange being, in the room.”

  “Unless he’s sleeping on Clayton’s couch,” Fred said.

  Molly stood and took off the black jacket of her suit and draped it over the back of a side chair. She wore a white blouse under it, and pearls. She ran her fingers through her tight curls and sat down again. “I mentioned the constant sense I have of being always next to a serious, impending danger. Sensation of flying. And the scar I cannot account for.”