Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “What?” Fred asked, startled.

  “That got her attention too,” Molly said. “She said—her first words after she asked me if I wanted the blinds closed—‘Show me.’

  “Now Fred, you know me. I’m not one of these Vagina-of-the-Month Club women that gets together over coffee and everybody talks up their episiotomy, like the new Our Bodies, Ourselves pretends; all smoke and mirrors in my opinion. But it was my own damned fault. You mention the symptoms, you have to be able to demonstrate them, and everything else I had offered was in the ectoplasm field. So the only scar I had to show is where the stob went in when Pheely pushed me out of the apple tree.”

  Fred grinned. “That put you at a tactical disadvantage,” he allowed.

  “I had a choice between two tactical disadvantages. One, I refuse and immediately my story goes up in smoke—unless I can be convincing about scars only I can see, of which there are numerous examples in the literature—or, two, I drop my pants.”

  Fred said, “And you can’t afford to look like you’re planning your next move. You have to respond fast.”

  “Exactly. So the doctor sat there waiting, gentle, smiling a little. Not pushy. She had all the time in the world to watch which door, which chair, or which mistake I was going to try. I figured I had to raise her, so I took off all my clothes, deliberate, and challenged her: ‘Many deny they see his mark on me.’”

  Fred said, “That’s really good. It gives you center stage, but it’s a bit extreme…”

  “I wanted to challenge her.”

  They heard, from the kitchen, the sound of Sam and Terry fighting about who got the bathroom first, to brush their teeth on the way to bed.

  “I made her come onto my turf and look me over, me testing her now,” Molly said. “It was not the way I had imagined spending my lunch hour. Cover-Hoover, being a true psychic, or adept, or whatever, found the old ragged pinch of scar on my left buttock. She hissed in when she touched it and said, ‘Does it feel hot?’”

  “Mmm. She saw you and raised you, Molly.”

  “Meanwhile, playing for time, I made her swear she truly could see and feel it,” Molly said. “Then I sort of collapsed and told her, ‘I can’t remember anything. I’m afraid.’

  “‘He’s long dead,’ Eunice said. ‘He can’t touch you again.’

  “She was absolutely convincing, working like water that insinuates itself into every opening and is going to damned well drag itself to sea level, and you along with it. As soon as she said, ‘He can’t touch you,’ I started manufacturing visions of who this he might be.

  “It was as if I’d hypnotized myself, almost, standing there, as Terry used to call it, barefoot. I was surrounded by a violent aura of fear I couldn’t put a villain to, or see, or recall—I was inventing it after all—but the sensation and the emotion were real enough to bottle and sell. With this thing lapping around me like a fog, I put my clothes on again—got through that gracefully enough, I think—before I thought of asking her, ‘What do you mean he’s long dead? Who’s long dead?’

  “I don’t know why the poor old man who came out to the house that night was the first person I thought of. Because he touched me with an intimate fear, I guess.

  “Eunice said, ‘No need to rush this, Molly. May I call you Molly? Please call me Eunice. You did right to come to me. No human power by itself can withstand the darkness that has reached its long finger into your body.’

  “It’s embarrassing, Fred. When she said that, I felt the long finger of darkness reaching into me through the old scar on my ass. Which I know for a fact came when I was ten and fell out of a tree. My mother thought I’d got my period.

  “Listen, I can’t go through the next hour line by line. I am absolutely furious with Ophelia. Do you know how she set me up? Do you know what she did?” Molly started shaking.

  “She told Cover-Hoover that she, Ophelia, suspects her older sister, Molly—me—was used in witches’ Sabbaths by my poor old dad, before the accident in the warehouse that killed him when I was eight and she was six.

  “She told Eunice she suspects Dad was head witch in regular satanic worship on some blasted heath in Newton Lower Falls. God, did I walk into that one.”

  Molly burst into what was either laughter or tears; a noisy, generous fury of emotion that lasted a full minute and then was gone. She stood, wiped her eyes with a napkin, blew her nose, and said, “I’m taking a long hot shower, Fred. The bugs of fear and loathing and self-pity are all over me. That woman’s Typhoid Mary. I’ve never met anything like it.”

  “I’ll come up with you.”

  Molly put a hand on his arm. “Fred, I’m sorry. Do you mind? Use the downstairs couch tonight? I can’t stand being in the same bed with anyone. I’m crawling all over.”

  “I can sleep on your floor,” Fred offered. “Do you mind if I take a look at Cover-Hoover’s book?”

  Molly smiled wanly. “Better sack out downstairs,” she said. “My poor old dad, who went to the red-eye Mass every morning of his life, at six-thirty, before he came back to the house to give us breakfast.”

  “It’s always who you least expect,” Fred said. “That’s one of the rules of fiction.”

  18

  Fred woke at five, walked through the village of Arlington, and breakfasted at Dunkin’ Donuts. After looking through Power of Darkness, he was bemused and interested at the situation Molly had gotten herself into. She had walked into a trap baited with the most persuasive pheromone known to the human spirit: Eau de Soupçon.

  The premise of the book was reassuringly simple, arguing from effect to cause and starting from a series of symptoms of malaise like what Molly had described. Add to that the following guidelines: If you think you might have been abused, you were; and failing to recall it likely proves it, because that’s exactly what they want.

  Ophelia was a fool playing games with such a subject. You can get the person out of the woods, but you can’t get the woods out of the person. The fear that’s in each of us will be believed under any of a million names, because the fear itself, the prime evidence, is always real.

  The worst of it was not the theoretical basis of the argument, or its scientific trappings; the worst part was the implications the sad stories of abuse, so proudly presented, had for the lives, the families, and the identities of the self-proclaimed victims. The role of victim must for some become a full-time occupation. Cover-Hoover, if her pioneering theory was to be proved, must be able to point to a stable of willing guinea pigs who would announce themselves as “broken” individuals now (and forever) in the healing process.

  It was unpleasant and sad, Molly said, and very soft science, like that book The Bell Curve, big a couple years back, which while pretending to measure intelligence quotients was nothing more than a long way of complaining that black people had failed to remain at home in Africa. “Do not send to know for whom the bell curves,” Molly had remarked at the time, tossing the book onto the floor. “It curves for thee.”

  * * *

  Fred had little company at Dunkin’ Donuts: two solid Greek girls behind the counter, a sweating male who was probably the father of one of them cooking in back, and two men, like himself, drinking coffee. Fred bought a dozen donuts and more coffee and took it all back to Molly’s. Terry preferred donuts that squirted, and Sam liked chocolate on chocolate. Molly claimed no interest in donuts and would eat whatever the kids left. Fred made the kids drink milk to offset the sugar.

  “Sorry about last night,” Molly said after the kids had left for school, as she was putting herself together. “The woman put me in a tailspin.”

  “How did you leave things with her?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” Fred leaned to kiss her good-bye and she jerked away like a girl with brand-new breasts starting. “Sorry, Fred,” she said. “It’s just … well, sorry, I guess, is all I know.”

  “OK,” Fred said. “I’ll clean up here. I’m waiting to go into town until after I talk with this detect
ive, Bookrajian, since Dee says I should.” He saw Molly out the kitchen door into the garage, heard the garage door heave open and close again, and Molly’s Colt putter away into a cold gray morning.

  * * *

  “You left a message I should call?” Bookrajian said when he called back at ten. Fred by this time was pacing Molly’s kitchen, cursing himself for putting himself in hock to a telephone. He wanted to pick up the matter of Manny. Every departing minute threatened to take the head end of the Copley portrait farther into the distance.

  “Yes. I did business with Oona Imry, and I understand from Dee Glaspie, who writes parking tickets for the city…”

  Bookrajian interrupted, “Go on.”

  Fred said, “I understood you people were satisfied the death was an accident. The nephew said you were ready to release the body.”

  “Are you kidding?” Bookrajian’s amazed bluster caused Fred to hold the receiver away from his ear. “Oh, the nephew. That fucking snake son of a bitch? You a friend of his?”

  “Not really.”

  “You want to come in and talk?” Bookrajian asked.

  Fred told him, “My dance card’s pretty full today, unless it’s urgent.”

  “We’re gonna nail the little fuck,” Bookrajian said. “And you can tell him I said so.”

  “To be frank, I was surprised you were happy with the accident theory,” Fred said.

  “Are you kidding?” Bookrajian said again. “That turkey won’t even tell us where he was that night between eight and midnight—which is when we finally got through to him on the old lady’s phone. If you’re a friend of his, tell him how that looks to some of the dumb, crass, plain old born-American assholes working my department,” Bookrajian said.

  “I’ll let him know.”

  “Anything else I can help you with, sport?”

  “That’ll do it. Thanks,” Fred said.

  “No problem.”

  * * *

  When Fred called the Carlyle Clay was out, leaving no message. If Clay were willing to enter the twentieth century, Fred would have had a machine on his desk to take messages. But Clay was convinced such a convenience would “let them know what we are doing.” Fred drove into Cambridge shortly after noon and was just in time to spot Manny leaving Kwik-Frame, and to follow him down Massachusetts Avenue toward Harvard Square. Manny crossed Linnaean Street and took himself into a Mexican restaurant, where he ordered at the counter and then sat at a tippy Mexican revival table to wait for his refried or otherwise reconstituted lunch. Fred ordered iced tea, carried it to Manny’s table, and sat across from him.

  Manny looked up. He’d been studying the inlaid chips of colored ceramic making a semi-Olmec style design on the tabletop.

  “Do you mind?” Manny said belligerently.

  “Business,” Fred said. The man behind the counter called out, “Twenty-three.”

  “Table’s taken,” Manny announced, getting up. He strode the seven strides to the counter and returned with a loaded tray from which fat steam rose, wafting an afterthought of bean. Manny stood, holding his tray, staring belligerence. He himself smelled strongly of something intended to keep a person from smelling like sweat when aroused.

  Fred said, “I noticed you work at Kwik-Frame and I want to ask about a picture you framed.”

  “I’m on my lunch break.” Manny tucked into his tortillas, fajitas, burritos, enchiladas, or whatever they were, with meat.

  “Please go ahead,” Fred said.

  Manny stared at him, his eyes gobbling.

  “A painting of a squirrel,” Fred continued. “The person said you did the framing. Of the squirrel.”

  Manny swallowed. He took a drink of orange soda, using a straw. He sucked a long time, watching Fred. He picked up something brown, took a bite from it, and chewed. “The person? What person?” Manny asked.

  “Person I got it from,” Fred said. “You recall doing the squirrel? Old picture on canvas. A lot of extra canvas bent around back.”

  Manny swallowed. He took a bite of something else that started brown but oozed green in protest when he put pressure on it. “We do a lot of squirrels,” he said. “Cats. Other animals. Mostly cats. The people go for cats.”

  The storefront was loud with customers giving their orders, the cooks slamming dishes, and people making conversation over hasty lunch. Fred drank from his tea.

  “Why do you care?” Manny asked.

  “It could be worth money to the person who helps me find the owner of that picture.”

  “You say you are the owner?”

  “The one you framed it for,” Fred said. “Maybe they have the other part. The picture of the squirrel was cut from something bigger.”

  Manny said, “I can’t help you. But if I could, how would I find you?”

  “I come by all the time.”

  “You have an idea what the information is worth?” Manny asked. “Or what you’re looking for if the other part of this canvas should come in, or if I hear about it?” Manny ate a piece of lemon. He was dressed for cold weather, wearing a deep-blue down jacket, open, over the yellow Mickey Mouse T-shirt he was working in today. “I don’t like you following me here,” he said.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Fred offered. “If it’s in reasonable condition. My guess is a guy at a table, dressed like George Washington, you know? He could even be wearing a wig.”

  “I’ll ask the other person in the store,” Manny said, through a large amount of something that had become tan. “You stop in sometime when I’m working, maybe I’ll know something. Unless you want to give me a number, or like that.”

  “I move around so much,” Fred said. “Out of state half the time. You’d go crazy trying to reach me. I’ll stop over when I’m in the area.”

  Fred finished his tea and stood. Manny had a long way to go to clear his tray. The only way to maintain show-muscle like that was by wasting enormous amounts of energy.

  Manny looked up and swallowed painfully. “That’s a lot of money,” he said.

  Fred shrugged. “Maybe in your business,” he said. “Not in mine.”

  * * *

  Fred drove into town along Charles Street, past Oona’s closed shop, and parked next to Clay’s car off Mountjoy.

  When Clay telephoned at three, Fred was taking counsel with himself over the question of how, and how soon, to stop by Kwik-Frame again. The prospect of ten thousand unexpected dollars had settled firmly into Manny’s head by now, and he’d be worrying how to maneuver his knowledge of Fred’s quest into the best possible position for himself. When Fred assured Clayton that it was indeed himself at this end of the line, Clay said, “Concerning the research you are engaged in—your project, I fully acknowledge—but as long as I had the opportunity, I have been looking into the matter of the Copley fragment…”

  Fred interrupted, “That’s fragments now. Plural.”

  A stunned pause on Clay’s end. “Excellent, Fred. You made that woman sell us the rest of it? What does it look like?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Fred confessed. “Unfortunately. This will take some time. First you should know that Oona Imry is dead.”

  It required twenty minutes to fill Clay in. Clay understood immediately that what he owned now was a grotesque. His passionate responsibility to the pure cause of art would prevent him from keeping the fragments separate and enjoying the expurgated details. He would, in due course, be obliged to have the two parts joined, and should they be unable to find the last part, no one would hang and enjoy the headless man with a squirrel. Its missing element would intrude too much. It could be seen only as an illustration.

  “At any rate, Fred,” Clay continued, “as a matter of interest you might want to take these down as being of possible relevance—American portraits we know Copley executed but which are lost or thought to have been destroyed.”

  Fred jotted down the information as Clayton reeled it off.

  “There’s Thomas Ainslie—too early to be ours, painted in 175
7, but I might as well mention it. Then Benjamin Andrews of 1773. The wife was done in a companion piece, also unlocated. We know of them from Andrews’s own letter to Henry Pelham, who was supposed to paint alterations in some of the landscape detail.”

  “Pelham the half-brother and apprentice,” Fred said. “Maybe Pelham hocked them and … never mind.”

  “The three-quarter-length portrait of Governor Francis Bernard which du Simetière saw hanging in Harvard Hall in 1767—that is missing. Wilkes Barber, of 1770, is not located. But that was a boy of four. A Mr. Barron was painted in New York in 1771, but I doubt ours is a New York portrait because there is no reason for it to have migrated north. But the thing to note in this case is that we know the size, fifty by forty inches, a standard size for Copley. Those must be the dimensions my painting had prior to the assault.

  “But here, Fred, you might want to think about these three paintings said to have been destroyed in the Boston fire of 1872, by which time they belonged to a Peter Wainwright: Dr. John Clarke seated at a table and wearing a white wig; his wife, née Elizabeth Breame; and their son William.”

  “Clarke,” Fred said. “That’s the family Copley married into, isn’t it? Wasn’t his wife Susanna Clarke?”

  “Same name but different family,” Clay said.

  19

  Clay careened down his list. Fred noted only the known portraits, acknowledged to be unlocated, that had any likelihood of corresponding to what they had: adult, male, originally fifty by forty inches, and painted in the Boston area reasonably close in time to the paintings containing the squirrel motif Copley was using in the Pelham and Atkinson portraits of 1765.

  Captain Tristram Dalton of Marblehead, painted in 1767, was gone, missing (along with Mrs. D). Fred liked Dalton, and starred him. James Flucker he dismissed as too small, too late. Maybe Peter Oliver. He noted a missing John Hancock whose size and date were not recorded; a Benjamin Greene (no date) also destroyed in the 1872 fire.