Man With a Squirrel

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Here’s a question. I have two ends of a string—Ann Clarke, and her sister Alexandra, daughters of Martin Clarke—that maybe connect to the portrait. Copley married into a Tory family named Clarke. Question: Who’s the guy, and are my people Copley’s relatives?

  Regards, Fred

  Marek’s assignation with Madeleine Shoemacher on the night of Oona’s death had not yet been confirmed. That was another loose end. The Cover-Hoover enterprise, and its ability to spirit away a living person into the bosom of loving-caring—that warranted attention also.

  Fred drove to Hay Street. The top buzzer was still without identifying name beside it. No response. The second floor, where Martin Clarke was listed by the Registry as owner of a vehicle, offered the name Mukerjee, and did not answer. First floor gave him Cubit-Miller-Henry, who showed herself through the glass window of the entrance door. She looked him over out of a bright pink face that seemed sleepy: a woman of about forty, wearing a gold stretch corduroy jumpsuit; and pregnant. She opened the door only enough so they could talk through the crack.

  “Ms. Cubit-Miller-Henry?” Fred asked. She indicated assent. “I’m looking for Martin Clarke,” Fred said. “I understand he lives on the second floor.”

  “He did,” the woman said. “Moved out a few years back, I don’t know where to. Daughter’s taking care of him. He can’t hack it. Too old. Loony. Mail comes for him but the daughter, she picks it up. The other one.”

  “The other daughter. That’s Sandy?”

  “Top floor.”

  “She said her name is Blake.”

  “Was Blake, for about ten minutes. I don’t know how that guy stuck with her as long as he did. Once they were married he pulled out.”

  “You wouldn’t know where she is?”

  “If she isn’t upstairs, she’s running in circles around the planet Pluto,” Fred’s informant said. “The way she carries on, I put my earplugs in half the time I’m home.”

  “Who’s on the second floor?”

  “Guy’s never here. Lives with his girl. The place is for when his mother flies over. Student. Foreign. Business school. They’re gonna own us. Hump like maggots, all of them. You know how they are.”

  “Blake, the husband, how do I find him?”

  “Jeff went back where he came from, which I believe was J.P. Wherever it is he’s better off than he was here with that dingbat. I was asleep. Her and her sister both!”

  “Sorry to bother you,” Fred said. “And I appreciate your help. Would you mind giving me a call if you see Sandy Blake again?”

  “I would mind if I did it, but I won’t do it,” Ms. Cubit-Miller-Henry said. “Mind your own business and let mind your own business is my motto.” She closed the door.

  “You stole that line from Molly’s mother,” Fred told the door.

  * * *

  Fred went to his office on Mountjoy Street to think. He had a second reason now to be in touch with Bookrajian, if he could control that—which he certainly could not. He would like to ask, Did anybody identify the naked old man with cinder blocks around his broken neck, who washed up out of the Charles? He’d appeared quite recently, less than two weeks ago, wasn’t it? The day before Fred bought the squirrel? Yes, it was in the paper on that day. He had discussed it with Molly.

  * * *

  Who was the subject of the portrait: a man with a beautiful head? Fred had been thinking of the complete painting, and of the man’s hands in shadow, holding a squirrel on a chain—so poignant an image it seemed now, given the context of a human’s life in Boston in 1765, supposing that human to be African in origin.

  * * *

  J.P. was Jamaica Plain. Fred looked in the Boston and near-suburbs directory and found a Jeffrey Blake listed. He dialed and tripped a recording: “Me and my shadow are in conference and don’t have time for you at the moment. If you have a message for Jeff Blake or [a woman’s voice] Albion Puttanesca, [now Blake’s voice continued] after the tone say what you want. It’s a free country. God bless you, and [female voice] God bless these United States of America.”

  Fred gave the numbers where he could be reached, and enough message to cause interest if he had found the right Jeff Blake. He telephoned Molly’s house, reached Sam, and told him he would take Sam and Terry out for something to eat, and something else, at about five-thirty.

  “You want to talk to Mom?” Sam asked.

  “If she has something to tell me.”

  Fred heard Sam’s voice in the distance, calling. In a minute Sam returned and told him, “Mom says OK.”

  “You and Terry be hungry at five-thirty.”

  * * *

  I don’t want to stir things around, Fred thought later, driving past Cambridge on his way to Arlington. Everyone denies that the remainder of the Copley exists. If I keep making trouble they are going to deep-six it. It’s what I would advise them to do, given that it is probably associated with murder. Nobody who’s dead is going to become less dead if I let things trickle along at their own pace. If I push, I could make everything worse. We’ll ease up onto the thing quietly from another direction, if we can.

  * * *

  Clay telephoned Molly’s, which he rarely did, to tell Fred, “Not knowing how urgently you wished the information, I talked with Madeleine Shoemacher. She is clear—she is even upset—that Marek Hricsó was nowhere near her house, or herself, last Monday night. She does not know where he was.”

  “Hmm,” Fred said.

  “I can’t eat and I will not sleep,” Clay went on. “From anxiety about my beautiful Copley. I should not have gone to New Bedford to look. It will haunt me until we can complete it. I understand tomorrow is the day of rest, Fred. But given the delicacy of the situation, do you think—also perhaps a need for deliberate speed…”

  “I have no plan to rest tomorrow,” Fred promised him.

  * * *

  He took the kids to Charlestown and showed them Bunker Hill, explained the layout of the battle, and told them if they were interested he’d bring them back sometime when the buildings were open so they could see the dioramas and displays inside. He drove them past the building where he kept his room. He owned the house, along with a pickup group of veterans of this and that—some of whom were now settled elsewhere in the country. They used it, or had used it, or could still use it, as a place to come if they needed privacy to get priorities in order.

  “Can we go in?” Terry asked.

  “We won’t today. It’s just a room like yours, where I can close the door.”

  “Or slam it,” Terry reminded him, grinning.

  Fred didn’t mention that someone else had been sleeping in his room for the past year or more. “Besides, who’s hungry?” Fred asked.

  They ate fish and chips at Poppy’s by the bridge. They found a tedious movie about swords in Somerville. When Fred got them back to Molly’s it was almost eleven. Molly’s red Colt was in the garage, but Molly was not home.

  “Oh,” Sam said, yawning, and on his way upstairs. “Mom said tell you she’s going in Aunt Ophelia’s car, with Ophelia driving, and she’ll be late or if she doesn’t come back tonight don’t worry, she’ll stay at Ophelia’s in Lincoln. I told her you said that was all right. That is all right, isn’t it? You’re staying the night?”

  Fred looked at Molly’s couch, touched and furious. It wasn’t Molly’s fault Sam had manipulated events, using his position as an intermediary. That even was what touched Fred most, Sam setting things up to leave Fred no alternative. But with Molly gone and himself the surprised babysitter, Fred was obliged to guess his place was, once again, to be the fold-out option.

  He read Rothenstein until midnight; then lay on the couch without opening it. He had no idea where Molly had gone. If there were an emergency with one of the children he should know. He could not authorize an appendectomy. He was no more than the guy on the couch. At one o’clock he telephoned Ophelia’s place. After ten rings a male voice answered, half asleep or three-quarters drunk, and drawlin
g in a marked Western manner, “Yello there…”

  “Ophelia Finger?” Fred asked.

  “Honey, you are plumb blamed out of luck,” the voice said.

  “Wrong number?” Fred asked.

  “You are the wrong number, honey. Me, I’m the right number. See, I am here. She is not here but here is where she’s coming to, and when I say coming you better believe it. She is hightailing it back right now to my lonesome, limber dick. Therefore you lose, honey.” The voice howled like a wolf before it replaced itself with a click. That would be Byron Ponderosa.

  Fred made up the couch.

  * * *

  Fred roused to the kitchen door opening at almost three. Lying in the dark, he listened to the sounds. It was Molly, alone. He knew the way the air changed when she entered the house. She took her raincoat off, shook it, and hung it from the hook he’d told the kids he wanted for his baseball glove. He heard her stand in the dark kitchen, listening to her house. She’d know he was here because his car was in the driveway. She took off her shoes. Her plan was not to wake him, then.

  Fred listened for five minutes. Molly was standing still in the center of her kitchen, not moving from the place where she had taken off her shoes. Finally came the slow rustle of her limbs in their clothing moving from the kitchen into the hallway to go upstairs. To be the witness of a lover while she believes herself unperceived—that is more intimate than anything erotic. Fred felt a pang of desire and rage, hearing her shift cautiously up the stairs. He heard Terry’s door open and close. Molly didn’t trust him with the children then? No, that was stupid; he was just mad at her and taking it out by making her accuse him in his imagination. He heard Sam’s door open and close.

  The door to the children’s bathroom opened and spilled light down the stairs. Molly did not use that bathroom anymore. But she was using it tonight, not going into the new bathroom off her bedroom—the one Fred had given her.

  Fred heard the toilet flush: an oasis of noise in the silence of Molly’s house in the larger silence of Arlington. She ran water. The spill of light narrowed again. They always left enough to illuminate the hallway in case one of the kids woke in the night, though both were too old by now for that to be a major issue.

  Fred’s watch ticked near his ear. The house poised. Molly’s slow steps moved along the upstairs hall, then descended the staircase in that deliberate, secretive way guaranteed to discover every creak.

  Molly stood next to Fred for a full minute, quiet, and tense as an assassin with a conscience. He heard her breath shudder when she decided. She pulled the covers back and climbed in next to him, with all her clothes on but her shoes, and shivered. Her face was wet against his neck.

  “You want me to be awake or asleep, Molly?” Fred asked her.

  “Just be here, Fred, and be a human grown-up.”

  “Bad day?”

  “Don’t move. Don’t turn around. Let me hold you,” Molly said, curling against his back and reaching around him. “No, don’t move. Don’t talk. Be asleep, Fred. There’s no chance I will.”

  They lay together like that until Molly sighed and said, “How can it be so many educated people over the age of twenty-five don’t understand there’s always going to be a war between the sexes? There’s always going to be a war between the generations. But Jesus merciful God in wide blue heaven, we’re all in trouble if anybody starts winning those wars.”

  Molly slept, weeping.

  26

  Next morning Fred stuck to the kitchen, listening to Molly’s occasional snore, drinking coffee, and looking across the Sunday papers. He had not actually slept after Molly crawled in with him; but in his time he’d lain awake with worse company. When Molly started moving and complaining at around ten, Fred called in to her, “Your sister Pheely’s little friend Byron Ponderosa: he tells me he has a limber dick. I have been puzzling about the claim. Do you think he means limber as in limp, or limber like a fifth limb?”

  Molly said, “Ophelia’s practically walking bowlegged, she’s gone so cowgirl.”

  “You going to tell me what you were up to last night?”

  “Later,” Molly said on her way upstairs.

  * * *

  “The way I see the setup,” said Molly, washed and dressed in jeans and a big gray sweatshirt advertising Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, “the deal last night was supposed to work like an initiation and get me absolutely nailed. Ophelia and Cover-Hoover are in a hurry to come to terms, or I wouldn’t have gotten this far this fast with Cover-Hoover. She’s subtle, able, and careful. But I’ve given Cover-Hoover the impression I am prematurely ripe for the harvest, and she’s tripping over her own eagerness to get something going with Pheely. She makes the mistake of wanting to get everyone on her side; dumb thing for a crusader to do, since it would put her out of business not to have an enemy. Anyway, Pheely was there as an interested observer, informant, and the gal who has the know-how to move Cover-Hoover’s operation into the big time.”

  Molly had entered the kitchen talking. Her hair was damp from the shower. She went to the stove and poured coffee for herself.

  “Every time I’ve been with that woman I come back feeling, Where was I? India? Tibet? Someplace where they eat dogs alive?” Molly sat at the table. She waited for what she was inviting him to say.

  “You’ve seen her other times? More than the first time and last night?” Fred asked. Molly’d been playing a double game. No wonder she’d been keeping to herself.

  “Oh, sure. I’m interested to learn the woman’s scam,” Molly said lightly. “We have a session every lunchtime. She is helping me remember quite a lot.” Molly looked grim. “You see, the post-traumatic stress syndrome makes a barrier across the memory which causes the adult to have forgotten horrors in her childhood, which nonetheless have had a shaping function in creating her characteristic flawed adaptation to the world. The therapy finds apertures in this barrier, through which the past, in time, comes flooding back.”

  “All this for free,” Fred said.

  “Except for the fact her foundation pays her a salary. And something is supporting the foundation, isn’t it? Grants and donations. Does it matter whether it’s directly from patients or from others, even institutions, who can write off their payments so the taxpayer covers them? Last night I got a good look at where this loving-caring is supposed to lead.”

  Fred asked, “You want bacon and toast?”

  Molly shook her head. “I couldn’t eat. The affair last night was staged for Ophelia’s benefit, and to rope me in. They won’t trust anyone but a convert, and I am their hole card with Ophelia, Cover-Hoover thinks. Cover-Hoover arranged for Pheely and me to meet her on Hay Street. She warned us that we should expect to be so emotionally exhausted her driver would have to take us home afterward. She dropped more than a broad hint I might want, in order to feel secure, to go straight to their safe house afterward. ‘Bring overnight things,’ she said. ‘In case. My driver will take you.’ Her driver, by the way, is that top-heavy guy from the frame store.”

  “Also treasurer,” Fred interrupted. “Called Manny. Short for Boardman. Boardman Templeton. I wish you’d let me know what you were going to…”

  “You don’t,” Molly said, “do you? You don’t tell me a thing you’re going to do. OK. Following instructions, Ophelia and I wait in Ophelia’s car until Manny drives up in a sleek French car…”

  “A Lance-Flamme,” Fred said.

  “I wouldn’t know. Cover-Hoover climbs out her side. Two women get out the back. One’s the redhead I saw in the same store as Manny—the lady who looks like she has bought a lot of real estate in the Dismal Swamp from magazine ads. She is called Ann. First names only, by the way. Everyone gets to be anonymous. I assume it’s Ann Clarke, recording secretary?” Fred nodded. “The other one, who I haven’t seen before, turns out to be her younger sister, Sandy.”

  “There’s Sandy again,” Fred said.

  “Manny’s job is to watch the street, making sure the sa
tanic forces don’t get in. Cover-Hoover, for our benefit, so as to stress the aura of danger and mystery, makes a production of warning him to keep his eyes open for someone they call the Stalker on account of the widespread and common satanic movement you and I were not aware of, Fred, flourishing here and elsewhere, with thousands of secret unknown worshipers and adepts and dupes in every major urban center, all of them looking for a chance to rain on Cover-Hoover’s parade of hopeful-healing. As we both know from her book, these villains hold Black Masses, kill babies and bury their bodies, eat human flesh, force each other to dance naked—

  “Fred, how come—have you noticed?—everyone who spends a lot of solitary time thinking about evil, whether they are for it or against it, fixes on nudity as the keynote symbol, naked people being the sure sign something is going on—

  “Anyway, the women go upstairs and Manny sits downstairs looking alert and important and ready for trouble in Cover-Hoover’s car.”

  Fred started frying bacon. He was hungry and this was going to take time if Molly’s pace continued. Her upset of last night had crystallized into deliberate rage.

  “All right, Fred,” Molly said. “Here’s the genius of the setup. It’s perfect, even for nonbelievers—in fact maybe it’s best for nonbelievers, since they have nothing to measure against. It does not matter whether Satan is real. You are not required to accept anything supernatural as a given. If there is a God or none, nobody gives a shit.

  “We, the recovering victims of satanic worship, need only accept that anyone we trusted in the past is suspect—the bishop, the crossing guard, the fourth-grade teacher, the uncle, the wicked stepmother, the piano teacher, the acrobat in the circus—whoever might have had intimate access to us. By that person, and by that person’s numberless cohorts, who are called enablers, we were betrayed.

  “As little innocent children we were taken hostage by dark powers. Now, as adults, we remain hostages until we are ransomed by Cover-Hoover, who gently leads us to mistrust everything we have ever known, and bring to birth the loving-caring self we would have been all along had we not been so abused and betrayed. Turn the bacon over, Fred. It’s going too fast.”