Man With a Squirrel Page 3

  They went back and forth until they settled on a figure slightly over two thousand dollars. It was a lot of money to pay for a fragment, but Fred wrote a check on Clayton’s account.

  “You want the frame?” Oona asked him, starting to fold the picture around the stretcher again until Fred held her back.

  “The frame’s yours, Oona.” Fred rolled the fragment carefully, with the paint side out, laying newsprint down as he rolled so the paint was protected. He wrapped the package in newsprint. He took the stretcher also. “If you want, call me when they come in again,” Fred said.

  “In case they have the rest of it,” Oona hinted.

  Fred said, “Likely the rest was destroyed, but you never know—maybe it was torn and they didn’t know it could be saved. If I can see the rest before it goes into the rubbish, we’d make sure you were included. But go easy, you know, Oona, in case…”

  “I was in this business, and making a living at it, before you peed your first long pants, Fred Taylor,” Oona said. “But give me your number there on Beacon Hill.”

  Fred wrote the number of his office at Clayton’s Mountjoy Street brownstone and spent a little more time looking at this and that before making Oona’s bell ching as he stepped into the street again.

  Clay heard Fred come into the office in the basement of the building on Mountjoy Street that Clay called his flat. He came downstairs, a gangly figure with a shock of white hair that no one, in earshot, would accuse him of having filched from Andy Warhol. He was dressed in reserved opulence, as always; today in a deep blue suit and a crimson tie with miniature green paisleys running in choreographed riot upon it.

  “Ah, Fred,” Clayton said. “You found something.” Clay could see that Fred was excited as he cleared a table so as to lay the fragment out. They weren’t bothering with good-mornings. Fred had a blood trail. “What have you got?” Clay asked, even before Fred started unrolling it.

  If Fred had asked Clay such a question, there would have been a pregnant pause in reply, which could continue for the full nine months. But Fred didn’t waste time on games when he could help it.

  “The bottom third of a Copley,” Fred said, unrolling it slowly. “Unless I miss my guess, and if the Lord is kind.”

  “The former being more likely than the latter,” Clayton said, coming to watch.

  When Fred had the thing rolled out, Clay asked, “Where did you pick it up?” Not, How much?

  “Oona’s,” Fred told him.

  “Oona’s?”

  Clayton had never heard of the place. It was six blocks from his house.

  5

  “You say Copley on account of the squirrel,” Clayton Reed said, turning his full attention to the fragment of the painting. Clay’s lean face was eager, inquisitive. Fred’s office space, as always, was crowded: with books, periodicals, paintings they were thinking about buying, and the racks in which paintings were kept while they were not hanging upstairs.

  Fred had a good look at the fragment himself, now that he could do it without Oona around. The manner was right; the age, the subject, the feel of it was right for Copley. If it was Copley, even just a fragment, it was a major find. This was a gray squirrel. Sometimes you’d get a flying squirrel instead, with that scalloped frill down the side.

  “Because of the squirrel,” Clay repeated, flipping the fragment over carefully and looking at the back, his excellent eyes needing no glasses. “But as far as squirrels are concerned—and clearly, Fred, you have in mind Copley’s 1765 Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—the squirrel wasn’t an unusual subject in the mid-eighteenth century. As you know, there are other Copleys with squirrels in them. The portrait of Daniel Verplanck in the Metropolitan’s collection; the portrait of Mrs. Theodore Atkinson from 1765, I forget where it is, but the husband is at the Rhode Island School of Design. No doubt there are others.

  “My point, Fred, is that there was plenty of contemporaneous precedent. Copley’s sitters were not the only portrait subjects who wanted to be immortalized in the intimate company of squirrels. Why should this fragment not be by William Williams? You recall Williams’s portrait of Deborah Hall, or Hill, with a squirrel and roses, at the Brooklyn Museum? Williams was English, but he was active in these colonies between 1746 and 1776 when he, like Copley, inferred that there was personal and professional risk to remaining here.”

  Clayton Reed turned the painting over so as to look at its face again.

  “I see no immediate reason to think this is either American or even done over here. I could show you a Joseph Highmore from the same period, as English as Westminster Bridge: Portrait of a Boy with a Pet Squirrel, which was sold out of New York within the past few years. That picture, which was entire, incidentally, brought about five thousand dollars.”

  Clay was on a roll, as if he’d had a premonition Fred would give him the chance, and he’d been studying the subject of the arboreal rodent in eighteenth-century portraiture in England and her colonies—and Fred had walked into his trap.

  The squirrel as subject caught his interest, not the money expended. In fact, a cavalier disregard for the reputed financial value of paintings they cared about was one of the things Fred and Clayton held in common. Fred cared about the thing: the wrenching violence, held in suspension, that makes up a work of art. And Clayton—well, Clayton cared about whatever it was he cared about, which Fred respected though he could not divine it. But both of them liked a puzzle.

  Fred took the cut fragment and pinned it by its original tacking edges to an empty place on the wall where he could see it from his desk. It felt like Copley. It had that naive juice and bounce and hope of the young Copley when he was striving to educate himself. “I’m going to work on it,” Fred said. “It takes my fancy. It may never be more than what we’re looking at.” If Clayton did not want to associate himself with this project, he had only to say so. That wouldn’t stop Fred.

  “It does have a certain Colonial charm,” Clay admitted. He went upstairs and Fred got started.

  * * *

  By noon Fred was surrounded by books from Clayton’s library. He called Molly at her reference desk. “Why don’t we do lunch?” Fred asked. When Molly welcomed the idea, he suggested she hop on the subway and come into town, but she wanted to meet in Harvard Square.

  “I won’t eat,” she said. “But I’ll ingest tea and watch you.”

  Fred was sitting in a booth, drinking thin yellow tea, when Molly came into the Japanese place they’d decided on. It was horribly cold for March, and Molly wore Sam’s red down jacket with the hood, which Fred watched her take off beside the door. Sam wouldn’t wear the jacket because it wasn’t the right style for this year. Under the jacket Molly had on her black wool cardigan and a violet silk blouse that made her green eyes show across the room. Her dark brown corduroy pants matched her hair.

  “You found me,” Fred said, as she came to his table.

  “You stand out. Not making comparisons, but I recall the cinder-block restrooms for tourists at Versailles,” Molly said. “They are easy to see, and people who are looking for something of the kind are grateful for rude comfort.” Fred poured tea into a cup for her. Fred had already ordered sushi, and when it came he offered Molly some, which she refused, although she was normally a dedicated carnivore.

  “Kids coming in from the high school next door,” Molly said, “from a teacher who wants them to research their family trees. They ask me for help, and for most of them there’s not much to say. They’re trying to find their roots; meanwhile, a few blocks away, Cover-Hoover’s encouraging her patients to sever theirs. Most of us can’t find them beyond a couple generations. Suppose I wanted to press the search for my own disreputable roots, which are as Black Irish as Madonna’s—or is she Italian?” Molly fumbled in the large bag she carried and found a set of Xeroxed pages. “Look what I pulled out this morning. It’s an advertisement, from the Boston Statesman of September 13, 1714…”

  Either could
get the other started, in research matters.

  “‘To be disposed of,’” she read, “‘by Mr. Samuel Sewall, Merchant, at his warehouse near the Swing Bridge in Merchant’s Row’—that’s down near Faneuil Hall—‘several Irish Maid Servants, time most of them for Five years; one Irish Man Servant, a good Barber and Wiggmaker, also Four or Five likely Negro Boys…’”

  “Very multicultural slavery,” Fred observed.

  “My ancestors could be in any Irish job lot—not one Irish person ever gets a name. Why can’t I have the Wiggmaker?” Molly said. “Not that the indentured servant and the slave were equally deprived of human rights, but I do note a lack of interest in reporting names where both are concerned. The bonded illiterate and the captive owned no identities worthy of record. The likely Negro boys would be as easy to identify as the so-called Irish Maid Servants, for any of their descendants.”

  “Let me tell you about a picture I bought,” Fred said. “At least part of it.”

  “You’re changing the subject,” Molly said.

  “I am, but not exactly, in that I am searching for an identity to apply to a pair of eighteenth-century feet,” Fred said.

  He described the fragment he had purchased, and Molly spoke at length about the difficulty of establishing the family lines of any but the most fortunate among the citizens of Boston, or anywhere else. After he’d eaten, Fred was eager to look at Copleys. But the urgency of the March wind suggested a joint amble along the river before they returned to their respective labors.

  They walked upriver, stood in the raw wind, and sniffed at the water. Cars rushed along the parkways on either side of the slow gray water. The cherry trees were far from starting to fill their buds. They came to a place where the dirt of the bank was scuffed and tire tracks crossed the sad-looking mat of grass. They were way above 1010 Memorial Drive, where a wealth of residential condominiums dwarfed the view.

  “It must be where they pulled the old boy out,” Fred said. “Blanche Maybelle’s dancing ground.”

  Molly shuddered at the reminder of the dead white male of this morning’s newspaper. “She must make a loop, taking in both sides of the river so she can be seen at WBZ on the Boston side, trot over one of the bridges, and give the early academics a treat on this side. Strange,” Molly said. “I’m looking for the cinder blocks from around his neck. Of course, they take those with the body, since they’re part of the package.”

  Fred looked speculatively up the river, maybe a half-mile, to where a bridge crossed connecting Soldier’s Field Road, on the Boston side, to Cambridge and civilization and the road to Concord. The body could have been dropped off there and come downriver.

  “You think he jumped in there?” Molly asked, following the direction of Fred’s glance.

  “If he went in from the bridge, he could have washed down this far,” Fred said, “although in winter a person might not stand naked on the parapet of a bridge with twenty pounds or more of cinder blocks around his neck.”

  * * *

  They turned back to Harvard Square and parted company. Fred went into Boston, to the Museum of Fine Arts, to look at Copleys.

  There was a time after the Revolution when the first pirates of Boston got civic religion and established a temple for it in the form of the Athenaeum, into which only they were permitted to venture. Here they hoarded books and paintings, privacy and male courtesy. When their civic religion became tainted by democracy, certain of the pirates established a second temple, put art into it, called it the Museum of Fine Arts, and decreed that it should be available to edify the common citizenry. The idea was for people to enter and gaze at the portraits of the pirates hanging in the museum (rather than on the yardarms they had merited), and they, the common citizens, would be encouraged. It was a subtle form of terrorism.

  A century later, the trustees noted that citizens were not coming to the temple to be edified, and so they undertook to make the museum more attractive by raising the admission price, building a couple of new wings, flushing through blockbuster exhibitions of French pictures, selling souvenirs, gifts, and fancy luncheons, taking their cue, Molly said, from 2 John:13–16.

  A number of the founding pirates, in the good old days, had themselves painted by John Singleton Copley, and these were among the portraits that later formed the basis for the museum’s collection. Copley was a local boy who managed to paint almost as if he had seen European pictures, and certainly something more couth than the flat, mean renditions done by his only rivals, the part-time barn painters called limners, who rendered folks as if they were no more complex than turnips.

  Fred found in the early Copley a native intelligence and inquiry. Whatever the subjects assigned to him, he had his own interests, and played with space. He was most aware of the places you thought of looking last—under the table, for instance, or in the shadow of a hand or foot—until he went to England and lost it. Copley had no choice but to leave the Colonies, because his marriage, a move up socially, allied him with the Tories, and the country’s impending first election (in the form of the Revolution) was not going to go the Tories’ way.

  So just before the Revolution, Boston’s best native painter escaped to England and, since he’d been moving upward socially anyway, continued in a parallel aesthetic direction that took him into pious and/or history painting and worse, until he traveled to the Continent, became mortally infected by an Italian stylistic venereal disease, and lost his honest character entirely in a pompous riot of gilded frippery.

  The Museum of Fine Arts had enough Copleys to cover the subject. Fred studied them, more convinced every moment that he had, tacked to the wall of his office, the earnest amputated stockinged feet, in their buckled shoes, of a Boston worthy who, in about 1765, was sitting with his pet squirrel on a leash and thinking furiously about either the injustice of the motherland’s tax on tea, or of how to go about getting a piece of that selfsame tax for himself.

  At some point down the line, if they were going to establish this fragment as a certifiable Copley, Fred would have to get an official vetting from the Copley fellow; still, he was feeling reasonably smug when he called Molly at four to check in. If this was Thursday, Fred was supposed to go to a teacher’s meeting at Sam’s school, because Sam was messing up and Fred thought he could help. But it was Wednesday, he assured himself; he told Molly he might be a while and don’t keep supper, except maybe save him something to warm up later if she wanted to, and if there was enough, and if the kids didn’t finish it.

  It was a tricky thing about Sam, because the children were Molly’s, not Fred’s. Sam had a father somewhere, who didn’t give a shit about his children. Sam could use a friendly man leaning on him sometimes; but whenever Fred tried it, he feared the both of them felt it was Fred trying to push Sam away from his mother, and Sam quite properly resisting, while Molly observed, ready to blast at Fred with both barrels if he leaned too hard.

  But Sam just wasn’t doing his work in school.

  Fred and Molly argued about it. Molly wanted to throw the TV away, but Fred pointed out that sports are an important part of the adult world and a boy has to know about them. If the kid was having trouble working up interest in what he had to do, maybe you shouldn’t take away the only thing he was interested in, at which point he could lose interest in everything. “I don’t know anything about boys,” Fred said. “But that’s what I think.”

  Molly was not convinced. It was a problem, since she didn’t know how to punish Sam anymore and wouldn’t want Fred to try. “He’s not your child, and he’s not your friend. You’re not his big brother, either. He’s the son of the woman you are living with. And he cares for you.”

  “I’ll come back early,” Fred said.

  “I don’t need you,” Molly said, distracted. “I mean, not till I see you.”

  * * *

  Fred had errands to do, and had as well to check with the men at the place in Charlestown, where he kept a room in case he found himself needing a room again. It
was eight o’clock when he stepped into the Boston wind.

  6

  When Fred got back to the house, Molly was on the kitchen phone, apparently talking to her sister, Ophelia. Ophelia Finger, whose success in popular showbiz, mostly daytime TV, was limited only by her attention span, was presently contributing her energy to a think-tank seminar in Colorado, which Molly and Fred characterized as plotting ways to Cash in on Others’ Unfortunate Body Images and Bad Habits. Terry was at the kitchen table doing her math homework. Sam was crouched in the living room, watching the Celtics mortify the Pacers while pretending to refer to his social studies book.

  Fred looked over Terry’s shoulder and pointed out a place where a 6 might get on better if it resembled an 8 more closely. Presently Terry’s most earnest interest was the impending start of the Little League season, in which her pitching, on her on days, could prove crucial to the chances of her team. She did not live and die for math.

  “What did you have for supper?” Fred asked her.

  “Ugh. Ughplant,” Terry told him. “Most of it’s in the fridge.” Molly made a mean eggplant parmigiana.

  Molly, overhearing, told Ophelia, “I don’t have the time or the interest for this, Pheely. I don’t like the woman’s politics, and I don’t like her cause. If you want to get involved with her…” She hauled open the refrigerator door and made a gesture. Fred put a chunk of the eggplant into the oven to warm and went to loom over Sam.

  They talked about important things for a bit, as determined by the screen before them, and then, during a time-out, Fred reminded Sam, “We’re talking to your teachers tomorrow night, Sam.” Sam tried to grin, then tried to look insulted, and neither succeeded. “Why don’t we look at your geography after the game,” Fred suggested. “I’ve been to some of these places.”

  Sam said, “I can do it, Fred.” He closed the book so Fred could not see what he was working on.