Man With a Squirrel Page 5

“She’d know whatever you have in mind is a fraction of the real worth of the thing. And she would mention she has been in this business since you peed your first long pants.”

  It was not often Fred was able to engineer a look of astonished guilt on Clay’s face, and he exulted in this one, which betrayed little Clayton Reed, buttoned into a sailor suit, with an increasingly navy stain spreading down its legs.

  “Let me work this out,” Fred suggested.

  8

  Molly had not yet arrived when Fred brought Sam back from the open house, relieving Cindy Baker, who had been roped into sitting for a furious Terry.

  “It isn’t fair,” Terry said.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Everything,” Terry shouted, and stamped upstairs to slam her door dramatically, twice.

  “Terry’s jealous,” Sam said, smiling. He had wet and combed his hair for the evening, put on clean jeans and a sweatshirt, and led Fred affably from one teacher to another, not opening his mouth once. The occasion had left Fred feeling like a parole officer.

  “As long as we have a minute,” Fred suggested, sitting at the kitchen table and gesturing toward a chair, “why don’t we review what we learned this evening—some of the recurring themes?”

  “It’s OK, Fred, I get the message.”

  Sam was looking more like Molly this year, as if the hormones kicking him mercilessly into adulthood were molding his features toward the nearest available example of his own genes’ maturing. Sam was going to be a handsome man. Fred heard Sam yelling through Terry’s door, “You didn’t miss anything, jerk.”

  Every one of the teachers had suggested attention to homework would be an appropriate alternative to Sam’s present course. At least he’s not playing hooky, Fred thought. He’s going to school, anyway.

  When Molly came in, Fred was sitting on the couch in her living room reading Rothenstein’s memoirs. The room was frilly, mostly blue and white, with posters of paintings Molly liked: Watteau, Sheeler, Alma-Tadema, and Kline. Her taste was random.

  “Terry said you were out and she didn’t know where,” Fred told her. Molly shook off the damp chill of the evening and hung up Sam’s red down jacket—too large for Sam and about right for her—next to the kitchen door. Fred had gotten up to meet her as she came in. She was wearing a blue corduroy jumper over a white knit something with long sleeves, and looked like a fourth-grader.

  “How’d it go at Sam’s school?”

  Fred told her, “Friendly but inconclusive. There’s a general sense that homework would make a difference. Terry, saying everything is not fair, is closeted in her room. I do not feel crowned with success.” Fred took the book back to the couch while Molly went upstairs. She was gone for five pages, during which Rothenstein and Wilde exchanged pleasantries. When Molly came in again she observed, “Terry says you and Sam had pizza and didn’t bring her any. She smelled it on you.”

  “Guilty,” Fred said. “We got anchovy and olive, which Terry hates, and we ate the whole thing, bonding.”

  “You got something she hates on purpose and then didn’t give her any,” Molly said. “That makes you doubly guilty. Triply guilty, since you didn’t bring any for me.”

  Fred offered, laying his book down, “You want to go out for pizza?”

  Molly phoned an order in to Arlington’s nearest Pizza Haven, and while they were on the way to pick it up, Fred put the question again: “What were you up to this evening?”

  Molly drove her car through the rain—it hadn’t stopped raining all day—and Fred crouched in the suicide seat. Her car, an old red Colt, was too small for him. Molly pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t ask again, Fred, because if I get started I don’t think I can stop.”

  “OK,” Fred said.

  Molly pulled up in front of Pizza Haven and Fred went in for the pie.

  * * *

  Fred called outside Terry’s room, “Yo, if I slide your pizza under the door the pepperonis will scrape off.”

  He waited until Terry, in her Red Sox pajamas, her wan face grinning, her mousy hair falling in fine wisps, opened the door and accepted the pizza, yelling, “Yah, Sam, I got pepperoni.”

  “It’s not fair,” Fred heard from behind Sam’s door.

  * * *

  “The thing is,” Molly said, sitting at her kitchen table with a Sam Adams and the lioness’s share of the pizza, “I got interested, with Ophelia hounding me and the damned woman after me on the telephone. So I went tonight and listened to Doctor Eunice Cover-Hoover perform. Fred, she is a pheenom. She is a reassuring snake of righteousness.”

  Molly took a bite from the leading edge of a slice of pizza and with a look questioned whether Fred wanted a bite, or a swig of her beer. He shook his head.

  “She used to teach, but no more,” Molly said. “Says she’s too busy. Her position’s gone more to research and various committee and board activities here and there, and I gather Holmes College is getting grants through her also, though this year she’s on sabbatical. Her dog and pony show, her lecture, whatever that was I attended—she’s worse than I expected because she’s absolutely open, absolutely sincere, and she doesn’t come on like a crusader. The bulk of her argument is assumption and innuendo which need not be examined since they are postulated in her first book. But it turns out this gal Cover-Hoover’s really serious about the power of darkness thing.”

  Molly chewed and swallowed. She drank from Sam Adams’s neck and looked around the kitchen, shuddering. “Something walking on my grave,” she said. “She’s into it in a big way. Fred, after you make it past the graphs and footnotes in her talk, and all the political wisdom and quotations and statistics she pulls from the book, anybody can read the real story under the scholarly line. She’s talking witchcraft and Satanism, pure and simple.”

  “Satanism,” Fred said. “That would sell. But how is she, given her degrees and training, waving that banner? Can you, in any East Coast institution, get away with teaching supernatural forces in the sciences?”

  “Disregarding whether or not sociology is science—and I’d say a lot of it is yellow journalism in a suit—what Cover-Hoover claims she’s doing is deprogramming,” Molly said. “Her main argument is that this century and this country have seen the growth of organized forms of worship of the power of darkness—call it Satan if you want, she says, offhand—to which children and women—natural-born victims—are victim.

  “You should see her, Fred. She’s white as a napkin, dresses like a banker, and is built.

  “It was a public meeting at a Presbyterian church in Brookline, though she’s not tied to any church. Not many people there, maybe a couple dozen, but half of them claimed to be former victims of cults from all over the country. Or they think maybe they are or were, or they know one or some. See, one theory of hers is that once you are a victim you remain so, because the bondage is repressed along with the memory, until you are healed by a conscious and contrary imposition of the power of light. That’s the side she’s on.

  “These people are being guided by Cover-Hoover as they cast off the guilt and shame and dread and shackles of their newly recovered remembered former years. She’s very effective, and she’d be especially convincing for people at a crossroads of grief or indecision, who are looking for someone to be.” Molly walked to the cabinet over the sink and pulled down coffee mugs. “You want coffee?”

  Fred shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like your sister Ophelia,” he said. “Believing all this? At her age?”

  “Nope. But, Fred, these people in the audience were not kids. They’re half of them as old as you and me. Some look fifty and older.”

  Fred said, “Your sister is concerned with the bottom line, and in this case I don’t see where it is. I mean, what soap or mouthwash or kitty litter wants to sponsor a Satanism TV show? How does the profit motive fit in, and doesn’t the shrink lose all credibility if she starts driving a big gold Caddy?”

  Molly ran water into a ket
tle, put it on the stove, and stood over it, fidgeting. “The lecture was free and Cover-Hoover made a point of insisting that she charges nothing for private deprogramming,” Molly said. “It looks like reckless volunteerism of a purely eleemosynary nature. Since it must represent a lot of labor with people who are not by nature a barrel of laughs, I am mystified at the moment. I didn’t stay through it all. Partly on account of my misspent youth, I hightailed it when they started chanting.”

  Fred fetched himself a beer out of the fridge. “Chanting,” he said. “Right.”

  “Victim of Darkness, child of Light,” Molly chanted softly. The kettle squealed. “It’s catchy and persuasive, and meaningless, like much that impels the human race to take decisive action.” She put water onto brown crystals and stirred.

  Fred poured beer into his coffee mug. “When they say ‘Light,’ I presume they mean God?”

  “The idea is to replace the formulae for repression with new, positive mantras. You are allowed to think in terms of God and Satan if you wish.”

  “Right,” Fred said. “Wash out the brainwashing. God’s too male. ‘Light’ is better, maybe, for the purpose. Did they work it like AA, everyone having a story to tell?”

  “Enough to give us all the cold grues,” Molly said, “for the next forty months. And the stories told were pretty devil-specific. A lot of victims out there.”

  Fred said, “As I walked through the highly literate wasteland of Harvard Square earlier, I noticed lots of them go to Harvard.”

  “I’m calling Ophelia,” Molly said, “to try to warn her off. This woman is poison. It’ll be nine o’clock in Denver. It’s going to take a while, so hit your Men and Memories again if you want.”

  Coming in fifty pages later, Molly said, “The thing about Ophelia is, like Oprah or Roseanne, you understand their intellective processes in the light of the profit motive. But Pheely’s sounding as if there’s something in it for me as well, which I am not used to. I told her I want no part of whatever she has in mind and she insists: ‘Talk to the Doctor is all I’m asking, honey.’”

  She looked over Fred’s shoulder at the book. “Incidentally, Ophelia found a painter in Denver, she said. Wants you to know, Fred, because of your interest in the arts. She says this guy is going to be the new Leroy Neiman.

  “Anyway, ‘Just talk to Eunice,’ Pheely says. ‘Please? For me?’ God. She’s done so well with the Learning to Love the Body You Have series. I can’t imagine Ophelia Finger’s really got designs on the mystic realm now, do you?”

  “Most everything mystifies me. I spent half my day looking at a captive squirrel and thinking about a dead man’s feet.”

  “Dead feet?”

  “The ones in the painting. Since it’s over two hundred years old, I figure my guy croaked.”

  “Good. All this cult talk,” Molly said. She kissed the top of Fred’s head—the bristle of dark hair he kept short so it needed no brushing. “I started seeing dark woodses and dancing divils. I’m going upstairs. I thought you meant the old person Blanche Maybelle Stardust found by the river.”

  “No, I was talking art,” Fred said. “Nothing but good old art.”

  * * *

  “That goddamned Ophelia,” Molly said later, curled into Fred in her bed. “I’ll tell you what I hate, Fred.”

  Fred became more awake. Molly’s house was far enough from Spy Pond so you couldn’t see water, except from the roof peak. Nonetheless, tonight watery darkness lapped against Molly’s bedroom windows. There was no star- or moonlight, only a furry dusk that allowed Fred to make out Molly’s dresser and the mirror over it; the open door to the new bathroom, which had once been a closet or a borning room; the bedroom walls, papered with cornflowers and pinks in vertical swags. Fred’s presence in the house was betrayed only by his bulk in Molly’s bed and the clothes he kept in the smaller of Molly’s two clothes closets.

  Fred put a palm on the warm round of Molly’s knee where it pushed against his stomach. She was wearing the white shirt he’d taken off. “What do you hate, Molly?”

  “The stories were all about how these grown-ups were betrayed in childhood by their minister or their parents or the head of the PTA.”

  “There are hideous people in the world,” Fred said.

  “I gather the new book is full of them—but I’m not so impressed by the stories,” Molly said. “Though a tale about how a fifty-year-old woman was almost sacrificed to death on an altar of sin by her father, the respected symphony conductor who’s been dead twenty years—and who would have guessed he had that much spare time for a hobby?—it suggests an interesting tide of revisionism.”

  “And may be hard on the old man,” Fred observed. “Except he’s deader than my guy’s feet.”

  “No, what I hate,” Molly said, stroking a hand absently down Fred’s chest and fingering a nipple, “is that all of it sounds like the wisdom of the four-year-old, with heavy guns backing it up.”

  “Mm,” Fred said.

  “I remember Sam convinced, at about four, that his mother—that was me—had been replaced by a witch who looked exactly like me. Imagine if at that point he’d had the benefit of a kindly chorus gathering around him wearing capes and chanting, ‘You’re right, kid.’”

  They listened to a spasm of rain attacking the windows and crossing the roof. “I know it’s only March, but if something green doesn’t happen out there pretty soon,” Molly said, “I’m not going to be responsible.” Her questing fingers rested on the scar under Fred’s left shoulder. She was getting used to his scars, telling him he was battered like any old tree that doesn’t know to stand farther from the driveway. “It feels like another nipple,” Molly said.

  “A witch’s tit,” Fred said.

  “I was amazed,” Molly said. “For all I’ve railed and raged against organized religion, I have to say it beats the disorganized kind.”

  “I’ll tell you, Molly,” Fred said, sliding his hand along Molly’s fragrant-feeling back, under the wilted shirt, “I am beset by a sense of duality, because our mutual body language belies the content of our conversation.”

  “We’ll stop talking,” Molly suggested.

  * * *

  “Tell you what,” Molly said, turning efficient after the expiration of the moral equivalent of twenty-three pages.

  “What,” Fred said drowsily.

  “I keep remembering you running out naked into the snow that night.”

  “What?” Fred asked, almost sitting up.

  “The night you caught the man watching my house.”

  “I put my pants on,” Fred protested.

  “That’s irrelevant,” Molly said. “What I remember is my man naked as Adam’s off-angel, with knobs on, standing in a scurry of snow in the middle of the dark street—the snow in the streetlight makes a halo of white feathers around you, Fred. That’s what I remember. As if it was yesterday.”

  Fred stared into the room’s muddle of darkened forms.

  “You were on your way to meet the other witches,” Molly said. She went to sleep.

  9

  Oona, in her front window, beckoned to Fred as she saw him passing, carrying a large container of espresso from Chico’s. Jesus, that’s fast, Fred thought, pushing the door open and listening to its bell ching. They came in again? It was not yet ten o’clock. Oona shouldn’t be open.

  “Fred Taylor, I’m in love,” Oona said. She blushed. She was in black watered silk, which set off the blush. She clasped her rotund hands, beaming like a farm wife pleased by productivity on the part of her gang of chickens.

  “I’m glad for you,” Fred said. He dodged a collection of andirons, stepping aside to let Oona get to her street door and lock it.

  “No, not like that,” Oona said. “My little thing rests on its laurels. But nevertheless, Fred Taylor, this confirmed widow is in love.”

  Oona had never entrusted anything remotely confidential to him. Fred took a sip of his coffee, black and bitter.

  “I have sliv
ovitz to put in that, Fred Taylor,” Oona offered.

  “Thanks, maybe not,” Fred said.

  “Mr. Clayton Reed, the man you are working for,” Oona whispered, leading Fred toward the back room. “He came in yesterday pretending to be someone else, in order to trick from me my secret of the squirrel, and I am in love. I had not dreamed such a man could exist outside of fiction. He is—he is, I do not know which, the Wooden Prince or the Miraculous Mandarin?”

  Fred sat next to the desk while Oona installed herself behind it, where she could see to the street. The desk was covered with china salt-and-pepper shakers in the forms of birds and animals. “It’s a collection I bought,” Oona said. “Mostly American, mostly 1950s, but people like them.” She shrugged.

  “How about Wooden Mandarin?” Fred suggested. “As a compromise. For Clayton Reed.”

  “You are making fun,” Oona said. “It was love at first sight. Immediately I knew him, strutting like a stork who has just swallowed a fat frog filled with eggs and does not wish you to guess what pond he fished it in. And he was whistling an air from Szekelyfono, which not everyone can do, Fred Taylor—not on purpose, as he did it, in order to win my heart with a Magyar melody. I wept.” Bright tears even now stood in the corners of Oona’s eyes, and broadened their normal brilliance. “For Kecskemét is also my hometown.”

  Oona sighed and gazed past Fred toward distant Hungarian fields just the other side of Charles Street.

  “I must tell you I am partially bewildered,” Fred said.

  “Naturally,” Oona said magnanimously. She began marking prices on paper labels and sticking them onto salt-and-pepper shakers, which she coupled with rubber bands.

  “Seven-fifty?” Fred exclaimed, looking at one of the labels for a set of lurid post-Impressionist tortoises.

  Oona winked. “If you price them what they are worth, people think they are junk,” she said. “This reassures them they are not making a mistake. They can trust their eye, which tells them to like this. What can I do?”

  Fred had a drink of his coffee. Oona was taking her time.