Man With a Squirrel (3 page)

Fred's job with Clayton Reed had never been defined. It was quite well paid and subject to endless redefinition, according to what was happening. Basically, Clay was as much a collector as Fred was a noncollector, and Clay didn't pick things up; so Fred did a good deal of lifting and kept his eyes open for paintings that might appeal to Clayton.

It was standard practice that if Fred saw something he thought interesting and that might otherwise escape, he should grab it for Clayton's account, as long as it wasn't too expensive. If Clay didn't think much of it, they'd ditch it later.

Clay had disposed of a few things Fred still regretted; but Clay had never once faulted Fred's choice. Clay's tastes in painting were so broad, and his personal foibles so particular, that Fred had a twenty percent chance of choosing something that actually stayed in the collection when he did haul in a painting on his own.

In general, especially when a large expenditure was involved, they had plenty of time to confer before a commitment was made. Clayton loved the period of deliberation, because it allowed him to perfect his foibles.

Once over the Pepper Pot, Fred crisscrossed the street, finding nothing to hold him until he came to Oona's. Oona was sitting in the back of the shop behind her big table, which was cluttered as always with breakable objects.

“Come on back, and watch your feet, Fred Taylor,” Oona called. She was busy gluing price tags to a row of unmatched cut-glass liqueur goblets.

Oona was in her mid-sixties, a comfortably fat woman who boasted that she had kept a shop on Charles Street since shortly after Noah's Flood. She knew everything there was to know about any human artifact made between
A.D
. 1700 and 1940. After 1940 she lost interest and proclaimed, It's all junk. She was as honest as she was ruthless. Fred had never found anything he wanted to buy for Clayton from her shop. If he bought jewelry for Molly, though—which must not be expensive or Molly would refuse it—he would get it from Oona.

Oona today was wearing a dark green dress that looked like a surplus tent, with many silver pins attached to it. Her hands fluttered around the crystal, seeming to hypnotize it so that it moved from place to place without her actually touching it.

“Something I want you to see, Mr. Fred Taylor,” Oona said, groaning as she rose to her full five feet, and started for the back room. It wouldn't be unusual for her to have the best things out of sight, reserved for preferred customers or being kept from the light of common day.

Fred followed Oona between cases where china and glass swayed; against these were stacked portfolios of prints and drawings that he could go through later.

“A painting just came in,” Oona said, opening the door to the room in back, which looked like a small version of the one they had just left, packed with furniture, glass, china, books, and portfolios. A square canvas leaned against the legs of a small desk, representing a man's feet, in shoes with buckles, shrouded in greasy dirt. The man was wearing stockings, and all around the feet was a smooth darkness. The thing was nailed clumsily into a frame, and Fred winced, seeing how the heads of the nails had scratched the canvas. Slowly he realized that this was the back of something, the back of a framed picture. Oona turned it around.

“The frame is Woolworth's,” Fred said. “Or the next class down.”

Oona puffed slightly, holding the painting. “You take it, Fred Taylor,” Oona said. “What do you think?”

The thing was almost two feet square and, behind the dirt, quite interesting. The bell on the shop door clanged and Oona stood in the back room's doorway, to keep her eye on the newly entered client.

The picture that the frame displayed represented a squirrel, half life-size; a common gray squirrel sitting in a patch of sunlight on a floor, with a little collar from which a chain—gold, and done with great care (if one could read correctly behind the dirt)—extended upward through the gloom to the top of the canvas. The chain seemed to come out of the frame, one of those Mexican things, real wood carved to look poured, like plastic. Beside the squirrel, on the floor, was an acorn. The floor was laid out in a pattern—either marble or wood painted to resemble marble. Most of the floor was in shadow, like the background of the feet on the other side.

“Tell me your story,” Fred said.

4

“I'm crazy,” Oona said. “I bought it from some people this morning. I just like it, crazy as I am. I know nothing of paintings.”

“It's interesting,” Fred said.

“I know, but what is it?”

“A squirrel,” Fred said. Oona was asking, What is the painting? but Fred wouldn't bite. If she was selling and he was buying, why should he tell her what she had?

“Why don't I take it out of the frame?” Fred suggested.

“Be my guest. Tools in the top drawer.” Oona went into the shop to wait on a customer, closing Fred into the back room. Fred cleared a space on the desk and laid the frame on its face, to examine those shoes with the buckles. Almost dissolved in shadow behind them appeared the legs of a piece of furniture, round, curving feet in back of the human feet and legs, and a central shaft of wood that should support a round tabletop. The vandal who had nailed the picture into the frame had scarred the canvas in back with the hammer and scored it with the heads of the nails.

Fred found diagonal pliers and slipped an index card behind the nails as he removed them so as not to cause more damage. Then he lifted out the canvas. It had been cut out of something larger. This length was bent around a cheap new stretcher and stapled, so that the squirrel was made the subject of an exclusive portrait, the legs and feet of its human companion folded away. Staples had been fired through the painted surface around the stretcher's top and sides. Only the bottom edge was where the artist had intended. Even more of the painting had been bent over at the top, cut off brutally just below the man's knees. That cut was fresh. This was a living fragment of a thing recently destroyed.

Fred took the staples out carefully. It was a job more properly done by a conservator, but in an emergency the brave bystander must attempt the appendectomy. The canvas, when he had gotten the whole thing off, was heavy and quite dark with dirt and age. It looked to be from the eighteenth century.

It was the relic of incredible vandalism.

Fred laid the fragment across the desk. The paint, for all the dirt and the abuse it had suffered, was in reasonable shape. The artist had not used bitumen, and so the darks were not severely crackled. What appeared on Oona's desk, once the fragment was freed of its stretcher, was about two by three and a half feet: an image, stitched up and down with the holes the staples had made, in which the gentleman's buckled shoes were on the left, and pointing off left, and his squirrel was on the right and facing to the right. The top edge of the fragment had been cut, with a knife or a razor blade. Hesitation marks were hacked at the edge and where the blade had run off-square and done extra cutting across the man's shin.

When Oona came in, Fred said again, “It's very nice. It was. What a mess. What a crime. It's ruined. Still, at least they folded it instead of chopping out the squirrel and gluing it on a board, which they could have done.”

The marks on the top looked so fresh that if it had been a human body cut that recently, the blood would still be oozing, wet, not yet settled to scab.

“Oona, what can I say?” Fred said. “Except I like it. It's been destroyed. Wrecked. It's a disaster. I'll buy it.”

“I paid a lot for it,” Oona said. “Because I'm crazy, Fred Taylor. I like the squirrel more than the feet. It's better without the feet. Overcome by the squirrel, I paid them too much money. It had cardboard over the back. I didn't understand it was cut from a bigger picture. The rest was damaged maybe?”

“How much?” Fred asked.

“It's not for sale. I paid too much,” Oona said. “So I have to charge you too much.”

“Tell me what you want,” Fred said. “I'm in your hands. If you paid too much, you'll want too much, and I'll pass.”

Oona thought for a minute. They stood on either side of the dismounted canvas. Fred studied the stretcher. It had a paper inventory sticker from Bob Slate on it, as well as the Fredrix brand name burned in. The vandals were local talent. Fred knew of three Bob Slate locations in Cambridge. Slate himself, recently dead, was a legend of Cambridge entrepreneurial success and stability. The size of the stretcher bars was stamped on them too: twenty by twenty inches.

“How does five thousand dollars sound?” Oona asked.

“Jesus!” Fred said.

“Hmm,” said Oona.

“Can I see the cardboard that you took off it?” Fred asked.

“Nothing on it,” Oona said, shaking her head. “Just cardboard from a box.”

The door's bell clanged, with the mailman entering, and again, departing. Fred strolled toward the front of the store and looked at the portfolios of prints, indicating that his interest in the transaction was dwindling. Oona went back to her table and sat there, writing prices and fluttering them onto the crystal, indicating that if Fred didn't want to bite, plenty of other people in the world would.

“The thing is, Fred Taylor,” Oona said, “they may come again, with something better, as long as I buy the first time, for which reason I pay too much. In case they have something good next time.”

“Have you seen them before?” Fred asked.

Oona shook her head and kept shaking it, falling into a different key, adding, “I always lose money.”

Fred said, “How about a thousand?”

It was not possible that Oona had paid more than five hundred, tops, to someone coming in off the street with this vandalized object in its ludicrous frame. But she knew quality when she saw it—and her own opinion could only be reinforced by Fred's interest.

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.”