Man With a Squirrel (6 page)

“Not yet,” Fred said. He turned to go, and had another thought. “If a person brought in an unstretched canvas, you wouldn't put it on stretchers for them, would you?”

The wise head continued shaking slowly from one side to another. “You want a framer,” it told Fred. “We can't help you.”

“Thanks anyway,” Fred said.

“No problem.”

*   *   *

At Mountjoy Street Fred surprised Clay, who was standing pensively next to his cluttered desk, staring at the fragment. Clay never dressed in anything other than a suit, unless, in a state of leisure, he dispensed with the suit jacket and substituted a red satin gown over his shirt and tie. The suit today was what Fred would call, in Copley's honor, Royall blue.

Fred took his battered brown tweed jacket off and hung it over the back of his chair. He leaned the frame against his desk. He'd picked it up from Oona's on his way over. Clay stood rapt, as if he heard the distant voice of someone else's conscience. Fred sat at his desk and popped the cap of the Dunkin' Donuts coffee he'd brought with him. Clay, as he often remarked, did not require stimulants, so there was no point picking up coffee for him.

Clay coughed, ran his fingers along the smooth angles of his cheek and chin, and said, “I believe you are right, Fred.”

“Think so?”

“All wisdom points in the direction of its not being by Copley,” Clay said. “But under the dirt, the manner, the brushwork, the apparent layering of color in the glazes, the awkward naïveté of the drawing, the clumsy goodwill of the detail if I see it correctly—I have to admit, Fred, it says Copley; and Copley almost at his best, before he fell in with bad companions.” Clay meant the English, the French, and the Italians. On the matter of the deleterious effect of the European influences on Copley, Fred and Clayton Reed were in agreement. “It introduces a nice diplomatic problem, Fred.”

Clay twisted with discomfort, corkscrewing on his feet, his long legs imitating those of an ostrich overcome by modesty.

“Because I found it and identified it?” Fred asked, touched at Clay's unusual generosity in acknowledging Fred's part in what could prove to be a major discovery. Clay looked blank. “You know I don't want anything,” Fred said. “If it turns out to have value we're not going to sell it.”

“Sell a Copley? Even a fragment?” Clay exclaimed, aghast. “I don't know what you are thinking, Fred.”

“My mistake,” Fred said. “I thought you felt uncomfortable because it was my discovery.”

Understanding blossomed, with a mild blush, beneath Clay's stack of white windblown hair. “No, no,” he said. “I would not insult you, Fred. If you wish to purchase something for your own account we have established that as your prerogative. No, what I meant as a nice diplomatic problem is, how can you make that woman tell you where the painting came from?” Clay folded his arms and tapped his foot, blocking the squirrel out of Fred's view.

“You've been to Oona's,” Fred concluded.

“It was a beautiful morning and I took the air,” Clay said.

“It was raining,” Fred reminded him.

“The saturated air led me along Charles Street. I spoke to the woman but said nothing to betray my interest. She struck me, Fred, as one whose family has, for generations, handily withstood what I have heard you refer to as augmented interrogation.”

“You understood Oona well,” Fred said. “For God's sake, Clay, don't go back. She's no dope, and if she smells she sold us a Copley she will become an enemy immediately. Our adversary. Competition.”

“Suppose she were informed I might budget a substantial figure for the rest of it?” Clay suggested.

“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 kettle, 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.