Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Read Free Book Online

to make its library facilities available to all alumni—and, nudged by its worldly-wise development office, it extends alumnus status to include those like Fred whose Harvard careers were brief and catastrophic, who may use the library for a premium reduced to the level of near charity.
    Fred indulged a nonexistent taste for German art photography, putting off the moment when he might face incontrovertible evidence that Squirrel with Attendant Feet was no more than a daring flight of fancy by such a drudge as Reuben Moulthrop. The periodical room Fred sat in still smelled new, as if someone sprayed canned newness into it every Wednesday morning: new shelving, new glossy magazines. Even the few students, entering or reading, wafted strains of shampoo and designer coffee freshly brewed.
    The thing about the fragment he had purchased, that had attracted him as much as the quality of the painting’s workmanship, was the contrast between the old canvas—dirty and honest—and the new slash of separation from its matrix: the presence of staples where tacks should have been, and the cut-rate inadequacy of both the stretcher bars and frame. The contrast shrieked, Something is wrong here—like a man otherwise in business dress wearing sneakers and no pants, or the feral pig carrying a child’s head, trotting through dappled woods.
    It was the juxtaposition that grated. In Fred’s experience, you wanted either to follow the money and see where it flowed, eddied, and guttered, or to watch carefully the points where juxtapositions were awry.
    Fred realized he was staring at a particularly Mapplethorpean German exercise in black and white involving, it appeared, twinned melons and a flamethrower in dirty weather. He rose, tossed the magazine, stretched, and went down the new but brightly dismal staircase to poke in the stacks and think about Copley. The desks around the stacks had a feeling of panic: Christmas on death row. The intellective energy seemed caused more by anticipation than by thanksgiving. To begin with, the place smelled like a hamper. Homemade paper signs warned users away from certain of the carrels, reminding clients of persistent drips from plumbing overhead. One empty desk was covered with pleas scrawled in Magic Marker on the backs of 8½-by-11-inch flyers: “Help! I am studying for my generals. I need these books. Please!!! If you must use them, put them back.” Not a volume remained. The user had already, Christmas morning, been led to execution. Fred pulled an armload of books on Copley out of the stacks and sat at the victim’s desk.
    Perhaps people existed somewhere who could look at the stockings on the man’s legs in Fred’s painting and announce, That’s prime Worcester worsted, woven in 1763 by Dame Hannah Trimble and dyed by her in an iron cauldron using buckthorn and oak bark. Perhaps the shoes or their buckles, to a seasoned eye, would divulge age and place of origin—the shoes no doubt of local manufacture, and the buckles either imported or inherited (they would pass from one pair of shoes to another, being silver and precious), or made by Paul Revere.
    Fred started looking at the accessories in the reproductions of early Copley portraits, as if the dull, flat effigies of three-dimensional paintings were advertisements from old Sears catalogs, showing the satisfied users of the gateleg table (cat. #1763-a) or the china import plate (cat. #567-c) heaped with overstuffed clingstone peaches (see Garden section).
    The gold chain on the squirrel might have considerably more market value than a Negro Man, being offered for sale below the reproduced fragment from a newspaper advertisement announcing the removal of Copley’s widowed mother, together with her tobacco store, from Boston’s Long Wharf to Lindel’s Row, against the Quaker’s meetinghouse …
    â€œIf I’d ever finished college,” Fred told Molly later, over a