Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Read Free Book Online Page A

selection of books he was carrying with him to study at home, “or gotten a Ph.D. in art history, or found myself teaching a Copley seminar to a passel of grad students, I’d make them take all the portraits he did between 1760 and 1774 and compute the fair replacement values of the accessories shown—not the architectural motifs, which are wish-fulfillment fantasies on the part of the sitters, but the necklaces, tables, chairs, pots, books, rugs, clothes—and figure Copley’s social rise in terms of purely crass materialism.
    â€œIt’s how the human killed the painter in him,” Fred said. “Success leads to gilding, which is no more than fat with sunlight on it.”
    â€œDid you say gilding or gelding?” Molly asked. Fred had stopped in at the public library and was failing to persuade Molly to come out in the rain for lunch. “And if you are trying to trick me into eating with you,” Molly said, “it would be tactful not to mention fat. I am working for lean and mean.”
    The reading room at the public library looked like death row after a long-postponed general amnesty has been proclaimed: the few inmates left seem bemused by a sudden relief that might, in time, lead to their generating a purpose in life.
    â€œYou’re not forgetting the thing at Sam’s school?” Molly asked.
    â€œSeven-thirty,” Fred said. “I’ll eat lunch for us both.”
    â€œMeanwhile I was going to have a look at Cover-Hoover’s book, the first one, Culture of Abuse, ” Molly said. “But it’s always out, and there’s a waiting list. Can you get me a copy out of Harvard’s Widener?”
    â€œYou can’t call Cover-Hoover and ask her for a copy,” Fred said. “I failed to record her secret number. Come have lunch.”
    â€œCan’t. I have work to do. There’s a student coming in at three looking for ancestors.”
    â€œSend him to the New England Historic Genealogical Society,” Fred suggested.
    â€œI don’t think she’s got those kind of ancestors,” Molly said, “any more than I do. As far as yours go…”
    â€œMine went as far as they could,” Fred said. “To Iowa, where people don’t write books. Too busy stamping on grasshoppers.”
    *   *   *
    Fred wandered toward the T stop. As long as he was in the vicinity, he’d stick his nose into Bob Slate’s. That was the warmest trail he had to follow concerning the squirrel—except for maybe the cheesy Mexican frame. He paused at the first pay phone he encountered and telephoned Oona. “Hold that frame for me, would you? I’ve decided I can use it.”
    Whoever had stapled the old canvas to the stretcher bars had gone into Bob Slate’s—one of the two in Harvard Square, or the one at Porter Square. Fred came first to the Mass. Ave. branch, across from the forbidding entrance to Harvard Yard at Widener Library. He located the bins where stretcher bars were offered—the twenties in between the eighteens and the twenty-twos—and became no wiser.
    Fred found his way to a desk in back where he waylaid an individual wise in the ways of the world, with special knowledge of inventory control. “Suppose I found a Fredrix stretcher bar with a Bob Slate sticker on it reading TAR 6020? What would the sticker tell me?”
    The individual wise in the ways of the world scratched a honey-colored chin, brushed crumbs off a checked shirt, and told Fred, “Not a whole lot. “The ‘TAR’ is short for Tara Distributing Inc. The ‘sixty’ likely means it’s for a stretcher bar, which you say you already know, and the ‘twenty’ means it’s a twenty-incher. Why?”
    Fred dodged a frantic young man smelling strongly of second-hand smoke who pressed through the aisle carrying stacks of cardboard meant to be folded into boxes so that when you