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

moved, everything you owned would be the same size.
    â€œI wonder if, starting from the label, we can work back to which of the three stores the stretcher bar came from,” Fred said. “The particular one I have.”
    The individual shook a head whose wealth of reddish curls moved in counterpoise. “Everything comes through Porter Square,” the individual said. “Before it’s here it’s there. But that doesn’t mean the person who bought it bought it there. They could as easily get it here or in the Church Street store. Do you need one?”
    â€œNot 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.”
    â€œThanks anyway,” Fred said.
    â€œNo 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.”
    â€œThink so?”
    â€œAll 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.
    â€œBecause 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.”
    â€œSell a Copley? Even a fragment?” Clay exclaimed, aghast. “I don’t know what you are thinking, Fred.”
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œYou’ve been to Oona’s,” Fred concluded.
    â€œIt was a beautiful morning and I took the air,” Clay said.
    â€œIt was raining,” Fred reminded