Man With a Squirrel Read Online Free PDF Page B

was scuffed and tire tracks crossed the sad-looking mat of grass. They were way above 1010 Memorial Drive, where a wealth of residential condominiums dwarfed the view.
    â€œIt must be where they pulled the old boy out,” Fred said. “Blanche Maybelle’s dancing ground.”
    Molly shuddered at the reminder of the dead white male of this morning’s newspaper. “She must make a loop, taking in both sides of the river so she can be seen at WBZ on the Boston side, trot over one of the bridges, and give the early academics a treat on this side. Strange,” Molly said. “I’m looking for the cinder blocks from around his neck. Of course, they take those with the body, since they’re part of the package.”
    Fred looked speculatively up the river, maybe a half-mile, to where a bridge crossed connecting Soldier’s Field Road, on the Boston side, to Cambridge and civilization and the road to Concord. The body could have been dropped off there and come downriver.
    â€œYou think he jumped in there?” Molly asked, following the direction of Fred’s glance.
    â€œIf he went in from the bridge, he could have washed down this far,” Fred said, “although in winter a person might not stand naked on the parapet of a bridge with twenty pounds or more of cinder blocks around his neck.”
    *   *   *
    They turned back to Harvard Square and parted company. Fred went into Boston, to the Museum of Fine Arts, to look at Copleys.
    There was a time after the Revolution when the first pirates of Boston got civic religion and established a temple for it in the form of the Athenaeum, into which only they were permitted to venture. Here they hoarded books and paintings, privacy and male courtesy. When their civic religion became tainted by democracy, certain of the pirates established a second temple, put art into it, called it the Museum of Fine Arts, and decreed that it should be available to edify the common citizenry. The idea was for people to enter and gaze at the portraits of the pirates hanging in the museum (rather than on the yardarms they had merited), and they, the common citizens, would be encouraged. It was a subtle form of terrorism.
    A century later, the trustees noted that citizens were not coming to the temple to be edified, and so they undertook to make the museum more attractive by raising the admission price, building a couple of new wings, flushing through blockbuster exhibitions of French pictures, selling souvenirs, gifts, and fancy luncheons, taking their cue, Molly said, from 2 John:13–16.
    A number of the founding pirates, in the good old days, had themselves painted by John Singleton Copley, and these were among the portraits that later formed the basis for the museum’s collection. Copley was a local boy who managed to paint almost as if he had seen European pictures, and certainly something more couth than the flat, mean renditions done by his only rivals, the part-time barn painters called limners, who rendered folks as if they were no more complex than turnips.
    Fred found in the early Copley a native intelligence and inquiry. Whatever the subjects assigned to him, he had his own interests, and played with space. He was most aware of the places you thought of looking last—under the table, for instance, or in the shadow of a hand or foot—until he went to England and lost it. Copley had no choice but to leave the Colonies, because his marriage, a move up socially, allied him with the Tories, and the country’s impending first election (in the form of the Revolution) was not going to go the Tories’ way.
    So just before the Revolution, Boston’s best native painter escaped to England and, since he’d been moving upward socially anyway, continued in a parallel aesthetic direction that took him into pious and/or history painting and worse, until he traveled to the Continent, became mortally infected by an Italian