John Finn Read online

  So, it wasn’t a bad wait. Maybe forty-five minutes. I expected as much, after putting Peterson off. But what did he expect? I’d paid half-price for mine, but Bruins tickets run at least sixty bucks even for the nosebleeds. Besides, it was time well spent. Burley had a story.

  ​Burley tells me he’d been working a bit in a show in Cambridge. The lead got sick. The understudy steps in, leaving the understudy’s slot, a secondary role, open. Burley knows the piece cold and asks for the part. The assistant director looks at him and says he’s not right for it. The part calls for a good-looking fellow who might be competition for the lead’s interest in the leading lady. Burley is a good-looking guy. But he’s a little darker than the assistant director had in mind. Burley doesn’t let him get by with that. The director figures he can solve this problem by asking Burley to read the part on the spot with half the cast within earshot. It’s a challenge. If he can’t, it’ll be reason enough to overlook him. Burley delivers the whole five minutes worth of lines without a pause. Now the assistant director is in a fix. But he tells Burley to find some clothes and get ready.

  At the end of the show, the audience wants Burley to take an extra bow. He does. But afterwards, he gets fired. The star—the star who was sick that night with laryngitis—was in the audience. He doesn’t want the competition.

  ​That’s not the way it works in the movies, is it?

  So, Burley is out of a job. That turns out to be important.

  ​Lieutenant Peterson shows up and we go into the gallery and chat. Right off there is no guessing. Peterson is an obnoxious moron who obviously knows how to kiss ass, or he would not have risen even to the rank of lieutenant. I figure he is about due anytime soon to hurt his back on the job and go out on full disability for a year or two so he can play with his new boat up at Winnipesaukee or nurse his roses in Sarasota and I think I can see that same wish for him in the eye of his partner. His partner is a sergeant and doesn’t say a word. I can just read it in his eyes when Peterson talks.

  ​Peterson wants to know where I was after the gallery closed. I tell him. He wants to know if I have any corroboration for that. I tell him I don’t. He wants to know if I have ever been involved with anything—anything being a felony, fraud, or capital crime. I tell him I haven’t killed anybody in years. He doesn’t like the joke.

  ​Meanwhile, he has his eye on Burley, who is sitting in a chair by the door. He can see that Burley is very interested in what’s going on. When I crack the joke about not recently killing anybody, the Lieutenant’s voice gets strained. He wants to know all about it. He asks me when that was? He actually did. I tell him it was a bad joke and apologize. He had no idea. He’s must be about thirty years old. It totally went by him.

  His partner, a sergeant, speaks up. The Sergeant has an index card with some particulars about me he probably cribbed from a phone call to Connie.

  ​So instead the detective turns on Burley. He says, “Were you with your friend last night?”

  ​Burley blinks at him like he is trying to figure out the source of this totally stupid question. Burley is a good actor and he somehow says this without a word. I’m standing right there. Burley has heard every word I’ve been saying. If the detective wanted a contradiction, he should have kept Burley outside and questioned him separately, right? The sergeant rolls his eyes and looks away. The sergeant’s got my sympathy now.

  ​The sergeant pulls the detective over to the side and whispers in his ear. I take the time to look at the pictures on the wall and make note of the empty space where the Turner was.

  It was a large piece that was stolen. Maybe four feet wide in the frame. Ships in a harbor. Portsmouth, England, I think. I didn’t look hard at it last night because I’m not a Turner fan. I think he’s over-rated. Big on the soft watercolor proto-impressionist skies and too short on the important detail for me. Besides. There were several small Thomas Eakins pieces there and I like Eakins. Those had gotten me to thinking about when I was a kid and that was why I was so loaded with words by the time I got home last night.

  Just then, I was standing in front of the empty wall, wondering if they took the Turner out in the frame or cut it out like the guys did who robbed the Gardner Museum. That’s when the detective finally asks me, “Did you notice anything odd last night?”

  I don’t say, ‘Gee, it’s about time you asked.’

  I said, “Yes,” and I paused then to make sure he was listening and not just going through the numbers. “I noticed a fellow who spent at least fifteen or twenty minutes looking at the Turner, but I don’t think he was looking at the paint job. Black hair. Too black. About my age, but not a touch of gray. A little over-weight. Blue suit. No tie. Glasses with steel frames. And he seemed very interested in the frame of the picture.”

  “How tall?”

  “Your height.” I motioned to the Sergeant.

  The detective turned to the gallery owner. Just looked at him. No question.

  The owner perked right up. “I didn’t know him. He had one of the invitations. He could have gotten it from another gallery. I don’t know. But I saw him too. He’s right. I noticed him too.”

  The detective says, “Why didn’t you mention him before?”

  The gallery owner shrugged as if that wasn’t his job. “I’d forgotten about him.”

  “Can you give me a description?”

  “Like that fellow says. About as tall is the sergeant there. Black hair. Glasses.”

  Then silence. The detective’s partner is writing. I nudge the partner’s shoulder with my hand and pointed at Burley.

  I say, “The guy stood over there by the window for maybe ten minutes after he’d looked at the painting. Just before he left. There was a woman sitting in the chair where Burley is now. Good-looking redhead. Green dress. Another woman came over to her and the red head stood and they talked and it partly blocked the guy from the door. I noticed him reach for the back of the chair and shift it over, so he could leave.”

  ​The Lieutenant detective says, “So?”

  The Sergeant looked over at Burley’s chair. It had a nice wide chrome metal frame. Burley got up and stood by the evidence, blocking the gallery owner who was already moving in that direction. The Sergeant detective put his cell phone up to his ear and asked from some assistance.

  Half an hour later, two more cops show up with their bags and take some prints off the back of the chair. Most of this time I spent talking to Burley about Turner and Eakins. Burley needs an art education and I needed to exercise some of what I learned in schools years ago before I forget it entirely. At that point I just went home. I was tired. The cheap beer at the Garden does that, so I parted with Burley at the Park Street station.

  None of this was very difficult. All of the details of the robbery worked their way out over the next week or so. The gallery owner was arrested. His partner in crime was well known by his prints and cut a deal by laying the plan on the owner. It was an insurance heist. Mr. Boris was heavily in debt. Drugs.

  In the meantime, I got Connie to give Burley a job. I’ve been full-time with Connie’s team for all of two weeks and I already have him picking up another player. He isn’t happy about it, but it’s part of the deal. I told him. If he’s going to keep his business, he needs some more talent. I’m a partner now, even if Connie’s the boss. For Burley, it’s only temporarily, of course. Until he can get another gig in a show somewhere.

  7. Beekeeping

  I’ve kept journals off and on through the years. For the most part, just another excuse for not doing something else. Another escape. I want to say, people doing worthwhile things don’t have time for journals.

  And that said, you know I’m wrong.

  There is Cherry-Garrard. There is the great Champlain. There is the strangely anonymous James Magra’s account of the astounding voyage of Captain Cook. And there is always Boswell. There’s Pepys too, but that’s more a diary. I could never keep a diary. But keeping a journal has been useful. Especially
of late.

  My method isn’t parochial. I don’t try to get everything down—just the bits I’m likely to forget. The smell of something. The color. Usually that’s enough. Then maybe a little of what was said.

  I had an early breakfast yesterday over at the Columbus Diner. Rickie Havens is dicing potatoes in the bacon grease on the griddle with his spatula. Doddie Parker is talking about the uniforms of the British regulars when they landed near Phipp’s Farm—a place better known today as Lechmere and just another stop on the MBTA Green Line—but then it was a point of swampy land almost directly across the Charles River from Barton Point in Boston. Barton Point is another place long since swallowed by the growth of the city.

  Doddie is fond of small details. He goes to auctions looking for neglected scraps of history. He’s a small man and goes unnoticed until his hand reaches up at the air like he’s going to grab a rope and he snags the item he came for with a low bid. He has small hands and, if you look past the liver spots, you’d think he was a kid.

  I’m sipping my coffee as slow as I can so there’ll be time to hear all Doddie has to say. It sounds like it will be a three-cup explanation.

  He says, “This was foolish. There were no good roads out of there. It was the closest point as the crow flies, but for a grenadier packing a fourteen-pound musket, powder that he hasta’ keep dry and even a light pack at thirty pounds more, plus those godawful boots—have you seen a pair of those boots?—a soldier’s foot changed shape before that leather would—can you imagine what they were like when they were wet? And those woolens—hell, the uniform’s weighed twenty pounds before you added the water. No. Colonel Smith was a fool. Had he taken the main road, his men would have moved faster—and dryer—and reached Concord just as fast, but in better shape. They weren’t going to fool anybody by surprise anyway.”

  Rickie Havens had the potatoes pushed back in a heap and broke our eggs on the center of the griddle. He turned to talk as he broke the eggs, but he hit his spots very neatly.

  “John, you said that boy in the well wasn’t wearing any wool. You said he was a farmer.”

  “Linens. Homespun linen.”

  Doddie said, “Linen! Now that stuff is proof our forefathers had better mettle. It’s nothin’ like the cloth they make today that’s been broken down with chemicals. You ever wear homespun? It’s not soft and comfy right outta the box. And every time you wash it, some of those little fibers break. Like wearing the shirt you had on at the barbershop all day long. It’ll put welts on my delicate skin like I was stung by a bee. That’s why they didn’t wash things then the way we do today. Now, if you wear a new homespun linen shirt for a week or two, it breaks in, just right.”

  Now, that’s the kind of detail I really liked. I got that down in my journal last night. Then I did a bit of internet searching. I went for eighteenth century spellings. I wondered if there might have been more wool available just before the outbreak of hostilities than afterward. Linen, made from flax, could be grown anywhere, of course. The quality depended on the growing season. A shorter season produced a short fiber. I added a couple of dozen notes to my original description. Then, all of a sudden, I had a nice bit of dialog in my head between Izaak Andrews and his wife.

  Mary Ellen once told me it looked like a beehive on the page. One of those rounded hives they always had in the newspaper cartoons with the bees making lines away. I remember how odd I thought the observation was. Mary Ellen was not given to metaphors. But then I left my journal open one day and when I came back I saw it from the far side of the desk for the first time. Upside down it does look like a beehive.

  I always start at the top of the page with the ideas spilling thick and heavy before they run out line by line. Afterwards, I’ll get second thoughts about what I’ve written and scrawl those down and draw lines to where they connect to the original observation. Usually it’s just a better word to use—or marking an idea to develop.

  Sometime later I found another similarity. There is a sting to past thoughts. Just now I’ve been trying to make sense of what has happened with Rebecca. Why did I want to like her so much, and why had that failed so badly?

  The last Sunday in July we had breakfast in the narrow space Becky has designated as her balcony. It’s actually an area intended as a fire escape over the extended roof of the floor below. Those old Cambridge Victorians have all been subdivided into apartments now and the fire laws have called for some creativity. She had plants hung on the iron rail for decoration. An orange and green striped canvas awning extended from the sill above the same open window we had used to climb out. And there is a tight grill of wooden slats to create the appearance of a floor. The back leg of my folding lawn chair kept getting stuck between the slats. But then, I probably weigh twice as much as she does. She keeps herself trim.

  We had both Sunday papers splayed on the slats between us. She was leaving for Maine that afternoon, so we were out there early. Very little breeze. The sun smelled of honeysuckle.

  Out of the blue—actually between sips of coffee—she says, “Did you know I was a virgin then?”

  I was reading about the mechanics of Josh Beckett’s pitching arm and it caught me off guard.

  “When?”

  “Amherst. When we first met.”

  Facts are facts, I suppose.

  “What made you ask me that now?”

  She looked at me briefly, eye to eye, and then stared out over the back yard below us as if looking for something as she answered.

  “I was just thinking about why I hadn’t slept with you way back then. I know I wanted to. It was on my mind a lot. I remember that. And I think you were working on the same idea. Am I right?”

  “Right. I was twenty years old. That was just about the only thing on my mind back then.”

  “So why didn’t it happen?”

  I dropped Josh Beckett to the slats. My coffee mug was empty, so I couldn’t use it as a delaying tactic. Instead, I examined the line of her one leg where it broke the parting in her robe. I didn’t have an answer I could use. I grunted stupidly. Then I said it.

  “I was stupid.”

  She shook her head.

  “No. It had nothing to do with how stupid you were. You were a colossal jerk, but I did think I might be in love with you and I was desperate to find out what sex was all about.”

  Well, there was no denying my stupidity at least. I protested, “You disappeared. Remember? You went away. To Virginia.”

  She shook her head at me. “That was in May. I mean before that. We started hanging out together in September. That’s a long time to avoid the obvious.”

  “Yeah.” It was. I remembered that.

  She turned one widened eye on me.

  “Were you seeing somebody else?”

  I shrugged innocently at the accusation. “No. The first year, yes. But after that I swore off sex. I really couldn’t think with that on my brain. Senior year I was a monk. I had credits to make up to graduate.”

  She narrowed her eyes

  “That first year—was that the little blonde?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was her appeal?”

  I shrugged. “She was blonde.”

  “I see.”

  But that gave me an opening to avoid a direct answer with a question of my own. “Does that mean you already had an eye on me in our freshman year?”

  She nodded. “Yes. We had the same history class. Remember?”

  I remembered, “Yeah. Bennett. He almost put an end to my interest right there.”

  She took that memory in with a loud breath. “He was terrible. But it gave me lots of time to make an appraisal of the class. You were the only one that seemed at all interesting.”

  This had to be a compliment. I jumped at this chance after being categorized as a stupid jerk.

  “What was so interesting about me? I was a lout.”

  “Yes. That too. But you asked questions. You were the lout who was always questioning Bennett. No matter
what he said. I used to watch his eyes when he made any substantive statement of fact. They would always flit over to you, to see if you were going to raise your hand. You never failed him.”

  I remember the class as a continuing effort to stay awake. I had a night job at a local hotel to help with expenses. Asking too many questions was as much of a game as I could make out of that class.

  I said, “He was an idiot. That was just to stay awake.”

  “It was fun. I think it entertained everybody.”

  “It got me a ‘B’. I wrote a twenty-page paper debunking his bullshit about the French Revolution, point by point, and he gave me a ‘B’.”

  “He gave me an ‘A’. But I think he gave every girl in the class an ‘A.’ I figured he was looking for some extracurricular appreciation. But we all thought he was a buffoon. And I wasn’t the only girl in that class who was watching you.”

  That made me sit up. I could remember a red head with eyes so green the colors clashed.

  “Really. Who else?”

  She shook her head with pity.

  “Well, there was the blonde, of course.”

  I had forgotten. I redirected the questioning.

  “So why did you keep your virginity under the circumstances? I mean, despite my hot panting and heavy hands?”

  She shook her head at me, ready to scold.

  “No. You were always gentle. I was surprised at how gentle you were. I still am. You don’t look it. And now I regret my efforts to stay chaste. You’re like a lost explorer. I never know where you’re going to turn up next.”

  “It’s only because I can’t make up my mind.”

  That got a smile. She looks twenty years younger when she smiles.

  She looked down at her hands. “But the answer to your question is what you said to me a few weeks ago. About love. Remember? You can remember that far back, can’t you? You hit the button with that. It was because I wanted you to tell me you loved me. I wanted to make love. I believed in Keats and Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning then. I believed in love. Just like the Beatles. And I waited. And waited—you lout, you. I waited all the way to graduation.”