Painted Ladies

“Do they know who the men were that tried to kill you?”

“Couple of Dutch mercenaries,” I said. “Joost and Van Meer.”

“Do you know why they wanted to kill you?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, they probably wanted to kill me because they’d been employed to. But who employed them and why?” I shook my head.

She sipped her coffee and looked at her watch.

“Is there any way I can help,” she said.

“Actually, yeah, maybe,” I said. “I need to talk with an expert in seventeenth-century low-country art, somebody got no stake in this case.”

“I don’t know anyone like that at this minute,” Susan said. “But I have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

“So you’ll find somebody.”

“Of course.”

She checked her watch. According to the clock on my stove, it was five minutes to ten. Actually, the clock, being digital, like they almost all are, read nine-fifty-six. But I was pretty loyal to the old ways, and I translated and rounded off, just as I had in the happy years before digital. On the couch, Pearl was snoring calmly.

Susan put her coffee cup on my counter.

“I think I’ll get her started,” Susan said.

“Good idea,” I said. “How long you think it’ll take you to get there?”

“Oh, I don’t know, five minutes maybe?”

“Which will make it approximately ten o’clock,” I said.

“Yes, but I don’t want to be late.”

“You’re always late,” I said.

“Not on Pearl’s second date,” Susan said. “What kind of a mother would I be?”

She was playing, and we both knew she was. And we both knew also that she wasn’t altogether and entirely playing. We cleaned up the breakfast, put the dishes in the washer, and headed over to the Public Garden. It was ten-fifteen.

34

At eleven-oh-three Susan and I were leaning on the railing of the bridge over the frozen pond where late the sweet swan boats plied. Pearl was snuffling through the vestigial snow at the Arlington Street end of the bridge, alert for a discarded doughnut. No one would, of course, discard a doughnut, so I knew her search was aimless. Still, I liked to let her cultivate her hunting impulse. I didn’t want to impose our realistic limits on the soar of her imagination.

“‘To strive,’” I said to Susan, “‘to seek . . . and not to yield.’ ”

“Of course,” Susan said.

Pearl stopped suddenly and lifted her head. She did an olfactory scan of the air, head lifted, short tail out straight, body motionless and rigid, one forepaw raised. Then she put the forepaw down carefully, posed like that for another few seconds, and exploded on a dead run toward Boylston Street. Coming like a tidal wave through the gate from Boylston Street was Otto. They met in exuberant collision somewhere near the far end of the frozen swan boat pond. Otto bowled Pearl over and then tripped over her and fell down, too, and they rolled on the ground, mock fighting, with their tails wagging ferociously. Otto’s mother was there, with a good-sized man, who turned out to be Otto’s father. Otto’s father had a definite New York City look about him.

Both dogs got their feet under them and faced each other with their back ends elevated, front paws extended, chests near the ground, growling lasciviously, and head faking at each other. Then suddenly they straightened and began to dash in widening gyres about the Public Garden as pedestrians dodged and some cringed. Susan and I and Otto’s mom and dad stood watching like chaperones at a freshman dance.

“They’re adorable,” Otto’s mother said.

“Absolutely,” Pearl’s mother said.

There was a Scottie and a Jack Russell off leash in the garden as well as Otto and Pearl, and they made a kind of halfhearted attempt to get in on the frolic, but they couldn’t keep up, and neither Pearl nor Otto paid them any mind.

“We take him almost everywhere,” Otto’s mom said. “Do you like pictures?”

“I love pictures,” Susan said.

Otto’s mom took out a digital camera and began to click through the stored pictures as Susan leaned over, looking at them and saying “Oh my God” and “Totally adorable,” and things like that. What made me smile was that I knew she meant it. She loved looking at other people’s pictures, especially pictures of Pearl’s first real romance.

“Stop there,” Susan said. “Where is this?”

“Oh, that’s a gala we took him to,” Otto’s mom said. “We posed him in front of that painting because we thought it looked a little like him.”

Susan said to me, “Look at this.”

I looked. It was a picture of Otto, beaming and self-confident, in front of the painting of a prosperous-looking seventeenth-century merchant who did, in fact, look a little like Otto.

“Frans Hals?” I said.

“Yes,” Otto’s mom said. “It was a benefit for a small museum in New York of seventeenth-century Dutch art.”

“Same period when they founded New Amsterdam,” I said.

“Exactly,” Otto’s mom said.

As they had on their last meeting, Pearl and Otto finally burned themselves out and came and flopped down with their tongues hanging from their mouths. Otto’s dad bent over and patted them both.

“Do you know people at this museum?” Susan said.

“Oh, yes,” Otto’s mom said. “I’m on the board.”