Free Harmony In Flesh and Black by Nicholas Kilmer

life? Why shouldn’t he quietly watch Terry play baseball? Afterward he would drive her home and take the family out for Chinese. Later he and Molly might see what developed.
    Sitting in the chilly sunlight, enjoying the children’s struggle with the game, Fred was amazed, almost alarmed, at what his life, at this moment, looked like. He resembled someone with a wife and kids.
    As he watched the game, he felt anger blossoming that he knew had been seeded as soon as he looked down on that sordid, murdered thing on Turbridge Street. It had no right to spoil his chances. It had no right to threaten to cast its cloud—Fred’s cloud—over the little family where he was finding a civilian purpose.
    He wouldn’t stand for it. And why should Molly?
    In Molly’s company things could be funny. Unless Fred ruined it.
    That was a kind of beauty, funny. Like the children.
    Fred saw Terry’s team suffer a beautiful and ignominious defeat. He bought her an ice cream and comforted her for her skill and heroism, and they arrived home as the cold rain of evening started again. Molly met them at the door, dressed in a damp towel, moving fast.
    â€œYou shit,” she told Fred. “You didn’t leave a message where you were. I’ve been on the phone to Clayton. You never told me he gave us tickets to the party at the Gardner. I had to stop on my way home to have my hair cut. I ordered pizza for the children. Can you pick it up while I dress? I don’t know what you’re going to wear.”

7
    The style of the Gardner Museum was what Molly’s mother called Italianette. The building squats on Boston’s Fenway, a stucco cube embracing a covered garden courtyard that Mrs. Gardner built to segregate a segment of nature for the enjoyment of herself and her collection, including her husband, Jack. She bequeathed it in trust, to be maintained for posterity as she had left it, with nothing to be added or taken down.
    Molly and Fred were ushered in, ditched their raincoats at the door, and became beautiful.
    Molly’s routine did not normally lead her to spend time with the glitterati. She looked with interested pleasure across the ebb and flow.
    â€œOf course they’re only doing what they can to get into one another’s pants,” Molly observed. “Robbing each other, telling tales, backbiting, setting each other up as fools and criminals, stealing from each other, wrecking each other’s jobs and marriages, generally making hell for each other—but don’t they look lovely doing it!”
    Musicians played instruments in the courtyard: strings and reeds. It was a mob scene. Each paying guest was one of the elect. There was barely room in the corridors, staircases, exhibition rooms, and balconies for the happy few. Old Isabella’s collection was hard to see except for what was suspended above crowd level: the tapestries and Oriental screens. Isabella had led an extended rape of Europe’s churches, burdening ships with cargoes of rood screens, altarpieces, baptismal fonts, and fossilized saints. “It’s as if I’d kept Terry’s room just as she left it this morning,” Molly said. They’d gone to a third-floor room to make a first survey of the place. Above the crowd, Titian’s bull carried Europa off, the bull being headed toward them across painted water like a duck while attendants worried in the background, on the shore. Europa managed in spite of everything to keep her nightgown from riding all the way up, “maintaining a nice sense of priorities,” as Molly said.
    When Molly had met him at the kitchen door, so mad at him and so eager to go to the ball, Fred had objected. Clayton had pulled a fast one, stacking the deck by sneaking her the invitation. They’d almost had a fight, but not quite, and Molly was prepared to have a good time and be friends, if Fred would only “cheer up and be a good loser.”
    As