Free Harmony In Flesh and Black by Nicholas Kilmer Page B

courtyard, lush with palms and potted blue flowers that looked to Fred like a cross between pansies and linoleum. Clayton Reed, in black tie (he was born in black tie), appeared, kissed Molly’s hand, and asked Fred more loudly than necessary, “What do you represent?”
    Having been trapped into attending the party, Fred was prepared to be belligerent concerning the costume he had cobbled together. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck, and on his head a wreath woven of ivy and spring flowers torn out of Molly’s garden. To this he had added pants, his darkest available pants.
    â€œI’m surprised you don’t recognize the allusion,” Fred answered. “You are familiar with John Reinhard Weguelin’s Toilet of Taunus, also known as Adoring the Herm? Oil on canvas, forty by twenty-three inches, signed and dated 1887, in which a young bacchante is crowning, with a wreath, the herm of Bacchus? Offered at Sotheby’s in New York on May 24, 1988? You don’t remember? Lot ninety-six. I’m being the herm.”
    â€œThat explains the wreath,” Clay muttered. “The John Reinhard Weguelin allusion eludes me. Is it necessary?”
    â€œYou can check with the John Reinhard Weguelin guy,” Fred said. “That’s Vern G. Swanson of Springville, Utah, director of the Museum of Art there. It’s probably necessary at least to Vern.”
    â€œI understand, Fred. This is blather. You are joking, yes? Meanwhile, Finn’s here,” Clay said grimly. He pointed upward. “I saw him presiding over that balcony, from which he may yet bless this multitude should the divine afflatus move him. The man’s a miracle of heated air. All afternoon I had him. And at Doolan’s—he stood for fifteen minutes with that haystack in his hands, talking about how grand he is, and how modest a thing is Heade in comparison. Dismissing it. Yes. Yes, indeed. But I saw him on that balcony. He was talking, nay, whispering, with Higginson.”
    Higginson was an intern, a temporary assistant to the world’s expert on Martin Johnson Heade. The expert himself was traveling this year, which made Higginson, in Higginson’s opinion, world expert by default pro tem.
    â€œRight,” Fred said. “He’d have to be. Admitted it’s a small world, but it is unfortunate that the Heade guy should be a local boy. Why couldn’t it have been he, and not Swanson, who took the job in Springville, Utah?”
    â€œLet me have your ear, Molly,” Clayton said, leading her toward a table groaning with little things to eat. Clayton was not over six feet, but he was so thin and graceful that he gave the appearance of being very tall. His full mane of white hair made him seem older than he was; also, he looked distinguished. In fact, Fred thought, considering the scene from under the sticky shadows of his wreath, Molly and Clay made a distinguished-looking couple.
    Fred had warned Molly, driving in, that Clayton’s motives in procuring entrance for them were not pure.
    â€œPoor herm. Even this party is almost like work for you, isn’t it?” She grinned.
    The main work Fred was doing consisted in his appearing within this gathering as someone totally unburdened by guilty knowledge. It was why he had chosen the wreath’s conspicuous disguise.
    Fred watched Molly disappear into the throng on Clayton’s arm. Clay was looking smooth, concerned about nothing, happily exploiting his canopy. Molly was as good as Clayton at working a crowd: affable, personable, and able to converse without ruffling feathers. These were skills Fred did not have and could not make up for with directness and candor. It was a mark of the creative working relationship between them, not to mention also of Molly’s willing versatility, that even when tricked into attending this function against his better judgment, Fred, without prior planning, could slide Molly onto