by Jane Langton
All the benefactors were wealthy men and women, but in the Renaissance mind of Titus Moon, they fitted into categories. Some of them were cultivated lovers of art whose appetite could only be fed by looking at monuments of ageless splendor, by gazing at the green faces of fourteenth-century saints, or the marble folds of Greek and Roman draperies, or the painted skies of eighteenth-century landscapes. And of course there were scholars among the benefactors, learned men and women lost in their own specialties, with strong opinions about Flemish tapestries, or new theories about the cinerary urns of ancient Rome.
But many of the benefactors were rich women who favored the museum because it was a safe and attractive charity, worthwhile but not upsetting, unlike welfare associations or pressure groups for civil rights. In a casual way they admired the sculpture and the paintings, but best of all they loved dropping in with their friends to exclaim at the blossoming courtyard and eat lunch in the café.
Flower ladies, Titus called them in mild contempt, but he was well aware of their value to the museum. And he was grateful for the magnificent floral effects his head gardener had produced in the courtyard, where blue cinerarias were blazing now among trees of yellow jasmine, pots of arum lilies and pale narcissus, where throughout the year the garden burst into magnificent bloom with extravagant displays of lilies and orchids, cyclamen and azaleas.
“It’s always so peaceful here,” the flower ladies would say to one another, failing to notice the scenes of the Passion on the wall behind them, or the tragic marble head of Apollo beside the jar of Easter lilies, or the slave in the claws of a lion, above the container of sweet-smelling jasmine.
This morning the naked boy on Pesellino’s panel painting, the cruel youth called Love, was sharpening his arrows for Titus Moon, and he was busy among the benefactors as well, drawing his bow and taking careful aim.
His new victims were Beryl Bodkin, the wife of an impossible husband, and Fenton Hepplewhite, the husband of an impossible wife. Somehow these two unhappy people, crushed as they were in the grip of their wretched marriages, had stumbled upon one another in a nook between a Roman sarcophagus and a flowering jade tree. John Bodkin, the impossible husband, was absent at the moment because he was attending the trustees’ meeting upstairs, and Madeline Hepplewhite, the impossible wife, had abandoned her husband in order to barge all over the galleries with one of the flower ladies. Thus Beryl Bodkin and Fenton Hepplewhite suddenly found themselves alone together.
Beryl and Fenton had never before exchanged a personal word. The noisy locomotives to which they were attached had always dominated their encounters with huge noises of CHUFFA-CHUFFA-CHUFF and furious whistle blasts. Towed along in the rear, they had never been shunted onto the same railway siding. Now, stunned, they greeted one another and began to talk, stuttering in their excitement, fearful of the return of Madeline or John.
For the moment they were safe from interruption. The meeting of the trustees had only just begun, upstairs in the Dutch Room, and Madeline Hepplewhite was at this moment dragging her friend, one of the new benefactors, through all the galleries on the upper floors.
In the absence of his wife, Fenton Hepplewhite expanded like a paper flower in water. His bowed shoulders straightened, his nervous laughter sobered, his sinews loosened their rigid grip on his bones. And Beryl’s eager face was bright. She was finding all sorts of things to say; she was astonished at the things that were in her, waiting to be said.
It was a Monday, and therefore the museum was closed to ordinary visitors. “I’m sorry,” said the guard to Madeline Hepplewhite as she charged past him up the stairs. “The galleries aren’t open today.”
Madeline continued to sail upward. “I am one of the principal benefactors of this museum,” she said, grasping the arm of her nervous friend, urging her along. “I think I have a right to go anywhere I please.”
What could he do? He couldn’t engage in physical combat with a benefactor. Swiftly the guard checked in at the watch desk, asking to be replaced at his post, then galloped up the stairs two at a time to follow Madeline Hepplewhite wherever she went.
Madeline was eager to play a proprietary role, to show off her treasures, her Velásquez, her Rubens, her Fra Angelico. “We’ll just take a little whirlwind tour,” she said to her friend, Viva Mae Biggy.
But the tour went on and on, exhausting the energy of the new benefactor, who wasn’t really very much interested in art. By the time they reached the third floor, Viva Mae’s eyes were glazed, she was glutted with masterpieces, she could absorb no more.
But in the Veronese Room she perked up. In the middle of the floor stood a solid object that was neither a painting nor a piece of sculpture.
“Oh, look at the sedan chair,” she said, summoning a last spark of interest. “Imagine being carried around in that thing!”
“Muddy streets,” explained Madeline Hepplewhite. “Filth everywhere. No standards of hygiene. Raw sewage running in the gutter.”
“Oh, ugh,” said Viva Mae, and then she gave a soft shriek. “Oh, Madeline, there’s someone in it. Look, there’s a man inside.”
“Good heavens.” Madeline moved forward and stared courageously into the sedan chair, mindful of her reputation as a fearless woman who had once climbed a tree at a garden party. “So there is.”
The big man in the sedan chair was asleep. He lay cuddled on his side, his hands under his chin, his long knees drawn up.
Imperiously Madeline summoned the guard. “How, may I ask, did he get in here? What on earth has happened to the security of this institution?”
The guard too peered into the sedan chair. “Oh, no, not again,” he said. “That’s Tom Duck.”
“What do you mean, again?” said Madeline Hepplewhite. “Do you mean this sort of thing has happened before? Who in the world is Tom Duck?”
“He’s just this old bum. He’s a friend of Titus Moon’s. He keeps coming in off the street. He likes it here, that’s the trouble. I don’t know how he does it, but he gets in somehow. I’ll call the watch desk. You ladies better get back to your reception.”
“Well, all right,” said Madeline. “But I’m really quite shocked. To think something like this could happen in an institution devoted to the protection of so many valuable things. I mean, Viva Mae was really quite frightened.” Madeline frowned at the guard, regarding him as the visible representative of the establishment at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “I really am beginning to doubt whether this museum cares for what it has. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t change my will.”
At last, to the guard’s relief, Madeline and Viva Mae rejoined the rest of the benefactors, who were now touring the greenhouses. Thrusting her way along the narrow greenhouse aisle, Madeline looked for her husband Fenton. She couldn’t find him anywhere. Where had he gone? At last she discovered him deep in conversation with Beryl Bodkin, the two of them sheltered by a gigantic rubber plant.
Shrewdly she guessed at the damage done in her absence. Swiftly she swept him out of danger.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“He Would Valiant Be” by Percy Deamer (1867–1936), after John Bunyan, reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
“Turn Back, O
Man” by Clifford Bax, reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd.
copyright © 1986 by Jane Langton
978-1-4532-5231-4
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