Evil Breeding

Yorker. She gets her medium-length brown hair lightly streaked with blond and has the kind of expensive cut that would cause the average Cambridge woman to wrap her head in a scarf until her hair grew out. To hang around with my dogs and me on a Sunday morning, she wore a navy wool pullover she’d bought in Scotland, dry-cleaned jeans with sharp creases down the legs, and a pair of ankle-length Joan and David boots sturdy enough to withstand a one-block hike on Fifth Avenue. As I understand it, her concern with superficialities is a necessaiy counterbalance to her personal and professional preoccupation with such heavy psychological matters as life, death, and what to do with the time in between if it isn’t automatically filled by dogs, dogs, and more dogs. Rita has only one, a Scottie named Willie. Still, if she didn’t give a damn about things like having her eyebrows waxed, the weight of her concern about love, fear, depression, and madness would throw her completely off balance, and she’d topple over like an old-fashioned scale with nothing on one end and a ten-ton bar of lead on the other, not that she views her clients’ problems or anyone else’s as leaden, in the sense of dull or worthless. On the contrary, human suffering and conflict are Rita’s pleasure as well as her business, but only because she is always certain she can help.
    “The principal victim of this lunacy,” Rita now declared, “was Steve. He was asleep only a few yards away. And you chose to act as if the noise wouldn’t disturb him, or as if he wouldn’t care if it did. Or”—here Rita paused to place a slice °f nova on her bagel—“as if by comparison with your dogs and with your desire to train your dogs, Steve’s needs did not count one whit with you.”
    Noise! I ask you! The music of the spheres. I said nothing.
    “And when I say noise,” Rita continued, “I mean noise. I know that to your ears, when the dogs howl, it’s the music of the—”
    “Spheres,” I finished. “As the hymn says: ‘All nature rings.’ ”
    “Do you want my professional opinion on this matter?” Rita demanded.
    With what her clients pay, I’d have been a fool to say no. She told me to think of the most romantic place in Greater Boston. What sprang to mind was the Bayside Expo Center during the Bay Colony Cluster dog shows. Unfortunately, the Bay Colony Cluster takes place in December, this was May, and a May-to-December romance was not at issue. Steve and I are about the same age. Besides, according to Rita, if I didn’t make Steve feel loved, important, and central to my life within the next few hours, there wouldn’t be any romance left.
    Even if you rule out the Bayside Expo Center during the Bay Colony Cluster shows, Boston is rich in romantic places. The North End, Boston’s Little Italy, with its winding, narrow streets and pastry shops, is ideal for romantic wandering, but the sky had darkened and rain was predicted, so it seemed like a poor choice, as did the Public Garden, not that riding in a swan boat in the rain was outright unromantic, but it felt childish to visit the setting of Make Way for Ducklings. Also, Steve, being a vet, might take a more anatomical than romantic view of the boats and realize that we were nestled in the swan’s liver or in a section of its large intestine.
    So that’s how Steve and I happened to spend the afternoon at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Fenway Court, which is so outrageously romantic that the Boston papers are always reminding us that Mrs. Gardner did not, in fact, import and reassemble an Italian palace stone by stone. As myths do, this one contains a truth that overrides reality: Fenway Court feels exactly as if its pink marble had been imported stone by stone from Italy, especially if, as in my case, you’ve never actually been to Italy. The building is four stories high and constructed around a big central courtyard with a mosaic floor and, high above it, a gigantic skylight. The upper floors have galleries that let you peer down into the courtyard, and especially on a rainy day, the filtered light that pours through the immense glass roof feels and tastes like some tangible form of grace given by one of the ancient gods depicted in the museum’s statues and paintings. All year round, the courtyard displays plants and flowers, including what must be the longest and most luxuriant nasturtium vines in the world. Isabella Stewart Gardner built the house between 1899