Evil Breeding

and 1901 to display her art collection. She always intended it as a museum. But she didn’t just turn it over to the public. She lived on the top floor. You can see why.
    Mindful of Rita’s advice, I stood next to Steve just outside the courtyard and said, “There! Doesn’t this make you feel special?”
    Because of the soft light, we looked special. In some parts of Fenway Court, the light was better for looking at live people than for examining the works of art, many of which were hidden in dark comers. According to art experts, that’s where some belong. Some pieces in the eclectic collection are considered to be, ahem, not in the best taste, which is more or less what Brahmin Boston thought about Isabella Stewart Gardner, too. Anyway, the central courtyard was a big hit with Steve, especially when he discovered a promising-looking café a few steps from it on the ground floor. But I persuaded him that having come to the Gardner, we were obliged to do more than ooh and ah at the courtyard, eat, and go home. Didn’t he want to see the scenes of the famous robbery? He did. In fact, it crossed my mind that Steve’s idea of the perfect museum would be one from which all the art objects had been filched and nothing remained but the coffee shop. I more or less dragged him up one flight to the Dutch Room, which I remembered from childhood visits with my mother.
    As everyone in Boston knows, on the night of March 18, 1990, two robbers dressed as Boston police officers convinced the museum’s two guards to do exactly what they had been ordered never, ever to do: open the door. The guards promptly found themselves bound, gagged, and handcuffed. The robbers got away with art worth between two and three hundred million dollars. The most valuable piece was taken from the Dutch Room: Vermeer’s The Concert, one of only thirty-two Vermeers in the world. The Dutch Room also lost two Rembrandt oil paintings, A Lady and Gentleman in Black and The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, as well as a Rembrandt etching, a bronze beaker, and a painting by someone named Flinck once attributed to Rembrandt. Six additional works of lesser value were stolen from the second floor. One was the finial from a Napoleonic flag. The robbers also took a Manet painting that was in a room right by the entrance. The total was thirteen objects. All were uninsured. A one-million-dollar reward was offered for the safe return of the stolen art. By now, the reward had been increased to five million. Not a single piece had been recovered.
    Steve was gazing at the frame that had held Rembrandt’s lady and gentleman. “Is this your idea of an upbeat afternoon?” he asked.
    “Romantic,” I corrected. “Not necessarily upbeat.”
    “Can we eat now?”
    In spite of the Sunday-afternoon crowd, we lucked into a small table by the window. The view was of a section of the garden thick with ivy that sprawled over the ground and climbed heavily up the trees. It was raining hard now, so the trees and plants were dripping, and we were warm, dry, and hungry. The menu was a little too ladies’-lunch for Steve’s taste, heavy on light quiche, but he ordered homemade soup and spicy cold linguine and didn’t complain. And he wasn’t the only man there. In fact, there were a lot of other couples. At a table close to ours, a man sat alone. We decided that he had to be an art student. The Gardner is right near the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Museum School, so the area is full of art students. This one had thick, dark, curly hair. On his left forearm was a tattoo embellished with such elaborate curlicues that I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to represent.
    “He’s eating quiche,” I said quietly to Steve.
    “Artistic type,” Steve mumbled.
    Raising my voice, I said, “I’m sorry I dragged you here. Rita said I had to do penance for waking you up at two o’clock in the morning by taking you to the most romantic place in Boston. I thought this was it.”
    “The most romantic place in Boston is your bed,” Steve said. “With you in it.”
    “That’s not what the guidebooks say.”
    “Little do they know.”
    “Do you want to go home?”
    He just smiled. Then he asked how my book was coming along. I remember talking mainly about Geraldine R. Dodge and her husband. I also remember how noisy the café was. “Mr. Geraldine R. Dodge had money, too?” Steve asked. “Lots. Not as much as she did, but he was still loaded. His grandfather was the