As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor.  She’d mercifully made it into the elevator with her shopping bag without seeing Vivian Longmuir anywhere.  It had been a shock to run into her earlier—today of all days, and here of all places.  She’d thought both sacrosanct.  When the creaky elevator finally scudded to a stop and let her out, she rushed past the penthouse apartment, #14, to the far end of the hall.  She didn’t even look around before fishing the key out of her coat pocket and opening the painted-over door.  She felt unreasonably relieved that Rylan was busy this evening, so wouldn’t be around.  She desperately needed some time alone to calm down, let the newly stirred up memories settle again.  Or write them down while fresh; confront her feelings honestly in the biography-cum-memoir she was struggling with.

            Inside the carefully camouflaged door, she climbed the steps and let herself into the rooftop hideaway, Mireille’s plexiglass greenhouse that replicated the French countryside here in the Back Bay Fens.  Refuge for bruised spirits and damaged souls.

            She took the Calvados bottle out of the bag, and with a knife worked off the red wax sealing it.  She had remembered it just as she let herself into the lobby, earlier, and was about to slip back out, down to the corner liquor store, when she stopped dead—seeing Vivian Longmuir waiting for the elevator.  She fled before the older woman spotted her in turn.  The woman’s face was just as she remembered it, scornful by inclination, thin lips a hair’s breadth from disdain.  Her lipstick almost black, like that of an aging—fermenting—Goth.  Harriet never had liked her, and couldn’t begin to understand the attraction her father’d felt.

            She poured some of the apple brandy into one of the Versailles-green claret glasses from the little stenciled wooden cabinet which held plates too, and cutlery, noticing that her hands were still shaking a bit.  She plugged in the string of fairy lights, which offered quiet cheer, and settled at the garden table in a lacy antique bistro chair.

            “To you, Papa Baer,” she said, raising the glass in a heart-aching toast.

               He would have been turning that famous sixty-four today, the milestone of the Beatles song he used to sing in the shower back in Quincy, when her mom was still around.  Would she still need and feed him and send him a valentine, when he’d gotten as ancient as all that? the rather tongue in cheek question of the lyrics had been.  She did, she would—she wanted so badly to tell him, if only he hadn’t thrown himself blind drunk into the Charles River when he wasn’t more than forty and three days.  The brandy and the unvoiced words burned in her throat, as she took another long swallow in remembrance of her father and his life and hideously early death.

               If only Vivian hadn’t become involved with him.  If Vivian’s oh so important husband, Barrett Longmuir, hadn’t found out and been determined he would be revenged.  If on the night of March 18th that year, the thirteen priceless artworks hadn’t been stolen during the night from the Fens’ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  An unsolved crime still now, modern history’s largest art theft.  And blamed, by Barrett, on Harriet’s father, Lewis Baer—his oldest friend, a security consultant brought in just before the theft who was on record as affirming that the museum’s security was adequate.

               Harriet wrote down a few details in her notebook—the Beatles concert Lewis had been thrilled to get to see in Boston in his teens, coincidentally in 1964; his comic off-key singing voice that didn’t dissuade him in the slightest—and as she did found herself settling down, back down to sad, instead of furious.  The tonic of Mireille’s bolthole was starting to work, as usual.

               The roof of the apartment building looked out on the Fens, the area between Fenway Park and the museums, south of the Charles River, west of the Common, Beacon Hill, Faneuil Hall, the other famous landmarks of Boston.  But it wasn’t the view that distinguished Mireille’s creation.  The space, a sort of spatial time-out from the world, inspired inward-looking things instead.  Mireille had erected the plexiglass greenhouse and turned it into a true oasis.  Wooden latticework held climbing hydrangeas and evergreen jasmine; two pear trees grew in terracotta pots.  Other planters overflowed with an array of grasses, flowering plants, and herbs, including lavender, rosemary, thyme, and santolina with its curiously flavored leaves.  An antique wooden rocking horse and a couple of those huge handblown Mallorcan bottles sat beside the table.  The roof supports were draped with strings of beads and origami paper birds, besides the fairy lights.

               No one but Harriet and Rylan knew the access door was there, at the end of the seventh story hall, or that it opened onto half a flight of stairs that led up to the roof—to the amazing hideaway created and kept hidden by the previous tenant of the penthouse.  Mireille Chabrol had lived there since the mid-90s, while working as Cultural Attachée at the Consulate General of France.  She’d left just six or seven months ago when she’d gone back to France to live out end-stage emphysema.  She’d given Rylan the only keys, having herself jimmied the ancient lock and later had a locksmith replace it.  Rylan had entrusted one of them to Harriet last month, when they’d met on the Provincetown ferry and become lovers—or whatever it was they were, whatever they sought from each other.  Maybe only momentary respite from their separate pain.  The key, Harriet thought, was intended as compensation for the affection he couldn’t summon, not after the older woman he had clearly, fatally adored.

               The door to the roof had been carefully painted by Mireille her first spring there, layers of a dingy gray semi-gloss serving to keep it from being noticed, back in the shadowy corner.  She’d calculated that it wouldn’t be of interest to anyone visiting the seventh floor, even if they happened to spot what they’d suppose was an old closet or furnace long since boarded up.  The landlady was elderly and lived housebound in South Quincy.  The current tenant of the penthouse was a committed professional who came home late, and then worked hours more on his laptop before watching a little Hulu Plus and heading off to bed.  He’d mentioned that to Rylan one night when they’d coincided in the lobby.

               Feeling more at peace again, Harriet took out cheese and Croccantini crackers from the mini fridge next to the cabinet.  Smoked Gouda, manchego, a goat cheese with fresh herbs.

               She ate and lost herself in her writing, hardly aware of Rylan’s letting himself in some time later.

               “What’s up?”  Rylan had noticed the Calvados bottle and her flushed cheeks, if not exactly how far down the level of the brandy was.

               Harriet temporized.

               “My father loved Maigret, the French detective, and read all the books.  Maigret is always drinking something, but most memorably Calvados.  When my father’s sister was in France one year, she brought back a bottle for Dad.  He got so excited—and it became a little ritual of theirs to have a smidgen when one of them needed cheering up.  I’d get to have a taste, though I was still in school.”

               “A ritual?  Okay . . .”

               “It’s his birthday.”

               “I’m sorry, Harriet, I didn’t know.”

               He knew her father had died in the Charles years ago, but hadn’t ever brought it up.  His standard reluctance to delve into personal things.  He’d been bottled up tight since Mireille left to die—and admittedly, long before.  Rylan Doyle had worked for a decade as the building’s property manager, and lived in one of the apartments on the second floor, keeping a discreet distance from the other tenants.  Taking care of maintenance and various emergencies promptly and efficiently; listening pleasantly enough if folks wanted to chat, but not confiding anything in turn. 

               Helping himself to a scant inch of Calvados, and some of the goat cheese, he settled on the floor softened by Persian rugs and cushions in a jewelbox of warm colors, rusts and wines and plums.  He sensed that he needed to do his best to be there for Harriet now (sex seeming to be off the agenda), though an hour or two here on the rooftop was usually all she needed to unwind and find her way back to a brighter state of mind.

               On their long ride to Provincetown, she’d told him, “With two roommates and their high-strung Border Collies, I can’t find real peace ever.  This city pelts everyone constantly with noise and congestion and the rudeness we’re famous for that’s so exhausting to live with.’” 

               In sympathy with that, and seeing the pain carried in her eyes, he had invited her up to the place where he perpetuated his own pain.  He always hoped to feel Mireille there, but really only ever felt her absence.  He couldn’t find her in his own apartment downstairs, either, though he kept the books there she had given him along with the roof keys—a numbered first edition of the Poësies de Madame Deshoulières; a valuable copy of an artistic review with text by Jacques Prévert and reproductions of Marc Chagall’s illustrations for Boccaccio’s Decameron; first editions of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Fires and The Memoirs of Hadrian in both English and French.

               Needing to conjure her father tonight, to coax him back to life on his birthday—Harriet poured herself another splash of Calvados, and started telling Rylan about Lewis’s eccentricities, his love of 60s rock music, his love of art.

               “He was so thrilled when he was hired as security consultant for the Gardner Museum.  He’d loved to take me there when I was little, to see the almost Venetian palazzo with its beautiful courtyard, and the paintings he loved best.  Rembrandt’s etching, and his Storm.  Vermeer’s Concert.  The fresco of the mourning virgin, with her sad, sad eyes—‘like my mother’s,’ Dad said.  Delacroix’s crusader.  Bellini’s seated scribe.  The three Italian women of the 15th century.”

               She stood in front of the tender reminders of him often again now that she’d gotten a job at the museum as assistant to the Academic Programs Manager.  But it was the haunting frames on the wall of the Dutch Room that called him back most eloquently.  The empty frames they’d left hanging when the paintings were gone, ever awaiting their return.

            “It was the Rembrandts that especially broke his heart.”

            “He’d loved them.”  Rylan understood.

            “He felt responsible,” she told him bitterly.  “He caved in to his friend, because he felt guilty.  Because he was his friend.  My father was honorable, if flawed.”

            Rylan was uncomfortable with her anger, but Harriet couldn’t stop now.  She craved a sympathetic ear.  And his was here, the nearest ear available.

            “His friend was a big-shot on the Museum Board, and when the paintings were stolen so easily the friend started rumors—and then leaked accusations to the press—of Dad’s having been involved with the thieves.  Barrett needed a fall guy so he wouldn’t be the one held liable—as was threatened—for having said no to extra funding for security.  And anyway, maybe more to the point, he’d found out that Dad was having an affair with his wife.”

               Startled, Rylan sat up abruptly from the cushion he had been reclining on.

               “She told Dad, one of those last nights in bed, ‘He refuses to budge on upping the budget.  The others worry, think it would be wise, but he’s got better business sense, of course.’”

               Harriet was lost in her story, reliving it again.

               “So Dad, feeling terribly guilty about Vivian, and protective of his friend, advised that the lesser security proposed should be just fine—not wanting just then to go against Barrett’s wishes and make him look foolish to the others.”  She took a shaky breath.

               “So after the theft, you see he couldn’t help feeling responsible.  Blaming himself twofold.”

               Barrett had gone on even after the suicide, maintaining his accusations, making Harriet’s life still more hellish—causing her to drop out of college, her junior year, and finally lose a boyfriend she was just about to get engaged to.  Only after years of therapy had she gotten over the worst of it, applied successfully for a job at the museum, and started working on a narrative biography about her father’s life.

               “Of course he was responsible.”  Rylan’s voice was cold.

               Harriet gaped at him, surprised.

               “Only for the affair,” she protested, bewildered and defensive.

               “Only?  My mother was thrown out, as a result—she’s recently told me the evil things Barrett Longmuir claimed publicly in divorce court, and to the press.  How he made her life hell for years after.”

               “Your mother?”  Harriet couldn’t understand.

               “Vivian is my mother.”

               It made no sense—except logistically, she saw.  Vivian had been there that afternoon, waiting for the elevator.  So, visiting someone.  Her son.  Rylan had known he’d be busy—would have a visitor.  But Vivian?  She was horrified, her world reeling again.

               “She was married to my father before taking up with Longmuir.  I know she told me years ago—I haven’t seen a lot of her lately—that her lover took full advantage of her at the time.  He learned about the deficient security from something innocent she said, something he weaseled out of her, and then tipped off the thieves.”

               His voice was ugly, harsh.  He hadn’t let himself respond to anything remotely personal, for years; he’d become a past master at smiling evasively and not getting called out.  But he’d been caught off guard, and he could hear his mother’s voice wrangling inside his head, brooking no funk.  In spite of Harriet’s outraged exclamation of protest, he went on.

               “Later, I think she said that Barrett was in on it too:  deliberately keeping the security levels too low.  ‘They were friends, after all.’”  He hadn’t remembered the name of this particular lover, among them all; hadn’t associated it with Harriet’s.

               “After the ugly divorce, surely she would say that.  Say anything.”  Harriet was shocked.  Unable to believe what she was hearing.  She couldn’t bear any more.

               She pushed herself out of the bistro chair, feeling the little room which had been sanctuary reeling.  She looked all around it, as if to make it right again, but saw it damaged and defiled.  Like the gaping picture frames that harried her, its peace had been laid waste.  She took the key out of her pocket, laid it on the bistro table, turned to go.

               She fumbled with the doorknob at the bottom of the concrete steps that led down from the roof, and had just managed to wrestle the door open when she heard Rylan calling out to her, half choked, pleading.

               “Don’t, please.”

               She hesitated, undecided.  How could he ask her that?  But needing something of him, still, something she couldn’t name, she climbed back up, and stood warily waiting, looking at this stranger with his haunted eyes and tousled auburn hair framed in the greenhouse entryway.

               “My mother ruined things,” he said, his usually impassive face haggard.  “Over and over.  All my life.  She ruined what she touched—deliberately.  It’s why my father left, after giving her countless chances to see the harm she was doing, and stop.  She never did.  Just added to her string of lovers, and then did her best to destroy them, one by one, when she left them.  One way or another.  Whatever hurt the most—she had the knack of finding out.  She’s got me programmed still, to be like her, to defend her—especially when she has just been around.”

               Harriet slowly walked back inside the greenhouse.  Past him, into its sympathetic heart.  Rylan struggled with words he wasn’t used to offering.

               “I’m told she’s why I’m not able to feel—to give myself.  Either to risk being like her, in my relationships, or let myself be gotten at, since I believed all women were like her.”  Until Mireille had showed him otherwise.  But he hadn’t survived Mireille, either.  Her going.  How ironic was that?

               He laid his key down on the table, next to Harriet’s.

               “I’ll go, instead.  Keep these.  You’ll get more good out of this place than I have; I can’t bring it back to life.  You can, you do.  So maybe I can make up slightly for past harm.”

               “It isn’t mine,” she protested.  “I’d feel like a thief, taking it from you.  Taking something I’m not entitled to.  There’s been enough of that already, in my life.”

               “Life is essentially all about theft, I’ve concluded.  What we steal from others; what we make of that.  Mireille stole this space, to improve it, transform it.  What my mother steals is to obliterate, lay waste to—like salting the earth behind a retreating army.  The theft of your paintings, who knows?  Only the thieves know what they’ve done with them, and why.  Diogenes, who I studied at Tufts, compares the little thief (Mireille, if you like, and each of us to some degree) to the great thieves—my mother, taking life and possibility away.  Whoever stole the art.  The ‘treasurers of the temple’—the crooks in charge, who have the power to ruin great segments of the population daily, just because they can.  Vivians on steroids.”  He stopped, surprised at his own eloquence.  Wanting Harriet, more than anything, to keep the keys.  To make up for the myriad losses and harms.

            “Don’t go,” Harriet said, daring to plead a little as she closed the key back in his hand.  Searching for words to heal them both.  “I’d like to start again.  Pretend our prior lives aren’t there.  Pretend someone—let’s say the greatest thief of all—broke in tonight and stole away with those, leaving us free from regrets and recriminations . . . from our parents, and what is damaged in ourselves.”

               Surprised by a rush of emotion, feeling something loosen inside, maybe even the bands around his heart, Rylan laughed.

               “I’d like that.”

               He smiled at Harriet, and drew her gently towards him, stealing a vital piece of her heart.

___

 

(This account of the art theft is purely fictional, though based fairly closely in broad terms on what actually happened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990.)