The Cloisters(7)

Everyone in the circle appraised the interaction, the way one might assess the performance of a racehorse under the command of a new jockey.

“It’ll just be the two of us,” she said, finally pulling away. “No one else ever gets up to The Cloisters. But it’s a nice place to be abandoned to.”

“I thought you were Renaissance?” said Stephanie, looking for confirmation at my name tag.

“Yes, but that’s just what we need,” said Rachel. “So Patrick made sure that we scooped Ann right up. Stole her from all of you at the Met.”

I was grateful to not have to explain my situation in greater detail.

“Well, come on then,” Rachel said, reaching out and pinching my arm. “We should go.”

I clasped my hand over the spot, and despite the heat and pain that ran toward my collarbone, I was surprised to find myself enjoying the flush of it all—the attention, the pinch, the fact I wouldn’t be here with Stephanie Pearce. All because I had decided to sit in Michelle’s office just a moment longer, just long enough for Patrick to walk by and knock.





CHAPTER THREE


I don’t think I’ll ever forget what it was like to arrive that June day at The Cloisters. Behind us was the congestion of Museum Mile—that stretch of Fifth Avenue where the Frick, the Met, and the Guggenheim were packed with tour groups and waiting taxis, camp children and first-time visitors, all agog at the marble facades—and ahead of us was the greenery of Fort Tryon Park at the city’s northern edge. When the museum first came into view, I did my best not to tumble into Rachel’s lap as I leaned across the car to get a better look; it never crossed my mind to feign indifference. Here, it was as if we had left the city entirely, taken an unmarked exit and found ourselves under a collaged network of downy maple leaves. The road to The Cloisters curved up a gentle hill, revealing a gray stone wall, overgrown with moss and ivy, that unspooled through a staccato of tree trunks. A square campanile with slender Romanesque windows peeked above the canopy of trees. I had never been to Europe, but I imagined it would look something like this: shady and cobbled and Gothic. The kind of place that reminded you how temporary the human body was, but how enduring stone.

The Cloisters, I knew, had been brought into being—like so many institutions—by John D. Rockefeller Jr. The robber baron’s son had transformed sixty-six isolated acres and a small collection of medieval art into a fully realized medieval monastery. Crumbling remnants of twelfth-century abbeys and priories had been imported throughout the 1930s from Europe and rebuilt under the watchful eye of architect Charles Collens. Buildings that had been left to the ravages of weather and wars were reassembled and polished to a new-world sheen—entire twelfth-century chapels restored, marble colonnades buffed to their original gloss.

I followed Patrick and Rachel up a cobblestone path that snaked around the back of the museum, and under a natural hallway of tumbling holly bushes whose prickly leaves and dark red berries snagged at my hair. Like a true cloister, it was silent save for the sound of our footsteps. We walked until we found ourselves on top of the ramparts, where our progress was blocked by a large stone arch that framed a black metal gate; I half expected an armored guard from the thirteenth century would greet us.

“Don’t worry,” Patrick said. “The gate is to keep people out. Not lock you in.”

On the roughly hewn stone blocks that made up the building’s facade I could just make out the places where they had been cut, riffles where the bronze head of an axe had sliced through. Patrick pulled out a key card and swiped it against a thin gray pad of plastic that blended in so well with the existing stonework, I hadn’t noticed it. Hidden in the stone wall was a small, rounded door that Rachel held open; we had to duck to enter.

“Normally, you’ll enter through the front, but this is more fun,” he said from behind me. “You’ll discover more hidden passageways and overlooked corners the longer you’re here.”

On the other side of the door was a garden courtyard that teemed with pink and white flowers, delicate brushes of silvery sage. It was one of the green spaces, one of the cloisters, for which the museum had been named. There was a hush in the air that even the insects seemed to respect, the only sound a soft buzzing and the occasional slap of shoes along the limestone floors. I wanted to pause and take in the plants that spilled out of pots and over beds, reach out and touch the stone walls that ringed the space, to feel with my fingers the realness of this world that looked like a dream. I longed to close my eyes and inhale the mixture of lavender and thyme until it erased the smell of Michelle de Forte’s office, but Rachel and Patrick were already moving.

“Typically,” said Rachel, “any square medieval garden surrounded by walkways like this one was called a cloister. This is the Cuxa Cloister, named for the Benedictine monastery Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in the Pyrenees. The footprint of the garden was originally laid out in 878 BCE, and when the cloisters were built, the builders in New York maintained the original north axis. We have three other gardens like this.”

The walkway was flanked by marble columns, each topped with carved capitals that revealed eagles unfurling their wings, lions poised on their haunches, even a mermaid holding her tail; between the columns, framed arches were decorated with palmettes and bits of stone lattice. And despite the number of pictures I had seen of medieval cathedrals, I was unprepared for The Cloisters’ overwhelming scale, for how intricately everything was carved, for how many sculpted and painted eyes were peering back at me, for the way the stone kept the garden cool. It was the kind of world that would continue to offer up surprises, no matter how familiar I became with it.