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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 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