BOSTON - I'm in luck, it's raining. Just as it was the first time I visited
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here just off Louis Prang Street on the
Fenway.
It's a nice soft rain, just as it was then, nothing violent, but enough to
cool things off and bring out the greens in the landscape against whatever
sky you can see in a big city. It's a perfect rain in which to repeat my
first visit to the Gardner.
Binx Bolling would call it a repetition. Binx being a fictional character,
he never changes. Neither does his natural habitat - pre-Katrina, 1960ish
New Orleans. His time and place are fixed forever, like a butterfly sprawled
on a pin.
Binx is the moviegoer in Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." Good ol' Binx,
formally John Binkerson Bolling of a good/strange Southern family, would go
to the same movie years apart to make himself aware of the passage of time.
Or just to make himself aware. Lest he sleepwalk through life.
It was a rainy day in February the first time I went to the Gardner, or
rather was taken there by a lady who loved it. She didn't specify why she
did or, at the end of the visit, need to. She was never one to lecture, only
to introduce. What you did with her gift was up to you; her pleasure was in
the giving.
It's a great luxury to get to a place early. It allows you to anticipate
what's ahead, and contemplate how you got there - rather than rush into it.
It's still half an hour before the museum opens. My daughter has insisted on
driving me, rather than letting me take the T, so we wait inside the car as
the gentle rain splatters on the windshield. I can't remember the year I
first saw the Gardner. It was probably before she was born - or maybe when
she was a little girl. Now she has children of her own.
It is a fine thing to sit silent with your only daughter in a gentle rain.
She reads her book, and I think back, taking notes for this column. (For
some of us nothing happens, even a silent wait, unless we put it into words.
Writing Behavior, the psychiatrists call it.)
Then it's time. Snapping open my umbrella, I walk around the corner and join
the short line waiting at the entrance to Mrs. Gardner's house. It's a
modest entrance, belying the dream palace inside.
Hanging in their accustomed places, the paintings remain the same. Mrs.
Gardner's will specified that nothing must be changed, which may explain why
some of the works that have grown in fame over the years are hanging in
dusty alcoves, or in the dim corner of a guest room, just where she put them
in her time.
Some of the best are missing - 13 of them, stolen in a notorious art heist
in 1990 that remains unsolved. If you happen to spot Rembrandt's "The Storm
on the Sea of Galilee," the only seascape the mas