Angelology

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
Verlaine parked his car—a 1989 Renault he’d bought secondhand during college—before St. Rose. A wrought-iron gate cut across the passageway to the convent, leaving him no choice but to climb over a thick limestone wall that surrounded the grounds. Up close, St. Rose proved to be much as he had imagined it: isolated and serene, like a castle enchanted in a spell of sleep. Neo-Gothic arches and turrets lifted into the gray sky; birch and evergreen trees rose on all sides in tight protective clusters. Moss and ivy clung upon the brickwork, as if nature had embarked upon a slow, insatiable campaign to claim the structure as its own. At the far end of the grounds, the Hudson edged alongside a riverbank crusted with snow and ice.
As he walked up a snow-dusted cobblestone path, Verlaine shivered. He felt unnaturally cold. The sensation had come over him the moment he left Central Park, and it had remained heavy and stifling throughout the drive to Milton. He had blasted the heat in his car in an attempt to shake off the chill, and still his hands and feet remained numb. He could not account for the effect the meeting had had upon him or why it unsettled him to discover how truly ill Percival Grigori really was. There was something eerie and disturbing about Grigori, something that Verlaine couldn’t put his finger upon. Verlaine had a strong sense of intuition about people—he could discern much about a person within minutes of an introduction, and he rarely wavered from his initial impressions. From their first meeting, Grigori had provoked a strong physical reaction in Verlaine, so strong that he felt instantly weakened in Grigori’s presence, empty and lifeless, without a trace of warmth.
The meeting earlier that afternoon had been their second, and it might, Verlaine surmised with relief, be their last. If he himself didn’t terminate their arrangement-which would happen very soon if this research trip went as planned—there was a real chance that Grigori wouldn’t be around much longer anyway. Grigori’s skin had appeared so colorless that Verlaine could see networks of blue veins through the thin, pale surface. Grigori’s eyes had burned with fever, and he could only just hold himself up on his cane. It was absurd that the man would leave his bed, let alone conduct business meetings outside in a blizzard.
More absurd, however, was his sending Verlaine to the convent without the prerequisite preparations in place. It was impetuous and unprofessional, just the sort of thing Verlaine should have expected from a delusional art collector like Grigori. Standard research protocol required that he get permission to visit private libraries, and this library would be even more conservative than most. He imagined that the St. Rose library would be small, quaint, filled with ferns and hideous oil paintings of lambs and children—all the cheesy decor that religious women found charming. He guessed the librarian to be about seventy years old, somber and gnarled, a severe and pasty creature who would hold no appreciation whatsoever for the collection of images she guarded. Beauty and pleasure, the very elements that made life bearable, were surely not to be found at St. Rose Convent. Not that he’d been to a convent before. He came from a family of agnostics and academics, people who kept their beliefs closed up within themselves, as if speaking of faith would cause it to disappear altogether.
Verlaine climbed the wide stone steps of the convent’s entrance and rapped upon a set of wooden doors. He knocked twice, three times, and then searched for a doorbell or speaker system, something to draw the attention of the sisters, but found nothing. As someone who left the door of his apartment unlocked half the time, he found it odd that a group of contemplative nuns would employ such ironclad security. Annoyed, he walked to the side of the building, removed a photocopy of the architectural plan from his interior pocket, and began to look over the drawings, hoping to locate an alternate entrance.
Using the river as a touchstone, he found that the main entrance should have been located on the southern side of the building. In reality the entrance was on the western fa?ade, facing the main gate. According to the map (as he now thought of the drawings), the church and chapel structures should dominate the back of the grounds, the convent forming a narrow wing in the front. But unless he had read the sketches incorrectly, the buildings were situated in a different configuration entirely. It became more and more apparent that the architectural plans were at odds with the structure before him. Curious, Verlaine walked the perimeter of the convent, comparing the solid brick contours with those in pen and ink. Indeed, the two buildings were not at all as they should be. Instead of two distinct structures, he found one massive compound molded together in a patchwork of old and new brick and mortar, as if the two buildings had been sliced and jointed in a surreal collage of masonry.
What Grigori would make of it, Verlaine couldn’t say. Their first meeting had been at an art auction, where Verlaine assisted in the sale of paintings, furniture, books, and jewelry belonging to famous Gilded Age families. There had been a fine set of silver belonging to Andrew Carnegie, a set of gold-trimmed croquet mallets engraved with Henry Flagler’s initials, and a marble statuette of Neptune from the Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s Newport mansion. The auction was a small affair, with bids coming in lower than expected. Percival Grigori caught Verlaine’s attention when he bid high on a number of items that had once belonged to John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Laura “Cettie” Celestia Spelman.
Verlaine knew enough about the Rockefeller family to realize that the lot of items Percival Grigori had bid upon was not special. And yet Grigori had wanted it very badly, driving the price well above its reserve. Later, after the last lots had been sold, Verlaine had approached Grigori to congratulate him on his purchase. They fell into discussing the Rockefellers, then continued their dissection of the Gilded Age over a bottle of wine in a bar across the street. Grigori admired Verlaine’s knowledge about the Rockefeller family, expressed curiosity about his research into the MoMA, and asked if he would be interested in doing private work on the subject. Grigori took his telephone number. Verlaine became Grigori’s employee soon after.
Verlaine had a special affection for the Rockefeller family—he had written his Ph.D. dissertation on the early years of the Museum of Modern Art, an institution that would not have existed without the vision and patronage of Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller. Originally Verlaine’s study of art history had arisen from an interest in design. He took a few classes in the art history department at Columbia, then a few more, until he found that his attention turned from modern design to the ideas behind modernism—pnmitivism, the mandate to break from tradition, the value of the present over the past—and eventually to the woman who had helped build one of the greatest museums of modern art in the world: Abigail Rockefeller. Verlaine knew perfectly well, and his adviser had often reminded him, that he was not an academic at heart. He was incapable of systematizing beauty, reducing it to theories and footnotes. He preferred the vibrant, heart-stopping color of a Matisse over the intellectual rigidity of the Russian formalists. Over the course of his graduate work, he had not become more intellectual in the way he viewed art. Instead, he had learned to appreciate the motivation behind creating it.
In working on his dissertation, he had come to admire Abigail Rockefeller’s taste and, after years of research on the subject, felt himself to be a minor expert on the Rockefeller family’s dealings in the art world. A portion of his dissertation had been published in a prestigious academic art journal the year before, which led to a teaching contract at Columbia.
Assuming that everything went as planned, Verlaine would clean up the dissertation, find a way to give it a more general appeal, and, if the stars aligned, publish it one day. In its present form, however, it was a mess. His files had grown into a tangle of information, with facts and miscellaneous bits of portraiture knotted up together. There were hundreds of copied documents saved in folders, and somehow Grigori had persuaded him to copy, for Grigori’s personal purposes, nearly every piece of data, every document, every report he’d found in compiling his research. Verlaine had believed his files to be exhaustive, and so it came as a surprise when he discovered that, during the very years he specialized in, the years when Abigail Rockefeller was heavily involved in her work with the Museum of Modern Art, there had been a correspondence between Mrs. Rockefeller and St. Rose Convent.
Verlaine discovered the connection on a research trip he’d taken to the Rockefeller Archive Center earlier in the year. He’d driven twenty-five miles north of Manhattan to Sleepy Hollow, a picturesque town of bungalows and Cape Cods on the Hudson River. The center, perched upon a hill overlooking twenty-four acres of land, was housed in a vast stone mansion that had belonged to John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s second wife, Martha Baird Rockefeller. Verlaine parked the Renault, threw his backpack over one shoulder, and climbed the steps. It was a wonder how much money the family had accumulated and how they had been able to surround themselves with seemingly endless beauty.
An archivist checked Verlaine’s research credentials—a Columbia University instructor’s ID with his adjunct status clearly marked—and led him to the second-floor reading room. Grigori paid well—one day of research would cover Verlaine’s rent for a month—and so he took his time, enjoying the peacefulness of the library, the smell of the books, the archive’s orderly system of distributing files and folios. The archivist brought boxes of documents from the temperature-controlled vault, a large concrete annex off the mansion, and placed them before Verlaine. Abby Rockefeller’s papers had been divided into seven series: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Correspondence, Personal Papers, Art Collections, Philanthropy, Aldrich/Greene Family Papers, Death of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Chase Biography. Each part contained hundreds of documents. The sheer volume of papers would take weeks to sort through. Verlaine dug in, taking notes and making photocopies.
Before embarking on the trip, he had reread everything he could find about her, intent to discover something original that might help him, some piece of information that had not been claimed by other historians of modern art. He had read various biographies and knew a considerable amount about her childhood in Providence, Rhode Island, her marriage to John D. Rockefeller Jr., and her subsequent life in New York society. He’d read descriptions of her dinner parties and of her five sons and one rebellious daughter, all of which seemed dull compared to her artistic interests and passions. Although the particulars of their lives could not be more different—Verlaine lived in a studio apartment and ran a haphazard and precarious financial existence as a part-time college instructor while Abby Rockefeller had married one of the richest men of the twentieth century—he had come to feel a certain closeness with her. Verlaine felt he understood her tastes and the mysterious passions that drove her to love modern painting. There would not be much in her personal life that hadn’t been examined a thousand times over. He knew full well that there was little hope of his finding anything new for Grigori. If he were to strike gold—or at least discover a fragment of material that might be useful to his boss—it would be a major piece of luck.
And so Verlaine bypassed the batches of papers and letters that had been pillaged by scholars, crossing the Chase Biography files off his list and turning to the box pertaining to art acquisition and the planning of the MoMA—the Art Collections, Series III: Inventories of artworks bought, donated, lent, or sold; Information pertaining to Chinese and Japanese prints and American folk art; Notes from dealers on the Rockefeller art collection. After hours of reading, however, he found nothing exceptional in the material.
Finally Verlaine sent back the boxes of Series III and asked the archivist to bring Series IV: Philanthropy. He had no concrete reason for doing so, except that Rockefeller’s charitable donations were perhaps the only element that he had not overexamined, as they tended to be dry sheets of accounting. When the boxes arrived and Verlaine began to work through them, he found that despite the dull subject matter, Abby Rockefeller’s voice intrigued him nearly as much as did her taste in paintings. He read for an hour before discovering a strange set of letters—four missives folded among a mess of papers. The letters were tucked among reports of charitable donations, neatly folded in their original envelopes without commentary or addenda. In fact, Verlaine realized, turning to the catalog for that series, the letters were entirely undocumented. He couldn’t account for them, and yet there they were, yellowed with age, delicate to the touch, giving off a dusty powder on his fingers as if he’d touched the wings of a moth.
He unfolded them and pressed them flat under the glow of the lamp to see them more clearly. Instantly he understood the reason behind the oversight: The letters had no direct relation to Abigail Rockefeller’s family, society life, or artistic work. There was no definite category at all for such letters. They were not even written by Abigail Rockefeller, but by a woman named Innocenta, an abbess at a convent in Milton, New York, a town he had never heard of before. He learned, upon checking an atlas, that Milton was only a few hours north of New York City on the Hudson River.
As Verlaine read the letters, his wonder grew. Innocenta’s handwriting was spidery and old-fashioned, featuring narrow European numerals and pinched, looping letters, obviously scratched out with nib and ink. From what Verlaine could gather, Mother Innocenta and Mrs. Rockefeller had shared an interest in religious work, charity, and fund-raising activities, much as any two women in their respective positions might. Innocenta’s tone started out as one of deference and polite humility but grew warmer with each letter, suggesting that a regular communication had transpired between the women. He could find nothing overt in the letters to substantiate this, but it was his hunch that some piece of religious art was at the bottom of it all. Verlaine became more and more certain that these letters would lead him somewhere, if only he could understand them. They were exactly the sort of discovery that could assist his career.
Quickly, before the archivist had a chance to observe him, Verlaine slid the letters into the interior pocket of his backpack. Ten minutes later he was speeding home toward Manhattan, the stolen papers lying exposed upon his lap. Why he had taken the letters was a mystery even then—he had no motivation other than that he’d desperately wanted to understand them. He knew that he should have shared his discovery with Grigori—the man had paid him to make the trip, after all—but there seemed little concrete information to relay, and so Verlaine decided to tell Grigori of the existence of the letters later, once he had verified their importance.
Now, standing before the convent, he was flummoxed once again as he compared the architectural drawings with the physical structure before him. Sheets of winter light fell across the pages of sketches, the spiky shadows of birch trees stretching upon the surface of the snow. The temperature was falling quickly. Verlaine turned up the collar of his overcoat and set out on his second trip around the compound, his wing tips soaked from slush. Grigori was right about one thing: They could learn nothing more without gaining access to St. Rose Convent.
Halfway around the building, Verlaine discovered a set of ice-glazed steps. Down he walked, grasping a metal railing so as not to slip. A door stood in the hollow of a vaulted stone entranceway. Giving the knob a twist, Verlaine found the door unlocked, and a moment later he was in a dark, damp space that smelled of wet stone, rotting wood, and dust. When his eyes had adjusted to the dim light he closed the door, securing it firmly behind him before walking through an abandoned corridor and into St. Rose Convent.