The interior courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the Fenway in Boston is never more beautiful than it is in April. Although the courtyard is always festooned in flowers, in April, the staff hang ropes of red nasturtiums from the third floor balconies in honor of the founder’s birthday, a tradition that has continued since its opening in 1903. The space itself was worthy of admiration and contemplative peace. Isabella Gardner had so admired the façade of the palace she stayed in on frequent trips to Venice and those of its neighbors that when designing her museum, she had copied them, thus creating a touch of Venice in the middle of Boston. It was Isabella Wagner’s favorite space. It was not true, as often said in jest, that she had been named Isabella so that she could be admitted free, which was, indeed, the case -- as all people with the name Isabella were admitted free at Mrs. Gardner’s bequest -- but was in fact named after her grandmother who had died before she was born. Isabella had been raised on the family farm in Dover, not far from Wellesley, from which her father commuted each day by train to his job at the Hancock Insurance Company. In an attempt to escape to a place somewhat difficult to get to from home but still in surroundings she understood, she had attended Wheaton College, between Providence and Boston, and there had met John Wagner, a student at Harvard Law, who would soon join a Boston law firm. She was now caged, with three children under six, in a Back Bay house of Victorian lineage. On this Sunday afternoon, as the Gardner Symphony Orchestra played a Bach concerto, Isabella sat on a folding chair at the edge of the audience and wept. Isabella’s daughter Angela was now almost six years old, and it was painfully obvious that appreciation of this very special place, or of anything else, for the rest of Angela’s life would be impossible. What had begun with such joy and high expectations had, at this point turned for Isabella to disaster. Her adorable baby was now a wild child who forced everyone in the household to live behind gates. Johnny, 4, hadn’t built anything with his blocks or Legos that Angela had not destroyed, and Emma, 2, screamed and ran whenever Angela approached. Angela had been slow to walk and still had not begun to talk. She would escape from the house or garden, and heart stopping hours would be spent trying to find her in the neighborhood. Finally, a neurologist told Isabella that Angela would never be normal, there was nothing she could do, and she must go home and learn to live with it. There was no name for Angela’s disability. No explanation. There seemed to be no other child in the world quite like Angela. Isabella made up a name: Wild Child Syndrome. She had prayed there was a key. The child of her expectations was dead. She had another reality to deal with. And deal she must. She knew that the sunshine of her own heart – that part of her soul that had soared – had died too. That week, Isabella and John had made the most difficult decision that she had ever had to make – and they had made it while on the phone. All meaningful conversations took place on the phone because, despite her efforts, there was no peace at home. They would send Angela to a special boarding school for special children. That summer before Angela left, she only disappeared once. When she and John realized that she was not in the yard or in the house, they locked the other two children in Johnnie’s room and searched the neighborhood. Four hours later they found Angela playing with the lawn mower in a neighbor’s garage across the street and halfway down the block. “It’s a miracle that she was not hit by a car,” John said. “It’s a miracle,” she thought darkly, “that I wish had not happened.” It was like that for Isabella. The horror of living with the surprises Angela brought daily, had destroyed her equilibrium. She wished Angela would die. In September, Isabella drove Angela to her new school in Western Massachusetts. While they were moving at 65 miles per hour on the Turnpike, Angela, who was strapped in with her seat belt, still succeeded in opening the door. Isabella knew they had made the right decision! When Isabella returned home she immediately took down all the gates. She filled in the holes and repainted all the trim. Life settled down to normalcy for both Johnny and Emma, and in short order, life without Angela was a relief. But, all was not well with Isabella. After the decision and the summer filled with daily adrenalin rushes of fear, she mourned. Although Johnnie and Emma demanded her time and energy, her heart was absent. She knew she was supposed to love them in an abstract kind of way, but was burned out. For a year, she wandered the streets of Boston with no purpose day after day. She attended social events when John insisted. She survived, but with no joy. She did not seek out the company of friends: they had children who were thriving, or, those with children with disabilities, they were intolerant of Isabella’s decision to send Angela away. This young woman who always had had a ready laugh, laughed hardly at all. She was, of course, in mourning for her dead child, who was not dead at all. Angela had vacations and would come home. The barricades would go up – closed doors. And because Angela never slept through the night, neither did Isabella. Christmas that first year was the worst of her visits, because once the presents were opened, Johnny and Emma retreated behind their bedroom doors, John took to his bed with a fever, and Isabella tried to keep Angela under control in front of the TV. A grand Christmas, indeed! Finally, in September, Isabella took a class in sculpture. Then another. John was so relieved that she had found an interest that he built a small studio for her in the backyard. There she retreated when motherhood duties were not demanding her time, and in a few years, she began to exhibit her work, first at community fairs, then at small galleries. Within a decade, she had reached a level where her work was in some demand, and she sold enough to gain a reputation as a force in the Boston art world. By this time, Angela’s visits home were rare, and the family traveled at Christmas so that Angela could not join them. A perfect solution devised by Isabella to deal with barricades and John’s fevers which had become annual affairs. Johnny complained to his dad one day that his mother was emotionally detached. He resented it. “It’s a reaction to Angela,” his father said. “She died inside. In her heart. Forgive her and accept her as she is.” Emma, on the other hand, over time, filled the void that Angela had left. For Isabella, all the joy lost in Angela was eventually gained in Emma. About this time, her college friend Martha Rogers and her husband Steve who had not been able to have children of their own and had suffered their own pain, adopted a little girl from El Salvador whom they called Elizabeth. Isabella and Emma adopted her at their “best baby ever” and took almost as much joy in Elizabeth as her parents did. Because of Elizabeth, Martha paid attention to El Salvador. She knew there was a civil war and no matter how much she read, she could not understand how a government could be so cruel to its citizens. She also could not understand how there could be so many healthy babies available for adoption. Over the years, Martha, Isabella, Emma, and eventually Elizabeth talked about what might have happened, and by the time Elizabeth was ten, they were rather certain that she had been stolen and sold. But, in that strange and murky world of war and devastation, how would they ever know if Elizabeth’s parents were alive, much less be able to find them. When Johnny was at Harvard and Emma a senior in high school – she had had an early teenage rebellion, which had been intense but short lived – Isabella was invited to serve on the Board of Directors of the Gardner Museum. Throughout the years, she had continued to find solace and joy in the Courtyard and the three floors of galleries so artfully created by Isabella Gardner a century before. She was exhilarated by the chance to give her own special talents to the museum she so loved. And then the robbery happened. Twelve great masterpieces stolen! All in one night by two men posing as police officers who did not even carry guns. They took Vermeer’s most famous painting, The Concert, three Rembrandts, five Degas, a Manet, the Chez Tortoni, and two others. Isabella was devastated. The loss to her was as great as the loss of Angela. She ranted in the house, threw pieces of her sculpture against the windows of her studio, breaking them all. At the Gardner, she cried at Board meetings. Everyone was upset, but no one except Emma understood the vehemence of Isabella’s reaction. Emma knew that her mother was finally reacting to the loss of Angela in ways that she could not and would not have twenty years before. As time passed, and leads drew cold, Isabella would wander the galleries and with each empty frame of a masterpiece lost, she would tremble with fury. She took the losses personally. Emma watched her mother with alarm as she reverted to her habits of years before. She was wandering the streets of Boston aimlessly, ignoring her smashed studio, and otherwise retreating further and further into her misery. Emma was accepted at Yale, but she considered her mother too frail to be able to deal with an empty nest along with the empty frames at the Gardner. Her father said that Isabella would get over it, but Emma was not so sure. But, over time, Isabella arranged to have the windows in the studio repaired. She bought a piece of marble and started to allow the image locked in the stone to emerge through her gentle guidance of her tools. She often went to the Gardner on Sunday afternoons, and as the music played, however, she would weep. Johnny graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law and followed his father in the profession. He married and now had children of his own. Emma was in theater and was working with a small experimental workshop not far from home. She had a beau they were all fond of. Angela had been living in a group home in the suburbs where she had been for years. She had never developed the facility of speech, but seemed to understand everything said around her. John was contemplating retirement from the firm, and Isabella found herself in the awkward position of not knowing what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Into this mix of settlement and anticipation in the Wagner family came Elizabeth with her news of upcoming adventure. She was going to El Salvador. It was a part of her graduate studies. Behind her news was the prayer that she would be able to start the process of finding her own family. By now, there was little doubt in Elizabeth’s mind that she had been stolen and sold. Everyone is El Salvador now knew that during those awful war years, it had been the custom of army officers to steal children from families in the rebellious areas and sell them to orphanages which would in turn sell them to foreigners, mostly Americans. She would register with Asociacion Pro-Busqueda, and if her mother had registered, Voila! The mystery would be solved. She knew the Asociacion had already documented over 750 cases of missing children who had all been under two years old when they were stolen, and had located over 300 of them. She intended to be the next. When she arrived, she registered, gave a sample of her DNA – the only way to search for her mother – and spent her entire visit to San Salvador doing what adopted daughters in the United States have done for fifty years, search for her face among the thousands of faces she passed on the streets in that city. She was surprised to find the government so hostile to the work of the Asociacion; she supposed they did not want the honor of their army to be questioned. Elizabeth returned home with no resolution, but within a few months Martha called Isabella with a joy in her voice that told Isabella everything. She called Emma. “Elizabeth has found her mother. And, her father. And, a dozen siblings. She has a huge family. Some of them live in this Country today! Can you imagine? What has been lost is found!” In April as the garlands were again being hung from the third floor balconies of the Gardner Museum, Martha, Elizabeth, Isabella, and Emma flew from Boston to San Salvador. After checking into their hotel, they went directly to the Asociacion to be briefed. The counselor suggested that they should not all travel to the village where Elizabeth’s parents lived, that the mothers should stay behind. “Four of you, plus the translator, will double the size of the village,” she laughed. The next day, Elizabeth and Emma took the long and dusty trip in a van to the remote village in the mountains where Elizabeth had been snatched 25 years before. “I’m frightened!” she exclaimed to Emma. But there was nothing to be frightened about, Emma later told her mother. “Upon arriving, we were ushered into a courtyard, and there standing waiting to meet her long lost daughter was a very short little lady who, although so much older, looked exactly like Elizabeth. They hugged, they wept, and with the help of the translator, they talked. The mother called her Maria. Her mother’s name is Conceptiona. It’s a huge gap to bridge, but I am sure it’s a journey Elizabeth wants to take.” A few days later the same van brought Conceptiona, two daughters, and her husband to San Salvador to visit Elizabeth. She took them shopping, lavished them with new city outfits – because it gave her pleasure, and she could see that it gave them pleasure too – and took them to lunch at the fanciest restaurant in the city. While Emma, Martha, and Isabella took Elizabeth’s father and sisters to an open air market, Elizabeth and Conceptiona – with a translator in tow – shared news of their lives for the afternoon. The story of the kidnapping was brief. It had happened in a moment. The soldier had told Conceptiona that he wanted her baby and would take it, and he did. Maria had been only 15 months old. “I felt dead,” Conceptiona admitted. “But, I had other children to care for and others came as well. Twelve in all. So, I was blessed. But there was always an empty place in my heart for you. I have prayed for you every day.” She had obviously cared about her baby Maria, because when given a chance to add her DNA to the data base being developed by the Asociacion, she had done so eagerly. “It all happened so quickly,” she said. “In a month I knew you were alive. God has blessed us both!” Back home in Boston, where the garlands were still hanging at the Museum on the following Sunday afternoon, Isabella sat in the folding chair in the Gardner Museum Courtyard while the orchestra played Bach. Emma was at her side. She did not weep. Instead she pondered silently to herself, “Might DNA hold the key to Angela’s ‘Wild Child Syndrome?’ If DNA made it possible for Elizabeth to find her mother, maybe it might help the police find the lost pictures.” She smiled and took Emma’s hand in hers. |