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