The Cloisters(27)

I took a steadying breath and continued to sort through the papers until something caught my eye. Handwriting I recognized but could not place. Not my father’s, but someone else’s. I focused past the looping letters to read the text. It was written in the Ferrarese dialect of Italian, and as I read the transcription, I realized to whom the penmanship belonged and why it looked familiar: it was written by my advisor, Richard Lingraf. The man still copied archival material by hand in the era of the digital phone scan. He didn’t, as far as I knew, even own a cell phone. My father had probably fished the pages out of Lingraf’s trash one evening, but had never gotten around to sharing them with me.

I made slow progress with the document. A few of the words I couldn’t make out due to the tendency Lingraf had to string words together in haste, but the rest started to come into focus. It was a record of household contents on the eve of someone’s death. Clearly, whoever’s household it was had been of significant means: gold coins, books, hunting hounds, porcelain, and frescos. There were also listed, I noticed, carte da trionfi. Tarot cards. I picked up the page and flipped it over, but there was nothing on the back. Lingraf had abandoned the transcription midsentence. I set it aside and continued to look through the rest of the papers, searching not for my father’s script, but Lingraf’s. I turned up another half dozen pages, some of which my father had already provided translations for; those I set aside.

During my four years at Whitman, Lingraf had once joked that I was his only student. Only it wasn’t really a joke; it was largely true. Lingraf had been hired in the nineties from Princeton. I always imagined him as an anchor for the department, a hire that conferred the kind of stable, long-term legitimacy a liberal arts college in the wheatfields of eastern Washington so desperately needed. But he hadn’t taught much at Whitman, nor had he researched very much after his early publications. And even if he had, he never shared that information with me. Mostly he enjoyed the view from his office and offered me vague suggestions about where I might decide to take my work on the Schifanoia Palace. He did, I realized in retrospect, truly love the strangeness of the work—he liked to linger over the iconography, to talk through the symbolism, to delight in the arcane associations. I thought little about his obsessions, because we were all too preoccupied with our own. That was, after all, what being an academic was all about.

I was surprised to find that the pages my father had translated talked in detail about playing cards and tarot. They talked about a character in Venice whose gender was unclear, and who had been known to use cards for telling the future. The documents spoke, too, about the work of a man I knew well—Pellegrino Prisciani, the astrologer of the d’Este family—and the images he was developing. Lingraf had never mentioned any of this to me, even though the connection to my own research was obvious—Prisciani had also designed the astrological banquet hall at the Schifanoia Palace. If my father had lived, I was certain he would have shared it with me, but I never had a chance to talk to him about the d’Estes or their pleasure palaces.

Outside of those details, however, there was little else the pages revealed. There was some evidence that tarot had been in and around the d’Este court, something we already knew and something that could have been reasonably assumed anyway. But when I turned to the final page of Lingraf’s handwritten notes, I could not make out the words. They were written in a language that looked like it should have been Ferrarese or even Neapolitan, but all the suffixes were inverted and appeared as prefixes.

It was, I realized, something like a code: a carefully inverted series of letters that I couldn’t decipher. A code for which my father had not attempted a translation.

I tested a few scenarios, to see if I could make a sentence work, a technique my father had taught me when a dictionary was not handy. A way to rely on the Latin I knew so well, but nothing clicked. I put the page aside and tried to find a note or a word from my father or Lingraf that might identify where the transcriptions had come from—an archive, a private collection, anything. There was only—at the top of one of Lingraf’s rare photocopies—the edge of a watermark, half of an outstretched eagle’s wing, the sharp fragment of a beak.

Without knowing the archive or library from which the transcriptions had come, there was little more I could do. Of course, I could guess at the location, I could confirm my father’s translations, although they already looked very clean, but there were hundreds of prefectures and archives and libraries and personal collections. The options, overwhelming.

Around me, the papers were strewn across the floor—echoes of the past that were calling me back—and it suddenly felt like too much, like they were blanketing not just my floor but my life. I needed to escape those four walls the way I had my bedroom at home. I hastily grabbed my bag and found myself on the street, walking south, finally breathing.



* * *



I didn’t have a destination in mind, but it soon became clear I was walking in the direction of Central Park, down the big blocks of the Upper West Side where prewar brick buildings boxed out views of the river and occasionally the sun. The neighborhood changed in subtle but marked ways with each block, getting leafier, richer, more boutique as I went. I wanted to walk the papers out of my system, walk long enough that I might be able to go back in time and throw them away. It bothered me that Lingraf had never brought up this aspect of his research with me. All the afternoons we had spent together in his office, full of loose papers and handwritten lectures, and he had never implied that tarot was a topic he might be interested in. If Patrick had hoped, upon reading Lingraf’s letter, that I might have shared in some of his research, I was sad to disappoint him. If it hadn’t been for my father’s willingness to sort through discarded materials, I might never have known that Whitman connected me to The Cloisters.