Outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art one cold February evening, photographers swarmed around the entrance, pushing and jostling, angling for the perfect shot. The Met’s grand staircase, swathed in black carpet and dotted with snowflakes, was the runway for a flock of Manhattan luminaries who ascended the steps to the museum and into the event of the winter season, the Dendur Ball. Most posed and preened for the cameras, savoring their moment in the spotlight before they were ushered into the museum.
An exquisitely beautiful woman in her late twenties, with long dark hair, fair skin, and a thin, regal neck, walked across the street with her husband, dodging the limousines and town cars that were stacked three deep on Fifth Avenue. She clutched her dress so it wouldn’t catch on her heels, and held her petite handbag in one hand and a sheer wrap that fluttered in the wind in the other. She didn’t come in a chauffeured car or a taxicab like the other guests at the ball. She didn’t need to, for she lived right across the street.
The crowd parted ways for the two of them, as if they carried an electric charge, an irresistible field announcing to all that she was in their path. He was handsome and dressed in a classic black dinner jacket, but it was she who commanded attention as she ascended the staircase, photographers and reporters shouting her name. She appeared barely to hear them as she climbed slowly and carefully. At the top of the steps, she turned around and glanced not at the crowd, not at the white-hot flashbulbs, but at the swirling snow around her.
She delicately stuck her tongue out and caught a snowflake on it, closing her eyes, as if to make a wish.
Her name, photographers whispered to the uninitiated, was Esme Madison Evans. She was wearing an ivory column dress that had been designed by Sebastian Giroux, the up-and-coming young couturier. Around her neck was an exact replica of the new jewel of the Met’s Egyptian wing, an artifact temporarily on loan from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo for a special exhibit. Around the neck of Esme Madison Evans, wife of Patchfield Evans, Jr., was a replica of the Scarab of Isis, a necklace that, until tonight, had never been viewed in New York City.