ACCLAIM FOR ALLAN GURGANUS’S

  THE PRACTICAL HEART

  “This collection places Gurganus in the pantheon of America’s best storytellers.”

  —Library Journal

  “A provocative, eloquent look at our national character, of who and what we are…. Full of charm and good humor…. A demonstration of both extraordinary range and Gurganus’s considerable storytelling skills.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Lyrical and moving…. Gurganus explores emotions, sexual awakenings and what people will sacrifice for the ones they love.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Elegiac and tributary…. One of contemporary fiction’s most ebullient and versatile stylists strikes again—straight to the heart.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Nostalgia, sentiment and admiration are qualities rare in contemporary fiction. Gurganus may be the writer who presents these most effectively.”

  —The Star-Ledger

  “Brilliant … subtle … masterly renderings.”

  —Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “A superlative writer at the wheel navigates [The Practical Heart’s] many twists and turns with manic glee and stylistic assurance.”

  —Out

  “[Gurganus] sings the odd, sad, quavery grace notes that come when we follow our hearts where they lead.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  For Jane Holding,

  friend, sculptor, mother of sons,

  gardener and garden

  The first obligation of a gentleman is to dream.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  This census is the first to let U.S. citizens choose from among seven racial categories: “White,” “Black,” “Asian or Pacific Islander,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Multiracial,” “Hispanic,” or “Other.” 823 Americans checked all seven racial boxes.

  —USA Today

  Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

  A: Practice, practice, practice.

  —OLD JOKE

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  THE PRACTICAL HEART

  The Expense of Spirit

  The Impractical Truth

  PRESERVATION NEWS

  Available for Restoration

  “Celebrating the Life of Theodore Hunstable Worth”

  HE’S ONE, TOO

  SAINT MONSTER

  1. Old Testament: Expulsion

  2. New Testament: Return

  About the Author

  Also by Allan Gurganus

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am honored to thank my generous first readers: Mona Simpson, Joanne Meschery, Erica Eisdorfer and Dave Deming, Daisy Thorp, Charles Millard, Andrea Simon, Danny Kaiser, George Eatman, Michael Pollan and Judith Belzer, Helen Miranda Wilson and Timothy Woodman. Terry Smith was the gifted small-press publisher who first offered my novella The Practical Heart. Like so many other important presses, his has been closed because of fiscal crises. I was honored to work with him. Cecil Wooten, Latinist and friend, gave invaluable help to Saint Monster.

  I’m indebted to my brave grandmother and great-aunts, The Fraser Girls, who first inspired (and then demanded) The Practical Heart.

  All my books have been designed by two wizards. Peter Andersen guides all the interior decisions with a reader’s heart and an artist’s eyes. Chip Kidd has done my covers with psychic skill and a seeming ease Mozartian. I thank them both for having the wit to read those books they help to shape. Increasingly a rarity, I believe.

  My assistant, Mona Sinquefield, has braved the no-man’s-land between caffeine highs and technophobic lows. Her belief and company proved essential.

  My agent, Amanda Urban, has shown such immediate and long-range faith in my work. Her genius for detail can rival any novelist’s.

  And, finally, my editor, Gary Fisketjon, granted me his clarion judgment, long patience, and consoling presence.

  Thank you, friends.

  THE

  PRACTICAL

  HEART

  For Michael Pollan,

  and

  for Jack Fullilove

  (1917–2000)

  At last, the distinguished thing.

  —HENRY JAMES, final words

  THE EXPENSE OF SPIRIT

  1

  Oh, did I mention that John Singer Sargent painted my great-aunt? No?

  —Yes, Muriel.

  What led to the portrait? A streetcar accident.

  What led to the streetcar? Her professor father’s low appetite for cowboy novels written by Karl May. May (1842–1912) was a German high-school teacher nabbed for petty theft. In prison he taught himself to write. His narrow cell’s subject? Galloping Indians of the Great Plains, palominos, buttes. He saw America only after writing sixty books about it. And yet, to this dreamer con man I owe my American citizenship, my lack of a trust fund, and, I suppose, the Sargent portrait.

  My great-grandfather, Professor Donald Fraser of the University of Glasgow, was tenured, landed, married, surrounded by four adored if never-quite-beautiful daughters. A gardener pruned his vista. Three intelligent maids realphabetized his library. Professor Fraser had inherited the seven-acre compound with its orchard, with the sixteenth-century stone house, big and old enough to warrant a name—Sunnyside, naturally. (Oh, to have a dollar for every lost homeplace once called Sunnyside.)

  Fraser was forty-five, boasted a lustrous white beard that seemed a dividend on his distinction. He’d published four books, two about Robert Burns and one concerning lotus imagery in world literature. (All this is all true, I swear to God.) His most personal work, The Bagpipe, Some Reminiscences, chronicled his own collection of ancient nearly museum-worthy pipes.

  But local happiness was not enough. No, his venturing spirit led him to those cheap, gallant, faintly autoerotic Westerns by a German jailbird jewel thief. And the Professor believed those tales. Then he learned of a teacher exchange program. And without really consulting his family, Donald Fraser chose to transport them all to a university in Chicago for a year. He thought Chicago was The West. Turns out it was, but not “The West” he’d planned.

  History is not just lived; it’s also wished, isn’t it? Maybe Art is history most livingly wished. Oh, to break in now and shout back to him, ambered in the 1870s, “Great-Grandpapa, stay home. Perfect Sunnyside’s rock garden. Marry off your smart daughters to the smug and titled local gentry. Save to buy more Mackintosh furniture. Get fat. But don’t read trashy books for boys. Great art always offers troubling adult portraiture. Bad art offers easy lies and makes for bad decisions. Stay. Stay there.”

  But I can’t. And he couldn’t, and if he hadn’t, Singer Sargent wouldn’t enter into it, and you might not be interested.

  Professor Fraser, his ladies, and their nineteen trunks (packed with one year’s art supplies for the daughters) arrived, unheralded, in the mythic Chicago of the 1870s. The town had a cowboy novel’s mules and dust. After rain, it became a Venice made of mud. Painted women, revealing entire inches of dead-white ankle, loitered under gas streetlamps in even the best neighborhoods. Civil War veterans, their blue uniforms emptied of legs and arms, begged, aggressive, on street corners. No building looked more than six months old. To the stately Professor’s four virgin daughters, workmen muttered personal ghastly things. Stockyards brought the scent of reality into the most elevated thought. Everything seemed omen.

  One afternoon, to cheer five womenfolk, Donald Fraser squired them toward high tea at what, one heard, was the best hotel. It featured Chicago’s first revolving door. But a crowd stood pressing noses to the portal’s fanning glass. One clever brown hen had escaped a passing farm cart. She then dashed toward safety but chose a door like an upright threshing machine made of mirror. Professor Fraser could see the chicken in there, still alive and flapping against tile floor, her head twisted beneath the rotating black rubber flange, her red wattle seeped out from underneath like black rubber’s own red rubber blood.

  “Don’t look, Muriel,” the Scotsman told his eldest girl and confidante, who looked. Nobody could push the door without killing the bird. Her free wing beat so, trying to lift a ten-story building nesting on her spine. The crowd of city swells in fur, velvet, and cashmere seemed unconcerned about one chicken’s life, but everyone acted embarrassed that a single country fowl could block entry to so fine an establishment, and at teatime. Muriel, having peeked, her face a stark white vertical beneath its tweed bonnet, now tried to hold cupped hands over three younger sisters’ eyes. “It’s a hurt one,” she explained. “If you see it, you’ll remember, so don’t … please.” The youngsters peeked; crying resulted. Muriel already understood: This sight had entered her forever, a hen was lodged there in that door and the sight was in her now.

  The family soon discovered: homesickness meant just that—sickness, a stubborn flu of longing. Sometimes the sight of a letter’s pink Scottish stamp could send any of them unto nausea itself. The girls did sketches of Sunnyside’s apple orchard. Muriel, the astute eldest, Papa’s favorite, portrayed Sunnyside’s foyer. She showed its William Morris laurel wallpaper backing forty frames of Piranesi’s classical ruins. She even added the yellow ceramic umbrella-stand, crammed with hawthorn walking sticks and houseguests’ orphaned umbrellas. Her drawing made the container seem so avuncular a jumble that, according to Papa, it looked the very portrait of Mr. Holmes’s squat, companionable sidekick, Dr. Watson. “I see that.” Muriel nodded, smiling.

  The visiting Professor taught classes in
an accent his students joked about; they asked for repetitions. Two months before the Frasers’ planned return to Glasgow, the whole family began packing. Overpreparing, Fraser brogues thickened to butterscotch density. The day before departure arrived, the Professor’s wife—pretty, plump—hurried to Marshall Field’s, buying gifts for Scottish relatives, tablecloths and matching napkins. Laden with goods, happy, rushing, she was one block from the store when a streetcar jumped its tracks. It came at her. It was striking her. It had pinned her underneath it. Already, her pelvis had been crushed like some Sèvres teacup trod upon by boots. Kind treatment she received on the street was later attributed to eleven scattered bundles in Field’s gift-wrapping. Those, if not her dreadful screams, had marked her as a lady. Four doctors, overpaid, the best by all accounts, told Donald Fraser, “Scotland? Any travel would be fatal. She would die on the train to New York.” The accident rendered the daughter of Lord Kilkairn an invalid for life. She could not walk, would have to be carried, forever moaning, from bed to bed.

  And so the Professor’s employment ended. (The teacher he’d traded places with came home wearing a touristic tartan vest, and amicably evicted the clan.) Fraser’s own university was an ocean away, unable to continue his salary or tenure. Donald Fraser was forced to move his brood to ever-more-modest lodgings. Educated by live-in tutors at Sunnyside, the man was skilled in Greek and Latin. To quote all the poetry he had by heart would take him three days. He could draw serviceably, could sing in a decent tenor the popular Italian arias; his bagpipe collection was considered somewhat comprehensive. He’d known Rossetti, had entertained Ruskin. He had shared a childhood mathematics coach with that other gifted, charming nomad susceptible to boys’ literature: Robert Louis Stevenson. But not one of Fraser’s skills/languages/friendships warranted five dollars of ready Chicago cash.

  Stranded here, Professor Fraser sought a permanent job at the university, but he’d been a guest, a novelty. So he ran a newspaper ad, the cheapest four-word minimum: “Can Tutor, Most Subjects.”

  With the house exchange over, shelter for a family of six must be paid for out of pocket by a man who’d never known the heartache of rent. The Frasers’ leased house now stood between a busy firehouse and a busier liquor store. Servants at Sunnyside wrote for their salaries. The professor began contributing articles to a local sporting paper. As his waggish, tragic pen name, he chose “Raffles.” The Racing News complained he too often mentioned lotuses, Greek gods. Donald Fraser considered taking in a lodger. He tried the public schools, but his Scottish credentials were not respected here. Soon the word “Professor,” written before his name, seemed as dubious as the “Doctor” he saw scribbled on calling cards tacked to doors in the dark halls of the latest boardinghouse.

  He was forced to telegraph a land agent in Glasgow. He sold Sunnyside via mail—his furniture, his library, everything at a loss. His wife’s bills were terrible, and he, so eager to get the poor woman home (mistaking this for Cure itself), consulted doctors who made promises they could not keep. Instead, they gave her drugs she came to need too much, even as the prices rose.

  Four daughters performed their usual Friday musicales on a rental Chickering upright, not the homeplace’s signed Bechstein. In a small if overdecorated parlor, maroon hangings flanked the mantel; pennants showed a peacock to the right, a peahen to the left, both worked in metal threads, placed there, in part, to hide the plaster’s cracks.

  The Sisters Fraser attended crowded slumside public schools. A head-lice epidemic made even their curls suspect. Their mama had been the forceful utilitarian, humoring Papa’s whims, standing guard over his writing hours. Whenever he acted swaggering or impractical, she had smiled at their daughters, saying as he listened, “Spare wee Donald his illusions, girls. They’re our only real capital.” But now—without her help—how loud and under-rehearsed poor Papa sounded. The girls soon lied to protect him; school was fun; this flat was “cozy”; America was friendly. Mrs. Fraser needed attending round-the-clock; her bedside table seemed an opium den’s as she reverted to baby talk, lived banked in pillows, gained weight, looked pale and round in her daytime nightdress. The girls pampered Mama with chocolates and mustard plasters; they sang to her. If left alone even a minute, she cried. Mabel, the youngest, chanted to herself, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put poor Mama back together again.” But Mrs. Fraser—second daughter of Lord Kilkairn—would live, a victim of stupefying good health, for another thirty-five years.

  One evening while his wife slept her laudanum sleep, the Professor called his daughters from their narrow rooms, walls pasted with photogravures, inspirational poems, and their own accomplished sketches. Into the hands of Muriel, Ethel, Jenny, Mabel, he placed gold coins, $200 apiece. “Hide these,” he said. “It’s what ye’ll have from our selling the dear homeplace. Your mother will never travel again. This must be your dowry. No matter what awaits us on ahead, I will never ask you for it. And if I somehow do, you’re never to surrender it, ye hear me?” Then Fraser quoted his correspondent and onetime houseguest, John Ruskin, “‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it SAW in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.’ Girls, continually SEE yourselves. Know you were born to be more … than mere Americans.”

  As the sisters, arms around one another, sat watching, Papa overwound his pocket watch while reciting Bobby Burns in roiling Gaelic. It was a language the daughters had already most cleanly forgot. Weeping, the gentleman feigned a coughing fit, then rushed out for a walk along a great lake he pretended, late at night, to be the surging River Clyde.

  The more fuddled Professor Fraser became, the louder did he praise his eldest girl as “the son I never had.” To Muriel he ceded household accounts once kept by her mother; to Muriel he confided his daily shame; he told every fact learned belatedly about the imprisoned author of those Westerns that’d tricked him into sacrificing his wife and virgin daughters to some idea of an American future. “One assumes a writer knows whereof he speaks, that he’s traveled farther than some atlas copied in a jail cell,” Donald Fraser complained about Karl May’s deception. But the more gossip he collected concerning the writer’s woes (May had been blinded from birth until age five by nothing worse than malnutrition), the more allied he felt with a fellow victim. Untenured, Donald Fraser—alias “Raffles” of The Racing News—could only envy May’s speed, his caliber of well-paying pulp.

  Within too few years, Fraser had sent all his girls into the world to earn their keep; for him, this tragedy outweighed the accident itself. To fare badly in Scotland was unseemly if melancholic, familiar; but “Perfesser” Fraser, as they called him here, soon understood that in America there was no curse, no comparison to lowly body parts, no blighting word as wicked as plain “failure.” It rendered you and yours prairie Untouchables.

  One girl would become an executive secretary, one a private tutor in French, and, saddest, the youngest and fairest found work wearing a starched mobcap and frilled apron selling Belgian chocolates in a lovely little mirrored shop on Michigan Avenue. Muriel, the talented eldest, a child-prodigy performer in Glasgow some years back, now taught the children of the rich to play piano presentably.

  Before the accident, she had entertained at afternoon parties for Mrs. Armour, who then hired her to train the little Armours. The heiress lectured Muriel that she must always use the mansion’s side entrance marked with a bronze plaque, DELIVERIES AND STAFF. Miss Fraser arrived wearing a black dress; the garment itself required costly benzine cleaning, but its detachable white lace cuffs and collar could be laundered daily and at home. Muriel understood from the start that a cheap black dress looks better longer than a cheap blue dress. In her carpet satchel, she always brought: her family’s own dependable fruitwood metronome, the difficult Czerny exercises annotated with her decisive script, an apple as her usual lunch, and slip-on gold ballet slippers to make pedal instruction easier.