She did not mention having learned through intermediaries that watercolor portraits, though rarely done, could be had for less than $350, while oils began at upwards of $800 to $1,200. In the wall safe at the Lygon Arms, Muriel had left her best jet-beaded reticule. It now contained but $600, and yet from that sum she and her sister must return to Southampton and then take the long train ride from New York to boomtown Chicago.

  “I’d begun a little watercolor, just to get my hand in again,” and he gestured down at the broad white page marked with traces of those pink flowers set on the upmost end of the sleek trunk just opposite. Muriel decided against stepping over too suddenly. And now, having achieved his studio—her dowry long since spent to get here, her life savings dwindling fast—Muriel found that, the more familiar and relaxed she felt with the great painter, the less likely it became that she might state just why she’d come. “Yes,” he said, leaning on the table where the watercolor rested, “I believe Mrs. Armour is the first I painted among a group there known to some, I am told, as ‘the meat people,’” and he gave a grin as non-committal as a grin can be. Muriel recalled the portrait itself, remarking inwardly that he’d at least paid Mrs. Sophy Brophy Armour the compliment of elongation.

  The artist mentioned how glad he was to be in the Cotswolds again, how he regretted having to rush off the very next morning. And Muriel paused in patrolling the studio; she felt her sister’s eyes upon her. “Is it customary”—Ethel herself intended to try something—“for you to accept appointments from those who might wish to ‘sit to you’ for a portrait?”

  “Months and years in advance. ‘Doing mugs,’ I call it in the slang. I should soon like to get beyond that….”

  He seemed to dare Muriel to state her history as wished, not assigned. The fabled Seeing would be hers; but perhaps, she now saw, the Telling of the vision was not to be….

  In order to save a few pence, she had not eaten lunch, believing this might further enhance her pallor. Now Muriel regretted that. She felt dizzied at being so near her hope and yet finding herself too unlike the Sophy Brophys of this world to just come out with it. Ethel, stricken, kept staring at the older sister, bobbing her head in a manner touching if a bit grotesque, as if to say, “Go ahead. Ask now.”

  “Mrs. Armour”—Muriel held fire—“at least has the distinction of having been set down by you. Tomorrow you leave?” He absently nodded, staring at the floppy peonies and the highly polished trunk that reflected flowers’ glowing aura; and, taking up a brush, he dispersed the slightest wash and soon seemed utterly lost to mere conversation. Did the Fraser girls distract him from his work or inspire him to go on with it? He was not much noticing them. He had two thousand visitors a year.

  Outside the immense window, Muriel noted one yellowed leaf fall from an elm, spiraling to the lawn, its descent modest, perfect, final. There came the childhood memory of one brown hen’s translucent wing beating beneath a door’s black rubber blade, murdered by a glazed entrance that seemed welcoming but was, being mirror, only the sky disguised. And all at once the impossibility of her mission broke upon her. She saw that precisely what gave her more inward stature than the meat people was just what would prevent her coming out with it, asking him to “do” her, “save” her, even for a fee. Even if she’d somehow assembled the correct secret amount. A wing-whipped lightness set to roaring in her ears. Trembling seized her calves, both knees locked, but instead of her feeling stricken, an unearthly clarity settled. Some flooding white intelligence claimed her. “So,” was her thought. Finally—Muriel Fraser had proven to herself (yet only to herself) her possession of it, of the distinguished thing, at last. And this very distinction prevented her naming that which she most wanted, wanted for reasons too urgent to state, for motives far beyond mere personal vanity, from an impulse as steadying and noble as any she’d encountered on a five-line musical staff or occupying any carved gilt frame. It would only come to pass in her imagination. But THERE it had been seen, then plainly stated, and therefore it was true, forever.

  Maestro liked to talk, during. Deft, half absently, he applied water paint. The Italian activated a phonograph with a bugle like a mammoth celluloid morning glory. Mixing bowls dripping with dried pigment occupied a sleigh-shaped daybed parked in one swagged corner of the glassy room. Behind a door loomed one headless mannequin wearing a dress beaded in a poisonous green, the costume in which Ellen Terry had been painted by the master, setting a crown upon her own head, in her role of Lady Macbeth. Maestro took up the theme of churches. He recommended ones in the neighborhood worth visiting and then ranged farther afield, mentioning hideous overrestorations of otherwise perfect a capella jewels in his adored Tuscany.

  As he spoke with fluency of his brush technique, he squeezed conversational dots of tubed watercolor paint upon a white glass to his right, blending these easily as he recombined casual spoken topics. The Italian appeared and disappeared, bearing clean white rags and bearing carafes of clear water. These he arranged and dispensed around the man in banker’s clothes, the servant performing his sacramental duties with an acolyte’s half-bored, half-awed matter-of-factness. By means of frequent recranking, he kept the tenor aria endlessly repeating. The late daylight seemed to coat the studio’s carved chairs, brass helmets, the Chinese screen backing one mammoth bouquet of disintegrating peonies set atop the handsome trunk. The chamber turned a tint now pink, now gold, soon both at once.

  Just as my great-aunt understood she could not ask; just as she understood that seven years’ savings, the daily plan, the apples had been in the service of practice, not performance, of getting here, not getting painted; just as she halted, giddied, alongside the trunk that Sargent idly if intently painted—just as she most wished she’d eaten both lunch and breakfast, as she stood wondering if all the postponed seasickness were about to strike, there came an insistent, indeed heart-stopping pounding on the front door. “That,” he sighed, “will be the Germans. Only Germans can knock comme ça.” And he had set aside his brush when he chanced to look her way.

  Feeling light-headed (she really should’ve eaten, she really should’ve been born a genius, rich, or beautiful, or all three), she had leaned upon the trunk, to prevent a crude stagger forward or perhaps even a fall (the disgrace of that, here!). And the slight pressure of her pianist’s hand caused the petals of the lowest peony to drop, with half a humid sigh, around her tensed white forefinger and thumb on which all weight now pivoted. The chin was lifted, accidentally displaying the long pale neck that her crippled mother had mercilessly and often described as, “along with Muriel’s hands, her one distinguished feature.” The painter saw the face set atop a neck tilting back for breath till it accidentally craned toward seeming almost swanlike, and something, something in the woman’s fortitude at trying to hide her vast disappointment, to hide her vast distinction (which was of the self-same Chartres size), something in the fading light, maybe even something obdurate and half attractive in the bone structure of her sinewy ridged side-face, something there revealed a respect for art so surrendered, so complete, it could not be ordered on demand. And one felt in the artist’s straightening spine, in a bracing almost alarmed, that something had annealed him. It made his habit of social lightness go briefly grave as, reconsidering, he paused, then barked four syllables of Italian at his manservant. One heard the front door open, a low explanation, a grumbled guttural protest, then the door most quietly closing.

  And the lifted dampened brush returned to motion!

  “Miss Fraser, stay, please, as you are. Just so. May I impose on you. There IS something. And, with watercolor, we shall soon know. You are quite well?”

  “Quite,” said she. “Well,” she, superstitious, added.

  Muriel stood facing the light, her long fingers supporting her, fingers strengthened into beauty by simple work—the infinite pressings over smaller hands, the countless virtuoso demonstrations with which she ended each lesson. This veteran hand was now bordered by supple ticklish petals that had made their only sound in falling. The servant arrived just as the aria wound, ratcheting, down; knowing the signs, he did not renew its spiraling blare. The paper where Sargent ministered was secured against its board by common mailing tape. The paper was of excellent nappy texture and was the size of, say, the Declaration of Independence. With music stopped, you could hear his brush now press, now stutter; and Muriel could feel his gaze upon her, warming like the mustard plasters poor Mama liked. There was something therapeutic, being so in the gaze one had just so totally forsworn. Popular journals claimed that Singer Sargent sometimes played his studio piano to cheer and refresh his famous subjects; and Muriel had come to occupy the useful pleasure of posing for fourteen minutes, just long enough to let herself wonder what he would play when and if he played. She was just deciding how to work into impending talk her admiration for his admiration of Fauré when “There,” he said.

  “Beg pardon?” Muriel offered. And instantly regretted this common little phrase, wishing she’d merely turned and lifted one eyebrow, but there it was.

  “I have taken the liberty,” Singer Sargent said, “of enlarging your hat brim. No criticism of the hat itself implied, you understand, Miss. But only for compositional purposes.”

  Muriel stretched slightly (her neck would be stiff during most of the return crossing, so concentrated a pose had she so briefly taken). Ethel meekly rose, then sat again, then stood like a concerned relation called in from the doctor’s antechamber to hear the verdict on some loved one’s life.

  “It’s the merest suggestion of you, naturally. However …” And he squinted, stroking the right side of his moustache with the thumb of a hand still holding its brush’s long maroon handle. It was Ethel, clutching her handbag as if yet braving the wooden sidewalks of some dangerous prairie metropolis, who first took a place beside the somber man in black. “Oh, Mur-iel,” the sister cried. And the painter smiled, as with a belief that if the first witness of a portrait exclaimed not to the artist but to its subject—it must be a fair likeness indeed.

  “But, Maestro,” Muriel herself ventured, stopping behind him. “However shall I … ? You see, it is ‘I’ as I feel, as well as ‘I’ as God, alas, saw fit to somewhat carelessly make me.” She’d not planned the statement. And it, Muriel admitted later, helped make up for that dreadful tartish Middle West “Beg pardon?” Though not completely.

  “Shall we finish our tea here,” he asked and told them. And soon they all sat in the carved chairs they would later see in portraits of prime ministers, royal couples, august artistic eminences, and milk-white moonflower ingenues.

  They did not speak further of the picture until Muriel stood to leave. Maestro offered, “Shall we have it shipped to you, then?”

  “What a bother that must cause you. If the paint is quite dry and if it might be rolled, perhaps I could venture to do something so simple as take it … with me? That, don’t you find, remains one of watercolors’ many merits—their portability, so to speak.”

  Again in insurmountable yet, one felt, idiomatic Italian, he ordered that a pasteboard tube be brought, and, before becoming hidden, the picture was studied again. “Are you averse, Maestro, to signing your works? Or does it interfere with the overall design, or whatever?” The “whatever” she would later rue, but at least it was less bad than that beef-jerky American “Beg pardon?”

  “No.” He took up the brush and bowed forward, left a trace of name not unprominently placed.

  “About my homage, your remuneration, or what have you …” she began, dogged, Scottish, stifled but determined. And really, now, for the first time in the seven years since she first labored toward this, Miss Muriel Fraser felt embarrassed at her half-coarse daring; it was like some pastor’s pious eldest daughter unaccountably choosing the traveling career of a juggling comic actress. She was briefly confused as to her motives in all she had attempted. But now Muriel could not imagine returning home without having achieved this one distinguished thing via fate’s own patronage. The prospect became such a sadness, it belatedly weakened her.

  There was a louder knocking at the front door, which somehow made them all laugh. This time he seemed to order his servant to refrain from even answering. So, the signature blown until quite dry, Maestro rolled the picture with a wrenching matter-of-factness and popped it—no other word would do—into its tube.

  And then, jovial as a mayor, he was walking them to the door. “This has been quite refreshing, spending time with two of my countrywomen who’ve remained so utterly unstudied. You would not believe the pretension of certain Americans who seek one out here.”

  “It can be a little frightful,” Muriel offered, and then Ethel, the door now opened, saw fit to risk, “Though they doubtless mean well and are merely nervous in your presence. It is clumsiness is all, perhaps.” And smiled.

  He seemed pleased enough, but as the door was nearly closed, they heard him cough some orders to his servant, or indicate social relief, going on to the next thing. And they felt no doubt, as they strode arm in arm back to the hotel, that Maestro had, for all his courtesy, already largely forgotten them. Maybe the Germans must now be dealt with? Maybe he needed dinner? Surely he had moved on to persons more significant and more lovely and with actual money. But the Fraser girls, their hen-brown mailing tube held before and against them, they did not mind.

  The two drifted past the front desk, failing to acknowledge the greeting of the bellman. Only when alone together did they embrace. Then unexpectedly they sobbed. They could not stop weeping. “Poor Mama,” Muriel said, as if explaining everything. The sisters seemed to cry for injustices endured. And not only by their loved ones. No, by everybody. The whore’s belief that her own breath might resurrect cloth violets. To be paid, in flipped coins, from a macaroon tin. The difficulty of quite literally every day on earth. How very odd that achieving some small token of justice should release in you not license toward a pure lit joy but descent into such careening blackened rage. The Fraser girls were both so wracked by heaves and bleats, they soon commenced laughing. They pointed to each other’s tear-painted face. It was only after ordering a full cream-tea, served in their rooms (an additional expense), only then did they dare turn up the gas lamp, and take out the picture, and look at it.

  Still holding on to each other, the sisters agreed it had the grandeur of his massive oil portraits but the intimacy, the atmospheric jeweled flash, of his best watercolors. It resembled Muriel but made her look, if no prettier, thank God—for flattery per se was her worst fear—then better. Just “better”—not overly elongated but more distinguished because, quite simply, more visibly herself than ever before.

  Come morning, Muriel would send, by messenger, the jet-worked black purse containing American bills in the amount of $400. Along with it, a three-sentence note: “I know the Caravaggios and have been painted by Sargent. I can now say I have experienced the ultimate. My thanks, and my sister’s, for your hospitality. Muriel Fraser.”

  (Her original note contained the postscript: “Have the Germans re-stormed the citadel?” But, after consulting her sister—an executive secretary, after all, who had used three years’ future vacations to come along—Muriel reconsidered and—wisely, I believe—copied the lines afresh, without that overfamiliar aside.)

  By return, their messenger brought the artist’s simple vellum notepaper, “The pleasure was all on my side, I assure you. JSS,” and the reticule. When Muriel glimpsed the money still folded inside, she had a sinking spell. It was only after her sensible and better-looking sister got her seated and wrapped a blanket round the subject’s legs, that Ethel thought to actually count the money. Maestro had seen fit to keep back $200 but had returned the rest and, of course, the handsome little beadwork bag itself.

  The boat fare, the cost of boarding for three weeks, the travel within England, and the return trip to Chicago—added to the price of the portrait—cost my Great-aunt Muriel nearly $900. Her dowry and savings gone, she would—without regret—take on years of additional night pupils to help justify and offset the single great expense of her life. But, she was later told, those with four times that amount to spend, those with pedigrees and ambassadorial letters of a magnitude far beyond even those wangled by Wrigleys, Armours, Palmers, and Fields, even those persons failed to achieve an audience with the great man, much less a picture.

  Framed in the thinnest of stark silver frames (Muriel believed that gold smacked of stockyard owners’ carnivorous pride), a glass-fronted watercolor replaced the mantel’s heavy mirror. The crowded little parlor benefited from the picture’s style, force, and lightly distinguished presence. Younger sisters sometimes said they missed consulting the central looking-glass, but Muriel’s mother asked to be carried in and propped before the painting, hours at a time. It soothed her as nothing else did.

  They decided to take down the peafowl hangings that flanked the fireplace. True, the crackled plaster showed, but now it seemed more eccentric, less pitiful. Though Papa was terribly critical of those boys brave enough to court his girls (such swains all proved to be mere Americans!), two sisters did bring home nice young men to see “the family Sargent.” Three boys’ genteel mothers came to pay respects. Muriel was asked to lend the picture to an exhibition in New York. She consented. Two Chicago papers reproduced Sargent’s portrait of her. One caption referred to her as “the distinguished local pianist and sometime coach to the finest of our youthful Lakeside keyboard talent.”