III. REWARD

  The painting now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. The woman shown looks, if not beautiful, then doggedly high-minded and, far better, a bit mischievous. Her expression contains qualities associated with the Scottish national character. Like the bagpipe’s wailing tone, her smile combines pagan playfulness with a mournful Nordic solemnity. (Golf, the major export of Scotland, with its elaborate strategy for a dubious end, might offer another example.)

  Arranged in profile against a pearl-gray suggestion of window panes and drapery, one hand’s tripod of tensed fingers rests among the scattered petals as she stands confronting daylight; she seems between appointments, lost in some personal rewarding reverie.

  She is pale but fixed, and the one depicted corner of her mouth shows something gleeful, as if the subject is plotting or, indeed, achieving, at the very moment of depiction, a goal, a comeuppance, a sweet payback fervently sought. Is the joke that an unwed, unrich, quite smart, forward-looking piano enthusiast from the Middle West has just attained something so long wished for? It is an expression that might be termed “intellectual happiness”—that joy some feel must be a contradiction in terms but which, made flesh here, quite plainly is not. Here use and pleasure, practice and performance are joined at last and for all time. The distinguished thing, intact and, via clarion water-clear understatement, preserved, preserved.

  The wide dark hat and a hastily rendered lace collar on a black black dress, all this could have only been done very fast, in speedy watercolor, by a genius of some sort, between other obligations, all at once, by accident. His accident, her plan.

  At the Art Institute, this is the single watercolor in a room of six massive vertical oils. These others limn department-store heiresses and meat ladies. The oil portraits sometimes seem more intent on flattering the costly Worth dresses than ladies’ dashingly rendered local faces, their supplemental chins hastily euphemized but nonetheless suggested. One lady confronts us from alongside a Great Dane dog, obviously borrowed, and she holds a riding crop. But there’s an unfortunate assumption that she is about to hop sidesaddle onto the beast and whip it into service as an unwilling form of transportation. Just this April, I myself loitered in the echoing chamber of white marble. For forty minutes, I listened with feigned detachment as talkative gallery visitors discussed the museum’s cluster of its choicest Sargents. I swear that, a hundred-odd years after the picture was done and forty-some years after its subject’s death, the picture’s freshness still seems to grow.

  After being overawed (even somewhat enjoyably snubbed) by the nine-foot oils, the more diligent lookers often come to rest before this, the smallest painting of the seven. I love to see viewers linger here longest. We find a woman vertical beyond an upturned steamer trunk, as if some household is in transit, and yet a still life has been improvised atop the trunk where one outstretched and elegant hand pivots. A wash of cobalt blue fills that hand with quick implied blood. What best distinguishes this picture from its mannequin companions is the way it presents a person plainly meditating on something, some fact or idea visibly satisfying. Simply put, it is a watercolor of a woman not handsome, not hideous, but shown, under her overhanging eave of a black hat, thinking something.

  I can imagine Muriel, just before she surrendered her small masterwork to the Institute. I see her just prior to achieving her clan’s (and her own) permanent detour past the squat alley entrance marked DELIVERIES AND STAFF. Easy to picture her just before yielding to History as she somewhat wished it. Muriel is seated at the parlor’s rent-to-own Chickering upright, an instrument long since rented unto ownership. A slow, sweet snoring from one room away means Mama, resting well. Outside, some roving street vendor cries, “Nice and sharp, let me put the edge back on those knives and scissors. Cut into anything. Get ’em nice and sharp for you today?”

  Over that and alongside it, I hear Muriel, retired, playing a favorite Field nocturne, at noon. Notes accumulate under and around her like brush strokes, like paychecks; like all the pinfeathers required to make one airworthy wing, angel-white or hen-brown. She touches keys while studying the mantel’s picture that, through the saving mystery of Art, is notable because it is not merely herself, and yet somewhat is, herself. Muriel plays today, for free, for joy, for no one but herself.

  The museum affixed a gilt label to Muriel’s own simple silver frame and dove-gray silk mat. The museum adjudged her choices unimprovable. It reads: “‘Portrait of a Lady, in Black’—watercolor. Subject: Miss Muriel Fraser (American)—by John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). Executed, April 19, 1888.—A Gift of the Sitter.”

  • • •

  So all this, you see, underwrites her permission, her blessing on my artful offhandedness in finally remarking to you, with a carelessness oh so hard-won, as if to almost make light of it—the distinguished thing, our one distinguished thing, at last:

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

  —Yes, Muriel, our practical one.

  THE IMPRACTICAL

  TRUTH

  Fact is is is Fable.

  —JAMES MERRILL

  I. PASSPORT

  I did have a Great-aunt Muriel. Also true how one misguided streetcar stranded her whole family for life. By 1890, Muriel’s dashing father, author of the out-of-print Lotus Images in World Literature: A Reflection, debarred from university library privileges, fired from being “Raffles” of The Racing News, impatient at teaching holy English to mere Asia Minor foreigners, was forced at last to undertake full-frontal “trade.”

  In a literary irony no sane writer would go near, he ended his career selling tablecloths and matching napkins at Marshall Field and Co., the very items from the same store that had accessorized his wife’s tragedy. With his groomed white beard and Longfellow grandeur, the man was put to use as a nine-to-five visual aid for women hoping to make their tables appear respectable as he. Ladies naturally gravitated toward a gent almost distinguished-looking enough to pose as some Scottish professor who’d published four books, who’d inherited a nineteen-room freehold house worthy of a name. Donald Fraser appeared, in fact, someone distinguished enough to have lost everything, and survived.

  Maybe that—and not a family Sargent—becomes the lasting, ultimate Distinction? To have forfeited all your class trappings, but to remain somewhat standing. Here’s hoping that counts. It might be my own unlucky family’s single chance at amounting to anything, at getting on record. And might that matter? I have no choice, given our history, our story, but to believe it does.—Odd that “History wished” should be so much easier to tell than “History merely if bravely lived.”

  In your own life, don’t you find that?

  For Donald Fraser’s sixtieth birthday, daughters gave him a pair of lively English water spaniels. Dogs soon accompanied him everywhere except Field’s “Fancy Linen Goods.” The esteemed Professor, long deprived of his property, his classroom audience, finally stopped saying, “No one ever listens to me.” Now his dogs did. He named them Sonny and Sadie. Muriel was quiet in noting how much these names, uttered all together, recalled the word “Sunnyside.” He’d say, “Come Sonny/Sadie, my poor landlocked creatures. Shall we stroll our bit o’ lakefront and see what erosion’s left us since last night?” In spaniels’ unwavering respect, the old man seemed to recover some of his sense of home, of honor, even humor. The pretty animals, flanking him, rendered this once-forbidding patriarch picturesque. Fraser became less a skulking fugitive of the lakeside park, more an official greeter on this estate he did not own. He indulged the pets just as his young daughters—without his ever quite suspecting—had shielded him. To Sonny and Sadie, he quoted Gaelic poetry that they alone seemed able to enjoy. Ears perked, heads tilting, they stared up at him with a helpless trust unseen for decades from his kin merely American.

  My actual Aunt Muriel wore a pince-nez all her life. She possessed a beautiful contralto speaking voice. It seemed richer than her face and wider than the fragile partridge neck. Her Glasgow accent still lived—a cushy burr—beneath the Midwest’s layered brass. Aunt’s hair went gray when she was twenty-some; she wore it pulled back in a bun to “keep it out of the way.” She had one good friend, named Jewel. A family joke, how Muriel carried a tight-furled black umbrella even on days half sunny. As a child, I recall Aunt Muriel’s always smelling clean yet clerical. It was a minty, neutral scent, like the glue on a good business envelope. If she was agitated, her aroma could upgrade to that of Twining’s English Breakfast Tea steeping after being violently at boil. One personable widower called on her during the entire summer of 1908, but either he was married or lost interest or moved, or all three. His name, it is recalled with a bitter retentiveness peculiar to poor literate families, was “Stan,” “Stan” Something.

  After trying, as a young woman, to teach piano, Muriel Fraser found her pupils no more lucrative or socially notable than the twin daughters of a Bengali hemp-importer and the handsome son of her own Presbyterian pastor. Thanks to the secretarial pool of her sister Ethel, she finally took a day job. Quickly accomplished at the new shorthand, being blessed with a most avid intellect, Miss Fraser spent the next forty-seven years serving as executive secretary to a fifth vice-president of the International Harvester Company, the fellow charged with manufacturing bailers and crop-binding twines.—Musical yet hardheaded, trim yet faintly asexual, cheerful if not visibly ecstatic or excessive, blessed with the ripe speaking voice but a thin singing one, Muriel never married, devoting herself to her difficult, wounded, attractive parents.

  My question is: Why her? Of all the family members held up to my kid brother and myself as excellent American examples, Miss Muriel Evangeline Kilkairn Fraser was never cited once.

  I came of age in eastern North Carolina but often wrote to my favorite of “The Fraser Girls.” Savoring such exclamatory illustrated childhood bulletins, Muriel determined I could draw, or was trying hard. So, in the margins of her own terse letters, she started sketching quarter-notes with faces, wispy stick figures playing drums or horns. She assured me, age eight, that artistic genes coursed, wild, through our family. Muriel prepared me for the onslaught of my own latent brilliance—brilliance at doing what, she didn’t yet say. Maybe she preferred not to limit me? Aunt saw predictive traces of my good mind everywhere; and who was I to contradict her? She foretold Prizes, in much the way my parents hinted at a cruel Puberty waiting dead ahead. I preferred Aunt’s verdict.

  Kids along our suburban North Carolina street were force-fed lessons in ballroom dancing, dressage, and piano, even the boys. I endured three years of dreary Czerny exercises. One of Aunt’s notes told me, with what seemed glossy sophistication, “Czerny has few great supporters, no? The very word ‘Czerny’ means, of course, ‘black’ in Czech.” This fact I tried, with uneven success, to wedge into conversations at grammar-school marble games. Nobody had the slightest idea what I meant. Looking back, I see that happened often. It helps explain how much, between trips North, I longed for the snobbish certainties of a brisk, unlikely woman my father called Miss Mouse.

  Mother caught me admiring one of Muriel’s little illustrated notes and said, “How dear. She’s like our own Beatrix Potter, isn’t she? Only without the talent.” Christmases, Aunt might send my younger brother a ski sweater or some cowboy wallet—his name burned there in lasso script. But, upon me, Great-aunt Muriel lavished the most exquisite of art supplies. The expensive candy of Winsor Newton tubed watercolors, paper so rich with rag no frame was needed to help it stand. Such supplies were always beautifully gift-wrapped by Marshall Field’s. (Our family’s fate seemed as bound to that emporium as some clans to, say, the Roman Catholic Church.)

  In Falls, North Carolina, you could only buy artist’s equipment in one corner of our better hardware store. On sale beside a tray of pink bathtub-plugs, such local paint smacked less of art than carpentry.—Just before Christmas, I would roll the best of my whole year’s work into a brown mailing tube. (She never didn’t like my efforts!) Her gifts led me to check out art books from our local library. I found one, The Underappreciated Singer Sargent, and, applying the idea of being underrated to her and to myself, renewed the book and renewed it. Muriel insured my love with her annual bundle, the finest art supplies mere money could buy. I swear, with those, she half-created me. And this.

  I felt related to her. There was something in how Muriel, though cohabiting with family, lived so visibly alone. Something in her own appetite for study, her faith in the “National Geographic Society” (whose expeditions she hinted she helped fund). Something in her morbid breath-mint fear of imposing on others. Something in her gluttonous eyes, her Museum memberships, her relish for facts, her extraordinary memory and its companion, sympathy. All these drew me, like predictions.

  Masquerading as a boy, I weakened with gratitude whenever Aunt—recognizing one of my emerging qualities—mailed me some sketch or playbill. My local teachers worried I “exaggerated.” They claimed I was cursed with a “perhaps morbid and surely over-vivid imagination” (a direct quote). Short of driving you to criminal acts, can the Imagination be too vivid? Can a wish have too much ballast, too much invented History? Can a person’s life be over-alive? And to Whom should we apologize for too much Seeing?

  My parents fretted: Miss Mouse was overstimulating me. “Something here from one of your more elderly girlfriends,” they held her good blue stationery in their big oily paws. Such jealousy bewildered me. But then I could lock my room’s door, could settle on my bed in stocking feet, could plant the reading glasses on my snub freckled nose, could study both sides of the envelope before tearing into her fresh packet of lore.

  Muriel had a nickname for me. It was based on one of my infant mishearings: she’d planted me in her bony lap while perusing pages of the Geographic. At a picture of some jowly black-robed Caribbean judge, she read the caption, “His Honor,” but I somehow heard “His Owl.” This delighted her, not as a lapse, but an invention. She reported this to strangers till my parents began to look at each other.

  Soon—inside each Muriel letter—she abbreviated me “H.H. H.O.” “His Honor His Owl.” By the time I was eight, these endearments began to fill me with a strange half-sexual charge. Such intimacy came, after all, from a woman, a grown woman, and one so adult and alone, so marginal to all but me—she seemed either half dead or half invented. I knew I would provide the rest. I volunteered for that, I’d be her sixty-eight-pound avenger. A battle was coming, one I must prepare for. What my parents considered Muriel’s plain sadness, I saw as the Tragedy of Everything Taken from Her, and “Our Line.” Morbid perhaps, I asked Mother many ghoulish questions about her grandmother’s streetcar accident. Did the trolley actually climb actually right on top of her? And just sit there? For how long? To my lurid little mind, the family tragedy had sexual overtones—a pretty woman on her back, pelvis crushed, surrounded by costly gifts still safe in their white tissue paper.

  At eight, I ordered encoder rings off the back of cereal boxes (“Boys, Nobody Will Crack YOUR Secret Messages, Ever”). Muriel’s letters seemed encrypted, and sweeter for that. I felt a tenderness whose by-product was a kind of enraged defensiveness. When my parents made jokes about a Northerly nest of chilly Scottish spinsters, I left the room with a silent grandeur so discreet I sometimes wondered if they noticed.

  Aunt sent me office gossip and not-that-riveting neighborhood news flashes: “Guess what? Someone at church left ten Presbyterian hymnals outdoors in the bushes last week. Certainly nobody knows why. But, H.O., they were very nearly ruined by the rain!” She wrote explaining about sentences that spelled the same things backwards and forwards. By return mail, I scored: “Madam, I’m Adam.” Aunt retorted: “Eve.” She offered fabric swatches: “Which is best for the parlor’s wingchair, H.H. H.O.?” Magazine articles were marked only “Made Me Think of You, of Course.”

  I begged to go visit her. “In six or eight months,” they told me. I saved my dimes. I planned for this one distinguishing thing that set me apart from other routine kids on Country Club Drive.

  My parents provided the shelter, the food, and schooling. Taking care of us, they sometimes seemed too busy to note precisely who they’d drawn from the genetic sweepstakes. Mother provided a new set of maroon encyclopedias and the coarse newsprint for Bradley and me to sketch on. Brother and I were expected to be self-sufficient, uncomplaining. To clean up after ourselves regarding both hygiene and emotion. In our lipless Presbyterian realm, grime and emotion were considered equally annoying, similarly susceptible to strong soap, fierce bristles, and “the silent treatment.” My father never once tossed a ball to Brother and me on our two-acre lawn (which appeared designed for exactly that). If we strolled the yard with him, it was to follow his massive back and the faceted arm pointing out some spot we’d missed while trimming the endless hedge, a tourniquet that stanched our unused yard from others adjoining it.

  Our parents’ kindnesses seemed present-day precautions against some future litigation. “Don’t ever say you didn’t have the very best encyclopedias, plus the yearbook updates,” Mother encouraged whenever she found us scanning a volume. “I hope you appreciate the steak you boys get every Saturday night. Look at them, wolfing it down, T-bone this tender.”—Appreciation cannot, I think, be actively solicited.

  Awaiting the Chicago trip, I remember marking my bedside calendar. Beyond my aunt, there was an added expectation. Since Father liked to “get the jump on” Falls, North Carolina’s 1956 rush hour, he always packed our Buick Super the night before. At dawn, I would hear the dark house come alive with Christmassy draggings and knocks, paper rustlings. Once the car was humming, last thing before leaving, our father would pad into the rooms of his sleeping sons; he always lugged me out first. This meant his lifting me in footed blue pajamas; this meant his carrying me, still feigning weighty dreams; this meant his settling me inside a nest of quilts he’d made for us on the Buick’s back seat of pearl-gray flannel broadcloth. As Dad rushed back indoors for Bradley, I remember scouting through the car window. I’d never been awake this early. Our yard, the neighbor’s roof were wet, all silver-blue and gold, and looked brand-new. When I heard the front door open, I konked over in some faked adorable attitude. Mother brought along our daytime clothes. And only when we got a few miles clear of the city limits, listening to the folks’ usual dull list, “I turned off the stove, didn’t I? We canceled the paper delivery, right,” only then would Brother and I sit up. Pretending to wake, we yawned, “But where ARE we, Daddy?” Like so much in our stiff, attractive lives, all of it was simulated. This little ritual, this being carried—last luggage—to the car, might seem trivial, but it filled us with an unexplainable excitement. All year, we waited. It was the one part of our Chicago treks my kid brother liked. Only later, only recently, did Bradley and I, seated at the end of a dock on his property at Venice, California, figure just why this had always been a favorite memory. Because: only while loading us into his sedan, only then—apart from shaking our hands, or slapping us, or sometimes pulling on our snowsuits—only then did this rangy man feel free to touch us once a year. In our faked sleep, how we curled against him, our arms around his solid neck.—Why this enforced coldness that fathers saw as their job description then? Why were we kids seen as assured slackers, latent beatniks, who must be kept in line like some miniature militia? Why, if you work yourself blind for your own children, should you be scared to squeeze and tousle them with the sweet rough-housing they so crave? Such were the mysteries surrounding that oddly more comprehensible mystery: Muriel’s patronage and fascinated attendance on one bright child. I tell you all this other so you’ll see why I really needed her—Muriel, who couldn’t keep her hands off my brother and myself. And for that, was considered “strange.”