THE EXPENSE OF SPIRIT

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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.