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.