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.