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.