Aunt appeared finch-sized tucked out there waiting, nervous, a bit odd. Now, from the Human Heart, I watched her with a concern half amused, half protective. My great feeling for Aunt Muriel confused me. If boys of eight admit to feeling love at all, they tend to see its weakening brunt as their own fault, a lapse to stifle. I feared it was both bad luck and sissified to show too often my unlikely attraction, a mystery especially to myself. But how to encode and obscure our love’s immense comfort in a world of slapped faces, trolley beds, and young men making museum displays of their lower bodies’ private science and industry? She once told me that, as eldest, she would’ve inherited Sunnyside. She said as the oldest boy, I would’ve got it all direct from her—its orchard, library, and art. If only her papa hadn’t read the impractical cowboy art of one Mr. May. If only … I were hers…. If only … Years later, I understood: nobody ever wondered, aloud or not, if poor Muriel failed to marry because she was a lesbian. That, I saw, would have implied much more curiosity than our family ever showed her. Did I make this woman up to serve some need of mine—support, respect, an audience, and, incidental, love? How much of my own family life was I overvividly inventing? And how much of it, assigned, not wished—daily, badly, and morbidly—made me up?

After our pilgrimage to the habitable heart, aortas for its chimneys, Auntie beckoned me into the Museum Store. She would now buy me some little souvenir. But I mustn’t show my sometimes jealous baby brother, all right? Here was a glass case I called “a glass case,” and she called “vitrine.” On it, adult veined human hearts, scale models in high-grade impact-resistant ruby-colored plastic. They half-reminded me of that rude young man upstairs. You could disassemble them; you could learn from that. With the greedy memory of a vacationing child denied, I recall how these models cost $4.98 plus tax. Seeing the price, Muriel turned away from me. Umbrella clamped between her knees, she leaned nearly headfirst into her opened handbag, she pried open a black brass-jawed nylon coin-purse. Aunt swiveled from her cash to the counter’s gleaming heart, and back to fiscal reality, back, then back.

Beyond the expensive model, I noticed a big postcard depicting other children—strangers to me, Yankees—entering and leaving the heart’s exhibition. Stapled to each card, sealed inside a clear cellophane sack, was a one-inch plastic heart—not shaped like anyone’s actual organ—but symmetrical, designed, mere valentine—that artful and oversimplified. Each card costs 89¢.

Now Muriel spied those too, I felt the click. I understood: my small aunt’s spirit was enormous, her ambitions for me were even more vast; she saved to splurge on these luxurious outings and on my Christmas paints. But what a tight-boned corset her retiree’s budget made! She turned and smiled apology my way. The “beg pardon” in her lifted eyebrows told me, if I made a scene or sighed hard—then, yes, she’d buy me a real-looking heart, not just the chintzy, tiny false one. I saw what I must do. I saw what I must plainly say. It killed me, behaving.