She knelt toward my height, giving at the knees, her umbrella a cane. And as she grinned discolored teeth my way, I knew to beam right back. Bifocaled pince-nez made her eyes subdivide: shields of magnified mineral gray-green. Though I felt betrayed, less by experience than by my great-aunt herself, I said exactly what my parents would’ve wished. I said what I had been taught by nine hundred years of cringing, genteel, bent-backed manners.

“Ma’am? The card’s just as nice. It’ll probably help me remember just as well, probably.—Really.”

“But you’re sure? Only if ye’re absolutely certain.”

“Yeah. Really.” I knew to answer with bright forced conviction.

Is this not our bitter heritage? Trading away the Pleasures we most want, in hopes of scoring Duty Points to win some greater credit up ahead and via Suffering’s rebates? Sick. And surely sad. But, ours.—I am forty-five years old. I live alone and basically like it. But I am personally so tired of enforced self-denial. Of being considered just a fragment-fraction of some family not founded yet. I’m tired of restaurant hostesses reaching for menus while looking over my shoulder to say, “Just you? Only the one?” I recall Muriel’s stubborn traction, her willingness to constitute a crowd of one.

But there it is. Call it pain. Or call it our tradition.

Then “poor Muriel”—for so my parents named her—thanked me as she rose to face the clerk. Onto the glass case she emptied her change purse’s secret compartment. While the checkout girl made a mouth at the four customers waiting behind us, Aunt said she’d just be getting rid of these few pennies here, all right? And Muriel’s elegant, tapered, pianistic fingertips counted groups of five aloud, counted aloud the 89¢, plus tax.

The museum’s logo being on the brown paper bag, that made my loss a little easier to bear. Hand in hand, we silently endured the long elevated-streetcar ride home. She’d bought the item meant for people smart enough to want some keepsake, but too poor to expect the finest.

I wanted the expensive heart.

III. REWARD

Aunt spent her last year in a rest home south of Evanston. Her two surviving sisters had died within ten days of one another. Family loyalty had become, of necessity, our tribe’s low-cost form of recognized nobility. Muriel, the oldest of them, was miffed at being left behind and said so. But to whom? Only at the end did she reveal some of the outlaw mischief I alone had felt bulking there beneath her breath mints and “gay” violets.

A letter arrived in North Carolina for the executor of Aunt’s trivial estate, my mother. It was from the home’s director: “Muriel is fast becoming one of our all-time worst incorrigibles.” “Well, high time, and good for her!” Dad laughed. Mother said, “Great, go on and chortle, you ox. But this is the third place, and if they chuck her out, she’s on the street, Richard. Or, worse, down here with us.” That sure shut Dad up.