I knew this was meant as punishment. But even at that age, even considering the fortune my earnings seemed—I saw that no amount would ever make it up to her; I mean, the debits. I noticed with horror that her nightdress was misbuttoned, that she wore no underclothes. And just by sitting here, I’d have to see her flat tire of one breast and some portion of a nipple gray-brown and cracked-looking. She didn’t know. She was pert and frazzled and she kept smiling. “Good you’ve come,” she said now. I wanted to rescue her from this narrow room. I wanted to rescue her from History—so bad at assigning, so good at misplacing. Such a slob, really, History. Muriel’s grandfather was asked to give crippling amounts (irretrievable loans) to the porky future King of England. Finders keepers, losers weepers…. Was there not some way to help her, even now? Some intuitive science, some practical bill-collector’s art? The more cross she acted toward me, the more I felt I knew her, and the more unworthy I felt. I sat here, winded and confused, so glad they’d let me come alone. Nobody need ever know she’d scolded me like that for being too slow, for my mentioning the money. Nobody would know. She least of all. But, I didn’t count on my own habitual remembering, a gift so enhanced in me by Muriel Evangeline Kilkairn Fraser.

“Was I wrong?” she asked, half aware she might’ve bruised my feelings. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t know how to do portraits yet. They’re harder than people realize. Portraits matter more than people think, I think.”

She nodded, but toward the air vent.

Aunt’s white hair, tugged free of its bun, appeared a witch’s, thin on top, wild wings out the sides. Her eyes seemed strained and blockish in their pouches. “But, what’d they do with your glasses?” I finally asked. She pointed to a drawer. I found them, lenses filthy. Glad to be useful, I cleaned these, my own spit on the back strand of my first silk necktie (bought with profits from the show). “Can you see now?” I set them on her long nose.

“See WHAT?”

I was glad my parents hadn’t found her like this. I believed they might hold it against me. Sitting here, I felt the first round of some strange guilt. The place smelled unclean. Staffers kept staring through Aunt’s open door, all wearing glum expressions, as if expecting to find her on her hands and knees, or maybe strangling me. I touched her bedclothes and gave off my best guardian looks to the wheelchaired corridor. Even here and unattended, Aunt’s clerical good-envelope-glue smell held on, as if baked into her by routine, a last gift. On the wall beside her pillow hung one framed girlish drawing of Sunnyside … a gate, a stone wall, the hollyhocks. On her bedside table, a brown celluloid radio, one side melted by tubes’ heat; today it was set to a gospel station, spitting quiet static. Atop a bureau missing its oval mirror, a single favorite doll of hers still safe under one clear glass dome. Beside it, a Bible concordance published in Glasgow in 1840, but no Bible here. One dog-eared copy of Forever Amber, a best-selling bodice-ripper historical romance from the forties, the nineteen forties. And, in its dainty silver frame, that brass plaque from International Harvester (now in Chapter Eleven) praising Muriel for saving the company so much bailing twine, “and for general excellence.”—All the sixteenth-century homeplace’s lore and trappings come down to this. The only thing still beautiful, her familiar battered black umbrella tilted against the curving wall, the umbrella alone somehow witty and intact.