With the house exchange over, shelter for a family of six must be paid for out of pocket by a man who’d never known the heartache of rent. The Frasers’ leased house now stood between a busy firehouse and a busier liquor store. Servants at Sunnyside wrote for their salaries. The professor began contributing articles to a local sporting paper. As his waggish, tragic pen name, he chose “Raffles.” The Racing News complained he too often mentioned lotuses, Greek gods. Donald Fraser considered taking in a lodger. He tried the public schools, but his Scottish credentials were not respected here. Soon the word “Professor,” written before his name, seemed as dubious as the “Doctor” he saw scribbled on calling cards tacked to doors in the dark halls of the latest boardinghouse.

He was forced to telegraph a land agent in Glasgow. He sold Sunnyside via mail—his furniture, his library, everything at a loss. His wife’s bills were terrible, and he, so eager to get the poor woman home (mistaking this for Cure itself), consulted doctors who made promises they could not keep. Instead, they gave her drugs she came to need too much, even as the prices rose.

Four daughters performed their usual Friday musicales on a rental Chickering upright, not the homeplace’s signed Bechstein. In a small if overdecorated parlor, maroon hangings flanked the mantel; pennants showed a peacock to the right, a peahen to the left, both worked in metal threads, placed there, in part, to hide the plaster’s cracks.

The Sisters Fraser attended crowded slumside public schools. A head-lice epidemic made even their curls suspect. Their mama had been the forceful utilitarian, humoring Papa’s whims, standing guard over his writing hours. Whenever he acted swaggering or impractical, she had smiled at their daughters, saying as he listened, “Spare wee Donald his illusions, girls. They’re our only real capital.” But now—without her help—how loud and under-rehearsed poor Papa sounded. The girls soon lied to protect him; school was fun; this flat was “cozy”; America was friendly. Mrs. Fraser needed attending round-the-clock; her bedside table seemed an opium den’s as she reverted to baby talk, lived banked in pillows, gained weight, looked pale and round in her daytime nightdress. The girls pampered Mama with chocolates and mustard plasters; they sang to her. If left alone even a minute, she cried. Mabel, the youngest, chanted to herself, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put poor Mama back together again.” But Mrs. Fraser—second daughter of Lord Kilkairn—would live, a victim of stupefying good health, for another thirty-five years.