—See, Aunt kept running away. Armed only with her change purse and umbrella, she would leave a note on her good blue paper: “Food Dreadful. Consider This My Two Weeks Notice. It’s Inadequate. Do Not Follow Me.” Then she simply wandered out into traffic. Aunt either thumbed or stood there till the car of someone tenderhearted or citizenlike stopped. Muriel told strangers that the Presbyterian Home badly abused her; she said that Presbyterians were “secretly mostly prostitutes, Papist villains, and frequent doo-doo heads.” “They hurt my wrists,” she told me when I saw her last. Auntie sat there in bed, long fingers of her right hand braceleting the wrist of her left, rubbing, testing, till I almost believed her.

My parents, merciful, had given me plane fare. It was my first air trip alone. They themselves felt little urge to rush up here to see her. At our local arts center, I had just sold eight paintings from my first one-boy show. I was half sick with an adolescent’s joy at recognition: I told myself I’d “done it all for her.” It pleases many men to claim this of their wishes. Two newspaper notices were folded in my pocket. But Aunt hardly listened, she seemed restless, irked.

When I arrived, she’d confused me by asking if I had attended “the College of Cardinals.” … This made an image of red birds wearing mortarboards. “I’m in junior high, Aunt. ‘The College of Cardinals’? That doesn’t make any sense,” I told her, plain, with the strength of love. I saw her suspect she’d revealed too much; she lowered her head, slightly ashamed at being caught.

To soothe her, I described the opening, catered by Mom mostly. Aunt hinted, wasn’t the show a bit too local to matter much? “It’s not as if it were being held someplace real, inside the Loop,” she spoke while staring at the air vent over her bed. Inside my blazer pocket, I clutched thirty photos of the opening I now feared I’d never get to show her. Strange, I hadn’t thought to bring her a real painting—instead, just snapshots of the things hung on the gallery walls and quietly for sale. Her room could’ve used some help. It was in a turret, had no windows, and was partly round, not much bigger than a hotel’s entry breezeway.