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.

I sat wondering, could I ever help make things up to this old woman by—at least—making things up?

Whenever authorities caught the impenitent runaway, Aunt never seemed headed for Oak Park. The bungalow at 1200 Home Avenue was long since sold. Authorities always found her aiming for the lake. Maybe some memory of ocean? safety? true escape?

Now she interrupted my renewed saga of several good Carolina families who’d wisely added my oil paintings to their collections. “They hurt, they hurt me. They listen, too.” She nodded toward the air-duct’s grillwork, shreds of dust shuddering there. It did look sinister. I took her small rough hand. Turning it over, I found the bruises. Old ones fading greenish under newer navy-blue.