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THE IMPRACTICAL TRUTH
Fact is is is
Fable.
—james merrill
I.
Passport
I did have a Great-aunt Muriel. Also
true how one misguided streetcar stranded her whole
family for life. By 1890, Muriel’s dashing
father, author of the out-of-print Lotus Images in
World Literature: A Reflection, debarred from
university library privileges, fired from being
“Raffles” of The Racing News, impatient
at teaching holy English to mere Asia Minor
foreigners, was forced at last to undertake
full-frontal “trade.”
In a
literary irony no sane writer would go near, he
ended his career selling tablecloths and matching
napkins at Marshall Field and Co., the very items
from the same store that had accessorized his
wife’s tragedy. With his groomed white beard
and Longfellow grandeur, the man was put to use as a
nine-to-five visual aid for women hoping to make
their tables appear respectable as he. Ladies
naturally gravitated toward a gent almost
distinguished-looking enough to pose as some
Scottish professor who’d published four books,
who’d inherited a nineteen-room freehold house
worthy of a name. Donald Fraser appeared, in fact,
someone distinguished enough to have lost
everything, and survived.
Maybe
that—and not a family Sargent—becomes
the lasting, ultimate Distinction? To have forfeited
all your class trappings, but to remain somewhat
standing. Here’s hoping that counts. It might
be my own unlucky family’s single chance at
amounting to anything, at getting on record. And
might that matter? I have no choice, given our
history, our story, but to believe it does.
—Odd that “History wished” should
be so much easier to tell than “History merely
if bravely lived.” In your own life,
don’t you find that?
For Donald
Fraser’s sixtieth birthday, daughters gave him
a pair of lively English water spaniels. Dogs soon
accompanied him everywhere except Field’s
“Fancy Linen Goods.” The esteemed
Professor, long deprived of his property, his
classroom audience, finally stopped saying,
“No one ever list-ens to me.” Now his
dogs did. He named them Sonny and Sadie. Muriel was
quiet in noting how much these names, uttered all
together, recalled the word “Sunnyside.”
He’d say, “Come Sonny/Sadie, my poor
landlocked creatures. Shall we stroll our bit
o’ lakefront and see what erosion’s left
us since last night?” In spaniels’
unwavering respect, the old man seemed to recover
some of his sense of home, of honor, even humor. The
pretty animals, flanking him, rendered this
once-forbidding patriarch picturesque. Fraser became
less a skulking fugitive of the lakeside park, more
an official greeter on this estate he did not own.
He indulged the pets just as his young
daughters—without his ever quite
suspecting—had shielded him. To Sonny and
Sadie, he quoted Gaelic poetry that they alone
seemed able to enjoy. Ears perked, heads tilting,
they stared up at him with a helpless trust unseen
for decades from his kin merely American.
My
actual Aunt Muriel wore a pince-nez all her life.
She possessed a beautiful contralto speaking voice.
It seemed richer than her face and wider than the
fragile partridge neck. Her Glasgow accent still
lived—a cushy burr—beneath the
Midwest’s layered brass. Aunt’s hair
went gray when she was twenty-some; she wore it
pulled back in a bun to “keep it out of the
way.” She had one good friend, named Jewel. A
family joke, how Muriel carried a tight-furled black
umbrella even on days half sunny. As a child, I
recall Aunt Muriel’s always smelling clean yet
clerical. It was a minty, neutral scent, like the
glue on a good business envelope. If she was
agitated, her aroma could upgrade to that of
Twining’s English Breakfast Tea steeping after
being violently at boil. One personable widower
called on her during the entire summer of 1908, but
either he was married or lost interest or moved, or
all three. His name, it is recalled with a bitter
retentiveness peculiar to poor literate families,
was “Stan,” “Stan”
Something.
After trying, as a young woman, to
teach piano, Muriel Fraser found her pupils no more
lucrative or socially notable than the twin
daughters of a Bengali hemp-importer and the
handsome son of her own Presbyterian pastor. Thanks
to the secretarial pool of her sister Ethel, she
finally took a day job. Quickly accomplished at the
new shorthand, being blessed with a most avid
intellect, Miss Fraser spent the next forty-seven
years serving as executive secretary to a fifth
vice-president of the International Harvester
Company, the fellow charged with manufacturing
bailers and crop-binding twines. —Musical yet
hardheaded, trim yet faintly asexual, cheerful if
not visibly ecstatic or excessive, blessed with the
ripe speaking voice but a thin singing one, Muriel
never married, devoting herself to her difficult,
wounded, attractive parents.
My question is:
Why her? Of all the family members held up to my kid
brother and myself as excellent American examples,
Miss Muriel Evangeline Kilkairn Fraser was never
cited once.
I came of age in eastern North
Carolina but often wrote to my favorite of
“The Fraser Girls.” Savoring such
exclamatory illustrated childhood bulletins, Muriel
determined I could draw, or was trying hard. So, in
the margins of her own terse letters, she started
sketching quarter-notes with faces, wispy stick
figures playing drums or horns. She assured me, age
eight, that artistic genes coursed, wild, through
our family. Muriel prepared me for the onslaught of
my own latent brilliance—brilliance at doing
what, she didn’t yet say. Maybe she preferred
not to limit me? Aunt saw predictive traces of my
good mind everywhere; and who was I to contradict
her? She foretold Prizes, in much the way my parents
hinted at a cruel Puberty waiting dead ahead. I
preferred Aunt’s verdict.
Kids along
our suburban North Carolina street were force-fed
lessons in ballroom dancing, dressage, and piano,
even the boys. I endured three years of dreary
Czerny exercises. One of Aunt’s notes told me,
with what seemed glossy sophistication,
“Czerny has few great supporters, no? The very
word ‘Czerny’ means, of course,
‘black’ in Czech.” This fact I
tried, with uneven success, to wedge into
conversations at grammar-school marble games. Nobody
had the slightest idea what I meant. Looking back, I
see that happened often. It helps explain how much,
between trips North, I longed for the snobbish
certainties of a brisk, unlikely woman my father
called Miss Mouse.
Mother caught me admiring
one of Muriel’s little illustrated notes and
said, “How dear. She’s like our own
Beatrix Potter, isn’t she? Only without the
talent.” Christmases, Aunt might send my
younger brother a ski sweater or some cowboy
wallet—his name burned there in lasso script.
But, upon me, Great-aunt Muriel lavished the most
exquisite of art supplies. The expensive candy of
Winsor Newton tubed watercolors, paper so rich with
rag no frame was needed to help it stand. Such
supplies were always beautifully gift-wrapped by
Marshall Field’s. (Our family’s fate
seemed as bound to that emporium as some clans to,
say, the Roman Catholic Church.)
In Falls,
North Carolina, you could only buy artist’s
equipment in one corner of our better hardware
store. On sale beside a tray of pink bathtub-plugs,
such local paint smacked less of art than carpentry.
—Just before Christmas, I would roll the best
of my whole year’s work into a brown mailing
tube. (She never didn’t like my efforts!) Her
gifts led me to check out art books from our local
library. I found one, The Underappreciated Singer
Sargent, and, applying the idea of being underrated
to her and to myself, renewed the book and renewed
it. Muriel insured my love with her annual bundle,
the finest art supplies mere money could buy. I
swear, with those, she half-created me. And
this.
I felt related to her. There was
something in how Muriel, though cohabiting with
family, lived so visibly alone. Something in her own
appetite for study, her faith in the “National
Geographic Society” (whose expeditions she
hinted she helped fund). Something in her morbid
breath-mint fear of imposing on others. Something in
her gluttonous eyes, her Museum memberships, her
relish for facts, her extraordinary memory and its
companion, sympathy. All these drew me, like
predictions.
Masquerading as a boy, I
weakened with gratitude whenever
Aunt—recognizing one of my emerging
qualities—mailed me some sketch or playbill.
My local teachers worried I
“exaggerated.” They claimed I was cursed
with a “perhaps morbid and surely over-vivid
imagination” (a direct quote). Short of
driving you to criminal acts, can the Imagination be
too vivid? Can a wish have too much ballast, too
much invented History? Can a person’s life be
over-alive? And to Whom should we apologize for too
much Seeing?
My parents fretted: Miss Mouse
was overstimulating me. “Something here from
one of your more elderly girlfriends,” they
held her good blue stationery in their big oily
paws. Such jealousy bewildered me. But then I could
lock my room’s door, could settle on my bed in
stocking feet, could plant the reading glasses on my
snub freckled nose, could study both sides of the
envelope before tearing into her fresh packet of
lore.
Muriel had a nickname for me. It was
based on one of my infant mishearings: she’d
planted me in her bony lap while perusing pages of
the Geographic. At a picture of some jowly
black-robed Caribbean judge, she read the caption,
“His Honor,” but I somehow heard
“His Owl.” This delighted her, not as a
lapse, but an invention. She reported this to
strangers till my parents began to look at each
other.
Soon—inside each Muriel
letter—she abbreviated me “H.H.
H.O.” “His Honor His Owl.” By the
time I was eight, these endearments began to fill me
with a strange half-sexual charge. Such intimacy
came, after all, from a woman, a grown woman, and
one so adult and alone, so marginal to all but
me—she seemed either half dead or half
invented. I knew I would provide the rest. I
volunteered for that, I’d be her
sixty-eight-pound avenger. A battle was coming, one
I must prepare for. What my parents considered
Muriel’s plain sadness, I saw as the Tragedy
of Everything Taken from Her, and “Our
Line.” Morbid perhaps, I asked Mother many
ghoulish questions about her grandmother’s
streetcar accident. Did the trolley actually climb
actually right on top of her? And just sit there?
For how long? To my lurid little mind, the family
tragedy had sexual overtones—a pretty woman on
her back, pelvis crushed, surrounded by costly gifts
still safe in their white tissue paper.
At
eight, I ordered encoder rings off the back of
cereal boxes (“Boys, Nobody Will Crack YOUR
Secret Messages, Ever”). Muriel’s
letters seemed encrypted, and sweeter for that. I
felt a tenderness whose by-product was a kind of
enraged defensiveness. When my parents made jokes
about a Northerly nest of chilly Scottish spinsters,
I left the room with a silent grandeur so discreet I
sometimes wondered if they noticed.
Aunt sent
me office gossip and not-that-riveting neighborhood
news flashes: “Guess what? Someone at church
left ten Presbyterian hymnals outdoors in the bushes
last week. Certainly nobody knows why. But, H.O.,
they were very nearly ruined by the rain!” She
wrote explaining about sentences that spelled the
same things backwards and forwards. By return mail,
I scored: “Madam, I’m Adam.” Aunt
retorted: “Eve.” She offered fabric
swatches: “Which is best for the
parlor’s wingchair, H.H. H.O.?” Magazine
articles were marked only “Made Me Think of
You, of Course.”
I begged to go visit
her. “In six or eight months,” they told
me. I saved my dimes. I planned for this one
distinguishing thing that set me apart from other
routine kids on Country Club Drive.
My
parents provided the shelter, the food, and
schooling. Taking care of us, they sometimes seemed
too busy to note precisely who they’d drawn
from the genetic sweepstakes. Mother provided a new
set of maroon encyclopedias and the coarse newsprint
for Bradley and me to sketch on. Brother and I were
expected to be self-sufficient, uncomplaining. To
clean up after ourselves regarding both hygiene and
emotion. In our lipless Presbyterian realm, grime
and emotion were considered equally annoying,
similarly susceptible to strong soap, fierce
bristles, and “the silent treatment.” My
father never once tossed a ball to Brother and me on
our two-acre lawn (which appeared designed for
exactly that). If we strolled the yard with him, it
was to follow his massive back and the faceted arm
pointing out some spot we’d missed while
trimming the endless hedge, a tourniquet that
stanched our unused yard from others adjoining
it.
Our parents’ kindnesses seemed
present-day precautions against some future
litigation. “Don’t ever say you
didn’t have the very best encyclopedias, plus
the yearbook updates,” Mother encouraged
whenever she found us scanning a volume. “I
hope you appreciate the steak you boys get every
Saturday night. Look at them, wolfing it down,
T-bone this tender.” —Appreciation
cannot, I think, be actively
solicited.
Awaiting the Chicago trip, I
remember marking my bedside calendar. Beyond my
aunt, there was an added expectation. Since Father
liked to “get the jump on” Falls, North
Carolina’s 1956 rush hour, he always packed
our Buick Super the night before. At dawn, I would
hear the dark house come alive with Christmassy
draggings and knocks, paper rustlings. Once the car
was humming, last thing before leaving, our father
would pad into the rooms of his sleeping sons; he
always lugged me out first. This meant his lifting
me in footed blue pajamas; this meant his carrying
me, still feigning weighty dreams; this meant his
settling me inside a nest of quilts he’d made
for us on the Buick’s back seat of pearl-gray
flannel broadcloth. As Dad rushed back indoors for
Bradley, I remember scouting through the car window.
I’d never been awake this early. Our yard, the
neighbor’s roof were wet, all silver-blue and
gold, and looked brand-new. When I heard the front
door open, I konked over in some faked adorable
attitude. Mother brought along our daytime clothes.
And only when we got a few miles clear of the city
limits, listening to the folks’ usual dull
list, “I turned off the stove, didn’t I?
We canceled the paper delivery, right,” only
then would Brother and I sit up. Pretending to wake,
we yawned, “But where ARE we, Daddy?”
Like so much in our stiff, attractive lives, all of
it was simulated. This little ritual, this being
carried—last luggage—to the car, might
seem trivial, but it filled us with an unexplainable
excitement. All year, we waited. It was the one part
of our Chicago treks my kid brother liked. Only
later, only recently, did Bradley and I, seated at
the end of a dock on his property at Venice,
California, figure just why this had always been a
favorite memory. Because: only while loading us into
his sedan, only then—apart from shaking our
hands, or slapping us, or sometimes pulling on our
snowsuits—only then did this rangy man feel
free to touch us once a year. In our faked sleep,
how we curled against him, our arms around his solid
neck. —Why this enforced coldness that fathers
saw as their job description then? Why were we kids
seen as assured slackers, latent beatniks, who must
be kept in line like some miniature militia? Why, if
you work yourself blind for your own children,
should you be scared to squeeze and tousle them with
the sweet rough-housing they so crave? Such were the
mysteries surrounding that oddly more comprehensible
mystery: Muriel’s patronage and fascinated
attendance on one bright child. I tell you all this
other so you’ll see why I really needed
her—Muriel, who couldn’t keep her hands
off my brother and myself. And for that, was
considered “strange.”
In the
usual order of succession, father passes lore to
son, mother to daughter. Great-aunt to great-nephew
has, I’m told, some precedents in certain
Oceanic tribes. But she broke rank, she came at me
and barked, “Follow,” and I just did.
Muriel had decided that talent skips a
generation—which left us both in the clear!
And, weary, from the sidelines, my parents watched
with equal parts amusement, pity, dread. If Muriel
had controlled the family fortune—if
we’d had one anymore—my tie with her
might have been more seriously promoted. But
I’m thankful to my parents. They were social,
handsome, well-meaning, exhausted. Unlike Muriel,
fifty years their senior, they seemed, as I recall
them, always very, very tired. Only in retirement
would they find an almost childlike vitality I had
never witnessed. But during those gray days of their
youths, Muriel came forward, asking, thanking,
assuming. And my parents mostly let her have
me.
The only time I felt sick with readiness
to say, “I do, I do appreciate this,”
was on being hand-bundled into our Buick headed
North. My parents saw these trips as a duty; my kid
brother considered them hell; I literally pined for
my great aunt.
Someone should eventually write
the truth: there is always something embarrassing
about love. All of it. That’s because
there’s always something wrong with the
beloved. Because one’s motives for loving are
never pure as love itself. It’s too good for
us. That’s why our hearts stay
broken.
Between sightings, my image of Muriel
evolved and faltered and improved. She lengthened,
stood straighter, dressed better, and took on
qualities like Shirley Temple’s stern yet rich
step-grandmother seen on the late show (probably
Edna Mae Oliver?); this old girl finally revealed
her good nature with a game try at doing the
Charleston. Sometimes in memory Muriel made atypical
hostess-entrances. She acted kindly toward the
servants, who, on account of this, did even more for
her. And her home’s polished white halls were
wider than those in your bigger Yankee hotels. First
glimpse of Muriel Actual always shocked me.
She’d both shrunk and wizened. I’d
forgotten her medicinal bifocals and how she forever
appeared faintly powdered, hair and arms and face.
(I was already a secret late-show fan, and it seemed
strange to me that my Rebecca should be played by
Mrs. Danvers.) But as soon as this toothsome hag
bent down before me (there wasn’t far to
stoop), soon as I smelled her documentary
file-drawer scent, soon as she put her knotty hands
upon my shoulders and said, “Here His Honor
and Owlness is, at last. I have planned it to the
minute and all of Chicago knows you’re
here,” that pretty much did it.
I
don’t think I just imagined that sexual
charge. I still own her insinuating, cryptic
letters. They are charming. And like so many
charming things, they can finally seem pointless.
But they do hint: whatever Muriel had saved of her
romantic erotic restlessness, she offered me. If my
father and mother ASSUMED me, Muriel SAW
me—observed me with a lavish spendthrift joy
it troubles me a little to recall.
These
days, parents would never let their eight-year-old
go off on unsupervised day trips alongside an adult
so obsessed with such a pretty, pretentious,
innocent, and eager child. “I believe that if
Miss Mouse told him to jump off a building he
would,” my father said. And I sat listening,
already choosing which of Sullivan’s Chicago
towers Muriel might consider most
beautiful...
Excerpted from The Practical Heart by
Allan Gurganus
Copyright 2001 by Allan Gurganus. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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