Dear Life: Stories (13 page)

A mistake. Not only did an incredulous expression come over my uncle’s face—raised eyebrows, marvelling nod—but the words just out of my mouth sounded alien even to me, pompous and lacking in conviction.

I had not approved of my parents’ going to Africa. I had
objected to being dumped—my word for it—with my aunt and uncle. I may even have told them, my long-suffering parents, that their good works were a load of crap. In our house we were allowed to express ourselves as we liked. Though I don’t think my parents themselves would ever have spoken of “good works” or of “doing good.”

My uncle was satisfied, for the moment. He said that we’d have to drop the subject, as he himself needed to be back at his practice doing his own good works by one o’clock.

It was probably then that my aunt picked up her fork and began to eat. She would have waited until the bristling was over. This may have been out of habit, rather than out of alarm at my forwardness. She was used to holding back until she was sure that my uncle had said all that he meant to say. Even if I spoke to her directly, she would wait, looking at him to see if he wanted to do the answering. What she did say was always cheerful, and she smiled just as soon as she knew it was okay to smile, so it was hard to think of her as being suppressed. Also hard to think of her as my mother’s sister, because she looked so much younger and fresher and tidier, as well as being given to those radiant smiles.

My mother would talk right over my father if she had something she really wanted to say, and that was often the case. My brothers, even the one who said he was thinking of becoming a Muslim so that he could chastise women, always listened to her as an equal authority.

“Dawn’s life is devoted to her husband,” my mother had said, with an attempt at neutrality. Or, more drily, “Her life revolves around that man.”

This was something that was said at the time, and it was
not always meant as disparagement. But I had not seen before a woman of whom it seemed so true as Aunt Dawn.

Of course it would have been quite different, my mother said, if they’d had children.

Imagine that. Children. Getting in Uncle Jasper’s way, whining for a corner of their mother’s attention. Being sick, sulking, messing up the house, wanting food he didn’t like.

Impossible. The house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his. Even if he was at his practice next door, or out on a call, things had to be ready for his approval at any moment.

The slow realization that came to me was that such a regime could be quite agreeable. Bright sterling spoons and forks, polished dark floors, comforting linen sheets—all this household godliness was presided over by my aunt and arrived at by Bernice, the maid. Bernice cooked from scratch, ironed the dish towels. All the other doctors in town sent their linens to the Chinese laundry, while Bernice and Aunt Dawn herself hung ours out on the clothesline. White from the sun, fresh from the wind, sheets and bandages all superior and sweet-smelling. My uncle was of the opinion that the Chinks went too heavy on the starch.

“Chinese,” my aunt said in a soft, teasing voice, as if she had to apologize to both my uncle and the laundrymen.

“Chinks,” my uncle said boisterously.

Bernice was the only one who could say it quite naturally.

Gradually, I became less loyal to my home, with its intellectual seriousness and physical disorder. Of course it took all a woman’s energy to keep up such a haven as this. You could not be typing out Unitarian manifestos, or running off to Africa. (At first I said, “My parents went to
work
in
Africa,” every time a person in this house spoke of their running off. Then I got sick of making the correction.)

Haven was the word. “A woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.”

Did Aunt Dawn actually say that? I don’t think so. She shied away from statements. I probably read it in one of the housekeeping magazines I found in the house. Such as would have made my mother puke.

At first I explored the town. I found a heavy old bicycle in the back of the garage and took it out to ride without thinking of getting permission. Going downhill on a newly gravelled road above the harbor I lost control. One of my knees was badly scraped, and I had to visit my uncle at his practice attached to the house. He dealt expertly with the wound. He was all business then, matter-of-fact, with a mildness that was quite impersonal. No jokes. He said he couldn’t remember where that bike had come from—it was a treacherous old monster, and if I was keen on bicycling we could see about getting me a decent one. When I got better acquainted with my new school and with the rules about what girls there did after they reached their teens, I realized that biking was out of the question, so nothing came of this. What surprised me was that my uncle himself had not brought up any question of propriety or what girls should or should not do. He seemed to have forgotten, in his office, that I was a person who needed straightening out on many matters, or who had to be urged, especially at the dinner table, to copy the behavior of my aunt Dawn.

“You went riding up there all by yourself?” was what she
said when she heard about this. “What were you looking for? Never mind, you’ll soon have some friends.”

She was right, both about my acquiring a few friends and about the way that that would limit the things I could do.

Uncle Jasper was not just a doctor; he was
the
doctor. He had been the force behind the building of the town hospital, and had resisted its being named for him. He had grown up poor but smart and had taught school until he could afford medical training. He had delivered babies and operated on appendix cases in farmhouse kitchens after driving through snowstorms. Even in the fifties and sixties, such things had happened. He was relied on never to give up, to tackle cases of blood poisoning and pneumonia and to bring patients out alive in the days when the new drugs had not been heard of.

Yet in his office he seemed so easygoing, compared with the way he was at home. As if in the house a constant watch was needed but in the office no oversight was necessary, though you might have thought that the exact opposite would be the case. The nurse who worked there did not even treat him with any special deference—she was nothing like Aunt Dawn. She stuck her head around the door of the room where he was treating my scrape and said that she was going home early.

“You’ll have to get the phone, Dr. Cassel. Remember, I told you?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he said.

Of course she was old, maybe over fifty, and women of that age could take on a habit of authority.

But I couldn’t imagine that Aunt Dawn ever would. She seemed fixed in rosy and timorous youth. Early in my stay, when I thought I had the right to wander anywhere, I had
gone into my aunt and uncle’s bedroom to look at a picture of her, on his bedside table.

The soft curves and dark wavy hair she had still. But there was an unbecoming red cap covering part of that hair and she was wearing a purple cape. When I went downstairs I asked her what that outfit was and she said, “What outfit? Oh. That was my nursing student’s getup.”

“You were a nurse?”

“Oh no.” She laughed as if that would have been absurd effrontery. “I dropped out.”

“Is that how you met Uncle Jasper?”

“Oh no. He’d been a doctor for years before that. I met him when I had a ruptured appendix. I was staying with a friend—I mean a friend’s family up here—and I got really sick but I didn’t know what it was. He diagnosed it and took it out.” At this she blushed rather more than usual and said that perhaps I should not go into the bedroom unless I asked permission. Even I could understand that this meant never.

“So is your friend still here?”

“Oh you know. You don’t have friends in the same way once you get married.”

About the time I nosed out these facts I also discovered that Uncle Jasper was not altogether without family, as I had supposed. He had a sister. She, too, had been successful in the world, at least to my way of thinking. She was a musician, a violinist. Her name was Mona. Or that was the name she went by, though her proper, baptized name was Maud. Mona Cassel. My first knowledge of her existence came when I had lived in the town for about half the school year. When I was walking home from school one day I saw a poster in the window of the newspaper office, advertising a
concert that was to be given at the Town Hall in a couple of weeks’ time. Three musicians from Toronto. Mona Cassel was the tall, white-haired lady with the violin. When I got home I told Aunt Dawn about the coincidence of names and she said, “Oh yes. That would be your uncle’s sister.”

Then she said, “Just don’t mention anything about it around here.”

After a moment she seemed to feel obliged to say more.

“Your uncle doesn’t go for that kind of music, you know. Symphony music.”

And then more.

She said that the sister was a few years older than Uncle Jasper, and that something had happened when they were young. Some relatives had thought that this girl should be taken away and given a better chance, because she was so musical. So she was brought up in a different way and the brother and sister had nothing in common and that was really all that she—Aunt Dawn—knew about it. Except that my uncle would not like it that she had told me even that much.

“He doesn’t like that music?” I said. “What kind of music does he like?”

“Sort of more old-fashioned, you could say. Definitely not classical, though.”

“The Beatles?”

“Oh goodness.”

“Not Lawrence Welk?”

“It’s not up to us to discuss this, is it? I shouldn’t have got going on it.”

I disregarded her.

“So what do
you
like?”

“I like pretty much anything.”

“You must like some things better than other things.”

She wouldn’t grant more than one of her little laughs. This was the nervous laugh, similar to but more concerned than, for example, the laugh with which she asked Uncle Jasper how he liked his supper. He nearly always gave approval, but with qualifications. All right, but a bit too spicy or a bit too bland. Perhaps a little over- or possibly undercooked. Once, he said, “I didn’t,” and refused to elaborate, and the laugh vanished into her tight lips and heroic self-control.

What could that dinner have been? I want to say curry, but maybe that’s because my father didn’t like curry, though he didn’t make a fuss about it. My uncle got up and made himself a peanut butter sandwich, and the emphasis he put into this did amount to making a fuss. Whatever Aunt Dawn had served, it wouldn’t have been a deliberate provocation. Maybe just something slightly unusual that had looked good in a magazine. And, as I recall, he had eaten it all before pronouncing his verdict. So he was propelled not by hunger but by the need to make a statement of pure and mighty disapproval.

It occurs to me now that something might have gone wrong at the hospital that day, somebody might have died who wasn’t supposed to—perhaps the problem wasn’t with food at all. But I don’t think it occurred to Aunt Dawn—or, even if it did, she didn’t let her suspicion show. She was all contrition.

At the time, Aunt Dawn had another problem, a problem that I wouldn’t understand until later. She had the problem
of the couple next door. They had moved in about the same time as I had. He was the county-school inspector, she a music teacher. They were perhaps the same age as Aunt Dawn, younger than Uncle Jasper. They had no children either, which left them free for sociability. And they were at that stage of taking on a new community, where every prospect looks bright and easy. In this spirit they had asked Aunt Dawn and Uncle Jasper around for drinks. The social life of my aunt and uncle was so restricted, and so well known around town to be restricted, that my aunt had no practice in saying no. And so they found themselves visiting, having drinks and chatting, and I can imagine that Uncle Jasper warmed to the occasion, though without forgiving my aunt’s blunder in having accepted the invitation.

Now she was in a quandary. She understood that when people had invited you to their house and you had gone you were supposed to ask them back. Drinks for drinks, coffee for coffee. No need for a meal. But even what little was required she did not know how to do. My uncle had found no fault with the neighbors—he simply did not like having people in his house, on any account.

Then, with the news I had brought her, came the possibility of a solution to the problem. The trio from Toronto—including, of course, Mona—was performing at the Town Hall on one evening only. And it so happened that that was the very evening when Uncle Jasper had to be out of the house and had to stay out fairly late. It was the night of the County Physicians Annual General Meeting and Dinner. Not a banquet—wives were not invited.

The neighbors were planning to attend the concert. They would have had to, given her profession. But they agreed
to drop in as soon as it was over, for coffee and snacks. And to meet—this was where my aunt overreached herself—to meet the members of the trio, who would also be dropping in for a few moments.

I don’t know how much my aunt revealed to the neighbors about the relationship with Mona Cassel. If she had any sense, it was nothing. And sense was something she had plenty of, most of the time. She did, I’m sure, explain that the doctor could not be present on that evening, but she would never have gone so far as to tell them that the gathering was to be kept secret from him. And what about keeping it secret from Bernice, who went home at suppertime and would surely get a whiff of the preparations? I don’t know. And, most important of all, I don’t know how Aunt Dawn got the invitation through to the performers. Had she been in touch with Mona all along? I shouldn’t think so. She surely didn’t have it in her to deceive my uncle on a long-term basis.

I imagine she just got giddy and wrote a note, and took it to the hotel where the trio would be staying. She wouldn’t have had a Toronto address.

Even going into the hotel, she must have wondered what eyes were on her, and prayed that she would get not the manager, who knew her husband, but the new young woman, who was some sort of foreigner and might not even know that she was the doctor’s wife.