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.