Dear Life

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 shesaid 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 hadgone 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 aconcert 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