AUNT PLEASANTINE

July 14 , 2024

Thank you, Diane, for suggesting I share how the character of Aunt Pleasantine came to be.

My 1978 novel AUNT PLEASANTINE was inspired by my Aunt Dot who, like Aunt Pleasantine, wasn’t really an aunt.  Aunt Dot was my Grandmother Ruth’s dear friend, just as Aunt Pleasantine was narrator Mary’s grandmother’s close friend. Her background was much the same as Aunt Pleasantine’s, a comfortable childhood, an unfaithful husband, a divorce when divorces were rare; then financial hardship.

Aunt Dot had always been in my life. She helped take care of Penny and me on the chicken farm right from when we were born. When we visited our grandparents in Lexington she was usually part of the visit. She visited us in New Hampshire. Penny and I enjoyed her visits, her humorous outlook. I also enjoyed the little coconut cakes she always brought from a bakery for our father!

She corresponded with our mother, and later in life she began writing to me too. In one of her letters she sent a photograph of her young self. This is what galvanized me into the idea of a novel. Don framed the photo and arranged it on a living-room wall, and I wrote Aunt Dot’s description into the description Aunt Pleasantine writes to Mary:

“[The picture] must have been taken about 1909, because it was before I was married and that momentous event occurred in 1910.
The picture was taken during a drive. We stopped and got out of the automobile to have our picture taken by your grandmother’s brother.
From left to right:
Your grandmother is wearing a blue and white checkered taffeta dress. Her bonnet is blue, with white ties.
Next, my father, whom I adored, in his auto cap and duster, the latter oil-spotted because he always rode in the front seat.
Next, my poor grandmother, whose life I made miserable . . . Grandma is wearing a blue and green silk foulard dress with a light straw bonnet.
The coy one is, of course, me. My bonnet was black with bunches of violets, supposed to add greatly to my appearance, when the ribbon ties held them securely over my ears.
In the background there is a Rah-Ray boy. And a ‘smoothie’ who is smoking a ‘seegar.’ They were your grandmother’s and my beaux, but I can’t remember their names.
We ladies must have left our dusters in the car. We always had to wear them because the roads were all dirt then.”

On another living-room wall there is another photo of Aunt Dot, one I inherited from my parents’ house. It’s a formal studio portrait of a lovely young mother seated with her daughter and two sons. Even if I’m hurrying across the room, it always gives me pause. One of her sons died in World War II in an Allied operation that’s known as “A Bridge Too Far.”

The name “Pleasantine” comes from the other side of my family, my father’s side. His grandmother was named Pleasantine; she named one of her daughters Pleasantine and the name continued into the next generations. One of my father’s sisters was a Pleasantine. My mother didn’t particularly like this sister-in-law—and that’s probably the reason why neither Penny nor I became a Pleasantine!

While writing the novel I told Aunt Dot that she had inspired it. This tickled her.

Alas, she died before she could read it.

I was in my late thirties when I decided to have a heroine who was eighty-four. I feared the leap of imagination I’d need to do it, but Aunt Dot’s voice was in my head and I proceeded. Now here I am a year older than she was and I’m dumbfounded and highly amused by my daring to imagine old age.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.