Impatient With Desire by Gabrielle Burton Page A

is our mother’s sister,” Leanna said, looking straight at me.
    “Sometimes an aunt can be like a mother,” I said.
    We sipped tea for a while.
    “My mother died when I was 6,” I said. “My stepmother loved me as if I were her own child.”
    And I’ve loved Elitha and Leanna the same way.
    I was educated in Newburyport, Massachusetts, mainly bymy brother William’s tutors. My maternal grandfather, Jeremiah Wheelwright, had been a schoolmaster in the 1700s, and education was highly valued in our household. That grandfather, whom I never met, served in the Revolutionary War under General Benedict Arnold—not yet a traitor. He died at 46 of exposure to cold, something I try not to think closely about.
    I have told my daughters, “You come from illustrious people, but they are on the Atlantic Coast and you are on the Pacific, so your future depends upon your own merit and exertions.”
    I was a quick learner and avid student. I would be rich now if I had a penny for every time a tutor or Father said, “If only you’d been a boy, you’d go to Harvard, you’d be this, you’d be that…” They meant well, but the remark always riled me inside. The mind is like angels, neither male nor female, and I’ve never understood why people find that simple fact so difficult to grasp.
    George is not bookish and makes no pretense to be, but he is my superior in temperament. I have struggled my whole life to tame my quick temper and curb my impatience. I have told our daughters to look for a steady temperament in their future mates. A man subject to sudden shifts in mood may be romantic in a novel, but makes a difficult husband who will require more care than their children.
    I started teaching when I was 15. I taught mathematics, geometry, and general subjects.
    “I heard you once taught surveying to a group of surprised young gentlemen, Mrs. Dozier,” George said on that Springfield country road.
    “It’s been my general experience that gentlemen surprise far too easily, Mr. Donner.”
    “Not this gentleman,” George said, and though I merely replied, “Good,” my heart was smiling.
    When I was 18, I traveled to Maine for a teaching job. Therewere nine families there, and I had twenty scholars. I enjoyed myself highly and might be there still had not the regular schoolteacher unexpectedly recovered from his illness. Back in Massachusetts, still deep in recession, I cast about for teaching jobs and was compelled again to leave home and Betsey and Father, though not at such a great distance as before.
    Then in 1824, when I had just turned 23, with Father’s and Betsey’s blessing I answered an advertisement for a teaching job in North Carolina, sailing there on a great ship at a time when many people thought that respectable women didn’t travel alone. For the benefit of those who may wish to follow my example and encounter similarly ignorant people today, I leave it on record that, far from considering me an outlaw, people of all stamps on that ship from the Senator, Author, & Southern planter treated me with attention & respect. In my lifetime people have sometimes wondered at my conduct, but they have never despised me. And I never shall be despised. Most people, properly so, are quite indifferent to me. As Betsey once sagely told me: Others think much less about us than we believe or fear, because they are almost always thinking about themselves.
    It was in North Carolina that I buried my first husband, my son, and a daughter almost at full term in 1831, and struggled on alone, able to survive only because I had a profession. My brother, William, was living in Illinois, and after his wife died in 1836, he asked me to emigrate there to take care of and educate his children. I went—leaving a school worth five hundred dollars a year—because I knew how he suffered, although William acted as if he were doing me a favor. My surroundings were of little concern to me. Much to my surprise, I met and married George