As I've said--while my father and his brothers were physically brutalized by their parents, my grandparents, into non-entityhood--their sisters, my aunts, in their very different but recognizably sisterly ways, turned into delightful human beings....

There were four:  Lois, Betty, Dorothy and Margie--and, of them, the eldest and the smartest, a school teacher and a professional woman in California, Aunt Lois, was perhaps my favourite.  She was the only relative of mine, maternal or paternal, that I knew of who sometimes attended the opera--She said that Lohengrin was "over-whelming" and that the music was "glorious."  She also once, at a family picnic, grabbed me and hugged me because, as a ten-year-old, I had observed that eating healthful foods makes you healthy.

Aunt Lois's husband, Ray, though an immensely likeable man, an intense pinochle player, and sort of the designated Clan Bard of long, funny stories, was, of all my aunts' husbands, the one most unlike his wife, and most ill-suited to be her husband--and when I remarked on this disparity to my mother, she answered bluntly:

"Ray raped Lois on a supposed date, when he was on leave from the Navy, and she was just finishing school.  And when she got pregnant with your cousin Lillian, he married her--and they have lived happily together ever since."  

I should say that Cousin Lillian, who, if she were alive, would be in her mid-eighties--was an Honors Graduate from Stanford, and one of the most intelligent women I've ever known--and, to my bemusement and wonder, in her twenties and thirties, she was a Great Beauty, who married, briefly but effectively, for money, and who ever after lived a life of  independence, splendor and fabulous luxury.  Or so I believe. This much is certain:  During the 60's when Reza Pahlavi and his ghoulish Savak ravaged Iran, Cousin Lillian was married to the son of a governor of an Iranian province, and I have seen many pictures of her attending the Shah's many wastefully luxurious parties, standing on staircases, in long dresses, with her hair done up, dripping with jewels.  She said she hated it (utterly despised the Shah), but it was fun for her to introduce her mother, my Aunt Lois, to the Empress and the Queen Mother.