Am I allowed to speak of it? My life. I was always assured by my mother that discussing my life with others was not only rude but forbidden. Regardless of my own reasons for speaking, she told me that it was certain that anyone else would think I was being snobbish and aloof.
It was a large house, an empty house, filled with only one child and that was me. Our house was one of only a very few houses that my grandfather had allowed to be built on the vast tracts of Ohio farmland near Cincinnati that he had bought at the beginning of the depression in the early 1930’s. The house that he had built for himself and my grandmother was in the style of an Argentinian ranch house, complete with a turret on top of the roof that gave a 360° view of the surrounding countryside and of the Ohio River at the foot of the great hills that the property sat upon. I am sure he envisioned his enthroned future self going up to the turret room daily to survey his domain. Today, most of the land is now covered with subdivisions, as is almost all of the former farmland that surrounded Cincinnati. One has considerably longer distances to travel should one be in the sudden mood to view farmland and the ensuing vast tracts of corn and soybeans being raised to mechanical perfection by the local farm conglomerates.
When I grew to be old enough to form my own memories, my grandfather had been dead for several years and my grandmother had no desire to be climbing all of those stairs to survey her husband’s domain. Soon after that, she grew unable to do so. The tower room itself and the staircase leading up to it had become nothing more than an exotic attic holding boxes full of my aunts’ and uncles’ possessions from their childhoods. I did not think it feasible at the time that any of these aunts and uncles had ever been young enough to have been considered a child, but there the objects in their boxes sat.
I was left unattended for a few moments during an afternoon visit to my grandmother’s house with my parents, and I took the opportunity to climb up a few of these steps and take a peek inside one of the boxes. Curled up in its brittle white linen lay a horror of a doll: shaped like a baby doll, but with a huge crack from top of skull to where the neck disappeared into its clothing. The crack gaped and black dust had taken the decades to crust over the doll’s face, its movable eyes closed tight. I knelt there on the stair in front of the box, frozen with both fear and then uncertainty, for my aunt, whose doll it had been, climbed up the stairs behind me to see what I was looking at.
“Oh yes,” she said with fondness that I couldn’t understand in her voice. “That’s my old doll, Bessie. And there,” she said pointing to another which lay in the next box over, “that one was Peg’s.” Yet another horror in yet another secret box. I could see in my imagination how she and Aunt Peg had had these dolls when they were new and shiny with their eyes endlessly opening and closing at each and every movement. These were the dolls that she remembered now, and saw now, and not the things from a nightmare that were before me.
Both of my aunts still considered that their boxes of old toys were nothing more than that, and that perhaps some day they would get around to taking these boxes down to St. Vincent de Paul so that another little girl could play with them. I worried briefly for this other little girl for a few minutes until I went back downstairs to the family and forgot about what lay in the boxes.
As far as I know, the dolls stayed where they were for the rest of my grandmother’s life, until she died and one of my uncles laid claim to the house and cleared it out for his own family to live in. He put a pool in the basement and some central air-conditioning. I don’t know what he did with the tower, but it’s still there.
white pebble 