Various Miracles (17 page)

The tourists—hulking, Western, flat-footed in their bare feet—watched as the tiny white doll heads were passed around the circle of workers. The first woman, working with tweezers and glue, applied the eyes, pressing them into place with a small wooden stick. A second woman painted in the fine red shape of a mouth, and handed on the head to a woman who applied to the center of the mouth a set of chaste and tiny teeth. Other women touched the eyes with shadow, the cheeks with bloom, the bones with high-light, so that the flattened oval took on the relief and contours of sculptured form. “Lovely,” Roberta writes in her letter, “a miracle of delicacy.”

And finally, the hair. Before the war, the guide told them, real hair had been used, human hair. Nowadays a very fine
quality of blue-black nylon was employed. The doll’s skull was cunningly separated into two sections so that the hair could be firmly, permanently rooted from the inside. Then the head was sealed again, and the hair arranging began. The two women who performed this final step used real combs and brushes, pulling the hair smoothly over their hands so that every strand was in alignment, and then they shaped it, tenderly, deftly, with quick little strokes, into the intricate knots and coils of traditional geisha hair dressing.

Finally, at the end of this circular production line, the guide held up a finished head and briefly propagandized in his sharp, gingery, lordly little voice about the amount of time that went into making a head, the degree of skill, the years of apprenticeship. Notice the perfection of the finished product, he instructed. Observe the delicacy, mark the detailing. And then, because Roberta was standing closest to him, he placed the head in her hands for a final inspection.

And that was the moment Roberta was really writing me about. The finished head in her hands, with its staring eyes and its painted veil of composure and its feminine, almost erotic crown of hair, had more than the weight of artifact about it. Instinctively Roberta’s hands had cupped the head into a laced cradle, protective and cherishing. There was something
alive
about the head.

An instant later she knew she had overreacted. “Tom always says I make too much of nothing,” she apologizes. The head hadn’t moved in her hands; there had been no sensation of pulse or breath, no shimmer of aura, no electrical charge, nothing. Her eyes went to the women who had created this little head. They smiled, bowed, whispered, miming a busy humility, but their cool waiting eyes informed her that they knew exactly what she was feeling.

What she
had
felt was a stirring apprehension of possibility. It was more than mere animism; the life, or whatever it was that had been brought into being by those industriously toiling women, seemed to Roberta to be deliberate and to fulfill some unstated law of necessity.

She ends her letter more or less the way she ends all her letters these days: with a statement that is really a question. “I don’t suppose,” she says, “that you’ll understand any of this.”

Dolls, dolls, dolls, dolls
. Once—I forget why—I wrote those words on a piece of paper, and instantly they swam into incomprehension, becoming meaningless ruffles of ink, squiggles from a comic strip. Was it a Christmas wish list I was making? I doubt it. As a child I would have been shocked had I received more than one doll in a single year; the idea was unworthy, it was
unnatural
. I could not even imagine it.

Every year from the time I was born until the year I was ten I was given a doll. It was one of the certainties of life, a portion of a large, enclosing certainty in which all the jumble of childhood lay. It now seems a long way back to those particular inalterable surfaces: the vast and incomprehensible war; Miss Newbury, with her ivory-colored teeth, who was principal of Lord Durham Public School; Euclid Avenue where we lived in a brown house with a glassed-in front porch; the seasons with their splendors and terrors curving endlessly around the middle eye of the world which I shared with my sister and my mother and father.

Almost Christmas: there they would be, my mother and father at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning in early December, drinking drip coffee and making lists. There would come a succession of dark, chilly pre-Christmas afternoons in which the air would grow rich with frost and
longing, and on one of those afternoons our mother would take the bus downtown to buy the Christmas dolls for my sister and me.

She loved buying the Christmas dolls, the annual rite of choosing. It’s the faces, she used to say, that matter, those dear molded faces. She would be swept away by a pitch of sweetness in the pouting lips, liveliness and color in the lashed eyes, or a line of tenderness in the tinted cheeks—”The minute I laid eyes on that face,” she would say, helplessly shaking her head in a way she had, “I just went and fell head over heels.”

We never, of course, went with her on these shopping trips, but I can see how it must have been: Mother, in her claret-wine coat with the black squirrel collar, bending over, peering into glass cases in the red-carpeted toy department and searching in the hundreds of stiff smiling faces for a flicker of response, an indication of some kind that this doll, this particular doll, was destined for us. Then the pondering over price and value—she always spent more than she intended—having just one last look around, and finally, yes, she would make up her mind.

She also must have bought on these late afternoon shopping excursions Monopoly sets and dominoes and sewing cards, but these things would have been carried home in a different spirit, for it seems inconceivable for the dolls, our Christmas dolls to be boxed and jammed into shopping bags with ordinary toys; they must have been carefully wrapped—she would have insisted on double layers of tissue paper—and she would have held them in her arms, crackling in their wrappings, all the way home, persuaded already, as we would later be persuaded, in the reality of their small beating hearts. What kind of mother was this with her easy belief, her adherence to seasonal ritual? (She also canned
peaches the last week in August, fifty quarts, each peach half turned with a fork so that the curve, round as a baby’s cheek, gleamed lustrous through the blue glass. Why did she do that—go to all that trouble? I have no idea, not even the seed of an idea.)

The people in our neighbourhood on Euclid Avenue, the real and continuing people, the Browns, the McArthurs, the Sheas, the Callahans, lived as we did, in houses, but at the end of our block was a large yellow brick building, always referred to by us as The Apartments. The Apartments, frilled at the back with iron fire escapes, and the front of the building solid with its waxed brown foyer, its brass mailboxes and nameplates, its important but temporary air. (These people only rent, our father had told us.) The children who lived in the apartments were always a little alien; it was hard for us to believe in the real existence of children who lacked backyards of their own, children who had no fruit cellars filled with pickles and peaches. Furthermore, these families always seemed to be moving on after a year or so, so that we never got to know them well. But on at least one occasion I remember we were invited there to a birthday party given by a little round-faced girl, an only child named Nanette.

It was a party flowing with new pleasures. Frilled nutcups at each place. A square bakery cake with shells chasing each other around the edges. But the prizes for the games we played—Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Musical Chairs—were manipulated so that every child received one—was that fair?—and these prizes were too expensive, over-whelming completely the boxed handkerchiefs and hair ribbons we’d brought along as gifts. But most shocking of all was the present that Nanette received from her beaming parents.

We sat in the apartment under the light of a bridge lamp, a circle of little girls on the living-room rug, watching while the enormous box was untied. Inside was a doll.

What kind of doll it was I don’t recall except that her bronzed hair gleamed with a richness that was more than visual; what I do remember was the affection with which she was lifted from her wrappings of paper and pressed to Nanette’s smocked bodice, how she was tipped reverently backward so that her eyes clicked shut, how she was rocked to and fro, murmured over, greeted, kissed, christened. It was as though Nanette had no idea of the inappropriateness of this gift. A doll could only begin her life at Christmas. Was it the rigidities of my family that dictated this belief, or some obscure and unconscious approximation to the facts of gestation? A birthday doll, it seemed to me then, constituted a violation of the order of things, and it went without saying that the worth of all dolls was diminished as a result.

Still, there sat Nanette, rocking back and forth in her spun rayon dress, stroking the doll’s stiff wartime curls and never dreaming that she had been swindled. Poor Nanette, there could be no heartbeat in that doll’s misplaced body; it was not possible. I felt a twist of pity, probably my first, a novel emotion, a bony hand yanking at my heart, an emotion oddly akin—I see it clearly enough now—to envy.

In the suburbs of Paris in one of the finest archeological museums in Europe—my husband had talked, ever since I’d known him, about going there. The French, a frugal people, like to make use of their ancient structures, and this particular museum is housed inside a thirteenth-century castle. The castle, if you block out the hundreds of surrounding villas and acacia-lined streets, looks much as it always must have looked,
a bulky structure of golden stone with blank, primitive, upswept walls and three round brutish towers whose massiveness might be a metaphor for that rough age which equated masonry with power.

The interior of this crude stone shell has been transformed by the Ministry of Culture into a purring, beige-toned shrine to modernism, hived with climate controlled rooms and corridors, costly showcases and thousands of artifacts, subtly lit, lovingly identified. The
pièce de résistance
is the ancient banqueting hall where today can be seen a wax reconstruction of pre-Frankish family life. Here in this room a number of small, dark, hairy manikins squat naked around a cleverly simulated fire. The juxtaposition of time—ancient, medieval and modern—affected us powerfully; my husband and young daughter and I stared for some time at this strange tableau, trying to reconcile these ragged eaters of roots with the sleek, meaty, well-clothed Parisians we’d seen earlier that day shopping on the rue Victor Hugo.

We spent most of an afternoon in the museum looking at elegantly mounted pottery fragments and tiny vessels, clumsily formed from cloudy glass. There was something restorative about seeing French art at this untutored level, something innocent and humanizing in the simple requirement for domestic craft. The Louvre had exhausted us to the glitter of high style and finish, and at the castle we felt as though the French had allowed a glimpse of their coarser, more likable selves.

“Look at that,” my husband said, pointing to a case that held a number of tiny clay figures, thousands of years old. We looked. Some of them were missing arms, and a few were missing their heads, but the bodily form was unmistakable.

“They’re icons,” my husband said, translating the display card: “From the pre-Christian era.”

“Icons?” our daughter asked, puzzled. She was seven that summer.

“Like little gods. People in those days worshipped gods made of clay or stone.”

“How do you know?” she asked him.

“Because it says so,” he told her.
“Icône
. That’s the French word for icon. It’s really the same as our word.”

“Maybe they’re dolls,” she said.

“No. It says right here. Look. In those days people were all pagans and they worshipped idols. Little statues like these. They sort of held them in their hands or carried them with them when they went hunting or when they went to war.”

“They could be dolls,” she said slowly.

He began to explain again. “All the early cultures—”

She was looking at the figures, her open hand resting lightly on the glass case. “They look like dolls.”

For a minute I thought he was going to go on protesting. His lips moved, took the necessary shape. He lifted his hand to point once again at the case. I felt sick with sudden inexplicable anger.

Then he turned to our daughter, shrugged, smiled, put his hands in his pockets. He looked young, twenty-five, or even younger. “Who knows,” he said to her. “You might be right. Who knows.”

My sister lives 300 miles away in Ohio, and these days I see her only two or three times a year, usually for family gatherings on long weekends. These visits tend to be noisy and clamorous. Between us we have two husbands and six children, and then there is the flurry of cooking and cleaning up after enormous holiday meals. There is never enough time to do what she and I love to do most, which is to sit at the kitchen
table—hers or mine, they are interchangeable—with mugs of tea before us and to reconstruct, frame by frame, the scenes of our childhood.

My memory is sharper than hers, so that in these discussions, though I’m two years younger, I tend to lead while she follows. (Sometimes I long for a share of her forgetfulness, her leisured shrugging acceptance of past events. My own recollections, not all happy, were relentlessly present, kept stashed away like ingots, testifying to a peculiar imprisoning muscularity of recall.) The last time she came—early October—we talked about the dolls we had been given every Christmas. Our husbands and children listened, jealously it seemed to me, at the sidelines, the husbands bemused by this ordering of trivia, the children open-mouthed, disbelieving.

I asked my sister if she remembered how our dolls were presented to us, exactly the way real children are presented, the baby dolls asleep in stenciled cradles or wrapped in receiving blankets; and the schoolgirl dolls propped up by the Christmas tree, posed just so, smiling brilliantly and fingering the lower branches with their shapely curved hands. We always loved them on sight.

“Remember Nancy Lynn,” my sister said. She was taking the lead this time. Nancy Lynn had been one of mine, one of the early dolls, a large cheerful baby doll with a body of cloth, and arms and legs of painted plaster. Her swirled brown hair was painted on, and at one point in her long life she took a hard knock on the head, carrying forever after a square chip of white at the scalp. To spare her shame we kept her lacy bonnet tied on day and night. (Our children, listening, howled at this delicacy.)