The Porcelain Doll

The Porcelain Doll

Creative Nonfiction

The doll is lifelike, baby-like, in size and appearance. It has a porcelain head, hands and legs, and a soft cloth body. Her eyes move side to side—not only the usual open and close motion like other dolls—as if she’s searching for something in her peripheral vision. Maybe for something unseen to us. It makes her look more like a real baby. The doll is a treasured childhood memory, near twice my age. My sister and I used to play with her when we would visit my mother’s aunt and uncle in the city of Miskolc, where I was born. A twenty-five-kilometer bus ride from home.

Aunt Claire was my favorite non-blood relative on my mother’s side—Great Uncle Frank’s wife. Nobody would figure she had only married into our family because she loved us like her own. Aunt Claire never had children. At eighty-six, three decades after our great uncle passed away, when I was all grown up and a mother myself, she told me the story of the doll.

***

On this day, like most times when visiting Aunt Claire and her sister, Elizabeth, I buy flowers—accented with lace fern, orange, pink, and red gerbera daisies. Aunt Claire’s favorite. Also, I pick up several pastries and a half dozen fresh rolls at the corner bakery on the main street before getting on a yellow villamos—the little, electrical train running through the city. Six stops and I arrive at the ten-story gray panel across from the church and cemetery on the hill.

In Aunt Clare’s bright little kitchen, I unwrap the kürtőskalács, zserbó, and krémes, two each. On the silver tray she provides, I line them up beside my chestnut puree with whipped cream—my favorite.

“You always spoil us,” she says, smiling.

“Well, I’m not here often enough, I need to make up for the lost time.”

“Your journey from America is expensive, long, and tiring. We’re grateful to be able to see you at all.” She pours boiling water over the teabag in the cup in front of me that’s hand-painted with roses and blue forget-me-nots.

“I’m always happy to see you and Aunt Elizabeth. It’s worth all my time and effort. I wish I could travel home every year.”

“I would be afraid to fly.” Carefully, she puts one of each of the pastries on a dessert plate, shuffles to the other room, and places it into Elizabeth’s lap. I watch her fluff the pillow supporting her sister’s back.

Elizabeth lays her crossword puzzle aside. She thanks me and asks Aunt Claire for more tea. She’s bedridden since her illness. Her bones would crack and break if she tried getting up.

“Next Monday, I’ll come one more time,” I say, “to say goodbye before I go back.”

“Already?” The smile fades from Elizabeth’s face. “Your mother must be sad to see you leave. She misses you.”

“Yes, four weeks slipped by so quickly.”

“We’ll miss you, too. Did you buy the doll you wanted?” Aunt Claire asks, returning to the kitchen with a thick, tall glass.

“No, not yet. All too small, not what I imagined.”

“Spend no more money.” She peers into my face and touches my arm. “I want you to take the porcelain doll.” Her voice fills with determination. “It would be perfect for your daughter.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think I should.” I search her tired eyes. “It’s special and belongs here with you.”

“Just collects dust on a shelf in the cabinet. Your little girl will love her.” She glances toward the window, and after a long pause, she adds in a whisper, “I can’t.”

“Why?” Confused, I furrow my brows.

Silent, Aunt Claire fills the glass with more tea from the pot cooling on the stove. She takes it to Elizabeth.

This time Aunt Claire returns with the doll in her hands. “I washed its clothes and now can’t find them, but my neighbor said she’d give me baby clothes that will probably fit her.”

“Please, don’t trouble yourself.”

“Wouldn’t be proper to give it to you naked.” She sits on the sofa across from me and continues in a low voice, “Your Great Uncle Frank didn’t want children. He saw how your Uncle Joe treated his mother as a teenage boy and told me he wouldn’t allow that.”

“I didn’t realize,” I say, remembering how cruel my uncle could be to my grandmother… We called her Muhisi Mama, Hungarian for “grandmother from Muhi,” the tiny place where I grew up. Accordingly, we titled my father’s mother, Csecsi Mama, named after the village next to us where she lived. Great Uncle Frank was Muhisi Mama’s younger brother.

Uncle Joe stayed a bachelor all his life, which wasn’t long. Only forty-seven years. Once, he almost got married, I heard, but it didn’t work out. I never found out the details, but it had something to do with Muhisi Mama. Perhaps she didn’t approve? Was that why he beat her?

“Did you want to have children?” I ask, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yes, more than anything.”

“I thought you got the doll because you couldn’t conceive, although you’d tried. Almost like to try to fill that void.”

“No, my sweet child, your Uncle Frank got it for me, saying, ‘You wanted a baby, so I brought you one. Better than a real one. No need to feed and change her. You can enjoy her
without all the fuss.’”

“Mom told us that Uncle Frank couldn’t father a child because of his injury. From the grenade detonating near him when he was in his twenties. Wasn’t that the cause?” I ask and wonder why I never asked before.

I remember the brown leather glove concealing his hand. He never took it off. My sister told me it covered a wooden hand. Still, when I was a child, I used to think they were without a baby because Aunt Claire was barren. With admiration, I looked at Uncle Frank for staying with her and loving her, although I assumed he would’ve loved to raise children of his own. Mom told us how they wanted to adopt her when Muhisi Mama ended up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown and the disease that claimed her husband. Our grandfather got sick in the War. My mother was only six years old, and Uncle Joe was eleven when they became fatherless. They stayed with Aunt Clair and Uncle Frank for a few months, but when their mother got better, they both wanted to go home.

“No,” she says. “The grenade only tore off Frank’s right hand.” Her face contorts with grief. “He never got over the injury. I first met him before it happened. Then he disappeared. Later, I found out about the accident. Without his right hand, he didn’t think of himself as a whole man, although he taught himself to write with his left.” She looks over at the picture frame standing on the small table. A black-and-white photo of Uncle Frank in his youth.

“Yet somehow, you got back together?” I ask, realizing there’s so much I don’t know. We visited them often, yet I had not noticed the gap between them.

“He told me he would divorce me if I ever got pregnant and kept the baby.” Aunt Claire pulls her legs under herself and straightens her dress with long, nervous strokes. “I was forty when I missed my period. Your Uncle Frank was so careful to always use protection, even though I was on the pill. He was adamant about not wanting to conceive a child. He said I would need to have an abortion.”

“Oh,” I draw in a stuttered gasp, “how terrible.” Unaware of this, I had always thought he was a good, gentle, sober man. Had I truly grasped who Uncle Frank was? I’m sure Aunt Claire’s well aware I understand her since I told her about how my boyfriend had left because I wouldn’t abort our unplanned baby. Did she?

She laces her fingers over one knee and gently rocks herself. “I made up my mind to keep the baby and let him divorce me.”

“What happened?” At the sound of her words, newfound respect toward Aunt Claire fills me, and I lean in, eager to hear her answer. All my life, I loved and admired her but didn’t know she had this kind of strength. Divorce? In those years? Wow!

They had no children, so what happened to the baby? Did she miscarry? Did he force her to give their child away? I’m scared of what she’ll say next.

“I wasn’t pregnant and found out I would never—” Aunt Claire’s eyes glimmer as she gazes out the window. “The doctors told me that menopause had started.”

“So sorry, I didn’t know.”

“He died over thirty years ago, and he left me here. Alone. Elizabeth got sick the next year and moved in with me the year after, so I’m not totally alone, but there’s no one to count on.
Only myself.”

“I’m so sorry.” I sit by her side, placing a hand on hers, and with the other, I hug her.

My heart breaks for her.

***

I never understood why my mother would say, “Why do you always run to look at those old people,” when I went to the city to see Aunt Claire and her sister. For thirty-five years, Aunt Claire selflessly had been taking care of her ill sister. After Elizabeth passed away on one Christmas Day, two-and-a-half months later, Aunt Claire died, too, at age ninety, three and a half years ago. This year, I’m home again, visiting my mother. Mom makes negative remarks about Aunt Claire and Elizabeth as usual.

“Why were they hanging on, afraid for their life so much at an old age?” she says. “Had the doctor on house calls every other day.”

I’d like for her to find compassion instead of jealousy and envy. Each time I’ve visited over the years, I’ve noticed this in her. She didn’t want me to go to them.

“Aunt Claire would cry about how she missed eating derelye,” Mom says, shutting off the stove.

“Yes, I remember. Occasionally, I had bought it for Aunt Claire from the frozen section of Aldi in Miskolc.” Derelye is a Hungarian delicacy of pasta similar to ravioli, but sweet—filled with plum preserve or sweetened cottage cheese. It’s tedious to prepare. Mom sent her freshly made ones with me one time five years ago.

“She could no longer make it since her heart was weak, and she couldn’t stand for long,” Mom continues, “so I made it for her and hurried with it to the city, and they didn’t have an appetite to eat.” Mom sits on her small bed, where she lays down to pray during the day. Her face is stern, lips tight with bitterness.

Does my mother not realize how one can crave things, but with old age and disease, they may not be able to eat? I sit across from her, separated only by a narrow coffee table, hoping to gap the divide and share with Mom what I had learned about Aunt Claire. Perhaps her expression will soften, and her heart will melt a little if she learns about Aunt Claire’s childless grief. So I tell her.

“That cannot be true,” Mom raises her voice.

“Why not?”

“Somebody who wants children, they will leave if their spouse doesn’t want any.”

“This is what she told me.”

“If your father didn’t want kids, I would’ve left him.”

“Why would Aunt Claire lie about something like this?” I ask, wondering if she would’ve. I mean, if Mom would have left. She didn’t leave Dad to give us a safe and peaceful childhood. She took the beatings, too.

“How could Uncle Frank know my brother would become an alcoholic and beat our mother? How could he have any knowledge of the future?”

“I don’t know.”

My mother has a valid question. My uncle Joe was only a teenage boy in those years, not drinking yet when Aunt Claire and Uncle Frank had gotten married. Maybe Uncle Frank already saw signs of aggression, or perhaps he needed an excuse to live a life with no responsibilities for someone else? I may never know the whole truth.

It’s one of the many mysteries most of my family members who passed away took to the grave. Each time I ask Mom anything about anyone, she says, “Why do you care? It doesn’t matter. They are all dead and buried.”

***

I fly back to my home in Chicago and pick up the porcelain doll—a gift to my daughter from my great aunt, Claire. Her eyes slide to the side like she has a secret she’s not willing to tell.


First published in Spark Literary Journal in June 2020