The Dolls

“Aunt Mary and Uncle Bob’s house almost burned down,” said Dad.

“How?” I asked.

“They say the water heater exploded and within a few minutes the kitchen was on fire. But, they saved most of the dolls.”

Aunt Mary loved dolls. She had hundreds of them that she kept displayed in two large glass cabinets, protected from dust, and the curious hands of little girls like me and my many cousins. No one but Aunt Mary was allowed to touch the dolls. None of them were meant to be played with, only to admire. But knowing how fascinated we were with them, she would occasionally unlock a cabinet and remove one for us to marvel upon. Aunt Mary’s cabinets held so many dolls, it was possible to discover someone new each time you looked into their cramped little world. Shirley Temple, Betsy Wetsy, Chatty Cathy, Baby Crissy, and Barbie were among the many more modern manufactured specimens, but also rare antique bisque and porcelain additions, along with series dolls like the characters from Little Women, Gone With the Wind, and all the fairy tales and storybooks. The Madame Alexander dolls most captured my imagination.

Consequently, when Dad said they’d saved most of the dolls, my first thoughts were to wonder which ones had not made it. And to Aunt Mary, I knew that any loss would be a great one.

“I’m heading out to the farm to take a look at the house, would you like to come along?” Dad asked. It worried me about what I might see, but I went with him. We met Uncle Bob outside the house, which looked pretty much the same. It was streaked with black soot, but otherwise looked fine. When we went in the back door to the kitchen, however, the full catastrophe lay before us. The place looked like it had been smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer, and everything was charred and black. There was no color at all besides black and dark shades of grey and brown. The smell was a complex combination of the chemicals used to smother the fire along with the moldering of ashes and burnt formica, linoleum, wood, and metal. The stove looked like it had melted. Uncle Bob pointed to where the water heater had been located. It, too, was a melted pile of metal. “Watch your step,” he said, as we carefully made our way toward the living room.

“The first thing we did after calling the fire department was to open up the doll cabinets,” Uncle Bob explained. He went on to say that right after the explosion, Uncle Hunk and Aunt Cile had run over from next door and helped him and Mary throw the dolls out the front door of the house into the lawn. “We only lost the ones that were on the bottom shelf of the cabinet closest to the kitchen,” he said with pride. “Wish we could have saved them all. We’re just thankful that we have your Grandma Mac to help fix up the ones that got damaged.”

Like a skilled surgeon, Grandma Mac had taken in the dozen or so dolls that had not been damaged beyond repair to meticulously see to their wounds. One needed an eye, another a new arm; a few needed to have their faces repainted and new eyelashes glued into place; and they all needed to have the soot cleaned from their bodies. But the job that Grandma really took seriously was to reproduce their clothing. One by one, she restored them each to their previous splendour.

Within a year, the house, too, had been restored. New cabinets were built, and all the dolls that had lived through the fire were carefully positioned into place by Aunt Mary. And to celebrate, everyone chipped in to buy her a new Madame Alexander to add to her collection.

Copyright by DJ Anderson, 2017