I always hated dolls. They had expectations. They had steel-blue eyes that stared at me imperiously (and yes, I just did an inventory:  every one of my 50’s era dolls had Paul Newman peepers). They stared at me and I never knew what I was supposed to do. They weren’t for cuddling, like my bunny – as big as a 5-year old until David broke its ears off. Or my autograph dachshund, or even my velvety penguin by Steiff. Or my Raggedy Andy who yes, who had the word “Doll” in his official title but whose soft heart declared I LOVE YOU with every beat.

Dolls were different. Stiff. Perfectly coiffed. Delicate fingers splayed in a way that clearly said, “Don’t touch me.” That clearly said, “There is no way I’m going to touch you.”   I think, perhaps, that dolls were the original Mean Girls. So why do I have five of them in a shrine upon my shelf?

I’m not really sure. I think it started when I found a heap of stuff in the Pawtucket attic. Periodic purges were a staple of my Dad’s post-Mom life. Decades before her death, she had asked if there was anything of hers she should be putting in her will for me. I imagine she expected me to mention jewelry, furniture, even a painting. I asked for the juicer sitting on a high kitchen shelf. She had used it to squeeze oranges for breakfast when I was little. I do have other kitchen-based, vaguely maternal, memories:  mom making fudge or chocolate candy pies or cream cheese pies adorned with unpitted cherries (that cracked the teeth of the unwary). But all of those were intended for gifts or for her many many dinner parties. The orange juice was just for my brothers and me. And though the orange-juice squeezer was made of aluminum and undoubtedly seeded our little brain cells with incipient Alzheimer’s, it was one of my few fond normal-family touchstones. So I am sure that somewhere she dutifully noted my request in her neat round handwriting. And then, soon after she died, my Dad threw it out.

Eventually I located its twin on Etsy. I like to imagine that someone found it wherever Dad tossed it and, in the mysterious karma of the Internet, returned it to me. But of course, that’s unlikely and there’d never be any way to prove it. It’s not like I scratched into it my own personal Kilroy. Still, it glows in the same way, is worn in the same way, and it reminds me in the same way of a time when I felt cossetted. I am very glad to have it where I can see it every day.

Which is not entirely true of the dolls. Okay, back to the heap o’ stuff in the attic. This was another junk pile my Dad planned to toss. And in it was my Toni doll, the first doll I can ever remember my parents giving me. Not that I wanted it. I must say, they made a habit of giving me things I had no earthly use for. I got a LOT of dainty jewelry:  necklaces and drops.

In fact, my first actual memory is of standing in a crib waiting for someone to come and get me. David had been born and I had been banished to a room so far from the family I might have been in a separate time zone. At roughly 19 months, I clearly knew it would be a bad idea to yell;   so I just waited. And as I waited, I sucked on my thin strand of pearls. A toddler in pearls! This is confirmed by the many images my smitten and camera-happy Dad recorded. To this day, I remember the sweet plasticky taste. I assume they were fake. I have been tempted to buy some (yes, on Etsy) to see if they are still just as yummy. Again, I must emphasize, “delicate” was never the word to describe me. I’m sure I went through a lot of pearls.

Still my parents desperately tried to imbue me, their only daughter, with some semblance of girly-ness. This was the fifties and the iron-clad rule book was vast. But achieving Breck-ad perfection was complicated by the fact that my hair was even more willful than I was. I had curly Jew-hair in straight-haired Gentile Pawtucket. A further complication was the fact that my father was a dermatologist who had seen the alopecia caused by pony-tails. So that easy — and ultra fifties – coiffure was out.

There were many battlegrounds:  pointy-toed shoes that made me totter, unyielding waistbands that made it hard to breathe, dresses with enormous buttons on the back that turned normal chairs into devices from the Spanish Inquisition. But hair, my unruly hair, was undeniably the fiercest. In fact, my only memory of my 6^th birthday was being sent outside to brush my hair despite the guests already – embarrassingly — arriving. And yet that that was the year the Ideal Toy Company ceased Toni production, so it must have been for that very birthday she arrived.

Introduced in 1949 as an advertisement for the Toni Home Permanent, she had a nylon wig that could be set and styled over and over again. She came with her own Play Wave kit including play wave lotion, shampoo, curlers, comb, end papers and instructions. And that smirk, that mean girl smirk. Of course her blonde hair was beautiful. This girl would be no fellow sufferer. This girl was intended as a role model;   she would lord it over me.

She may have had the hair, but I had the size. I grabbed her by her ankles and smashed her head on the sidewalk. It split right open with a satisfying crack. After that, I could play with her. I dutifully “put up” her hair. I dutifully unrolled all those curlers and combed out the resultant mare’s nest. In my hands, even perfect Toni was an unredeemable mess. In an act of frustration or perhaps fellow feeling, I chopped her flowing blonde locks into a crew cut. If I couldn’t have a pony tail, neither could she.

I soon forgot about her. In those days, if I was inside I was usually reading; but mostly I was outside as kids were supposed to be. Not seen, not heard. We wandered with a freedom children today can’t even imagine. We did get into trouble. We spent all of Cindy’s birthday money one year on doughnuts. I got trapped ankle-deep in the gumbo mud of our Korean-War-military-housing every single time it rained. We got soaked through as we played King of the Mountain on the huge heaps of frozen slush thrown up by snow plows clearing the Darlton Theater parking lot. We risked terminal head injures as we sledded down Lyman Street’s steep slope. Probably if Cindy had been more of a doll person, I might have been also. But neither of us had that particular itch. In fact, I can remember with a precision that astonishes me – since I totally lack Alan’s photographic memory – the occasions on which I acquired my two other dolls.

I received my ballerina sometime in 1957. Grandpa Mike was paying us a visit from New York. My parents’ friend Shep Freed had a wholesale toy company down on North Main Street so Grandpa took David and me there to select our own special gifts. Mike was definitely what we considered our rich relation. He had a summer house on Long Island where I had spent my first two years as the Amityville Horror. He even had an inboard cabin cruiser docked beside. So money was not the issue. But discernment was (Given that Jonathan was only 2 I’m pretty sure he missed out on this adventure). What I remember most from that day was the agony of decision. Shep’s Main Wholesale Company was just packed with toys. Somehow I knew I was expected to want a doll and amazingly I did. In fact, I wanted two of them. But Mike made it clear I was getting just one. This man had been a mouthpiece for Murder, Incorporated. No way was I going to argue with him.

In those days, I was attending the Irene Owen School of Ballet in downtown Providence. You might expect that I railed against this as against all other attempts to make me frilly, but while the horse-gene and the doll-gene and the hair-genes had all somehow skipped me, I in fact adored ballet. I read every book, fiction and nonfiction, adult and juvenile, the Rochambeau Branch Public Library had on the topic. I lobbied for birthday trips to Boston to see live ballet. In fact, my freshman year of college when Rudolf Nureyev defected and brought Dame Margot Fonteyn back  to life and her toe shoes, I skipped studying for my final exams (and I really needed that studying) so I could be in the audience every night the Royal Ballet performed.

Alas, I was a klutz. I was never in the front row at Irene Owens’. I was never going to get any toe shoes of my own. So I picked Dorenna or Valentina or maybe even the vaguely knocked-off Nina. She had her own pale pink Capezios and such tidy untouchable hair. Alas, she also had those blue eyes and stiff fingers and walked goofy when you dropped her feet out of the pointe position. To be perfectly honest, she was sort of a bust. I probably played with her twice and then put her aside with cracked-pate Toni. And yet – to my amazement — I still have them both.

The third doll was Ginny. Compared to the statuesque Toni and Ballerina, Ginny was a midget. She was a grand total of eight inches high. But she was not merely a doll. The Ginny was a Lifestyle. She came with a pink steamer trunk chock full of fashionable outfits. Giving Toni perms was bad enough. Now I was supposed to change clothes as entertainment?! Fortunately I was older and wiser — or something — then.

In fact, when I began to research these dolls, I was surprised to find that Ginnie’s launch actually preceded the Ballerina’s. But her reign was longer and I’m guessing I must have been at least eleven when we began visiting the Merry-Go-Round Toy Store near Providence’s College Hill. My mother and I went there more than once. I have always agonized over decisions. And this would be a very big decision. Ginny would be the last doll I ever got. And, I must emphasize, I most certainly did not want her. But most certainly my mother did. I could feel yearning rise off her like the heat off a summer sidewalk. I watched her examine the tiny dresses with awe and affection, as though she were a child herself. By then, I had probably found the moth-eaten artifact in the attic, the battered, peeling baby doll with a rotting belly and one arm held on by a safety pin. This – I had been told – was my mother’s doll. My mother’s only doll no one needed to add. I knew she had grown up poor. I knew she had only been five when the Depression hit and Peish lost the store and Lil had to leave college to get a job to help support the family. I knew she had gone to Pembroke on a Pratt Whitney Engineering scholarship and taking apart jet engines had been part of her definitely un-girly curriculum. I knew she had never bought a full-price anything in her life. But she wanted this full-price doll. And after many trips back and forth to the store, I finally agreed I wanted it. But in my heart, I wanted it for her.

Years later, when visiting David and his family in Maine I found that his daughter, my niece Zoe, had quite logically been given some of my left-behind playthings. I was in my forties by then and yet, damn, I wanted my penguin back. It had a long history, dating to the first time Lena took me to visit the Outlet Company Santa. I was two or three and terrified as as I was dropped onto the crimson lap of this this strange, bearded fat man. And when he roared, “What do you want for Christmas, little girl?!” I blurted the first thing that popped into my mind, “A furry penguin!” Though in fact I don’t believe the flightless bird had ever before waddled about in my brain cells. A vision of one had simply descended from somewhere on high.

In these days of Happy Feet and March of the Emperors, penguins fuzzy or otherwise are virtually everywhere. Mysteriously both my sons inherited the penguin gene. In our house, well-loved penguins were thick on the ground. But back in the late 40s, early 50s, penguins were a non-starter. A teddy bear or a doggie or even a stinky skunk would have been easy for my parents to come by. But a penguin? Wasn’t going to happen. Or at least not until I was well out of childhood. As I recall, I was roughly thirteen when my Dad returned from a conference in Chicago or New York or some other big city, with Steiff’s Peggy the Penguin under his arm.

Now the Web, font of all knowledge, tells me that Peggys were only produced between 1952 and 1956 so I shouldn’t have been more than 9 when the stiff little thing (8” high, exactly the same as Ginny! They could have mated!) magically entered my life. But I know for certain I was older. And I also know my father – who I am still astonished somehow remembered all those years later what I most yearned for – was as disinclined as my mother to pay full-price for anything. I can only imagine that wandering into F.A.O. Schwartz in search of expected convention swag for the youngsters (I once got a stapler undoubtedly snared in a moment of last-minute panic) he spied Clearance Peggy shoved onto the back of some shelf. She was mine!

She wasn’t perfect. She had a birth defect that kept her standing askew, like a drunken sailor in a high-wind. But her wings were velvet. There was no denying her mohair body was fuzzy. And she was the closest thing to a real penguin I would ever touch. (At that tender age, I had no way of knowing that 30 or so years later, while Cody and I played hooky during one of Jonas’  endless Thanksgiving baseball tournaments, we found ourselves in the Penguin Encounter at San Diego’s Sea World. Years of reading him books about the flightless birds had made me an unwitting expert on the subject and when the tour guide surprised us with a pop quiz, my hand- — normally so shy and tentative – shot up without any intervention by the rest of me… and my mouth blurted out arcane facts I didn’t know I knew. We won a trip backstage to wander amidst the Adelies in their fake Antarctica… and then outside to touch the more climate-appropriate Magellanics. They smelled fishier than Peggy and were definitely larger than 8” high even in bare webs, but the essential gestalt was most thrillingly the same.)

She was definitely not cuddly so she would never be hugged or cradled or dragged all over Europe (like Babar’s son Pom that I purchased at La Samaritaine in Paris and mistakenly called Alex for his entire life); or carried in my wedding bouquet (that would be Pom/Alex also). But she was a Penguin, exactly the sort I had requested from Santa. She was My Penguin, a toppling symbol that my Dad did occasionally think of me with fondness. And in her attic-y sort of room, Zoe – of the constant ineffable sweetness – surrendered her back to me without a second’s thought.

I left Ginny with her. Given Zoe’s generosity, it is possible Ginny has moved on to less frigid pastures (Seattle?). But it is also possible she is still in Maine, wondering what happened to the grown woman who loved her best. I suppose, if I had been thinking, I would have buried her with my mother. Except that Mom isn’t buried. Her ashes, or at least part of them, still lurk in some forgotten closet in the house on East Avenue. But that is another story, for another day.

As for Peggy, she stands on my shelf. Or lies. At the moment she is half-reclined in the lap of cracked-pate Toni who several years ago acquired a brand new head. That was probably a mistake. She doesn’t smell right anymore and her eyes are even more icily blue than I remember. But over the years of abandonment, her face had been smashed in, her neck warped, her eyes deranged, her wig worn down to its base, and her appendages fallen out into a blindly gesturing tumble. It was repair the girl or let my Dad go ahead and dump her. I am still not entirely sure why I took the road to “repair”. But I did. I found Michele Otey at This Old Doll and sent Toni off for rehab. I guess by that point, the hair battles had retreated far enough into the past that I could forgive her. What is even more inexplicable is that now a second Toni sits beside her, tilting a surprisingly kindly smile at me from just an arm’s length away.

Blame the vagaries of commerce. Long before I rescued cracked-pate Toni, I had found the dress that Lena had made for her:  yellow organdy with tiny silk flowers in pale pink.

I loved that dress. It invoked in me some semblance of what I imagine was normal girl-doll feeling. In fact, one of my very first stabs at archiving my past was framing the dress and hanging it on the wall of my office. It hangs there to this day. And as wildfires rage around the state and I begin thinking about a Go-Bag: which family photos to take, which paintings by Jonas to grab from the wall.., I know that before Toni, cracked-pate or otherwise, that miniature dress would make the cut.

But now I had Toni again and no desire to unframe the dress and put it on her. And yet I have two sons. I really didn’t want a naked dolly sitting out on view. So I did the Real American thing. Yes, I went on eBay. She was a P-91, a very standard 16” of hard plastic. I didn’t think reclothing her would be much of a deal.

Except this was 10 years ago, before the heyday of Etsy. The dresses available were both expensive and as ugly as sin. And then I found a listing for a 16” Toni in a beautiful handmade wedding dress. Doll and dress together cost less than a dress alone.

So I bought it. Well, back then I had to bid and wait and worry. But I won it, assuming when it came I would strip this unknown Toni. After all, I had only purchased her for the dress.

Except… this “new” Toni was really old. And she smelled exactly like the Toni I remembered. Plus her face was softer than my new improved one, faded by time. There is no way I could denude her. She was way too lovely. What was this overgrown girl to do?

I looked to my ballerina doll. I did still have the tattered blue tutu and pink tights she’d come in. But somewhere alone the line she had acquired a thin white dress. It was much too big for her and it also was much too big for my Toni. But I shucked it off the ballerina and returned her to her crumbling original outfit; and Peggy the Penguin’s head now rests on an expanse of embroidered white lisle.

Astonishingly, the doll-hater had somehow grown her doll collection. But the ballerina doll now looked like a poor relation, with her tights around her ankles and the silver rickrack straps of her tutu gone. So back to eBay. How hard could it be to find some tights for this baby? I figured I could repair the tutu on my own.

You know what happened. A brand-new doll, with a mint-condition outfit, cost less than the tights would. When the doll came – her names was Aida — , her arms and legs were loose in the box. The rubber bands that hold them in place are often the first things to crumble. So it should have been a no-brainer: remove the outfit from this mutant and use it to adorn my otherwise perfect dolly.

Except… except… there was something in me that resisted the act. Aida had been wearing that tutu for 55 years of anticipation. For 55 years she had been poised to rush onstage at any moment. How could I rip away her dream? So my original ballerina still stands behind cracked-pate Toni in her torn tights and her falling-down tutu. And perfect but limb-less Aida still lies face down in her box. Someday I will reattach her arms and legs, and she will join the crowd that stands on the shelf, their blue eyes directed fixedly at my right shoulder. Ballerina #1 and Ballerina #2, en pointe in their pink Capezios, will wait side by side eternally for their cue.

Which brings me to the centerpiece of the shelf. In this semi-disreputable lot, my mother’s baby doll is by far the sketchiest. Her skin seems in the throes of terminal psoriasis. Her feet are leprous. The back of her head is mostly gone. I say “her” but in those days dolls were not genitally correct and, in an old eBay listing, a similar specimen was described as Baby Boy Chuckles. So there’s an off chance a male has crashed this crowd.

As already mentioned, a safety pin secures one arm. An ancient Band-Aid has long attempted to keep the back from disintegrating entirely. I thought this had to be a modern addition. Who knew the invention of Band-Aids preceded the births of both my Mom and Dad? ¹

Not to put too delicate a point on it, this baby is a dump!

But when I first brought her downstairs from the attic, my father cautioned that I shouldn’t repair her. I’m sure he was thinking of some intrinsic value that would be lessened if this babe had “work”. In point of fact, a mint Baby Chuckles is now going for something just shy of two thousand dollars. But even on a good day I wasn’t sure this kid had ever been mint.

Because for a long while, I believed she had to be a hand-me-down from my mother’s older sisters. But the archeology of toydom indicated I was wrong. Her composition head, shoulders, arms and legs put her manufacture as somewhere in the 1924 to 1928 range. By then Lil was a teenager and Dorothy was dead.

In fact, with her three-strand forelock and her shy little smile enclosing two upper teeth, mom’s doll was almost identical to the 1924 Effanbee Bubbles, the 1927 Century Chuckles, the 1928 Horseman Baby Dimples and the 1928 Madame Hendren Baby Brite… except that darned forelock curved the wrong way.

Six years ago, I found her virtual twin on eBay. The doll was listed as a “1920s Cuckles (sic) look-a-like”. The head (including forelock) was exactly the same as Mom’s, as was its composite upper chest, arms and shoulders. Its composite legs, however, only began at the knee.

Dollreference.com lists several toy makers at a lower tier than Effanbee, Century or Hendren that were engaged in “making copies of other dolls”. Apparently imitation was not only the best flattery but a tenet in the doll business. Knock-offs were rife; manufacturers often shared heads.

The only thing I felt fairly sure of was that this doll’s birth preceded the death of the American economy. In the August 1929 Pawtucket City Directory – as in every directory since 1912 –, my grandfather Peish was listed as the owner of a dry good store at 573 Smithfield Avenue. (He had had a previous dry goods store around the corner at 799 Weeden Street since his arrival in Pawtucket in 1909-10.) Two months later, the stock market crashed. One family story I have never questioned is that my grandfather could not stand to see his neighbors hungry or shoeless; and gave them what he could until he’d given away his store. In the 1930 census, enumerated on April 7^th, he is still listed as a store proprietor (and my 19-year old Aunt Lil is still a student). But in the Pawtucket City Directory published five months later, although Lil is still a student, the Smithfield Avenue store is vacant and Peish is listed with no occupation at all. (Strangely, while his name is gone, the Fairlawn Department Store is listed. For a long time, I thought this might have been a tenant like the man who invented Eclipse Coffee Syrup and manufactured it from a back room at Peish’s, but I recently found some business checks of Peish’s imprinted with Fairlawn Department Store. So the name was still above the door, but there was no one inside.) In the 1931 directory, Peish is listed as a salesman. Lil has dropped out of school and is working as a not-quite-certified teacher. She would never be qualified to be more than a substitute. She regretted this for most of her life.

I imagine Peish watching as the contents of his store were liquidated and impulsively grabbing a doll for his youngest child. Presumably he wasn’t investing in new stock after Black Tuesday. So the doll sitting on my shelf had to have been made in 1929 or earlier. Did he give it to Mom right away? Or did he wait for some special event to bestow it? I’m betting he gave it to her then. She would have been five or six.

In college, I was once assigned a study about children who could pass up an immediate nickel for a dime they would receive a day or a week later. A few years after that, Stanford University publicized its famous Marshmallow Test. Children were promised a second marshmallow if they resisted the first one sitting in front of them. And then those children were followed for years. The ability to delay gratification seemed to indicate some inherent moral superiority. Those who had it did generally better in life. Then in 2012 a study trumpeted its proof (p<0.0005), arguing that children’s wait-times reflected reasoned beliefs about whether their waiting would pay off. The difference between children who could wait and those who could not did not just reflect differences in self-control abilities, but also beliefs about the stability of the world.

I was amused when I read of that 2012 “breakthrough” because to me the thrilling proof was decidedly old news. The experiment I had studied in the mid-sixties had reached a similar conclusion:  the children who could wait for a dime were middle-class whites; the children who took the nickel were poor and black.

I imagine that as his dreams crumbled around him, Peish lost his belief in “the stability of the world”. The poor man would never again have any real financial security, or at least not the sort he had become used to. For the rest of his life, as his older brothers’ fortunes and homes and buildings swelled in Providence, Peish would work for other men.

I get a sick feeling as I track his movements from place to place before, during and after the Depression. The family’s first apartment in 1910 was at 602 Smithfield Avenue, the first store at 799 Weeden, exactly one block away. Two years later, their store was in much larger quarters at 573 Smithfield Avenue; though they continued to live down the street at 602 Smithfield Avenue until they moved next door to 604 in 1916 (The Great American & Pacific Tea Company, which we grew up with as the A&P, took over #602 for its tenth Pawtucket location). Then sometime between August 1918 and August 1919, they moved a quarter-mile away to 18 Whitford Avenue. (Dorothy’s death certificate listed this address). The residence had to be fairly new. It didn’t appear in the House Directory until 1913 when James Farron, Silversmith, took up occupancy. (Though Peish took over the place from the improbably named Wilfrid Pickles). So far as I can tell, this is the first time my grandparents didn’t have to share their home with any other families, though at 602-604 Smithfield Avenue, the other tenants might have occupied a building to the rear

Then, maybe haunted by Dorothy’s death or perhaps just wanting a fresh start with their new toddler Elmer, in 1921 or 1922 they moved to 809 Weeden Street, alone again under the roof. This was seven doors from the Whitford Avenue house and four doors from their first store at 799 Weeden. They circled continually, tightly, around the same few blocks, always a stone’s throw from their Dry Goods store.   

 In 1925 or 1926, with baby Sybil swelling their ranks, they moved to 562 Power Road. At this point, Power Road was basically the western frontier of Pawtucket, with only the marshes of the Moshassuck River beyond. Online real-estate sites (including that of the City of Pawtucket) state that the current building at this address was built in 1930, but city directories of the time suggest that date is wrong. The August 1, 1925 Pawtucket House Directory lists no building at 562 Power, but by August, 1926 the house has popped into existence, with a single resident: Grandpa Peish. Presumably then as now, the building contained six bedrooms and two full bathrooms. The family was moving up in the world!

Here is a photo of my mother sitting on the front steps. The façade behind her looks the same as the building there now. And then everything fell apart. By 1931, the family was at 65 Oriole Avenue and Peish was commuting over two miles to a salesman job in downtown Pawtucket (okay, two miles doesn’t sound like much but we’re talking about Little Rhody. The entire state is only 37 miles wide).

It is hard to express how quickly this part of Pawtucket was developed. On the 1923 Sanborn Insurance Company map, Oriole Avenue was a sea of empty lots. Five years later, the block where they would land still only had a single building on it, home to Robert McGarvie. By the following year three more homes had been built, though — with McGarvie moving out and a single family moving in –three houses on the block still stood hollow-eyed. By 1930, only #65 was vacant. And then, in 1931, the Blisteins moved in. The house – still standing as of this writing — had been empty two years. It had two bedrooms and one bath for Lena, Peish, 21 year old Lil (who perhaps not coincidentally married Henry just a year later), 11 year old Elmer and 7 year old Sybil. And, I assume, one Mama Doll, not small. The house was cramped but the neighborhood — compared to the familiar streets of Fairlawn they had been circumnavigating for over twenty years – had to seem sparse and raw.

And then by 1933, they were at Summit Street, whose turreted façade graces the homepage of Lenaland. I loved this place but it was on the far side of downtown, across the Seekonk River, miles from anyplace they’d lived before. Similarly, Peish’s work life zigzagged into a vague sort of limbo. He went from being owner of his own store to unemployed (in the 1930 directory) and then a salesman at the Paramount Clothing Company in 1932. In the 1934 directory he was a Salesman but with no specific place of employment. By 1935, he was at North Union Tailors. By 1937, he was an unemployed salesman again. And then starting in 1938, he began working as a tailor out of the backroom on Summit Street. I remember that room with its tape measures, dummies, huge scissors, and a long table with bolts of cloth.

Although on his World War 2 registration, he would list his employer as Berry Clothing on Main Street in Pawtucket (Berry to this day makes uniforms so I assume that’s what he was sewing for them during the war); and while the 1958 city directory would oddly list his place of employment as P & Q Clothes Shop, Pawtucket, he basically worked as a self-employed tailor for the rest of us life. This is precisely what he had been when he first arrived in America over a quarter century earlier. He was 46 years old — no child in those days — when he had to start all over again.

And yet, among his possession when he died was a letter of congratulations from the Industrial Bank in Pawtucket. He — perhaps alone of all those who had gone bankrupt during the Depression — had after thirty years repaid his old loan to the cent. I don’t know how much that loan was for. He never owned a home but he did own the dry goods store on Smithfield Avenue. The Pawtucket Tax Book of 1919, the latest one I have found, appraised it at $1940. From 1912 to 1915, when it was owned by the Fairlawn Improvement Society and Peish merely rented, it was also appraised at $1940. (I don’t know what to make of the fact that there was nothing listed under Tangible Personal Property when a dry goods store surely had some stock. Shartenberg & Robinson’s Department Store for example — in 1919 — had no real estate valuation, but $133, 140 in tangible personal property.) So it is doubtful, Peish had rung up an enormous arrears. Regardless of the amount, Peish spent three decades saving enough to pay off what he considered a debt of honor… to an institution with $150 million in assets the year before his life went belly up.

Basically destitute when he died demented in the Jewish Home for the Aged (he did get some Social Security but I expect my father covered most of his in-law’s expenses), he could leave my mother no inheritance at all. But he did pass on his deeply held sense of moral probity, which she in turn passed on to my brothers and me. (My grandmother, on the other hand, described herself as a Republican Communist. This made perfect sense; and like Lena, none at all.)

And of course, around 1929 or so, he also passed on to my mother one Off-brand Chuckles lookalike. I try to imagine my mother when all this was happening, when she was five, and six and seven as the family moved and moved, on whatever day this doll came into her arms. I have no photos of her with it although in the esteemed Folk Art collection she and Dad put together after I left Rhode Island, children were often painted with their favorite toys. I understand now how little I know about my mother’s life as a young girl. I heard about the 1938 hurricane when all the trees went down in front of her as she hurried home from junior high. And she used to sing me a lullaby she reported learning from her sister Lil. But virtually nothing else. It belatedly occurs to me she might not have even received the doll from her father but from Lil who married Henry Cutler in 1932.

I remember my shock when I discovered her doll actually contained a noisebox. At one time, it could say “Mama, mama!”. It was the baby of the family’s baby. It was the baby of the Dorothy-replacement. And yet — knowing my mother’s indifference  to my own children when they were babies — I have to wonder if she had any  more interest in this battered creature than I did in my Toni, cracked pate or not.

Nonetheless the Mama doll is still dressed in the flannel pj bottoms and flowered-lisle briefs I am guessing my mother made for it. At least — judging by the crudeness of the stitching — this was not my grandparents’ work. So maybe Mom did love this baby. She had to have some feeling for it. It remained in her possession for her all of her life. Maybe it was only real children that disappointed her. (My father once wrote me a letter stating I’d been a disappointment since I was three.) All I know is that I never asked my mother how she felt about anything. And, now, I’ll never know.

I continue to haunt Etsy and eBay in the hopes of finding a duplicate of Mommy’s Mama Doll. I am dreaming of a marked doll which would give me the date she was made. If hers had any markings on its back they – along with its skin – are long gone. And as the doll continues to deteriorate, I feel some anguish that ultimately she will fall apart altogether, like my poor ear-less, faceless Bunny, rescued from the East Avenue basement but now mostly just a heap of stuffing on my shelf. A part of me leans toward restoration only to stop the inevitable disintegration, but after the sad experience of my new-headed Toni, I know I will leave The Doll alone. And she will die.   And all that will remain will be my memory.  And these pictures.  And, somewhere, these words.

 

Chapter 11: Postscript

 

 

¹ “The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by Thomas Anderson and Johnson & Johnson employee Earle Dickson in Escondido, California for his wife Josephine, who frequently cut and burned herself while cooking. The prototype allowed her to dress her wounds without assistance.” Way to go, Josephine! While cooking, I frequently cut and burn myself. In fact, at this moment I wear a waterproof CVS knockoff on my left pointer. Our new Victorinox utility knives are sharp but cruel