Tiny Houses 2: Doll House

He stands, or sits, on the sprawling back terrace of his apartment in Rome. In a few years, he will build a tool-house there out of a fiberglass-like material that may or may not contain tiny particles that will enter his lungs. He will choose pink and green for the fiberglass because pink is his daughter’s favorite color and green is his: he will make a shed with two windows, one at his eye level and a lower one at hers. He will make a bench in front of each window at the appropriate height and source tools for her that are about three quarters of the usual size. These will not be dolls’ size, but real tools, sized to fit her hands. A few years, with the tools that he has stored in their pink and green home, he and his daughter will build a trellis garden bed with a concrete wall in which they will embed tiny tiles from Deruta. The trellis will be taken over by morning glories, and he will wake her up to see them in bloom.

But right now, somewhere around 1963, his tools are scattered everywhere.  He is listlessly, aimlessly building a large rectangular box. Listless, because he is slowly recovering from a bout of hepatitis, which may or may not have been exacerbated by his drinking. Aimless because he is letting the wood and the nails and the time of recovery  tell him what to do.  It makes sense given everything about him that he would recover by making something, although, once the rectangle takes shape, he is not sure what it is that he has made. He thinks perhaps it is a toy box for his daughter, although she does not really play too much with toys. As the bright sun of a Roman spring makes its way across the terrace, he feels the box taking a new shape under his hands. The box becomes the first floor of a dollhouse; he adds a second floor with two large rooms, stairs and a hallway leading up to the third floor, two rooms under a hinged roof. As he works, he looks over the cityscape before him—the churches, apartment buildings, and cafes of the Parioli neighborhood where the streets are named after musicians. The street where he lives is named after Gaspare Spontini, a composer so obscure that nobody outside the family can remember the street name. But if he squints, he can see the cobblestones of Piazza Verdi, a satisfyingly famous.

The house he is making, or rather, the house that emerges under his hands, has nothing to do with what he sees from its place of making. It is, he acknowledges when it is almost done, a replica of his parents’ house in Vancouver: square with symmetrical windows and a severely sloping roof that repels rain and the occasional snow. He paints his house, his daughter’s dollhouse, a stark white, and the roof the red of houses in children’s drawings. 

The house he has made is not the house he grew up in, which was on a prairie in Saskatchewan, not the house he had left never to return, first for a commune with his first wife about whom he has yet to tell his daughter, and then for New York and his second wife and to a job with the United Nations which would eventually take him to Rome and to this terrace. The house he has almost finished is, however, precisely the kind of house he has always felt the need to escape, with its symmetry, its strange clapboard solidity, its aura of (North) American dream. At the last moment he adds green shutters like the ones he sees from the terrace, shutters that Romans in their real apartments shut against the afternoon sun. On the very top floors the shutters, with their curved tops, mimic the windows of the church below the terrace.

The size of the original box has determined the scale of the completed house. It is higher than his daughter is tall; as it turns out she will never grow past the peak of its cherry-colored roof. Until she is ten and the family moves back to New York, she and her friends will occasionally empty the ground floor of its furniture and try to crawl through the front door of the dollhouse. By the time she leaves Rome, only she and one other friend can fit. It is one of many signs that her many of the girls she knows are developing, as one of them puts it, into “little women.” This sounds better in Italian. The dollhouse accompanies the other household furniture to the family’s New York apartment, where its size is even more apparent. His daughter knows better not to play the crawling game in New York; this is as much an issue of her friends’ sophistication as it is their size. They have left childish things behind. At ten and eleven they are to her, women.

As Norman works—slowly because he is still tired from what he calls the “bug” (this is also one of his pet names for his daughter). Is he thinking about his other daughter in Canada? The one who lives with her mother who ran away with a banjo player while her husband was serving in the second world war? Does he wonder if she has a dollhouse, if the banjo player has taught her to use tools? He has not told his current daughter about his first family; she will not find out about it until he is dead and will not meet her half-sister, Sharon, until mid life. The two daughters, sitting across from each other, each with their father’s face, will try to piece together the story. The younger daughter will be a professor, the older one an Episcopal minister. They will  both, for their own purposes, read a lot of Trollope. They will both read through the works of Jane Austen every year, just like Norman’s second wife, Gladys, who is of course not related to Sharon, so the Austen thing cannot exactly be genetic. The half sisters agree  that there are a lot of puzzling elements to the story, that they  will never understand. Sharon, who is very wise, knows some things for sure. In her possession are gifts from her father, sent every year for her birthday until one year there were no more gifts. The younger daughter watches as her half-sister unwraps a straw purse shaped like an apple. It is clearly, intimately related to her own carefully preserved straw purse, shaped like a strawberry, bought of her by her mother. They are part of a set, a twin set, a medley of fruits. The older daughter thinks her own mother put a stop to the gifts, perhaps even sending some back. It is hard to say. As far as anyone can tell, the gifts probably stopped about the time of the dollhouse.

As the box becomes a house, a Canadian house, is the father planning a gift for his secret daughter? Has he given up sending the gifts, has his wife given up choosing them? Is he wondering, as he declares it finished, whether and when he will tell his second daughter about his first? Does he think that his younger daughter will resent not being an only child, the only child? Does he know that his daughter, this younger one, has six imaginary sisters and that they will live, invisibly, in the dollhouse?Does he think of himself as a man betrayed by his first wife and a banjo-plying seducer, as a father exiled from a daughter and a son (for the older daughter was not an only child?) As a man who abandoned his children? As someone forced to start anew, to reinvent himself first—and uneasily—as a New Yorker and then as a denizen of Rome?

As I write my father into the third person, I grow increasingly uneasy. It was all so long ago, and in the country that I think of as his country, even though he was almost thirty when he moved to it, what do I, what can I, know about what he was thinking as he built my dollhouse alone, out on the terrace? Of how he felt about Rome, about his drinking, about his first family, about me? I know, or I think I know, he hated returning to New York and to an apartment without a terrace, without a place on which to build things. The adult I am now has words for what he was in New York: depressed, self-medicating, claustrophobic. The child in me grew slowly to understand that he was also afraid. The man who was always ready for an adventure, who would drive anywhere in Europe, never took me to a baseball game even though much of our relationship in America centered on baseball. Was he afraid of the subway? Of the geography of the city? Of crowds? Of, paradoxically, being hemmed in? Of not being able to afford tickets? How did claustrophobia manifest itself, become agoraphobia? When he drank did he drink himself out of New York, or deeper into the city at night? Did his drinking figure as safety, as familiarity or as a form of risk? Did alcohol help him to feel or to avoid feeling? “Both” or “all of the above” seem like the obvious answer, but also like a cop-out; which of these possibilities did he actually feel?

I hear my mother’s voice, although I don’t think she ever actually used these words. “Men feel more deeply than women, so deeply they cannot express it without falling apart. They show their feelings through their actions, their gifts.”

I know how my father felt about me in part because of what he built for me. As I write from the desk made for me during the early days of the pandemic by my husband, I realize without surprise that I have absorbed her gendered story of giving, adding to it, as she might well have, a story of making.

As I write from the desk my husband made for me, about the dollhouse my father made for me, I find that I must give up on the third-person father. As I continued the story past the building of the house and into the story of its furnishing, past my father’s death, and then my mother’s, I began, suddenly, to address my father as “you.” At first, I resisted this eruption of the second person, changing each “you” to “he.” Part of me, perhaps, wanted to talk to my father, to ask him questions—the other part took comfort in the authority of third-person narration, even though it could not begin to approach omniscience. After a while the slips into the second-person became slips into the first: somewhere between the dollhouse on the terrace and the dollhouse inside our apartment in Rome, somewhere between the giver and the recipient, this became my story. In abandoning my third-person father, I write myself into the first person.

I don’t remember seeing the dollhouse for the first time. Perhaps my father surprised me with the finished object. Perhaps I was in on the project almost from the beginning; perhaps he allowed me to paint or stain it. What I do remember, though, is the decoration and furnishing, a process that included my mother. My father carefully “tiled” the bathroom floor with green and white checked shelf paper from a sample book at a furniture store. As always, I am not sure what the material was; I know it was shiny and that the squares were raised, like real tiles. My father added lamps that actually lit up, although the effect was somewhat spoiled by the battery packs they had to trail behind them.  The bathroom, when it was done, included not only towels, but an impossibly small roll of toilet paper. There were also appliances at many scales, including a washing machine with a spinning drum. The dolls were the first in our houshold to own such an appliance. My mother never owned one; she thought that a washing machine—about the size of the dollhouse-- would be too big for an apartment.

My mother went to her favorite boutique, Myricae, and sourced painted furniture in two sizes: tiny (actually intended for dollhouses) and medium (from their collection of outdated samples). The samples, of course, were replicas of the sore’s human-scale furniture that my mother longed for but could never afford. The dollhouse  became a fantasy in two scales of my mother’s dream apartment. The dolls and their clothing may well have come from Myricae as well—perhaps as payment for when I modeled their children’s clothing at my first and last runway show. 

Like what would become my favorite novels, the dollhouse combined meticulous attention to realist detail with the unworkable and the improbable.  Although there was a beautiful staircase between the second and third storeys, there was no way for the dolls to get from the former toy box of the first floor to the second. This was resolved by making the first floor into a general store that included tiny bolts of fabric and minuscule but accurately rendered cans of fruit and vegetables. The sample (medium) size furniture fit in perfectly. Again, as in the novels I grew to love, the dollhouse segregated home from business, the market and the domestic.

The dollhouse, with its freight of furniture, appliances, battery-powered lamps, and, best of all, tiny representations of food, would make it first to New York, back to Rome, and then, after my father’s death, to the United States again. For a while, my mother stored the dollhouse in her doll-size apartment in New York—neither my husband nor I remember where she kept it, although it must have hogged a great deal of space. I “inherited” the dollhouse, ironically or not, when I became an adult—when I got my first job in the Boston area. There was plenty of room for it in my rat-infested first apartment, and some room in the study of the apartment I later shared with my husband in Virginia. At some point, I turned the dollhouse around so its Canadian exterior could be seen, and its interior remained private, the realm of dolls and bears that I still dutifully but perhaps not quite as carefully set out. 

The dollhouse’s final move was to Houston, where, for the last time I unpacked the furniture and positioned it. By this time, the bolts of fabric had frayed and unrolled: I faithfully rerolled them and placed them in the sample chest. Soon after this move to our first house, I gave birth to my older son. My mother, in the last year of her life, gently bemoaned the fact that as a boy he would not be interested in the object we had carried between us from place to place. Ross was not in fact interested in the dollhouse, although he shared my interest in toy kitchens and faux food. He had a kitchen of his own, with a stove, a sink and a dishwasher—the latter an amenity not included in the dollhouse. The cabinets were filled with plastic turkeys, pizzas, vegetables, eggs and bacon. The eggs were the size of real eggs, but the turkey was oddly small. By the time he was three, Ross preferred cooking in the real kitchen; he was especially good at separating eggs as he squatted on the counter. Once, when his father and I had to go to the Emergency Room just before a planned baby shower for one of his preschool teachers, he taught my friend to use the stand mixer so that the planned menu—I remember pastry-cream filled swans—appeared without a hitch. After a while, we put the plastic food away, perhaps for another child, who, when he came, joined Ross, at a very early age, in the real kitchen, leaving for me the delights of a plastic pantry.

Finally, we gave the dollhouse away to a friend. She had a daughter and a bigger house. Helen, the daughter, has what appears to be the only extant picture of the dollhouse (see above). In the picture, you can see the white façade and the windows with their green shutters. In the window are two kittens, real ones. Something about the kitten in the foreground suggests possession—perhaps it is the paw draped casually over the windowsill. The kittens seem very much at home, if somewhat out of scale. But, of course, this was always a house of many scales, one of the few building projects my father never quite got right. 

Although the dollhouse is long gone, I do have some of its furniture that was returned to me when my friend’s daughter outgrew playing house. I have saved, I think, a cradle (the smaller version), a lamp, and two pairs of curtains lovingly hemmed by my glamorous Italian babysitter who washed her hair twice a year and had a large and quarrelsome family in Salerno. All the furniture fits in one small gift box. On I took it all out and made what I think is called a vignette—an arrangement of related objects that tell a story. Then I put everything back in a box in an upper drawer that escaped the floodwaters of hurricane Harvey. When I moved to my current house I put the box somewhere safe.I feel that I could find it quite easily if I tried, but I have not felt moved to do so, even now that I have told my story and perhaps my father’s. Perhaps I have finally outgrown the dollhouse, even perhaps grown up a little.