The Porcelain Doll by E. Izabelle Cassandra Alexander

Photo by E. Izabelle Cassandra Alexander (The actual doll in the story)

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

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The Author

E. Izabelle Cassandra Alexander was born and raised in a little village in Hungary. After immigrating to the US, she first lived in New York. There she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s in Information Systems from Monroe College before moving to Chicago, where she earned her MBA in Business from Webster University.

In 2013, Izabelle refocused to pursue her life-long dream of writing and began taking writing classes at Oakton Community College and online. Since then, she’s a member of numerous writing and poetry groups, attending workshops and conferences, reading at Oakton's Beautiful Minds events, and at the Des Plaines Public Library's NanoWrimo Showcase, continuously updating her writing and editing skills. She’s a single mother, nature and animal lover.

Izabelle writes short stories, creative nonfiction essays, flash fiction, plays, and poetry. Also, she’s currently working on a few novels and a series of children’s books along with illustrations.

Publications

Several of her fiction, creative nonfiction essays, and poetry have been published in Spark, a print literary journal, in 2016, 2018, and 2019, and forthcoming in 2020, as well as by The Scarlet Leaf Review on their website in 2018 and in their March 2020 issue. By the Illinois State Poetry Society (ISPS) on their website in 2017, 2018, and in the ISPS print anthology, Distilled Lives, Volume 4, 2018. Also, in Yearning to Breathe, a print anthology by Moonstone Art Center, 2019. By WOW! Women on Writing, 2019 & 2020, in The Book Smuggler’s Den, 2019, by Tint Journal, 2020, in Ariel's Dream Literary Journal, 2020, Unlimited Literature Magazine (UL-Mag), 2020, by Ariel Publishing on their website in 2020, in Beautiful Words by Ariel Publishing in 2020, and more.

Honorable Mentions, Runner Up, and Finalist

She won Runner Up status with her flash fiction “Fragments of Bones” in a contest by WOW! Women on Writing in 2019, and with her creative nonfiction essay "Why I Hate Yellow Peas" in April 2020. An interview was published by WOW in The Muffin on January 14, 2020, and another one forthcoming. Her creative nonfiction essays “Disciplined Discipline” (2017) and “My First Camel Ride” (2019), and her flash fiction “Invisible Love” (2018), “Drowning Under Pressure” (2020), and “Yellow Carnations” (2020) each received an Honorable Mention in contests by WOW! Women on Writing while they chose many of her flash and creative nonfiction pieces as finalists.

In The New York City Midnight Challenge Flash Fiction Contest, she won the first round within her tier with her flash fiction titled “What Eyes Can’t See” in 2018. Several of her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction essays, and plays had been selected by Oakton Community College over the last six years as a finalist to represent them in the annual Skyway Competitions (eight community colleges competing).

To Reach Her

You can find Izabelle on her website: izabelle2012.wixsite.com/Izabelle

Connect with her on Facebook: fb.me/E.IzabelleAlexander and Twitter.com/IzabelleAlexan3

Support her work on Patreon at www.patreon.com/IzabelleAlexander

E. Izabelle Cassandra Alexander