The Friendship Doll

by Kirby Larson

  “Biscuits,” Seal repeated. Then she turned to Mason. “And not one for you, Delbert.” She laughed a scary, witchy laugh.

  Mason bolted and headed for the ship’s ladder. Headed up to his room. Well, not his truly, but his whenever he came to stay. He grabbed the ladder’s rails and began to climb. He burst through the opening at the top, launching himself into the familiar bedroom, the one he used to think was built for a Munchkin. Small and square, it held the basics: dresser, bed, desk. But the dresser’s legs were cut off so it would fit under the angled ceiling. The “bed” was a mattress resting right on the floor. And the desk was an old door bracketed to the wall under a row of small-paned windows.

  He walked over to the windows, dropped to his knees, and leaned over the desk to press his forehead against one small pane. His racing pulse began to slow. He took a few deep breaths. From here, he could see the Space Needle. When he was little, he used to pretend it was a spaceship that would take him back to his home planet. He’d been such a doofus. He turned his head so he could see the seaplanes land down at the other end of Lake Union.

  He heard sniffling behind him.

  Emma had followed him up the ship’s ladder. She was sitting cross-legged on the mattress. Her nose was shiny and her eyes red. “I want Seal,” she said, grabbing a pillow and hugging it close to her chest.

  Mason was embarrassed by her dramatics, but he felt the same way. “I didn’t think she would be this bad,” he said.

  Emma wiped her nose on the pillowcase. Then she began to cry in earnest.

  He felt his own throat tighten. If this kept up, he’d be bawling himself.

  “Hey, do you want to go in the attic?” That had always been against the rules. Seal had been afraid one of them would put a foot between the joists, or something. But Seal wasn’t in any condition to tell them to stay out and Mom was too busy with Seal to check on them.

  “Sure.” Emma ran her nose across the pillowcase one more time. “Let’s go.”

  Whenever adults tell you to stay away from something, that something gains a powerful draw. Mason knew where the attic hatch was—had gotten close to opening it many times. He scooted across the floor to the far wall. “It’s this door.” He’d been about five when he discovered the hidden attic entrance, almost invisible in the bedroom wall.

  The door was stiff. He put his shoulder into it. After three tries, it opened and he fell through.

  “Shh!” Emma flapped her hands at him. “Your mom will hear.”

  “That was an accident.” He shook himself and then wriggled through the now-open door. Emma followed. They balanced their way over to a section where some floorboards had been laid down. Mason was relieved to reach the secure surface. All those years of Seal telling him he could fall through the joists were hard to let go of.

  “It’s kind of creepy,” said Emma, feeling her way to the safe spot next to Mason. “Do you think there are spiders?”

  “Only poisonous ones.”

  Emma squeaked. “What?” She began scrambling toward the door.

  Mason grabbed her foot. “Just kidding.”

  “That was mean!” But Emma said it with a laugh.

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, looking over the jumble of boxes and trunks and stuff. “Remember when Seal let us eat strawberry shortcake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that time?” Emma hugged her knees to her chest. “And how she always made a treasure hunt for us to find our birthday presents?”

  Remembering those things made Mason feel worse, not better. He got on his hands and knees and began exploring. “Hey, look at this.” He held up an old record.

  Emma read the label. “It says ‘Hawaiian Love Song.’ I wonder what they played these on.”

  “A record player, dummy.” Mason flipped open the lid of a nearby cardboard box. “Hey, here are Seal’s Christmas decorations.” He gently pulled out a blown-egg ornament, made before his mom was even born, decorated with red felt and cotton to look like a Santa head.

  “Careful with that,” Emma said. She tugged at an old suitcase, trying to open it. “Do you know how to pick locks?”

  Mason made a face. “We haven’t gotten to that unit in school yet.” He scootched past Emma to the very back corner of the attic. Under a moth-eaten army blanket he found a trunk. And it wasn’t locked. He pushed the levers and they clicked open. He lifted the lid.

  A pair of eyes stared back at him.

  “Aaah!” He fell back.

  Oh, to feel a bit of light again. It’s lovely. Lovely. If I could move my limbs, I would indulge in a glorious stretch. But for now I will be content to be out of the darkness.

  It appears that a boy is the one who opened my trunk. Strange creatures, boys. They tend to avoid dolls and thus avoid me. I recall Brigitte telling me they were smelly, with disgusting things in their pockets. This one doesn’t look so bad. And I don’t smell anything but dust.

  “What is it? A rat?” Emma squirmed her way to Mason and peeked over his shoulder. “You yelled about a doll?”

  “I was surprised, okay?”

  Emma nudged him out of the way. “She looks Japanese. Where do you think Seal got her?” She set the doll on the floor and rummaged in the trunk. “Look at all this stuff in here.” She pulled out a small teapot and a torn silk parasol. “Some of this doesn’t look like it belongs. A marble? And this handkerchief doesn’t look Japanese.” She shook it out. “Not with yellow airplanes on it.”

  A piece of paper fluttered to the floor when Emma lifted out the printed handkerchief. Mason picked it up. He couldn’t read it very well—the writing was all faded. He could make out something about words and birds. He folded the paper up carefully and put it back in the trunk. “This stuff might be valuable. It looks pretty old.”

  There is a cloud over these children, especially the boy. I sense a loss, not unlike the one Lucy experienced when the hard times changed her father so.

  Was I awakened by this boy’s need? Is he the one I am to help? I have been asleep so long that my mind is as useful as one chopstick. Perhaps it is best to wait. To watch. To listen.

  Mason didn’t like the way Emma had set the doll facedown on the floor. He turned it over. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s take this downstairs. Ask Seal about it.” He wasn’t sure where the idea had come from, but now that he’d said it aloud, he liked it.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” said Emma. “I want to look around some more.”

  Mason gingerly picked up the doll. The last thing he wanted to do was break it getting it down the ship’s ladder. But he managed safely.

  “What have you got there?” Mom was coming out of Seal’s bedroom carrying a teacup.

  “Uh. We found it. In the attic,” Mason answered.

  Mom frowned. “You know that’s off-limits.” But she didn’t sound too mad. “It’s pretty. I’ve never seen it before. I wonder if it was Seal’s when she was a kid.” Mom filled the teakettle and set it on the burner. “Were you going to show it to her?” She smiled at him. “That’s a great idea. Sometimes the past is an easier place for her to be.”

  The doll slid around a bit in Mason’s arms. He felt goofy holding it. Good thing none of his friends could see him.

  “Go on in. I’ll be there in a minute. Abby went out to grab some lunch and Seal wanted another cup of tea.” She lifted the tea tin down from the cupboard.

  Mason took a deep breath and stepped into the bedroom, holding the doll out in front of him like a shield.

  “Oh!” Seal struggled to sit up in bed when she saw what he carried. “Miss Kanagawa!” Her voice sounded younger. Almost girlish.

  It is a shock to see an old friend so gray and wrinkled. But I would recognize those eyes anywhere. All those hours we spent together, there in the museum. She would come to me, eyes damp with discouragement and pain, and by the time she left, they would be lit with hope.

  Seal laughed a Seal laugh. A real laugh. It made the knot in Mason’s stomach loosen a bit. “My old friend,”
she said. “Oh, do we have stories to tell!” She took the doll from Mason and set it on one side of her in the bed. She patted the other side for Mason to come sit. He did. Mom slipped in with Seal’s tea and perched on the chair at the vanity.

  “I hope you never have to live through a time like that. The Dirty Thirties, some folks called it. We lost the farm, Mama …” Seal’s eyes seemed to be focused on something far away from her bedroom in a houseboat on Lake Union in Seattle. “And lost our way, Pop and I.” And she told them the story of how she and her father left Oklahoma for California. And how they ended up in some kind of camp in Oregon. It was a sad story. Mason saw Mom wipe her eyes every now and then.

  “Then Dr. Evans opened the museum, and when I saw Miss Kanagawa”—Seal stroked the doll’s black hair—“I knew I’d found a friend. When the war broke out, they didn’t want her anymore. Didn’t want anything Japanese. Dr. Evans bought her from the museum with his own money. And he gave her to me.” She shook her head. “He and his wife, my old schoolteacher, were both so good to me.”

  “How did you end up in Seattle?” Mason asked.

  “When Pop passed, he left me enough money that I could finally live by the water.” She chuckled. “Never dreamed I’d live on it! That’s something for a little old Okie gal.”

  Emma wandered in, holding a piece of paper, as Seal was telling about picking hops in Yakima for a penny a pound.

  “Hey, Seal,” Emma said, “is this letter really from Eleanor Roosevelt?” She brought it over to the bed.

  Seal stroked the yellowed paper. “I must have written her a dozen letters. Never dreamed she’d answer me.”

  “That’s you?” Emma asked. “Lucy?”

  “For Lucille.” Seal handed the letter back to her. “I outgrew Lucy, and then, when I met Clarence, he called me Seal.”

  Mom got up from her chair and went to stand by the bed. “I never knew that was how you got your nickname.” She took Seal’s hand in hers.

  “I like this part,” Emma said, pointing to the letter. “Where she says, ‘What one has to do can usually be done.’ ”

  Mom looked over Emma’s shoulder. “We should get it framed. And put it over by the mirror so you’d see it every day.”

  Seal sighed. “That’d be real nice.”

  The afternoon felt like Christmas to Mason, with each one of Seal’s stories—stories he’d never heard her tell before—like a gift that had been forgotten under the tree and newly discovered. He felt like he had his old Seal back. When he thought about it, it had started when he brought in that worn-out doll. It wasn’t until she saw Miss Kanagawa that Seal really got to talking.

  Mason shook his head at such a crazy thought. How could that old thing have made a difference? It was like Mom said. Seal was going to have good days. And bad days. They lucked out that today was one of her good ones.

  Seal shifted in the bed, to face Mom. “Gloria Jean, you said you were going to help me with my arithmetic,” she said. “You promised.”

  Mason and Emma exchanged glances. As quickly as she’d slipped out of her confusion, Seal had slipped back into it.

  Mom pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose quietly. “Well, I always keep my promises,” she said. “But maybe you should get some rest first.”

  “I am feeling tuckered out. I guess I’ve a right to be. I picked thirty-two pounds of beans this morning.” Seal settled back, head on the pillow, and tucked an arm around Miss Kanagawa.

  Mason turned off the bedside lamp and tiptoed out of the room behind Mom and Emma. He turned back to look at Seal resting there, that doll in her arms. The dark must have been playing tricks on his eyes. It looked like there was a tear rolling down the doll’s cheek.

  Seal said something as he was about ready to step over the threshold. “What?” he asked.

  “See you tomorrow?”

  He thought about that line in the Eleanor Roosevelt letter. That what a person has to do can be done. He patted his hand on the door frame.

  “I’ll be here,” he told her.

  I may be showing signs of age, like my friend Lucy—my kimono frayed, my joints stiff, and my gofun face cracking—but the nerve of that boy to think that because I am old and worn out I cannot help people!

  I will be faithful to the task for which I was created until I am so far beyond repair that not even one such as Master Tatsuhiko could mend me.

  Until then, there is a boy with a lesson to learn.

  And no one better to teach him than I.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Bunny’s Story

  Belle Wyatt Roosevelt did indeed accept Miss Japan on behalf of the children of New York in a ceremony at City Hall, attended by Mayor Jimmy Walker. One story has it that the doll did wobble in her arms when the envoy handed it to her. The dolls really were on display at Lord & Taylor for ten days when Mr. Reyburn was the company president. Though Town Topics was a 1920s periodical, I created the news story “Little Envoys Arrive in Town,” but I can’t take credit for the delicious expression “Fifth Avenoodle,” which I found in an issue of the magazine. I am also grateful to have discovered Eric Homberger’s The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s History, which helped me imagine the New York City that Bunny moved around in.

  I am certain that the real Belle Wyatt Roosevelt, granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States, was a lovely child; however, since I invented Bunny, I also invented Belle’s less-than-pleasant personality to add tension to the story.

  Lois’ Story

  It’s hard to imagine that the city of Chicago would dare host a World’s Fair in 1933, smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression, but it did. And the fair was such a hit it was extended into 1934. Thanks to an engaging website, www.cityclicker.net/chicfair, and a lovely book called Chicago’s 1933–34 World’s Fair, A Century of Progress in Vintage Postcards, by Samantha Gleisten, I was able to find out a great deal about the exhibits, the fairgrounds, and the Sky Ride. Neither Miss Kanagawa nor any of the other dolls I describe was actually displayed at the fair, but I reasoned that if the organizers allowed such novelties as the Mills Freak Show, alligator wrestling, and something called the Great Beyond, they would have readily welcomed an exhibit of dolls from around the world.

  Willie Mae’s Story

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a lot about creating New Jobs. In 1935, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA (renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939, and sometimes called We Poke Along, by skeptics), was created to help put people to work. One of the jobs created was that of packhorse librarian, which you can read more about in Kathi Appelt and Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer’s wonderful book Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. Willie Mae’s brother worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, as did 250,000 other men, eighteen years old and older, helping to plant trees and build dams, fire towers, and park trails, in addition to many other public projects.

  Lucy’s Story

  One of the many things I remember my beloved grandmother telling me was that she hoped I would never have to live through a depression, as she had in the “Dirty Thirties,” when millions of people were out of work. During the Great Depression, people lost everything—their businesses, their homes, and, like Lucy’s Pop, their pride and hope. While I grew up hearing my grandmother’s stories about those hard times, I got a specific picture of the plight of the Okies from Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp, by Jerry Stanley. And giving truth to the saying that one picture is worth a thousand words, I found the photographs in Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field, by Anne Whiston Spirn, and The Depression Years: As Photographed by Arthur Rothstein (published by Dover Press) invaluable.

  Like Lucy, thousands of people, adults and children alike, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression. They asked for money, clothes, and even
bicycles. Between 1933 and 1940, she received nearly seven hundred thousand letters. As often as she could, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote back. I’m sure she would have answered Lucy’s letter had she seen it, but the reply in this book was written by me, not Mrs. Roosevelt.

  The Friendship Dolls did indeed travel around this entire country. According to Dr. Gulick’s own report (Dolls of Friendship: The Story of a Goodwill Project Between the Children of America and Japan, Second Edition, Sidney L. Gulick), “Between January and July [1928] welcome receptions were given the dolls in every state but two of the Union. The towns and cities visited … numbered four hundred and seventy-nine.” I found no record, however, that any Friendship Doll visited Klamath Falls, Oregon. That was another of my inventions for the sake of the story.

  The Friendship Dolls

  In November of 1927, fifty-eight Friendship Dolls arrived in the United States as a gift from Japanese schoolchildren. The dolls were about three feet tall, with black human hair—cut into a bob with bangs—and handpainted faces. Their pearl-white “skin” was not porcelain but gofun, a material made from crushed oyster shells. Each doll was dressed in an elegant silk kimono and was equipped with dozens of accessories, including lacquer chests, tea sets, parasols, and even a passport.

  The dolls were feted and admired as they traveled around the country, eventually finding homes, primarily, in various museums. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, many of them were removed from display, sold, lost, perhaps even destroyed. Only one doll remained on exhibit during World War II. That was Miss Kagawa (not the Miss Kanagawa of this story), at the North Carolina State Museum. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was turned to face the wall, and a sign was placed next to her. It began: “Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Mad.”