Miss Dooley’s long walk to Christmas

How a two-mile walk in the snow and the gift of a special quarter saved my Christmas.

by David Mattia

This is the first time I am telling a story from my childhood without my mother’s help. She died earlier this year, and until now she was always the one who filled in the details my child’s mind couldn’t remember. What follows is my attempt to carry out the memory on my own, guided by what mom once told me, the little I’ve retained, and whatever else I still hold inside.

I was 7 when I had surgery the day before my birthday, which also happens to be Christmas. It wasn’t a grave condition, but it was serious enough to land me in the hospital at Christmas and to keep me there for three days. For a child, three days in a hospital might as well have been forever. The antiseptic smell, the white tile walls, the squeak of nurses’ shoes on linoleum — none of it felt like Christmas.

My birthday had always been tangled up with the holiday. At home there were pine needles on the carpet, the smell of my grandmother’s baking in the kitchen, and the anticipation of gifts wrapped in paper that sparkled under the tree. That year there was only the hum of fluorescent lights and the faint sound of muzak carols drifting in from speakers in the hall.

In the room adjacent to mine was a boy I never knew. In fact, I wasn’t supposed to know anything about him because he was gravely ill, but children overhear things. I caught whispers that he was “a vegetable.” At 7 years old I took that literally. I imagined a carrot or a celery stick lying in a hospital bed, covered with a blanket. It was funny in a way but also terrifying. The image stuck with me, a strange mixture of humor and dread that only a child’s mind could conjure.

The hospital itself was a place of contrasts. Nurses moved briskly, and their voices sounded like women on TV. The smell of rubbing alcohol clung to everything. The food arrived on trays with covers that lifted to reveal stuff that didn’t look right. I remember lying in bed, listening to the faint buzz of fluorescent lights, wondering if Christmas could find me there, and what it would be like to be a vegetable.

That is when Miss Dooley appeared. Miss Dooley was one of the three kindly old spinsters (my mom’s words) who lived in the old house next door to ours.

She was, according to my mom, at least 90 years old, and she had walked more than two miles through the snowy park in orthopedic shoes to reach me. My mother told the story so many times that I can almost see it myself: Miss Dooley leaving the green house, silver hair pinned tight in its Victorian bun, breath pluming in the cold, the slow, deliberate squeaksqueak of those thick-soled shoes on packed snow, the long empty path across the park, the hospital doors finally opening to let her in.

She stepped into my doorway looking exactly like the woman who was always chasing the cat away from Tweety Bird’s cage. My mother used to make that comparison, and at that moment, it was a perfect way to describe her. Yes, Miss Dooley, the tallest of the three housemates, looked exactly like Tweety Bird’s broom-swinging granny.

After a brief chat with my mother and father in the doorway, Miss Dooley came to my bedside. She sat on the edge, took my hand in her cool, dry one, and told me not to worry about the boy next door because he was in God’s hands. Then, she reached into her old coat pocket and drew out a Standing Liberty quarter. She pressed it into my palm with a kind of ceremony, as if she were passing down something sacred. I knew immediately what it was because my Aunt Grace gave me those special quarters on birthdays and holidays. They were the beautiful ones, the ones with Liberty standing brave. Twenty-five cents was not a lot of money, I knew that, but this one felt priceless. I imagined that one day I would have a book filled with them.

My mother, standing behind her, started fretting about the cold and the distance, and a woman her age walking so far. Miss Dooley brushed it off with the one single word I actually remember her speaking that day: “Nonsense.”

She stood up, smoothed her coat, intent on walking back home to the old green house the same way she had come, but my dad intervened and drove her home despite her unrealistic protests.

I still have that coin.

It was from the green house next door to mine that this strange kind of comfort had often come. Miss Dooley lived there with Miss Frye and Miss Van Dyne, three elderly women who seemed frozen in another era. Their home was painted in deep forest green, layer upon layer, until the wood looked more like it had been buried by time rather than repeatedly painted by a handyman. My mother used to say there must have been a hundred coats of paint on that old house, and that each coat simply sealed in the decade of paint before it.

Inside, everything was antiquated but not dark as you’d expect. Red velvet drapes hung in the parlor, tied back with golden ropes that looked like they belonged in a theater. Doilies covered every surface — the arms of chairs, the tops of tables, even the chocolate cookies Miss Frye always offered were placed on lace doilies and gently covered by lace doilies. It was a house that had stopped in doily time, somewhere between the 1920s and 1930s.

The staircase was steep and wide, with a banister that felt enormous to a child’s hand. Climbing those stairs was like entering another world. Miss Dooley lived surrounded by figurines and old furniture and more doilies. Her silver hair pinned in its Victorian bun was what I remember best. Every morning, rain or shine, she brushed it out in the yard. Unpinned, her hair reached the ground. She brushed methodically, stroke after stroke, until it shone pewterwhite. The strands that stuck in her brush were gathered up and wrapped around the fence posts “for the birds to build nests,” she said.

Miss Frye’s room was nearby and faced the street. My mother told me Miss Frye had crafted the lace curtains by hand, and I believed it. Everything was “dainty,” mom said, and the curtains were designed to let the light in rather than keep it out because Miss Frye had an “innate sense of style and taste.” Miss Frye, remembered fondly by my mother in one of her stories, was quieter than Miss Dooley, but her presence was felt in the details — the curtains, the doilies, the careful order of things.

Miss Van Dyne owned the house. My father once told me that when he was a boy, she had hired him to shovel coal through the basement window. He remembered the job, and he also remembered that Miss Van Dyne had worked a highpaying job as a judge’s assistant. The 1940 census confirms it: private secretary, $5,000 a year — more than most family doctors earned then. In later years she grew grouchy, but my grandmother remembered her as a very nice woman with a deceptively risqué sense of humor. I only knew her as a crotchety old lady whose right eye twitched once every few seconds.

Together, the three women formed a kind of Victorian tableau. Miss Dooley with her tightly tiedup bundle of hair, Miss Frye with her ample frame, flannel dresses, and chocolate cookies, and Miss Van Dyne with her cute little twitchy eye.

My mother called them “old settler stock” but in more recent years she referred to them also as intellectuals living in a Boston Marriage. Mom assumed that Miss Dooley and Miss Frye were the true companions and Miss Van Dyne was just the landlord. We’ll never know.

Miss Frye, it turned out, had written several children’s books decades earlier under a pseudonym now forgotten, but my mother remembered seeing and reading one.

Miss Van Dyne spent most of the day at the local library, and on Sundays, even at her advanced age, she taught lessons on history, literature, and Latin at the nearby Presbyterian church.

Miss Dooley had read so deeply in poetry and philosophy that she could hold her own in discussions with anyone about anything. I didn’t know this about her, but I knew that she and my mom talked at length in the garden behind the house – mostly about theater and poetry.

To me, Dooley, Frye and Van Dyne were simply the old ladies who lived next door in an old green house. I didn’t know they had accomplished brains.

Of course, time moved on, as it always does, and the house next door began to change. The velvet drapes grew heavier with dust, the varnished wood darker with age. The doilies yellowed, and the old women who had seemed frozen in the 1920s began to fade, one by one.

Miss Frye was the first to go. I don’t remember the details, only that her absence was noted by my mom. Still, her handmade curtains hung in the upstairs window, a reminder of what used to be.

Miss Dooley remained for a time, still brushing her hair each morning, still wrapping strands around the fence posts for the birds. But eventually, well into her 90s, a relative came and took her away to Pennsylvania. She left quietly, without ceremony, and was never heard from again save for a note on a card she left for my mom.

Miss Van Dyne lingered the longest. By the time she left she was at least at the century marker — taken to a nursing home where she lived out her final days. It seemed strange to me that someone so old, someone who had been part of that house for so long, could end up in a place so anticlimactic.

And so, the house, once filled with the shadows of three old spinsters, stood empty. In my mind, the green paint peeled, the velvet drapes sagged, the doilies gathered dust, but what really happened was that the world had simply moved on, and the women who had seemed eternal were gone too. In less than a month, a man from India named George moved in with his wife Preethy and their daughter Pria.

Why do I know those names, but I never knew the first names of Miss Dooley, Miss Frye, and Miss Van Dyne? What good would that have done? I would never have been permitted to use them anyway. That formality suited them, as if they had chosen to remain figures from another time.

Moreover, when I think of that Christmas, I think of Miss Dooley’s long walk to the hospital, her silver hair pinned in its bun, her words of reassurance, and the Standing Liberty quarter she placed in my hand. How did she seem to know that I was worried about being a vegetable?

Then, I think of the way she brushed off my mother’s concern with that emphatic “Nonsense,” and the way my mother later retold the rest, filling in the gaps of my non-memory with her own voice.

Funny how I said that my mom, who died earlier this year, was no longer here to fill in the details my childish mind could not recall. But look at what just happened. My mom, now just a small spirit who lives within me, just told you the whole story of Miss Dooley’s long walk in the snow.