The Nursery

Lyrics

Up the main stair, where the runner is worn to thread by ghosts in shoes I never saw.
The great clock in the Foyer below us is holding its breath.
Second floor landing. The air always changes here. It gets smaller, gets private.

Past the long throat of the Portrait Hall, where the dead watch you pass with painted-on patience.
I keep my eyes on the floorboards, counting them.
Past the heavy, shut door of the Master Bedroom, a silence inside it like a held note, deep and unsleeping.
I turn my head from the Sick Room. I always do. Its cold brass handle burns from across the hall, a warning not for me.
I'm walking a line drawn in chalk, from a morning when I wasn't born yet.
This way. To the left. Always to the left.

And here is the door. The one with the cool porcelain knob, small for a child's hand.
The Nursery.
The first thing you see is the horse, carved wood and leather, standing perfectly still in a long slant of morning light.
It waits for a rider who is always just about to arrive, whose feet will never touch the stirrups.

The smell is linseed oil from 1904, and the faint, sweet memory of coal smoke in the plaster.
The light is from the east, just as the architect promised, a clean blade at dawn.
Three little silhouettes on the wall, cut from black paper. Eleanor, age four. And the others. But not the one from the Bible, the one who was only 11 months of breath.
Margaret is humming by the window, mending a tear. Her song is still folded into the heavy linen curtains.
In the locked glass cabinet, the doll with one eye is watching. She remembers being put away. She remembers why.

The horse. Always the horse, its painted eye seeing both worlds.
It rocks now, just a little, without a hand to push it.
Back to a morning in 1899, forward to me standing in the doorway.
A journey from here to here, that takes a hundred years to make.

The creak of the runners on the floorboards has a texture. It’s the feeling of grey felt, the soft, dry dust on a moth’s wing brushing against my thumb.
And there, in the corner, the dollhouse. A perfect, tiny copy of this mansion.
In its nursery, a smaller rocking horse, and a smaller dollhouse inside that one.
I remember the baby that never grew old enough for a silhouette.
Or I remember the empty space on the wall where it should have been. The difference closed a long time ago.

The rocking stops. The dust motes settle in the light.
The horse is just wood and horsehair and memory again.
Just a toy in a room that forgot how to play.
Eleanor?
Was it you?