THE STORY OF ELOISE

Lolly and the little girl in the pink house

The little girl sat in front of the fire on the hooked rug on the floor with her mother eating a meal of calves liver.  This was a horrible meal and if her mother had not been taking turns eating a bite and then getting the little girl to eat a bite, she surely would not be eating the horrible stuff.  So eat she did!  She had been diagnosed with rheumatic fever and had been taken to the hospital room with the doctor and both her parents.  She just stared at the bed from the doorway and couldn't imagine herself there....although she was there in the hallway.  Then it was if she had been taken away in a dream and she was riding on the Southern Pacific Railroad traversing a familiar route.  Los Angeles to las Vegas, las Vegas to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City to Laramie, Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming to Billings, Montana and then finally Nebraska.  Here her grandfather would come to meet them with  his hearse, with the black velvet curtains.

Her grandfather came with his hearse, a stretcher and a companion to help lift her onto the stretcher .
They slid her onto the old black hearse with the velvet curtains that swayed with the weight of the people positioning the girl.  Her mother was  close by as they slid her on the stand where the casket was usually placed.  When she and her mother were in,  the door was shut and the girl looked at the ceiling of the hearse where the belts that held the casket were tied up, but swinging to the sway of the velvet curtains.  The earth was cold and covered with a layer of snow as the old hearse began the trip to Iowa.   Along the road the back tire popped and her grandfather and companion got out and started to change the blown tire.  The girl positioned herself and repositioned herself to see outside.  There was a blizzard now.  Her mother spoke to her sharply, "If you do not lay still I will strap you down."  She became still and waited.  It did not take her grandfather long to change the tire and they were on the road again.

Her grandfather's house was a small brick house on a street in Sioux City.  When they carried her in the house on the stretcher she had fallen asleep and wasn't aware until morning where she was, or that she had arrived.  She awoke to a beautiful, pink room in a big bed with a satin pink bedspread and an excess of pillows.  The carpeting was pink and the walls of the bedroom.  There was a huge dresser with a mirror above that and Lollie's perfume bottles and brushes sitting on top.  In the front room the girl could lay on the couch and look out a window overlooking the carport and watch visitors leave.

The little doll was sent in a large round container to a seven year old girl confined in bed with rheumatic fever.  Although she was filled with energy and always wanted to  move around, she stayed in bed and only went to the bath room or living room when she left her bed, in a wheel chair.  She tried very hard not to bang the walls of her grandfather's hallway as she maneuvered herself from one place to another.  The bedroom had become too familiar.






She was in the pink house now, and she had her doll and then the family doctor came to visit her.  They had made the trip from California just to see him.  He came to her sitting in her wheel chair and lowered himself to his knees getting very close to her face.  She could plainly see his eyes were of a different colour, one blue, one brown!  "Would you like to get out of that wheel chair and play in the snow?"  he asked her with a friendly but serious face.    It was good to stretch and run and play again.  And Eloise would be waiting for her-always.