Dwarf stars
When the old house was falling apart and Mother decided to have it pulled down, she distributed the movables, those that she did not wish to keep for herself, to her children. I got an old mirror, a set of lawn chairs and an accompanying low table, and the remaining two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs.
The concrete figures of these characters from the Brothers Grimm lined up the little garden beside the entrance to the family residence. Five dwarfs could not be accounted for. Since to a man, or woman, we clamored for Snow White, Mother made a Solomonic decision—she retained her.
My two dwarfs are a foot tall each. One leans from atop a two-foot toadstool and joins hands with the other dwarf to lift him up from the ground. I installed the mushroom near a stone path inside our iron-grill fence beside the road, where passersby could see the two dwarfs, their hands locked as though catching each other on a flying trapeze.
The longest to view the dwarfs is the littlest of the passersby-—a 3-year-old girl, a neighbor’s daughter.
Every morning without fail, on her way to nursery school, she would stop and peer through the grilled fence at the dwarfs, and in the afternoon on her return she would do the same. When she stops, her nanny stops, and would wait for her while she looks at the dwarfs in silence until the girl gives the signal for them to move on.
Quite probably the girl knows the story of Snow White, and the sight of the concrete dwarfs must have given her a shock of recognition. To be sure, I could not read the girl’s mind, but having been a child once, I know that a little boy or girl shuttles between the real world to the imagined with complete ease. But I just wonder if the behavior of the two dwarfs has anything to do with her fascination with them. Because their deportment is uncharacteristic. They’re usually portrayed as just standing or sitting or horsing around. But here they are shown aiding each other and are offered as an icon of kindness.
When she grows up, the girl will likely come across a parable of Jesus as narrated by Matthew, about a servant who owed his master 10,000 bags of gold. When he could not pay, the king, his master, ordered that he and his wife and his children be sold to settle the debt. But the servant fell on his knees and begged for patience, and the master, taking pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
That servant, however, showed no mercy to a fellow servant who owed him just a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him, demanding payment, and, despite the other servant’s appeals for clemency, he had him thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
When he learned of this, the master called the servant in. “You wicked servant,” he said, “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” Then his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart,” Jesus said.
For now what the little girl sees in these two stragglers, or remnants of a tableau from a tale dear to children, is a scene that the master would have desired to see happening between the servants, which Jesus wanted his disciples to use as template.
Her young mind, nonetheless, the girl knows that the dwarfs are not real, however realistic they seem. But I’m sure that already she discerns what living with others will confirm, and the forgiveness that it requires if charity does not precede the act. Already she has an inkling that in each of these two dwarfs beats a real heart, because no one who shows compassion can ever have a heart of stone.
