Skeleton Key

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David Cohen illustration

Skeleton Key

I found the skeleton key in a cabinet on my mother’s back porch, stored there alongside discarded tools, nails and screws, and spools of twine my father had brought home from the hosiery mill where he worked.

I recognized it as our old house key. Our two-story frame house, built in the late 1940s, had sturdy oak front and back doors with square glass panes and iron door knobs. Sometimes we didn’t lock the doors, feeling the house was safe in our friendly Marion, North Carolina, neighborhood. But one day when we went to visit relatives and returned a short time later, we realized that someone had been in our house. When I went upstairs to a bedroom where I kept my toys, I found them scattered on the floor, as if someone had sat and played with them. But I also saw that my Jane West doll had been broken, her head lying detached beside her body.

We never knew exactly who came into our house while we were gone that day, but we suspected some rowdy kids who had recently moved down the street and had been upstairs with me before. This is probably when my family began locking our doors more regularly. My father carried the key, so sometimes I came home when my parents were at work and found the doors locked. When this happened, I simply went to a window accessible from the front porch, removed the screen, raised the lower sash, and crawled through into my parents’ bedroom.   

Upon finding the skeleton key, I asked my mother, “Can I have this old key? I’d like to keep it.”

“Yeah,” she said, and I knew I would preserve it as a memento of my childhood. My mother didn’t seem to have any sentimental feelings about the key and likely had forgotten it was still around. In more recent years, along with storm windows, my parents had installed dead bolt locks, with new knobs and keys. So the skeleton key has no use. After my father passed away and I began helping my mother take care of the house, I taped over the old keyholes in her front and back doors, to prevent cold air from seeping in.

As I held the iron key in my hand, feeling its long shaft, grooved bit, and oval bow, I thought about how many similar keys were stored in drawers of houses, their identity vague, like images of people in old, unlabeled photographs. When I was a child, my grandmother gave me such a key—a large folding skeleton key that had belonged to her mother. It was included in an assortment of trinkets she found for me to add to my antique collection. At the time I didn’t ask her what the key had once opened; it didn’t matter to me then, and she probably didn’t know anyway. But now I wonder what my great-grandmother’s key might have opened in some past place and time. I will never know the answer.

The skeleton key I found in my mother’s cabinet offered an entry to our past. It reminded of opening our front door as a child, accessing the wallpapered front room, comfortable with the radiance of an oil heater and the simple furnishings of a working-class home. There at night, in a room dark except for the glow of a television screen, my parents and older brother and I sat and watched our favorite shows. At Christmastime in the corner of this room, I had sat cross-legged under the Christmas tree, studying the gifts my mother had wrapped, and I had admired the pine tree’s glowing lights, shiny ornaments, and tinsel. Our modest front room was a sanctuary for us all.

The skeleton key that once unlocked the door to our house doesn’t have any practical use anymore, yet it is an emotional connection to an earlier time when I was a child embraced by my loving family.

That’s purpose enough.