Some time ago,  I wrote about our family summer house when I was growing up and asked each of my sisters and brother to draw their recollections of it.  On a similar note, I asked each of them if they remembered what became known as The King’s Dining Room.

We lived in a row house, a very old brick construction common in industrial cities before and up to World War II.  The closets in these homes were very small for two reasons:  people did not have many clothes and, at one point, closets were taxed as extra rooms.  (I will add a side note here that the closet tax was more during colonial times but it does not surprise me this mentality persisted because not all that long ago, my art club had to disconnect a dumb waiter because the city wanted to tax it as an elevator). 

One day I was in the back of the 2 foot by 3 foot closet in my parents room looking through a crack in the plaster and saw what I could only describe as a very elaborate dining room. Two of my sisters also saw this, only they said the access to their view was from the bathroom (which was next to my parent’s bedroom).  When we told our mother about it, she brushed it off saying we were probably looking into our neighbor’s dining room. But we have all been in our neighbor’s dining room and it was not all that fancy.   

Recently, I asked my two sisters, independently, to describe what they saw. This is also when I learned that they also viewed this mysterious room through the bathroom. I always assumed they saw it through the crack in back of my parent’s closet.   To this day, I have no idea why I was sitting in the back of my parent’s closet peering through cracks and find this almost as mysterious as the vision we all saw.  Anyway, this is what they said:

Sister One:  It was very elegant like from a Victoria Era. And it was between the bathroom and mom and dad’s bedroom.

Sister Two:  It had a gigantic rectangular table with about 10 or 12 chairs around it.

As for me, I remember very elaborate chairs, like those imagined in fairy tales. And I believe they were red or deep red.

Our oldest sister never saw this but remembers us talking about it. My brother thinks we are all goofy. Here I will also add that my sisters at the time were not young children (though I was). So for them, it was not some wild childhood fantasy.

This odd vision became known as The King’s Dining Room because we all assumed that such a magnificent room would be used by royalty. My access to the King’s Dining Room was shut off when my father turned the closet in their bedroom into a powder room, which was amazing given the small size. And this no doubt closed up any cracks in the plaster in our other bathroom because he probably had to connect pipes somehow and re-plastered.

So that is the story, as it is, of The King’s Dining room. I wonder what they served for dinner??