The Giant's House

by Elizabeth McCracken

  He became a regular after that first school visit, took four books out at a time, returned them, took another four. I let him renew the magic book again and again, even though the rules said one renewal only. Librarians lose reason when it comes to the regulars, the good people, the readers. Especially when they’re like James: it wasn’t that he was lonely or bored; he wasn’t dragged into the library by a parent. He didn’t have that strange desperate look that some librarygoers develop, even children, the one that says: this is the only place I’m welcome anymore. Even when he didn’t want advice, he’d approach the desk with notes crumpled up, warm from his palm, his palm gray from the graphite. He’d hold it out until I grabbed the wastebasket by its rim, swung it around and offered it; his paper would go thunking in.

  James was an eccentric kid, my favorite kind. I never knew how much of this eccentricity was height. He sometimes seemed peculiarly young, since he had the altitude but not the attitude of a man; and yet there was something elderly about him, too. He never returned a book without telling me that it was on time. Every now and then, when he returned one late, he was nearly frantic, almost angry; I didn’t know whether it was at me for requiring books back at a certain time, or with himself for disregarding the due date.

  He’d been coming in for a year when I finally met his mother. I didn’t know her by sight: she was an exotic thing, with blond wavy hair down her back like a teenager, though she was thirty-five, ten years older than me. Her full cotton skirt had some sort of gold-flecked frosting swirled over the print.

  “My son needs books,” she said.

  “Yes?” I did not like mothers who come in for their children; they are meddlesome. “Where is he?”

  “In the hospital, up to Boston,” she said. A doleful twang pinched her voice. “He wants books on history.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twelve-but-smart,” she said. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she trilled her fingertips over the edge of the counter. “Ummm … Robert the Bruce? Is that somebody?”

  “Yes,” I said. James and I had been discussing him. “Is this for James? Are you Mrs. Sweatt?”

  She bit her lip. I hadn’t figured James for the offspring of a lip-biter. “Do you know Jim?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Of course,” she repeated, and sighed.

  “He’s here every week. He’s in the hospital? Is there something wrong?”

  “Is something wrong?” she said. “Well, nothing new. He’s gone to an endocrinologist.” She pronounced each syllable of this last word like a word itself. “Maybe they’ll operate.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For what?” she said. “For him. To slow him down.” She waved her hand above her head, to indicate excessive height. “They’re alarmed.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not good for him. I mean, it wouldn’t be good for anyone to grow like that.”

  “No, of course not.”

  He must have known that he was scheduled to go to the hospital, and I was hurt he hadn’t mentioned it.

  “I was thinking Mark Twain too,” she said. “For him to read. Tom Sawyer or something.”

  “Fiction,” I said. “Third floor. Clemens.”

  “Clemens,” she repeated. She loved the taste of other people’s words in her mouth.

  “Clemens,” I said. “Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens. That’s where we file him.”

  Before his mother had come to the library, I hadn’t realized that there was anything medically wrong with James. He was tall, certainly, but in the same sweet gawky way young men are often tall. His bones had great plans, and the rest of him, voice and skin balance, strained to keep pace. He bumped into things and walked on the sides of his feet and his hair would not stay in a single configuration for more than fifteen minutes. He was not even a teenager yet; he had not outgrown childhood freckles or enthusiasms.

  They didn’t operate on James that hospital visit. The diagnosis: tall, very. Chronic, congenital height. He came back with more wrong than he left with: an orderly, pushing him down the hall, misguessed a corner and cracked his ankle.

  He was twelve years old then, and six foot four.

  A librarian is bound by many ethics no one else understands. For instance: in the patron file was James’s library card application, with his address and phone number and mother’s signature. But it was wrong, I felt, to look up the address of a patron for personal reasons, by which I mean my simple nosiness. Delinquent patrons, yes; a twenty-dollar bill used as a bookmark in a returned novel, certainly. But we must protect the privacy of our patrons, even from ourselves.

  I’d remained pure in this respect for a while, but finally pulled the application. I noted that James had been six when he had gotten his card, five years before; I hadn’t even seen Brewsterville yet. He had written his name in square crooked letters—probably he’d held the pen with both hands. But it was a document completed by a child and therefore faulty: he’d written the name of the street, but not the number. If I’d been on duty, such sloppiness would never have passed.

  I decided I could telephone his mother for library purposes, as long as I was acting as librarian and not as a nosy stranger. The broken ankle promised to keep him home for a few weeks. I called up Mrs. Sweatt and offered to bring over books.

  “I’ll pick them up,” she said.

  “It’s no bother, and I’d like to wish James well.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “I just said it’s no trouble.”

  “Listen, Peggy,” she said. That she knew my Christian name surprised me. There was a long pause while I obeyed her and listened. Finally she said, “I can’t do too much for Jim. But I can pick up his books and I intend to.”

  So of course I resigned myself to that. I agreed with her; there was little she could do for him. Every Friday—his usual day—I wondered whether James would come in. Instead, Mrs. Sweatt arrived with her big purse, and I stamped her books with a date three weeks in the future. Mostly she insisted on titles of her own choosing—she seemed determined that James read all of Mark Twain during his convalescence—but she always asked for at least one suggestion. I imagined that it was my books he really read, my choices that came closest to what he wanted. I’d sent Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky; Mistress Masham’s Repose by T. H. White; Hiroshima. Mrs. Sweatt was always saying, “And something else like this,” waving the book I’d personally picked out the week before.

  “How’s James?” I asked her.

  “Fine.” She examined the bindings of a row of books very closely, her head tilted to a hunched shoulder for support.

  “How’s the ankle?”

  “Coming along.”

  “Not healed yet?”

  She scratched her chin, then rucked up the back of her skirt like a five-year-old and scratched her leg. “He’s still keeping off it,” she said. “Ambrose Bierce. Do we have any Ambrose Bierce?”

  I looked up the card for the magic book; James had not been in for three months. Surely an ankle would knit back together in that time. Maybe Mrs. Sweatt was keeping James from the library, had forbidden him to come. It wouldn’t be the first time. A certain sort of mother is terrified by all the library’s possibilities. Before he was homebound, James faithfully renewed Magic for Boys and Girls every three weeks. Perhaps his mother didn’t like it—perhaps she thought sleight of hand was too close to black magic—and so he’d filed it between his mattress and box spring. But I couldn’t accuse Mrs. Sweatt; though she projected fragility, I suspected she wouldn’t crack under the harshest of cross-examinations.

  I was meddlesome myself: I decided to cut off James’s supply of interesting books. He was one of my favorite patrons—that is to say, one of my favorite people—and even this early in our friendship, the thought of never seeing him again was more than I could bear.

  “This looks difficult,” said Mrs. Sweatt, looking at a tra
nslation of Caesar’s Wars.

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought he was bright for his age.”

  “Of course.” She tucked the book under her arm. “Half of it’s in Latin,” she said under her breath.

  If they ever want me to teach a course entitled History: The Dull and the Punishing, I have the reading list all worked out. Bulwer-Lytton, the poems of Edgar Guest, cheap novels whose morals were that war is bad but sometimes results in lifelong love between a soldier and his girl. We owned the complete works of a certain nineteenth-century lady author who drew quite a few more morals out of history than that: her books were called things like A True Friend of Christ and Daisy, a Girl of the West. I chose fiendishly well, and sent the books home with the unfortunate Mrs. Sweatt, who brought them back unread.

  “This one’s close,” she’d say sometimes. “But not quite. How about the Civil War?”

  I gave her Gone with the Wind, which I knew James would never be able to stomach.

  Later in the week, a boy I recognized as one of James’s friends came into the library. In this way we were different: James had friends, in fact plenty of them. All I ever had were patrons. Somehow his size did not make him an outcast; or, if it did, he won friends despite it. Every child in school knew him, of course. I asked the boy how James was doing, whether he’d seen James recently, and by the way, where did James live.

  “Winthrop Street,” the boy told me. “He and his mom live with his aunt and uncle.”

  “Which number?”

  He shrugged with half his body. “The white house,” he said. “It’s got flowers painted on it.”

  I’d pictured a floral house—like a sofa, or a dress—so I almost missed the flowers that were painted on the clapboards, like handwriting practiced on ruled paper. The side of the house was punctuated with a peculiar garden of tiny blooms, each labeled, both Latin and common name, as if someone had copied them straight out of a botany textbook. They were not well painted. Even from the outside I could tell the house was too small for two people, never mind four.

  The aunt met me at the door. She was as different as she could be from Mrs. Sweatt, who was her sister-in-law. The woman in front of me was dressed like a jaunty boy indulged by his mother: blue jeans held up by a western belt and a red-checked shirt. I was surprised she didn’t sport toy guns in a holster.

  She had a streak of dirt down one cheek; I later learned she was rarely seen without it. Only her bright red lipstick was grown-up. It matched the check of her shirt exactly. She didn’t say hello, though she raised her eyebrows in a pleasant way.

  “I’m the librarian,” I told her. I held up the few books I had brought as evidence.

  She still didn’t say anything.

  “Is James here?”

  She opened the door, then held her hand to her lips, sshh. The door opened directly into the living room, no preamble or vestibule. In the dining room to my left, the late-afternoon light soaked through the colored bottles on the plate shelf and left jellied puddles on the floor. Mrs. Sweatt was asleep on the sofa, her little feet in their flat shoes resting on a pillow. The sofa itself was clad in a slipcover as baggy and gaudy as a muumuu; its pattern clashed badly with Mrs. Sweatt’s skirt. A few spinstered straight-back chairs stood in the corner, wallflowers.

  The aunt tiptoed across the living room in an exaggerated way. I followed, trying not to imitate.

  In a small back room, James sprawled across the bed on his stomach like any twelve-year-old. His legs were bent at the knees, and his feet waved in the air behind him. I realized I didn’t know which ankle he’d broken. The latest pile of books I’d pawned off on his mother sat on the radiator, beneath a window with the shade pulled down below the sill. I immediately went to rescue them—heat isn’t good for the glue—but their covers were perfectly cool. It was June; of course the heat wasn’t on. I stood there, clutching the pile of books, then realized that it looked like I was reclaiming them, so I set them on a little table by the bed. That put me right next to James. I had no idea what to say.

  “Well,” I tried. “How have you been?”

  His aunt answered for him from across the room, closing the door behind her. “He’s been fine,” she said. Her voice gave me a start, but a weird pleasure, too—it was a deep sticky voice, the kind a woman generally gets through sin of some sort.

  James sat up, put his feet on the ground. His hair was flattened up in back, like a plant climbing an invisible wall. He blinked. I didn’t know it then, but he was an inch taller than he’d been the last time we’d met.

  “James,” the aunt said. “Didn’t you tell me that you had something to explain to the librarian?”

  “Tom Sawyer got ruined, I’m sorry,” he said in a rush.

  “By what?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out what could have ruined Tom Sawyer. Had someone told him the ending?

  James leaned over and pulled open the drawer of the table by his bed; it caught on something, so he slipped his hand inside to press whatever it was down. I had to step aside to give him room. “It got dropped in a sink,” he said, pulling a book out by the corner of its cover. I put my hands out to receive it, but he set it on the tabletop, next to the books from the radiator. Tom Sawyer, ruffled to twice its right size.

  “I’m sorry,” James said miserably.

  “She doesn’t care,” said the aunt. “She has lots of books.”

  “Even a few more copies of Tom Sawyer,” I said.

  “I told you that’s what she’d say,” said the aunt.

  “I’ll pay for it,” James said.

  “No. Consider it a get-well present from the library.”

  All the time James put a hand on the cover, trying to close it. It sprang up under his palm again and again.

  The aunt sat down next to him on the bed. She patted his knee.

  “You know how boys are,” she said to me. “He’d about vowed not to go back to the library over this.”

  He looked up at me, and his hair fell into his eyes, so he combed it with his fingers, both the front part and the part that stuck up in the back.

  “Good heavens,” I said. “You should see what some people do to books and don’t even care.”

  “I told him,” said the aunt.

  “We’ve missed you at the library,” I said. “I hope that’s not the reason you haven’t been by.”

  “No.” He wiggled his ankle—the left one—as if to remind himself there had been another reason.

  “Okay, Jim?” the aunt said.

  “Yes. Look.” He reached into the drawer again and pulled out a pack of cards, then, using only one hand, fanned them in the air, snapped shut the fan, fanned them again, made one stand up from the deck.

  I couldn’t decide whether I was supposed to pull the one card from the others. I wanted to. He looked at the cards, then using both hands, closed the deck.

  “That’s as far as I’ve got,” he said.

  “Not too shabby. You’ll need a rabbit next.”

  The aunt laughed. “A rabbit? Sounds delicious.”

  “Yuck,” said James.

  I said, “I quite agree.”

  The aunt stood up and stretched. Her red-checked shirt pulled out of her jeans, and she tucked it back down absentmindedly. “Rabbit stew,” she said to James, and then, to me, “You’ll have to come to dinner sometime, and make sure to bring—”

  “Dessert,” I said, before she could suggest husband, or gentleman friend. I pointed at a small seascape painting over the bed. The one gull looked as menacing as a zeppelin. “That’s nice.”

  “My husband is an artist. Yes,” she said, thinking it over. “I wouldn’t turn down dessert.”

  I leaned on that cool radiator. “Should think about getting back. We’ll see you at the library, James?”

  “Yes.” He scratched his chin with the pack of cards. “Good-bye.”

  She saw me out, stepping onto the porch with me, still careful of the sleeping Mrs. Sweatt.

  “I’m Carol
ine Strickland, by the way. James is my brother’s son. Make sure to come to dinner.”

  “Peggy Cort,” I told her. “I will.” I wondered if she was going to issue a more decisive invitation than that.

  “Well, Peggy Cort.” She took my hand and shook it like a salesman. She must have been about my age, mid-twenties. “You’re not an unpleasant woman.” Then she went back into her house.

  I stood there for a while, staring at the flowers, lily of the valley, Convallaria majalis; poppy, Papaver orientale. They seemed just right blooming there now. I repeated Caroline’s parting sentence to myself, but couldn’t remember where she’d put the emphasis. You’re not an unpleasant woman. You’re not an unpleasant woman.

  I could hear Mrs. Sweatt inside the house waking up, asking in her twangy voice, now unstrung with sleep, what time is it?

  Early, said Caroline, which of course means nothing to a sleeper.

  Then Caroline started to sing. Perhaps she’d been waiting for Mrs. Sweatt to wake up all afternoon, so she could sing inside her house. I imagined her stepping out on the back porch to sing now and then, like a polite smoker. She had the voice of a dancer, I mean like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, someone who has such grace at another art that the grace suffuses their voice, which does not quite match the tune but instead strolls up to a note and stands right next to it, that slight difference so beautiful and heartbreaking that you never want to hear a professional sing again. Professionals remember all the words. Caroline’s song was patched together with something something something.

  Everyone Felt Sorry for the Beiderbeckes

  I won’t pretend that I was in love with James right away. He was only a boy, though one I liked quite a bit.

  Well, now. Only this far into the story and already I’m lying. Juvenile magazines feature close-up photographs of things that are, like love, impossible to divine close up for the first time: a rose petal, a butterfly’s wing, frost. Once you’re told what they are, you can’t believe you didn’t see it instantly. So yes, I loved James straight off, though I didn’t realize it then. I know that sounds terrible, the sort of thing that makes people think I’m crazy or worse.