The Giant's House

by Elizabeth McCracken

  But there was nothing scandalous about what I felt for James. I am not a scandalous person. No, that isn’t true either. Given half a chance I am scandalous, later facts bear that out. But life afforded me few opportunities in those days. He was not even a teenager and more than half a foot taller than the average American man. I was more than twice his age and I already loved him.

  There’s a joke about that. A forty-year-old man (it’s always a man) falls in love with a ten-year-old girl. He’s four times her age. He waits five years; now he’s forty-five and she’s fifteen and he’s only three times her age. Fifteen years later he’s sixty, only double her age.

  How long until she catches up completely?

  I love that joke. It reads like a chart, like the grids that were eventually printed in medical journals, describing James’s growth, at age ten, age twelve, steady intervals of time and quite nearly as steady in inches. Imagine it: my age on one side of a chart, James’s on the other. How long until he catches up?

  James and I met at a particularly happy time in his life. He was just six foot two, remarkably tall but not yet automatically noticed on the street. At school, yes: he was eleven, and this was the year that the tallest kids in the classes were girls, and the boys, innocent of adolescence, occupied the front row of class pictures, the far right-hand side of gym class lineups. James always knew where he belonged in such indexing, but he wasn’t strange. Out in the world he just seemed like a nice, naive, full-grown man.

  In 1950, when I met James Carlson Sweatt, I was twenty-five years old, without any experience at love whatsoever. I don’t mean beaux; I’d had those, stupid boys. In college I’d had friends and boyfriends, was invited to parties and asked to the movies. I wasn’t objectionable, not then, but neither was I exceptional: after graduation, I never heard from a single college chum. In library school I had a few after-class-coffee friends, but that was it.

  Then I moved to Brewsterville. Suddenly, I felt quite sure I would never hear an affectionate word from another human being in my life. Most days I spoke only to my library patrons, which is one reason I loved my work—it kept me from being one of those odd women discussed in books of odd people: her neighbors saw her only as a shadow on the street; then she died, buried beneath newspapers, movie magazines, and diaries filled with imaginary conversations.

  Even with work, I was odd enough. Every morning I walked along the gravel path from my house to the sidewalk, thinking, Is this who I am? A lonely person? I felt awkward as a teenager most days, as if Cape Cod were one big high school that I had enrolled in too late to understand any of the running jokes. My life was better in many ways than it had been in high school, I knew that. I worked harder, which was a blessing; my skin had turned up pleasant enough. I had been kissed.

  But I still dreamed of kisses that wouldn’t be delivered, and I knew they wouldn’t be delivered, and I grew morose as I waited to be stood up by nobody in particular. I was aware that I didn’t know anything about love; every morning I realized it again.

  And then I met a tall boy.

  If I were a different sort of woman, I would point to fate. I would claim that I understood the course of the rest of my life the minute James walked into my library. But if I were a different sort of woman, I wouldn’t have needed to cling to the weekly polite visits of a tall boy, or to wonder what went on in a house with painted flowers on the side, dreaming of the day I might be allowed back in.

  That, perhaps, is all you need to know. I was not a different sort of woman. Right there you have my life story, because my life is beside the point. Most lives are. Just as Bartlett’s is not interested in the librarian’s quotations, Who’s Who is not interested in the librarian’s life. In a big library you will find dozens of biographical dictionaries: South American women writers, Scottish scientists of the eighteenth century, military men and psychologists and businesspeople; the important citizens of every country.

  You will not find a volume marked Everybody Else.

  You will not find me in any reference source; your finger will slide along index after index, under Cort, under Librarians—American, but you won’t find the slightest reference to me.

  You might be tempted to ask, but I’ll tell you: it’s a colorless story, one that no one could possibly be interested in. By now it’s outdated and probably riddled with lies. If somebody wrote the story of my life before James (and it would be a short book, repetitious and unillustrated), I would not buy it; I would not have it on my shelf. It would be a waste of the budget.

  I was a librarian when I met him. That much is important. I had my library, which I loved and despised. All librarians, deep down, loathe their buildings. Something is always wrong—the counter is too high, the shelves too narrow, the delivery entrance too far from the offices. The hallway echoes. The light from windows bleaches books. In short, libraries are constructed by architects, not librarians. Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.

  Space is the chief problem. Books are a bad family—there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can’t, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.

  My library was no exception. It had started its life in 1880 as a nice one-room building; almost immediately the collection was crowded. The town started to tack on additions: a skinny hall, a dusty reading room, two stories of stacks with frosted glass floors. These floors—an invention of the nineteenth century—were composed of panes cloudy as cataracts which allowed only close-up objects to show through. On the second floor you could see the glow of the lightbulbs that lit the first floor; on the first floor you could see the outline of people’s feet by looking up. The panes of glass were always cracking and had to be replaced with wood. The shelving went right through the floors, and there were gaps where they met the glass panes, which meant that a man on the first floor could look up the skirt of a woman on the second, if he were so inclined, and at least once a month some man was.

  The tile teared up at a hint of moisture; the slender-throated plumbing choked on the daintiest morsel. The roof leaked. There were staircases that led nowhere.

  I came to the job fresh from library science school. Purgatory would have seemed quite an adequate setup to me then; I would have happily issued cards to the not-quite-condemned and the not-yet-blessed and thought it a vast improvement over the dullness of catalog class. I loved that building when I first met it; I suppose I continued to love it the way a woman will love a husband who sticks around while she silently prays he will leave or die. Indeed, until 1950 the library occupied much of my heart and mind. When we were apart, I wondered what wrongheaded thing it would insist upon doing in my absence (bursting a pipe, inviting birds through broken windows); when we were together, I cursed it and made apologies for its behavior to visitors. Before I met James Carlson Sweatt, the library was my best comfort and company. I was a fool for that library.

  We are fools for who will have us.

  I did see other people. My patrons, for instance. Pharmacists are the same, I guess—you learn the dirty little secrets of what’s wrong with your customers and what might possibly cure it: shy men who want to read about wars, any war at all; fading women who need a weekly romance. Plenty of people came in more than once a week. Mr. Mackintosh, a widower, fancied himself a writer and wanted me to read his stories. I read one; it was about a stripper. Mrs. Carson was on her fourth husband; I wondered when she had the time to read her best sellers. A nice couple brought in pictures of their dogs, fox-haired terriers, natty dressers—the dogs, I mean, not the couple. My landlord, Gary, a tragic man whose wife had left him eight years before, came to read magazines once a week.r />
  I had my co-workers, too, who some days I forget. I see myself alone in the library, alone with the patrons. Pride does this. I remember myself alone with James when he was dying, too, although that isn’t true either; there were always other visitors. At the library I worked with two other people: Astoria Peck and Darla Foster, both part-timers. Darla was a twenty-year-old who’d have been better suited to waitressing. I don’t know why I hired her, other than the fact she was my sad landlord’s daughter. Darla shelved the books, put the daily papers on the forked wooden spines that rested in metal stands, worked the front desk when I was busy. She had a rear end as big as an open dictionary and a bad attitude.

  Astoria Peck handled most of the library’s technical processes—repairing books or sending them out to a bindery, if they could be saved at all; cataloguing; billing. Like me, she was a librarian (that is, she had a master’s in library science) and had for many years worked at the elementary school. Once she hit forty, she said, she got tired of the smell of children.

  “They smell like bad cookies,” she told me. “Go ahead, get a good whiff.”

  I demurred, which was never enough for Astoria. The next child through the door prompted her to nudge me—“Go ahead.”

  Astoria had been told once that she should go to Hollywood; she never did, but she also never forgot the suggestion, and wore her hair and makeup like a movie star. She was the type of person who relied very much on what other people told her about herself. She’d been informed, variously, that she was a card, an enigma, a heartless woman. Her mood depended on what was last said to her; it prevailed until the next assessment. Her husband told her she had beautiful legs, and she was happy; her niece told her she had big ears, and she was devastated.

  “I have big ears,” she told me mournfully. “I’m a big-eared woman.”

  Astoria and I were bound together by our terrible struggles with the library building and the troubles it caused with the town manager, who, when we wanted our book budget increased, said that he’d been to the library, and the shelves were already full. He’d look at a repair bill and say, “What did they fix that toilet with, gold?” Between the building, which was falling to pieces, and the town manager, who was solid rock, we were left to setting out buckets for leaks and fixing wobbly tables with books we were going to throw out anyhow, books that had not circulated in thirty years. For some reason, though, a table leg set down on a dust jacket seemed to patrons the highest recommendation; they wanted to take those books out, accused us of neglecting great works.

  Mrs. Sweatt started coming to the library for herself, for romance novels and women’s magazines. She nodded at me shyly, sneezed in the dust. You could hear her sneeze in the stacks from anywhere in the library; it sounded like a reproach.

  “What is her name?” I asked Astoria. “She calls me Peggy, but she hasn’t even told me what her Christian name is.”

  “That’s it,” Astoria said. “That’s what everyone calls her. I guess when she and her husband got married, they called each other Mister and Missus—you know, like any honeymoon couple—and they just never got out of the habit. Then other people picked up on it.”

  “She’s not from around here.”

  “No,” said Astoria. “Heavens, no. Midwest somewhere. Came out on vacation with her parents, met Mr. Sweatt, stayed. He could have swept any girl off her feet, that one. Charming, a fast talker. Nobody could figure out what he saw in her.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “I mean, she was this sort of tragic character—even then she was, I’m not sure why—and Mr. Sweatt was a boisterous, friendly guy. A bad guy who made himself seem nice sometimes, or the other way around, you know the type?”

  No, I said, I didn’t.

  “He left. About six years ago, maybe. Just disappeared out west. That’s where ex-husbands go, right? There must be whole ranches of ex-husbands out there, leaning on corrals and drinking too much gin.” She laughed. “And now here’s poor Mrs. Sweatt. Drinking a little too much herself, actually.”

  “Oh.”

  “She thinks it’s a secret. But listen to her purse when she walks by. Slosh, slosh.”

  “I don’t listen to purses,” I said. “Purses are a private matter.”

  Shy, sensitive-to-dust Mrs. Sweatt. Her arms and legs were plump, as if her heart did not want them to get too far away, and sometimes she seemed to limp. I thought her marriage must never have been happy; I couldn’t imagine her enjoying the company of a boisterous man. And if you were boisterous, it would be hard not to torment Mrs. Sweatt, who did not have a sense of humor in the way most people do not have a sense of French.

  In our town, we did not measure time in years, but in winters. Summers were debatable daylight; winters were definite, like night. In the dark privacy of winter Brewsterville’s citizens were more likely to drink, weep, have affairs, tell off-color jokes, let themselves go.

  Then summer came around again, and they ironed their best pants, sewed on buttons popped by eagerness or an extra five pounds, and got back to work.

  It wasn’t that nothing happened during tourist season, simply that summers were so crowded with quotidian incidents as to appear identical to one another. The tourists came in. Every year one took a heart attack in a restaurant; several were accused (rightly or wrongly) of shoplifting a souvenir ashtray from one of the souvenir ashtray emporiums; dozens tried to seduce coffee shop waitresses and succeeded or didn’t, depending on the coffee shop; and an even hundred tried to get library cards good for one week, despite living in California, despite a remarkable lack of identification. And then the summer ended, and the tourists left, and it was as if the town itself had just returned from a vacation somewhere far off, having never sent a postcard to keep all of us up-to-date on its seasonal goings-on.

  There was the winter of 1951, with the bad ice storm (unusual for us) during which, Astoria said, Marie at the post office got stranded and then pregnant with a boyfriend from Hyannis at the only inn open year-round. James was twelve, and just under six foot four. The following winter, there was barely any snow at all, and the used bookstore closed up when the man who owned it shot himself—nobody could understand why, with the weather so pleasant for a change. James turned thirteen. Next, the winter of 1953. His growth was like weather, some years worse than others: he grew six inches between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, and Brewsterville lost power four times in thunderstorms.

  Though I wouldn’t have admitted it, what I’d mostly known previously was what everyone did: his height. The tall boy, our town giant. I knew that height well, of course: Astoria had given me the details. When he was a baby, strangers thought he was retarded because he was so slow for his size. The hems on everything he wore were deep as most people’s pockets, so they could be let out, and his pockets were twice as deep as his hems.

  I’d been captivated by his height, and the heroic way he seemed to bear it. Now I learned he was interesting in many unconnected ways. I could write an encyclopedia on his enthusiasms and how they accumulated, complete with dates and cross-references.

  “What’s your hobby this week?” I’d ask.

  “I’m thinking model building,” he’d say. “But not from kits. I want to start from scratch, so I need books on battleships.” Or, “Gardening.” Or, “I want to make my own root beer. Are there recipes for things like that?”

  He was fond of the sorts of books that I’d loved as a child, huge omnibuses of humor, pranks, or science experiments. A serious kid most of the time, he allowed himself to get silly at strange moments.

  He came in one day wearing a plastic nose, ordered from the back of a magazine, underscored by the falsest moustache I’d ever seen. (All his life, he loved what you could get through the mail. Eventually he had dozens of degrees from correspondence schools and was a mail-order minister several times over.) The nose was beaky and sharp and coming loose at the edges. I said, “You look like the canary who swallowed the cat,” and he laughed his mo
ustache right off. Every now and then he’d approach the desk with a glass of water filled from the bubbler in the hall, and would ask me, in a reasonable tone of voice, to put my hands out or turn my back for a second. I explained to him that I wasn’t born yesterday. Astoria, however, was a perfect pigeon, and I more than once had to rescue her: she’d set her hands, palms down, on the circulation desk, and James had balanced a glass filled with water on each, then whistled his way to the back of the library. James introduced me to my first joy buzzer, and Astoria to her first whoopie cushion. I knew better than to accept candy from him: I knew it would be rubber, or bitter, or explosive.

  Nevertheless, I was the town librarian—less a woman than a piece of civic furniture, like a polling machine at town hall, or a particularly undistinguished WPA mural—and even those years had a sameness to them, uninvolved in gossip as I then was. I have had to consult one of those medical charts to see during which year he grew six inches. James was a library patron, then, a cherished one, but when I saw him on the street with his friends, a rare summer sunburn across his nose, or, in the fall, heading toward his house with a bag of groceries, or, in winter, pulling on a knit cap that his mother no doubt insisted on, I was only one of the many people who knew him: everyone knew him. There was no way for him to tell that I noticed the sunburn, that I could summon up Mrs. Sweatt’s voice commanding him not to be foolish, not to catch cold.

  My own life went on in this way. I woke up, cleaned my apartment, went to work, came home. I almost always had a book in my hand, to shelve or read or consider.

  James’s life went on, too. He grew. That was his life’s work. He got the glasses he needed. His uncle found him a camera, and James carried it by the neck strap all around town. I saw him making his way down the street clicking pictures. The year-rounders were used to him, but tourists stopped and stared.