There’s James below. Really, he doesn’t look so tall, so unwieldy. He looks handsome and manageable. An aerial view is not the whole story, it’s a gloss, an abstract, a beautiful, beautiful summary.
In the end, she died as most of us do, absolutely still, earthbound.
The Boy in the Bed
Mrs. Sweatt’s body was sent to Iowa, to be buried in her family’s plot. “We’d like to come to the funeral,” Caroline had said when she called to make arrangements, thinking she’d send Oscar out, since she felt too pregnant to travel. But Mrs. Sweatt’s mother said that wouldn’t be necessary. Funerals were not a tradition their family observed.
That upset Caroline; it seemed heathen. But she couldn’t hold a funeral herself, and she couldn’t sway Mrs. Sweatt’s family, and so the body was buried in Davenport, without ceremony.
“Terrible,” said Caroline, and it was terrible. “But at least she’s back in Iowa.” She said this as though Mrs. Sweatt had just gone home to visit friends, stare at her old high school, have a drink in her favorite bad bar. As if being dead were like getting pregnant while unmarried, and Mrs. Sweatt had to disappear until the trauma was over.
“When you think about it,” Caroline said, “Iowa is not such a bad place to be.”
I talked my way back into the house that Saturday, by insisting that the only thing that would make me happy was doing the Stricklands’ housework for them during their difficult time. This was a statement of fact.
Caroline was suddenly hugely pregnant, pink-cheeked and pretty. “Write to James, why dontcha,” she said. “He’ll be there awhile. At least a couple of weeks.”
“I’m planning to go to Boston tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I’d take the bus.”
“Nice of you,” she said. “He could use some company. Oscar will drive you to the bus station.”
“Oh, that’s not—”
“No. He will. Don’t argue. Well, shall we sit?”
“How about laundry?” I said. My unoccupied hands made me nervous, as if I needed to prove that I was here for one purpose: housework. “There must be plenty to do.”
“Most people I would tell no,” she said. “But I know you won’t be happy unless I say yes.”
“That’s right,” I said.
There was plenty of laundry. Oscar’s paint-spattered clothing, some of the cotton men’s shirts Caroline wore instead of maternity smocks. Two shirts and a pair of pants belonging to James, which I set aside for hand washing to save wear since they were so expensive. It was the last of his laundry for a while; now that he was in the hospital, he’d dirty nothing. I didn’t know where Mrs. Sweatt’s clothing had gone.
“Have you been to see James?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I want to, but my doctor says stay put till the baby comes. Which should be at any moment. You don’t know how to deliver a baby, do you?”
“Why? Are you feeling—”
“No. I just thought maybe you might have read a book on it,” she said, as if baby-delivering were a knack, like refinishing furniture, that people picked up for the pleasure of doing. “I feel very pregnant, and I feel like I will be very pregnant forever.” She sighed. “Luckily there’s a cure for it.”
“Has Oscar been to Boston?”
She leaned on the dryer. “Just once. He gets nervous. Thinks I’ll go ahead and have the baby without him. Once the baby comes, everything will be easier.”
“I admire your optimism,” I said.
“I hate suspense,” she said.
A line of socks waited for their matches on the top of the dryer.
“These poor socks have lost their spouses,” said Caroline. She picked one up and talked to it. “Poor widowed sock.”
“It’s true,” I said. “Socks mate for life. Socks and swans.”
“But you can’t just throw them out, can you? I always introduce them to another abandoned sock.” She picked up two lone socks and began to roll them together.
“Still,” I said, “they’re never really happy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Caroline. She unrolled the socks and held up both to inspect them. “Wash them together enough, and they grow to look like each other. Just like an old married couple.” Then she rolled them back up and threw them in the basket.
“A sock love story,” I said. “I’ve never before thought of the laundry as romantic.”
“Everything’s romantic,” she said. “But I suspect you’re a cynic.”
“No doubt.”
“Peggy,” she said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I said. I snapped a pair of Oscar’s pants so the wrinkles flew out, then began to fold.
“No possibilities?”
I folded clothing double-time to show that I did not care to talk about it.
“Hmm,” she said. I didn’t know what she was hmming about. “You should try it,” she said.
“I’m afraid I’m not cut out for all that,” I said.
“Well, who cut you out?” she said. “Cut yourself out again.”
“Easy to make it sound so easy,” I said. “But it isn’t.”
“A girl needs a husband, Peggy,” she said.
“Well,” I said. “I’ve always been a terrible failure at being a girl.”
Caroline did not understand me. She was as beautiful as her sister-in-law but never seemed to put much effort into it; every attractive thing about her, from the way her clothes fit to the red lipstick that flattered her skin exactly, seemed like great good luck. She was a dry person, not in an unpleasant way: like a flower that had been pressed in a dictionary for years, lovely and saved but liable to fall to dust. Like a pressed flower, she was messy but steady, captured at some moment for good. Even her clothing was like that, thin pretty cotton that showed the faint tint of her skin beneath it. For all her messiness, her clothes never seemed dirty, as if they came away from meetings with her unimpressed.
Caroline pulled a cobwebbed chair out from a corner and lowered herself into it. “I don’t know,” she said.
“What don’t you know?”
She stretched an arm, thinking. “I wish my family were here. I mean, Mrs. Sweatt is gone, poor Jim’s in Boston. I even miss my brother, and I haven’t missed my brother in years, not since he left Mrs. Sweatt. It’s like I’m about to have even more family”—she put a hand on her stomach—“and all I can think is it isn’t enough, I want more. Don’t you ever get greedy for relatives?”
“You forget,” I told her. “I’m a librarian. All I’m greedy for is peace and quiet.”
Caroline wanted to find me a romance. Perhaps it was the action of a friend who was worried about me, of a soon-to-be mother who suddenly planned to take care of the world. Perhaps without Mrs. Sweatt, she needed a new person to take in hand. Perhaps she wanted to get me out of her hair.
I did think of love sometimes, for months at a time, to the exclusion of everything else. If I had love, I could concentrate on other things. If I had love, then my entire life would open up. Late at night I wouldn’t have to dream of who would love me, and how; nor while shelving books; nor moments when I found myself not paying attention to what people were saying to me. Ordinary people, I thought—loved people—could devote themselves to good works, or other sins, or benign undemanding hobbies.
And then the feeling would pass. I would realize that I hadn’t thought of such things for ages, that such hopeless dreams of romance were like a language I had made up to communicate with a childhood friend and, losing that friend, the verbs and nouns curdled to gobbledygook, evidence of a passion and belief I could not believe I’d ever taken seriously.
I had not had that feeling since I’d met James, and perhaps I was now, for the first time in my life, in love. If that were so, I was wrong: my thoughts were not freer, my life not more efficient. Not even more pleasant—like Caroline, I hated suspense, and suddenly it seemed suspense was the fabric of my life. What will happen next, what will I say next, what will b
e said to me?
James looked trussed as a turkey in his hospital bed. Actually, it was two beds, laid end to end, at a funny angle to the wall so they would fit. His broken leg was suspended from the ceiling.
“James,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether he was awake, and all of a sudden I realized I hadn’t brought him anything. Not even library books, which would have cost me nothing.
“Yes?” He reached over to a chair by his head, found his glasses, and put them on. He’d outgrown even these; the wire earpieces stretched out from the edges of the lenses to embrace his ears.
“Oh,” he said. “Miss Cort. How did you get here?”
“By bus,” I said.
“That must have been nice. I thought you were a nurse.” He gestured at me. “You’re dressed in light colors. That’s all I can see without—” He tapped one lens of his glasses; it flashed with the overhead light.
“How’s the old leg?” I asked.
He said, “Broken.” He was wearing a strange sort of hospital gown. Looking a little closer, I saw that it was two or more regular gowns sewn together.
The wall above his bed was feathered with get-well cards. I was about to walk closer to see—I’d been standing just inside the room—when someone knocked on my shoulder as if I were a door.
I stepped aside. The man who’d knocked was fat, with a moustache that covered his mouth.
“Hello, hello,” he said. The moustache bobbed up and down.
“I have a visitor,” James told the man.
“Yes, I know. Very nice. The aunt?” he said to me.
“No. A friend.”
“Nice,” he said. “Jim’s told me all about you.”
“You don’t even know who she is yet!” James said.
The man bowed to me politely. “You are—” He tried to look as if he were racking his brain for my name, but I knew the look. Library patrons who pretended to know the title of a book so as not to seem stupid wore the same expression.
“Peggy Cort,” I said.
“Of course!” He nodded. “I’m Dr. Bosley.”
“We’re busy,” said James.
“Of course you are,” said the doctor. He sat down in the only chair in the room, right by James’s head. “I’m just here to see how you’re feeling.”
“Fine,” said James. “Go away.”
The man nodded, still sitting.
“Dr. Bosley is a psychologist,” said James. “He always wants to know how I’m feeling. He never believes me.”
Dr. Bosley laughed in a way he probably thought was jovial. “I believe you,” he said. “Of course I believe you. Okay, okay. I’ll see you later, Jim—” He stood up from the chair with a great effort. “And it was nice to meet you, friend.”
“That man,” I said when he’d left, “does not have enough friends.” I went over and sat in the chair.
“I have to talk to him every day,” said James. “I mean, I like visitors, but he drives me crazy.”
James’s lack of affection for the doctor pleased me; I liked to think, sometimes, that I was his only friend, though this wasn’t true. I turned in the chair and looked at the cards. Most of them were from teenagers, kids in his classes.
“Who’s come to see you?” I asked. Until that moment I seemed to have forgotten the enormous fact that Mrs. Sweatt was dead. I felt dread drop down through my body, from my forehead to my stomach.
“Uncle Oscar. A teacher drove up some kids from school. If I’m here long enough, Uncle Oscar says they’ll bring the baby after it’s born.”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Lousy,” he said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I shouldn’t complain, but I feel lousy.”
“Leg hurt?”
“No.” He rubbed his hand on the metal at the side of the first bed. “That’s the problem. I don’t feel anything in my legs at all. I didn’t even know I broke it at first, I tried to walk on it.”
He was moving out of that body in steps.
Then suddenly he looked at me, directly in the eyes. This was new. Usually, like his mother, he concentrated on some other part of a face, perhaps because faces were frequently so far downhill.
“I hate it here,” he said.
“I know you do.” I tried to keep his gaze, and for a moment I thought I couldn’t possibly, that looking straight into his eyes was a weight I could carry only for seconds without resting. Then I realized all I had to do was do it, and it was easy. “How long will you be here?” I asked.
“I don’t know, they won’t tell me. They’re going to give me braces,” he said. “They’re going to give me a cane.”
“Until your leg heals?”
“Forever,” he said. “I want to go to college.”
I nodded.
“I want to be a lawyer,” he said. “I want to leave Massachusetts. I mean, just once.”
“You will,” I said. “You’ll go to New York, for that shoe convention.”
“How?” Now he looked up at the ceiling.
“What do you mean, how?”
“Car? Don’t fit. Bus? Less room. They had to take me all the way here from Hyannis in an ambulance, and even then it was crowded. Forget about airplanes.” He closed his eyes, clenched his jaw. “It’s been ages since I’ve been in a car. I stopped getting in them because I thought, well, they’re not all that comfortable. But I was just thinking: even if I tried now, no way for me to fit. It’s like I outgrew cars without even noticing.”
“That can’t be true,” I said.
“It is true. When you guys went to Provincetown for ice cream, don’t you think I wanted to go? I couldn’t cram myself into the Chevy for that long.”
“We’ll find a car for you,” I said.
“I’m outgrowing everything. I’m outgrowing my house. I can’t go anywhere by myself.”
“James.” What would I say to him? “We’ll figure things out.”
“I know,” he answered, though by his voice it was clear he knew no such thing.
The psychologist stopped me as I left James’s room.
“Where’s the mother?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “You should ask Mr. or Mrs. Strickland.”
“I’ve asked Mr. Strickland. He’s vague. Is she in the state? Her son would like to see her.”
“He’s told you that?”
“Jim is a complicated young man,” he said.
I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t think she’ll be able to come see him.”
“I see,” said the psychologist. “You folks are an odd family. Well, if she’s available”—he said this in a way that made me sure he knew the truth—“she should come. And if she can’t, Jim should know that too. He is understandably a little blue over his state.”
“Blue?” I said. “That’s your professional opinion?”
“Understandably blue,” he repeated. “With all that’s happened to him, and will happen.”
“What will happen to him?” I asked.
Dr. Bosley blinked, then smiled shyly. “He’ll die,” he said.
“What?” I’d only wondered about the cane, the braces.
“Amazing he’s lived this long, in some ways. I mean, not that he’s about to die—the leg is healing pretty well, he’ll be up and about—but in the next few years, chances are.”
“Of what?”
“Of himself,” said the doctor. “The family knows it, Jim knows it. Sorry. Thought you did too. Giants don’t live long. The good Lord knew what He was doing when He constructed the human body; when something goes wrong, well—basically, there’s such a thing as being the right size.”
This was all news to me. They all knew, and nobody had told me, and I hadn’t done my research. I could have gone to a medical library, found articles. Everybody knew.
“Nothing to be done?” I said.
“Some things. Make his life easier. Get a car and take out the passenger’s seat, and he can ride in the back—a pretty big car will give him some space.
Think about an addition to the house built to his scale. He’s likely to fall again, navigating small spaces. He needs as much room as possible, an environment that is more to his proportions.”
“But for him, the growing.”
“They don’t know enough yet,” he said. “You could talk to one of the medical doctors, as I have, and they’ll tell you the same thing. There’s so much we don’t know.”
I thought about staying in Boston for a few days. My parents lived here; I could see them. I’d grown up in Boston, my childhood unfurnished by religion or siblings. My parents were frugal and did not even give me a middle name. My parents were in love with each other, and that is a blow that no child can recover from. I walked around the city of my youth for a while, suddenly a little nervous. I held on tight to my pocketbook.
Would they let me stay at the hospital, pull up a chair and nap, a vigil? Perhaps they only let you do that if the patient was about to die. But he was a boy in a bed—in two beds—in a big city, far from his family.
Still, I could not make myself ask anybody at the hospital, and I could not make myself call my parents, who, whenever I suggested a visit, made themselves sound busy. Now that I had moved out, I became just like any would-be visitor: an inconvenience not to be tolerated. They would happily meet me in a restaurant, and for a moment I thought I’d call and suggest that. But the last bus back to Hyannis was in an hour, and Oscar had already agreed to meet me, and so I went to the station, bought a magazine, and waited.
On the bus ride home, I faulted myself. I should have known to stay, I thought. I should not be a coward. My love for James until this day had always been troublesome. I didn’t think I was any good at it. No good at talking to people in general and sometimes him in particular. He could make me feel uncomfortable, because I did not always understand him. I did not understand myself when in his presence.
The rest of the world fell in love, and the physics baffled me. I could see it happen—God knows, all around, I saw falling couples—but I did not understand the emotional gravity that allowed their descent.
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