The Giant's House

by Elizabeth McCracken

  And then, like Newton, I felt it smack me over the head.

  Those people had made a decision, and then they fell; they did not find themselves hip deep in love and wonder how they got there. For years I’d waited for someone to love me: that was the permission I needed to fall in love myself, as though I were a pin sunk deep in a purse, waiting for a magnet to prove me metal. When that did not happen, I’d thought of myself as unlovable.

  But now, with James lonely in his hospital room, I realized that waiting like that was hopeless. I could wait forever and he might never know to love me back and I would live and then die with a tiny awful feeling that could have been love, had it ever seen light or oxygen.

  Well, I’d change that. I would love him. It would be easy as keeping his gaze, easy as saying, This is what to do. I would perfect my love for him, never care what others thought of me, or even what he was thinking of me. It was this I’d waited for all my life: a love that would make me useful, a love that would occupy all my time.

  Well, who cut you out? Caroline had said when I told her I wasn’t cut out for a boyfriend. I would, now; I would redesign myself.

  I knew that day on the bus home that I was giving up things, old habits, future friends. That day I renounced everything, even my love for Caroline and Oscar—because I knew I would lose that; in certain ways I would now be at odds with them. I burned each of my possibilities in my head, those I recognized and those I didn’t.

  Perhaps I was a princess from a fairy tale. Sometimes, when your lover does not step from the woods to save you—because how many of us are rescuable, how many would look at some fool in a pair of tights and a pageboy and say, Of course—sometimes you have to marry your tower, your tiny room. You must take great interest in everything, a spinning wheel, a perfect single bed, the sound of someone breathing on the other side of the door. Once I had thought that the library was my tower, but that wasn’t true. My love for James was the dark room I moved into that day.

  It’s where I still live.

  I did not love him like a brother. I did not love him like a son. And though I loved him because of his body, it wasn’t his body I loved, not the body of some man I dreamed would hold me, a body containing secrets that would somehow transform my own. Some will hear this and say, librarian, spinster: clearly there’s a block, clearly there are problems here. But I’ve thought about this enough, and I’ve dreamed of other men’s bodies that way, and I know the difference.

  Perhaps it was because James’s body was unavailable, belonging to himself and no one else, or perhaps because, though I knew it, his body was still always unimaginable. Unimaginably that large, unimaginably refusing to stop, unimaginably killing him just with its growth.

  I did not imagine.

  I loved him in a way that I have never and will never love anyone ever again, in a way I suspect—Peggy, always greedy—few people love, or have been loved. I loved him because he was young and dying and needed me. I loved not only his height, but his careful way with any hobby, his earnestness, his strange sense of humor that always surprised me. I loved him because I wanted to save him, and because I could not. I loved him because I wanted to be enough for him, and I was not.

  I loved him because I discovered that day, after years of practice, I had a talent for it.

  Part Two

  Careless Love

  When I was in college in Philadelphia, I had my first job in a library. I sat behind the reference desk late nights, after the librarians had gone home, and tried to help students. I wasn’t good at it yet. A library is an exosomatic memory—what they nowadays call an out-of-the-body experience, though I believe most experiences are. Books remember all the things you cannot contain. I didn’t understand that at first. I wanted to remember only facts, not how to reach them; I was a tourist who hated travel.

  Afternoons, I trailed the librarians, trying to pick up tips. Some casually listed off names of sources the second a question was asked; they might not even stand up to talk to the patron. If the student still looked confused, the librarian would say, curtly, index. Impossible to tell whether there was any pleasure to it. Others loved every query. They were the ones who knew the most: not just facts—though they did—but the organization of every book, where you’d find bibliographies, where you’d turn up empty. They knew the subtlest treasures of national biographies and climatological tables and censuses.

  I stayed at the job when I went to get my master’s. My memories of library science school—and they are fading, thankfully—are of an alphabetized wilderness. Book leaves flapping in the afternoon, fine dusty mists rising from them. Equatorial heat. The toes of a dozen pairs of sensible shoes squeaking beneath desks. The teacher passing out the syllabus, the room filled with the soft click of handheld hole-punchers, a three-syllabled call, then the shush of hands over desks scooping up paper dots.

  Our professors told us that order was important. This is true; I love order. But they never explained why. Order was for order’s sake, they said, and the other students nodded seriously: for them precision was a religion taken up at late age that would keep you from sin and keep you from Hell and everybody who didn’t understand this was damned. Presumably, two years of graduate study was far cheaper than the psychoanalysis it would have taken to get over whatever it was their mothers had done to them.

  But a library is a gorgeous language that you will never speak fluently. You will try every day of your life. Order is a certain clumsy grammar, a mnemonic device. Order just means: try to use verbs. Consider the tense. The poetry will follow.

  The school’s motto should have been, Neatness Counts.

  I did well in library school. I am, in many ways, small-minded.

  Still, behind the reference desk I frequently felt like an idiot. I didn’t recognize the names of certain cabinet members, or the currency of some unfamiliar country, or a great Scandinavian author. There were times I couldn’t even make sense of a problem, never mind find the solution. Some evenings I sat and thought up reference questions that only I could answer. Something about a newspaper article I’d read that afternoon, or all the known facts about one of my favorite painters. A student would approach me, shy and pessimistic, and when I gave them the exact answer, more information than they’d thought possible, when I said, “Rosa Bonheur …,” oh, they’d melt, they’d thank me and tell their friends: see that woman? She knows everything.

  In my life I have spent hours constructing questions from just the right person, in just the right tone of voice: Have you ever known anyone who’s committed suicide? What celebrity would you marry if you could? Who was the first boy you ever kissed, and what do you remember about that boy?

  And then the best part, the part where I answer, carefully, at length, because there’s someone who wants to know.

  Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my whole life, who says, I know, me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?

  But you can’t spend your life hoping that people will ask you the right questions. You must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask. Otherwise you’re dreaming of visiting Venice by driving to Boise, Idaho.

  That year—the year that James turned seventeen, 1956—everything changed. Caroline had her baby, a girl, and they named her Alice Sweatt Strickland. I met her when she and Caroline came home from the hospital; I’d never known a baby so young. She was damp and stunned-looking, as if she couldn’t believe everyone had been expecting her to come ashore for months: she herself never imagined such things—February, Cape Cod, all these looming faces, and dry land—were even vaguely possible. Not really, her expression said, not this.

  We started work on a cottage behind the Stricklands’ house for James, with funds raise
d through the town, my doing: jars by cash registers in stores, a pancake breakfast, collections at basketball games. I’d asked a contractor about building an addition to the house, but he said it wasn’t possible: too much weight on a not-too-sturdy building. Besides, he said, it would have looked terrible. Plenty of room behind the house, though, and I liked the idea, because I thought a cottage would belong absolutely to James, and therefore also to me.

  We got businesses to donate furnishings, everything specially made: a huge armchair made by a man in Dennisport who just wanted the pleasure of building it; a bed from a mattress factory in Tiverton, in exchange for bragging rights. Their slogan was: for the longest night’s sleep you ever had.

  My doing, my doing, my doing. Oscar and Caroline were alarmed, I think, slightly grateful, quite bewildered.

  “Slow down!” Oscar said when I breathlessly listed the things I thought James would need in his cottage. I spoke more slowly.

  “No,” said Oscar. “Slow down everything. You’ll wear yourself out.”

  “I have plenty of energy,” I said.

  “You’ll wear me out, then.”

  But I couldn’t stop. I bought a hot plate, a little radio, a record player. I convinced a local carpenter to make a desk and end tables. I got the permits for building, painted the walls myself. Every night after work, I went to the cottage. At first just to walk around outside, and then, as it took shape, to sit inside on the floor and try to see what else it needed. In many ways it was not a proper house—no bathroom (we didn’t have the money; he’d have to go to the front house); no basement; no kitchen; no closet until I pointed out the lack. But there were high ceilings without eaves and a door that was wide and tall with a threshold plumb to the floor and no treacherous steps. Nothing for him to trip on. I’d thought at first that there’d be two rooms, because the idea of spending the whole day in one small place seemed depressing, but the contractor said that a single room allowed for the most space. Caroline sewed curtains to match those in the front house; Oscar painted the trim green, with a few trompe l’oeil jokes—ants on the sills, one long rose across the sash of each window. They wouldn’t have fooled anybody’s eye.

  Nights I sat on the floor and listened to the sounds that made their way from the front house to the back: the baby crying, the chatter of dinner plates in the sink. It was spring, and their windows were up, and I opened the front door of the cottage so I could hear Caroline’s lovely, odd voice singing to the baby, their whole house a radio. Never lullabies, just love songs: The Tennessee Waltz, After You’ve Gone, Careless Love. One night I heard all of a song about a woman who’d killed her lover and was pleading for the electric chair—Judge, Judge, please Mr. Judge—a morbid song for a baby, but it seemed to work: I heard Caroline finish and then Oscar’s awed voice saying, after a pause, she’s asleep.

  My years of simple living and careful saving meant I had enough money to buy a car, as well as all the knickknacks I stocked the cottage with. Oscar had a friend with a huge used Nash who sold it cheap. The front seat was divided in half, and each side would fold back to meet the backseat, forming (it was pointed out to me by the leering mechanic who looked it over) a bed, single or double depending. I figured we could fold down the passenger’s seat, and James could sit in the back, with his legs in the front.

  I was not much of a driver, having grown up and gone to school in cities, so I drove around town for practice. The Nash was the first car I’d ever owned, the first car I’d ever driven to amount to anything. It made me feel as though I were a Victorian lady who’d finally been allowed to wear bloomers—I could go anywhere, I realized, I could just start driving. But the only place I wanted to go was Boston, to visit James.

  And so I did. Every Sunday for four months I drove the two hours to Boston, checking my rearview, the speedometer, the gas gauge, the odometer. One of the reasons I’d never had an interest in a car before was certainly fear; so much could go wrong. But those simple controls were as reassuring to me as footnotes. They explained, they quantified. If I had gas, if I drove at a sensible clip, if I noted the car directly behind me and the one passing me on the left and kept all of these things in mind, surely everything would be fine.

  When James finally came home from the hospital—after four long months of healing and therapy and visits from friends, weekly visits from me—he lived somewhere new. He had a new relative, Caroline and Oscar’s daughter, Alice Sweatt Strickland. And he had me.

  “How is it?” I asked. He walked slowly into the cottage, leaning on the cane. The town would hold a welcome home party for him that night at the high school auditorium; they’d wanted to greet him at the cottage—they thought having made and eaten pancakes meant they deserved full credit for the building—but I’d dissuaded them. Let him get settled, I said. James was not quite graceful with his new cane, with the braces I could hear squeak with each step. Oscar stepped across the threshold, followed by Caroline with the baby.

  He reached over to the lamp on the closest table and snapped it on. The tables were the faultiest pieces of furniture: the carpenter had made them regular-size with extralong spindly legs.

  James sat down on the bed and let the cane fall to the floor.

  “It’s incredible,” he said.

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s a closet. And you should try out the desk—if it isn’t high enough we can raise it.” I turned the faucets of the little sink on the back wall, as if I had not tried them every night for a month. “Works,” I said.

  “Well, sport,” said Oscar. “What do you think?”

  “It’s good,” said James. He stood up with a great deal of effort; I saw that we’d have to raise the bed on blocks. It hadn’t occurred to me that the bed would have to be high, as well as big. He walked along the perimeter of the room, leaning on the walls.

  “Don’t you need your cane?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “We couldn’t afford a bathroom,” said Oscar apologetically. “But we figure that way we get to see you every now and then.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to forget us,” said Caroline. “You’ll come over for meals, too.” She walked with James to the window. “See the rose?” she said. I didn’t know whether she was talking to James or the baby.

  “It’s pretty,” said James.

  Everything was suddenly pretty: the June light coming through the window, the filmy curtains that, I noticed, matched Caroline’s skirt.

  Caroline cupped the baby’s head in her hand.

  “Oscar?” she said. He walked to them, and they stood there for a moment, looking out the window.

  “Jim,” said Oscar. “Your mother—”

  “My mother is dead,” said James.

  I wonder now whether they really meant to tell him then. Perhaps Oscar was about to say, Your mother is proud of you, or, Your mother called this afternoon. I didn’t even know whether James had known all along, or whether he’d just figured it out. I’d spent so long wishing they would tell him that I’d never imagined how it would happen.

  James looked at Caroline, leaned on the wall for support, and put his hands out for the baby. Caroline lifted Alice to his arms.

  Alice—higher in the air than she’d ever been—opened her eyes, looked at James. Caroline put her hand on his hip. “She misses you,” she said.

  “She doesn’t know me yet.” He put his nose to the baby’s stomach.

  “Your mother misses you, I mean.”

  “My mother’s dead,” James repeated.

  Caroline moved her hand in a slow circle on his hip. The baby made a noise as if she were about to cry, but she didn’t. “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t miss you,” said Caroline. “Because she does.”

  Did she think that would do? Did she think, now it’s over, now he knows and we don’t have to pretend. I did, I admit it. That was easy, I thought.

  James said to the baby, “When were you going to tell me?” We were silent. Maybe we thought the baby would answer. She
opened her mouth, but it was only to yawn.

  “We meant to—” Oscar said.

  “When?” said James. “When you figured I’d forgotten about her?” He was still looking at the baby, and Caroline put her hands out.

  “Don’t drop—” she said. James lifted Alice higher, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind before, but maybe he would. Maybe he would drop the baby. Instead, he swung her around and set her in her mother’s arms.

  “How long have you known?” asked Oscar.

  James folded his arms across his chest. “How long has she been dead?”

  “You’ve known all along?”

  “How long has she been dead? Because I don’t know.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “No such patient,” he read. “I wrote this to her two months ago, got it back two weeks later. So then I called, and they said nobody named Alice Sweatt was ever there. So. She’s been dead for—”

  “Four months and thirteen days,” said Caroline.

  “And you don’t even miss her.”

  “Oh, Jim,” said Caroline. “You don’t know how much.”

  “I don’t know if I even believe that.” He walked to the bed as fast as he could, which was not fast at all. I thought, he wants to throw himself down on the bed angrily, and he can’t even do that. Instead he sat on the edge and put his face in his hands.

  Caroline shook her head. “Peggy?” she said. She handed the baby to me. Alice was an awkward bundle. She still wasn’t crying, and I waited for her to. I thought that’s what babies did. They cried. I looked into her face, a five-month-old face, and waited for it to pleat and redden. I guess I wanted someone to cry.

  I got my wish. Caroline inhaled deeply, as if she knew what she was going to do would be an effort. She knew it would be the last clear, easy breath she’d take in a while. “It’s like this,” she said in an improbably careful voice, and then, suddenly, she was weeping.