The Giant's House

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “I’m not sure. An ordinary weight. Nine pounds, perhaps.”

  “Eats a lot?”

  “Not really. A little more than average. Not much.”

  “What’s his father do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not an over-proud mother, that’s for sure,” the reporter said to me.

  “I’m not a mother at all,” I said. “I’m James’s chaperone.”

  “Aha!” said the reporter. “What’s your name? I’ll make you famous.”

  “Peggy Cort.”

  “Miss or Missus?”

  “Miss.”

  “Even better,” said the reporter. He stopped writing. “Whatcha doing tonight?”

  This so flabbergasted me I couldn’t think of what to say.

  “Don’t look so scared,” the reporter said. “You want to grab a sandwich or not?”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “Bigfoot over there your boyfriend or something?”

  “Mind your own business,” I said.

  “Yeah, the tall guys get all the luck. Even the short girls like ’em better. Well,” he said, “he’s not the tallest this building’s ever seen. King Kong’s still got the record.”

  Then several reporters hushed him, and the wind rushed in, too, lifted up the ex-mayor’s hat, and deposited it in the wire nets meant to discourage suicides.

  James loved public spaces. I did, too, of course; it was one of the reasons I became a librarian. But we liked them for different reasons. I loved buildings where anyone was welcome, where no one could throw you out, wonder whether you belonged. And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints. I have always loved strangers a good deal more than my own family, will be politer and friendlier on a bus or in an airport than I am at a dinner table. You have nothing to lose with strangers: they will like you or not and most likely never think of you again, and conversation becomes that much easier. Love and hate are not on the menu.

  James loved public spaces for this reason: they were big. Even my small-town public library had ceilings high enough that he’d never have to worry. Town hall was the same, and the high school, and some stores and restaurants.

  New York was filled with such places. Hotel lobbies, train stations, museums, department stores—it was as if, having used up so much ground outside, they’d decided they needed wide inside spaces. Outdoors it was all claustrophobia; inside, atriums and staircases that made you look up to see where they ended.

  We took them slowly, of course. James was right: he knew when he got tired and said so, and we taxied back to the hotel and rested. We had to tell the desk clerk not to let up visitors. Then we’d go off again, to the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick, to Macy’s and Altman’s. “Go see a Broadway show,” the bellhop told us, though of course James wouldn’t have fit. He said he wasn’t interested. It’s only now I realize that we could have called a theater and asked them to figure something out. James was a celebrity; they would have done it. Of course, I would have pitied whoever sat behind him.

  Pat Anderson came to the hotel with clippings every morning. CIRCUS GIANT BUSY ON FIRST DAY HERE, the Times headline said, and then, in smaller print, EATS NORMAL-SIZE MEAL. There was a picture of the ex-mayor peering up at James through one of the Empire State Building telescopes.

  The reporters fell off after the first couple days, but the crowds continued. It got tiresome, though people were always nice—when we stopped to get a hot dog off the street, a stranger would always rush up to buy Jim’s.

  “Just one?” they’d say in disbelief. “Have a couple, you must be hungry! No? Just a snack, huh?”

  The circus manager had a thick southern accent. “Ease as pie,” he said. “For the p’rade, we’ll drive you ’round the rings. Then, ’bout midway through, you’ll come out by yourself. Wanna walk or ride?”

  “Ride.”

  “Ride’s good. Bigger surprise when you step off. Ringmaster’ll ’nounce you, ride in, step off. Leila rides with you.”

  “Leila?”

  “Smallest woman in the world,” said the manager. “That’s our story, anyhow. Jus’ stand there, the two you, wave, get back on the truck. Nothin’ to it. Ten minutes. Y’manage that?”

  “I think I can,” James said.

  The animals stank up the back of Madison Square Garden. Performers whirled around; their costumes were frayed this close up, and their faces bore little resemblance to the glamour of the program. Their teeth were bad, their skin was bad and paved with makeup. But they were nice, and impressed with James.

  “You’re the real thing,” a clown said, looking up.

  In a corner by the stairs, a thin woman painted at an easel. Another clown was sitting for her, in full makeup, a T-shirt, blue jeans.

  “You gotta hurry up, Blanche,” he said. “I gotta get dressed.”

  “Oh, you have plenty of time,” said the woman. Her voice was girlish and powdery. “Hold still.”

  “I’m holding still maybe thirty fucking seconds more.”

  “Well, promise to sit for me later.”

  “Sure thing,” the clown said, standing up.

  James walked over to the woman. “What do you do?” he asked her.

  She was rubbing a brush clean with a white cloth. “I paint,” she said. “What do you do?” She put a huge straw hat on the back of her head, as if she’d just smelled the animals and had taken it as evidence she was in a meadow.

  “I’m here, right now,” he said. “Appearing for the circus. But I paint, too.”

  “Do you,” she said, delighted. The clown she’d just been painting came running past her and pinched her bottom. “Good girl, Blanche,” he said. She smiled slightly and lowered her head. “What do you paint?” she asked James.

  “Seascapes,” he said. “Still lifes.”

  “Bowls of fruit,” she said.

  “Not so far,” said James. “But I’ve never had one lying around to paint. Do you work for the circus?”

  “No,” she said. “For myself. I don’t like bowls of fruit either. I paint clowns.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No,” she said. “Clowns. They’re so innocent.” She turned the painting of the pinching clown around to show us. He looked sweet as a schoolboy. “They bring people so much joy.”

  Then Leila, the Smallest Woman in the World, came out in a green-sequined dress with matching satin shoes. Whether she was in fact the world’s tiniest I didn’t know, but she was at least two feet shorter than me, Italian and glamorous, perfectly proportioned though stout and buxom. Even backstage of the circus I could smell her perfume, spicy vanilla set to low simmer.

  “Jimmy Sweatt!” she said. “You gonna change for our show?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Don’ get paint on your suit,” she said. “I’m Leila. This you know already.” She turned to me. “Hello. Don’ worry about your boy. Blanche is nice, only crazy.”

  “I am not crazy!” said Blanche.

  Leila smiled sweetly at me and adjusted her girdle. “Better get ready,” she said to James.

  He walked over. She barely came up to his knee. I could see where her girdle ended: her stomach rose up over it like a sequined bolster. The circus paired them so they’d exaggerate each other’s size, but they in fact looked right together, the way opposites often do, sequin and poplin, frivolous and studious. Leila looked like some fizzy obsolete green drink from a nineteenth-century novel, one that puts you to sleep and gives you dreams that explain your life; James, like the country doctor who’d visit you the next day to break the news that you might never recover. Leila the energetic drug, James the antidote, distilled from the same plant but with different inclinations.

  Leila did not even bother to attempt to look him in the eye when they were standing. “Good way to break my neck. So, Jimmy, where do you buy your clothing? Same place I do, I bet.
Help me on this truck, okay?” He offered his hand; she looked at it and laughed.

  “Too big!” she said. “We are a pair. Afterward, we will go dancing.” She put her hand out to the truck driver instead. James got in next to her, his cane across his lap.

  “You wanna go to your seat?” the manager asked me.

  I didn’t, but I went anyhow. Tomorrow I’d wait backstage, but for opening night they’d saved me a seat in the front row, just to the right of the center ring. I left Leila and James on their truck, ready far in advance for the starting parade.

  The parade was only a minute; James didn’t even get off the truck. He and Leila waved as they toured the arena, but they waved the same way the bouncing girls on top of elephants did, and the clowns, and the acrobats in their lamé suits.

  Then the circus started. Sitting that close dizzied me. As a child, I sat up high in the back of Boston Garden, where I could keep my eyes on all three rings at once; down here my attention was scrambled by the poodles with their fur shaved in ruffs and the ponies in feathered crowns. Really, I was just biding my time till James came back for his featured performance. I wondered what the audience would think of him. And then I wondered whether everyone in the circus had someone like me in the stands—not in New York, necessarily, but down the road, a mother in a hometown, a pretty girl met on the street in Miami, a barely known cousin in Des Moines: one particular person looking with particular interest. I wondered how Mrs. Sweatt, in this audience, would look at James. Some pride perhaps, a lot of worries. Mostly, I imagined her sitting still, saying, my son, my son, my son.

  And then I tried to view everyone with this individual interest. The showgirl with the red hair and blond eyebrows. The lantern-jawed clown dressed like a schoolmarm. The red-faced roustabout whirling the elephants’ steel pedestals through the cutaway into the center ring. It got oppressive, as if by paying this attention I created the need in them. Not a profound need: the showgirl was not offering me her soul, just her legs in thick not-quite-skin-colored stockings, her spangled doublet, her face smiling up at the audience in general. But surely she needed to be looked at; why else would she have joined up?

  Finally it was time for James and Leila. The ringmaster announced them from the center, and the truck was revealed in a splash of lights. Leila stepped out first, almost bouncing, waving. Then James. I waited for the gasp, but there was none. The light glinted off his glasses, though he barely moved. Maybe he was sniffing for the first rich hints of a fire from a dropped cigarette. First I looked across the arena to the people on the far side: the few faces I could divine seemed, well, unimpressed. The people on either side of me watched James with no wonder at all; the kids squirmed in laps, stood on thighs to face their parents. They’d seen women swinging from their long hair, men pedaling bicycles across wires, tigers complaining like retirees as they lay down, rolled over, sat up. The cheapest seats were so far away that nothing looked big to them, not even James. Just a man, just an ordinary man, leaning on a cane as tall as the ringmaster. They’d have preferred the cowboy outfit, a mile-long leotard.

  Leila climbed up to a high platform that put her at James’s eye level, and this the crowd liked—funnier to have the height difference beneath her. The lights bubbled off her sequins, green, intoxicating.

  “You were terrific,” I told James after the show. I’d gone backstage as soon as possible.

  “Not much to do. But I was nervous.”

  “You seemed like an old pro.” I reached up to smooth the lapel of his jacket. He’d been sweating, from nerves or exertion I didn’t know, and the fabric had darkened in spots. “Maybe we’ll get this cleaned tomorrow.”

  Leila came up to us, riding on the back of the truck. “My chauffeur brings me everywhere.” She punched the arm of the man behind the wheel, who didn’t even smile. “Where you staying, Jimmy?”

  “At the Astor.”

  “A snob!” she said happily. She stood up on the back of the truck. “Me, I stay with everybody else. So. We’ll have lunch. Me and you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Sure!” James said. “Great. Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow, yes. Where do you eat? Your favorite place.”

  “Anywhere. Where do you eat?”

  Leila shrugged. “When I get hungry, I stop and eat. Wherever I am. Not so fancy as you, so you choose.”

  “The Automat,” said James.

  Leila laughed. “Not fancy, but good. You will reach the top drawers and I the bottoms. Good.”

  “What time?” I asked.

  “Ah,” said Leila. Then she turned to James. “She wants to be invited. She’s afraid I will do something to her boy.”

  “No—” I started.

  “She thinks I will kidnap you to the circus forever. She thinks I will make you elope.” She looked at me again. “I will not. But maybe—” She sat down, not next to the driver but on the platform behind him, her legs dangling off the edge. “Maybe the boy wants to elope himself. So! To make you feel better, have dessert with us. For lunch I get him for my own, then you come. If we elope, we do this with your blessing. Right, Jimmy?”

  “Yes,” said James. “Of course.”

  “Twelve o’clock the Automat,” said Leila. “One-thirty for dessert.” Then she slapped the driver on the back as if he were a horse who’d fallen asleep, and the truck went lurching off.

  Before I went to meet them at the Automat, I looked through my suitcase for something to wear. How had I managed to assemble such a dowdy brown wardrobe? I put on one outfit, then tried a belt to dress it up and show off my hips, then decided that my hips were no prize and shouldn’t be highlighted. Leila would know what to wear, I thought. Then I was appalled with myself: now I was jealous of a midget with an accent. Which gave me something else to be appalled about, characterizing her in such a way. I finally put on the dress I’d worn the day before and went out to hail a taxi.

  The Automat was crowded with a combination of tourists—after life in Brewsterville, I could identify any sort—and regulars. The visitors peered through every single food window; the New Yorkers had the locations of their favorites memorized. I’d pictured Leila in a child’s red vinyl booster seat, but instead she perched on top of a stack of metal chairs. She was in the middle of some story that made her spread her arms like a fisherman describing a lost catch.

  The lunch china was still there, thick and yellowed and edged in gray marcelled waves. One solitary, ludicrous iced sweet roll sat on a saucer almost exactly the same size.

  “Welcome,” she said. “We have saved this bun for you to eat.”

  “No thank you,” I said. “I see you haven’t eloped.”

  “Not yet!” Leila pounded the top of the table. The sugar pourer jumped into the napkin dispenser. “Actually, it is a tragedy. I forgot, I already have one husband.”

  “One husband!” said James.

  “One husband at once,” said Leila primly. “That is a rule I don’t break so far. Five husbands in a row, not all together.”

  “You’ve been married five times?” I said.

  “See, Jimmy? She is surprised. She thinks I am too small for husbands. She is curious.” She pulled a rhinestone cigarette case out of her bag and lit a cigarette with a matching rhinestone lighter. I had a feeling Leila owned matched sets of everything. “They say, to smoke makes you short. I must not lose my job, and so I smoke much. Also it helps me eat less. Yes.” She pulled an empty plate over for an ashtray. “Five husbands so far.”

  “Five husbands, for anyone—”

  Leila hoisted her coffee cup and blew some smoke across the top. She said, gravely, “God has been good to me. This is all I will say.”

  “Have your husbands been”—I couldn’t think of a tactful way to say In the circus. “Show people?” I tried.

  “You mean short,” said Leila.

  “No, no. I meant. Well.”

  “My first husband, Al, was tall to me, short to everyone else, five foot. Next one, Francis, ta
ller. They get taller, boop, boop, boop—” She made her hand climb some invisible steps to show the evolution of her husbands, her cigarette dragging smoke behind it. “Rafe, my newest, is maybe six feet tall.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Such a surprise?”

  “Six feet is—well, isn’t that a lot taller than you?”

  “I like tall,” said Leila, winking. “I like big. My mother told me look for short men because they are used to less, they will be satisfied for me. Now I think, but am I satisfied for them? All my life, I eat less than other people, breathe less air, less material for my clothes, less wood for my furniture. Some things I should be allowed to have more of, isn’t that right? So I decided: never again am I stingy about men. The more man, the better. This is why I like your boy. You know this song?”

  She paused, as if we would know what song she was talking about, even if we’d never heard it. Then she started to sing. She had a sweet, deep voice; her accent and the cigarette made it seem, briefly, as if we were in a cabaret instead of an Automat.

  “ ‘I got a man that’s more than eight foot tall, four foot shoulders and that ain’t all.…’

  “No?” she said. “You never heard this?”

  “I don’t listen to the radio,” I said.

  “Oh, no, this song was never on the radio. Julia Lee. She is colored and a little, mmmmmm, risqué. Records and jukeboxes. I heard for the first time in a bar in Kansas City. I own the record, and I will send it to you. ‘They built the Boulder Dam, the Empire State, and then they made my man, and is he great!’ ”

  Then she moved away the sweet roll so she could put her elbow on the table, propped up her chin, and gazed at James like a starstruck teenager until he looked away in embarrassment. “Ah,” she said. “You must not be shy.”

  James looked back at her and gave a wry smile that dimpled one cheek. I’d never seen that smile before. “You make me shy. Usually I’m not.”

  “Oh,” said Leila. “I don’t want to make anyone this way.” She turned to me, and suddenly I felt the shyness fall over me like a tossed blanket. Her eyes were black and damp as olives. She regarded me with what seemed to be great affection.