When he wanted to quiet us, he talked about his health, and we thought, at least he’s being sensible. This was something we—Caroline and I—had in common: a passion for the practicals. Yes, that’s right, he could fall, he could break a leg or worse. Sometimes we worked hard to believe it, because otherwise we’d fret too much. Best to stay home.
Best to hold court in his own house, imagine himself a bachelor with a dance floor and a juke. If he fell at school, he’d be helpless in front of everyone he knew; at home he sat in his chair, did the schoolwork a tutor brought over, and waited for three o’clock, when his friends came by and Caroline brought refreshments and maybe—not that he cared or anything—maybe Stella would show up, too. Because she did show up sometimes, and danced, or flirted, or combed her hair. Her boyfriend, whose name was Sean, didn’t seem to mind that she flirted with every single boy there, and I wanted to take him aside, say, Doesn’t this bother you? Don’t you worry?
All those boys—fat and thin and tall and cross-eyed—had lipstick on their cheeks, little Stella kisses. Maybe she kissed them hello, or maybe she let her lips brush against them when they were dancing, because she danced with all of them. But only the one boy ever got to hold her when the music was over, when she’d clapped for the song and settled herself on the sofa we’d recently moved in. He was the handsomest boy, no doubt.
Some days I wondered why James tolerated me, a comparatively old woman of thirty-one, when he had those teenagers. Other days I knew why: he felt, if not older than the kids, at least significantly different. Maybe those days—the days he seemed sadder, the days he’d talk so long I wouldn’t leave for hours—were the times he remembered that he was going to die sooner than they were.
I have forgiven myself for the fact that I liked his sad days best. That was when he was happiest to see me. He liked the fact I was around so often that he did not have to lie about a bad mood. He’d become accustomed to me. I don’t know exactly when that happened—at the hospital? Afterward? Those days I could think that Stella and her visits and her pretty hair and tight sweaters could not make him happy. Those days he needed me most.
Where He Was
In newspaper articles that came toward the end of his life, when James had attained some measure of fame, they’d note: “He eats no more than the average growing boy.” People always wanted to know his appetite, his shoe size, how many yards of material it took to make one of his shirts. How much does it cost to run such a concern? they wondered, as though they’d plan to be as tall themselves if only it weren’t such an expense.
To build the World’s Largest anything requires money, usually in advance. James’s entrepreneurial body constructed itself without backing, and then threatened to bankrupt him in any number of ways. Including, of course, the coarsest, most literal way. The town had been generous with donations to build and outfit the cottage, but we could not set the collection cans out every time he outgrew a pair of pants, every time a shoe or shirt size lapsed into obsolescence. For a while Caroline tried to make his clothing, just as she made some of her own. Her talent was with delicate fabric: she hid the messy seams of her dresses and the odd bell-shapes of her skirts with too much cloth and loud unruly prints. The materials for a boy’s clothing—denim, tweed, oxford cloth—confounded her fingers.
James knew he needed money, not only for himself and Oscar and Caroline but for Alice, his cousin. She was a year old now, a petulant child, with Oscar’s round face and Caroline’s pink cheeks. She ruled the front house with her chubby fist; I thought her voice alarmingly loud for a baby’s. I’d have predicted that the Stricklands would be casual, even negligent parents, but they fussed over Alice from the time she formally woke them up at five A.M. until her bedtime, and then almost hourly after that, each time she demanded their attention.
“When do they start sleeping through the night?” I asked Caroline.
“College,” she said.
Alice was one of the reasons I stopped spending time in the front house. Frankly, I was tired of looking at her, and whenever I was there, I was obligated to.
“Look at Alice!” Caroline would say, and I would think, I have seen your child suck her toes a dozen times and once would have sufficed. I have heard the question “Alice, what are you eating?” a thousand times, answered these ways: dirt, a piece of cereal, tinfoil, and whatever-it-is-it’s-gone-now. She wasn’t exactly a Broadway musical.
I tried to ask Caroline politely. “Don’t you get bored sometimes? Don’t you want to go to a movie or read a book?”
“Nooo,” Caroline said. Alice lifted herself to her feet, dropped to her bottom, considered crying, rejected the idea, and pulled herself to her feet again. “If I had nothing else to do I could watch her all day.”
“Huh,” I said. Alice bit into a plastic squeaky pig. Then she did it again.
“You wouldn’t get bored if she was yours,” Caroline said. “She’d be better than any novel.”
“Babies,” I said, “have no plot.”
James, on the other hand, loved Alice. When he was depressed, he spoke of her as his heir, and sometimes I thought it was her existence that depressed him, made him think about his death. He’d realized he wasn’t the last generation. Seventeen years old was too young to realize that.
He wanted to accomplish something, and because he was a teenager, he figured the way to do it was to earn money. Sometimes it was for Alice’s college education, sometimes his own. Sometimes it was for the trip to New York City that he still dreamed of.
I wondered what my job was, pessimism or optimism. When he spoke of New York, he seemed to see himself everywhere, doing everything—in Broadway theaters, climbing the Statue of Liberty. I’d been inside the Statue of Liberty; despite her exterior size, she was not a generous hostess, and James could not possibly have fit on her spiral staircase, nor would he be able to climb all those stairs. I didn’t know whether to indulge his dreams or quietly remind him of his facts.
I chose indulgence; it was easier for both of us. When he wondered whether Alice would remember him when she grew older, I said, of course: they’d know each other all their lives.
I knew that he would die, but I never thought—or almost never thought—of James as someone who was dying. His death would shatter me. That was clear. I did not see how accepting his dying now would make his eventual death easier to bear: I knew my devastation would be so total there would be no leavening for it. His death was a thought that occurred to me, just as my finances were something I worried about, once a month, in the middle of the night, and then put off for another month.
So I argued for him to keep things in mind, practical, possible things. The shoe store people, for instance. They’d started to offer more: not just shoes but money. They reminded him of the expositions in New York. They’d give him money up front.
“Soon,” he said. “I’m just not ready yet.”
It would take something other than my daily nagging. So one night, a night I knew would be good for it, I waited outside the cottage, and when the kids left and said their good nights, I called her over.
“Stella,” I said. “May I ask you a question?”
She stepped closer. A clear, warm April night, and Stella wore a thin sweater with cap sleeves: her upper arms were plump. Pretty, too.
“I was wondering,” I said. I beckoned her around the house, so that James could not see us through his window. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to invite James out for a walk.”
I’d asked her this question in my head several times. Sometimes I heard her answer, “You mean, like a date? No, I don’t think so.” Sometimes she asked why, and I explained, made an elegant case that she agreed to. Sometimes she said scathing things, said, “You don’t think I have something better to do than take a walk with Mount Everest?”
What Stella actually said was “Sure.”
I waited for her to ask me why. But she didn’t, didn’t even raise her eyebrows, wanting me to tell her more. Pe
rhaps she simply understood herself as something that people would request.
“It’s that he’s not getting much exercise,” I said. “We try and coax him, but I thought if you asked if he’d like to take a walk, just as a friend, that might seem a little more attractive.”
“Sure,” she said again. She smiled. I tried to make it a mean smile. “You want me to ask him now?”
“No,” I said. “Next time you visit.”
“Okay. I’ll ask him tomorrow after school.”
“If it’s no bother—”
“Nope. I like Jim. Happy to do it.”
“Terrific. If the weather still holds.”
“Well, sure.”
She wasn’t a bad girl, despite my best hopes. She was a bored girl, slightly nervous, smarter than I wanted her to be. Although I admit it wouldn’t be hard for her to be smarter; I wanted her stupid. She was a girl who boys loved, and she loved their love of her. In fact, she was like Mrs. Sweatt, come back young and brunette and before all her bad luck. I had no doubt that James’s mother had been just this sort of girl, though midwestern, nicer, not so obvious. If Stella made James happy—and clearly she did—who was I to complain?
I hated her.
The weather held. So I stood behind the circulation desk about the time school let out and gazed through the window. There was only that one main strip in our town; chances were they’d walk down it. Three o’clock, then three-thirty, then four. And then, finally, I saw them.
If his legs gave him much trouble, you wouldn’t have known. He did lean on his cane, and they did walk slowly, but they were chatting. Stella laughed, then said something, and James laughed.
There was once a boy I’d liked a little, one of the kids I hung around with in college. I always knew where he was in a room. At a party, in a classroom, at the movies or a lecture, I’d be doing something else, talking or watching or sitting waiting for the next thing to happen, and I always knew where he was, could feel the fact of him on the back of my head or on my cheek or right through a person talking to me. At the movies I heard when he laughed and when he didn’t; when he leaned over to the person next to him and made them laugh. I could think, I’m keeping track of you, doesn’t that count for something? and I never paid attention to anything so diligently as his body as it ordered another drink at the bar or asked somebody else to dance. One late night, as he passed by, I leaned forward and kissed the boy I was talking to. It was not a kiss for my own benefit or for the recipient, but for the green-eyed tweed-clad boy who was now talking to somebody else entirely. You should never kiss for somebody else’s benefit—proper kissing is a selfish undertaking—but I was too young to know that.
The fact is, I always knew where James was, too. He was in his cottage, and I was with him or I wasn’t. At breakfast or dinner he was at the house; Caroline brought a lunch over. And maybe I’d built the cottage to keep track of him, so I counted; maybe I wanted him to know that I knew where he was.
You understand why I had to follow them.
Astoria agreed to take over the desk; I told her I had to walk some papers down to town hall. By the time I got out the door, they were two blocks ahead. Easy to spot James on a street this small and skinny. I wondered: should I happen into them? No, because I knew James might not be happy to see me, not when he was taking the air with Stella, and I could not bear to see him not happy to see me. I kept them in sight. I window-shopped. I tied my shoes. I walked a block, then waited. I was ready to duck into a shop when they turned around, and then I could shadow them as far as the library. By then, they’d be almost home anyhow.
Suddenly they turned down a side street. I hadn’t expected that; nothing was down that street. I walked faster. James still might fall or get tired—he was walking farther than he’d walked in months, and he’d scorned the physical therapy, and he should know better than to forget that. When I got to the side street, they’d gone. I’d lost them.
I leaned against a street sign, a little winded from my trot. I didn’t get enough exercise myself. Foolish, foolish, I thought, but I didn’t know whether I was bawling myself out for losing them or for following in the first place.
I turned back down the main street. You’ve learned your lesson, I told myself: even if you wanted to be a spy you haven’t the knack for it, and an incompetent spy is soon unemployed. I walked past the library and went to town hall anyhow, just for verisimilitude’s sake. I stood inside the lobby a minute, then headed back for work.
They were just coming up on the library themselves. Now he was walking with difficulty, hesitant steps. Stella’s hand fluttered up to his elbow, the one that didn’t hold the cane. They parted in front of the library; James started up the stairs. At first I couldn’t tell what he was doing, exactly, and then I realized: he was walking up sideways. He set his right foot a couple of steps up, then his left foot on the step below. Then again. His feet had gotten so big he could not fit them any other way. I had no idea when this had happened: it had been ages since I’d seen him climb stairs.
I began to walk briskly, in a businesslike way, the gait of somebody who had just been to town hall, who knew nothing about teenagers and their afternoon constitutionals.
He was sitting on the wide bench inside the front room of the library.
“Peggy!” Astoria said as I stepped inside. “Look at the stranger who’s come to see us.”
“What do you know? Decided to get a little air?”
He nodded, smiling.
“What brought you here?” I said.
“Decided it was time to get out,” he said. I could not tell whether his cheeks were rosy with health or exertion. Unfair of the body, I thought, to make a man dying of a heart attack look just like a man who has finished his daily improving run.
“How was it?” I sat down next to him. I wanted to know what made Stella look so worried at the end of the walk. “Worth the trip?”
He shrugged. Then he said, “Yeah. You’re right. I shouldn’t spend all day inside. I almost forgot what this sorry old town looks like.”
Well, I thought, it worked. Still, I wanted him to mention Stella, I wanted to be able to put to use the feigned surprise I’d practiced all the way up the street.
There were two things I hadn’t expected: Stella was a good girl, and she honestly liked James. Several times a week she dropped by the cottage early in the afternoon, before the rest of the teenagers, and suggested a walk. Sometimes they dropped by the library—I imagined Stella suggested this, to show me she was serious about her assignment—sometimes they just passed the big windows by the circulation desk. Should I take her aside and explain that I’d only meant one walk, one time, not this extended engagement? No, of course not; not even I could be that dumb or mean.
She still had her boyfriend, the skinny and handsome Sean, who arrived with the other boys nearly every day. James rarely mentioned Stella, that’s how much he liked her. I don’t know whether he watched Stella and Sean leave at dinnertime, hand in hand, hating both of them, or just him, or, briefly, just her; or whether the pleasure of her solitary company a few times a week was enough for him to think that she couldn’t care for this Sean, this dull American boy of dull Irish parents.
Some afternoons I arrived at the cottage to see Stella and her Swains—what a name for a 1940s band!—arranged around the room. And like a good, shy bandleader, there was Stella in the corner, each Swain absorbed in whatever he was doing and simultaneously paying her the most rigorous, imperceptible attention. The studied negligence of the Swains! They didn’t just listen to music and dance; they played cards or did homework. One boy sat cross-legged on the floor with a book on a knee, another leaned writing against the doorjamb, stopping every now and then to shake down the ink of his ballpoint pen. “You get the answer to number eight? No? Did you, Stell?”
Normally these were kids who’d come to the library, whispering questions and answers, bottles of Coke hidden beneath jackets. Here they didn’t have to whisper, and t
heir soda bottles stood on every surface, leaving kiss marks on the wood.
When I came in, only Stella and Sean and James would say hello. I got to know the other boys slowly: chubby Benny, whose eyes were so sunken they looked like bruised thumbprints in his face. Sullen Frank, who stuttered darkly. Eric, a good friend of James’s, a small kid with a brush cut who I knew from his visits to the library to take out books on sports. When Eric walked, he did not move the upper half of his body at all—passing by the circulation desk, he looked as if he were on wheels. He also could not speak in words, but offered nervous polite sounds—not the rude grunting noise other nontalking boys used, just pure open vowels.
“Hello, Eric,” I said.
“Ah,” said Eric.
“How’s school?”
“Oh,” Eric said, halfway between good and I don’t know yet.
And from across the room, Stella would call out, “Hi, Miss Cort!” I’d give her a jaunty, uncaring wave. She could break Frank’s heart, and Benny’s and Eric’s, but mine was safe.
Or mostly; sometimes even I was charmed. She was the object of so many glances, stares, careful appraisals, compliments, that when she looked at you it was as if she reflected all that dazzling attention upon you. She did it without talking: she looked at you directly, a small touch of cynicism to her smile. It was the cynicism, strangely, that made it appear she was paying attention; it made you feel like her co-conspirator.
James started asking me about my car.
“I can fit, right?” he said.
“Yes. Sure.”
“You wouldn’t mind giving me a ride somewhere?”
“Say the word. Where do you want to go?”
“I dunno.”
“We could take it to the shoe store, you know.”
He made a face. “I was thinking somewhere closer. The beach, maybe.”
“Okay.”
“And maybe I could bring a friend.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”