The Giant's House

  Maybe some nights he craved a brokenhearted singer the way another man might crave whiskey. Maybe those nights he got all the way to the radio, had his hand on the dial before he stopped himself. Slow down, man. One love song and you’ll do nothing but listen to love songs. One love song, and you’re around the bend. And then he’d drop Molly O’Day on the record player again and listen to her explain, carefully, that God tested us every day and every day most of us failed.

  His Heart Shares in His Proportions

  I want to tell you about his body.

  I want to describe his feet, now (he was eighteen) size thirty-seven, triple A. The store in Hyannis still made his shoes. I’d had to call and ask them to rush and make a new pair to replace the old ones, and they told me how to measure everything, instep, width, length. Now I did it regularly. We set his foot down on paper—not typing paper, which was too small, but some stuff cut from a roll at an artists’ supply shop, and traced. I did this. His feet left damp marks on the paper; his second toes were longer than his big toes, and I wondered whether this was a sign of something, either in medicine or folk wisdom.

  His calves were unmuscled things. I know because I held on to them while I traced. This was late in the day, eight-thirty or so—we wanted to get his feet at their highest swollen ebb—and I’d slipped my hands up under his pant cuff to hold on.

  His thighs—

  I want to say that they were like railroad ties, and they were, they were solid and blocky and no wider at the hip than at the knee, but I promised myself I wouldn’t turn his body into something it wasn’t, I wouldn’t compare it to other things. People always did that. They made him into a redwood tree, a building, the Eiffel Tower. I’d never thought about it before, but now suddenly, with so many strangers around, so many new people making guesses, assessing his girth, arm span, I couldn’t help doing it myself. I vowed to stop.

  I don’t want to leave you with a man assembled out of household goods, a scarecrow with hands big as toasters and arms long as brooms and glasses the size of a child’s bicycle. I want to detail only facts. For instance, his neck was fifteen and a half inches long, thighs three feet—but that’s how you describe the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and it means that his body is getting away from itself again.

  I want to say, his body was just a man’s body, only bigger. His thighs were the thighs you have met before in your life, but longer. It was any body you’ve ever known; there was just more of it.

  There’s a limit to what I knew then. Oscar gave him sponge baths all his life. I knew his feet best, from measuring and from cutting his toenails. They were my inheritance, my territory. Mine to wash and to diagnose. Every evening I asked him to take off his shoes and socks so I could look for all the danger signs that the doctor had told me about.

  One late night, in my apartment, I looked at my own feet. My toenails needed cutting. How did they grow so fast, I wondered. My big toes were calloused, turning in; the nails of my little toes small scabs. All blank, unlike Patty Flood’s blood red bouquet. They were the feet of someone who paid no attention; the feet of a woman who knew that no one would ever be there, at the end of the day, to watch shoes get kicked off, stockings pulled free. The feet of someone responsible for her own weariness. Still, I was tired, and I did not even think about going to the bathroom to take care of matters: I took care of James’s feet, not my own.

  It was a doctor—the one from the Midwest, the one who specialized in giantism—who soured me forever on James’s measurements and statistics. Caroline and I did not think James should agree to a visit from him. The article he sent, ripped from the pages of a medical journal, could scare anybody. It was illustrated with photographs of a tall naked man standing next to a short clothed one. The point was that this was a circus giant who claimed to be eight foot two but barely cleared six foot seven; the photographs had been taken by a man who wanted to prove the claim. The doctor exposed him as a fraud; he discussed all the ways a tall man can make himself look taller, the tricks of photography and posture.

  The circus giant was skinny, smiling, clearly used to posing for photographs. His hipbones cast shadows over his private parts; all you could see were some vague oval shapes. His nakedness seemed terrible to me, as if it were a demeaning costume he’d agreed to wear in hopes that his personal dignity would compensate.

  James wanted the doctor to come. “A specialist,” he said. “That means something.” James had seen specialists in Boston, but they were gland and bone experts; they were as startled by his height as anyone. This new doctor, whose name was Calloway—surely he’d seen it all. Surely our James would just be another note in his life’s work. I didn’t like the tone of the letter. “I have read you are eight feet tall,” he wrote, and you could tell he didn’t believe it.

  “Let him come!” said Oscar. “He won’t be disappointed, that’s for sure.”

  James read the clipped article over and over again, looking for hope and information. I could have told him, having read the damn thing only once: all the doctor had done was measure the nameless circus giant, that’s all. A carpenter could have written it.

  So James invited the doctor, who telephoned, and said that James would have to wait five months, he was terribly sorry but he could not get away, would that be all right?

  “By then I’ll be even taller,” James said into the phone. “Yes, still growing.”

  Meantime we were getting letters from circuses. Small and big, they all wanted him to hire on, but it was Barnum and Bailey who offered the most, of course—private cars on trains, unbelievable fees. They called. They sent free tickets. One day a man in a dungaree suit showed up at the cottage.

  “My outfit’s playing Providence,” he said. “Come down and see. Nice folks. We’ll treat you right.”

  Though James liked the man, who acted nonchalant about James’s height and discussed another giant he had known—“Short guy compared to you, only seven-five”—he declined the offer.

  James still wanted to visit New York, still did not know that the shoe store wasn’t interested. Maybe he would never have to find out—I thought we could talk Barnum and Bailey into a one-visit contract. James could go up in a hired train car, he could see New York, he could earn a little money for college. We were still talking college in those days. I explained my plan.

  “I’ll go for the shoe people,” he said. “More dignity to it. The circus just wants me to sell more tickets.”

  “The shoe people want you to sell shoes. The circus has more money,” I argued. “They’ll send you in style.”

  “No, Peggy,” he said. “I’d rather go cheap and quiet than posh and loud.”

  Dr. Calloway, the giantist, arrived the next March, 1958. He had a thin chinless face, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. His cheeks were sharp and scratched up with wrinkles; his ears looked permanently folded up by a too-small hat. Altogether, his head looked like one of those miraculous precarious rock formations featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not—you couldn’t imagine how such a thing kept balanced on its spindly neck. You expected one of his cheekbones to break loose and avalanche down to his collar, followed by his nose, then the other cheekbone, and finally by the total dusty collapse of his entire head.

  But perhaps this is wishful thinking.

  His eyebrows were the fiercest thing about him, awnings that nearly obscured his dark round eyes. He arrived on a rainy day without a hat or umbrella, and water collected on those brows and fell to his tan raincoat without impediment.

  “Ernest Calloway, M.D.,” he said to Caroline. James wasn’t home yet; he was watching an afternoon basketball game at the high school. I’d told him to call me to pick him up when it was over.

  “Hello,” Caroline said, Alice weighing down her arm. “Come in. I’m Caroline Strickland, James’s aunt. He’s not here yet—you’re a little early.”

  The doctor nodded, as if this were a compliment. He took off his raincoat and handed it to Caroline. “Who?
??s this?” he asked, pointing at Alice. Though she was two, she still rode around in Caroline’s arms almost all the time.

  “Alice,” said Alice, pointing at herself.

  He asked Caroline, “How is she related to our giant? Not a sister?”

  “First cousin,” said Caroline. “Let me get you a towel.”

  Dr. Calloway looked at me. “And you are—”

  “Peggy Cort.”

  He regarded me, waiting for more information.

  “Family friend,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “Well. I’d prefer only family be present for this visit.”

  “Peggy is family,” said Caroline, coming back with the towel draped over one arm, Alice draped over the other. “She’s closer to James than anyone.”

  “This will not be a delicate conversation,” the doctor said. He rubbed his hair with the towel. “Family medical histories, et cetera.” He pronounced et cetera as if it were a sentence of great wisdom.

  “As far as we’re concerned, Peggy can hear everything. If she hasn’t heard it all already. May I get you a cup of coffee, Dr. Calloway?”

  “I do not take coffee,” he said. He sat down on the sofa next to me. “Nor tea.”

  Caroline was a devoted coffee drinker, and for a guest in her house to decline was like a Catholic saying to a priest in church, no, I don’t think so, no communion for me today. Days I spent with Caroline I drank so much coffee I went home vibrating and nervous and ate straight from the refrigerator until I realized hunger was not the problem, I’d misdiagnosed that hollow feeling.

  “Well then,” said Caroline. “Water?”

  “Nothing, thank you,” said Dr. Calloway. Then he turned to me. “So, where is the celebrated young man?”

  “He’s due any minute. Actually, he’s supposed to call, and then I’ll go pick him up. You’re early.”

  “Are you hired?” he asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “A nurse, a companion?”

  “Family friend,” I said again.

  Then James came through the door. His umbrella hadn’t done much good. Even beneath the raincoat, his shirt was soaked through. The ceilings at the Stricklands’ were eight feet tall, so James slouched, then bent his knees and leaned against the wall.

  I stood up to help him off with his coat. “You were supposed to call,” I told him.

  “I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Aha!” Dr. Calloway said behind me.

  James looked up, then took off his glasses to wipe them. There wasn’t a dry spot anywhere on him, so I took them and cleaned them on my shirt and handed them back.

  Dr. Calloway walked over to meet James, who had to hunch over a little in this house. The doctor looked up.

  “Good God,” he said. “You are …”

  We waited for him to finish the sentence but he didn’t. I could see him stand up straighter, as if to challenge James with his own height, but of course there was no contest. “I’m Dr. Calloway,” he said. “You must be James.” He laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” said James. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “Why don’t you change,” I told him. “Then you and Dr. Calloway can talk.”

  “I don’t have to change,” said James to the doctor. “I don’t want to keep you waiting.”

  “He’s early,” I said. “You can’t sit around in wet clothing.”

  “Actually,” the doctor said, “I am in a bit of a hurry. I’m driving to Boston tonight, to talk to some of your doctors there. Get history and so forth. But I’ll want to examine you at any rate, so you might as well just put on dry clothes after that.”

  “Well, at least go around back, so you’ll be comfortable,” I said to James. “No point in squeezing in here.”

  “Shall we?” the doctor said to James.

  James nodded and put his wet raincoat back on.

  “You take the umbrella,” he said to Dr. Calloway. “I’m beyond help.”

  The two of them started out the front door to walk around the back. Dr. Calloway said, “I shall interview and examine James in private. Then may I come back and ask a few questions of you ladies?”

  Caroline was sitting on the sofa, rubbing Alice’s back; Alice was almost asleep. “Of course,” Caroline said quietly.

  The doctor was gone half an hour before he came back. “Almost finished,” he said. “But I seem to have left my tape measure behind. Do you have one, Mrs. Strickland?”

  Caroline pulled a floppy measure from her sewing basket, and Dr. Calloway took it and left. I imagined him gauging James with those three feet of cloth, the way you try to figure distance on a road map with your thumb. James would hold the end of the tape at his head while the doctor unfolded it to mid-chest, marking that spot with his thumb so he could determine where the next three feet led to, finally ending at his destination, James’s feet.

  Fifteen minutes later the doctor returned. He’d carefully folded the tape measure and held it at its center, as if it were a rare butterfly with peculiar markings that he wanted to study but preserve.

  “He is, I must say, gargantuan. I heard he was tall, people sent me clippings, but all the reports differed as to his exact height. I’d assumed all the lowest estimates must be closer to the truth, and even then I’d assumed they’d been exaggerated.”

  “He’s tall,” Caroline said. “Why would he lie about it?”

  “I didn’t think he would. But journalists always want the best story, and someone who’s eight foot four is a better story than someone who’s seven foot four. Eight foot four,” he said. “I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “That tall,” said Caroline. “What do you know.”

  “Tallest in the world, no doubt,” said the doctor. “Maybe the tallest ever. Still growing. Well. Now I have a few questions for you. Where’s the child?”

  “Asleep,” said Caroline. “It’s her naptime.”

  “Ah. Thought I might have a look at her, too.” He said this the way a collector will casually offer to buy something off your very walls. We went to the living room to sit down. “No matter. She’s about average, correct?”

  “Average height,” said Caroline.

  The doctor smiled. “About now, everybody looks tiny to me. So, no history of this sort of size in the family?”

  “Not that I know of,” Caroline said. “Not that kind. His grandmother—my mother—was big.”

  “How big?”

  “Fat,” said Caroline. “Extremely.”

  The doctor wrote this down on his pad. “How did she die?”

  “In a chair,” said Caroline, smiling almost wickedly. “At night.”

  “But what of?”

  “Of fat, I always thought. Or Nephritis, that’s a disease, isn’t it?”

  “A condition.” The doctor scribbled.

  He was more interested in the fat grandmother than in any of the other human frailties—diabetes, heart murmurs, cigar addiction—that Caroline supplied to him. She wanted to tell him about family accidents: the distant cousin who’d lost a finger to a saw (“the little finger of his left hand,” she said, “thank God”); her father’s limp, caused by a boyhood fall and complicated by arthritis.

  “Well, that runs in the family,” the doctor said. “Young Jim’s back is somewhat arthritic.”

  He was disappointed that we knew nothing of Mrs. Sweatt’s background, but said he’d heard that the doctors in Boston had gathered some of it years before. Myself, I was impressed by Caroline’s knowledge of her family’s bodily quirks. I could not even supply true hair color for any of my relatives.

  “Do you think his sense of smell’s normal?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I would think so. Peggy?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  Finally the doctor capped his pen and straightened his papers. “That should do it, I think. If I have more questions, I’ll call. No doubt talking to the Boston doctors will turn up more.”


  “So?” Caroline said.

  Dr. Calloway stood up. “Do you have a question, Mrs. Strickland?”

  “You examined him. What do you think?”

  “I think,” he said carefully, “that he is suffering from giantism. My examination was mostly anthropometric.”

  “Anthropometric,” said Caroline.

  “I measured him. I’m chiefly interested in his rate of growth, and much of that information I will get in Boston. I’ll examine photographs, X rays, records, et cetera. I came here just to confirm things.”

  “But what’s the prognosis?” Caroline said. “That’s what James invited you here for. He knows he’s tall already. Do you think he’ll be able to lead a normal life?”

  Dr. Calloway laughed. It was a dull, clattering sound, as if he were searching his pockets for his smallest loose change. “Has he so far?”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “He has.”

  “In that case—if you think living in an oversized garage and painting pictures of oversized furniture is normal, then he is leading and will continue to lead a normal life.”

  “What about travel?” I asked.

  “What about marriage?” asked Caroline.

  Both the doctor and I looked at her. I didn’t know whether this was a joke, like her grandmother’s death in a chair.

  “I wouldn’t rule out careful travel,” he said slowly. “I would rule out marriage.”

  “Why?” said Caroline. I looked at her: her face was pale but angry. Maybe she wanted to make him say something so rude she could throw him out, insult him. I knew the feeling. I didn’t want this man to make a clean getaway either.