Maybe I’d loved him because I knew he’d leave me. Maybe, once. It wasn’t worth it.
We hadn’t explained things to the funeral home, and they’d sent over a regular-sized hearse. “My God,” the driver said. “This is who it is?” He folded his arms across his chest. “No way. No way to do this.”
“Yes, there is,” I said. And they seemed to believe me. With Oscar’s help they lifted him to the back of the hearse, tied the doors shut.
“We’ll take him to the hospital—” one man started.
“What?” said Oscar. “Why? Is he—”
“No,” the guy said, and then, more gently, “No. But we need to get him declared dead by a doctor.” And they drove down the street, neighbors watching from their porches, and took James away from us.
I stood there, waiting for him to sit up, part the pleated curtains of the back window. Those curtains looked like coffin lining—why did the dead need so many folds of fabric, so much luxurious privacy, everywhere they traveled? I waited for him to wave at me. He didn’t, of course. I went back to the cottage and made his bed. I crawled into it for a second, wanting warmth. But it had been hours since anything warm had been in that bed, the sheets were cold, and I did not want to be the one to warm them.
What killed him was an infection caused by a brace rubbing his leg, the sore spot so far away from his brain he never felt it at all. This is not poetic fancy, but fact: the news from his leg was never delivered. He hadn’t noticed that he’d lost feeling that far up. Neither had we.
He was just three months past twenty, eight foot seven inches, four hundred and fifteen pounds.
There were other things to do. Funeral arrangements, for instance. Caroline took charge of that. He needed two burial plots. There was money—James’s circus money—to buy them, but the ones for sale were by themselves, away from family. Caroline and Oscar donated theirs, by James’s fat nephritic grandmother and limping arthritic grandfather. With the money they bought themselves a spot in the new part of the cemetery, knowing they would eventually have each other for company.
The funeral was attended by neighbors, reporters, friends, even the real estate brokers who saw him fall. Stella came up from Maryland with her husband and, incredibly, a baby, plump and pink-cheeked and pretty like her mother. I did not talk to her, nor to the reporters, not even to Caroline and Oscar. They had asked me to sit in the front with them—wasn’t I family? Didn’t I know by now I was?—but I said my heart couldn’t take that. “The front of a church is not the front of a roller coaster, Peggy,” Caroline said gently, “it’s going to be bad no matter where you sit.” I thought differently. A stranger might have concluded that I worked for the church or the funeral home, standing as I did at the door welcoming people, handing out programs; sitting as I did at the back, by myself, so I could see what was going on; comforting, as I did, some old lady who didn’t even know him but had shown up after seeing the obit in the paper. “He was so young,” she said, sobbing into my shoulder, “so young, and such an unhappy life. God is strange. God is good, but God is strange.”
For the second time, James made Time’s “Milestones” column.
He left a will, of sorts. Any money in the bank was to stay there for Alice’s education. The cottage belonged to Oscar and Caroline; only sensible, since it stood on their property. Anything else—letters, paintings, books—was left to me. I could do what I wanted with them, though he hoped I would consider requests from friends who wanted souvenirs. He’d underlined the word friends. Dr. Calloway called from Illinois, wanting to buy some things. “I have quite a collection of memorabilia, and I’d be interested in adding some of James’s effects,” he said.
“Dr. Calloway?” I said. “Doctor? Go to hell.” He hung up on me immediately; I knew he was that sort of man.
You seem to be taking all of this very well, somebody said to me. I don’t remember who it was. That person was wrong, although I didn’t know it then. I was taking it the worst possible way.
I believed then that the thought James is dead would be the key that swung open my heart and then broke off in the lock. It would ruin me. I believed I was making a choice. I could carry on, I could do my work and think of him and iron my clothes in the morning; or I could become so wrecked by grief that I wandered the streets, my fingers stuck in my hair and my hair stuck in my mouth, strangers running from me as I said, wait a minute, I only want to tell you about somebody. I thought these were the only two paths before me, that they diverged so wildly that, as I stepped onto the sensible ordered path, my lifelong choice, I would not see or think of the other path again; it would lead to another neighborhood entirely. I did not know that walking on one, I would be always in sight of the other; that they crossed one another sooner rather than later; and then crossed each other again, and again.
I offered my help to Caroline in closing up the cottage. “We’ll leave it for a while,” she said. That put me out of a job. I boxed up my inheritances without looking at them, emptied his desk drawers, rolled up paintings, and put them in my car.
And then I went home to my apartment.
Part Three
The Reverse Orphan
Caroline opened the cottage as a museum three weeks after James died. Oscar painted a sign that said, JAMES CARLSON SWEATT HOME, and then, in smaller letters, (THE GIANT’S HOUSE). They hung this in front of their house, visible from the street, so that visitors knew to come there first, pay their admission, and wait for the tour.
Some people thought that was heartless. At first I was one of them. But in fact Caroline was just being sensible. The tourists still came by, as they had when James was alive, and now they were insistent. They didn’t understand that, were James living, they’d be invited in only through his good graces. They acted like the cottage was some sort of national landmark, and that Oscar and Caroline’s reluctance to let them in was actionable.
Caroline explained it to me this way: “If I just sent them back, they’d think anything. Nobody there to stop them. But if I go, if I make it a tour, I can say things. I can explain who he was, and they have to listen to me.”
Caroline didn’t do a thing to the cottage, didn’t bother to dust or put away the huge shoes, one in the kitchen, another nosing the threshold of the back door. It was like they were on their way out, she told the tourists, looking for the one pair of feet in the world they’d ever fit. That was like her: turn every casual thing into something to be remarked upon.
“Custom made,” she said. “Well, everything he owned was. James Carlson Sweatt wasn’t made for anything store bought.”
She charged fifty cents for adults, a quarter for children, and sat in her own house waiting for someone to knock on her door. She was pregnant again, and this was perfect work for her. All day long she knit, put her knitting down, picked it back up. Sometimes the tourists were so desperate for souvenirs they admired her work and offered to buy it before she even took them out back to see the house itself. She stuck their money in the pocket of her shirt and led them through her own house, living room to kitchen to back door, and across a little patch of grass to the Giant’s House.
His glasses on the windowsill above his bed—had he taken them off to die?—were as big as horses’ blinders. That’s what the tourists wanted to hear, as big as. They didn’t care about Big enough to fit him or Couldn’t ride in a plane. You would think seeing the things themselves would drive out all thoughts of comparison, but the tourists craved those easy metaphors, wanted more, didn’t even care if they were true. Those glasses got bigger and bigger. As big as a child’s first bicycle; one lens the size of a toboggan.
He hadn’t taken them off to die. He took them off to sleep, I watched him do it.
The tourists skulked into the corners of the cottage, giggling, wanting to find the bathroom. Sometimes they asked.
Generally, of course, James used the front house—no endorsements for oversized commodes, so he went without—but toward the end he sometimes had to
rely on bedpans. He was an invalid, after all.
It was a reasonable question. But she could never think of a way to make it sound natural, not so bad.
“Closed to the public,” she always said. “Tour’s over.”
So there was something else for me to think about: how to turn the cottage into a proper museum. I’d have the paintings framed, maybe some newspaper clippings, too. We’d make up a plaque describing his life. I imagined scripting a tour, instead of the jumble of facts (“he liked birds; he read a lot of books; I never heard him sing”) that Caroline presented. There were clippings I could frame, photographs—dozens of the celebrated man’s late mother, who hadn’t even lived to see the cottage, never mind set foot in it. But I couldn’t look through the papers until we decided to really make it a tourist attraction. I couldn’t start until I had to, not until it was a job and there was some purpose to it.
Caroline didn’t want anything formal. “He’s not history yet, Peggy, even if the tourists think he is. It’s just his house, still.”
“But if we made it professional,” I said.
“No. Someday in the future, maybe. Not yet.”
The difference was that Caroline hadn’t spent that much time there, and now she was there several times a day. If she left it James’s house, she could believe he might be coming up the front walk for dinner at any moment. When she took tourists over, she could pretend he had just stepped out, he was at the library, out watching birds. Don’t move anything, he’ll be back, he wants everything just so.
But I had once been there several times a day, and now not at all, and I wanted the cottage changed. If we turned it into a museum, moved those heartbreaking shoes and made the bed again and put solid framed things on the wall, maybe then I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, wanting to walk over. Maybe I wouldn’t sit at my kitchen table at night, still waiting for the phone to ring.
Unlike Caroline, I could not bear to keep thinking he might walk in at any moment, because every moment of the rest of my life he wouldn’t be, he wouldn’t walk through that door, he wouldn’t telephone me, and I had to stop expecting he would.
So some days after work I stopped by to make my case. I never went to the cottage; I relied on Caroline’s descriptions of its success. They banked all the money in Alice’s account. One Friday, two months after James’s death, I heard Caroline talking to someone in the dining room as I walked through the front door.
The man Caroline was speaking with turned and looked at me. He had round blue eyes and a slightly ashen face, fluffy hair that stood out in peaks. He smiled at me.
“Peggy,” Caroline said. “This is my brother, Calvin.”
“We’ve met,” he said. Then he said to himself, almost immediately afterward, “No, we haven’t.”
“You haven’t met,” said Caroline. “You were long gone by the time Peggy moved to town.”
Caroline’s brother. She didn’t look happy to see him. Then I realized: James’s father. Mrs. Sweatt’s husband. Your father, C. Sweatt.
“Yes,” I said. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Hometowns,” he said. “Sometimes they get pretty scary when you think about them. But I figured it was time to come see where Jimmy lived.”
“Well. I guess it’s bad news for you. He’s dead.”
“I know that,” said the man.
“He knows,” said Caroline softly. “He’s here for his fucking inheritance. He’s here for the money.”
“Not like that, Carrie,” he said. “I just asked if there was any.”
I leaned on the doorjamb and rubbed my forehead. Caroline sat down at the table across from her brother.
She said, “Well then, you have your answer. No, none.”
“None?” The man smiled at me. “Circus, shoe stores? All those journalists, wanting to know the story?”
“Clothes,” Caroline said. “Furniture. Medical expenses. Coffin.” She looked at the man. “Specially made coffin. Cemetery said he needed a double plot.”
“End to end?”
She shook her head. “Diagonal. Concrete for the coffin.”
“Concrete?”
“To keep the curious—kids, doctors, entrepreneurs—from digging up the body.”
“Nobody would do that,” said Mr. Sweatt.
“It’s happened before. He wasn’t taking any chances, and rightly so. It was his money.”
“Maybe. He was my son.”
“What could he owe you?”
“Respect.” He gave the kitchen table a cheerful thump. “A little respect, and a little remembrance.”
“Calvin Sweatt,” said Caroline. “What for? What did you ever do for him?”
“Genes,” said the man. “That’s my investment. I supplied half of ’em. I was his father. Look at your daughter. Pretty tall. Must run in the family.”
“James favored his mother in every way,” I said quietly.
“I have photographs I could show you,” Caroline told him. “The two of them had the same face. Wasn’t a bit of you anywhere in James.”
“Maybe not in the face,” he said. “That leaves the body. Law of averages says I’m responsible for a good part of him. Without those genes, would he have been tall? No. Famous? No. Hired by the circus or the shoes people? Got his picture in the paper? Earned a living? No.”
“Been happy?” asked Caroline. “Yes.”
I looked at this man, who looked back at me, still smiling. “You tell me,” he said. “Was he happy?”
I said, “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
The next day Mr. Sweatt walked into my library. “Ah,” he said. “The illustrious librarian.”
“Mr. Sweatt. Good morning.”
“So far, not so good. Off season in vacationland. I find it depressing. Though not as depressing as the summers. I forget how small New England is: it’s like the whole place was built by dwarfs,” he said. “No offense.”
“No,” I said. “Well, this isn’t the West, that’s for sure.”
“New York’s my town, actually. Full of good-looking people.”
“Nice.” I turned my back to him.
“So maybe you could show me around town,” he said.
“You know this town,” I told him. “Didn’t you grow up here?”
He took off his hat and twirled it on his hand. “A lot’s different. Just here. Now, as I recall, fiction used to be here in the front room. Whydja change that? I figure, fiction is most popular, and you put your biggest mover out front.”
“This is a library,” I said. “Not a business. We arrange things for space.”
“See? Just that’s interesting. Tell me more.”
“Mr. Sweatt—” I said.
“Cal.”
“Mr. Sweatt. Please. I cannot help you.”
“Coffee?” he said.
“Across the street. No food or drink allowed in the library.”
He sighed deeply, put upon. “I mean, have coffee with me. My son died. I know I don’t seem like the kind of man that would bother, but it does. My son died, and my sister won’t talk to me, and I come back to my old hometown—suddenly I’m a villain, with nothing to console me, not even my son. I’m a—there must be a word for it; you’re a librarian, you tell me—I’m the opposite of an orphan.”
“You didn’t seem to care about James when he was alive,” I said. “So I don’t know why you should miss him now that he’s gone.”
“I did care for him. I did. After I saw him in New York—”
“When did you see him in New York?”
“Oh, what, a year ago? He was in town for the circus thing, and the paper covered it, so I showed up at the hotel. We did meet, you know. In the hotel. The restaurant.” His face softened. “You were there, and you were wearing a brown dress. See? I’m not making it up.”
I looked at him a little more closely. The drunk man. Louise’s friend.
“I didn’t introduce myself so well that night. I got scared. But I tal
ked to him in the lobby the next morning, and a couple of times on the phone in his room.”
And James had never told me. Would he have? If we’d married, would we on our honeymoon have spilled all those secrets we had kept?
“Talking to him in a hotel a year ago,” I said, “is not proof that you cared.”
“But not just then. I called him at home, too. His number was BL7-8928. He knew mine, too. Find his address book, I’ll betcha I’m in it. He wrote me, too. I have the letters, I can show them to you. Me, I was never too good at that. But a couple, I sent. Was Jimmy a saver?”
“A what?”
“A saver. Did he save things? Letters, I mean. Well, postcards.”
“A saver,” I said. “Yes, he was. Well, I’ll look.”
“If Caroline didn’t throw ’em out. She’s not feeling kindly toward her old brother, I know that much.”
“No, she isn’t. But I have those things. If he kept them—if you sent them—they’re at my apartment.”
“You’ll find them,” he said. “So have coffee with me. I have a couple of questions I need to ask you.”
“What about?” I said.
He looked surprised. “Jimmy,” he said. “I want to know about my boy.”
Why did I agree? I was lonely. And I kept telling myself, James would have wanted me to. My job, I thought, my new job, was not to let this man off the hook.
“Come back at lunch,” I said. “I’ll answer your questions.”
We went to the coffee shop across the street. Mr. Sweatt flirted with the waitress, who was not charmed. Somebody had told this man he was charming, and he believed it, and maybe it would work on some. But not me and not the waitress. He had a strange habit of starting a story and then laughing, as if he thought his own laughter was a sterling endorsement of the quality of what followed.
“Nice hair,” he said to me. “Permanent?”
“I hope so,” I said.
He laughed. “No, I meant your curls—they a permanent wave?”