The Giant's House

“Well, I got them,” he said. “These are good for your feet. I just started working for a shoe store. They make all my shoes.”

  I tried to picture James sitting on a shoe saleman’s slanty stool. He would not fit.

  “You’re selling shoes?” I asked.

  “Sort of.” He lifted one of the shoes out of the box and held it in his hand. “I’m going to do personal appearances. You know, show up. Look tall. And they’ll make my shoes for free.”

  “No pay?”

  “Shoes are expensive,” he said. “My shoes are, anyhow.” He looked back down at his feet. “Maybe I’ll go to New York.”

  “This shoe store is in New York?”

  He shook his head. “Hyannis. But there’s an expo in New York in the spring.” He pointed with the shoe in his hand at the shoes on my feet, navy blue snub-nosed pumps. “You shouldn’t wear those,” he said. “They’re bad for your feet. These”—he handed me the shoe—“they have ankle support and arch support and everything. I talked to the shoe guy. I was just going to get you black, and he wanted to talk me into pink. I knew you wouldn’t wear pink shoes.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “That’s true.”

  “So we compromised on red. Reddish brown, anyhow.”

  “They’re wonderful,” I said.

  “Try them on. Might be a little stiff at first, but they’ll wear in. The shoe guys break mine in for me with a machine, but they know exactly how my toes go. They’ve got a cast of my foot. A couple of casts. They’ve got one they’re going to put in the window, and a shoe in my size that they’re going to bronze and hang outside. I have to sit down now,” he told me. “Try them on.”

  He went to one of the library’s older chairs—the nineteenth-century furniture fit him best; the newer stuff was blocky and ungenerous—and dragged it close so he could watch me.

  I knew, looking at the shoes, that they would be murder. True, they had ankle support. And arch support, but for someone as flat-footed as I was—and getting more flat-footed every year—that would hurt, not help. Most important was the missing half-size I had shaved off, out of vanity’s sake. Now what difference would a half-size smaller foot have made to a sixteen-year-old boy, especially one who wore size thirty shoes?

  They’d put a little broguing around the toes of the shoes—to make them feminine, no doubt. They reminded me of the sort of boots sullen young girls of the gay nineties wore. I picked one up.

  Luckily, I could get my foot in. I was glad James had made me confess to the additional half-size. I bent down to lace it up, disappearing behind the circulation desk. The shoe had a bracing, athletic feel.

  “Try them both,” he said, straining to see me over the desk. “I can take them back for adjustments. Get them to stretch out parts.”

  I’d deliberately chosen the left shoe, since my left foot was slightly smaller than my right. But I put the other on, laced it up.

  “Walk in them,” James said. “Make sure they fit.” He sounded like my mother, school-clothes shopping.

  I took a few steps. It seemed like a miracle, and I the heroine of a fairy tale. They fit. They were rigid and, truth be told, unflattering, but what did I have that needed so badly to be flattered? I walked around the front of the desk and wiggled my toes for him.

  “Okay?” he said.

  “I love them.”

  “But do they fit?” asked James, ever practical.

  “Of course,” I said. “I couldn’t love anything that didn’t fit.”

  “Aunt Caroline says I shouldn’t take advantage of the shoe store, but they told me I could have as many pairs of shoes as I want, just ask. I was going to get a pair for Mom, but I didn’t.”

  I’d been admiring the shiny uncreased toes of my shoes. When I looked up at James, he was staring at my feet.

  “Why not?”

  “She only wears tennis shoes now, when she wears them at all. Mostly she just sleeps or stays on the sofa.”

  At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about Mrs. Sweatt. “How’s she feeling these days?”

  “Um. The same, I think. Aunt Caroline thinks better, but I don’t. She doesn’t get out much. You should come see her.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh, well. I don’t blame you for not wanting to.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just—well, maybe when she feels better.”

  “Sure,” said James. He smiled at me. “Whenever that is.”

  Though I loved my shoes (they are even now in their original box, worn once, immaculate), I did not love the fact of the shoe store. How was this different, I wondered, from Anna Swann in Barnum’s museum? In those days I still imagined James could have a career other than Acting Tall, that being inspected by the curious was fine on a volunteer basis (in the summer he could not help it) but was not a sensible profession.

  “So,” I said to Caroline when she came to see me the next Monday. “James has a job.”

  “He does?” she said. She took her spot at the front table; it was quiet, so I went to join her. “How wonderful.”

  “You don’t know about the shoe store?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “I never really thought of that as a job. He’s just going to be there twice a year, walk around.”

  “And perhaps go to New York for them?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s looking forward to that.”

  “A lot of responsibility for a boy.”

  “Good for him,” said Caroline. “And that way the shoes are free.”

  “When I was a girl,” I said, “I didn’t have to work for my shoes—”

  Caroline took my hand across the library table. “When you were a girl,” she said quietly, “you didn’t wear size thirty shoes. Peggy, if I could buy them for him, I would. But being that tall is an expensive proposition. I can’t tell you. It’s not like we’re rich people. I mean, we do our best, but shoes cost seventy-five dollars, and clothing as much or more. Mrs. Sweatt can’t do a thing for him. I mean, she does plenty for him, they talk, she loves him—well, that’s neither here nor there. If I could go to the shoe store, walk around for him, I would, I promise you.” She laughed, laid one hand on her stomach. “Goodness knows I feel like the biggest woman in the world, but they’re not offering free shoes to me.”

  At home that night, I looked at my shoes and thought of Mrs. Sweatt, napping on her sofa in her sneakers. All I had wanted was to become part of that family. And not even an important part: a trusted maid, perhaps, a cousin several times removed. But Mrs. Sweatt stamped her foot, told her sister-in-law never to invite me back. I loved seeing Caroline and James at my library, but I was still being simply a librarian.

  I was a fool. Foolish to imagine making myself part of a family that was not mine; foolish to think that people thought of me as anything but the librarian, a plain, no-nonsense, uninteresting person. Foolish to imagine myself some Hans Christian Andersen princess in those damn shoes, possessor of the only feet to inhabit the magic oxfords, especially since by the end of that day my feet—as if they might really have been momentarily bewitched into submission by the shoes—assumed their true size, and cursed at me bitterly for shutting them up in those leather dungeons.

  A knock on the door usually meant my brokenhearted landlord. Gary was a quiet, plain man, and his excuses for coming to my door did not make much sense. In winter, he wanted to check my thermostat; for what he never said. In summer, he wondered if it was too hot, though of course there was nothing he could do about that. Even when I met him outside, on my way to work, he tested the air with his arm as if he had not been outdoors all along, and guessed at the temperature.

  Nobody ever loved a woman more than Gary loved his wife, everybody said, and this might be so. People in town were amazed when he, who was heartbroken and not very handy, converted the attic of their house into the apartment I moved into.

  “He’s getting over her,” Astoria told me, just after I’d moved to town and started work at the library. “Otherwise he n
ever would have been able to do it.”

  This proved not to be the case. Even my most casual conversation with him—at the house, at the library—was peppered with references to My wife, Cynthia. Finally I told him: I know her name now, you can just call her Cynthia. This seemed to both alarm and please him, as if I were laying claim simultaneously to his memories and the burden of them.

  So when someone knocked on the door a few days later, I assumed it was him. It was winter and I didn’t know what sort of conversation he might make. Instead, it was Caroline.

  Messy people might wish their apartments clean when unexpected guests arrive. I wanted mine messy so I could do something, glance around nervously, shuffle newspapers to make room on the couch. If, upon my death, someone decided to turn my apartment into a museum, as Caroline did years later with James’s cottage, they’d have to bring things in. History is all in how you display it, what’s preserved: this is the lesson of Pompeii. Better to use the library, string velvet bank ropes in front of the tall stool behind the circulation desk, fan out my typed catalog cards in glass cases, frame the form letters to the thoughtless people who kept books too long and the hopeful people who returned them late but never paid the fines. In my apartment even the toothbrush was shut in the medicine cabinet. It was a toothbrush anyone might have owned. Everything was in its place, exactly, and there was nothing to occupy my worried hands.

  Caroline sat down slowly on the sofa; I sat next to her and straightened the fringed throw that our weight had disturbed.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Well,” Caroline said. Her bright lipstick hadn’t quite made its way into the corners of her mouth. “Missus is … she had an accident.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “What happened?”

  “That, of course, is the question. Something went wrong with her pills. She took too many of them, I guess.”

  “On purpose?” I asked.

  “Oh, maybe she forgot she’d taken it. We don’t know. She’d had a drink or two. No,” she said, suddenly sure. “Not on purpose.” Then she took a deep breath and told me this story:

  Something had gone wrong with Mrs. Sweatt’s medication. That is, she took a quantity of sleeping pills—Caroline had been sure she’d thrown them all out—together with a quantity of vodka. In the middle of the night, as far as they could tell, she began to get sick and wandered—on purpose? thinking it was the bathroom?—into James’s room. For some reason he elected not to wake Caroline and Oscar but to help his mother get some fresh air. Together they stepped outside onto the front step, which because it was January was icy, and because it was two-thirty A.M. had not been sanded and salted by Oscar—Caroline explained that her husband was always careful about such things. James slipped and fractured his shin; Mrs. Sweatt tumbled into the bushes. By the time James had gotten into the house and woken his aunt and uncle, his mother was unconscious.

  Now James was in a hospital in Boston. The doctors said they were surprised it hadn’t happened sooner—growing at such a rate guaranteed weakened bones, and almost any bone in his body was a candidate for breakage. Especially his legs, which grew faster than any other part of him.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m so sorry. How is Mrs. Sweatt?”

  “She’s dead,” Caroline said wonderingly—and she made it sound as if she were (like Mrs. Sweatt) merely repeating something I had said, as if I were the one with sudden tragic news.

  “Good heavens,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Poor Mrs. Sweatt.”

  “We wanted you to know—”

  “—I appreciate it—”

  “—we wanted you to know that we’re not telling James. That she’s dead. Not right off.”

  I looked at her. “How can you not?”

  “We’ll tell him when the excitement is over.”

  “It’s not going to be over,” I said. “His mother is dead.” The Stricklands’ extreme secrecy struck me as craven; they were as stingy with bad news as some people were with good.

  “We’ve thought this over,” said Caroline. “We really have, Peggy. James was trying to save his mother, if only for one night. How can we tell him he didn’t?”

  I didn’t know.

  “So maybe when he’s a little better. When he’s up and around. Just not today, and not tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Caroline said.

  “Yes.” I waited for her to get up. Instead, her eyes filled, and then tears rolled down her face. No other evidence of grief, just slow tears and an embarrassed smile. Then she set her wet turned-up hands on her considerable stomach, as if she intended to save her tears for some future use.

  “We’ll miss her,” she said. Then she patted her face with the back of her hands.

  “What will happen to James?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’ll stay with us,” said Caroline. “He’ll always stay with us.”

  “I know that,” I said. “What did the doctors say?”

  “They don’t know. Get taller still, I guess. Bound to stop eventually.”

  “The doctors said that?”

  “No. The doctors say he’s healthy. They’ve said that all his life. For now, he’s still growing.” Caroline shook her head at this, as if his growth were some teenage notion he’d got ahold of, motorcycle riding or a wild girl. “That’s all they’ll say.”

  “What have you told him? About his mother, I mean.”

  “The truth,” she said. “Just not all the way. She’s tired, she’s gone for a rest. James likes you,” she said, and even given the circumstances, that trilled my heart. “Just be nice to him. I mean, I know you are.”

  “I am,” I said. “I will.” I went to put my hand over hers, but couldn’t. “You’ll need help,” I told her. “Especially now that you don’t have—”

  “Yes. Well.” She played with the fringe of the throw. “I just never saw it coming.”

  “Never saw what?”

  “Mrs. Sweatt’s problems,” she said. “She seemed so happy to me. She had James, she had plenty to do. You’d never have known she was the least bit sad.”

  Not sad? To me she seemed the saddest person in the world, a woman completely perplexed by her life and its trappings. Being myself a sad person, I recognized that much. My own sadness isn’t something I admit to people. If someone asked, yes, I think I might. If someone noticed and inquired, I would explain—I think I would explain—that I am a fundamentally sad person, a fundamentally unlovable person, a person who spends her life longing for a number of things she cannot bring herself to name or define. Some people can. Some people are small reference works of their own obsessions and desires, constantly cross-indexed and brimming with information. They do not wait to be consulted, they just supply.

  Others of us—and I include Mrs. Sweatt—do not. We are the truly sad, I think; just as in some religions, those who pray alone, who do penance and charity work alone, are the truly pious. Like the truly pious, we can recognize one another. Mrs. Sweatt and I were lonely, independent mourners.

  But she was beautiful, and I was not. This is a vital difference. She grows more beautiful in my memory, looks more like James. True enough she is small and curvy and he tall and thin, but they have the same hair—though hers is blonder, by the grace of nature or science—the same upturned nose, the same pink pillowy lips. Young faces, much more alike in my memory than they ever were when alive.

  They are both dead now, and I can make them look however I want.

  She was beautiful. That is a fact. So beautiful Oscar could take her face and turn her into a superheroine, into Rocket Bride, and think he was only drawing a beautiful woman, no one in particular. He gave Mrs. Sweatt, abandoned wife, powers that might have made her life bearable. Maybe not. Maybe they’d have been a burden, a constant reminder. Did Rocket Bride want simply to leave, her gown a netted heap on the ground? Say, forget it, I’m taking my honeymoon solo? Crime can take care of itself; injustice wi
ll have to continue unabated without my help. I will drink blue drinks and dance alone. I will love myself.

  But you cannot fly away from people who have flown away from you; you cannot fly into your own arms. Mrs. Sweatt’s husband had left her, James himself was growing away and away. Once you have been left you are always left; you cannot leave your leaving.

  Mrs. Sweatt did not lift into the air like Rocket Bride, even though I liked to imagine she did. She died in the hospital, or on the way there, and that was only the end of the story. All night long she’d been dying on that gaudy flowered sofa, where she napped, where she waited for James to come home from school, where she spent her solitary nights. That sofa already missed the dip of her back, the way her legs were too short for her body. The way she hid those short legs with her full, high-waisted skirts.

  I see her rocketing into the sky, not in a wedding dress but in one of those skirts, so big it blossoms up and haloes her. Not defiant, as Oscar had drawn her, but pensive, full of plans.

  She is looking for an aerial view.

  There she goes, into the thin air that wraps around the heads of statues, not the sludge near the ground that we usual people must make do with. Everyone stands up as she leaves, though she’s flying away from us and can’t see. She just knows. Do we miss her yet? Our heads are thrown back, mouths wide as bowls, ready for her to drop something into them. Maybe she’ll write something in the sky with her vapor; maybe the vapor will use her up entirely. She levels off, inclines her head toward the ground. She’s so far away she can see everything and everyone, she’s made them all neighbors this way, her long-gone husband and the President of the United States and Orson Welles and she can’t tell the difference between the people and the buildings, the Washington Monument is just a stop sign from this altitude. It’s like she’s turned everyone on earth into tacks on a child’s map, each marking our own place. That far up she can see the slow curve of the earth. She sweeps closer, so she can see what we’re wearing, the color in our cheeks. James is here, in this crowd of people watching her, and she can barnstorm him, run a hand over his head without disturbing anyone else. We don’t even feel the breeze of her skirt as it flutters by, as she reaches down and touches his hair and his chin. Even now she straightens his collar, not on tiptoes this time. Only she can do this for him.