Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

The school’s motto should have been, Neatness Counts .

I did well in library school. I am, in many ways, small-minded.

Still, behind the reference desk I frequently felt like an idiot. I didn’t recognize the names of certain cabinet members, or the currency of some unfamiliar country, or a great Scandinavian author. There were times I couldn’t even make sense of a problem, never mind find the solution. Some evenings I sat and thought up reference questions that only I could answer. Something about a newspaper article I’d read that afternoon, or all the known facts about one of my favorite painters. A student would approach me, shy and pessimistic, and when I gave them the exact answer, more information than they’d thought possible, when I said, “Rosa Bonheur …,” oh, they’d melt, they’d thank me and tell their friends: see that woman? She knows everything.

In my life I have spent hours constructing questions from just the right person, in just the right tone of voice: Have you ever known anyone who’s committed suicide? What celebrity would you marry if you could? Who was the first boy you ever kissed, and what do you remember about that boy?

And then the best part, the part where I answer, carefully, at length, because there’s someone who wants to know.

Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my whole life, who says, I know, me too . I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?

But you can’t spend your life hoping that people will ask you the right questions. You must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask. Otherwise you’re dreaming of visiting Venice by driving to Boise, Idaho.

That year — the year that James turned seventeen, 1956—everything changed. Caroline had her baby, a girl, and they named her Alice Sweatt Strickland. I met her when she and Caroline came home from the hospital; I’d never known a baby so young. She was damp and stunned-looking, as if she couldn’t believe everyone had been expecting her to come ashore for months: she herself never imagined such things — February, Cape Cod, all these looming faces, and dry land — were even vaguely possible. Not really , her expression said, not this .

We started work on a cottage behind the Stricklands’ house for James, with funds raised through the town, my doing: jars by cash registers in stores, a pancake breakfast, collections at basketball games. I’d asked a contractor about building an addition to the house, but he said it wasn’t possible: too much weight on a not-too-sturdy building. Besides, he said, it would have looked terrible. Plenty of room behind the house, though, and I liked the idea, because I thought a cottage would belong absolutely to James, and therefore also to me.

We got businesses to donate furnishings, everything specially made: a huge armchair made by a man in Dennisport who just wanted the pleasure of building it; a bed from a mattress factory in Tiverton, in exchange for bragging rights. Their slogan was: for the longest night’s sleep you ever had.

My doing, my doing, my doing. Oscar and Caroline were alarmed, I think, slightly grateful, quite bewildered.

“Slow down!” Oscar said when I breathlessly listed the things I thought James would need in his cottage. I spoke more slowly.

“No,” said Oscar. “Slow down everything. You’ll wear yourself out.”

“I have plenty of energy,” I said.

“You’ll wear me out, then.”

But I couldn’t stop. I bought a hot plate, a little radio, a record player. I convinced a local carpenter to make a desk and end tables. I got the permits for building, painted the walls myself. Every night after work, I went to the cottage. At first just to walk around outside, and then, as it took shape, to sit inside on the floor and try to see what else it needed. In many ways it was not a proper house — no bathroom (we didn’t have the money; he’d have to go to the front house); no basement; no kitchen; no closet until I pointed out the lack. But there were high ceilings without eaves and a door that was wide and tall with a threshold plumb to the floor and no treacherous steps. Nothing for him to trip on. I’d thought at first that there’d be two rooms, because the idea of spending the whole day in one small place seemed depressing, but the contractor said that a single room allowed for the most space. Caroline sewed curtains to match those in the front house; Oscar painted the trim green, with a few trompe l’oeil jokes — ants on the sills, one long rose across the sash of each window. They wouldn’t have fooled anybody’s eye.

Nights I sat on the floor and listened to the sounds that made their way from the front house to the back: the baby crying, the chatter of dinner plates in the sink. It was spring, and their windows were up, and I opened the front door of the cottage so I could hear Caroline’s lovely, odd voice singing to the baby, their whole house a radio. Never lullabies, just love songs: The Tennessee Waltz, After You’ve Gone, Careless Love . One night I heard all of a song about a woman who’d killed her lover and was pleading for the electric chair— Judge, Judge, please Mr. Judge —a morbid song for a baby, but it seemed to work: I heard Caroline finish and then Oscar’s awed voice saying, after a pause, she’s asleep .

My years of simple living and careful saving meant I had enough money to buy a car, as well as all the knickknacks I stocked the cottage with. Oscar had a friend with a huge used Nash who sold it cheap. The front seat was divided in half, and each side would fold back to meet the backseat, forming (it was pointed out to me by the leering mechanic who looked it over) a bed, single or double depending. I figured we could fold down the passenger’s seat, and James could sit in the back, with his legs in the front.

I was not much of a driver, having grown up and gone to school in cities, so I drove around town for practice. The Nash was the first car I’d ever owned, the first car I’d ever driven to amount to anything. It made me feel as though I were a Victorian lady who’d finally been allowed to wear bloomers — I could go anywhere, I realized, I could just start driving. But the only place I wanted to go was Boston, to visit James.

And so I did. Every Sunday for four months I drove the two hours to Boston, checking my rearview, the speedometer, the gas gauge, the odometer. One of the reasons I’d never had an interest in a car before was certainly fear; so much could go wrong. But those simple controls were as reassuring to me as footnotes. They explained, they quantified. If I had gas, if I drove at a sensible clip, if I noted the car directly behind me and the one passing me on the left and kept all of these things in mind, surely everything would be fine.

When James finally came home from the hospital — after four long months of healing and therapy and visits from friends, weekly visits from me — he lived somewhere new. He had a new relative, Caroline and Oscar’s daughter, Alice Sweatt Strickland. And he had me.

“How is it?” I asked. He walked slowly into the cottage, leaning on the cane. The town would hold a welcome home party for him that night at the high school auditorium; they’d wanted to greet him at the cottage — they thought having made and eaten pancakes meant they deserved full credit for the building — but I’d dissuaded them. Let him get settled, I said. James was not quite graceful with his new cane, with the braces I could hear squeak with each step. Oscar stepped across the threshold, followed by Caroline with the baby.