Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

James’s ambition — besides dancing — was to attend one of the twice-yearly shoe conventions in New York. Perhaps he thought of New York as a city of size, avenues and skyscrapers and noise. Would the tallest boy in the world be such a sight on those streets? Wouldn’t he be able to walk them, plenty to look up at, thinking, this place is so big ? All his life he’d taken pleasure in the smallest tricks: sleight of hand, a camera, what made one bird different from another. He looked for a patch of red beneath a wing, or made a visitor wonder where a card had gone to, or shrank the world into a snapshot.

Finally, though, these things were small, in theory and in fact, and they were no longer enough. He could not shrink himself by loving smallness, though he tried; perhaps he could manage it by courting things even larger than himself. His books on magic taught him that you can convince people of anything if you just direct their attention where you want it, distract them from the matter at hand. Plenty of distraction in Manhattan.

He wrote away for train schedules.

“We could drive,” I said. I still hadn’t convinced James to get in the Nash with me. After all those years of avoiding them, cars made him nervous. They seemed an easy way to break a bone.

“I like trains,” he said.

He bought a map of Manhattan and stuck it to the wall by his bed. I brought him books about the city’s history, the stories of O. Henry, Knickerbocker Tales .

“I had a dream about New York City,” he said sometimes.

“What about it?”

“I was there,” he said. “That’s all.” I waited for him to say, You were there, too. But he didn’t.

As the summer progressed, something changed. He still spoke of New York, but it was something he’d see in years, not months. He scorned his physical therapy.

“No point,” he said. “I can’t feel it working.”

“Well, you wouldn’t,” I said. If he didn’t feel his legs, how would he feel improvement? “The doctors know best.”

“The doctors don’t live with it.”

The only place he ever went was the front house, and then only to eat, to take advantage of their more extensive plumbing. In the fall he’d be a junior at the high school, but he decided not to go back.

“You could just go some of the time,” said Caroline. “They won’t care. Show up when you feel like it.”

“No,” he said. “If I can’t do it right I don’t want to do it at all.”

“Right?” she said. “What’s right? They’ll be glad to see you whenever you show up. You always do well. Isn’t that right enough?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Jim—”

“I don’t want to fall,” he said. “Those floors are slick. I can do the work at home.”

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.

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.”