Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

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.

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.”