Michael Cunningham - A Wild Swan - And Other Tales

Is Jack disappointed by his mother’s poverty of imagination, her lack of nerve in the face of life’s gambles, her continued belief in the budget-conscious, off-brand caution that’s gotten her exactly nowhere? He is.

I mean, Mom, look at this house. Don’t you think thrift is some kind of death? Ask yourself. Since Dad died, why hasn’t anyone come around? Not even Hungry Hank. Not even Half-Wit Willie.

Jack doesn’t want, or need, to hear her answer, though it runs silently through her mind.

I have my beautiful boy, I see strong young shoulders bent over the washbasin every morning. What would I want with Hungry Hank’s yellow teeth, or Half-Wit Willie’s bent-up body?

Nevertheless, her son has sold the cow for a handful of beans. Jack’s mother tosses the beans out the window, and sends him to bed without supper.

Fairy tales are generally moral tales. In the bleaker version of this one, mother and son both starve to death.

That lesson would be: Mothers, try to be realistic about your imbecilic sons, no matter how charming their sly little grins, no matter how heartbreaking the dark-gold tousle of their hair. If you romanticize them, if you insist on virtues they clearly lack, if you persist in your blind desire to have raised a wise child, one who’ll be helpful in your old age … don’t be surprised if you find that you’ve fallen on the bathroom floor, and end up spending the night there, because he’s out drinking with his friends until dawn.

That is not, however, the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.

In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” the stranger has not lied. The next morning, Jack’s bedroom window is obscured by rampant green. He looks out into leaves the size of skillets, and a stalk as thick as an oak’s trunk. When he cranes his neck upward, he sees that the beanstalk is so tall it vanishes into the clouds.

Right. Invest in desert real estate, where an interstate highway is certain to be built soon. Get in on the ground floor of your uncle’s revolutionary new age-reversal system. Use half the grocery money to buy lottery tickets every week.

Jack, being Jack, does not ask questions, nor does he wonder if climbing the beanstalk is the best possible idea.

At the beanstalk’s apex, on the upper side of the cloud-bank, he finds himself standing before a giant’s castle, built on a particularly fleecy rise of cloud. The castle is dizzyingly white, prone to a hint of tremble, as if built of concentrated clouds; as if a proper rainstorm could reduce it to an enormous, pearly puddle.

Being Jack, he walks right up to the titanic snow-colored door. Who, after all, wouldn’t be glad to see him?

Before he can knock, though, he hears his name called by a voice so soft it might merely be a gust of wind that’s taught itself to say, Jaaaaack.

The wind coalesces into a cloud-girl; a maiden of the mist.

She tells Jack that the giant who lives in the castle killed Jack’s father, years ago. The giant would have killed the infant Jack as well, but Jack’s mother so ardently pled her case, holding the baby to her bosom, that the giant spared Jack, on the condition that Jack’s mother never reveal the cause of his father’s death.

Maybe that’s why Jack’s mother has always treated him as if he were bounty and hope, incarnate.

The mist-girl tells Jack that everything the giant owns belongs rightfully to him. Then she vanishes, as quickly as the wisp of an exhaled cigarette.

Jack, however, being Jack, had assumed already that everything the giant owns — everything everybody owns — rightfully belongs to him. And he’d never really believed that story about his father getting dysentery on a business trip to Brazil.

He raps on the door, which is opened by the giant’s wife. The wife may once have been pretty, but no trace of loveliness remains. Her hair is thinning, her housecoat stained. She’s as offhandedly careworn as a fifty-foot-tall version of Jack’s mother.

Jack announces that he’s hungry, that he comes from a place where the world fails to provide.

The giant’s wife, who rarely receives visitors of any kind, is happy to see a handsome, miniature man-child standing at her door. She invites him in, feeds him breakfast, though she warns him that if her husband comes home, he’ll eat Jack for breakfast.

Does Jack stick around anyway? Of course he does. Does the giant arrive home unexpectedly? He does.

He booms from the vastness of the hallway:

Fe fi fo fum

I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Be he alive or be he dead,

I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

The giant’s wife conceals Jack in, of all places, the very saucepan in which her husband would cook him. She’s barely got the lid put down when the giant lumbers in.

The giant is robustly corpulent, thundering, strident, dangerous in the way of barroom thugs, of any figure who is comical in theory (he wears a jerkin and tights) but truly threatening in fact, simply because he’s fool enough and drunk enough to do serious harm; simply because he’s a stranger to reason, because killing a man with a pool cue seems like a justifiable response to some vaguely insulting remark.

The giantess assures her husband that he merely smells the ox she’s cooked him for lunch.

Really?

Here we move, briefly, into farce. There’s nowhere else for us to go.

Giant: I know what ox smells like. I know what the blood of an Englishman smells like.

Giantess: Well, this is a new kind of ox. It’s flavored.

Giant: What?

Giantess: It’s brand new. You can also get Tears of a Princess Ox. You can get Wicked Queen Envy Ox.

She serves him the ox. A whole ox.

Giant: Hm. Tastes like regular ox to me.

Giantess: Maybe I won’t get this kind anymore.

Giant: There’s nothing wrong with regular ox.

Giantess: But a little variety, every now and then …

Giant: You get suckered in too easily.

Giantess: I know. No one knows that better than I do.

After the giant has eaten the ox, he commands his wife to bring him his bags of gold, so he can perform the day’s tally. This is a ritual, a comforting reminder that he’s just as rich today as he was yesterday, and the day before.

Once he’s content that he still has all the gold he’s ever had, he lays his colossal head down on the tabletop and falls into the kind of deep, wheezing nap anybody would want to take after eating an ox.

Which is Jack’s cue to climb back out of the saucepan, grab the bags of gold, and take off.

And which would be the giantess’s cue to resuscitate her marriage. It would be the time for her to holler, “Thief,” and claim never to have seen Jack before.

By evening, she and her husband could have sat laughing at the table, each holding aloft one of Jack’s testicles on a toothpick before popping them into their mouths. They could have declared to each other, It’s enough. It’s enough to be rich, and live on a cloud together; to age companionably; to want nothing more than they’ve got already.

The giant’s wife seems to agree, however, that robbing her husband is a good move.

We all know couples like this. Couples who’ve been waging the battle for decades; who seem to believe that if finally, someday, one of them can prove the other wrong — deeply wrong, soul-wrong — they’ll be exonerated, and released. Amassing the evidence, working toward the proof, can swallow an entire life.

* * *

Jack and his mother, wealthy now (Jack’s mother has invested the gold in stocks and real estate), don’t move to a better neighborhood. They can’t abandon the beanstalk. So they rebuild. Seven fireplaces, cathedral ceilings, indoor and outdoor pools.