The Giant's House (10 page)

“—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 will 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.

There's James below. Really, he doesn't look so tall, so unwieldy. He looks handsome and manageable. An aerial view is not the whole story, it's a gloss, an abstract, a beautiful, beautiful summary.

In the end, she died as most of us do, absolutely still, earthbound.

Mrs. Sweatt's body was sent to Iowa, to be buried in her family's plot. “We'd like to come to the funeral,” Caroline had said when she called to make arrangements, thinking she'd send Oscar out, since she felt too pregnant to travel. But Mrs. Sweatt's mother said that wouldn't be necessary. Funerals were not a tradition their family observed.

That upset Caroline; it seemed heathen. But she couldn't hold a funeral herself, and she couldn't sway Mrs. Sweatt's family, and so the body was buried in Davenport, without ceremony.

“Terrible,” said Caroline, and it was terrible. “But at least she's back in Iowa.” She said this as though Mrs. Sweatt had just gone home to visit friends, stare at her old high school, have a drink in her favorite bad bar. As if being dead were like getting pregnant while unmarried, and Mrs. Sweatt had to disappear until the trauma was over.

“When you think about it,” Caroline said, “Iowa is not such a bad place to be.”

I talked my way back into the house that Saturday, by insisting that the only thing that would make me happy was doing the Stricklands' housework for them during their difficult time. This was a statement of fact.

Caroline was suddenly hugely pregnant, pink-cheeked and pretty. “Write to James, why dontcha,” she said. “He'll be there awhile. At least a couple of weeks.”

“I'm planning to go to Boston tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I'd take the bus.”

“Nice of you,” she said. “He could use some company. Oscar will drive you to the bus station.”

“Oh, that's not—”

“No. He will. Don't argue. Well, shall we sit?”

“How about laundry?” I said. My unoccupied hands made me nervous, as if I needed to prove that I was here for one purpose: housework. “There must be plenty to do.”

“Most people I would tell no,” she said. “But I know you won't be happy unless I say yes.”

“That's right,” I said.

There was plenty of laundry. Oscar's paint-spattered clothing, some of the cotton men's shirts Caroline wore instead of maternity smocks. Two shirts and a pair of pants belonging to James, which I set aside for hand washing to save wear since they were so expensive. It was the last of his laundry for a while; now that he was in the hospital, he'd dirty nothing. I didn't know where Mrs. Sweatt's clothing had gone.

“Have you been to see James?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I want to, but my doctor says stay put till the baby comes. Which should be at any moment. You don't know how to deliver a baby, do you?”

“Why? Are you feeling—”

“No. I just thought maybe you might have read a book on it,” she said, as if baby-delivering were a knack, like refinishing furniture, that people picked up for the pleasure of doing. “I feel very
pregnant
, and I feel like I will be very pregnant forever.” She sighed. “Luckily there's a cure for it.”

“Has Oscar been to Boston?”

She leaned on the dryer. “Just once. He gets nervous. Thinks I'll go ahead and have the baby without him. Once the baby comes, everything will be easier.”

“I admire your optimism,” I said.

“I hate suspense,” she said.

A line of socks waited for their matches on the top of the dryer.

“These poor socks have lost their spouses,” said Caroline. She picked one up and talked to it. “Poor widowed sock.”

“It's true,” I said. “Socks mate for life. Socks and swans.”

“But you can't just throw them out, can you? I always introduce them to another abandoned sock.” She picked up two lone socks and began to roll them together.

“Still,” I said, “they're never really happy.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Caroline. She unrolled the socks and held up both to inspect them. “Wash them together enough, and they grow to look like each other. Just like an old married couple.” Then she rolled them back up and threw them in the basket.

“A sock love story,” I said. “I've never before thought of the laundry as romantic.”

“Everything's romantic,” she said. “But I suspect you're a cynic.”

“No doubt.”

“Peggy,” she said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I said. I snapped a pair of Oscar's pants so the wrinkles flew out, then began to fold.

“No possibilities?”

I folded clothing double-time to show that I did not care to talk about it.

“Hmm,” she said. I didn't know what she was hmming about. “You should try it,” she said.

“I'm afraid I'm not cut out for all that,” I said.

“Well, who cut you out?” she said. “Cut yourself out again.”

“Easy to make it sound so easy,” I said. “But it isn't.”

“A girl needs a husband, Peggy,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “I've always been a terrible failure at being a girl.”

Caroline did not understand me. She was as beautiful as her sister-in-law but never seemed to put much effort into it; every attractive thing about her, from the way her clothes fit to the red lipstick that flattered her skin exactly, seemed like great good luck. She was a dry person, not in an unpleasant way: like a flower that
had been pressed in a dictionary for years, lovely and saved but liable to fall to dust. Like a pressed flower, she was messy but steady, captured at some moment for good. Even her clothing was like that, thin pretty cotton that showed the faint tint of her skin beneath it. For all her messiness, her clothes never seemed dirty, as if they came away from meetings with her unimpressed.

Caroline pulled a cobwebbed chair out from a corner and lowered herself into it. “I don't know,” she said.

“What don't you know?”

She stretched an arm, thinking. “I wish my family were here. I mean, Mrs. Sweatt is gone, poor Jim's in Boston. I even miss my brother, and I haven't missed my brother in years, not since he left Mrs. Sweatt. It's like I'm about to have even more family”—she put a hand on her stomach—“and all I can think is it isn't enough, I want
more
. Don't you ever get greedy for relatives?”

“You forget,” I told her. “I'm a librarian. All I'm greedy for is peace and quiet.”

Caroline wanted to find me a romance. Perhaps it was the action of a friend who was worried about me, of a soon-to-be mother who suddenly planned to take care of the world. Perhaps without Mrs. Sweatt, she needed a new person to take in hand. Perhaps she wanted to get me out of her hair.

I did think of love sometimes, for months at a time, to the exclusion of everything else. If I had love, I could concentrate on other things. If I had love, then my entire life would open up. Late at night I wouldn't have to dream of who would love me, and how; nor while shelving books; nor moments when I found myself not paying attention to what people were saying to me. Ordinary people, I thought—loved people—could devote themselves to good works, or other sins, or benign undemanding hobbies.