The Giant's House (20 page)

Of course I should have told James straight off about what Hugh Peters had said. James's life was constantly forged for him: your mother is alive, you'll be employed forever, you will never die, you should look forward to everything.

“Maybe New York in the spring,” he said. “I need to get in better shape.”

“Maybe so,” I said.

The curious thing is that within weeks of that shoe store visit, James began to get letters. They started close to home—the Boston papers wanted to visit, then
Time
magazine. A letter of inquiry from the circus. A doctor from the Midwest, a specialist in gigantism, sent an article he'd written.

How had we previously kept him a secret, I wondered. Why did it take so long to find us? I don't know to this day what started it—whether Hugh Peters, feeling bad, had called up the circus, looking for another job for James, or the parents had told people, who told more people. Every day there were more letters. Soon people knocked on the door of the cottage. If I was there, I turned them
away, but daytimes, when he was bored anyway, he invited them in to talk.

I made up a Do Not Disturb sign and told James to make good use of it. Saturdays, before I went to the cottage, I went to other libraries to look for James's reading material—he had long since exhausted mine. Soon I was driving to Boston on a regular basis, wandering through some other librarian's stacks like a regular, obsessed patron.

Time
magazine featured him in an article titled “Strong and Big,” along with a boy from Rhode Island who could lift 1,165 pounds attached to a bar across his thighs. When James turned nineteen,
Time
noted it in its “Milestones” column. It was as if he finally saw the pleasure in being that tall. Not that he loved it all the time, but a certain amount of attention and fuss was an acceptable dividend on all the energy it took to be the Tallest Man in the World. Caroline and Oscar and I felt bad. We'd struggled so long to make him
not
feel tall, worked so hard to believe that excess height was just a little quirk, a port-wine birthmark, a limp. Suddenly I began noticing his height myself. He was spectacular.

More letters. James worked up quite a correspondence with strangers, and I told him he'd have to hire a secretary to keep track of them all.

“I remember them,” he said. “I remember everybody.”

By the spring, he was famous.

Oscar was a good man and, before he became a father, an unworried one. I would have said that was his main character flaw: an unwillingness to worry. As soon as there was a problem, he would try to find an ingenious solution. A belt fixed with a bent nail, faulty locks repaired with folded paper. When a solution was not possible, he tried to turn the difficulty into advantage.

But then Alice was born, and the world suddenly seemed full of possible harm. He saw that a baby was a magnet for inappropriate objects. Bent tetanic nails could find their way to bare feet, folded paper sought the warmth of a baby's mouth. All his brilliant inventions turned to weapons aimed at his daughter. Even his nephew in the back house, even James, seemed an advertisement for things that went wrong.

In the basement, Oscar still fiddled with his comic books, had in fact borrowed from my library (which had borrowed it from another, more cosmopolitan library in Boston) a book on drawing the things, and so he pasted up and used faint pencil for guide marks and wrote careful block-lettered dialogue in squared-off balloons that floated over his characters. Except that his characters rarely said anything. Unlike Oscar, unlike anyone in Brewsterville, they simply acted, no announcements or negotiation. One becaped man punched his enemies in the jaw without benefit of the smallest
kerpow
or
kaboom
. Another swam in the bay that granted
his powers (he had none in the ocean itself), underwater for miles, not even a soft thought bubble carbonating the water above his head.

And, of course, Rocket Bride. She threw rosebud grenades at single criminals; when confronted by a gang of thieves, she cast her veil over them, and they struggled against one another like minnows beneath it. When she took them thus wrapped to the police station, she let them file out singly, looking for the face of her missing husband, that one bad man who knew everything about her: secret identity, dreamed-up names for future children, ring size, how she looked in a bathing suit, best friends. She might find him in any group of no-goodniks.

Rocket Bride was inclined to overlook mistakes. Sometimes, if a crook was very small or very young, she'd let him go. She treated the worst of them with understanding; you knew that she brought down evil for its own good. Even when a thug lay at the back of an alley, his tweed-capped head surrounded by birds, or stars, or any swarming celestial indication of concussion, Rocket Bride saw and smiled sadly. This was any mother's son, any wife's misplaced no-good lovable husband. This man, in his cap and gray jacket (always with three fastened buttons) is not so bad: somewhere, there is a good woman waiting to take him back.

And the same for every woman who schemed against Rocket Bride—despite the villainess's tight black outfit (always black and tight, because Rocket Bride was bell-shaped and pale, and Oscar had perfected only one female face)—that bad girl was forgiven, too. Rocket Bride's strength was righteous anger, but her weakness was The Extenuating Circumstance, which, unlike kryptonite, was everywhere.

I always thought she looked less like a superheroine than a medieval saint. Like any saint, she was caught at the moment of her martyrdom. Not run through with swords, not offering her eyes or heart or tongue on a tray, no bloody miraculous wound; instead, she was tragically physically intact, martyred as she was by heartbreak.

And then Rocket Bride, still husbandless, acquired a baby.
Oscar showed me the panel, Rocket Bride and Rocket Girl, both in what were wedding dresses or christening gowns.

“Who's the proud father?” I asked.

“There isn't one. I figure, Superman has X-ray vision, nobody gave it to him. Rocket Girl is part of Rocket Bride's superpowers.”

The baby nestled in her Rocket Mama's arms. Whether Oscar was thinking of the one historical precedent and His powerful mother, I didn't know. But I did see that Rocket Girl looked like Alice, with her blond sugary hair and slightly squinty eyes, and I knew that this was part of Oscar's dream, to put Alice in such a place that, with help, she could soar into the ether away from harm. She was a baby; he knew she couldn't do it without help. With her new responsibilities Rocket Bride avoided almost all confrontations.

“Tell me,” Oscar asked me once. “What do you think caused Jim's height?”

“His pituitary gland,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“But what caused
that
? There has to be a book that explains those things.”

“No, not yet,” I said.

Now the shady genetic side to his wife's family bothered Oscar. He hadn't thought to worry about it until his child arrived, and while he was inclined to blame Mrs. Sweatt for the inheritance that had turned James into what he called, “The Rockefeller of Height,” who knew? Could have been Caroline's brother, could be his wife—and therefore his daughter—had some of the same genes.

Oscar watched Alice, waiting for her to get big. Maybe it wouldn't be all of her. Maybe just one leg, or an organ, or most likely her head; one little isthmus would start to balloon and fill like all of James. I saw Oscar with his hands on either side of Alice's head, as if he could discern growth by touch, as if he could hold it back with his loving strength. Had Oscar lived in another country, he would have been the first father to advocate foot- and head-binding. Get to the root of the problem and stop it.

“Oscar,” I said. “Alice is fine. By the time James was her age, he was already growing.”

“I know.” Still, it seemed possible to him, her head expanding without the permission of the rest of her body. Like the comic books of the time, maybe, which he read: babies exposed to radiation who grew not only large but scaly and bug-eyed. One day he might wake up to find himself the father of the Turtle Girl of Cape Cod. Jimmy Olsen was always getting in scrapes like that, and when he did, he never recognized Superman.

The summer tourists didn't help. If Alice were around, they'd say, “Is this his little sister? She big for her age? She gonna be a giantess?”

“No,” Oscar would say. “She's just an ordinary height. And she's his cousin, not sister.”

“But still growing,” a tourist would say, smiling, making it sound like a dark prediction.

Even though Oscar hated it, the visitors kept coming. All day long people showed up at the cottage. The locals would knock shyly. The tourists knocked raucously or not at all. They ignored my Do Not Disturb sign.

“Is this the place—” they'd say, opening the door. “Whoops! Guess it must be.”

Mostly they didn't have questions, unless, of course, it was whether there were any souvenirs to be had.

“This is someone's
house
,” I told them. “It is not a tourist trap.”

“You could make some money,” they said. “Think about it.”

Most of the tourists were meltingly the same: families with one, two, or three children; portions of church tours (the tours themselves always had the sense not to come all at once, or else did not know about us); couples of which one member was an eager reader of the newsmagazines that occasionally profiled James as if he were a celebrity. They took his picture, had me take his picture with them, and sometimes sent a print when they'd returned home, as if he, too, would want a memento of the meeting.

A few of the visitors I remember with more clarity. A classics professor who'd come into the library, wanting to read town records (he'd mistakenly believed that one of his forebears had passed through Brewsterville), followed me after work and
presented James with an ancient pen and pencil set, inscribed with the name of a bank. A middle-aged lady with dyed-black hair, a wide painted mouth, and an artificial beauty mark told stories of being a silent movie starlet; there was something Egyptian about her, and her ears were unfashionably pierced and hung with thick gold hoops. I did not believe her stories of the Sisters Gish and Mister Griffith, but when she died a year later, the Boston
Globe
carried her obituary with a photograph: the same black hair and dark lips, the same beauty mark more artfully applied, the gold earrings, and a cheroot brandished between her tiny fingers. The copy below said that records were so unclear, she might have been fifty-nine, sixty-nine, or eighty at the time of her death.

One tall man seemed both delighted and depressed by James's size. “I'm six foot ten myself, and I felt outta place all my life. But then again, I ain't as handsome as you,” he told James, and in fact he wasn't: his features were thick and flat, like callouses; his voice sounded as though it came from a cave. He seemed like the friendliest, saddest monster I ever met. (By then I could diagnose it: acromegaly, the condition that results when the pituitary gland continues to produce even when the body has stopped growing in altitude. James, who never stopped growing, therefore never suffered.) This man had quit his job and was moving to California. To be an actor? we asked. Close, he said, professional wrestler; he'd met a man who'd promised him a job. “Lots of money in it,” he told James.

The visitors—both tourists and people from town—bore gifts, told their friends, wrote back. Their visits were formal, natives come to gawk at a tree that has grown in a strange holy shape. They brought things they thought he would like: big-print books (he was nearsighted, that was all), round serving platters to use as dinner plates, unabridged dictionaries. Assuming any large thing would please him, make him feel normal-sized, they offered up huge slices of fudge and casseroles cooked in Dutch ovens.

James took up painting that summer. Oscar had encouraged him to give it a try, and now that people were likely to drop by the cottage, it seemed only right to look busy. That way James could set down the brush and invite them graciously in. He started with paint-by-number sets, then moved on to watercolors, he explained, because he liked their easy, curvaceous effect. I didn't know what this meant. At first he did nothing but ocean scenes, though he never went to the beach, sand being too tricky a surface for his feet; they were naive, trusting feet, assumed every surface was flat and unmoving. After a while he started painting interiors of his cottage.

“What happened to the ocean?” Oscar asked him. “For my money, it's a lot more interesting than your chair. Centuries of artists agree with me.”

“I did the ocean till I figured out what I was doing,” James answered. “No matter what, I could always get it to look like the ocean. Now that I've got the hang of it, I'm moving on to harder things.”