The Giant's House (26 page)

We went to our separate rooms. I immediately washed my face and felt a little more clearheaded. Part of me knew it would be a good idea to change into my nightgown, but I felt suddenly too exhausted. After a minute I heard a knock, and I realized it came from the door that led from my room to James's. I went to it.

“Here you go, Peggy,” he said. He handed me a folded piece of hotel stationery. “Good night. See you in the morning.” He closed his door, and I closed mine.

The stationery said:

Love Poem for a Librarian
Although her love for me is infinitesimal
,
Her eyes are as Dewey as any old decimal
.

I lay awake for what seemed like hours but was probably minutes, repeating those two lines in my head. Sometimes I could not quite get the meter right; sometimes the syllables all fell into place exactly. James was on the other side of the door. I strained to hear what he was doing—pushing aside the drapes to look out, turning
down the sheets of his bed, maybe untucking his shirt before taking it off. I thought I could hear the brush of fabric against fabric that might have been any of these things. Life should be like this always, I thought again, and in my drunken state I wondered how I could make it possible. There has to be some way, I thought. Then I fell asleep.

“Clear day,” Pat Anderson said at ten-thirty the next morning, when he met us in the hotel lobby. There was a crowd around James, reporters and gawkers, asking questions. One man in an awful plaid jacket shook James's hand again and again. “Perfect Empire State Building weather!” Pat said. “Who knows—maybe we'll go out to the Statue of Liberty.”

“We can't get to the top of that,” I said.

“No, but good pictures there anyhow.” He looked at his watch. “I'll go flag the taxi. You flag Jim.”

James was reluctant to leave the crowd. The plaid man was still shaking his hand, then pulled out a business card. I saw that he was the drunk man from the dining room.

“Nice people,” James said absentmindedly, pocketing the card. “Wow. What's today?”

“Tuesday. Empire State Building Day. Remember to tell me when you get tired. No point in wearing yourself out first thing.”

“No,” said James. He climbed into the back of the taxi.

“You already sound tired. Are you up for this? Maybe you need to rest.”

“No,”
he said. “I'm in New York. I guess I should be allowed to do a little sightseeing.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I just—”

“Peggy,” he said, “you're not my mother, and I'm over eighteen, and I can tell when I'm tired.” He looked at me. “I promise.” You would have thought he was the one with the hangover. I didn't feel sick, exactly, just dried out and slow-witted.

The Empire State Building's lobby was big enough that had he stood in it alone, James would have looked quite in scale. A pack of
reporters trailed us, from the daily papers, from the newsmagazines. A man in a derby, who said he'd once been mayor of New York, shook James's hand.

“The only thing that rivals you is this building,” he said.

We couldn't avoid the elevator, of course, but it went so fast—so alarmingly fast!—that James didn't have to crick his neck for long. Then we stepped out.

James immediately went to the observation deck. The ex-mayor followed him. “Winds are thirty miles,” he said, and as I stepped outside, I could feel it. I hadn't imagined it windy up here; I thought for sure we'd left all the weather on the street. The ex-mayor took off his hat, put it back on, and clamped his hand down on its crown. Photographers took pictures of the three of us.

“Well, Jim,” he said, “New York isn't such a big place when you look down on it, is it?”

“It's a pretty good size,” James said.

Reporters wrote this down.

“You keep growing the way you do,” the ex-mayor said, “and you'll be able to get up here without using the stairs or elevator.”

Below us, New York went on as usual. It was so sunny even the dirt looked clean and monumental. The East River sparkled like some big scaled animal turning over and over in bed. “Where's the hotel?” James wondered, and Pat Anderson went over to help him locate the neighborhood.

“Quite a kid you got there,” a reporter said to me. He was one of those men who seemed to have walked to the edge of adolescence, looked over, and then stepped back in horror. Thin and high-voiced and baby-faced, as short as I was. I wasn't used to looking at a man at eye level. “How much did he weigh at birth?” he asked.

“I'm not sure. An ordinary weight. Nine pounds, perhaps.”

“Eats a lot?”

“Not really. A little more than average. Not much.”

“What's his father do?”

“I don't know.”

“You're not an over-proud mother, that's for sure,” the reporter said to me.

“I'm not a mother at all,” I said. “I'm James's chaperone.”

“Aha!” said the reporter. “What's your name? I'll make you famous.”

“Peggy Cort.”

“Miss or Missus?”

“Miss.”

“Even better,” said the reporter. He stopped writing. “Whatcha doing tonight?”

This so flabbergasted me I couldn't think of what to say.

“Don't look so scared,” the reporter said. “You want to grab a sandwich or not?”

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

He shrugged. “Bigfoot over there your boyfriend or something?”

“Mind your own business,” I said.

“Yeah, the tall guys get all the luck. Even the short girls like 'em better. Well,” he said, “he's not the tallest this building's ever seen. King Kong's still got the record.”

Then several reporters hushed him, and the wind rushed in, too, lifted up the ex-mayor's hat, and deposited it in the wire nets meant to discourage suicides.

James loved public spaces. I did, too, of course; it was one of the reasons I became a librarian. But we liked them for different reasons. I loved buildings where anyone was welcome, where no one could throw you out, wonder whether you belonged. And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints. I have always loved strangers a good deal more than my own family, will be politer and friendlier on a bus or in an airport than I am at a dinner table. You have nothing to lose with strangers: they will like you or not and most likely never think of you again, and conversation becomes that much easier. Love and hate are not on the menu.

James loved public spaces for this reason: they were big. Even my small-town public library had ceilings high enough that he'd
never have to worry. Town hall was the same, and the high school, and some stores and restaurants.

New York was filled with such places. Hotel lobbies, train stations, museums, department stores—it was as if, having used up so much ground outside, they'd decided they needed wide inside spaces. Outdoors it was all claustrophobia; inside, atriums and staircases that made you look up to see where they ended.

We took them slowly, of course. James was right: he knew when he got tired and said so, and we taxied back to the hotel and rested. We had to tell the desk clerk not to let up visitors. Then we'd go off again, to the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick, to Macy's and Altman's. “Go see a Broadway show,” the bellhop told us, though of course James wouldn't have fit. He said he wasn't interested. It's only now I realize that we could have called a theater and asked them to figure something out. James was a celebrity; they would have done it. Of course, I would have pitied whoever sat behind him.

Pat Anderson came to the hotel with clippings every morning. CIRCUS GIANT BUSY ON FIRST DAY HERE, the
Times
headline said, and then, in smaller print, EATS NORMAL-SIZE MEAL. There was a picture of the ex-mayor peering up at James through one of the Empire State Building telescopes.

The reporters fell off after the first couple days, but the crowds continued. It got tiresome, though people were always nice—when we stopped to get a hot dog off the street, a stranger would always rush up to buy Jim's.

“Just one?” they'd say in disbelief. “Have a couple, you must be hungry! No? Just a snack, huh?”

The circus manager had a thick southern accent. “Ease as pie,” he said. “For the p'rade, we'll drive you 'round the rings. Then, 'bout midway through, you'll come out by yourself. Wanna walk or ride?”

“Ride.”

“Ride's good. Bigger surprise when you step off. Ringmaster'll 'nounce you, ride in, step off. Leila rides with you.”

“Leila?”

“Smallest woman in the world,” said the manager. “That's our story, anyhow. Jus' stand there, the two you, wave, get back on the truck. Nothin' to it. Ten minutes. Y'manage that?”

“I think I can,” James said.

The animals stank up the back of Madison Square Garden. Performers whirled around; their costumes were frayed this close up, and their faces bore little resemblance to the glamour of the program. Their teeth were bad, their skin was bad and paved with makeup. But they were nice, and impressed with James.

“You're the real thing,” a clown said, looking up.

In a corner by the stairs, a thin woman painted at an easel. Another clown was sitting for her, in full makeup, a T-shirt, blue jeans.

“You gotta hurry up, Blanche,” he said. “I gotta get dressed.”

“Oh, you have plenty of time,” said the woman. Her voice was girlish and powdery. “Hold still.”

“I'm holding still maybe thirty fucking seconds more.”

“Well, promise to sit for me later.”

“Sure thing,” the clown said, standing up.

James walked over to the woman. “What do you do?” he asked her.

She was rubbing a brush clean with a white cloth. “I paint,” she said. “What do you do?” She put a huge straw hat on the back of her head, as if she'd just smelled the animals and had taken it as evidence she was in a meadow.

“I'm here, right now,” he said. “Appearing for the circus. But I paint, too.”

“
Do
you,” she said, delighted. The clown she'd just been painting came running past her and pinched her bottom. “Good girl, Blanche,” he said. She smiled slightly and lowered her head. “What do you paint?” she asked James.

“Seascapes,” he said. “Still lifes.”

“Bowls of fruit,” she said.

“Not so far,” said James. “But I've never had one lying around to paint. Do you work for the circus?”

“No,” she said. “For myself. I don't like bowls of fruit either. I paint clowns.”

“Nothing else?”

“No,” she said. “Clowns. They're so innocent.” She turned the painting of the pinching clown around to show us. He looked sweet as a schoolboy. “They bring people so much joy.”

Then Leila, the Smallest Woman in the World, came out in a green-sequined dress with matching satin shoes. Whether she was in fact the world's tiniest I didn't know, but she was at least two feet shorter than me, Italian and glamorous, perfectly proportioned though stout and buxom. Even backstage of the circus I could smell her perfume, spicy vanilla set to low simmer.

“Jimmy Sweatt!” she said. “You gonna change for our show?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Don' get paint on your suit,” she said. “I'm Leila. This you know already.” She turned to me. “Hello. Don' worry about your boy. Blanche is nice, only crazy.”

“I am not crazy!” said Blanche.

Leila smiled sweetly at me and adjusted her girdle. “Better get ready,” she said to James.

He walked over. She barely came up to his knee. I could see where her girdle ended: her stomach rose up over it like a sequined bolster. The circus paired them so they'd exaggerate each other's size, but they in fact looked right together, the way opposites often do, sequin and poplin, frivolous and studious. Leila looked like some fizzy obsolete green drink from a nineteenth-century novel, one that puts you to sleep and gives you dreams that explain your life; James, like the country doctor who'd visit you the next day to break the news that you might never recover. Leila the energetic drug, James the antidote, distilled from the same plant but with different inclinations.

Leila did not even bother to attempt to look him in the eye when they were standing. “Good way to break my neck. So, Jimmy, where do you buy your clothing? Same place I do, I bet. Help me on this truck, okay?” He offered his hand; she looked at it and laughed.

“Too big!” she said. “We are a
pair
. Afterward, we will go dancing.”
She put her hand out to the truck driver instead. James got in next to her, his cane across his lap.

“You wanna go to your seat?” the manager asked me.

I didn't, but I went anyhow. Tomorrow I'd wait backstage, but for opening night they'd saved me a seat in the front row, just to the right of the center ring. I left Leila and James on their truck, ready far in advance for the starting parade.

The parade was only a minute; James didn't even get off the truck. He and Leila waved as they toured the arena, but they waved the same way the bouncing girls on top of elephants did, and the clowns, and the acrobats in their lamé suits.

Then the circus started. Sitting that close dizzied me. As a child, I sat up high in the back of Boston Garden, where I could keep my eyes on all three rings at once; down here my attention was scrambled by the poodles with their fur shaved in ruffs and the ponies in feathered crowns. Really, I was just biding my time till James came back for his featured performance. I wondered what the audience would think of him. And then I wondered whether everyone in the circus had someone like me in the stands—not in New York, necessarily, but down the road, a mother in a hometown, a pretty girl met on the street in Miami, a barely known cousin in Des Moines: one particular person looking with particular interest. I wondered how Mrs. Sweatt, in this audience, would look at James. Some pride perhaps, a lot of worries. Mostly, I imagined her sitting still, saying,
my son, my son, my son
.