The Giant's House (35 page)

“You will?” she said.

“I will. I'm pregnant.”

I can't say that her mouth fell open, but her entire face rearranged itself. Then she bit her lip.

“Wonderful?” she asked.

I nodded. I think I even blushed.

“Good,” she said. “But, Peggy—”

“James,” I said. “It's James's baby.”

I knew, by telling her, that it would get around town. One of the reasons Astoria liked working at the library was to receive and relay gossip. She would tell everybody—strangers, and the regular patrons, and Oscar and Caroline—and she would tell each in a hushed voice, as if they were the only ones she was taking into her confidence.

That night Caroline called me at home.

“Peggy,” she said.

“Yes?”

She waited for me to say something, but I didn't.

“Is it true?” she began. I heard Alice nattering on in the background. “Is it true you're expecting—”

“—yes—”

“James's baby?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But that's impossible, isn't it?”

“No,” I said. “It's more than possible. It's true.”

“But that doctor. The one who wrote the article. He said James couldn't …” She let her voice trail off, and I felt sorry for her. She was not good at this sort of thing.

“Did that doctor get anything else right?” I asked.

“No,”
she said emphatically. “That's what I told Oscar.” Suddenly her voice flooded with something, and it took me a second to realize it was her usual warmth, which she'd been holding back. “You should come home,” she said. “You could live in the cottage. We'll close it down as a museum and set you up. You should live with us, Peggy. Look! I'm pregnant, too—”

“Caroline—”

“We'll have children together,” she said, like a lovestruck man proposing marriage.

“Oh, Caroline,” I said. “Yes. Okay. Yes.”

And that night I packed a few things and put them in the car and drove back to Winthrop Street.

Oscar and Caroline and Alice greeted me, Oscar so full of attention and caution that I thought, if he wasn't already married, he would have offered to make an honest woman of me. They carried my things back to the cottage.

“We'll pick up your furniture tomorrow,” Caroline said. “You can't climb up into this bed—”

“I've climbed into it before,” I said, not thinking how that sounded.

“Well, yes,” said Caroline. “I just meant—later, it will get harder. Believe me—after a while that bed will look like Mount Kilimanjaro. We'll spruce up the place—”

“No,” I said. “Leave it. Leave everything.”

The town manager called me later that week, to tell me I'd been fired; not bad enough that the library (so he'd heard) was falling to pieces, but surely I understood the
moral
problem here. A
public
librarian, after all …

Fine, I told him, fine, and I said good-bye to my library. Oh, I was a scandal. A grown woman, they said, well into her thirties and him barely out of his teens. Not to mention everything else. Maybe they did mention it, some of them, but that talk didn't make it back to me. Some of the more sympathetic and liberal people in town—those who considered themselves artistic—thought I was a romantic figure. Caroline told me a few people even claimed that James and I had gotten married secretly in New York. She'd done nothing to discourage that rumor.

I had a new job, anyhow, in charge of the James Carlson Sweatt Home. Still a librarian—always a librarian—I organized his letters, to and from, I wrote a guide to the newspaper clippings.

You would have thought that first week would have been the worst, but it wasn't. I ate cookies from the bakery, canned soup heated up on the hot plate. I listened to the radio and read the last library books I'd brought to James, which since his death had sat
on the night table, collecting fines; I'd known they were there, of course, just never could bear to pick them up.
City of God
,
From Here to Eternity
,
Thurber Carnival
. I'd felt like returning them meant I was closing out his account.

Finally one morning Caroline came to the cottage and said, “You can't go on like this.”

I looked around the room. I thought she was kicking me out.

“There's someone else you have to think about, Peggy,” she said, and she touched my stomach to remind me. “Come to the front house.”

“I like it here,” I told her.

“For meals. That's all. For meals and a little company. I'm home all day, too; I could use the conversation myself.”

So I did that. I took my dinner and breakfast there, chatted with them. I wanted to stay at the cottage mornings and afternoons, waiting for visitors; I wanted to be always ready and present. That is, I wanted them to know that I lived there.

But evenings, I sat on the sofa with Caroline, whose stomach was just beginning to push at her own clothes; soon she'd move on to wearing Oscar's pants, kept up with a knotted scarf. And though I'd thought during the week I'd spent alone in the cottage that it was the way I wanted it—me, the radio, the silly cat leaping from surface to surface—I discovered that it was simply because I could not have imagined the pleasant life in the front house. Oscar offering me something, sweet potatoes or gravy, a homey rich dish, his hands on one side of a warm platter or bowl and mine on the other; Caroline back and forth from the kitchen, her hair tied back; Alice, a good eater always, picking one thing off the plate and sticking it in her mouth till the plate came clean. Caroline cooked and I washed, each according to her abilities.

I'd always thought of happiness as some dramatic talent, or unreal luck; I'd never imagined it could come in this workaday variety. This was something James had done, too, after all: he sat in this dining room, ate Caroline's careful soft food. She was frightened of people choking, and if anyone so much as coughed at her table, she looked alarmed; if it went on, she stood up asking,
Are you okay, do
you need some water?
The cougher, red-faced and damp-eyed, had to smile and nod, and Caroline took her place again. Such sweet strange concern was everywhere in that house. It was not my life—I knew that—but it was the life of people I felt comfortable with, and that was enough. When dinner was over, I went back to the cottage and turned on the radio and knit. Caroline had taught me.

After a while I just stayed at the front house till it was time to go to sleep. Caroline and I got bigger and bigger. She was a little disappointed with me—she wanted someone to discuss stretch marks with, to compare swollen feet, and I demurred. But I learned from her, sometimes too literally, as if she were a girl I admired one class ahead. I did everything she did, two months behind: a crying jag at the end of the third month; a passion for salt in the fourth; a two-day superstitious prohibition on mentioning the baby at all in the fifth. When Caroline gave birth to another daughter, they named her Margaret Ann, after me and then Oscar's mother. They didn't realize that Peggy is my given name. Now they call her Ann, because I do.

That gave me two months to meet a baby before being introduced to my own, which seemed like good planning. I was strangely patient. The townspeople were the ones who waited nervously, who called each other up to say, Has it happened yet? Will it be another one, do you think?

Dorothy was born two months to the day after Ann, perfectly healthy, fat, but nothing else. I decided not to name her after anybody.

And so I had James back. I don't mean Dotty, who grew up so much her own person, I sometimes thought she wasn't related to anyone—plump and impetuous, a dear, longed-for foundling. Our girls played together in the yard between our houses. They knew they were somehow related.
Cousin Dotty
, Alice called, and sometimes, mistakenly,
Cousin Ann
, as if all babies born that one year were her cousins.

I told Dotty about her father. I told her about James, because he is her father, in every way. For instance: it is a scientific fact that she shares his genes. We live in his house, among his possessions. And
in every way, he is the one who brought her to me, which is one of the reasons I love her—though much to my misanthropic amazement, not the only reason. He was my one, true husband and love, and he would have loved her best, like he loved Alice, only better, because Dotty is his and has his name. And everybody else told Dotty about James; everybody else told her stories about that wonderful man, her father.

The girls are gone now. The Strickland girls went to college in Boston and stayed there. I see them when they come for visits. Alice looks like photographs of the old Alice; it's only when she speaks that Mrs. Sweatt disappears. She is certain of herself, and it gives her a weird beauty. Ann is tall enough that we once worried, though the doctors told us not to; she stopped growing in eighth grade when she was five foot nine, as if it were a childhood hobby.

And Dotty is in Chicago, twenty-five years old, older than James lived to be. Still plump, still looking like no one I've ever known. She comes to visit me every summer for a month; in between I rarely hear from her. My address book is crowded with her different houses. I don't think I have the most recent. Sometimes my letters bounce back to me; other times she writes, thanking me for my news. She sends postcards, no place for a return address, saying
I'm fine, I'm okay, more later
. She always signs,
love
. She had parents who were in love with each other, and that is a blow no child can recover from. Everyone I ever knew has turned into a stack of papers.

I have James back because I live in his house. I show the tourists around. Every day I talk about him and sleep in his big bed, dream of him. That mattress is a mess. I can't bear to replace it. It feels warm, as if he's just gotten up, the whole bed warm wherever my skin touches it. Even in the summer, not enough people come. I wait. I read.

Sometimes I try to pull myself into my body. Sometimes I can, I can even feel my self unscrolling from my head down, to my shoulders, my chest, down to my hips, and I try to hold it. It's a physical,
definite sensation. But it's as if my self is a stubborn window shade. The minute I loosen my grip, it goes snapping back up, leaving only the faintest wind.

I live in my head and my hands, the mouth that kissed James and the hands that held him. Plenty of space.

I take walks in town with Dotty on her summer visits. We are bold, a scandalous woman with definite proof of scandal, my definite Dotty. The tourists look at us and I see them forming certain questions. But there are some things even a tourist won't put into words.

“I want to tell you about somebody,” I say, and they listen. They send me postcards addressed to Mrs. James Carlson Sweatt. When I write back, I sign my letters the same way. It's the first posthumous marriage in history, a true, real marriage. Don't doubt that.

They talk about me in this town. I have passed into legend, even though I'm still around in the flesh. Who would have thought? people say to each other. Now, when I walk past the windows of the library, into stores, along the beach, I am discussed. I know the sound; I heard it enough with James. See that woman? they say.

I am a figure they imagine knocking on their doors, to test them. They don't know what they should do to pass the test: let me in to sit by the radiator, or send me down the sidewalk to bewitch another house. They anticipate me at any moment, thrilled with the possibilities.

Elizabeth McCracken is the recipient of the Harold Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Winship Award. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also honored as one of
Granta
's 20 Best Writers Under 40.