All those boys — fat and thin and tall and cross-eyed — had lipstick on their cheeks, little Stella kisses. Maybe she kissed them hello, or maybe she let her lips brush against them when they were dancing, because she danced with all of them. But only the one boy ever got to hold her when the music was over, when she’d clapped for the song and settled herself on the sofa we’d recently moved in. He was the handsomest boy, no doubt.
Some days I wondered why James tolerated me, a comparatively old woman of thirty-one, when he had those teenagers. Other days I knew why: he felt, if not older than the kids, at least significantly different. Maybe those days — the days he seemed sadder, the days he’d talk so long I wouldn’t leave for hours — were the times he remembered that he was going to die sooner than they were.
I have forgiven myself for the fact that I liked his sad days best. That was when he was happiest to see me. He liked the fact I was around so often that he did not have to lie about a bad mood. He’d become accustomed to me. I don’t know exactly when that happened — at the hospital? Afterward? Those days I could think that Stella and her visits and her pretty hair and tight sweaters could not make him happy. Those days he needed me most.
Where He Was
In newspaper articles that came toward the end of his life, when James had attained some measure of fame, they’d note: “He eats no more than the average growing boy.” People always wanted to know his appetite, his shoe size, how many yards of material it took to make one of his shirts. How much does it cost to run such a concern? they wondered, as though they’d plan to be as tall themselves if only it weren’t such an expense.
To build the World’s Largest anything requires money, usually in advance. James’s entrepreneurial body constructed itself without backing, and then threatened to bankrupt him in any number of ways. Including, of course, the coarsest, most literal way. The town had been generous with donations to build and outfit the cottage, but we could not set the collection cans out every time he outgrew a pair of pants, every time a shoe or shirt size lapsed into obsolescence. For a while Caroline tried to make his clothing, just as she made some of her own. Her talent was with delicate fabric: she hid the messy seams of her dresses and the odd bell-shapes of her skirts with too much cloth and loud unruly prints. The materials for a boy’s clothing — denim, tweed, oxford cloth — confounded her fingers.
James knew he needed money, not only for himself and Oscar and Caroline but for Alice, his cousin. She was a year old now, a petulant child, with Oscar’s round face and Caroline’s pink cheeks. She ruled the front house with her chubby fist; I thought her voice alarmingly loud for a baby’s. I’d have predicted that the Stricklands would be casual, even negligent parents, but they fussed over Alice from the time she formally woke them up at five A.M. until her bedtime, and then almost hourly after that, each time she demanded their attention.
“When do they start sleeping through the night?” I asked Caroline.
“College,” she said.
Alice was one of the reasons I stopped spending time in the front house. Frankly, I was tired of looking at her, and whenever I was there, I was obligated to.
“Look at Alice!” Caroline would say, and I would think, I have seen your child suck her toes a dozen times and once would have sufficed. I have heard the question “Alice, what are you eating?” a thousand times, answered these ways: dirt, a piece of cereal, tinfoil, and whatever-it-is-it’s-gone-now. She wasn’t exactly a Broadway musical.
I tried to ask Caroline politely. “Don’t you get bored sometimes? Don’t you want to go to a movie or read a book?”
“Nooo,” Caroline said. Alice lifted herself to her feet, dropped to her bottom, considered crying, rejected the idea, and pulled herself to her feet again. “If I had nothing else to do I could watch her all day.”
“Huh,” I said. Alice bit into a plastic squeaky pig. Then she did it again.
“You wouldn’t get bored if she was yours,” Caroline said. “She’d be better than any novel.”
“Babies,” I said, “have no plot.”
James, on the other hand, loved Alice. When he was depressed, he spoke of her as his heir, and sometimes I thought it was her existence that depressed him, made him think about his death. He’d realized he wasn’t the last generation. Seventeen years old was too young to realize that.
He wanted to accomplish something, and because he was a teenager, he figured the way to do it was to earn money. Sometimes it was for Alice’s college education, sometimes his own. Sometimes it was for the trip to New York City that he still dreamed of.
I wondered what my job was, pessimism or optimism. When he spoke of New York, he seemed to see himself everywhere, doing everything — in Broadway theaters, climbing the Statue of Liberty. I’d been inside the Statue of Liberty; despite her exterior size, she was not a generous hostess, and James could not possibly have fit on her spiral staircase, nor would he be able to climb all those stairs. I didn’t know whether to indulge his dreams or quietly remind him of his facts.
I chose indulgence; it was easier for both of us. When he wondered whether Alice would remember him when she grew older, I said, of course: they’d know each other all their lives.
I knew that he would die, but I never thought — or almost never thought — of James as someone who was dying. His death would shatter me. That was clear. I did not see how accepting his dying now would make his eventual death easier to bear: I knew my devastation would be so total there would be no leavening for it. His death was a thought that occurred to me, just as my finances were something I worried about, once a month, in the middle of the night, and then put off for another month.
So I argued for him to keep things in mind, practical, possible things. The shoe store people, for instance. They’d started to offer more: not just shoes but money. They reminded him of the expositions in New York. They’d give him money up front.
“Soon,” he said. “I’m just not ready yet.”
It would take something other than my daily nagging. So one night, a night I knew would be good for it, I waited outside the cottage, and when the kids left and said their good nights, I called her over.
“Stella,” I said. “May I ask you a question?”
She stepped closer. A clear, warm April night, and Stella wore a thin sweater with cap sleeves: her upper arms were plump. Pretty, too.
“I was wondering,” I said. I beckoned her around the house, so that James could not see us through his window. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to invite James out for a walk.”
I’d asked her this question in my head several times. Sometimes I heard her answer, “You mean, like a date? No, I don’t think so.” Sometimes she asked why, and I explained, made an elegant case that she agreed to. Sometimes she said scathing things, said, “You don’t think I have something better to do than take a walk with Mount Everest?”
What Stella actually said was “Sure.”
I waited for her to ask me why. But she didn’t, didn’t even raise her eyebrows, wanting me to tell her more. Perhaps she simply understood herself as something that people would request.
“It’s that he’s not getting much exercise,” I said. “We try and coax him, but I thought if you asked if he’d like to take a walk, just as a friend, that might seem a little more attractive.”