The Thunder of Giants Read online

  The celebrations continued for several weeks. Now that other couples were free to marry, one marriage feast simply bled into the next. The chaos was still being enjoyed when the supreme moment came. Geoffrey was carousing with some of those rough smugglers, whose activities were never questioned and whose acquaintance he had still never explained. As for Elionor, she was at the stove attempting to fix an oversalted stew. Having added more water, she was tasting the concoction when the first great tremor seized her frame. She nearly choked; the tension caused her to snap the wooden ladle in two. As she fell, she glanced at the clock on the wall: It was just after nine o’clock in the morning, forty-seven days into the dawn of the twentieth century.

  At once, Manuela Noguerra took control. Before leaving Madrid, she had questioned several midwives on the proper procedure in case the stress of the journey caused a premature birth. Now she could finally use the knowledge she had learned. She exiled the men from the room and locked her and her sister away. For the next nine hours, Elionor and Manuela wrestled with a baby who did not want to be born. Andorra was happy in the womb; she resisted birth with every last ounce of strength.

  Beyond the bedroom, in the main room of his father’s great stone house, Geoffrey paced by the hearth and took solace in the batches of wine supplied by his smuggler friends. Throughout those nine hours, Noria Blanco threatened to break into the birthing room, and each time Geoffrey held her at bay. “Manuela brought Elionor here,” he said. “She’ll get the baby here, too.” His confidence masked a terrible fear. His mother had died giving birth; so had the many women in his library of books and plays. His body was firm, but his blood secretly trembled, and by the start of the ninth hour, he was convinced Elionor would never make it out of this day alive.

  But Captain Noguerra had taught his daughter well—she was still a girl who could sail through a storm. She was screaming with life when, just after six o’clock, Andorra finally shot free. At just over eight pounds, the baby was large but not extraordinary; there was no reason for anyone to guess what was to come.

  Elionor fell into the deepest sleep of her life. Geoffrey, now drained of his fear, opened the doors of his house to yet another raucous celebration. As was custom, it was a purely male affair. They arrived with gifts while the women hid in the kitchen and prepared the food. Manuela Noguerra was the happiest she had ever been; Noria Blanco was the happiest she had ever been, too. Both had been in mourning for the lives they had known—Noria’s father was gone, and Manuela knew she would never see any of her family again. Each mourned the death of the comforts of the past. But the best cure for grief is hope: a baby brings with it unending optimism and great potential. Noria and Manuela would never get along so well again. Working from the kitchen, the stepsisters merrily doled out ewe’s-milk cheese, spiced salami, fresh bread, and bottles from Geoffrey’s secret supply of aguardiente.

  By midnight the drunken men had taken to singing songs around the hearth while one of the smugglers strummed a broken guitar. Everything about the music was out of tune, so no one noticed when a terrible cry filled the house: it was drowned by the cacophony of the men. But the sound woke the infant Andorra. She had slept through the music but could not bear this terrible cry: she knew before anyone that the sound had come from her mother. She released a tragic wail as Elionor clawed her way from the room. Holding her stomach, shrieking as she leaned against the wall for support, she made her way into the other room, where the men continued to roar out their song. Distracted by their celebration, the men didn’t notice her even as she flailed. At last, she did the only thing she could: she crashed into the table of food. Down she went, against the wooden table, cracking the legs and sending plates and goblets into the air. The men turned from the hearth to see Elionor collapsed on the floor, surrounded by salami and cheese in a gown stained brown with piss.

  The music stopped. A pestilent stench filled the room. As Geoffrey helped his wife to stand, his great terror returned. There was excrement along her backside; a trail of dark blood leaked down the insides of her thighs.

  Elionor remained weak and fevered for several days. Despite assurances that this was a common aftermath of birth, Geoffrey wandered from room to room in a state of horror that he no longer bothered to hide. At last a surgeon arrived from another parish and diagnosed the problem. A gaping hole had developed between the womb and the bowels. He guessed that Elionor’s birth canal must have been too narrow and had been torn open by Andorra’s arrival. The surgeon called the hole a fistula and proclaimed it to be an ancient disease, one that had been sent to afflict women since the dawn of time.

  In the hall outside the bedroom, the surgeon reproached them all. “If only I had been here,” he said. “There might have been something I could have done.”

  Manuela Noguerra began to cry. “Then it was me. It’s all my fault.”

  “Stop that,” said Geoffrey. “What could you have done?”

  “She could have summoned a professional,” said the surgeon.

  “It took you three days to get here,” snapped Geoffrey del Alandra. “Were we all supposed to wait?” To the loyal Manuela he said, “This was no one’s fault. No one is to blame.”

  “No one but your wife,” said Noria Blanco.

  “What does that mean?” said Geoffrey.

  “God only punishes those who deserve it.” His sister shrugged. Already she was looking at Elionor as the people of Troy must have looked at the first soldier emerging from the Trojan horse.

  The surgeon announced the fistula would remain with Elionor the rest of her days. Sex was impossible: her genitals began to erode and now leaked without warning. The condition also meant that her breasts were merely aesthetic; her nipples turned inward, and baby Andorra could not find a way to drink. Her cries of hunger caused the house to tremble. Noria Blanco refused to turn herself into a wet nurse and directed all eyes to the loyal Manuela. Fed a special concoction of herbs, tea, and beer, Manuela was made to force Andorra into her chest, but the baby only wept; this was not her mother’s milk. It was days before the constant suckling finally produced a miraculous flow. The ruined Elionor could only watch from afar. As for the richest man in town, he became a melancholy wreck.

  Publicly, Noria Blanco let it be known that Elionor had developed consumption, but the truth was an open secret and Noria began to plot to send Elionor away. Near the edge of the valley, by the banks of the Valira River, there stood an abandoned hut whose origins were largely unknown. It was Noria’s plan to use this house as Elionor’s refuge. She could survive on a small remittance, away from the eyes of the world.

  “Send me away,” said Geoffrey. “The shame is mine.”

  “Have you thought what Elionor might do to her?” asked Noria. “I’ve seen it happen. It’s like a madness in women. They start to think it’s all the baby’s fault. Then they do something without meaning to, because, deep inside, their souls want revenge.”

  Meanwhile, Noria went to work on Elionor herself.

  “One day Andorra will be the age where she remembers you. Do you really want her to remember you like this? Do you really want her to grow up cleaning away your shit and your piss?”

  Beaten down by shame, Elionor agreed to the one thing she had feared ever since leaving Madrid: exile. Again, there was no question of Manuela’s staying behind; like all mules, she was hitched to something larger than herself. As soon as Andorra had been weaned, the sisters left the house behind. Each of them wept as they walked. The richest man in town also cried, but it was a masculine weeping, done only where it could not be seen. As for Andorra, she did not cry at all. Her terrible wails stopped the same day her mother left. Her only response was to grow: within a month of the exile, she was too large for her crib. Within a year, she was the size of a girl twice her age.

  THREE

  Opening Day

  Detroit, 1937

  ON THE FIRST DAY of the 1937 baseball season—her last in Detroit—Andorra packed her clothes with the skill
of a veteran pitcher. From the dresser, she lobbed one ball of clothes after another into the trunk. Each one was a perfect pitch. This talent used to amuse the children, but right now they were distracted by the trunk itself. They had never taken a vacation; the notion of travel was a marvelous thing.

  “Anna Swan was born in Nova Scotia,” Andorra told them. “It was a place called Tatamagouche.”

  “Tatamagouche!” said Gabriel.

  “Tatamagouche!” repeated Gabriella.

  “How do you spell Tatamagouche?” asked Rowena.

  “What does that matter?” asked Gabriel.

  “I want to get it right,” sniffed Rowena.

  Of course you do, thought Andorra. The girl had been named for Rowena Moira Kelsey, her paternal grandmother, who had been called the Irish Queen of Burlesque. Rowena had her grandmother’s red hair and coat of freckles, but that was where the similarities ended—she was far too serious to ever be a Burly-Q Queen. She wanted to be a writer; at the age of four, she had scrawled a brief report about Gabriel and Gabriella’s birthday party; at eleven, she had written about the start of the Great Depression; and at fourteen, she had written about the death of her father. Now, two years, six months, and eleven days later, she was recording a giant’s departure from Detroit. And she wanted to make sure she had all the details, right down to the proper spelling.

  “T-a-t-a-m-a-g-o-u-c-h-e,” spelled Andorra. “P. T. Barnum sent a man there to take Anna to New York.”

  “Who’s P. T. Barnum?” asked Gabriel.

  “A man who had his very own museum,” said Andorra.

  “Boring!” said Gabriel.

  “Boring!” echoed Gabriella.

  The twins were restless, and she knew why; they wanted to go down to Navin Field and sneak inside to watch the game. These days, Gabriel wanted to play shortstop for the Tigers; and since Gabriella wanted whatever her brother wanted, she wanted to play shortstop, too. She had trailed her brother into the world and had been following him ever since.

  “It wasn’t a boring museum,” she said, lobbing a ball of stockings into the trunk. “It was a place for entertainment. They had lots of exhibits with giants and dwarves. She was paid twenty-three dollars a week in gold.” Andorra was reciting from memory everything she knew, all of which came from the only book she had found on the subject: an encyclopedic volume entitled Whoozits, Whatzits and Other Freaks of the Globe. The only other mention of Anna Swan had been in Barnum’s autobiography, which contained little information other than the delicious fact that Anna had been “an intelligent and by no means ill-looking girl.”

  “She married another giant,” Andorra went on. “He was a soldier in the Civil War.”

  “Another giant!” said Gabriel.

  “How many giants were there?” asked Gabriella.

  “Not many,” said Andorra. “A handful.”

  “A handful of giants!” said Gabriella, and she shook her head in awe.

  “Do you think they were all like you?” asked Rowena.

  “I don’t know,” said Andorra. “I suppose so.”

  “Was Anna Swan like you?” asked Gabriella.

  “Of course she was, dummy,” said Gabriel. “Why else would they have asked Mama to play her in the movies?”

  “Don’t call your sister dummy,” said Andorra. There was no force in her voice; the scolding was purely automatic. She was wondering the same thing as Gabriella. Was Anna Swan like her? Or was that a ridiculous thought, as ridiculous as assuming that Gabriella might be like Shirley Temple simply because they were both girls?

  “What about the man she married?” said Rowena. “Was he anything like Tata?”

  Like the scolding, Andorra’s reply was a reflex response. “No one was like your father.”

  “How could he have been like Tata?” snorted Gabriel. “Tata wasn’t a giant.”

  “Mama said he was a soldier,” said Rowena. “Tata was a soldier, too.”

  “Tata fought in the Great War,” said Andorra. “Anna’s husband fought in the Civil War. He was a captain in the Confederate Army.”

  “The Confederates!” said Gabriella. “Who were they again?”

  “They were the ones who shot President Lincoln.”

  This last remark came from the doorway, where her father was leaning against the frame. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, although Andorra knew he had probably been lurking this whole time. The man who had once been the richest man in town was now a shaggy dog. His hair and beard were unkempt, and his slender eyes were completely gray. But there was strength in him; this dog could still froth at the mouth. Rutherford had promised nothing but a single role in the Anna Swan picture, but Geoffrey del Alandra was convinced this was the first step toward total exploitation. “You just wait!” he had argued the night before. “They want to see you sold to the world.” Quietly, she wondered if he was right. She had done a screen test for Rutherford Simone, and there had been a nerve-racking week while it had been jettisoned across the country. She had chosen something from Macbeth, hoping that Shakespeare might lend her a little sophistication. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Certainly, her portrayal of Lady Macbeth had not been without merit. But, as Rutherford had said, she was a giant being hired to play a giant; like so many other women in Hollywood, she had probably been hired on the strength of her measurements alone.

  Andorra turned back to the children. “Anna Swan had two babies, but they both died. One of them is still on record as the largest baby ever born—twenty-three pounds.”

  “How did Anna Swan die?” asked Rowena, pen poised.

  “She died of heart failure,” Andorra replied. “She had a weak heart, like me.”

  “You don’t have a weak heart,” said her father.

  “She always says she does,” muttered Rowena.

  “I don’t always say it,” said Andorra.

  “Dad always said she had a possibly weak heart,” said Gabriella.

  “Where was I?” said Andorra, anxious to change the subject.

  “You were dying of heart failure,” smirked Gabriel.

  “Anna Swan was dying of heart failure,” corrected Rowena.

  “They buried her in Ohio,” said Andorra. “She and her husband were living in a town called Seville. They had built themselves an enormous house with high doorways and giant chairs.”

  “So it’s like this place,” said Gabriel.

  “We should go live there,” said Gabriella. “It would probably be better than this place.”

  “Anywhere is better than this place,” said Gabriel.

  Andorra wanted to chastise her son, but how could she? The house was an old coat, worn through right to the seams. The wallpaper peeled and the rats ran rampant through the walls. Winter brought an arctic chill while summer brought terrible heat. And there was that one particular ghost, that one shadowy memory who had left his mark on everything from the bookends to the crooked painting hanging in the hall.

  Geoffrey, on the other hand, had no trouble scolding Gabriel. “There’s nothing wrong with this place,” he grumbled as he moved into the room. “It’s a home, isn’t it? What right have you to complain?”

  “Who’s complaining?” said Gabriel. “I just think it would be better to live in a giant house in Ohio.”

  “Well, it isn’t going to happen,” said Geoffrey. “All of us are staying here.”

  “Except Mama,” said Gabriella.

  “Mama’s staying here, too,” said Geoffrey. His eyes found Andorra’s. There it was: that gaze of steel.

  Andorra stayed firm. “Mama is leaving,” she told the children. “But she’ll be back as soon as she can.”

  She pitched a ball of stockings at the trunk, but by now Geoffrey had positioned himself so he was between her and the luggage. He had only to swing an arm to swat the stockings away. Out on Navin Field, it would have been a sacrifice bunt; in here, Geoffrey never even left the plate. He grabbed more clothes from the trunk and threw them across the room. H
er skirt landed on the dresser, while a yellow slip, as large as a blanket, landed on the lampshade and changed the color of the room. Everything came down with a sudden case of jaundice.

  Geoffrey pointed to the children. “At least take them with you. You heard them—they think anywhere is better than here. So bring them along.”

  “We’ve been over this. They’re only paying for me. Rutherford said I’m going to stay in his sister’s house. There isn’t room for all of us.”

  “You ask me, it’s nothing but a lousy shame,” said Geoffrey. “What sort of mother leaves her children?”

  “Mine did. And her mother left for a man in a balloon. Maybe it’s in the blood.”

  “That was different.”

  “Mama was sick. Mama was sick, and we’re poor, but it all amounts to the same thing.”

  Her father slumped down to the bed and adjusted the black mourning band around his arm. He wasn’t wearing it for her husband. It was for her mother—word of Elionor’s death had reached them sixteen years before.

  “Why don’t you run downstairs and wait for Mr. Simone?” Geoffrey said to the twins. Andorra glanced at the clock. Rutherford was coming in a taxi; he would be there any minute. “Tell him your mama needs help with her luggage.”

  “Since when does she need help?” said Gabriel.