The Thunder of Giants Page 5

  A thunder of giants! Her mind reeled at the thought.

  “Have you really never seen a lady giant?” asked Ann Swan.

  “Never in all my years,” said the New Yorker.

  “She’s not a lady giant,” said Alexander. “She’s a lady like anyone else.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I want her to believe it.” Alexander put a firm hand on H. P. Ingalls’s arm. “Time’s up.”

  The New Yorker tipped his hat. “Until next year, then.”

  “When are you going to give up?”

  The New Yorker fixed a hard gaze on Alexander Swan. “When you let her make up her own mind,” he said. Then he turned to Anna, who was still trembling at the thought of P. T. Barnum’s thunder of giants. “What do you want, Annie? Do you want me to leave forever?”

  Here was something new to the clockwork: no one had ever asked her this before. Anna knew what Alexander wanted her to say; she knew what Ann Swan wanted her to say, too. But what did she want to say? New York. War. That thunder of giants. Best to play if safe while she sorted it all out.

  “I suppose there’s no harm in you coming back,” she said.

  H. P. Ingalls clapped Alexander on the back. “Looks like you’re building yourself another sign,” he said.

  * * *

  THE NEW YORKER’S GRIN lingered in Anna’s mind well into summer. She read and reread Jane Eyre, always using the paper from The Toronto Globe to mark her place. She read the book to her sisters; she read the book to her dog. She liked the way Jane Eyre kept reinventing her life. One minute she was with her evil aunt; the next she was a governess at Thornfield Hall. Anna also liked how, at the end of the book, when Jane and her great love return to Thornfield Hall, it was Jane who had to show him the way. “Being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide.”

  Being so much lower in stature! thought Anna. Imagine if that could ever be so!

  In the autumn, she left for Truro. Like Jane Eyre’s time at the Lowood School, Anna’s time at the teachers’ college felt like an “irksome struggle”; it was a gloomy place consumed by deep snow and impassable roads. Worse, it was called the Normal School, an irony lost on no one. The faculty members had been warned of Anna’s size, but they were not equipped to handle it. “Little children might respect you,” the teachers told her. “But no one over the age of ten will ever take you seriously.” Sure enough, when she took her walks on the college grounds, the youth of Truro followed and gawked as if she had just escaped from the zoo.

  She did not write home of her troubles; instead, she risked a letter to Gavin Clarke. She had been thinking of it for days, and at last, during a wintery evening when the wind and snow had buried her in the dormitory, she put ink to page. She described the school and her teachers; she masked her loneliness with invented incidents and friends that didn’t exist. She agonized over how to sign such a letter, and in that agony she finally became aware of the hope that was burning in her chest. She began to fear sending the letter; she became suddenly terrified he wouldn’t respond.

  But, to the relief of her throbbing heart, he responded swiftly. His own letter was filled with the gossip from his father’s shop. In America, H. P. Ingalls’s summer skirmish had evolved into a war, and in Nova Scotia this had led to fears of annexation. Mother England had sent troops to defend the borders. Yet nobody could agree on where their sympathies lay. “Some people say they’re fighting to free the slaves,” wrote Gavin. “If so, then we’re for the North. But some say they’re fighting about money and power. Everyone thinks the North will invade. All the men have to join the militia. It’s become a mandatory thing.” From the intensity of his underline, she knew that impressment impressed him. He was a boy, wasn’t he? He liked the idea of war. Anna liked the idea, too. She liked the idea of Gavin’s long body draped in militia gray; she liked the idea of Gavin period. She imagined him with a rifle growing hot in his hands; she imagined him injured and needing to rely on her—as both a prop and a guide.

  Their correspondence continued, but it was hardly enough to keep her afloat; she continued to drown in her own isolation. Jane Eyre became an obsession; she read it until she didn’t have to read it because she knew so much of it by heart. “What do I want?” she asked herself one night, and in response she quoted Jane Eyre, who answers the very same question in chapter 10: “A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances. I want this because it is of no use wanting anything better.” Suddenly, Anna knew that she could finally answer the question H. P. Ingalls had put to her last spring. She wanted to be in New York; but she didn’t want to be there alone. She supposed she should be thinking of men her own size—men like those giants in the American Museum. But if she married a giant, then she would always be a lady giant. If she married someone like Gavin Clarke, then she could be what her father had wanted: just a lady, like anyone else.

  This was what she wanted. To marry Gavin and go to New York. To be both celebrated and have a normal life.

  When the snow thawed, she dropped out of college and returned home. The New Yorker returned like clockwork, didn’t he? But this time the clockwork would change; this time, she thought, I’ll make that clock bust a spring.

  “Teaching just isn’t for me,” she told her parents.

  “Then what is for you?” asked Alexander.

  Anna held her tongue. She knew what her father would say if she told him what she was thinking: New York is for me. A new place and new circumstance.

  She held her tongue with Gavin, too; she was too scared to confess her dreams. He startled her. Now nineteen, there was a fire in him and he merrily kicked at the world. He stalked through the town, eager to find a way to prove himself. He had lost interest in the militia; he adored having a rank but did not believe they would ever be called upon to fight.

  “Why would America want to fight two wars?” he asked one day. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” agreed Anna.

  “You’re both too young to understand,” said Alexander. They were all in the tailor shop, waiting for Gavin’s father to provide Alexander with his latest pair of pants. “Every time you turn around, the Yanks have their claws in something else. They want this whole continent to themselves. They think it’s their destiny.”

  “The only way we’ll ever see action is if we take the regiment and go down to Maine,” said Gavin. “We could offer to join up.”

  “That’s treason talk,” said Anna. “We’re supposed to be neutral.”

  Gavin revealed a folded piece of newsprint that he had torn from the Royal Gazette. “Look! They’ll give us money and clothes. If we get an honorable discharge, they’ll give us land. You even get a bonus if you bring your own gun. I’m telling you: every one of us could be rich.”

  “The only people who get rich in a war are those who don’t fight,” remarked Johnson Clarke.

  “Politicians and munitions men, they’re the ones who get fat.” Alexander nodded. “The rest of us grow poor trying not to get shot.”

  “I’m telling you,” said Gavin, “we all need to go down and give those rebels what for.”

  “Those rebels are our bread and butter,” called his father. “What do you think this war is doing to the price of cotton? And you want to go fight them? Have you no shame?”

  Gavin leaned in and whispered in Anna’s ear. “I’m going to do it,” he said, his breath hot on her neck. “I’m going down to Maine, maybe even New York. I’m running at the end of the week.”

  Anna hardly knew what to say. She loved that she knew something about Gavin that no one else did. But did it have to be this?

  Johnson Clarke was still distracted with her father’s fitting, so Anna leaned down and whispered back to Gavin, blowing her own warm breath into his ear. “You can’t go off to war,” she said.

  “You just wait. One day I’m going to be all big and fine. In my boots I might ev
en be as big as you.”

  “You’re going to get hurt.”

  “What I’m going to do is save the life of some Southern belle.”

  “You wouldn’t want a girl from the South.”

  “I would if she was rich. Can you imagine me as a war hero with a rich wife? I can’t wait to look in the mirror and see that staring back at me, I’ll tell you that.”

  He had puffed up his chest, and she hated him. So arrogant! So cruel! “Go right now, if you’re so excited,” she snapped.

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “You don’t even need to pack. Why would you? There’s nothing for you here. So why don’t you just pick up and leave?”

  She meant to make a dramatic exit. She meant to turn away in a single great motion so the frills of her skirt whipped through the air. She meant to exit with the sort of magnificent gesture that would obsess Gavin Clarke for the rest of his life. But as she turned she stepped on his foot, and the bones cracked like fallen leaves.

  “Damn and double damn!” Gavin sprang into the air. His cries drew the attention from the others in the shop. Anna tried to help, but Gavin pushed her away. He gingerly put his foot on the ground but drew it back almost at once. “I think it’s broken! You better hope it’s not broken! If it’s broken, I’ll never speak to you again!”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Anna.

  “You did that on purpose!” he hollered.

  “Oh, enough. It was an accident.”

  “The hell it was! You’re trapped, so you think everyone else should be, too!”

  Her cheeks flared. “I’m not trapped. I’m going to New York just as soon as I can!”

  “Why don’t you then?” snapped Gavin, and he began to limp away.

  “You don’t mean that,” said Alexander Swan. Anna had forgotten he was there. “You don’t want to go to New York, do you, Annie?”

  “The hell I don’t!” said Anna. She called after Gavin. “I will go to New York. I’ll go and I’ll marry a merchant or a New York banker or maybe even P. T. Barnum himself!”

  She stormed from the shop and went to the edge of town, hoping that by some amazing coincidence this would be the day when H. P. Ingalls returned. But his timing wasn’t that good; it would be another three weeks before the New Yorker appeared. By then, Gavin Clarke would be gone, having limped stubbornly out of town on his injured foot. She would not allow herself to weep, even though he would leave without saying good-bye. After he left, she gripped her heart and forced it to sit still. In New York she would have her new place and new circumstance. She might even have something more. There was always Barnum’s thunder of giants. Surely one of them would give her a normal life. She may have been the only lady giant in the modern world, but in New York, she knew, she would never be alone.

  FIVE

  The Not-So-Little Girl

  Sant Julià de Lòria, 1905–1910

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to protect Elionor from the news of Andorra’s size. According to Manuela Noguerra, who returned to the house periodically for food and supplies, Elionor wept when she first heard of her daughter’s incredible growth. Her grandmother had warned that the sins of the mother are passed along; and here was Andorra, suffering as she grew.

  Needing to tell Andorra something about her mama, the loyal Manuela informed the not-so-little girl that Elionor had gone to America. (To the romantic Manuela, America was a lost horizon as exotic as the moon). As for Andorra’s father, Manuela told her niece he had taken up a life of solitude in the west wing. Forbidden to go near the rooms, Andorra was five before she found the courage to search for her father. Unsure why the wing was prohibited, she braced herself for spirits, ghouls, and all manner of deadly things; instead, she found only covered furniture and broken antiques. The west wing was empty. The windows were shut; the walls covered in dust. No one lived here. Having summoned all her bravery to come here, the not-so-little girl experienced the first great horror of her life: her father was gone.

  She told no one about the secret of the west wing and returned in silence to the unhappy life she shared with Noria Blanco, a woman who was impossibly ugly both inside and out. It hadn’t always been like this. She had once been engaged to a musician whose blindness kept him from noticing her terrifying looks. But on the day of the wedding, he was kicked in the head by a mule. Ever since, Noria Blanco had been entirely alone. Solitude had twisted her heart. She was now like the forests of the principality: dense and dangerous.

  Noria had little sympathy for Andorra’s strange condition, and almost at once she began to isolate the girl. It was years before Andorra would read the story of Rapunzel; when she did, she wondered if Noria had read it for inspiration. Noria Blanco did not exactly imprison Andorra in a tower, but she worked as hard as any witch to keep her away from the outside world. Andorra didn’t go to school, and she never played with the other children of the parish. In a town as small as Sant Julià de Lòria, though, nothing could keep the truth of Andorra a secret for very long. From the window of her room, the not-so-little girl could easily see the little little girls as they stood near the gates of the house. They were forever pointing. Forever whispering words Andorra would never hear.

  It wasn’t until she was six—and already three and a half feet—that Noria Blanco summoned the same physician who had discovered the hole in Elionor’s womb. This time, he made no diagnosis. How could he? There was nothing to diagnose. Size is not a disease.

  “But she’s growing too much,” said Noria Blanco.

  “How much is too much?” asked Andorra.

  “Look in the mirror,” snapped Noria.

  The physician turned to Noria and lowered his voice. “She’s perfectly healthy, but that doesn’t mean there’s no cause for concern. Scientifically speaking, the larger the animal, the shorter the life. It’s the heart. It just starts to wear out.”

  Andorra blanched. She had heard every word—the physician had not lowered his voice enough. After he was gone, she tried to force herself into her aunt’s arms. She wanted to hide from the terror the doctor had left in his wake.

  “Is my heart going to stop?” she asked.

  “It’s very rude to eavesdrop,” said Noria Blanco, and she pushed the child away. “You poor thing. I won’t be around forever. Who will care for you when I’m gone?”

  “What about Manuela?” asked Andorra.

  “She has her loyalties. I’m not sure they involve you.”

  “Won’t Mama come back for me?”

  “I doubt it very much.”

  “And Tata?” asked Andorra carefully.

  Here Noria paused because the truth was that Geoffrey del Alandra was not as far away as Andorra thought. Dutiful as ever, he had continued to run the business his father had left behind. But it had nothing to do with tobacco. The tobacco farms ran themselves. The real family business was smuggling; the real family fortune had been made using the principality’s dense forests to transport contraband between France and Spain. This was why Geoffrey had always been such good friends with the smugglers, whose criminal behavior was quietly ignored by everyone in the parish. The smugglers paid good money for their passage and furnished the isolated parish with many goods they would not otherwise have. Geoffrey, like his father before him, could have orchestrated the business dealings from home. But he was eager for escape.

  So although it was true he disappeared for months at a time, he always returned, and during these times, he indeed stayed in the west wing of his father’s house. Andorra only thought the wing had been deserted that night months before when she had crept inside; in fact, Geoffrey had been hiding behind the couch. He had been wide awake, for he was plagued by such terrible dreams that he had trained himself in the art of insomnia by keeping sharp stones in his pockets so that every movement caused him pain. He spent most of his nights standing on the banks of the Valira River, staring across at the shack where Elionor and her faithful Manuela now lived. Andorra wouldn’t know this for many years; not unti
l she was a young woman would she learn how her father had prayed to catch a glimpse of his wife. “But I didn’t want to see her as she was,” Geoffrey would tell his daughter. “I wanted her to appear to me as she had been; I wanted her only if she was cured.”

  In those early years of the twentieth century, though, this information was still years away. For now, Andorra was just a not-so-little girl, and Noria Blanco knew that Geoffrey was nothing but an echo of a man, lost even to himself.

  “Your tata prefers his isolation,” Noria told her niece. “You can’t really count on him at all.”

  The young Andorra could only conclude that her parents’ absence had everything to do with her great size. Size may not be a disease, but it was definitely a curse. She began to stare in the mirror and tell herself to shrink. “Stop!” she told her reflection, as if it were a dog being trained to sit. But her reflection ignored her, as reflections often do. Like her missing parents, like her body, like everything in this world, her reflection had a terrible will of its own.

  It was her eighth Christmas when the loyal Manuela appeared bearing a gift: a letter, all the way from America. It was from Elionor, who claimed to be writing from a house on some golden American street. She said she had become an actress, a darling of the stage. Andorra clutched at the envelope. She didn’t comment on the fact the letter had no stamp or postmark. She knew little about the laws of the postal system; this was the first letter she had ever received.

  Andorra disappeared to her room to read (and reread) the letter, while, downstairs, Noria scowled at the loyal Manuela.

  “An actress?” said Noria.

  “That was my idea,” said Manuela.

  “Is any of this necessary?”

  “Elionor begged me.”

  “Elionor asked you to do this?”

  “She likes the lie. She says it’s better than the truth.”

  “Nothing is better than the truth. Better we tell Andorra everything.”

  “She has enough problems,” said Manuela. By then, Andorra was four foot three.