The Thunder of Giants, page 18
Andorra forgot the past, too. There was no avoiding it; she had become a casualty of war. She had reached her final, magnificent height: ninety-four and a half inches, just a few breaths shy of eight feet. She knew she was memorable; she did not think she could be unforgettable, too. In sorrow, she threw the ball cap into the sewer. As for that short story, she buried it along with Nicholas’s letters, just as Jews do with books that contain the word of God.
Winter came, and the music died down. Snowfalls were ignored, and sidewalks went unshoveled. Garbage bags grew into hills. Gone was the noisy city, but that didn’t mean it had fallen still. On Andorra’s nineteenth birthday, the hacking coughs were making the snowy streets tremble like strings on a guitar. People began to disappear. Funeral bells became a daily sound. The Widow’s Russian cook was seen spilling buckets of disinfectant across the ground.
“Is plague!” she told Andorra. “Is Spanish flu!”
“This is Detroit,” said Andorra.
“Then is Detroit flu,” said the Russian. “Whatever is called, is killing us dead.”
The words were prophetic; three days later, the Russian cook disappeared from the world. Her death was so swift that Andorra was left winded, as if the death had come at the end of a marathon run. There was no funeral; out of fear of the disease, the body was burnt many miles away.
“I’d be grateful your Nicholas still hasn’t returned,” the Widow said. Her voice was muffled because she was now wearing a mask.
“He’s not my Nicholas,” Andorra said, blushing beneath her mask.
The Widow dabbed her eyes. “Time is such a monster. Why didn’t I marry any of those men who asked? Now I won’t have anyone in my old age.”
“You’re only twenty-nine!” said Andorra.
“For an unmarried woman, that’s old!” said the Widow.
“Andorra and I aren’t going anywhere,” Geoffrey assured her.
“Some company!” snapped the Widow. “You’re married to a ghost. And Andorra will leave as soon as her Nicholas returns.”
“He’s not my Nicholas,” Andorra said again.
“You just wait,” said the Widow. “He’ll come back and marry you and I’ll be left eternally alone.”
The Widow’s sorrow was so great that Andorra wondered if the woman would marry the next man who asked. But the pandemic was keeping most of her boars away, and the ones who did come were so full of caution that they often tried to seduce the Widow from the porch. The Widow ignored them, leading Andorra to assume she was not as desperate as she pretended to be. (Of course, the Widow was desperate—but only for Geoffrey to finally start repaying her years of kindness in other ways.)
It was a lousy March afternoon when a knock came from the window rather than the door. Andorra, who was playing whist with her father, drew back the curtain. A man stood in the spring rain. One half of his face was obscured by the old sign that warned pilgrims would be shot; the other half was covered by a mask. Almost four years had passed since this visitor had battled Geoffrey in the front hall, but Andorra recognized him all the same. His eyes were the same as his son’s.
“Uh-oh,” said Andorra.
“Uh-oh?” said Geoffrey.
“The Ambassador’s returned,” said Andorra.
“Uh-oh,” said Geoffrey. He was already making a fist.
But Zachariah was no longer an Ambassador of Goodwill. He had long since left the entertainment world and was now a stray cat with a face of matted fur. He entered with his hat in his hand, holding a single white envelope, which he delivered with an apologetic air.
“It’s from Nicholas,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” said Andorra. She snatched the letter from his hand. Years before, Manuela had been able to trick her with those letters from her mother, because Andorra had not known to look for stamps and postmarks. But she knew to look for them now. “There’s no postmark,” she said.
“He gave it to me today,” said Zachariah.
That was when she learned the truth: Nicholas was in seclusion at his father’s house. Zachariah couldn’t say exactly when his son had contracted the Spanish flu—he suspected it had been that crowded military transport that had carried Nicholas home. He had a fever when he returned to Detroit and had collapsed in a delirium at the door of his father’s house. (“He had to have been delirious,” said Zachariah. “We haven’t spoken in months.”) Zachariah immediately put his son in quarantine. He placed him in the attic and fed him through an old dumbwaiter.
“He sent that letter with the dishes,” said the former ambassador.
“How long has he been here?”
“Almost three weeks.”
Three weeks! Andorra tore opened the letter and began to read. Almost at once, the blood ran to her cheeks.
Geoffrey touched his daughter’s arm. “Forget him, mi amor. There’s no good in a man who breaks your heart with a note.”
“Oh no,” whispered Andorra. “He hasn’t broken my heart at all.” She turned to her future father-in-law—already suspecting that he was her future father-in-law. The future was as clear as a stain. “Take me to him.”
“You can’t see him if he’s sick.”
“Why? So he can die alone?”
“He won’t be alone,” said Zachariah.
“Right, he has the dumbwaiter. How could I forget?”
Zachariah still refused to lead her to his house. But the precaution was useless: there were several Kelseys in the phonebook, but only one with the initial Z.
The next morning, she crept from the house, and a terrible chill shook her as she moved through the coughing streets. Even in a frightened city, she could not help but attract attention. People ran to their windows. An old woman paused with her bucket of disinfectant hanging in midair. Andorra imagined the sick calling to their nurses to report a giant walking through the streets. (“Poor things!” the nurses would think. “They must be nearing the end!”) The Kelseys lived on the outskirts of her usual six-block radius. It was a three-story townhouse with a red door that she ignored. If Zachariah was home, he might not let her inside. Instead, she explored the perimeter and soon found a side entrance whose lock broke easily against her weight.
She had to stoop to conquer the narrow halls, and this made her a poor intruder: she banged into furniture and tore her skirt as she pushed through the rooms. She was saved by the loud music coming from the attic: something in the latest style, a rag with a furious beat. As she turned to the foot of the stairs, she came upon the Kelsey’s maid, a dark little scarecrow with a broom in her hand. She froze in midsweep.
“There’s some antiques in the den,” she sputtered. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Why would I hurt you?” snapped Andorra. Was she truly so frightening that people could only expect the worst of her?
“Mr. Kelsey’s not here,” said the maid. “You’re best to just take the antiques and go.”
Andorra made a note to tell Nicholas how little he could depend on the maid: she may have been built like a scarecrow, but she wasn’t much in the way of security. “I’m here to see Nicholas,” she said, and she pushed her way to the second floor.
“He’s very sick,” said the scarecrow.
Andorra drew Nicholas’s letter from her pocket. “He wants to see me,” she said. “I have proof.”
* * *
NICHOLAS HAD BEEN AVOIDING their reunion for much longer than three weeks. Had he emerged from the war as a hero, he might have headed straight for his future wife with a lion’s conceit. But no one could lionize Nicholas David Kelsey. Onstage he had failed to inspire; in battle, things had proved much the same. “Once more unto the breech, dear friends!” he had bellowed at the Battle of St. Quentin Canal; the reaction was just as stifled as it had been at the Goodwin Theatre several months before. He escaped the war without a wound of any kind. Bitterly, he imagined that every bullet he ever fired had also gone astray. Other men entered peacetime shell-shocked, but Nicholas entered with a survivor’s secret shame. In the story of the war, other men had played heroes, while he, as always, had been given a minor role.
Now he lay wrecked in his father’s house. Convinced of his imminent death, he had written Andorra a letter more inflamed than anything he had dared to write during the war. He had known his letters would be read by the censors—this was why they had always been restrained. Now he was uninhibited. The letter was so charged that it read like pages from a dirty book (one of which Nicholas had read; a man has to do something while dying of plague). It was this purple prose that had made Andorra blush; it was this that gave her the proof that Nicholas had not broken her heart at all.
The attic was at the top of another narrow flight of stairs, but Andorra squeezed through by walking parallel to the wall. Beyond the door, ragtime played from a phonograph. A ball glove lay beneath a collage of photos of the Detroit Tigers. Each photograph had been pinned to the wall and the various pitchers, shortstops, and outfielders gazed down on the sick like grieving relations. In a cot, Nicholas lay swaddled in bedclothes. He was no longer devastatingly handsome; he was just devastating. Unshaven and gaunt, his bones seemed to creep from the depths of his torn clothes. The stench struck her hard. For three weeks he had lived in this room; for three weeks he had shit in this room, too. A makeshift bedpan sat by the bed, consumed by flies.
He appeared to be sleeping until the floorboards creaked under her weight. Then his bloodshot eyes went wide. “Go away.”
“Hello to you, too.”
“I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“I can see why.”
He fell into a rough cough; he hadn’t been shaving, and phlegm dripped into his beard. She refused to be revolted. Shaking the flies away, she took the bedpan and returned to the second-floor bathroom. She flushed the contents away. Then she found an empty basin and filled it with hot water. She soaked a facecloth. From the medicine chest she collected a razor, shaving mug, and soap.
When she returned to the attic, Nicholas tried to burrow deeper into the cot. “Will you please go home?”
“Don’t be difficult.” She dug him out of the sheets and laid the hot towel over his face.
“I have a fever!”
“You’re being difficult.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m not kissing you with that beard.”
“I don’t want you to kiss me!”
“Yes you do. And I have the letter to prove it.”
He took her hand—the one that was not holding the razor. “This isn’t a joke. This isn’t just about you. You could infect your father. And the Widow.”
“Then I guess I can’t leave until we’re both all right.”
“You can’t stay here! It would be improper.”
“I don’t exactly have a choice. I’m in quarantine now.”
She put the edge of the razor to his cheeks and he lay still, now frightened to move. Andorra was suddenly frightened, too. The blade was too small in her hands. She managed to shave his left cheek, but terror gripped her as she reached his neck. Nicholas sighed. “Well, I can’t leave it like that,” he said. He told her to bring the mirror from the wall so he could finish the job himself.
He winced when he saw his reflection.
“I gave up on you,” she said.
“Quiet,” he said. “I have to concentrate.”
“I threw away your hat.”
“You did?”
“And I buried your letters.”
“Ow! I cut my chin.”
A spot of blood appeared, and she pressed the towel to the wound. His skin was scruffy, but it was clean enough; in any case, she could no longer resist. She leaned down and kissed him. She was still wearing her surgical mask, so it wasn’t a true kiss. Their lips never touched. Yet it might have sealed a marriage vow: if at that moment a minister had appeared to pronounce them man and wife, Andorra wouldn’t have been completely surprised.
Nicholas remained in her care. Geoffrey was scandalized by the arrangement, but there was little he could do—as Andorra had said, she was in quarantine, too. It was easier to wait for the sickness to run its course. She almost never left the attic, except to use the bathroom (Nicholas still did not use the bathroom; Andorra continued to clean away his shit). She slept on a pile of old clothes. She played his records and burned his phlegm-soaked handkerchiefs and learned to shave his face with care. And she kissed him—how she kissed him! Always through her surgical mask, yes, but always with the full force of her weak heart. She finally told him about that, too. “A doctor told me that, scientifically speaking, the larger the animal, the shorter the life,” she told Nicholas.
He tried to laugh, though it came out more like a croak. “I know all about it. Your father told me before I left for the war.”
She frowned. “He did?”
“We were talking, and he mentioned something about your heart, thinking I already knew. He was mortified when he realized I didn’t know a thing about it. Made me swear not to let on that I knew until you told me yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you sooner.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Have you been to a doctor lately?”
She shook her head. That terrible doctor who had examined her when she was a girl had left her with an indelible dislike of the entire profession. She had not see a physician in all her years in Detroit.
Nicholas shook his head in wonder. “So you’re basing your fears on a diagnosis you received when you were a girl? Not to mention, I’m pretty sure that doctor was a quack. Large animals can live an awful long time. Elephants live for seventy years. And the blue whale can live for eighty.”
“Are you a zoologist now?”
He blushed and looked away. “I may have done some reading on the subject.”
“You did some reading about elephants and blue whales?”
“I was worried,” he said. “The point is, you don’t have a weak heart. At best, it’s possibly weak. You’ll probably outlive us all.”
She adored the prophecy and adored him more for making it. It gained credence as she continued to survive the days without developing so much as a cough. She was strong enough to defeat the Spanish flu; perhaps her heart was tough after all.
At long last, Nicholas’s health returned. The coughing stopped, and the color returned to his cheeks. It was then that the inevitable occurred; it was then that they worked to bring Nicholas’s lurid letter to life. Though alone in the attic, they had never been alone in the house. But one sultry August afternoon, when the gorgeous weather had driven Zachariah Kelsey to the park of Belle Isle, Andorra and Nicholas collided like comets in space. Nothing separated them now, not disease or surgical masks or war. Amazingly, he was more self-conscious about his body than she was. Weakened by illness, Nicholas Kelsey had become a ravaged field. He lay on his back, half covered in sheets, while Andorra cascaded over him. She forced herself to be fearless; it was the challenge of her life to reveal the great glory of her body without a hint of shame.
But there is a cost to fearlessness. Like her mother before her, Andorra enjoyed a single fearless afternoon and received a daughter in exchange. After that, there was no turning back. Not that Andorra tried. This was no time for caution or resolve. This is a world of war and plague, she thought. How could anyone afford to wait?
* * *
THEY MARRIED ON JUNE 17 in the parlor of the Widow’s house (the day was chosen out of convenience; Geoffrey del Alandra had Tuesdays off). Less than six months later, during a frosty December night, Rowena Kelsey was drawn into the world. The moment was a great relief for Andorra and even more so for her father, who had fallen into fits of paranoia the moment he learned of the pregnancy. Twenty years earlier, he had married a pregnant woman, and the result had been both a fistula and a daughter with a peculiar talent for growth. Noria Blanco had called it a curse, and he now worried that she had been right. Throughout the pregnancy, he became convinced that some terrible calamity would strike Andorra or Rowena—or both. But each of them survived the birth intact. Rowena was practically perfect, and no fistulas appeared in the depths of Andorra’s magnificent frame. They never even needed to search for a wet nurse—her monstrous breasts produced so much milk that Rowena became sausage-plump.
Geoffrey’s euphoria was so complete that he decided to bring a bottle of champagne over to the house of Zachariah Kelsey. The two men had barely spoken at their children’s wedding; now that they were grandfathers, Geoffrey was determined to make peace. It would never come. He arrived to find the front door standing open. In the front hall, the former ambassador was splayed out on the ground, surrounded by rotting fruit. He had suffered a stroke: he had left the world with the speed of a passing train on the same night that Rowena was born.
It was 1919. Revolutions were happening across the world, but the death of Zachariah was a revolution, too. That the former ambassador had money was almost as surprising as the fact that he had left it all—and the house—to his son.
“Are we rich?” asked Andorra.
“We’re certainly not poor.” Nicholas grinned.
“We should take a honeymoon,” she said.
But Nicholas was already thinking about the shape of his father’s house. “What we should do is knock down a few walls. And we need arches in those doors so you can stop banging you head.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I think I promised to take care of you. It was in the wedding vows or something.”
“It’s your legacy. We should do something that’s for you.”
“Oh, we are.” He grinned. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to see every ballgame we can.”
In the spring of 1920, they moved away from Elsa Street. They spent the following summer alternating between cheering for the Tigers and building a world Andorra could call her own. She was a great sight at the ballpark. She loathed the attention but endured it for her husband’s sake—they had, after all, made a deal. And he was more than honoring his part. In the heat of July he worked to enlarge rooms; in the depths of August, he widened halls. He had an undiscovered talent for carpentry—in September he surprised her with an enormous bed he built himself. All this work proved to be an inspiration. For months he had been trying to force a return to the stage; that summer, he started taking jobs behind the scenes. The same skill that had built a bed for his enormous wife soon also built Elsinore for a Danish prince. At long last, he had begun to accept what everyone else had known for years: he was not an actor.
