I could not imagine myself tall, could only imagine being held in the air, suspended at an altitude of seven feet. An uncharted stretch of big body surrounded my usual shape; I tried to feel it. My legs dangled, my fingers curled where my elbows should be. Like one of those maps of lakes, where the deepest part of the water is blue, surrounded by echoes of lighter blue until the cartographer hits land. My body was only the bluest, deepest part of the lake. I could not fill out the rest of the territory.
“Something must have happened,” said Astoria. “To his mother, I mean, when she was pregnant.”
“Astoria,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Frightened by a giraffe maybe.” She giggled like a bad girl. “Or—frightened by a basketball team.”
“Don’t gossip,” I said to her. “Especially if you’re going to make things up.”
“Peggy, you’re too serious,” she said. “In this life, you have to make things up.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said. “Because—that’s what life is. Making yourself believe the best things you can.”
“The best things I can believe,” I said, “are the things that happen to be true.”
James took out books on astronomy, ornithology: sciences at once about tininess and height. He approached the desk with books he’d liked and asked for more—he knew it was easier to find more books with a good example in hand.
Then one day, in the first months of 1955—I remember looking over his head at some awful persistent Christmas decoration Astoria had stuck to the ceiling—he came to me without books. His height had become unwieldy; he reached out to touch walls as he walked, sometimes leaving marks way above where the other teenage boys smudged their hands. “I want books about people like me,” he said.
I thought I knew what he was talking about, but I wanted to be cautious. “What exactly about you?” I asked. I made myself think of all the things he could have meant: Boy Scouts, basketball players. Never jump to conclusions when trying to answer a reference question. Interview the patron.
“Tall people,” he said.
“Tall people? Just tall people in general?”
“Very tall people. Like me,” he said, clearly exasperated with my playing dumb. “What they do.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Try the card catalog. Look in the big books on the table—see those books?” I pointed. “Those are books of subject headings for the card catalog. Look under words that you think describe your topic.” James was used to me doing this: I gave directions but would not pull the books off the shelf for him. My job was to show people—even people I liked—how to use the library, not to use it for them. “Dig around,” I said. “Try height, try stature. Then look in the catalog for books.”
He nodded, leaned on the desk, and pushed off.
An hour later he headed out the door.
“Did you find what you needed?” I asked.
“There isn’t anything,” he said. “There was one book that sort of was about it, but I couldn’t find it on the shelf.”
“There’s something,” I told him. “Come back. We’ll look for it together.”
That night after closing, I hunted around myself. The only thing under stature was a book about growth and nutrition. I tried our two encyclopedias under height and found passing references. Not much.
In truth, my library was a small-town place, and this was a specialized topic. Still, I was certain I could find more. I got that familiar mania—there is information somewhere here, and I can find it, I have to. A good librarian is not so different from a prospector, her whole brain a divining rod. She walks to books and stands and wonders: here? Is the answer here? The same blind faith in finding, even when hopeless. If someone caught me when I was in the throes of tracking something elusive, I would have told them: but it’s out there. I can feel it. God wants me to find it.
That night I wandered the reference department, eyed the bindings of the encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases. James was so big I almost expected to locate him in the gazetteer. I set my hands upon our little card catalog, curled my fingers in the curved handles of the drawers. Then I went to the big volumes of subject headings.
Looking under height and stature turned up nothing; anthropometry was not quite right. Then I realized the word I was looking for: Giant.
Giant described him. Giant, I knew, would lead me to countless things—not just the word, located in indexes and catalogs and encyclopedias, but the idea of Giant, the knowledge that the people that James wanted to read about, people who could be described as like him, were not just tall but giants. I sat in a spindle-backed chair in the reference room, waiting for a minute. Then I checked the volume of the Library of Congress headings. Giants. See also: dwarfs.
We did not have a book, but I found several encyclopedia entries. Nowadays I could just photocopy; but that night I wrote down the page and volume numbers, thinking I could not bear to tell him the word to look under. Most of the very tall people mentioned in the encyclopedia had worked in the circus as professional giants, so I went to our books on the circus.
The photographs showed enormous people. Not just tall, though of course they were that, often with an ordinary person posed beside them. The tall people looked twice as big as the ambassador from the normal-sized, as if they were an entirely different race. The books described weak stomachs and legs and bones. Sometimes what made them tall showed in their faces: each feature looked like something disturbed in an avalanche, separate from the others, in danger of slipping off.
Anna Swann, the Nova Scotia Giantess, married Captain Bates, the Kentucky Giant. As a young woman at Barnum’s Dime Museum in New York, Miss Swann had been in two fires; in the second she had to be lifted out by a crane. No ordinary over-the-shoulder rescue for a woman better than seven feet tall. She and her husband retired to Ohio, to a specially made house. Their church installed an extra-large pew.
Byrne, the Irish Giant, lived in fear of a certain doctor who lusted after his skeleton; he imagined the doctor’s giant kettle ready to boil his bones.
Jack Earle was over seven feet tall, traveled with the circus for years; after his retirement he wrote poetry.
I took comfort in Anna Swann and her husband. They were solid-looking people. Respectable. They’d had two children, though neither survived. The book described them as in love, and you could believe that from the pictures: their complementary heights were just a lovely coincidence to their love affair. I found myself that late night a little jealous of Anna Swann and her handsome, bearded captain.
The books said that giants tended to exaggerate their heights for exhibition purposes. I did not know it then, but every person I read about was shorter than James grew to be.
The worst book was called Medical Curiosities. I say worst now. That is hindsight. The night I looked, I thought, in fact, that it was the best book—not because it was good or even accurate, but because it had the most pages on the subject I was researching. I found it under the subject heading Abnormalities, human. A terrible phrase, and one I knew I could not repeat to James. It was a late-nineteenth-century medical book, described two-headed people and parasitic twins and dwarfs. And giants. Not exactly information, but interesting: giants who had enormous or usual appetites; ones who grew throughout their lives or only after adolescence; professional giants and private citizens.
So I took that book, and the circus books, marked the pertinent places with the old catalog cards I used for scrap, and set them aside. Ready for him, so that he did not have to look in the index, or wander through the pages at all.
“Your tall friend is here,” Astoria said to me the next week. I was in my office, reading reviews. “He’s looking for you.”
James waited for me at the circ desk. “You said we could—”
“I looked,” I said. I’d stowed the books beneath the shelf. “Try these out.”
He took them to the big table in the front room. Read them. He made the sturdy cha
ir, the same chair I’d sat in the night before, seem tiny.
Afterward he came up to me.
“How were they?” I asked. “Would you like to take them home?”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Nothing useful here at all?”
“No,” he said.
I tried to catch his eye. “Close?”
“Close. I guess.” He pointed at Medical Curiosities. “I guess that’s close.”
I picked up the book and opened it to where the marker was, but he’d moved it to another page. A line drawing of a double-bodied baby looked up at me. Horrible. I snapped the book shut.
“I meant medical books,” he said. “But new ones. Ones that say what goes wrong. How to cure it.”
“Cures,” I said. “Oh.” Cures for giants? No such thing. No cure for height. Only preventive medicine. I said it as a question. “Cures? For tall people?”
“Yes,” he said.
All I wanted was for him to explain it to me. It seemed presumptuous to come to any conclusions myself. I knew what he was talking about. I did. But what he wanted, I couldn’t help him with.
Darla, the shelver, came rattling up with her metal cart. “Shelve these?” she said, pointing at the books. The catalog cards I’d used stuck out from the pages; James had lined them up, like a pack of cards he’d shuffled into them. “Hi, Jim,” she said.
“Hi.” He squinted down at her.
She stared at me; I waited for her to get back to shelving.
“Peggy. Shelve them, or not?”
“Not yet,” I said. She sighed and pushed the cart off.
James stood in silence on the other side of the desk. He looked ready to leave.
“You mean how to stop growing,” I said.
“Yes.” Now he looked at me. “Medicine, or operations, or something.”
“I’m not sure we have anything here,” I said. That was a lie. I knew we didn’t. “A medical library somewhere, perhaps. Or a university library. But really—” I started pulling the bookmarks from the books. I tried to sound gentle. “Really, you should ask your doctor.”
“I have,” he said. “I’ve asked a lot of doctors.”
He didn’t care about Anna Swann, or the Irish Giant, or the Kentucky Giant. He’d said—I remembered—“Tall people. What they do.” I assumed he meant: what tall people do. What sort of work, what sort of lives. Instead he’d meant: what doctors do for tall people.
He was a teenager who had grown into a solitary race. There was no Anna Swann for him, no Cape Cod Giantess. Only him, his shoulders carrying his head so far away from the heads of others that he had to sit down to have a private conversation with anyone, and often there wasn’t a chair large enough to accommodate him. Only a boy whose body was a miracle to others. You could believe in God, looking at James. He looked at himself, and decided not to.
The Assumption of Mrs. Sweatt
I sometimes got into disagreements with patrons. They were rare. Despite my clumsiness with the outside world, I was the perfect public servant: deferential, dogged, oblivious to insults. Friendly but not overly familiar. It was one of the reasons I loved being a librarian: I got to conduct dozens of relationships simultaneously and successfully. I conformed myself always to the needs of the patrons (they certainly did not care about mine), told them they were right, called them Mr. and Mrs. and Miss when they did not bother to learn my smallest initial. Do you wonder why we’re called public servants?
Every now and then, though, I would have a run-in with a patron who demanded something preposterous. Maybe they wanted me to immediately hand over a book so popular that others had been waiting months for it; maybe they wanted to supply a page-long shopping list of books so I could pull them off the shelves. Maybe they wanted not to be charged a penny for their enormous fines because they had been too busy to get to the library. (The most unmanageable patrons always told me how busy they were.) I’d say, politely, no. They’d say yes. I got firm; they got insulting. I’d start to explain my position in depth, they’d ask to see a manager—and then I’d bow my head (I loved this moment) and say, “I am Miss Cort, the director of the library.” It was not a title I ever otherwise claimed.
I longed to say, Listen: in my library, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, the rude and busy are not rewarded. We honor manners, patience, good deeds, and grave misfortune only.
And one of two things happened: the patrons returned, and either thought I’d forgotten what had happened or had forgotten themselves, and were amazed when I politely, smilingly remembered them by name.
Or they never came back.
James and I had not argued, but I’d felt I’d done something much worse in so misunderstanding what he’d wanted, in giving him Medical Curiosities. I could forgive myself social clumsiness, my occasional crippling shyness, a sharp tongue at the wrong time. I could not forgive sloppy library work, and that is what I was guilty of: a patron—my best, most beloved patron—needed help in finding something, and I’d jumped to a conclusion and given him books that were worse than useless. He’d asked me a straightforward question and I had not come close to providing an answer.
But he returned the next Friday, with a different question. I still remember: he wanted to know what an anti-Pope was.
Maybe it was forgiveness, and maybe it was just teenage obliviousness, but the sight of James that afternoon seemed miraculous. You came back, I said to him as I sent him to the card catalog (“Look under Catholic Church—history”) and he said, Sure, Peggy, where else would I go?
I watched him read that afternoon. He sat at the table in the front room—his favored spot, ever since his first visit. Looking over his shoulders, I could see his book through the edge of his glasses. The words slid in curves as he moved his head.
I wanted to stand there forever, see what he saw. Not possible, of course. He’d stand up and take those glasses with him. I could only see through them now, me standing and him sitting, hunched significantly over, because he needed a stronger prescription. His eyes were growing at a different rate from the rest of him and would not stay in focus.
Caroline had an easy pregnancy. I’d expected that she would. It was as if the new stomach that swelled in front of her were something she’d expected all her life, an addition that she’d been meaning for years to install. Some women move into their bellies when they’re pregnant; it’s everything they think of, it’s what they move first and most carefully. Not Caroline. She lived in her whole easy body, barely changed her flat-footed gait.
I myself hardly noticed my physical self, which I considered a not-too-useful appendage. Only my feet demanded my attention. When I wore a bad pair of shoes on a busy day, my feet swelled, complained. I was forced to think of them, to picture getting home and slipping off my shoes, the way a starving man will torture and comfort himself with fantasies of food. Nothing to do—I could not pad around the library stocking-footed. My mouth answered questions, but I was stuck in my throbbing feet.
My feet were wide, wide, wide, and flat-footed, which was mostly a blessing—no arches to ache or fall. Nevertheless, by the time I was in my mid-twenties, they were an old person’s feet, bunioned and calloused and noisome and shapeless and yellowed. Blue veins ran the length; my toes, forced into tiny places for years, huddled together for comfort. I didn’t mind so much: it was as if I knew what I would look like as a senior citizen, from the ground up.
James caught me late one Friday at the library, a week after his return. (Though he hadn’t actually been gone, I always thought of it that way, his return.) I’d taken off a shoe and put it on the counter, searching for the boulder I felt sure was somewhere around the toe. Probably it was just a piece of sand. This close to the ocean, you always have sand in your shoes, embedded in your carpet, even if you never go to the beach.
“Your shoes bother you?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said. I shook out the shoe, dropped it to the floor, and stepped into
it. I walked around to the front of the desk, trying to get the shoe jammed on; on top of everything, it was a little too small. “Always, I’m afraid. Usually. That’s what happens when you’re on your feet all day.”
“What size do you wear?” he asked.
“Five and a half,” I said, automatically shaving a full size off. “Women’s. Different from men’s.”
“I know. I wear a man’s thirty,” he said. Then he saw the surprise on my face and laughed. “Five times bigger. More than five times.” He stood beside me and steadied himself with his hand on my head. I didn’t take it personally—he often steadied himself with the closest person; it was usually the handiest thing. Then he took his hand away.
“Look,” he said. He’d lined up his foot with mine. They didn’t even look like the same part of the body, his high black shoe next to my white pump.
“Your feet are wide,” he said.
“Yes.”
“So you wear a five and a half wide?”
“Five and a half, six wide.”
“Which one?”
“Okay,” I said. “You caught me in a vain lie. Six wide. Honest.”
“Vanity is saying you wear smaller shoes than you really do?”
“Well,” I said. I blushed. “For some of us, it is. Women, I mean.”
Two weeks later he brought me a small cardboard box.
“I got these for you,” he said.
Inside were a pair of sensible oxblood lace-ups. Old-lady shoes. The good tangy smell of leather floated up.
“James,” I said. “You bought me shoes.” I could not remember the last time someone had given me a gift, other than the occasional Christmas box of chocolates from a patron.
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