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.
“Well, I got them,” he said. “These are good for your feet. I just started working for a shoe store. They make all my shoes.”
I tried to picture James sitting on a shoe saleman’s slanty stool. He would not fit.