“You’re selling shoes?” I asked.
“Sort of.” He lifted one of the shoes out of the box and held it in his hand. “I’m going to do personal appearances. You know, show up. Look tall. And they’ll make my shoes for free.”
“No pay?”
“Shoes are expensive,” he said. “My shoes are, anyhow.” He looked back down at his feet. “Maybe I’ll go to New York.”
“This shoe store is in New York?”
He shook his head. “Hyannis. But there’s an expo in New York in the spring.” He pointed with the shoe in his hand at the shoes on my feet, navy blue snub-nosed pumps. “You shouldn’t wear those,” he said. “They’re bad for your feet. These”—he handed me the shoe—“they have ankle support and arch support and everything. I talked to the shoe guy. I was just going to get you black, and he wanted to talk me into pink. I knew you wouldn’t wear pink shoes.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “That’s true.”
“So we compromised on red. Reddish brown, anyhow.”
“They’re wonderful,” I said.
“Try them on. Might be a little stiff at first, but they’ll wear in. The shoe guys break mine in for me with a machine, but they know exactly how my toes go. They’ve got a cast of my foot. A couple of casts. They’ve got one they’re going to put in the window, and a shoe in my size that they’re going to bronze and hang outside. I have to sit down now,” he told me. “Try them on.”
He went to one of the library’s older chairs — the nineteenth-century furniture fit him best; the newer stuff was blocky and ungenerous — and dragged it close so he could watch me.
I knew, looking at the shoes, that they would be murder. True, they had ankle support. And arch support, but for someone as flat-footed as I was — and getting more flat-footed every year — that would hurt, not help. Most important was the missing half-size I had shaved off, out of vanity’s sake. Now what difference would a half-size smaller foot have made to a sixteen-year-old boy, especially one who wore size thirty shoes?
They’d put a little broguing around the toes of the shoes — to make them feminine, no doubt. They reminded me of the sort of boots sullen young girls of the gay nineties wore. I picked one up.
Luckily, I could get my foot in. I was glad James had made me confess to the additional half-size. I bent down to lace it up, disappearing behind the circulation desk. The shoe had a bracing, athletic feel.
“Try them both,” he said, straining to see me over the desk. “I can take them back for adjustments. Get them to stretch out parts.”
I’d deliberately chosen the left shoe, since my left foot was slightly smaller than my right. But I put the other on, laced it up.
“Walk in them,” James said. “Make sure they fit.” He sounded like my mother, school-clothes shopping.
I took a few steps. It seemed like a miracle, and I the heroine of a fairy tale. They fit. They were rigid and, truth be told, unflattering, but what did I have that needed so badly to be flattered? I walked around the front of the desk and wiggled my toes for him.
“Okay?” he said.
“I love them.”
“But do they fit?” asked James, ever practical.
“Of course,” I said. “I couldn’t love anything that didn’t fit.”
“Aunt Caroline says I shouldn’t take advantage of the shoe store, but they told me I could have as many pairs of shoes as I want, just ask. I was going to get a pair for Mom, but I didn’t.”
I’d been admiring the shiny uncreased toes of my shoes. When I looked up at James, he was staring at my feet.
“Why not?”
“She only wears tennis shoes now, when she wears them at all. Mostly she just sleeps or stays on the sofa.”
At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about Mrs. Sweatt. “How’s she feeling these days?”
“Um. The same, I think. Aunt Caroline thinks better, but I don’t. She doesn’t get out much. You should come see her.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Oh, well. I don’t blame you for not wanting to.”
“It’s not that. It’s just — well, maybe when she feels better.”
“Sure,” said James. He smiled at me. “Whenever that is.”
Though I loved my shoes (they are even now in their original box, worn once, immaculate), I did not love the fact of the shoe store. How was this different, I wondered, from Anna Swann in Barnum’s museum? In those days I still imagined James could have a career other than Acting Tall, that being inspected by the curious was fine on a volunteer basis (in the summer he could not help it) but was not a sensible profession.
“So,” I said to Caroline when she came to see me the next Monday. “James has a job.”
“He does?” she said. She took her spot at the front table; it was quiet, so I went to join her. “How wonderful.”
“You don’t know about the shoe store?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “I never really thought of that as a job. He’s just going to be there twice a year, walk around.”
“And perhaps go to New York for them?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s looking forward to that.”
“A lot of responsibility for a boy.”
“Good for him,” said Caroline. “And that way the shoes are free.”
“When I was a girl,” I said, “I didn’t have to work for my shoes—”
Caroline took my hand across the library table. “When you were a girl,” she said quietly, “you didn’t wear size thirty shoes. Peggy, if I could buy them for him, I would. But being that tall is an expensive proposition. I can’t tell you. It’s not like we’re rich people. I mean, we do our best, but shoes cost seventy-five dollars, and clothing as much or more. Mrs. Sweatt can’t do a thing for him. I mean, she does plenty for him, they talk, she loves him — well, that’s neither here nor there. If I could go to the shoe store, walk around for him, I would, I promise you.” She laughed, laid one hand on her stomach. “Goodness knows I feel like the biggest woman in the world, but they’re not offering free shoes to me.”
At home that night, I looked at my shoes and thought of Mrs. Sweatt, napping on her sofa in her sneakers. All I had wanted was to become part of that family. And not even an important part: a trusted maid, perhaps, a cousin several times removed. But Mrs. Sweatt stamped her foot, told her sister-in-law never to invite me back. I loved seeing Caroline and James at my library, but I was still being simply a librarian.
I was a fool. Foolish to imagine making myself part of a family that was not mine; foolish to think that people thought of me as anything but the librarian, a plain, no-nonsense, uninteresting person. Foolish to imagine myself some Hans Christian Andersen princess in those damn shoes, possessor of the only feet to inhabit the magic oxfords, especially since by the end of that day my feet — as if they might really have been momentarily bewitched into submission by the shoes — assumed their true size, and cursed at me bitterly for shutting them up in those leather dungeons.
A knock on the door usually meant my brokenhearted landlord. Gary was a quiet, plain man, and his excuses for coming to my door did not make much sense. In winter, he wanted to check my thermostat; for what he never said. In summer, he wondered if it was too hot, though of course there was nothing he could do about that. Even when I met him outside, on my way to work, he tested the air with his arm as if he had not been outdoors all along, and guessed at the temperature.
Nobody ever loved a woman more than Gary loved his wife, everybody said, and this might be so. People in town were amazed when he, who was heartbroken and not very handy, converted the attic of their house into the apartment I moved into.