James was an eccentric kid, my favorite kind. I never knew how much of this eccentricity was height. He sometimes seemed peculiarly young, since he had the altitude but not the attitude of a man; and yet there was something elderly about him, too. He never returned a book without telling me that it was on time. Every now and then, when he returned one late, he was nearly frantic, almost angry; I didn’t know whether it was at me for requiring books back at a certain time, or with himself for disregarding the due date.
He’d been coming in for a year when I finally met his mother. I didn’t know her by sight: she was an exotic thing, with blond wavy hair down her back like a teenager, though she was thirty-five, ten years older than me. Her full cotton skirt had some sort of gold-flecked frosting swirled over the print.
“My son needs books,” she said.
“Yes?” I did not like mothers who come in for their children; they are meddlesome. “Where is he?”
“In the hospital, up to Boston,” she said. A doleful twang pinched her voice. “He wants books on history.”
“How old is he?”
“Twelve-but-smart,” she said. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she trilled her fingertips over the edge of the counter. “Ummm … Robert the Bruce? Is that somebody?”
“Yes,” I said. James and I had been discussing him. “Is this for James? Are you Mrs. Sweatt?”
She bit her lip. I hadn’t figured James for the offspring of a lip-biter. “Do you know Jim?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Of course,” she repeated, and sighed.
“He’s here every week. He’s in the hospital? Is there something wrong?”
“Is something wrong?” she said. “Well, nothing new. He’s gone to an endocrinologist.” She pronounced each syllable of this last word like a word itself. “Maybe they’ll operate.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For what?” she said. “For him. To slow him down.” She waved her hand above her head, to indicate excessive height. “They’re alarmed.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not good for him. I mean, it wouldn’t be good for anyone to grow like that.”
“No, of course not.”
He must have known that he was scheduled to go to the hospital, and I was hurt he hadn’t mentioned it.
“I was thinking Mark Twain too,” she said. “For him to read. Tom Sawyer or something.”
“Fiction,” I said. “Third floor. Clemens.”
“Clemens,” she repeated. She loved the taste of other people’s words in her mouth.
“Clemens,” I said. “Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens. That’s where we file him.”
Before his mother had come to the library, I hadn’t realized that there was anything medically wrong with James. He was tall, certainly, but in the same sweet gawky way young men are often tall. His bones had great plans, and the rest of him, voice and skin balance, strained to keep pace. He bumped into things and walked on the sides of his feet and his hair would not stay in a single configuration for more than fifteen minutes. He was not even a teenager yet; he had not outgrown childhood freckles or enthusiasms.
They didn’t operate on James that hospital visit. The diagnosis: tall, very. Chronic, congenital height. He came back with more wrong than he left with: an orderly, pushing him down the hall, misguessed a corner and cracked his ankle.
He was twelve years old then, and six foot four.
A librarian is bound by many ethics no one else understands. For instance: in the patron file was James’s library card application, with his address and phone number and mother’s signature. But it was wrong, I felt, to look up the address of a patron for personal reasons, by which I mean my simple nosiness. Delinquent patrons, yes; a twenty-dollar bill used as a bookmark in a returned novel, certainly. But we must protect the privacy of our patrons, even from ourselves.
I’d remained pure in this respect for a while, but finally pulled the application. I noted that James had been six when he had gotten his card, five years before; I hadn’t even seen Brewsterville yet. He had written his name in square crooked letters — probably he’d held the pen with both hands. But it was a document completed by a child and therefore faulty: he’d written the name of the street, but not the number. If I’d been on duty, such sloppiness would never have passed.
I decided I could telephone his mother for library purposes, as long as I was acting as librarian and not as a nosy stranger. The broken ankle promised to keep him home for a few weeks. I called up Mrs. Sweatt and offered to bring over books.
“I’ll pick them up,” she said.
“It’s no bother, and I’d like to wish James well.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”
“I just said it’s no trouble.”
“Listen, Peggy,” she said. That she knew my Christian name surprised me. There was a long pause while I obeyed her and listened. Finally she said, “I can’t do too much for Jim. But I can pick up his books and I intend to.”
So of course I resigned myself to that. I agreed with her; there was little she could do for him. Every Friday — his usual day — I wondered whether James would come in. Instead, Mrs. Sweatt arrived with her big purse, and I stamped her books with a date three weeks in the future. Mostly she insisted on titles of her own choosing — she seemed determined that James read all of Mark Twain during his convalescence — but she always asked for at least one suggestion. I imagined that it was my books he really read, my choices that came closest to what he wanted. I’d sent Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky; Mistress Masham’s Repose by T. H. White; Hiroshima. Mrs. Sweatt was always saying, “And something else like this,” waving the book I’d personally picked out the week before.
“How’s James?” I asked her.
“Fine.” She examined the bindings of a row of books very closely, her head tilted to a hunched shoulder for support.
“How’s the ankle?”
“Coming along.”
“Not healed yet?”
She scratched her chin, then rucked up the back of her skirt like a five-year-old and scratched her leg. “He’s still keeping off it,” she said. “Ambrose Bierce. Do we have any Ambrose Bierce?”
I looked up the card for the magic book; James had not been in for three months. Surely an ankle would knit back together in that time. Maybe Mrs. Sweatt was keeping James from the library, had forbidden him to come. It wouldn’t be the first time. A certain sort of mother is terrified by all the library’s possibilities. Before he was homebound, James faithfully renewed Magic for Boys and Girls every three weeks. Perhaps his mother didn’t like it — perhaps she thought sleight of hand was too close to black magic — and so he’d filed it between his mattress and box spring. But I couldn’t accuse Mrs. Sweatt; though she projected fragility, I suspected she wouldn’t crack under the harshest of cross-examinations.