And in fact we stayed two hours. We agreed with the shoe salesman that there was no point in measuring him for shoes—“His feet are all swollen out of size right now anyhow,” he said, “you can just measure them for me when you get home”—so James sat on the desktop and waited for the customers. Children ran in, their mothers following with the rolled-up newspaper page: Meet the world’s tallest boy!
“I figured he must be,” said Hugh Peters. “Now I think he must be the tallest man, too.”
The children were amazed by him. “You must be very old,” one said. James handed out presents from the wicker basket. He talked to mothers. One was holding a fat baby. “Ninety-ninth percentile for height and weight,” she said, joggling him. You could tell it was something she usually said with pride, but this time her voice was tinged with apprehension.
Hugh Peters tapped me on the shoulder. “Cup of coffee?” he asked. I shook my head. “Come back and talk to me a second, anyhow.”
He took me to the storeroom and sat down on a wobbly salesman’s chair. “Nice kid,” he said. “Here, let me write you the check for the rest of his fee.”
“Got a lot of customers,” I said.
“Yeah. Advertising pays off.”
“Sorry it took so long to lure him out here. Now that he sees it’s easy — he’s having a great time with those kids — next time won’t be so hard.”
Hugh Peters nodded seriously.
“And I was wondering,” I said, and why was I so bold? Two pleasant hours in a shoe store, and I was ready to ask for, I was ready to demand the moon. “What about the exposition in New York?”
“Oh,” said Hugh Peters. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“He seems pretty fragile, don’t you think?”
“Not as fragile as he looks.”
“I just don’t want him to overextend himself.”
“I appreciate your concern—”
“Miss Cort,” said Peters. Now he looked me in the eye; I hadn’t realized he’d been avoiding that. “We’re a shoe company. He doesn’t walk well. He has foot problems.”
“Foot problems one day,” I said.
“It isn’t good advertising. We can work something out, certainly, with making his shoes and whatnot, we’d still like to use his name. But the exposition, no, I think we’ll have to turn that possibility down.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m a businessman,” he said, then he sighed. It wasn’t a businesslike sigh. “He’s a nice man, nice boy, but what can I do? He’s got those braces. I didn’t know about the braces. If he falls, where does that leave us? You understand?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“You’ll tell him? Because it’ll be better out of your mouth. Tell him what you like, what you think will make it okay. Make me a villain, if that’s easier. I am sorry.”
Out in the shop James had his foot under the fluoroscope. Through the shoe leather and skin, you could see the jumbled-up bones, gray and aquatic-looking. He wiggled his ghostly toes for the children.
Hugh Peters left me to drive home James, who’d thought the day was a success. I’d insisted that we stop by his doctor’s on the way home, and was already filled with shame that I hadn’t insisted on medical attention right away. “That wasn’t so bad,” said James, and for him that was a statement of starry-eyed optimism. “I’m thinking, Peggy, maybe I’ll go into sales.”
“I thought you wanted to be a lawyer.”
“Law school takes forever. Next time I come out, I figure I’ll prepare more.”
“Well,” I said. “That might be a while.”
He didn’t hear me. He was remembering the ring of the cash register as the mothers bought their children shoes, a sound that James could think he caused. He did cause it, I’m quite sure. The salesman would hand the customer the change, and the customer turned to James and thanked him, not the salesman, not the president of the company.
The doctor scrubbed his feet down and prescribed a salve. A mild infection, not too bad. But the doctor was angry.
“Who’s in charge of these things?”
“Me,” James said quietly. “I just didn’t feel it.”
“Well then, you need help,” said the doctor. “If you can’t tell when something’s gone this wrong, enlist somebody who can. No reason for this sort of thing to happen.”
He clipped James’s toenails, too. “Come here,” he told me. “Watch. Somebody else should know how to do this.”
Of course I should have told James straight off about what Hugh Peters had said. James’s life was constantly forged for him: your mother is alive, you’ll be employed forever, you will never die, you should look forward to everything.
“Maybe New York in the spring,” he said. “I need to get in better shape.”
“Maybe so,” I said.
The curious thing is that within weeks of that shoe store visit, James began to get letters. They started close to home — the Boston papers wanted to visit, then Time magazine. A letter of inquiry from the circus. A doctor from the Midwest, a specialist in gigantism, sent an article he’d written.
How had we previously kept him a secret, I wondered. Why did it take so long to find us? I don’t know to this day what started it — whether Hugh Peters, feeling bad, had called up the circus, looking for another job for James, or the parents had told people, who told more people. Every day there were more letters. Soon people knocked on the door of the cottage. If I was there, I turned them away, but daytimes, when he was bored anyway, he invited them in to talk.
I made up a Do Not Disturb sign and told James to make good use of it. Saturdays, before I went to the cottage, I went to other libraries to look for James’s reading material — he had long since exhausted mine. Soon I was driving to Boston on a regular basis, wandering through some other librarian’s stacks like a regular, obsessed patron.
Time magazine featured him in an article titled “Strong and Big,” along with a boy from Rhode Island who could lift 1,165 pounds attached to a bar across his thighs. When James turned nineteen, Time noted it in its “Milestones” column. It was as if he finally saw the pleasure in being that tall. Not that he loved it all the time, but a certain amount of attention and fuss was an acceptable dividend on all the energy it took to be the Tallest Man in the World. Caroline and Oscar and I felt bad. We’d struggled so long to make him not feel tall, worked so hard to believe that excess height was just a little quirk, a port-wine birthmark, a limp. Suddenly I began noticing his height myself. He was spectacular.
More letters. James worked up quite a correspondence with strangers, and I told him he’d have to hire a secretary to keep track of them all.
“I remember them,” he said. “I remember everybody.”
By the spring, he was famous.
Delaware Who?
Oscar was a good man and, before he became a father, an unworried one. I would have said that was his main character flaw: an unwillingness to worry. As soon as there was a problem, he would try to find an ingenious solution. A belt fixed with a bent nail, faulty locks repaired with folded paper. When a solution was not possible, he tried to turn the difficulty into advantage.
But then Alice was born, and the world suddenly seemed full of possible harm. He saw that a baby was a magnet for inappropriate objects. Bent tetanic nails could find their way to bare feet, folded paper sought the warmth of a baby’s mouth. All his brilliant inventions turned to weapons aimed at his daughter. Even his nephew in the back house, even James, seemed an advertisement for things that went wrong.