I was meddlesome myself: I decided to cut off James’s supply of interesting books. He was one of my favorite patrons — that is to say, one of my favorite people — and even this early in our friendship, the thought of never seeing him again was more than I could bear.
“This looks difficult,” said Mrs. Sweatt, looking at a translation of Caesar’s Wars.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought he was bright for his age.”
“Of course.” She tucked the book under her arm. “Half of it’s in Latin,” she said under her breath.
If they ever want me to teach a course entitled History: The Dull and the Punishing, I have the reading list all worked out. Bulwer-Lytton, the poems of Edgar Guest, cheap novels whose morals were that war is bad but sometimes results in lifelong love between a soldier and his girl. We owned the complete works of a certain nineteenth-century lady author who drew quite a few more morals out of history than that: her books were called things like A True Friend of Christ and Daisy, a Girl of the West. I chose fiendishly well, and sent the books home with the unfortunate Mrs. Sweatt, who brought them back unread.
“This one’s close,” she’d say sometimes. “But not quite. How about the Civil War?”
I gave her Gone with the Wind, which I knew James would never be able to stomach.
Later in the week, a boy I recognized as one of James’s friends came into the library. In this way we were different: James had friends, in fact plenty of them. All I ever had were patrons. Somehow his size did not make him an outcast; or, if it did, he won friends despite it. Every child in school knew him, of course. I asked the boy how James was doing, whether he’d seen James recently, and by the way, where did James live.
“Winthrop Street,” the boy told me. “He and his mom live with his aunt and uncle.”
“Which number?”
He shrugged with half his body. “The white house,” he said. “It’s got flowers painted on it.”
I’d pictured a floral house — like a sofa, or a dress — so I almost missed the flowers that were painted on the clapboards, like handwriting practiced on ruled paper. The side of the house was punctuated with a peculiar garden of tiny blooms, each labeled, both Latin and common name, as if someone had copied them straight out of a botany textbook. They were not well painted. Even from the outside I could tell the house was too small for two people, never mind four.
The aunt met me at the door. She was as different as she could be from Mrs. Sweatt, who was her sister-in-law. The woman in front of me was dressed like a jaunty boy indulged by his mother: blue jeans held up by a western belt and a red-checked shirt. I was surprised she didn’t sport toy guns in a holster.
She had a streak of dirt down one cheek; I later learned she was rarely seen without it. Only her bright red lipstick was grown-up. It matched the check of her shirt exactly. She didn’t say hello, though she raised her eyebrows in a pleasant way.
“I’m the librarian,” I told her. I held up the few books I had brought as evidence.
She still didn’t say anything.
“Is James here?”
She opened the door, then held her hand to her lips, sshh. The door opened directly into the living room, no preamble or vestibule. In the dining room to my left, the late-afternoon light soaked through the colored bottles on the plate shelf and left jellied puddles on the floor. Mrs. Sweatt was asleep on the sofa, her little feet in their flat shoes resting on a pillow. The sofa itself was clad in a slipcover as baggy and gaudy as a muumuu; its pattern clashed badly with Mrs. Sweatt’s skirt. A few spinstered straight-back chairs stood in the corner, wallflowers.
The aunt tiptoed across the living room in an exaggerated way. I followed, trying not to imitate.
In a small back room, James sprawled across the bed on his stomach like any twelve-year-old. His legs were bent at the knees, and his feet waved in the air behind him. I realized I didn’t know which ankle he’d broken. The latest pile of books I’d pawned off on his mother sat on the radiator, beneath a window with the shade pulled down below the sill. I immediately went to rescue them — heat isn’t good for the glue — but their covers were perfectly cool. It was June; of course the heat wasn’t on. I stood there, clutching the pile of books, then realized that it looked like I was reclaiming them, so I set them on a little table by the bed. That put me right next to James. I had no idea what to say.
“Well,” I tried. “How have you been?”
His aunt answered for him from across the room, closing the door behind her. “He’s been fine,” she said. Her voice gave me a start, but a weird pleasure, too — it was a deep sticky voice, the kind a woman generally gets through sin of some sort.
James sat up, put his feet on the ground. His hair was flattened up in back, like a plant climbing an invisible wall. He blinked. I didn’t know it then, but he was an inch taller than he’d been the last time we’d met.
“James,” the aunt said. “Didn’t you tell me that you had something to explain to the librarian?”
“Tom Sawyer got ruined, I’m sorry,” he said in a rush.
“By what?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out what could have ruined Tom Sawyer. Had someone told him the ending?
James leaned over and pulled open the drawer of the table by his bed; it caught on something, so he slipped his hand inside to press whatever it was down. I had to step aside to give him room. “It got dropped in a sink,” he said, pulling a book out by the corner of its cover. I put my hands out to receive it, but he set it on the tabletop, next to the books from the radiator. Tom Sawyer, ruffled to twice its right size.
“I’m sorry,” James said miserably.
“She doesn’t care,” said the aunt. “She has lots of books.”
“Even a few more copies of Tom Sawyer,” I said.
“I told you that’s what she’d say,” said the aunt.
“I’ll pay for it,” James said.
“No. Consider it a get-well present from the library.”
All the time James put a hand on the cover, trying to close it. It sprang up under his palm again and again.
The aunt sat down next to him on the bed. She patted his knee.
“You know how boys are,” she said to me. “He’d about vowed not to go back to the library over this.”
He looked up at me, and his hair fell into his eyes, so he combed it with his fingers, both the front part and the part that stuck up in the back.
“Good heavens,” I said. “You should see what some people do to books and don’t even care.”
“I told him,” said the aunt.
“We’ve missed you at the library,” I said. “I hope that’s not the reason you haven’t been by.”
“No.” He wiggled his ankle — the left one — as if to remind himself there had been another reason.
“Okay, Jim?” the aunt said.
“Yes. Look.” He reached into the drawer again and pulled out a pack of cards, then, using only one hand, fanned them in the air, snapped shut the fan, fanned them again, made one stand up from the deck.
I couldn’t decide whether I was supposed to pull the one card from the others. I wanted to. He looked at the cards, then using both hands, closed the deck.
“That’s as far as I’ve got,” he said.
“Not too shabby. You’ll need a rabbit next.”
The aunt laughed. “A rabbit? Sounds delicious.”
“Yuck,” said James.
I said, “I quite agree.”
The aunt stood up and stretched. Her red-checked shirt pulled out of her jeans, and she tucked it back down absentmindedly. “Rabbit stew,” she said to James, and then, to me, “You’ll have to come to dinner sometime, and make sure to bring—”