The Giant's House (2 page)

What I give you is the day's edition. Tomorrow it may be different.

I lived then, as now, in Brewsterville, an unremarkable little town on Cape Cod. Brewsterville lies halfway up the spit curl of the Cape, not close enough to the rest of the world to be convenient nor far enough to be attractively remote. We get tourists who don't know exactly what they've come out to see. Now we have little to show them: a few places that sell homemade jelly, a few guest houses, a small stretch of beach on the bay side. Our zoning laws keep us quaint, but just.

Once we had more. We had James Carlson Sweatt walking the streets. Some people came out specifically to visit James; some came for the ocean and happened upon him, more impressive
than the ocean because no philosopher ever wonderingly addressed him, no poet compared him to God or a lover's restless body. Moreover, the ocean does not grant autographs. James did, politely, and then asked how you were enjoying your visit.

Everyone knew him as The Giant. Well, what else could you call him? Brilliant, maybe, and handsome and talented, but doomed to be mostly enormous. A painter, an amateur magician, a compulsive letter-writer, James Carlson Sweatt spent his life sitting down, hunching over. Hunching partly because that's the way he grew, like a flower; partly to make him seem smaller to others. Five feet tall in kindergarten; six foot two at age eleven. He turned sixteen and hit seven-five the same week.

The town's talking about building a statue to honor James, but there's a lot of bickering: for instance, what size? Life-sized puts it at about the same height as the statue of the town founder, who's life-and-a-half. Some people claim it'll attract tourists, who even now take pictures in front of the founder. Others maintain that tourists will take a picture of any old thing. “Who's this behind me?” a lady tourist asks her husband, who is intent on his focusing.

“Pilgrims,” he answers.

For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It's what's cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it's stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can't purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won't believe it ever happened.

Librarian (like Stewardess, Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman) is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality. Librarians are supposed to be bitter spinsters; grudging, lonely. And above all stingy: we love our fine money, our silence.

I did not love fine money: I forgave much more than I collected.
I did not shush people unless they yelled. And though I was technically a spinster, I was bitter only insofar as people made me. It isn't that bitter people become librarians; it's that being a librarian may turn the most giving person bitter. We are paid all day to be generous, and no one recognizes our generosity.

As a librarian, I longed to be acknowledged, even to be taken for granted. I sat at the desk, brimming with book reviews, information, warnings, all my good schooling, advice. I wanted people to constantly callously approach. But there were days nobody talked to me at all, they just walked to the shelves and grabbed a book and checked out, said, at most,
thank you
, and sometimes only
you're welcome
when I thanked them first. I had gone to school to learn how to help them, but they believed I was simply a clerk who stamped the books.

All it takes is a patron asking. And then asking again. A piece of paper covered with notes, the pencil smudged: a left-hander (for instance, James) will smudge more. The patron you become fond of will say,
I can't believe you have this book
. Or even better (believe it or not)
you don't own this book—is there a way I can get it?

Yes.

Even at age eleven, twelve, James asked me how to find things in the catalog. He told me of books he liked, wanting something similar. He recognized me as an expert. Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't anyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? An earnest question: what day of the week does Thanksgiving fall on this year? Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better.
Knowledge is love
.

People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea
of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. I knew I would be a librarian in college as a student assistant at a reference desk, watching those lovely people at work. “I don't think there's such a book—” a patron would begin, and then the librarian would hand it to them, that very book.

Unromantic? This is a reference librarian's fantasy.

A patron arrives, says, Tell me something. You reach across the desk and pull him toward you, bear hug him a second and then take him into your lap, stroke his forehead, whisper facts in his ear.
The climate of Chad is tropical in the south, desert in the north. Source: 1991 CIA World Factbook. Do you love me? Americans consumed 6.2 gallons of tea per capita in 1989. Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States. Synecdoche is a literary device meaning the part for the whole, as in, the crowned heads of Europe. I love you. I could find you British Parliamentary papers, I could track down a book you only barely remember reading. Do you love me now? We own that book, we subscribe to that journal, Elvis Presley's first movie was called
Love Me Tender.

And then you lift the patron again, take him over the desk and set him down so gently he doesn't feel it, because there's someone else arriving, and she looks, oh, she looks
uninformed
.

He became a regular after that first school visit, took four books out at a time, returned them, took another four. I let him renew the magic book again and again, even though the rules said one renewal only. Librarians lose reason when it comes to the regulars, the good people, the
readers
. Especially when they're like James: it wasn't that he was lonely or bored; he wasn't dragged into the library by a parent. He didn't have that strange desperate look that some librarygoers develop, even children, the one that says:
this is the only place I'm welcome anymore
. Even when he didn't want advice, he'd approach the desk with notes crumpled up, warm from his palm, his palm gray from the graphite. He'd hold it out until I
grabbed the wastebasket by its rim, swung it around and offered it; his paper would go thunking in.

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.