The Giant's House Read Free

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 Igrabbed 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.
    â€œMy son needs books,” she said.
    â€œYes?” I did not like mothers who come in for their children; they are meddlesome. “Where is he?”
    â€œIn the hospital, up to Boston,” she said. A doleful twang pinched her voice. “He wants books on history.”
    â€œHow old is he?”
    â€œTwelve-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?”
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œOf course,” she repeated, and sighed.
    â€œHe’s here every week. He’s in the hospital? Is there something wrong?”
    â€œIs 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.”
    â€œFor what?” I asked.
    â€œFor
what
?” she said. “For
him
. To slow him down.” She waved her hand above her head, to indicate excessive height. “They’re
alarmed
.”
    â€œOh. I’m sorry.”
    â€œIt’s not good for him. I mean, it wouldn’t be good for anyone to grow like that.”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œI was thinking Mark Twain too,” she said. “For him to read.
Tom Sawyer
or something.”
    â€œFiction,” I said. “Third floor. Clemens.”
    â€œClemens,” she repeated. She loved the taste of other people’s words in her mouth.
    â€œClemens,”
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