“Don’t you ever worry about being caught?” I asked.
Magnus shook his head. “I wait until it’s late. There’s never anyone about. Although I take a fishing rod with me, just in case.”
I wondered whom he thought he might fool, dragging a fishing rod through the town in the middle of the night.
“Besides,” he added, “I’m never out there for very long.”
Later it would become apparent that the real danger in Magnus’s nocturnal excursions had nothing to do with being caught.
A
s the year wore on, the novelty of my infatuation with Miriam Imhoff faded, and with it disappeared the cocoon of blissful hope that had first protected me from the shrapnel of unrequited love. My joy at the fact of Miriam’s existence slowly morphed into bleak despair. Family history settled heavily on my shoulders. I thought of Frederick hiding behind the privet hedge, of Joseph standing beneath my mother’s bedroom window for night after night, and I knew that I would never have the nerve to serenade my beloved with a song of my own. Instead I floundered in silent anguish, unable to quell the storm of defeated self-loathing that was growing inside me. I no longer bounced out of bed in the mornings. Now I trudged to school, my head hung low, resigned to another day of torment.
Meanwhile, Miriam triumphantly conquered the school. She was top of our class, she won the lead part in the annual play, and she was always surrounded by an admiring gaggle of girls and boys. She floated down the corridors, serene, untouchable, and completely unaware of my existence. I loved her more with each passing day. And the more I adored her, the more I knew I would never do a thing about it.
I did my best to distract myself with regular trips to the locker-room stalls. While Miriam remained strictly off-limits, I began to broaden my palette beyond my lovely classmates. By far the most interesting addition to my erotic smorgasbord was the school music teacher, Mrs. Fitch.
Freddy and I both took extracurricular singing lessons with Mrs. Fitch. Every Tuesday afternoon she sat at the piano and coaxed a little more out of my limited talent. Mrs. Fitch had also taken over the piano-playing duties at First Christian Church when Riva Bloomberg’s arthritic fingers could no longer cope. She had always looked rather dour as she sat at the piano grinding out hymns, but away from church she was all sauce. She sashayed foxily down the school corridors, swinging her hips like a showgirl at Radio City Music Hall. We all looked on, agog. She was tall, blond, and perhaps slightly overweight. I suppose she must have been in her early forties. She favored brightly colored sweaters that were a size too small. I glimpsed whole universes in the taut promise of all that angora wool. Now on my trips to the locker room I had to make a delicious choice between my classmates’ coltish allure and Mrs. Fitch’s more mature charms. Both worked.
In her youth, Margaret Pfaff (as she was back then) had been one of the beauties of the town. She had been pursued by a legion of ardent young men, and she had rejected them all. In her early twenties she disappeared to Ohio. She returned three years later, with a new name and a husband in tow. That alone would have been enough to set half of the town against Rankin Fitch. But he was also an attorney.
Until Rankin Fitch’s arrival in Beatrice, the Caitlin County courthouse resembled a convivial gentlemen’s club more than a bastion of justice. Every morning the judge and the lawyers ate breakfast together at Frederick’s. Over plates of my father’s ham and eggs they went through the day’s docket and decided who was guilty, who was right, who was wrong, who would get what. Then they would troop back to the courtroom and perform their prearranged roles for the benefit of their unsuspecting clients. Justice had been administered in this way for as long as anyone could remember.
Rankin Fitch changed all that. He refused to go to Frederick’s for breakfast. He had the extraordinary notion that his clients deserved better than to have their fates decided in private by a cabal of lazy attorneys who wanted to get home in time for dinner with their wives.
His courtroom manner also provoked a good deal of attention. There were none of the pompous circumlocutions that the other lawyers were so fond of. Fitch prowled around the courtroom while he delivered his arguments; he harangued the jury, interrupted the other attorneys, and muttered abuse at the judge. He routinely savaged opposing witnesses on cross-examination, leaving them to be led away in tears.
The other thing about Mrs. Fitch’s husband was that he was a dwarf.
Rankin Fitch stood three and a half feet tall in his little stockinged feet. His body was the size of a child’s, but he possessed none of a youth’s limber ease. Thick, foreshortened limbs emerged at peculiar angles from his compact torso, and he moved with an awkward, staccato stiffness. On top of his tiny body sat, disconcertingly, a full-sized adult head. Behind his thick, purplish lips were crammed irregular yellow teeth. His long nose was mottled with dark moles. Lustrous tufts of black hair curled from his nostrils and ears. His eyebrows sprouted in fierce, untended abandon above small, dark eyes, which squinted suspiciously out at the world.
The town’s amateur psychologists discussed at length the extent to which Rankin Fitch’s physical flaws drove him to the success he found in the courtroom. The mesmerizing effect he had on juries was due, at least in part, to the extraordinary spectacle he presented. The jurors couldn’t take their eyes off him. He wore tiny patent leather shoes and three-piece suits. His undersized diaphragm gave his voice a nasal, high-pitched twang, which added to the bizarre drama of his performance. Whether it was because they were fascinated, or intimidated, or because they just felt sorry for him, juries responded to Rankin Fitch’s theatrical entreaties on behalf of his clients. He had a phenomenal success rate at trial.
For a while Rankin Fitch had driven a shiny, bright red Cadillac with white leather seats, modified so that his short legs could reach the gas pedal and the brake. When we saw the car gliding through town, it seemed as if it were driving itself. You had to look closely to see Rankin Fitch’s little hands on the steering wheel, his eyes glinting malevolently through the windshield. He drove as aggressively as he litigated, which, given his physical limitations, was something of a problem. After his fifth accident in the space of a few months—clipping a fire hydrant behind the courthouse, which he couldn’t see in his rearview mirror—the insurance company refused to underwrite him anymore. After that he sold the Cadillac and rode to court on a child’s bicycle instead, suit trousers tucked into his socks. He flew through the town with a ferocious scowl on his face, his custom-made coattails flapping behind him. A dwarf from Ohio: he couldn’t have been any more alien if he had arrived in a spaceship.
They made quite a couple, the statuesque blond bombshell and her miniature husband. Standing side by side, Rankin Fitch’s head barely made it to his wife’s midriff. The mechanics of the Fitches’ marital relations was a favorite topic of conversation among the regulars at the restaurant counter. Diagrams were sketched on napkins with possible solutions to what appeared to be a—literally—insurmountable problem. But the guffaws provoked by those crude drawings hid the room’s collective envy. They could mock the tiny attorney all they liked, but Margaret Fitch was still his.
All this gave my fond thoughts of Mrs. Fitch in the school toilets an extra frisson. I would occasionally find myself imagining Rankin Fitch’s ugly face bobbing up and down in helpless fury while he watched me ravish his wife. After that, whenever I saw him barreling down the streets on his little bike, I felt a chill of apprehension. Mr. and Mrs. Fitch taught me that fear can lend an additional charge to sexual encounters. I have been largely terrified ever since.
THIRTY-TWO
I was not the only one undergoing a profound physical metamorphosis back then. My father was counting the days until Freddy graduated from high school and joined him at the grill. He was looking toward the future, and was determined to haul the restaurant into the modern age. He installed a blazing flash of red neon above the door that could be seen from a block and a half away:
FRED’S DINER
Joseph ordered laminated menus, complete with touched-up photographs of his most popular dishes. I no longer had to memorize what was on offer, but simply dealt out pieces of plastic to hungry customers.
A less fortunate facet of my father’s grand plan to modernize the place was his idea that the waitstaff should wear uniforms. Now, at the start of every shift, I reluctantly clipped on a cheap red bow tie and pinned a badge onto my shirt pocket that read, idiotically in my opinion,
my name is james
. Worst of all, I had to wear a little paper hat that sat at a perky angle on my head. This ridiculous outfit would have been embarrassing at the best of times, but Joseph compounded my adolescent agony several times over when he invested in a jukebox.
The jukebox stood by the door, as fluted and flashy as any automobile. Every couple of weeks a man would appear to add new selections and take out the old 45s that nobody listened to anymore. The words “Seeburg Select-O-Matic” were printed in elegant, fluid chrome on the curved glass hood. Now the place was always filled with music, and to my horror, the diner (we were no longer allowed to call it a restaurant) became a popular destination for the town’s youth.
I began to dread going to work. My shifts—which I used to enjoy, in earlier, hatless days—became a brutal form of torture for my anxious, teenage soul.
My nadir came one busy Saturday afternoon when, to my horror, I saw Mrs. Heimstetter lead Miriam Imhoff and a coven of her pouting acolytes to one of the big corner booths. I knew at once that I would never win Miriam’s heart if she saw me in my stupid uniform.
I pulled my hat down over my eyes and slunk toward the back of the room, as far away from Miriam’s booth as I could be. The next time Franklin passed by I grabbed him. His arms were full of dirty plates.
“Frank, I need you to do me a favor,” I whispered urgently.
“Yeah, bit busy right now,” said Frank, trying to pull away.
“There’s money in it for you,” I said.
Frank stopped. “How much?”
I hastily calculated the price of eternal happiness. “Two dollars,” I said.
Frank appeared interested. “What do you need?”
“You see that booth in the corner? Go and take their order for me.”
Frank turned and looked in the direction of my surreptitiously pointing finger. Then he laughed. “You want me to wait
Miriam Imhoff’s
table?”
“You know Miriam?”
“I know
of
Miriam,” answered Frank, an enigmatic smirk on his face.
“So, well, great. Will you do it?” I asked anxiously.
“Hell, no,” laughed Frank. “Watch out, brother. Those girls look
hungry
.”
I trudged across the room, ready to bid my dreams of grand romance good-bye. I now regretted all the hours I had spent trying to draw attention to myself in the classroom. Miriam would recognize me at once, take one look at my stupid hat, and that would be that—my hopes dashed forever. My bow tie felt like a noose around my miserable neck as I approached the table.
All the girls were laughing at something Miriam had said as I pulled my order pad out of my apron pocket. I began to take orders for milk shakes and sundaes, slowly working my way around to where Miriam was sitting. When it was her turn, she raised those beautiful eyes to meet mine, and asked for a club soda and a grilled cheese.
There wasn’t the faintest glimmer of recognition on her lovely face.
A
new generation of American soldiers was fighting abroad, this time in the swampy deltas of Korea. We sang at the funeral of two local boys who were killed during the Battle of Triangle Hill. They were best friends and had enlisted together. Their coffins lay side by side in the church, each draped in an American flag. The whole town was crammed into the pews that day.
It was around this time that my grandmother bought a television. She grimly watched the death toll mount as the Allied campaign in the Far East ground to a bloody halt. For months there was a military stalemate; the only news was of casualties. Jette angrily shook her head as she listened to President Truman warn of the Communist threat, half a world away. She knew it was all a charade. Men had to have their wars. They would always find an enemy to fight.
Of course, my brothers and I didn’t want to know about the war; we wanted to watch
The Ed Sullivan Show
and
Martin Kane, Private Eye
. The four of us made the pilgrimage across the lawn to Jette’s house whenever we could. Morrie often came, too, as his family did not have a television.
Something strange was happening to Morrie. He had always been tall, but he had kept growing. Now he was massive—not just taller, but bigger in every respect. There was just an awful lot more of him than there had been when he’d first come to play the piano. He was too large to fit comfortably on the sofa. Instead he lay on the floor, his long legs stretched out toward the television screen, vast expanses of pale skin on display—his trousers were always too short for his ever-growing legs. He was still as kind as ever, but he laughed less than he used to. His movements became more ponderous as he struggled to keep those outsized limbs under control. I began to realize that he wasn’t simply a big kid. There was something wrong with him.
I asked Freddy about it.
“Good grief, James, did you just notice?” he said.
“Well, he was always tall,” I answered. “But he’s just kept growing. It’s like he’s never going to stop.”
“That’s just it,” sighed Freddy. “He’s
not
going to stop.”
“What do you mean?”
“His pituitary gland isn’t working,” said Freddy.
I frowned. “His . . . ?”
“Pituitary gland. His body doesn’t realize it should stop growing.”
“So he’s just going to keep on getting bigger and bigger? That’s crazy.” I laughed. “Is he going to be the tallest man in the world, then?”
Freddy shook his head. “He’ll probably die first.”
I looked at him, horrified.
“Bodies aren’t supposed to
be
that big,” explained Freddy. “The heart can’t cope. Too much strain.”
“But that’s—When will that happen?”
“Could be next week, could be next year. Nobody knows.”
Just like that, Morrie Knuckles was transformed from a gentle freak into a lumbering human tragedy.
A
s the months passed, Freddy and Morrie became closer than ever. They walked home together each day after school, Morrie’s vast frame towering over Freddy and leaning on him gently for support. His giant hands and feet grew so remote from the rest of his body that he had difficulty getting the blood to circulate. Freddy sat and rubbed those huge fingers and toes while they talked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I looked on, dumbfounded by the two of them. I knew that I would have run as far as I could from Morrie Knuckles’s broken pituitary gland and the havoc it was wreaking. But it never occurred to Freddy that he might bail out on his friend. They did everything together. Strangely, there was rarely a somber moment. Freddy cracked endless gags and did impressions of teachers from school. Morrie smiled and laughed at my brother’s antics. Their unguarded kindness toward each other was beautiful. They were just boys, unequipped to bear the weight of Morrie’s tragedy, but the shadow it cast burnished them with an exquisite grace. The two of them waited for the end together, Morrie gentle and brave, my brother dignified and hilarious. Their friendship was the only defense they had, but within its cocoon they seemed at peace. Together, they were immune to the sadness that they knew was waiting. It was only late at night, when he thought the rest of us were asleep, that I heard Freddy weep quietly into his pillow.
The strange thing was that, as I listened to my brother cry himself to sleep, I was jealous of him. I envied Freddy his central role in the drama. I longed for the chance to perform such heroics myself. I coveted his friendship with Morrie, but it was his new maturity that I wanted most of all. While I was still furtively grabbing myself at every opportunity, Freddy had embarked on a mission of beautiful, noble futility, and in the process he was becoming a man. I began to wish for a tragedy of my own.
And then, by golly (as Bertie Wooster would have said), I got one.
O
ne Saturday morning in late April of 1953, in the middle of a busy breakfast shift, Billy Florscheim appeared at the door of the diner, out of breath. Billy was the First Christian Church’s choirmaster. “James, James Meisenheimer,” he cried, the moment he saw me. “There you are. Have you seen Magnus Kellerman today?”
I shook my head. “We played chess after school yesterday afternoon. That’s the last time I saw him. Why? What’s happened?”
“He’s disappeared,” gasped Billy. “His parents are mad with worry. They’re forming a search party.”
“Magnus has
run away
?” I said.
He looked at me sharply. “Did he say anything to you?”
I thought of my friend’s cherished plans to begin a new life in St. Louis. My eyes grew as big as saucers. “No,” I said hollowly.
When I told Joseph what had happened, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. We closed the diner as quickly as we could and hurried off to help with the search. A large crowd was milling outside the church. Reverend Kellerman was organizing groups, sending volunteers off to search in different parts of town. When he saw us approach, he abruptly stopped what he was doing and walked over. He and my father hadn’t spoken in fourteen years. The minister’s hair had turned as white as snow by then. It fell, rich and lustrous, halfway down his back. His whiskers had grown into a long, uncontrollable thicket; even his eyebrows had begun to sprout in splendid, bushy abandon. He had begun to bear a startling resemblance to the Almighty himself. The two old adversaries looked at each other for a moment.
“Heard about your boy,” said Joseph. “We’re here to help.”
“Thank you.” Reverend Kellerman’s voice was soft, quite unlike his usual delivery from the pulpit.
“I’m not coming back, though,” warned my father.
The pastor’s eyes creased into a small smile.
The two men shook hands.
We were sent to search the woods behind our house. For the next five or six hours we went up and down the hill, calling out for Magnus. I searched and shouted along with the others, even though I was sure that he had hitched an early-morning ride out of town and was now heading toward his dreams, bound for St. Louis.
It seemed that everyone was growing up except for me.
As evening drew in, we finally gave up our search and returned to the church. We walked back along the riverbank, tired and hot, our voices hoarse from yelling. As we passed by the pier, I noticed that the far end of the wooden walkway looked strange. I went to investigate. As I approached the end of the pier I saw that some of the old planks had splintered into rotten fragments and fallen into the water. My throat tightened in sudden, wordless sadness.
I walked slowly back to the church.
W
e’re all sinners, Reverend Kellerman used to tell us. Week after week he had promised his congregation that they would all burn in Lucifer’s flames. As it turned out, his own dose of damnation arrived early; hell had come to visit him on earth.
His son’s body was found later that evening, a mile or so downriver. Magnus was floating facedown in the water, a few feet from the riverbank. His naked buttocks shone pale in the moonlight. I don’t suppose, given his monumental girth, that he was a very strong swimmer at the best of times, but he didn’t stand a chance with his trousers around his ankles. Some of the material had snagged on an underwater root, halting his progress.
In the end, he never even made it as far as St. Louis.