Mendel's Dwarf Read Online Free PDF Page A

genealogies from dwarf studies, discovered in a book of medical genetics that I found one day in the public library. The diagrams have a pleasing sense of design about them, don’t they? There is a balance, a rhythm, a subtle asymmetry that halts the eye. The whole has something of the composition of a Mondrian painting, or perhaps a doodle by Miró:

    All four of the children of the two achondroplastic mothers were born by Caesarean section. If either of the two affected boys has children, the risk for each of these children being affected is a half.
    That was the kind of thing I used to do in my free time, run to the public library. It was a refuge, you see, a place of quiet, a place of sympathy. One of the assistant librarians in particular befriended me. She used to put aside books she thought I might like; she used to talk to me almost as though I were normal. She was not a bad-looking woman. Woman, girl, she was on the borderline between the two, one or two acne spots still lingering on her chin, a blush still coming readily to her cheeks whenever the chief librarian addressed her. Mousy, of course. I feel that all librarians ought to be mousy. It should be a necessary (but not sufficient) qualification for the job. Mousy? Agouti? What, I wonder, is its genetic control? Perhaps it is tightly linked to the gene for tidiness. She was about eighteen, this mousy librarian: eighteen, tidy, and frightened of the chief librarian (also mousy, but fortyish and balding), and her name was Miss Piercey.
    “It’s Benedict,” she used to say as I waddled in. Her tone was almost one of contentment, almost as though she were pleased to see me. “How are we today?”
    We.
    Usually she would be sitting on a stool behind the main desk. Often enough, just often enough for it to be a distinct possibility, not too often for it to be anything more than chance, her skirt would be drawn rather too high up her thighs for modesty. I used to gain an interesting perspective on her when she sat like that. It was the only occasion in the whole of my life when I have been at an advantage over normal people, eyeing Miss Piercey’s legs, longing to be able to pierce Miss Piercey. “Are we looking for anything in particular today?” she would ask. “Or are we just browsing?”
    We . For those moments we shared my paltry existence. “Browsing,” I would reply, my eyes browsing up and over the angle of her knees and into the shadows above. “Just browsing.” Sometimes things would become quite difficult. On occasion—when, for example, turning on her stool to deal with anotherreader, she had to uncross her legs—I would have to excuse myself hastily and rush not to the bookshelves but to the bathroom, there to find solace and comfort at my own hands.
    You are surprised? Oh yes, I’m quite normal that way. It’s only my bones that are deformed …
    Well, you might call it a bone, but it isn’t one. The os penis or baculum, a heterotopic bone found in many insectivores and rodents and in most primates, is absent in man. It isn’t a bone, and I am anything but dwarf in that respect. Because of my shortened arms I have to bend to reach it, but it’s quite normal when I get there. Seven inches erect. I measured it on one occasion when it was thinking of Miss Piercey.
    A test question: Who praised masturbation as the perfect sexual relationship, because it is the only one in which pleasure given is exactly equal to pleasure received? Answer: Jean Genet.
    Once I saw Miss Piercey’s underpants. I was standing chatting with her when an old lady called her to get a book down from a high shelf. “Won’t be a mo, dear,” Miss Piercey replied. “Just coming.” And, as she slid down from her stool, her skirt, snagging some splinter in the wood, rode upward over her thighs. “Whoops!” she cried, tugging the skirt down. “You keep you eyes to yourself, young man.”
    Miss Piercey hurried to the old lady’s aid; I hurried toward the bathroom.