15.

“We’re lucky, Mrs. Ryan—in these modern, scientific days of ours, we can see into things. Atoms and X-rays, Mrs. Ryan— no more mysteries. Atoms and X-rays to make the purchase of a new pair of shoes a matter of science and not of guessing.”

This is Mr. Dreyhouse of Dreyhouse Shoes on Main Street in Janesville speaking to my mother. It’s still 1959.

He gestures as he speaks, raising up his arms and turning his hands as if he’s conducting an orchestra.

“You see, Mrs. Ryan,” he says. “Little Rickie will need these feet all his life, and the Adrian X-Ray machine will give him a better fit scientifically. Ah, the lovely Adrian X-Ray machine will allow us to look right into his feet, you see. It’s the scientific thing to do.”

He holds his hands toward the Adrian and bows. He then walks over and pats it. The wooden exterior of the device is streamlined and edged with aluminum, like a cabinet from the Normandie, “The Ship of Light,” that’s somehow been left off in Janesville.

“Isn’t it dangerous to look inside the human body?” my mother asks.

“Why, it’s dangerous not to. Here, Rickie, step up here and peek at all the secrets you thought were locked away.”

He bows again, and I step up on a riser at one side of the Adrian Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope and tuck my feet into an opening banded with aluminum around its edges. On the top of the machine are three built-in viewfinders that look vaguely like the stereopticons my grandmother had. One viewer on top of the fluoroscope is for the owner of the feet, one is for the companion to the owner, and one is for the shoe salesman.

“Here we go,” Mr. Dreyhouse says, throwing a large Bakelite toggle switch. “Let the science begin.”

The machine hums beneath my feet, and the black marker needle in a round gauge rises as the electricity warms up the X-ray tube. I make sure my feet are all the way into the opening. The shadowed black outline of the bones in my feet slowly comes into view. The little bones appear to float in a watery green solution. How strange it is to wiggle my toes and see my bones move a moment later. It’s like watching a shadow of me with a skeleton inside.

“Yes, Mrs. Ryan, the Adrian Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope will save your son years of health problems. It’s been awarded the famous Parents Magazine Seal of Approval, you know. Now that should give you confidence.”

Unfortunately, Parents Magazine didn’t have quite enough science to evaluate the Adrian. It didn’t know about all those roentgens: the radiation climbing through our three bodies and ricocheting around the shoe store. Bam from the penny loafers to the stiletto heels. Wham from the bedroom slippers over to the Jack Purcell tennis shoes. Parents didn’t know that the Adrian Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope might be more dangerous than Sputnik beeping overhead through our skies. The Adrian might, in fact, be more dangerous than the Communists.

Oh, it was such a dear, sweet era, wasn’t it, with those giant cars with their sulfurous exhausts, ruining our lungs, killing us. But we didn’t know that. No, we were checking our gas mileage. We studied those instruments in the dashboard. That was all we needed to know, right? The speedometer here in one circle and, in the other circle: TEMP, AMP, OIL, and GAS. All we needed to know, right there. TEMP, AMP, OIL, GAS.

Who could have known? Not Mr. Dreyhouse, surely, standing there in his striped sport coat and tousled hair. Looking over the glasses at the end of his nose as he answered our questions, he looked like a Norman Rockwell figure. He couldn’t have known that his machine was sending out rays sharp as carbon-steel knives. Who could blame him?

Why even Marie Curie, who probably died of radiation poisoning, would go out to her lab at night and see her vials of radioactive material flickering on the shelves in the dark. “The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights,” she wrote. She didn’t know that these “wonderful compounds” could kill as well as cure.

So strange, isn’t it—the way ignorance goes hand in hand with science. My mother, Mr. Dreyhouse, and I there, convinced we were learning something—when really, we were just killing ourselves for no good reason at all.

Nazis? Why, Nazis are always a long way from fourth grade.

My friend, he called me, Albert Speer did. My friend.

Yes, for five minutes, it was Albert Speer and I, the best of friends, but it took me years to get there.