The original first chapter of HERCULES as it was when the book was accepted
Hercules Amsterdam was only three inches tall, though no one knew exactly why. There were many competing theories. His grandmother thought he didn’t drink enough milk. His father thought he didn’t get enough exercise. His mother thought that he could be as tall as other children, if only he wanted to. Hercules himself blamed his mother. He thought she had smoked too many cigarettes while she was pregnant.
Whatever the reason, by the time he was eight years old, Hercules was not much taller than a mouse would be if it stood on its hind legs. You can understand how this made things difficult for his family, if not for Hercules himself. Even the simple things of life—a family breakfast together, for example—were complicated by the difficulty of using eyedroppers to serve up his soft-boiled eggs or tweezers to tease apart a raspberry so that he could eat it. And though his father had rigged up a little table and a tiny chair so Hercules could eat at the table, he was in constant danger of being knocked over by elbows and cereal boxes and coffee cups, and if he tried to venture across the table to serve himself from the common dish, the lazy susan in the middle might suddenly twist under his weight and he would go sprawling, dazed and dizzy, into someone else’s scrambled eggs. He had to be carried everywhere and was often in danger of being stepped on in large gatherings. Besides, being so small, he was apt to be overlooked, and people were constantly having conversations over his head.
There was also the problem of the cat. His mother had brought it home when he was seven.
“What were you thinking?” he asked in dismay. “The cat will try to eat me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother answered. “Cats don’t eat people. Don’t be so scared of everything.”
Hercules glowered at her insensitivity, and tried to explain that it was easy to be scared of things when you were only three inches tall, but knew she wouldn’t understand. Eventually they came to a compromise that the cat should not come into his room, which his mother thought more than settled the matter. Hercules wasn’t so sure. He had never seen the cat signal its agreement to keep its side of the bargain.
For his parents, the worst effect of Hercules’ smallness was how difficult it was for him to play with the neighborhood children. This made them very sad. “Don’t you want to play with the other kids?” his mother asked, almost daily, but Hercules only shrugged. The truth was that he did not really miss the company of other children. There had been a time when he had ventured out from behind his mother’s stockinged legs, the way a rabbit peeks out from behind a tree, and had gone to play with the little boy and girl who lived next door. He had never really recovered from the experience. It had not been much better on other attempts to have him interact with other children. They often teased him, for he was short and shy, and occasionally, they knocked him down in their rambunctiousness, and he hated being knocked down and especially being laughed at; his feelings were easily hurt. All in all, Hercules decided, it was better to be only three inches tall.
One benefit was that he got to have a whole house to himself, not just a bedroom, like other children, but a whole Victorian doll’s house that had belonged to his mother when she was a girl. It was very elegant. The living room had a bay window with real glass panes, although the muslin curtains were unfortunately glued open so he never had much privacy. The walls were lined with large bookshelves, and though it was not actually possible to remove the books and read them, they gave a cultured look to the room. There was even a grand piano in the middle with a music box hidden inside it so that Hercules could sit on the piano bench and dabble his fingers over the keys while “Für Elise” played inside.
There was also a kitchen on the first floor, which Hercules did not use often, since a wooden stove and a wooden refrigerator are pretty much only ornamental. The bathroom, too, was mostly for show. Although it was complete with real porcelain fixtures—a sink, tub, and toilet—none of them had running water, which is somewhat essential in a toilet and a sink. Of course people who lived in Victorian homes in real Victorian times did not have running water, either, so Hercules did as the Victorians did: he had someone fill up the tub with hot water from another tap, and he used a chamber pot instead of a toilet. The chamber pot was like a porcelain potty that had to be emptied into the toilet by someone else, usually his mother—perhaps this was one reason she wanted him to grow up. The chamber pot was a very interesting item. It was bright white, with a pattern of blue flowers around the outside, and on the inside it was decorated with blue letters that read: keep me neat and keep me clean, and I won’t say what I have seen.
His bedroom was on the second floor, complete with a four poster brass bed that had once been the prize of his mother’s collection. It was covered with sheets made from a real silk handkerchief. The elegance of the room was somewhat compromised, however, by the dresser, which his mother had made by the simple expedient of gluing six matchboxes together. Worst of all was the wood-patterned contact paper someone had installed crookedly on the walls, by way of wood paneling. But the view out the window was charming, for it looked down on his little garden, where a few plastic perennials brightened the scene. There was a little picnic table there, too, where Hercules liked to sit. The side of the house had a tree painted on it, that went up to Hercules’ bedroom window. He often wished that it was a real tree, so he could sneak out of his room at night as people did in books. But it was just painted, no matter how hard he wished, and always stayed the same, covered with pink flowers, because it was an apple tree.
There was also another room that he didn’t spend much time in, as it was full of ridiculous odds and ends that had never come in useful in any way, including a large collection of souvenir pencils that someone had left in the doll’s house because no other obvious spot presented itself. It was the sort of indignity Hercules was used to.
All in all, Hercules was perfectly content with his solitary habits in his solitary house. The only thing that clouded his enjoyment was the constant battles with his mother over his lack of contact with other children. He had never liked playing with other children since his unfortunate experiences with the neighbors, and had never wanted to try again. On the grounds that it was absurd to expect someone only three inches tall to go to school, he refused to go, and taught himself out of books his mother brought home from the library. Though it was exhausting to turn the pages, he read for hours each day, and believed that he had learned much more than he would have in school. His mother disagreed. She thought he would learn more if he played with other children. One day, the summer that Hercules turned nine, his mother brought over a little girl to play, though Hercules begged her not to. It was a disaster from start to finish. The little girl squealed when she saw the doll’s house and seemed not to notice that it was the home and private property of Hercules Amsterdam. First she moved the living room furniture about and left in the most unbalanced and impractical arrangement, and then she put all of his dishes inside the stove, which was very inconvenient, and then she took out the roll-top desk and rolled the top up and down until it jammed. She broke one of the bookcases trying to remove the decorative titles, and she ripped down the lace curtains trying to close them; and she unmade the bed and remade it wrong, and put a toy car to sleep in it, making the sheets all oily, and she laughed at his matchbox bureau, and crushed two of the drawers trying to open them, and finally ended by throwing all the furniture out of the house, here and there, hither and thither, breaking goodness knows what, while Hercules ran out of the room screaming for his mother to make her stop.
When it was all over, and the damage was done, his mother tried to console him. “It’s not so bad,” she said, helping him glue the books back onto the shelf, “and it was worth it to play with another child, wasn’t it?”
“No,” said Hercules, determinedly, “if that’s what playing with another child is like, I never want to do it again.”
“You’re just mad,” his mother said.
“Of course I’m mad!” Hercules shouted, waving his arm to encompass the domestic destruction. “If this is what playing with other children is like, I’d much rather play with mice!”