Peter Welles, psychiatrist, eyed the boy thoughtfully. Why had Timothy Paul’s teacher sent him for examination?
“I don’t know, myself, that there’s really anything wrong with Tim,” Miss Page had told Dr. Welles. “He seems perfectly normal. He’s rather quiet as a rule, doesn’t volunteer answers in class or anything of that sort. He gets along well enough with other boys and seems reasonably popular, although he has no special friends. His grades are satisfactory—he gets B faithfully in all his work. But when you’ve been teaching as long as I have, Peter, you get a feeling about certain ones. There is a tension about him—a look in his eyes sometimes— and he is very absentminded.”
“What would your guess be?” Welles had asked. Sometimes these hunches were very valuable. Miss Page had taught school for thirty-odd years; she had been Peter’s teacher in the past, and he thought highly of her opinion.
“I ought not to say,” she answered. “There’s nothing to go on— yet. But he might be starting something, and if it could be headed off—”
“Physicians are often called before the symptoms are sufficiently marked for the doctor to be able to see them,” said Welles. “A patient, or the mother of a child, or any practiced observer, can often see that something is going to be wrong. But it’s hard for the doctor in such cases. Tell me what you think I should look for.”
“You won’t pay too much attention to me? It’s just what occurred to me, Peter; I know I’m not a trained psychiatrist. But it could be delusions of grandeur. Or it could be a withdrawing from the society of others. I always have to speak to him twice to get his attention in class—and he has no real chums.”
Welles had agreed to see what he could find, and promised not to be much influenced by what Miss Page herself called “an old woman’s notions.”
Timothy, when he presented himself for examination, seemed like an ordinary boy. He was perhaps a little small for his age, he had big dark eyes and close-cropped dark curls, thin sensitive fingers and— yes, a decided air of tension. But many boys were nervous on their first visit to the—psychiatrist. Peter often wished that he was able to concentrate on one or two schools, and spend a day a week or so getting acquainted with all the youngsters.
In response to Welles’ preliminary questioning, Tim replied in a clear, low voice, politely and without wasting words. He was thirteen years old, and lived with his grandparents. His mother and father had died when he was a baby, and he did not remember them. He said that he was happy at home, and that he liked school “pretty well,” that he liked to play with other boys. He named several boys when asked who his friends were.
“What lessons do you like at school?”
Tim hesitated, then said: “English, and arithmetic… and history… and geography,” he finished thoughtfully. Then he looked up, and there was something odd in the glance.
“What do you like to do for fun?”
“Read, and play games.”
“What games?”
“Ball games… and marbles… and things like that. I like to play with other boys,” he added, after a barely perceptible pause, “anything they play.”
“Do they play at your house?”
“No; we play on the school grounds. My grandmother doesn’t like noise.”
Was that the reason? When a quiet boy offers explanations, they may not be the right ones.
“What do you like to read?”
But about his reading Timothy was vague. He liked, he said, to read “boys’ books,” but could not name any.
Welles gave the boy the usual intelligence tests. Tim seemed willing, but his replies were slow in coming. Perhaps, Welles thought, I’m imagining this, but he is too careful—too cautious. Without taking time to figure exactly, Welles knew what Tim’s I.Q. would be—about 120.
“What do you do outside of school?” asked the psychiatrist.
“I play with the other boys. After supper, I study my lessons.”
“What did you do yesterday?”
“We played ball on the school playground.”
Welles waited a while to see whether Tim would say anything of his own accord. The seconds stretched into minutes.
“Is that all?” said the boy finally. “May I go now?”
“No; there’s one more test I’d like to give you today. A game, really. How’s your imagination?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cracks on the ceiling—like those over there—do they look like anything to you? Faces, animals, or anything?”
Tim looked.
“Sometimes. And clouds, too. Bob saw a cloud last week that was like a hippo.” Again the last sentence sounded like something tacked on at the last moment, a careful addition made for a reason.
Welles got out the Rorschach cards. But at the sight of them, his patient’s tension increased, his wariness became unmistakably evident. The first time they went through the cards, the boy could scarcely be persuaded to say anything but, “I don’t know.”
“You can do better than this,” said Welles. “We’re going through them again. If you don’t see anything in these pictures, I’ll have to mark you a failure,” he explained. “That won’t do. You did all right on the other things. And maybe next time we’ll do a game you’ll like better.”
“I don’t feel like playing this game now. Can’t we do it again next time?”
“May as well get it done now. It’s not only a game, you know, Tim; it’s a test. Try harder, and be a good sport.”
So Tim, this time, told what he saw in the ink blots. They went through the cards slowly, and the test showed Tim’s fear, and that there was something he was hiding; it showed his caution, a lack of trust, and an unnaturally high emotional self-control.
Miss Page had been right; the boy needed help.
“Now,” said Welles cheerfully, “that’s all over. We’ll just run through them again quickly and I’ll tell you what other people have seen in them.”
A flash of genuine interest appeared on the boy’s face for a moment.
Welles went through the cards slowly, seeing that Tim was attentive to every word. When he first said, “And some see what you saw here,” the boy’s relief was evident. Tim began to relax, and even to volunteer some remarks. When they had finished he ventured to ask a question.
“Dr. Welles, could you tell me the name of this test?”
“It’s sometimes called the Rorschach test, after the man who worked it out.”
“Would you mind spelling that?”
Welles spelled it, and added: “Sometimes it’s called the inkblot test.”
Tim gave a start of surprise, and then relaxed again with a visible effort.
“What’s the matter? You jumped.”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, come on! Let’s have it,” and Welles waited.
“Only that I thought about the ink-pool in the Kipling stories,” said Tim, after a minute’s reflection. “This is different.”
“Yes, very different,” laughed Welles. “I’ve never tried that. Would you like to?”
“Oh, no, sir,” cried Tim earnestly.
“You’re a little jumpy today,” said Welles. “We’ve time for some more talk, if you are not too tired.”
“No, I’m not very tired,” said the boy warily.
Welles went to a drawer and chose a hypodermic needle. It wasn’t usual, but perhaps—“I’ll just give you a little shot to relax your nerves, shall I? Then we’d get on better.”
When he turned around, the stark terror on the child’s face stopped Welles in his tracks.
“Oh, no! Don’t! Please, please, please, don’t!”
Welles replaced the needle and shut the drawer before he said a word.
“I won’t,” he said, quietly. “I didn’t know you didn’t like shots. I won’t give you any, Tim.”
The boy, fighting for self-control, gulped and said nothing.
“It’s all right,” said Welles, lighting a cigarette and pretending to watch the smoke rise. Anything rather than appear to be watching the badly shaken small boy shivering in the chair opposite him. “Sorry. You didn’t tell me about the things you don’t like, the things you’re afraid of.”
The words hung in the silence.
“Yes,” said Timothy slowly. “I’m afraid of shots. I hate needles. It’s just one of those things.” He tried to smile.
“We’ll do without them, then. You’ve passed all the tests, Tim, and I’d like to walk home with you and tell your grandmother about it. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll stop for something to eat,” Welles went on, opening the door for his patient. “Ice cream, or a hot dog.”
They went out together.
Timothy Paul’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Davis, lived in a large old-fashioned house that spelled money and position. The grounds were large, fenced, and bordered with shrubbery. Inside the house there was little that was new, everything was well-kept. Timothy led the psychiatrist to Mr. Davis’s library, and then went in search of his grandmother.
When Welles saw Mrs. Davis, he thought he had some of the explanation. Some grandmothers are easy-going, jolly, comparatively young. This grandmother was, as it soon became apparent, quite different.
“Yes, Timothy is a pretty good boy,” she said, smiling on her grandson. “We have always been strict with him, Dr. Welles, but I believe it pays. Even when he was a mere baby, we tried to teach him right ways. For example, when he was barely three I read him some little stories. And a few days later he was trying to tell us, if you will believe it, that he could read! Perhaps he was too young to know the nature of a lie, but I felt it my duty to make him understand. When he insisted, I spanked him. The child had a remarkable memory, and perhaps he thought that was all there was to reading. Well! I don’t mean to brag of my brutality,” said Mrs. Davis, with a charming smile. “I assure you, Dr. Welles, it was a painful experience for me. We’ve had very little occasion for punishments. Timothy is a good boy.”
Welles murmured that he was sure of it.
“Timothy, you may deliver your papers now,” said Mrs. Davis. “I am sure Dr. Welles will excuse you.” And she settled herself for a good long talk about her grandson.
Timothy, it seemed, was the apple of her eye. He was a quiet boy, an obedient boy, and a bright boy.
“We have our rules, of course. I have never allowed Timothy to forget that children should be seen and not heard, as the good old-fashioned saying is. When he first learned to turn somersaults, when he was three or four years old, he kept coming to me and saying, ‘Grandmother, see me!’ I simply had to be firm with him. Timothy,’ I said, ‘let us have no more of this! It is simply showing off. If it amuses you to turn somersaults, well and good. But it doesn’t amuse me to watch you endlessly doing it. Play if you like, but do not demand admiration.’”
“Did you never play with him?”
“Certainly I played with him. And it was a pleasure to me also. We—Mr. Davis and I—taught him a great many games, and many kinds of handicraft. We read stories to him and taught him rhymes and songs. I took a special course in kindergarten craft, to amuse the child—and I must admit that it amused me also!” added Tim’s grandmother, smiling reminiscently. “We made houses of toothpicks, with balls of clay at the corners. His grandfather took him for walks and drives. We no longer have a car, since my husband’s sight has begun to fail him slightly, so now the garage is Timothy’s workshop. We had windows cut in it, and a door, and nailed the large doors shut.”
It soon became clear that Tim’s life was not all strictures by any means. He had a workshop of his own, and upstairs beside his bedroom was his own library and study.
“He keeps his books and treasures there,” said his grandmother, “his own little radio, and his schoolbooks, and his typewriter. When he was only seven years old, he asked us for a typewriter. But he is a careful child, Dr. Welles, not at all destructive, and I had read that in many schools they make use of typewriters in teaching young children to read and write and to spell. The words look the same as in printed books, you see; and less muscular effort is involved. So his grandfather got him a very nice noiseless typewriter, and he loved it dearly. I often hear it purring away as I pass through the hall. Timothy keeps his own rooms in good order, and his shop also. It is his own wish. You know how boys are—they do not wish others to meddle with their belongings. ‘Very well, Timothy,’ I told him, ‘if a glance shows me that you can do it yourself properly, nobody will go into your rooms; but they must be kept neat.’ And he has done so for several years. A very neat boy, Timothy.”
“Timothy didn’t mention his paper route,” remarked Welles. “He said only that he plays with other boys after school.”
“Oh, but he does,” said Mrs. Davis. “He plays until five o’clock, and then he delivers his papers. If he is late, his grandfather walks down and calls him. The school is not very far from here, and Mr. Davis frequently walks down and watches the boys at their play. The paper route is Timothy’s way of earning money to feed his cats. Do you care for cats, Dr. Welles?”
“Yes, I like cats very much,” said the psychiatrist. “Many boys like dogs better.”
“Timothy had a dog when he was a baby—a collie.” Her eyes grew moist. “We all loved Ruff dearly. But I am no longer young, and the care and training of a dog is difficult. Timothy is at school or at the Boy Scout camp or something of the sort a great part of the time, and I thought it best that he should not have another dog. But you wanted to know about our cats, Dr. Welles. I raise Siamese cats.”
“Interesting pets,” said Welles cordially. “My aunt raised them at one time.”
“Timothy is very fond of them. But three years ago he asked me if he could have a pair of black Persians. At first I thought not; but we like to please the child, and he promised to build their cages himself. He had taken a course in carpentry at vacation school. So he was allowed to have a pair of beautiful black Persians. But the very first litter turned out to be short-haired, and Timothy confessed that he had mated his queen to my Siamese torn, to see what would happen. Worse yet, he had mated his torn to one of my Siamese queens. I really was tempted to punish him. But, after all, I could see that he was curious as to the outcome of such crossbreeding. Of course I said the kittens must be destroyed. The second litter was exactly like the first—all black, with short hair. But you know what children are. Timothy begged me to let them live, and they were his first kittens. Three in one Utter, two in the other. He might keep them, I said, if he would take full care of them and be responsible for all the expense. He mowed lawns and ran errands and made little footstools and bookcases to sell, and did all sorts of things, and probably used his allowance, too. But he kept the kittens and has a whole row of cages in the yard beside his workshop.”
“And their offspring?” inquired Welles, who could not see what all this had to do with the main question, but was willing to listen to anything that might lead to information.
“Some of the kittens appear to be pure Persian, and others pure Siamese. These he insisted on keeping, although, as I have explained to him, it would be dishonest to sell them, since they are not purebred. A good many of the kittens are black short-haired and these we destroy. But enough of cats, Dr. Welles. And I am afraid I am talking too much about my grandson.”
“I can understand that you are very proud of him,” said Welles.
“I must confess that we are. And he is a bright boy. When he and his grandfather talk together, and with me also, he asks very intelligent questions. We do not encourage him to voice his opinions—I detest the smart-Aleck type of small boy—and yet I believe they would be quite good opinions for a child of his age.”
“Has his health always been good?” asked Welles.
“On the whole, very good. I have taught him the value of exercise, play, wholesome food and suitable rest. He has had a few of the usual childish ailments, not seriously. And he never has colds. But, of course, he takes his cold shots twice a year when we do.”
“Does he mind the shots?” asked Welles, as casually as he could.
“Not at all. I always say that he, though so young, sets an example I find hard to follow. I still flinch, and really rather dread the ordeal.”
Welles looked toward the door at a sudden, slight sound.
Timothy stood there, and he had heard. Again, fear was stamped on his face and terror looked out of his eyes.
“Timothy,” said his grandmother, “don’t stare.”
“Sorry, sir,” the boy managed to say.
“Are your papers all delivered? I did not realize we had been talking for an hour, Dr. Welles. Would you like to see Timothy’s cats?” Mrs. Davis inquired graciously. “Timothy, take Dr. Welles to see your pets. We have had quite a talk about them.”
Welles got Tim out of the room as fast as he could. The boy led the way around the house and into the side yard where the former garage stood.
There the man stopped.
“Tim,” he said, “you don’t have to show me the cats if you don’t want to.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“Is that part of what you are hiding? If it is, I don’t want to see it until you are ready to show me.”
Tim looked up at him then.
“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t mind about the cats. Not if you like cats really.”
“I really do. But, Tim, this I would like to know: You’re not afraid of the needle. Could you tell me why you were afraid… why you said you were afraid … of my shot? The one I promised not to give you after all?”
Their eyes met.
“You won’t tell?” asked Tim.
“I won’t tell.”
“Because it was pentothal. Wasn’t it?”
Welles gave himself a slight pinch. Yes, he was awake. Yes, this was a little boy asking him about pentothal. A boy who—yes, certainly, a boy who knew about it.
“Yes, it was,” said Welles. “A very small dose. You know what it is?”
“Yes, sir. I… I read about it somewhere. In the papers.”
“Never mind that. You have a secret—something you want to hide. That’s what you are afraid about, isn’t it?”
The boy nodded dumbly.
“If it’s anything wrong, or that might be wrong, perhaps I could help you. You’ll want to know me better, first. You’ll want to be sure you can trust me. But I’ll be glad to help, any time you say the word, Tim. Or I might stumble on to things the way I did just now. One thing though—I never tell secrets.”
“Never?”
“Never. Doctors and priests don’t betray secrets. Doctors seldom, priests never. I guess I am more like a priest, because of the kind of doctoring I do.”
He looked down at the boy’s bowed head.
“Helping fellows who are scared sick,” said the psychiatrist very gently. “Helping fellows in trouble, getting things straight again, fixing things up, unsnarling tangles. When I can, that’s what I do. And I don’t tell anything to anybody. It’s just between that one fellow and me.”
But, he added to himself, I’ll have to find out. I’ll have to find out what ails this child. Miss Page is right—he needs me.
They went to see the cats.
There were the Siamese in their cages, and the Persians in their cages, and there, in several small cages, the short-haired black cats and their hybrid offspring. “We take them into the house, or let them into this big cage, for exercise,” explained Tim. “I take mine into my shop sometimes. These are all mine. Grandmother keeps hers on the sun porch.”
“You’d never know these were not all pure-bred,” observed Welles. “Which did you say were the full Persians? Any of their kittens here?”
“No; I sold them.”
“I’d like to buy one. But these look just the same—it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I want a pet, and wouldn’t use it for breeding stock. Would you sell me one of these?”
Timothy shook his head.
“I’m sorry. I never sell any but the pure-breds.”
It was then that Welles began to see what problem he faced. Very dimly he saw it, with joy, relief, hope and wild enthusiasm.
“Why not?” urged Welles. “I can wait for a pure-bred, if you’d rather, but why not one of these? They look just the same. Perhaps they’d be more interesting.”
Tim looked at Welles for a long, long minute.
“I’ll show you,” he said. “Promise to wait here? No, I’ll let you come into the workroom. Wait a minute, please.”
The boy drew a key from under his blouse, where it had hung suspended from a chain, and unlocked the door of his shop. He went inside, closed the door, and Welles could hear him moving about for a few moments. Then he came to the door and beckoned.
“Don’t tell grandmother,” said Tim. “I haven’t told her yet. If it lives, I’ll tell her next week.”
In the corner of the shop under a table there was a box, and in the box there was a Siamese cat. When she saw a stranger she tried to hide her kittens; but Tim lifted her gently, and then Welles saw. Two of the kittens looked like little white rats with stringy tails and smudgy paws, ears and nose. But the third—yes, it was going to be a different sight. It was going to be a beautiful cat if it lived. It had long, silky white hair like the finest Persian, and the Siamese markings were showing up plainly.
Welles caught his breath.
“Congratulations, old man! Haven’t you told anyone yet?”
“She’s not ready to show. She’s not a week old.”
“But you’re going to show her?”
“Oh, yes, grandmother will be thrilled. She’ll love her. Maybe there’ll be more.”
“You knew this would happen. You made it happen. You planned it all from the start,” accused Welles.
“Yes,” admitted the boy.
“How did you know?”
The boy turned away.
“I read it somewhere,” said Tim.
The cat jumped back into the box and began to nurse her babies. Welles felt as if he could endure no more. Without a glance at anything else in the room—and everything else was hidden under tarpaulins and newspapers—he went to the door.
“Thanks for showing me, Tim,” he said. “And when you have any to sell, remember me. I’ll wait. I want one like that.”
The boy followed him out and locked the door carefully.
“But Tim,” said the psychiatrist, “that’s not what you were afraid I’d find out. I wouldn’t need a drug to get you to tell me this, would I?”
Tim replied carefully, “I didn’t want to tell this until I was ready. Grandmother really ought to know first. But you made me tell you.”
“Tim,” said Peter Welles earnestly, “I’ll see you again. Whatever you are afraid of, don’t be afraid of me. I often guess secrets. I’m on the way to guessing yours already. But nobody else need ever know.”
He walked rapidly home, whistling to himself from time to time. Perhaps he, Peter Welles, was the luckiest man in the world.
He had scarcely begun to talk to Timothy on the boy’s next appearance at the office, when the phone in the hall rang. On his return, when he opened the door he saw a book in Tim’s hands. The boy made a move as if to hide it, and thought better of it.
Welles took the book and looked at it.
“Want to know more about Rorschach, eh?” he asked.
“I saw it on the shelf. I—”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Welles, who had purposely left the book near the chair Tim would occupy. “But what’s the matter with the library?”
“They’ve got some books about it, but they’re on the closed shelves. I couldn’t get them.” Tim spoke without thinking first, and then caught his breath.
But Welles replied calmly: “I’ll get it out for you. I’ll have it next time you come. Take this one along today when you go. Tim, I mean it—you can trust me.”
“I can’t tell you anything,” said the boy. “You’ve found out some things. I wish… oh, I don’t know what I wish! But I’d rather be let alone. I don’t need help. Maybe I never will. If I do, can’t I come to you then?”
Welles pulled out his chair and sat down slowly.
“Perhaps that would be the best way, Tim. But why wait for the ax to fall? I might be able to help you ward it off—what you’re afraid of. You can kid people along about the cats; tell them you were fooling around to see what would happen. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, they tell me. Maybe with me to help, you could. Or with me to back you up, the blowup would be easier. Easier on your grandparents, too.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“I’m beginning to be sure of that. But things you try to keep hidden may come to light. The kitten—you could hide it, but you don’t want to. You’ve got to risk something to show it.”
“I’ll tell them I read it somewhere.”
“That wasn’t true, then. I thought not. You figured it out.”
There was silence.
Then Timothy Paul said: “Yes, I figured it out. But that’s my secret.”
“It’s safe with me.”
But the boy did not trust him yet. Welles soon learned that he had been tested. Tim took the book home, and returned it, took the library books which Welles got for him, and in due course returned them also. But he talked little and was still wary. Welles could talk all he liked, but he got little or nothing out of Tim. Tim had told all he was going to tell. He would talk about nothing except what any boy would talk about.
After two months of this, during which Welles saw Tim officially once a week and unofficially several times—showing up at the school playground to watch games, or meeting Tim on the paper route and treating him to a soda after it was finished—Welles had learned very little more. He tried again. He had probed no more during the two months, respected the boy’s silence, trying to give him time to get to know and trust him.
But one day he asked: “What are you going to do when you grow up, Tim? Breed cats?”
Tim laughed a denial.
“I don’t know what, yet. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another.”
This was a typical boy answer. Welles disregarded it.
“What would you like to do best of all?” he asked.
Tim leaned forward eagerly. “What you do!” he cried.
“You’ve been reading up on it, I suppose,” said Welles, as casually as he could. “Then you know, perhaps, that before anyone can do what I do, he must go through it himself, like a patient. He must also study medicine and be a full-fledged doctor, of course. You can’t do that yet. But you can have the works now, like a patient.”
“Why? For the experience?”
“Yes. And for the cure. You’ll have to face that fear and lick it. You’ll have to straighten out a lot of other things, or at least face them.”
“My fear will be gone when I’m grown up,” said Timothy. “I think it will. I hope it will.”
“Can you be sure?”
“No,” admitted the boy. “I don’t know exactly why I’m afraid. I just know I must hide things. Is that bad, too?”
“Dangerous, perhaps.”
Timothy thought a while in silence. Welles smoked three cigarettes and yearned to pace the floor, but dared not move.
“What would it be like?” asked Tim finally.
“You’d tell me about yourself. What you remember. Your childhood—the way your grandmother runs on when she talks about you.”
“She sent me out of the room. I’m not supposed to think I’m bright,” said Tim, with one of his rare grins.
“And you’re not supposed to know how well she reared you?”
“She did fine,” said Tim. “She taught me all the wisest things I ever knew.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as shutting up. Not telling all you know. Not showing off.”
“I see what you mean,” said Welles. “Have you heard the story of St. Thomas Aquinas?”
“No.”
“When he was a student in Paris, he never spoke out in class, and the others thought him stupid. One of them kindly offered to help him, and went over all the work very patiently to make him understand it. And then one day they came to a place where the other student got all mixed up and had to admit he didn’t understand. Then Thomas suggested a solution and it was the right one. He knew more than any of the others all the time; but they called him the Dumb Ox.”
Tim nodded gravely.
“And when he grew up?” asked the boy.
“He was the greatest thinker of all time,” said Welles. “A fourteenth-century super-brain. He did more original work than any other ten great men; and died young.”
After that, it was easier.
“How do I begin?” asked Timothy.
“You’d better begin at the beginning. Tell me all you can remember about your early childhood, before you went to school.”
Tim gave this his consideration.
“I’ll have to go forward and backward a lot,” he said. “I couldn’t put it all in order.”
“That’s all right. Just tell me today all you can remember about that time of your life. By next week you’ll have remembered more. As we go on to later periods of your life, you may remember things that belonged to an earlier time; tell them then. We’ll make some sort of order out of it.”
Welles listened to the boy’s revelations with growing excitement. He found it difficult to keep outwardly calm.
“When did you begin to read?” Welles asked.
“I don’t know when it was. My grandmother read me some stories, and somehow I got the idea about the words. But when I tried to tell her I could read, she spanked me. She kept saying I couldn’t, and I kept saying I could, until she spanked me. For a while I had a dreadful time, because I didn’t know any word she hadn’t read to me—I guess I sat beside her and watched, or else I remembered and then went over it by myself right after. I must have learned as soon as I got the idea that each group of letters on the page was a word.”
“The word-unit method,” Welles commented. “Most self-taught readers learned like that.”
“Yes. I have read about it since. And Macaulay could read when he was three, but only upside-down, because of standing opposite when his father read the Bible to the family.”
“There are many cases of children who learned to read as you did, and surprised their parents. Well? How did you get on?”
“One day I noticed that two words looked almost alike and sounded almost alike. They were ‘can’ and ‘man.’ I remember staring at them and then it was like something beautiful boiling up in me. I began to look carefully at the words, but in a crazy excitement. I was a long while at it, because when I put down the book and tried to stand up I was stiff all over. But I had the idea, and after that it wasn’t hard to figure out almost any words. The really hard words are the common ones that you get all the time in easy books. Other words are pronounced the way they are spelled.”
“And nobody knew you could read?”
“No. Grandmother told me not to say I could, so I didn’t. She read to me often, and that helped. We had a great many books, of course. I liked those with pictures. Once or twice they caught me with a book that had no pictures, and then they’d take it away and say, ‘I’ll find a book for a little boy.’ ”
“Do you remember what books you liked then?”
“Books about animals, I remember. And geographies. It was funny about animals—”
Once you got Timothy started, thought Welles, it wasn’t hard to get him to go on talking.
“One day I was at the zoo,” said Tim, “and by the cages alone. Grandmother was resting on a bench and she let me walk along by myself. People were talking about the animals and I began to tell them all I knew. It must have been funny in a way, because I had read a lot of words I couldn’t pronounce correctly, words I had never heard spoken. They listened and asked me questions and I thought I was just like grandfather, teaching them the way he sometimes taught me. And then they called another man to come, and said, ‘Listen to this kid; he’s a scream!’ and I saw they were all laughing at me.”
Timothy’s face was redder than usual, but he tried to smile as he added, “I can see now how it must have sounded funny. And unexpected, too; that’s a big point in humor. But my little feelings were so dreadfully hurt that I ran back to my grandmother crying, and she couldn’t find out why. But it served me right for disobeying her. She always told me not to tell people things; she said a child had nothing to teach its elders.”
“Not in that way, perhaps—at that age.”
“But, honestly, some grown people don’t know very much,” said Tim. “When we went on the train last year, a woman came up and sat beside me and started to tell me things a little boy should know about California. I told her I’d lived here all my life, but I guess she didn’t even know we are taught things in school, and she tried to tell me things, and almost everything was wrong.”
“Such as what?” asked Welles, who had also suffered from tourists.
“We… she said so many things… but I thought this was the funniest: She said all the Missions were so old and interesting, and I said yes, and she said, ‘You know, they were all built long before Columbus discovered America,’ and I thought she meant it for a joke, so I laughed. She looked very serious and said, ‘Yes, those people all come up here from Mexico.’ I suppose she thought they were Aztec temples.”
Welles, shaking with laughter, could not but agree that many adults were sadly lacking in the rudiments of knowledge.
“After that Zoo experience, and a few others like it, I began to get wise to myself,” continued Tim. “People who knew things didn’t want to hear me repeating them, and people who didn’t know, wouldn’t be taught by a four-year-old baby. I guess I was four when I began to write.”
“How?”
“Oh, I just thought if I couldn’t say anything to anybody at any time, I’d burst. So I began to put it down—in printing, like in books. Then I found out about writing, and we had some old-fashioned schoolbooks that taught how to write. I’m left-handed. When I went to school, I had to use my right hand. But by then I had learned how to pretend that I didn’t know things. I watched the others and did as they did. My grandmother told me to do that.”
“I wonder why she said that,” marveled Welles.
“She knew I wasn’t used to other children, she said, and it was the first time she had left me to anyone else’s care. So, she told me to do what the others did and what my teacher said,” explained Tim simply, “and I followed her advice literally. I pretended I didn’t know anything, until the others began to know it, too. Lucky I was so shy. But there were things to learn, all right. Do you know, when I was first sent to school, I was disappointed because the teacher dressed like other women. The only picture of teachers I had noticed were those in an old Mother Goose book, and I thought that all teachers wore hoop skirts. But as soon as I saw her, after the little shock of surprise, I knew it was silly, and I never told.”
The psychiatrist and the boy laughed together.
“We played games. I had to learn to play with children, and not be surprised when they slapped or pushed me. I just couldn’t figure out why they’d do that, or what good it did them. But if it was to surprise me, I’d say ‘Boo’ and surprise them some time later; and if they were mad because I had taken a ball or something they wanted, I’d play with them.”
“Anybody ever try to beat you up?”
“Oh, yes. But I had a book about boxing—with pictures. You can’t learn much from pictures, but I got some practice too, and that helped. I didn’t want to win, anyway. That’s what I like about games of strength or skill—I’m fairly matched, and I don’t have to be always watching in case I might show off or try to boss somebody around.”
“You must have tried bossing sometimes.”
“In books, they all cluster around the boy who can teach new games and think up new things to play. But I found out that doesn’t work. They just want to do the same thing all the time—like hide and seek. It’s no fun if the first one to be caught is ‘it’ next time. The rest just walk in any old way and don’t try to hide or even to run, because it doesn’t matter whether they are caught. But you can’t get the boys to see that, and play right, so the last one caught is ‘it’.”
Timothy looked at his watch.
“Time to go,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Dr. Welles. I hope I haven’t bored you too much.”
Welles recognized the echo and smiled appreciatively at the small boy.
“You didn’t tell me about the writing. Did you start to keep a diary?”
“No. It was a newspaper. One page a day, no more and no less. I still keep it,” confided Tim. “But I get more on the page now. I type it.”
“And you write with either hand now?”
“My left hand is my own secret writing. For school and things like that I use my right hand.”
When Timothy had left, Welles congratulated himself. But for the next month he got no more. Tim would not reveal a single significant fact. He talked about ball-playing, he described his grandmother’s astonished delight over the beautiful kitten, he told of its growth and the tricks it played. He gravely related such enthralling facts as that he liked to ride on trains, that his favorite wild animal was the lion, and that he greatly desired to see snow falling. But not a word of what Welles wanted to hear. The psychiatrist, knowing that he was again being tested, waited patiently.
Then one afternoon when Welles, fortunately unoccupied with a patient, was smoking a pipe on his front porch, Timothy Paul strode into the yard.
“Yesterday Miss Page asked me if I was seeing you and I said yes. She said she hoped my grandparents didn’t find it too expensive, because you had told her I was all right and didn’t need to have her worrying about me. And then I said to grandma, was it expensive for you to talk to me, and she said, ‘Oh no, dear; the school pays for that. It was your teacher’s idea that you have a few talks with Dr. Welles.’ ”
“I’m glad you came to me, Tim, and I’m sure you didn’t give me away to either of them. Nobody’s paying me. The school pays for my services if a child is in a bad way and his parents are poor. It’s a new service, since 1956. Many maladjusted children can be helped— much more cheaply to the state than the cost of having them go crazy or become criminals or something. You understand all that. But—sit down, Tim!—I can’t charge the state for you, and I can’t charge your grandparents. You’re adjusted marvelously well in every way, as far as I can see; and when I see the rest, I’ll be even more sure of it.”
“Well—gosh! I wouldn’t have come—” Tim was stammering in confusion. “You ought to be paid. I take up so much of your time. Maybe I’d better not come any more.”
“I think you’d better. Don’t you?”
“Why are you doing it for nothing, Dr. Welles?”
“I think you know why.”
The boy sat down in the glider and pushed himself meditatively back and forth. The glider squeaked.
“You’re interested. You’re curious,” he said.
“That’s not all, Tim.”
Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.
“I know,” said Timothy. “I believe it. Look, is it all right if I call you Peter? Since we’re friends.”
At their next meeting, Timothy went into details about his newspaper. He had kept all the copies, from the first smudged, awkwardly printed pencil issues to the very latest neatly typed ones. But he would not show Welles any of them.
“I just put down every day the things I most wanted to say, the news or information or opinion I had to swallow unsaid. So it’s a wild medley. The earlier copies are awfully funny. Sometimes I guess what they were all about, what made me write them. Sometimes I remember. I put down the books I read too, and mark them like school grades, on two points—how I liked the book, and whether it was good. And whether I had read it before, too.”
“How many books do you read? What’s your reading speed?”
It proved that Timothy’s reading speed on new books of adult level varied from eight hundred to nine hundred fifty words a minute. The average murder mystery—he loved them—took him a little less than an hour. A year’s homework in history, Tim performed easily by reading his textbook through three or four times during the year. He apologized for that, but explained that he had to know what was in the book so as not to reveal in examinations too much that he had learned from other sources. Evenings, when his grandparents believed him to be doing homework he spent his time reading other books, or writing his newspaper, “or something.” As Welles had already guessed, Tim had read everything in his grandfather’s library, everything of interest in the public library that was not on the closed shelves, and everything he could order from the state library.
“What do the librarians say?”
“They think the books are for my grandfather. I tell them that, if they ask what a little boy wants with such a big book. Peter, telling so many lies is what gets me down. I have to do it, don’t I?”
“As far as I can see, you do,” agreed Welles. “But here’s material for a while in my library. There’ll have to be a closed shelf here, too, though, Tim.”
“Could you tell me why? I know about the library books. Some of them might scare people, and some are—”
“Some of my books might scare you too, Tim. I’ll tell you a little about abnormal psychology if you like, one of these days, and then I think you’ll see that until you’re actually trained to deal with such cases, you’d be better off not knowing too much about them.”
“I don’t want to be morbid,” agreed Tim. “All right. I’ll read only what you give me. And from now on I’ll tell you things. There was more than the newspaper, you know.”
“I thought as much. Do you want to go on with your tale?”
“It started when I first wrote a letter to a newspaper—of course, under a pen name. They printed it. For a while I had a high old time of it—a letter almost every day, using all sorts of pen names. Then I branched out to magazines, letters to the editor again. And stories—I tried stories.”
He looked a little doubtfully at Welles, who said only: “How old were you when you sold the first story?”
“Eight,” said Timothy. “And when the check came, with my name on it, ‘T. Paul,’ I didn’t know what in the world to do.”
“That’s a thought. What did you do?”
“There was a sign in the window of the bank. I always read signs, and that one came back to my mind. ‘Banking By Mail.’ You can see I was pretty desperate. So I got the name of a bank across the Bay and I wrote them—on my typewriter—and said I wanted to start an account, and here was a check to start it with. Oh, I was scared stiff, and had to keep saying to myself that, after all, nobody could do much to me. It was my own money. But you don’t know what it’s like to be only a small boy! They sent the check back to me and I died ten deaths when I saw it. But the letter explained. I hadn’t endorsed it. They sent me a blank to fill out about myself. I didn’t know how many lies I dared to tell. But it was my money and I had to get it. If I could get it into the bank, then some day I could get it out. I gave my business as ‘author’ and I gave my age as twenty-four. I thought that was awfully old.”
“I’d like to see the story. Do you have a copy of the magazine around?”
“Yes,” said Tim. “But nobody noticed it—I mean, T. Paul’ could be anybody. And when I saw magazines for writers on the newsstands and bought them, I got on to the way to use a pen name on the story and my own name and address up in the corner. Before that I used a pen name and sometimes never got the things back or heard about them. Sometimes I did, though.”
“What then?”
“Oh, then I’d endorse the check payable to me and sign the pen name, and then sign my own name under it. Was I scared to do that! But it was my money.”
“Only stories?”
“Articles, too. And things. That’s enough of that for today. Only— I just wanted to say—a while ago, T. Paul told the bank he wanted to switch some of the money over to a checking account. To buy books by mail, and such. So, I could pay you, Dr. Welles—” with sudden formality.
“No, Tim,” said Peter Welles firmly. “The pleasure is all mine. What I want is to see the story that was published when you were eight. And some of the other things that made T. Paul rich enough to keep a consulting psychiatrist on the payroll. And, for the love of Pete, will you tell me how all this goes on without your grandparents’ knowing a thing about it?”
“Grandmother thinks I send in box tops and fill out coupons,” said Tim. “She doesn’t bring in the mail. She says her little boy gets such a big bang out of that little chore. Anyway that’s what she said when I was eight. I played mailman. And there were box tops—I showed them to her, until she said, about the third time, that really she wasn’t greatly interested in such matters. By now she has the habit of waiting for me to bring in the mail.”
Peter Welles thought that was quite a day of revelation. He spent a quiet evening at home, holding his head and groaning, trying to take it all in.
And that I. Q.—120, nonsense! The boy had been holding out on him. Tim’s reading had obviously included enough about I. Q. tests, enough puzzles and oddments in magazines and such, to enable him to stall successfully. What could he do if he would co-operate?
Welles made up his mind to find out.
He didn’t find out. Timothy Paul went swiftly through the whole range of Superior Adult tests without a failure of any sort. There were no tests yet devised that could measure his intelligence. While he was still writing his age with one figure, Timothy Paul had faced alone, and solved alone, problems that would have baffled the average adult. He had adjusted to the hardest task of all—that of appearing to be a fairly normal, B-average small boy.
And it must be that there was more to find out about him. What did he write? And what did he do besides read and write, learn carpentry and breed cats and magnificently fool his whole world?
When Peter Welles had read some of Tim’s writings, he was surprised to find that the stories the boy had written were vividly human, the product of close observation of human nature. The articles, on the other hand, were closely reasoned and showed thorough study and research. Apparently Tim read every word of several newspapers and a score or more of periodicals.
“Oh, sure,” said Tim, when questioned. “I read everything. I go back once in a while and review old ones, too.”
“If you can write like this,” demanded Welles, indicating a magazine in which a staid and scholarly article had appeared, “and this” —this was a man-to-man political article giving the arguments for and against a change in the whole Congressional system—“then why do you always talk to me in the language of an ordinary stupid schoolboy?”
“Because I’m only a boy,” replied Timothy. “What would happen if I went around talking like that?”
“You might risk it with me. You’ve showed me these things.”
“I’d never dare to risk talking like that. I might forget and do it again before others. Besides, I can’t pronounce half the words.”
“What!”
“I never look up a pronunciation,” explained Timothy. “In case I do slip and use a word beyond the average, I can anyway hope I didn’t say it right.”
Welles shouted with laughter, but was sober again as he realized the implications back of that thoughtfulness.
“You’re just like an explorer living among savages,” said the psychiatrist. “You have studied the savages carefully and tried to imitate them so they won’t know there are differences.”
“Something like that,” acknowledged Tim.
“That’s why your stories are so human,” said Welles. “That one about the awful little girl—”
They both chuckled.
“Yes, that was my first story,” said Tim. “I was almost eight, and there was a boy in my class who had a brother, and the boy next door was the other one, the one who was picked on.”
“How much of the story was true?”
“The first part. I used to see, when I went over there, how that girl picked on Bill’s brother’s friend, Steve. She wanted to play with Steve all the time herself and whenever he had boys over, she’d do something awful. And Steve’s folks were like I said—they wouldn’t let Steve do anything to a girl. When she threw all the watermelon rinds over the fence into his yard, he just had to pick them all up and say nothing back; and she’d laugh at him over the fence. She got him blamed for things he never did, and when he had work to do in the yard she’d hang out of her window and scream at him and make fun. I thought first, what made her act like that, and then I made up a way for him to get even with her, and wrote it out the way it might have happened.”
“Didn’t you pass the idea on to Steve and let him try it?”
“Gosh, no! I was only a little boy. Kids seven don’t give ideas to kids ten. That’s the first thing I had to learn—to be always the one that kept quiet, especially if there was any older boy or girl around, even only a year or two older. I had to learn to look blank and let my mouth hang open and say, ‘I don’t get it,’ to almost everything.”
“And Miss Page thought it was odd that you had no close friends of your own age,” said Welles. “You must be the loneliest boy that ever walked this earth, Tim. You’ve lived in hiding like a criminal. But tell me, what are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of being found out, of course. The only way I can live in this world is in disguise—until I’m grown up, at any rate. At first it was just my grandparents’ scolding me and telling me not to show off, and the way people laughed if I tried to talk to them. Then I saw how people hate anyone who is better or brighter or luckier. Some people sort of trade off; if you’re bad at one thing you’re good at another, but they’ll forgive you for being good at some things, if you’re not good at others so they can balance it off. They can beat you at something. You have to strike a balance. A child has no chance at all. No grownup can stand it to have a child know anything he doesn’t. Oh, a little thing if it amuses them. But not much of anything. There’s an old story about a man who found himself in a country where everyone else was blind. I’m like that—but they shan’t put out my eyes. I’ll never let them know I can see anything.”
“Do you see things that no grown person can see?”
Tim waved his hand towards the magazines.
“Only like that, I meant. I hear people talking in street cars and stores, and while they work, and around. I read about the way they act—in the news. I’m like them, just like them, only I seem about a hundred years older—more matured.”
“Do you mean that none of them have much sense?”
“I don’t mean that exactly. I mean that so few of them have any, or show it if they do have. They don’t even seem to want to. They’re good people in their way, but what could they make of me? Even when I was seven, I could understand their motives, but they couldn’t understand their own motives. And they’re so lazy—they don’t seem to want to know or to understand. When I first went to the library for books, the books I learned from were seldom touched by any of the grown people. But they were meant for ordinary grown people. But the grown people didn’t want to know things—they only wanted to fool around. I feel about most people the way my grandmother feels about babies and puppies. Only she doesn’t have to pretend to be a puppy all the time,” Tim added, with a little bitterness.
“You have a friend now, in me.”
“Yes, Peter,” said Tim, brightening up. “And I have pen friends, too. People like what I write, because they can’t see I’m only a little boy. When I grow up—”
Tim did not finish that sentence. Welles understood, now, some of the fears that Tim had not dared to put into words at all. When he grew up, would he be as far beyond all other grownups as he had, all his life, been above his contemporaries? The adult friends whom he now met on fairly equal terms—would they then, too, seem like babies or puppies?
Peter did not dare to voice the thought, either. Still less did he venture to hint at another thought. Tim, so far, had no great interest in girls; they existed for him as part of the human race, but there would come a time when Tim would be a grown man and would wish to marry. And where among the puppies could he find a mate?
“When you’re grown up, we’ll still be friends,” said Peter. “And who are the others?”
It turned out that Tim had pen friends all over the world. He played chess by correspondence—a game he never dared to play in person, except when he forced himself to move the pieces about idly and let his opponent win at least half the time. He had, also, many friends who had read something he had written, and had written to him about it, thus starting a correspondence-friendship. After the first two or three of these, he had started some on his own account, always with people who lived at a great distance. To most of these he gave a name which, although not false, looked it. That was Paul T. Lawrence. Lawrence was his middle name; and with a comma after the Paul, it was actually his own name. He had a post office box under that name, for which T. Paul of the large bank account was his reference.
“Pen friends abroad? Do you know languages?”
Yes, Tim did. He had studied by correspondence, also; many universities gave extension courses in that manner, and lent the student records to play so that he could learn the correct pronunciation. Tim had taken several such courses, and learned other languages from books. He kept all these languages in practice by means of the letters to other lands and the replies which came to him.
“I’d buy a dictionary, and then I’d write to the mayor of some town, or to a foreign newspaper, and ask them to advertise for some pen friends to help me learn the language. We’d exchange souvenirs and things.”
Nor was Welles in the least surprised to find that Timothy had also taken other courses by correspondence. He had completed, within three years, more than half the subjects offered by four separate universities, and several other courses, the most recent being Architecture. The boy, not yet fourteen, had completed a full course in that subject, and had he been able to disguise himself as a full-grown man, could have gone out at once and built almost anything you’d like to name, for he also knew much of the trades involved.
“It always said how long an average student took, and I’d take that long,” said Tim, “so, of course, I had to be working several schools at the same time.”
“And carpentry at the playground summer school?”
“Oh, yes. But there I couldn’t do too much, because people could see me. But I learned how, and it made a good cover-up, so I could make cages for the cats, and all that sort of thing. And many boys are good with their hands. I like to work with my hands. I built my own radio, too—it gets all the foreign stations, and that helps me with my languages.”
“How did you figure it out about the cats?” said Welles.
“Oh, there had to be recessives, that’s all. The Siamese coloring was a recessive, and it had to be mated with another recessive. Black was one possibility, and white was another, but I started with black because I liked it better. I might try white too, but I have so much else on my mind—”
He broke off suddenly and would say no more.
Their next meeting was by prearrangement at Tim’s workshop. Welles met the boy after school and they walked to Tim’s home together; there the boy unlocked his door and snapped on the lights.
Welles looked around with interest. There was a bench, a tool chest. Cabinets, padlocked. A radio, clearly not store-purchased. A file cabinet, locked. Something on a table, covered with a cloth. A box in the corner—no, two boxes in two corners. In each of them was a mother cat with kittens. Both mothers were black Persians.
“This one must be all black Persian,” Tim explained. “Her third litter and never a Siamese marking. But this one carries both recessives in her. Last time she had a Siamese shorthaired kitten. This morning—I had to go to school. Let’s see.”
They bent over the box where the new-born kittens lay. One kitten was like the mother. The other two were Siamese-Persian; a male and a female.
“You’ve done it again, Tim!” shouted Welles. “Congratulations!”
They shook hands in jubilation.
“I’ll write it in the record,” said the boy blissfully.
In a nickel book marked “Compositions” Tim’s left hand added the entries. He had used the correct symbols—F x, F 2, F 3; Ss, Bl.
“The dominants in capitals,” he explained, “B for black, and S for short hair; the recessives in small letters—s for Siamese, 1 for long hair. Wonderful to write 11 or ss again, Peter! Twice more. And the other kitten is carrying the Siamese marking as a recessive.”
He closed the book in triumph.
“Now,” and he marched to the covered thing on the table, “my latest big secret.”
Tim lifted the cloth carefully and displayed a beautifully built doll house. No, a model house—Welles corrected himself swiftly. A beautiful model, and—yes, built to scale.
“The roof comes off. See, it has a big storage room and a room for a play room or a maid or something. Then I lift off the attic—”
“Good heavens!” cried Peter Welles. “Any little girl would give her soul for this!”
“I used fancy wrapping papers for the wallpapers. I wove the rugs on a little hand loom,” gloated Timothy. “The furniture’s just like real, isn’t it? Some I bought; that’s plastic. Some I made of construction paper and things. The curtains were the hardest; but I couldn’t ask grandmother to sew them—”
“Why not?” the amazed doctor managed to ask.
“She might recognize this afterwards,” said Tim, and he lifted off the upstairs floor.
“Recognize it? You haven’t showed it to her? Then when would she see it?”
“She might not,” admitted Tim. “But I don’t like to take some risks.”
“That’s a very livable floor plan you’ve used,” said Welles, bending closer to examine the house in detail.
“Yes, I thought so. It’s awful how many house plans leave no clear wall space for books or pictures. Some of them have doors placed so you have to detour around the dining room table every time you go from the living room to the kitchen, or so that a whole corner of a room is good for nothing, with doors at all angles. Now, I designed this house to—”
“You designed it, Tim!”
“Why, sure. Oh, I see—you thought I built it from blue-prints I’d bought. My first model home, I did, but the architecture courses gave me so many ideas that I wanted to see how they would look. Now, the cellar and game room—”
Welles came to himself an hour later, and gasped when he looked at his watch.
“It’s too late. My patient has gone home again by this time. I may as well stay—how about the paper route?”
“I gave that up. Grandmother offered to feed the cats as soon as I gave her the kitten. And I wanted the time for this. Here are the pictures of the house.”
The color prints were very good.
“I’m sending them and an article to the magazines,” said Tim. “This time I’m T. L. Paul. Sometimes I used to pretend all the different people I am were talking together—but now I talk to you instead, Peter.”
“Will it bother the cats if I smoke? Thanks. Nothing I’m likely to set on fire, I hope? Put the house together and let me sit here and look at it. I want to look in through the windows. Put its lights on. There.”
The young architect beamed, and snapped on the little lights.
“Nobody can see in here. I got Venetian blinds; and when I work in here, I even shut them sometimes.”
“If I’m to know all about you, I’ll have to go through the alphabet from A to Z,” said Peter Welles. “This is Architecture. What else in the A’s?”
“Astronomy. I showed you those articles. My calculations proved correct. Astrophysics—I got A in the course, but haven’t done anything original so far. Art, no. I can’t paint or draw very well, except mechanical drawing. I’ve done all the Merit Badge work in scouting, all through the alphabet.”
“Darned if I can see you as a Boy Scout,” protested Welles.
“I’m a very good Scout. I have almost as many badges as any other boy my age in the troop. And at camp I do as well as most city boys.”
“Do you do a good turn every day?”
“Yes,” said Timothy. “Started that when I first read about Scouting—I was a Scout at heart before I was old enough to be a Cub. You know, Peter, when you’re very young, you take all that seriously about the good deed every day, and the good habits and ideals and all that. And then you get older and it begins to seem funny and childish and posed and artificial, and you smile in a superior way and make jokes. But there is a third step, too, when you take it all seriously again. People who make fun of the Scout Law are doing the boys a lot of harm; but those who believe in things like that don’t know how to say so, without sounding priggish and platitudinous. I’m going to do an article on it before long.”
“Is the Scout Law your religion—if I may put it that way?”
“No,” said Timothy. “But ‘a Scout is Reverent.’ Once I tried to study the churches and find out what was the truth. I wrote letters to pastors of all denominations—all those in the phone book and the newspaper—when I was on a vacation in the East, I got the names, and then wrote after I got back. I couldn’t write to people here in the city. I said I wanted to know which church was true, and expected them to write to me and tell me about theirs, and argue with me, you know. I could read library books, and all they had to do was recommend some, I told them, and then correspond with me a little about them.”
“Did they?”
“Some of them answered,” said Tim, “but nearly all of them told me to go to somebody near me. Several said they were very busy men. Some gave me the name of a few books, but none of them told me to write again, and… and I was only a little boy. Nine years old, so I couldn’t talk to anybody. When I thought it over, I knew that I couldn’t very well join any church so young, unless it was my grandparents’ church. I keep on going there—it is a good church and it teaches a great deal of truth, I am sure. I’m reading all I can find, so when I am old enough I’ll know what I must do. How old would you say I should be, Peter?”
“College age,” replied Welles. “You are going to college? By then, any of the pastors would talk to you—except those that are too busy!”
“It’s a moral problem, really. Have I the right to wait? But I have to wait. It’s like telling lies—I have to tell some lies, but I hate to. If I have a moral obligation to join the church as soon as I find it, well, what then? I can’t until I’m eighteen or twenty?”
“If you can’t, you can’t. I should think that settles it. You are legally a minor, under the control of your grandparents, and while you might claim the right to go where your conscience leads you, it would be impossible to justify and explain your choice without giving yourself away entirely—just as you are obliged to go to school until you are at least eighteen, even though you know more than most Ph.D.’s. It’s all part of the game, and He who made you must understand that.”
“I’ll never tell you any lies,” said Tim. “I was getting so desperately lonely—my pen pals didn’t know anything about me really. I told them only what was right for them to know. Little kids are satisfied to be with other people, but when you get a little older you have to make friends, really.”
“Yes, that’s a part of growing up. You have to reach out to others and share thoughts with them. You’ve kept to yourself too long as it is.”
“It wasn’t that I wanted to. But without a real friend, it was only pretense, and I never could let my playmates know anything about me. I studied them and wrote stories about them and it was all of them, but it was only a tiny part of me.”
“I’m proud to be your friend, Tim. Every man needs a friend. I’m proud that you trust me.”
Tim patted the cat a moment in siicnce and then looked up with a grin.
“How would you like to hear my favorite joke?” he asked.
“Very much,” said the psychiatrist, bracing himself for almost any major shock.
“It’s records. I recorded this from a radio program.”
Welles listened. He knew little of music, but the symphony which he heard pleased him. The announcer praised it highly in little speeches before and after each movement. Timothy giggled.
“Like it?”
“Very much. 1 don’t see the joke.”
“I wrote it.”
“Tim, you’re beyond me! But I still don’t get the joke.”
“The joke is that I did it by mathematics. I calculated what ought to sound like joy, grief, hope, triumph, and all the rest, and—it was just after I had studied harmony; you know how mathematical that is.”
Speechless, Welles nodded.
“I worked out the rhythms from different metabolisms—the way you function when under the influences of these emotions; the way your metabolic rate varies, your heartbeats and respiration and things. I sent it to the director of that orchestra, and he didn’t get the idea that it was a joke—of course I didn’t explain—he produced the music. I get nice royalties from it, too.”
“You’ll be the death of me yet,” said Welles in deep sincerity. “Don’t tell me anything more today; I couldn’t take it. I’m going home. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll see the joke and come back to laugh. Tim, did you ever fail at anything?”
“There are two cabinets full of articles and stories that didn’t sell. Some of them I feel bad about. There was the chess story. You know, in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ it wasn’t a very good game, and you couldn’t see the relation of the moves to the story very well.”
“I never could see it at all.”
“I thought it would be fun to take a championship game and write a fantasy about it, as if it were a war between two little old countries, with knights and foot-soldiers, and fortified walls in charge of captains, and the bishops couldn’t fight like warriors, and, of course, the queens were women—people don’t kill them, not in hand-to-hand fighting and… well, you see? I wanted to make up the attacks and captures, and keep the people alive, a fairytale war you see, and make the strategy of the game and the strategy of the war coincide, and have everything fit. It took me ever so long to work it out and write it. To understand the game as a chess game and then to translate it into human actions and motives, and put speeches to it to fit different kinds of people. I’ll show it to you. I loved it. But nobody would print it. Chess players don’t like fantasy, and nobody else likes chess. You have to have a very special kind of mind to like both. But it was a disappointment. I hoped it would be published, because the few people who like that sort of thing would like it very much.”
“I’m sure I’ll like it.”
“Well, if you do like that sort of thing, it’s what you’ve been waiting all your life in vain for. Nobody else has done it.” Tim stopped, and blushed as red as a beet. “I see what grandmother means. Once you get started bragging, there’s no end to it. I’m sorry, Peter.”
“Give me the story. I don’t mind, Tim—brag all you like to me; I understand. You might blow up if you never expressed any of your legitimate pride and pleasure in such achievements. What I don’t understand is how you have kept it all under for so long.”
“I had to,” said Tim.
The story was all its young author had claimed. Welles chuckled as he read it, that evening. He read it again, and checked all the moves and the strategy of them. It was really a fine piece of work. Then he thought of the symphony, and this time he was able to laugh. He sat up until after midnight, thinking about the boy. Then he took a sleeping pill and went to bed.
The next day he went to see Tim’s grandmother. Mrs. Davis received him graciously.
“Your grandson is a very interesting boy,” said Peter Welles carefully. “I’m asking a favor of you. I am making a study of various boys and girls in this district, their abilities and backgrounds and environment and character traits and things like that. No names will ever be mentioned, of course, but a statistical report will be kept, for ten years or longer, and some case histories might later be published. Could Timothy be included?”
“Timothy is such a good, normal little boy, I fail to see what would be the purpose of including him in such a survey.”
“That is just the point. We are not interested in maladjusted persons in this study. We eliminate all psychotic boys and girls. We are interested in boys and girls who succeed in facing their youthful problems and making satisfactory adjustments to life. If we could study a selected group of such children, and follow their progress for the next ten years at least—and then publish a summary of the findings, with no names used—”
“In that case, I see no objection,” said Mrs. Davis.
“If you’d tell me, then, something about Timothy’s parents—their history?”
Mrs. Davis settled herself for a good long talk.
“Timothy’s mother, my only daughter, Emily,” she began, “was a lovely girl. So talented. She played the violin charmingly. Timothy is like her, in the face, but has his father’s dark hair and eyes. Edwin had very fine eyes.”
“Edwin was Timothy’s father?”
“Yes. The young people met while Emily was at college in the East. Edwin was studying atomics there.”
“Your daughter was studying music?”
“No; Emily was taking the regular liberal arts course. I can tell you little about Edwin’s work, but after their marriage he returned to it and… you understand, it is painful for me to recall this, but their deaths were such a blow to me. They were so young.”
Welles held his pencil ready to write.
“Timothy has never been told. After all, he must grow up in this world, and how dreadfully the world has changed in the past thirty years, Dr. Welles! But you would not remember the day before 1945. You have heard, no doubt of the terrible explosion in the atomic plant, when they were trying to make a new type of bomb? At the time, none of the workers seemed to be injured. They believed the protection was adequate. But two years later they were all dead or dying.”
Mrs. Davis shook her head, sadly. Welles held his breath, bent his head, scribbled.
“Tim was born just fourteen months after the explosion, fourteen months to the day. Everyone still thought that no harm had been done. But the radiation had some effect which was very slow—I do not understand such things—Edwin died, and then Emily came home to us with the boy. In a few months she, too, was gone.
“Oh, but we do not sorrow as those who have no hope. It is hard to have lost her, Dr. Welles, but Mr. Davis and I have reached the time of life when we can look forward to seeing her again. Our hope is to live until Timothy is old enough to fend for himself. We were so anxious about him; but you see he is perfectly normal in every way.”
“Yes.”
“The specialists made all sorts of tests. But nothing is wrong with Timothy.”
The psychiatrist stayed a little longer, took a few more notes, and made his escape as soon as he could. Going straight to the school, he had a few words with Miss Page and then took Tim to his office, where he told him what he had learned.
“You mean—I’m a mutation?”
“A mutant. Yes, very likely you are. I don’t know. But I had to tell you at once.”
“Must be a dominant, too,” said Tim, “coming out this way in the first generation. You mean—there may be more? I’m not the only one?” he added in great excitement. “Oh, Peter, even if I grow up past you I won’t have to be lonely?”
There. He had said it.
“It could be, Tim. There’s nothing else in your family that could account for you.”
“But I have never found anyone at all like me. I would have known. Another boy or girl my age—like me—I would have known.”
“You came West with your mother. Where did the others go, if they existed? The parents must have scattered everywhere, back to their homes all over the country, all over the world. We can trace them, though. And, Tim, haven’t you thought it’s just a little bit strange that with all your pen names and various contacts, people don’t insist more on meeting you? Everything gets done by mail. It’s almost as if the editors are used to people who hide. It’s almost as if people are used to architects and astronomers and composers whom nobody ever sees, who are only names in care of other names at post office boxes. There’s a chance—just a chance, mind you—that there are others. If there are, we’ll find them.”
“I’ll work out a code they will understand,” said Tim, his face screwed up in concentration. “In articles—I’ll do it—several magazines and in letters I can inclose copies—some of my pen friends may be the ones—”
“I’ll hunt up the records—they must be on file somewhere—psychologists and psychiatrists know all kinds of tricks—we can make some excuse to trace them all—the birth records—”
Both of them were talking at once, but all the while Peter Welles was thinking sadly, perhaps he had lost Tim now. If they did find those others, those to whom Tim rightfully belonged, where would poor Peter be? Outside, among the puppies-Timothy Paul looked up and saw Peter Welles’s eyes on him. He smiled.
“You were my first friend, Peter, and you shall be forever,” said Tim. “No matter what, no matter who.”
“But we must look for the others,” said Peter.
“I’ll never forget who helped me,” said Tim.
An ordinary boy of thirteen may say such a thing sincerely, and a week later have forgotten all about it. But Peter Welles was content. Tim would never forget. Tim would be his friend always. Even when Timothy Paul and those like him should unite in a maturity undreamed of, to control the world if they chose, Peter Welles would be Tim’s friend—not a puppy, but a beloved friend—as a loyal dog loved by a good master, is never cast out.