The Eternal Wonder (8 page)

“Light the fire, son,” his mother said. “There’s snow in the air.”

He stooped to set the lighter ablaze beneath the logs, as he had so often seen his father do. The logs were dry and the flames roared up the chimney.

“Sit in his chair, son,” his mother said on this, the first of their evenings. “I like to see you sitting there.”

He settled himself in his father’s chair. He liked sitting there, his body settling into the hollows his father’s body had shaped during the years.

“I met your father in college,” his mother began. “I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t the sports type, not the football hero and all that, though he played a sharp game of tennis. When he found I was the champion tennis player, he challenged me promptly. I beat him—”

She paused to laugh, her eyes suddenly sparkling. “I don’t think he liked that too well. And I told myself I was a fool and probably he’d never want to see me again. But I was wrong. He told me afterwards, when we’d got to know each other quite well, that he liked me for doing my best against him. He thought he was pretty good, and he confessed to being mortified at being beaten by a girl, but he’d have thought the less of me if I’d done any pretending. That was one thing he was always firm about. ‘I want the truth from you, Susan.’ I can hear him say it now.”

She paused, a half smile on her face, and looked across to him, sitting there in his father’s chair. “I got the habit of truth, son—and I’ll never tell you anything but the truth. Let’s make it a bargain—truth between us for your father’s sake.”

“It’s a bargain,” he said.

She was silent for minutes, thinking. Then she began again, “I don’t want to go too fast. I want to make it last a long time. There’ll be evenings, too, when you want to do things. Evenings when we’ll have to decide what we should do. What do you want to do, son? I don’t think we ought to take the tour—we’ll need the money for your college education, even though they will give you your tuition as a scholarship for your father’s sake.”

“I’ll go to college,” he said. “I can start at the beginning of the term in the New Year.”

“But you’re not thirteen yet—and all those older pupils—what will they do to you?”

“Nothing, Mother. I’ll be too busy.”

“But you’ll miss all the fun of being your age.”

“I’ll have other things,” he said briefly, but he did not know what things, so he urged her to go on with her story. “Go on, Mother.”

“We soon fell in love,” she went on shyly. “In those days love was something important—not like today. But he said we wouldn’t be married until after his graduation. I was only a sophomore, but I didn’t want to go on. I only wanted to be with him. So in June we were married. It was a lovely wedding, I was the only child in my family, and they all wanted me to have the prettiest possible wedding. Besides, they liked your father. That’s one thing I didn’t like about coming to Ohio, Rannie, after your father got his doctorate. It brought us far away—so that you haven’t known my family. And since your father’s parents were dead and he was an only child, there’s been only the two of us to be your family.”

“I haven’t missed anything,” he said.

She was silent a long time now, her eyes fixed on the fire, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling. He sat silent, waiting, inwardly restless, and yet not wanting to break into her thoughts.

It was to be true of all these evenings. She relived her life, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling while he sat waiting, inwardly restless. Suddenly she would look at the clock, astonished at the time.

“Oh, it’s late,” she would exclaim, and the evening was ended.

Each evening he sat there submissively, his eyes fixed on the fire, and as his mother’s voice flowed on, broken now and again by laughter or a long sigh of remembrance, he enjoyed in himself the ability to see what she was saying. That is, as she finished describing an incident now long past, he saw it all as clearly as though taking place before him. He was aware of this ability, for as he read a book, whatever it was—and this had been always true ever since he could remember, or so it seemed to him—he saw what he read, and not the words or the pages on which they were printed. The ability had been of special value to him in school, always, and especially in mathematics, for when a problem was presented by his teacher or the textbook, he saw not the figures but the situation they presented and the relationship to the whole, so that he was ready with the answer immediately. Sciences, too, had been made very easy for him by this ability to visualize simultaneously as he read or listened.

So now he saw his father as his mother told of her life with him as a young man. It was actual seeing. He had this ability that he supposed everyone had, until he discovered later on in his life that it was unique, and that he could actually see, in shape and solidity, a person or an object of which he was thinking. As his mother described his father, he saw the tall young man, fair-skinned, fair-haired, quick to laugh but always ready to listen and to wonder. He had never told anyone of this visual ability, but now he told his mother.

“I see my father as he was, before I was born.”

His mother stopped and gazed at him, questioning.

“He walks very fast, doesn’t he? Almost running? He’s very thin but strong. And he had a little clipped mustache, hadn’t he?”

“How did you know?” his mother cried. “He did have a mustache when we first met, and I didn’t like it, and he shaved it off and never let it grow again.”

“I don’t know how I know, I don’t know how I see, but I know so well that I see.”

His mother looked at him wistfully and in awe, and she waited.

“Sometimes,” he went on almost unwillingly, “I think it is not good.”

“For example?” she inquired when he paused.

“Well, in school, for example, especially in math, the teachers thought I was cheating when we were doing mental arithmetic. But I could see. I wasn’t cheating.”

“Of course not,” his mother said.

He did not notice it then, and it was not until years later that he thought of it, but from this time on his mother told him no more of his father. She devoted herself to him, usually in a silence that was almost awe. She paid heed to his food, preparing him the most nourishing meals she could devise, and was anxious that he had sufficient sleep. But he forgot her. His mind was crowded with visions of creations. His thoughts were always of creations. But
he ate voraciously, for his body was beginning to grow very fast. Until now he had been a boy of medium height. Suddenly, or so it seemed to him, he was nearly six feet tall, though he was not yet thirteen. He was so tall that it seemed to him he got in his own way. There was one advantage to this extreme height. It made him less conspicuous at the college. His face was still a boy’s face, but his bones were gangling, and he was as lean as a big bird, and still he held his head high.

HIS PROBLEM WAS THE ETERNAL
question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release. He felt restrained and repressed. He sat in his college classes, holding himself in, forbidding himself the luxury of impatience with the slowness, the meticulousness of his teachers.

“Oh, get on,” he muttered under his breath, his teeth clenched, “get on—get on.”

He envisioned what they meant before they had finished a point. His imagination obsessed him. The very atmosphere was floating with ideas. He had so many ideas in the course of a day that he bewildered himself. How could he bring them into focus? What was this imagination of his, continually busy with creation but uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable? At least, he did not yet know how to control it and could not know until his will directed and compelled him to control his imagination.

So far as he could discover, none of his classmates suffered as he did. He had no friends, for mere friendliness, and he was by instinct eagerly friendly, did not mean friendship. He felt, at times, that he was in a desert alone, a desert of his own making merely because he was as he was. He had long ago outgrown his mother and he had almost ceased to think of his father. He was totally absorbed in the problem of himself and what direction he should give himself. He lived in absolute loneliness for most of his time at college.

One day in his third year, a chance remark of his professor in psychology class caught his attention.

“Most people,” the professor said, “are merely adaptive. They learn as animals learn—a chimpanzee rides a bicycle, a mouse follows a maze. But now and then a man is born who is more than adaptive. He is creative. He may be a problem to himself, but he solves his problems through his imagination. Once his problems are solved, his mind is free to create. And the more he creates, the more free he is.”

A sudden light broke across Rannie’s mind. He sought out the professor after the class, lingering until every other student had left the classroom.

“I’d like to talk with you,” he told the professor.

“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” the professor said.

“I SHAN’T BE HOME
THIS
evening,” he told his mother. “I have an appointment with Dr. Sharpe. He’s expecting me. I may be late—it depends.”

“Depends on what?” his mother asked.

She had a quiet, penetrative way of asking questions. He looked at her, thinking not of her but of her question.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I don’t know how the talk will go. If I don’t learn anything from it, I’ll be home early. If I do, I’ll be late.”

He ate his evening meal in the silence of abstraction. They had continued to eat their meals in the kitchen. While his father lived this meal had been the one formal occasion of the day, always set in the dining room. Breakfast was a brief pause at the kitchen table, luncheon a random sandwich, but his father liked the grace of dining at night with a change of garments, a table set with silver and china and a bowl of flowers. The dining room had never seemed too large for the three of them, but alone with his mother it was too large, too empty.

“I don’t know Dr. Sharpe very well,” his mother was saying.

“Neither do I, really,” he replied. “It’s good to have someone young with fresh ideas. I’ve known the other professors all my life, it seems. They’re all right, of course, but—”

His mind took over again and he fell silent. His mother prodded him.

“But what?”

“But what?” he repeated. “Only that I like having something new. Especially if it’s something I am already thinking about.”

“And that is? …”

He glanced at his mother’s questioning face and smiled, half shyly, “I don’t know—creativity, I suppose!”

Half an hour later he was in Donald Sharpe’s small living room. They were alone, for Sharpe was a bachelor and kept his own house, except for a cleaning woman once a week. It was a charming room, decorated with taste and design. Two French paintings, in the style of the Old Masters, hung on facing walls, and on a third, opposite the chimney piece, was a Japanese scroll. An easy chair covered in old gold velvet was on each side of the fireplace. The autumn was late autumn, the evenings were chill, and a wood fire scented the room.

He felt at ease and somehow comforted in this room as he had not been comforted since his father died. The gold velvet chair fitted his lanky body, and he liked its luxurious softness. Donald Sharpe sat opposite him, and on the small table beside him was a tall-stemmed wineglass.

“You’re still quite young, Rannie,” he had said, “but this is such a gentle drink that I don’t think it will count.”

So saying, he had poured a glass of wine for his visitor and Rannie had tasted it and set it down on the table beside his chair.

“You don’t like it?” Sharpe asked.

“Not really,” he replied honestly.

“It’s an acquired taste, I suppose,” Sharpe said.

That was how the evening began. Now it had progressed to solid talk, interspersed with long moments of working silence.

He was a handsome man in a dark way, almost too handsome, not tall, and with a feminine lightness of bone structure. His eyes were his most notable feature, large and dark under clearly marked brows, their gaze penetrative, bold, or stealthy by turns. He continued to speak.

“Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation. But I’m not sure that explains art. Perhaps art is the crystallization of emotion. One has to feel an overflow. I write poetry, for example. But days and months go by—sometimes a year or even longer—when I write nothing, not a line, because I’ve felt nothing deeply enough to crystallize. There has to be a concentration of emotion before I can crystallize it into a poem. I feel a relief, actual relief, emotionally, when I’ve written the poem. I
have
it, I have something in my hand as solid as a gem.”

His voice was beautiful, a baritone flexible and melodious. He leaned forward suddenly and with a total change of manner he put forward a question.

“What is your name—I mean, what do they call you at home?”

“My name is Randolph—Rannie for short.”

“Ah, but I always choose a special name for someone I like very much—as I do you. I shall call you Rann—two
n
’s.”

“If you wish—”

“But do
you
wish?”

“Rann—yes, I like it. I’m too big for diminutives.”

“Much too big! Where were we? Emotion! It’s still not at all clear to me, however, why we feel compelled to create art. I suppose it began in an awareness of beauty—dim, at first, perhaps merely surprise at a
sudden sight of a flower or a bird. But the
ability
must have been there—the ability to perceive—which must have meant a step in intelligence, an awakening, a wonder.”

He listened to Sharpe’s voice in the same way he listened to music, half sensuously, and only now and again venturing to speak.

“But when did science begin?” he asked.

“Ah, very late,” Sharpe replied. “Natural man, the uneducated mind, poetized in myth and dream before he analyzed, I suppose, contradictorily enough, science began with religion. Priests had to learn time-telling and so they had to match the seasons and the stars—accuracy, in a word, which is the basis of science—and this led to factual truth. Galileo laid the foundation of modern science, of course, experimentally speaking, using bodies in motion and measuring and observing until he affirmed a theory—
the
theory—that the sun was the center of the universe, for which he died in banishment. Later, Isaac Newton put this same theory into mathematics! Yes, science is creativity as much as art is—the two go together—
must
go together, for each is basic and indispensable to human progress.”