The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (68 page)

"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."