by Lisa Yaszek
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 other ten great men; and he 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 came 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 first went 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 less than half 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 reading other books, or writing his newspaper, “or something.” As Welles had already guessed, Tim had read everything in his grandfather’s library, everything 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 training 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.”
