by Lisa Yaszek
“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 little 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 just 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, because you’re not good at others and they can balance that 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.”
&nbs
p; “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 mayors of some towns, 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 about the cats?” asked 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 short-haired 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—F1, F2, F3; Ss, Bl.
“The dominants in capitals,” he explained, “B for black, and S for short hair; the recessives in small letters—s for Siamese, l for long hair. Wonderful to write ll over ss again, Peter! Twice more. And the other kitten is carrying the Siamese markings 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 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 have 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 blueprints 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 le
t me sit here and look at it. I want to look in through the windows. Put its little 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.”
