Other times the window of the bakery opens into the past and looking through it I see other things and other people.
It's astonishing how my power of recall is developing. I cannot control it completely yet, but sometimes when I'm busy reading or working on a problem, I get a feeling of intense clarity.
I know it's some kind of subconscious warning signal, and now instead of waiting for the memory to come to me, I close my eyes and reach out for it. Eventually, I'll be able to bring this recall completely under control, to explore not only the sum of my past experiences, but also all of the untapped faculties of the mind.
Even now, as I think about it, I feel the sharp stillness. I see the bakery window… reach out and touch it… cold and vibrating, and then the glass becomes warm… hotter… fingers burning. The window reflecting my image becomes bright, and as the glass turns into a mirror, I see little Charlie Gordon—fourteen or fifteen—looking out at me through the window of his house, and it's doubly strange to realize how different he was….
He has been waiting for his sister to come from school, and when he sees her turn the corner onto Marks Street, he waves and calls her name and runs out onto the porch to meet her.
Norma waves a paper. "I got an A in my history test. I knew all the answers. Mrs. Baffin said it was the best paper in the whole class."
She is a pretty girl with light brown hair carefully braided and coiled about her head in a crown, and as she looks up at her big brother the smile turns to a frown and she skips away, leaving him behind as she darts up the steps into the house.
Smiling, he follows her.
His mother and father are in the kitchen, and Charlie, bursting with the excitement of Norma's good news, blurts it out before she has a chance.
"She got an A! She got an A!"
"No!" shrieks Norma. "Not you. You don't tell. It's my mark, and I'm going to tell."
"Now wait a minute, young lady." Matt puts his newspaper down and addresses her sternly. "That's no way to talk to your brother."
"He had no right to tell!"
"Never mind." Matt glares at her over his warning finger. "He meant no harm by it, and you musn't shout at him that way."
She turns to her mother for support. "I got an A —the best mark in class. Now I can have a dog? You promised. You said if I got a good mark in my test. And I got an A A brown dog with white spots. And I'm going to call him Napoleon because that was the question I answered best on the test. Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo."
Rose nods. "Go out on the porch and play with Charlie. He's been waiting over an hour for you to come home from school."
"I don't want to play with him."
"Go out on the porch," says Matt.
Norma looks at her father and then at Charlie. "I
don't have to. Mother said I don't have to play with him if I don't want to."
"Now, young lady"—Matt rises out of his chair and comes toward her—"you just apologize to your brother."
"I don't have to," she screeches, rushing behind her mother's chair. "He's like a baby. He can't play Monopoly or checkers or anything… he gets everything all mixed up. I won't play with him any more."
"Then go to your room!"
"Can I have a dog now, Mama?"
Matt hits the table with his fist. "There'll be no dog in this house as long as you take this attitude, young lady."
"I promised her a dog if she did well in school—"
"A brown one with white spots!" adds Norma.
Matt points to Charlie standing near the wall. "Did you forget you told your son he couldn't have one because we didn't have the room, and no one to take care of it. Remember? When he asked for a dog? Are you going back on what you said to him?"
"But I can take care of my own dog," insists Norma. "I'll feed him, and wash him, and take him out…"
Charlie, who has been standing near the table, playing with his large red button at the end of a string, suddenly speaks out.
"I'll help her take care of the dog! I'll help her feed it and brush it and I won't let the other dogs bite it!"
But before either Matt or Rose can answer, Norma shrieks: "No! It's going to be my dog. Only my dog!"
Matt nods. "You see?"
Rose sits beside her and strokes her braids to calm her. "But we have to share things, dear. Charlie can help you take care of it."
"No! Only mine!… I'm the one who got the A in history—not him! He never gets good marks like me. "Why should he help with the dog? And then the dog will like him more than me, and it'll be his dog instead of mine. No! If I can't have it for myself I don't want it."
"That settles it," says Matt picking up his newspaper and settling down in his chair again. "No dog."
Suddenly, Norma jumps off the couch and grabs the history test she had brought home so eagerly just a few minutes earlier. She tears it and throws the pieces into Charlie's startled face. "I hate you! I hate you!"
"Norma, stop that at once!" Rose grabs her but she twists away.
"And I hate school! I hate it! I'll stop studying, and I'll be a dummy like him. I'll forget everything I learned and then I'll be just like him." She runs out of the room, shrieking: "It's happening to me already. I'm forgetting everything… I'm forgetting… I don't remember anything I learned any more!"
Rose, terrified, runs after her. Matt sits there staring at the newspaper in his lap. Charlie, frightened by the hysteria and the screaming, shrinks into a chair whimpering softly. What has he done wrong? And feeling the wetness in his trousers and the trickling down his leg, he sits there waiting for the slap he knows will come when his mother returns.
The scene fades, but from that time Norma spent all her free moments with her friends, or playing alone in her room. She kept the door to her room closed, and I was forbidden to enter without her permission.
I recall once overhearing Norma and one of her girl friends playing in her room, and Norma shouting: "He is not my real brother! He's just a boy we took in because we felt sorry for him. My mamma told me, and she said I can tell everyone now that he's not really my brother at all."
I wish this memory were a photograph so that I could tear it up and throw it back into her face. I want to call back across the years and tell her I never meant to stop her from getting her dog. She could have had it all to herself, and I wouldn't have fed it, or brushed it, or played with it—and I would never have made it like me more than it liked her. I only wanted her to play games with me the way we used to. I never meant to do anything that would hurt her at all.
My first real quarrel with Alice today. My fault. I wanted to see her. Often, after a disturbing memory or dream, talking to her—just being with her—makes me feel better. But it was a mistake to go down to the Center to pick her up.
I had not been back to the Center for Retarded Adults since the operation, and the thought of seeing the place was exciting. It's on Twenty-third Street, east of Fifth Avenue, in an old schoolhouse that has been used by the Beekman University Clinic for the last five years as a center for experimental education—special classes for the handicapped. The sign outside on the doorway, framed by the old spiked gateway, is just a gleaming brass plate that says C. R. A. Beekman Extension.
Her class ended at eight, but I wanted to see the room where—not so long ago—I had struggled over simple reading and writing and learned to count change of a dollar.
I went inside, slipped up to the door, and, keeping out of sight, I looked through the window. Alice was at her desk, and in a chair beside her was a thin-faced woman I didn't recognize. She was frowning that open frown of unconcealed puzzlement, and I wondered what Alice was trying to explain.