"Not exactly. It's a scientific report I wrote. Very technical. Look, it's called The Algernon-Gordon Effect. Something I discovered, and it's named partly after me. I want you to keep a copy of the report so that you can show people that your son turned out to be more than a dummy after all."
She took it and looked at it in awe. "It's… it's your name. I knew it would happen. I always said it would happen someday. I tried everything I could. You were too young to remember, but I tried. I told them all that you'd go to college and become a professional man and make your mark in the world. They laughed, but I told them."
She smiled at me through tears, and then a moment later she wasn't looking at me any more. She picked up her rag and began to wash the woodwork around the kitchen door, humming—more happily, I thought—as if in a dream.
The dog started barking again. The front door opened and closed and a voice called: "Okay, Nappie. Okay, it's me." The dog was jumping excitedly against the bedroom door.
I was furious at being trapped here. I didn't want to see Norma. We had nothing to say to each other, and I didn't want my visit spoiled. There was no back door. The only way would be to climb out the window into the back yard and go over the fence. But someone might mistake me for a burglar.
As I heard her key in the door, I whispered to my mother—I don't know why— "Norma's home." I touched her arm, but she didn't hear me. She was too busy humming to herself as she washed the woodwork.
The door opened. Norma saw me and frowned. She didn't recognize me at first—it was dim, the lights hadn't been turned on. Putting down the shopping bag she was carrying, she switched on the light. "Who are you?…" But before I could answer, her hand went over her mouth, and she slumped back against the door.
"Charlie!" She said it the same way my mother had, gasping. And she looked the way my mother used to look—thin, sharp features, birdlike, pretty. "Charlie! My God, what a shock! You might have gotten in touch and warned me. You should have called. I don't know what to say…" She looked at my mother, sitting on the floor near the sink. "Is she all right? You didn't shock her or anything…"
"She came out of it for a while. "We had a little talk"
"I'm glad. She doesn't remember much these days. It's old age—senility. Dr. Portman wants me to put her into a nursing home, but I can't do it. I can't stand to think of her in one of those institutions." She opened the bedroom door to let the dog out, and when he jumped and whined joyously, she picked him up and hugged him. "I just can't do that to my own mother." Then she smiled at me uncertainly. "Well, what a surprise. I never dreamed. Let me look at you. I never would have recognized you. I'd have passed you by in the street. So different." She sighed. "I'm glad to see you, Charlie."
"Are you? I didn't think you'd want to see me again."
"Oh, Charlie!" She took my hands in hers. "Don't say that. I am glad to see you. I've been expecting you. I didn't know when, but I knew someday you'd come back. Ever since I read that you had run away in Chicago." She pulled back to look up at me. "You don't know how I've thought about you and wondered where you were and what you were doing. Until that professor came here last—when was it? last March? just seven months ago?—I had no idea you were still alive. She told me you died in Warren. I believed it all these years. When they told me you were alive and they needed you for the experiment, I didn't know what to do. Professor… Nemur?—is that his name?— wouldn't let me see you. He was afraid to upset you before the operation. But when I saw in the papers that it worked and you had become a genius —oh, my!—you don't know what it felt like to read about that.
"I told all the people in my office, and the girls at my bridge club. I showed them your picture in the paper, and I told them you'd be coming back here to see us one day. And you have. You really have. You didn't forget us."
She hugged me again. "Oh, Charlie. Charlie… it's so wonderful to find all of a sudden I've got a big brother. You have no idea. Sit down—let me make you something to eat. You've got to tell me all about it and what your plans are. I… I don't know where to start asking questions. I must sound ridiculous—like a girl who has just found out her brother is a hero, or a movie star, or something."
I was confused. I had not expected a greeting like this from Norma. It had never occurred to me that all these years alone with my mother might change her. And yet it was inevitable. She was no longer the spoiled brat of my memories. She had grown up, had become warm and sympathetic and affectionate.
We talked. Ironic to sit there with my sister, the two of us talking about my mother—right there in the room with us—as if she wasn't there. Whenever Norma would refer to their life together, I'd look to see if Rose was listening, but she was deep in her own world, as if she didn't understand our language, as if none of it concerned her any more. She drifted around the kitchen like a ghost, picking things up, putting things away, without ever getting in the way. It was frightening.
I watched Norma feed her dog. "So you finally got him. Nappie—short for Napoleon, isn't it?"
She straightened up and frowned. "How did you know?"
I explained about my memory: the time she had brought home her test paper hoping to get the dog, and how Matt had forbidden it. As I told it, the frown became deeper.
"I don't remember any of it. Oh, Charlie, was I so mean to you?"
"There's one memory I'm curious about. I'm not really sure if it's a memory, or a dream, or if I just made it all up. It was the last time we played together as friends. We were in the basement, and we were playing a game with the lamp shades on our heads, pretending we were Chinese coolies—jumping up and down on an old mattress. You were seven or eight, I think, and I was about thirteen. And, as I recall, you bounced off the mattress and hit your head against the wall. It wasn't very hard—just a bump—but Mom and Dad came running down because you were screaming, and you said I was trying to kill you.
"She blamed Matt for not watching me, for leaving us alone together, and she beat me with a strap until I was nearly unconscious. Do you remember it? Did it really happen that way?"
Norma was fascinated by my description of the memory, as if it awakened sleeping images. "It's all so vague. You know, I thought that was my dream. I remember us wearing the lampshades, and jumping up and down on the mattresses." She stared out of the window. "I hated you because they fussed over you all the time. They never spanked you for not doing your homework right, or for not bringing home the best marks. You skipped classes most of the time and played games, and I had to go to the hard classes in school. Oh, how I hated you. In school the other children scribbled pictures on the blackboard, a boy with a duncecap on his head, and they wrote Norma's Brother under it. And they scribbled things on the sidewalk in the schoolyard—Moron's Sister and Dummy Gordon Family.
And then one day when I wasn't invited to Emily Raskin's birthday party, I knew it was because of you. And when we were playing there in the basement with those lampshades on our heads, I had to get even." She started to cry. "So I lied and said you hurt me. Oh, Charlie, what a fool I was—what a spoiled brat. I'm so ashamed—"
"Don't blame yourself. It must have been hard to face the other kids. For me, this kitchen was my world—and that room there. The rest of it didn't matter as long as this was safe. You had to face the rest of the world."
"Why did they send you away, Charlie? Why couldn't you have stayed here and lived with us? I always wondered about that. Every time I asked her, she always said it was for your own good."