“College age,” replied Welles. “You are going to college? By then, any of the pastors would talk to you—except those that are too busy!”
“It’s a moral problem, really. Have I the right to wait? But I have to wait. It’s like telling lies—I have to tell some lies, but I hate to. If I have a moral obligation to join the church as soon as I find it, well, what then? I can’t until I’m eighteen or twenty?”
“If you can’t, you can’t. I should think that settles it. You are legally a minor, under the control of your grandparents, and while you might claim the right to go where your conscience leads you, it would be impossible to justify and explain your choice without giving yourself away entirely—just as you are obliged to go to school until you are at least eighteen, even though you know more than most Ph.D.’s. It’s all part of the game, and He who made you must understand that.”
“I’ll never tell you any lies,” said Tim. “I was getting so desperately lonely—my pen pals didn’t know anything about me really. I told them only what was right for them to know. Little kids are satisfied to be with other people, but when you get a little older you have to make friends, really.”
“Yes, that’s a part of growing up. You have to reach out to others and share thoughts with them. You’ve kept to yourself too long as it is.”
“It wasn’t that I wanted to. But without a real friend, it was only pretense, and I never could let my playmates know anything about me. I studied them and wrote stories about them and it was all of them, but it was only a tiny part of me.”
“I’m proud to be your friend, Tim. Every man needs a friend. I’m proud that you trust me.”
Tim patted the cat a moment in siicnce and then looked up with a grin.
“How would you like to hear my favorite joke?” he asked.
“Very much,” said the psychiatrist, bracing himself for almost any major shock.
“It’s records. I recorded this from a radio program.”
Welles listened. He knew little of music, but the symphony which he heard pleased him. The announcer praised it highly in little speeches before and after each movement. Timothy giggled.
“Like it?”
“Very much. 1 don’t see the joke.”
“I wrote it.”
“Tim, you’re beyond me! But I still don’t get the joke.”
“The joke is that I did it by mathematics. I calculated what ought to sound like joy, grief, hope, triumph, and all the rest, and—it was just after I had studied harmony; you know how mathematical that is.”
Speechless, Welles nodded.
“I worked out the rhythms from different metabolisms—the way you function when under the influences of these emotions; the way your metabolic rate varies, your heartbeats and respiration and things. I sent it to the director of that orchestra, and he didn’t get the idea that it was a joke—of course I didn’t explain—he produced the music. I get nice royalties from it, too.”
“You’ll be the death of me yet,” said Welles in deep sincerity. “Don’t tell me anything more today; I couldn’t take it. I’m going home. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll see the joke and come back to laugh. Tim, did you ever fail at anything?”
“There are two cabinets full of articles and stories that didn’t sell. Some of them I feel bad about. There was the chess story. You know, in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ it wasn’t a very good game, and you couldn’t see the relation of the moves to the story very well.”
“I never could see it at all.”
“I thought it would be fun to take a championship game and write a fantasy about it, as if it were a war between two little old countries, with knights and foot-soldiers, and fortified walls in charge of captains, and the bishops couldn’t fight like warriors, and, of course, the queens were women—people don’t kill them, not in hand-to-hand fighting and… well, you see? I wanted to make up the attacks and captures, and keep the people alive, a fairytale war you see, and make the strategy of the game and the strategy of the war coincide, and have everything fit. It took me ever so long to work it out and write it. To understand the game as a chess game and then to translate it into human actions and motives, and put speeches to it to fit different kinds of people. I’ll show it to you. I loved it. But nobody would print it. Chess players don’t like fantasy, and nobody else likes chess. You have to have a very special kind of mind to like both. But it was a disappointment. I hoped it would be published, because the few people who like that sort of thing would like it very much.”
“I’m sure I’ll like it.”
“Well, if you do like that sort of thing, it’s what you’ve been waiting all your life in vain for. Nobody else has done it.” Tim stopped, and blushed as red as a beet. “I see what grandmother means. Once you get started bragging, there’s no end to it. I’m sorry, Peter.”
“Give me the story. I don’t mind, Tim—brag all you like to me; I understand. You might blow up if you never expressed any of your legitimate pride and pleasure in such achievements. What I don’t understand is how you have kept it all under for so long.”
“I had to,” said Tim.
The story was all its young author had claimed. Welles chuckled as he read it, that evening. He read it again, and checked all the moves and the strategy of them. It was really a fine piece of work. Then he thought of the symphony, and this time he was able to laugh. He sat up until after midnight, thinking about the boy. Then he took a sleeping pill and went to bed.
The next day he went to see Tim’s grandmother. Mrs. Davis received him graciously.
“Your grandson is a very interesting boy,” said Peter Welles carefully. “I’m asking a favor of you. I am making a study of various boys and girls in this district, their abilities and backgrounds and environment and character traits and things like that. No names will ever be mentioned, of course, but a statistical report will be kept, for ten years or longer, and some case histories might later be published. Could Timothy be included?”
“Timothy is such a good, normal little boy, I fail to see what would be the purpose of including him in such a survey.”
“That is just the point. We are not interested in maladjusted persons in this study. We eliminate all psychotic boys and girls. We are interested in boys and girls who succeed in facing their youthful problems and making satisfactory adjustments to life. If we could study a selected group of such children, and follow their progress for the next ten years at least—and then publish a summary of the findings, with no names used—”
“In that case, I see no objection,” said Mrs. Davis.
“If you’d tell me, then, something about Timothy’s parents—their history?”
Mrs. Davis settled herself for a good long talk.
“Timothy’s mother, my only daughter, Emily,” she began, “was a lovely girl. So talented. She played the violin charmingly. Timothy is like her, in the face, but has his father’s dark hair and eyes. Edwin had very fine eyes.”
“Edwin was Timothy’s father?”
“Yes. The young people met while Emily was at college in the East. Edwin was studying atomics there.”
“Your daughter was studying music?”
“No; Emily was taking the regular liberal arts course. I can tell you little about Edwin’s work, but after their marriage he returned to it and… you understand, it is painful for me to recall this, but their deaths were such a blow to me. They were so young.”