But the children ignored him and the objects eluded him when he tried to touch them. Though he was in the world, he was never part of it. He wandered through the big empty place of his dreams in a solitude just as absolute as that of his own room. And would wake up crying more often than not.
Miss Fellowes wasn't always there to hear him when he cried out in the night. She had begun sleeping three or four nights a week in the apartment elsewhere on the grounds that Hoskins had offered her long ago. It seemed wise to begin weaning Timmie from his dependence on her perpetual presence. The first few nights she tried it, she felt so guilty over abandoning him that she could scarcely sleep; but Timmie said nothing in the morning about her absence. Perhaps he expected to be left on his own, sooner or later. She allowed herself to feel more comfortable about sleeping away from the dollhouse, after a time. She realized that Timmie wasn't the only one being weaned from a dependence.
She took elaborate notes every morning about his dreams and tried to regard them as nothing more than useful material for the psychological study of Timmie's mind that would ultimately be one of the most valuable products of this experiment. But there were nights when she was alone in her room when she cried, too.
One day as Miss Fellowes was reading to him-the book was Tales from the Arabian Nights, one of his special favorites-Timmie put his hand under her chin and lifted it gently so that her eyes left the book and met his.
He said, "Every time you read me that story it's exactly the same. How do you always know how to say it the same way, Miss Fellowes?"
"Why, I'm reading it right from this page!"
"Yes, I know. But what does that mean, reading?"
"Why-why-" The question was so basic that she scarcely knew at first how to tackle it. Ordinarily, when children learned to read, they seemed somehow intuitively to divine die nature of the process by themselves, and then went on to the next step of learning the meaning of the coded symbols on the page. But Timmie's ignorance seemed to be more deeply rooted than that of the usual four-or-five-year-old who was just beginning to discover that there was such a thing as reading which perhaps he or she might actually be able someday to master. The essential concept was foreign to him.
She said, "You know how, in your picture books- not the tapes, the books-there are marks along the bottoms of the pages?"
"Yes," he said. "Words."
"The book I'm reading is all words. No pictures, just words. These marks are the words. I look at the marks and I hear words in my mind. That's what reading is-turning the marks on the page into words."
"Let me see."
She handed him the book. He swung it around sideways and then upside down. Miss Fellowes laughed and turned it right side up again.
"The marks only make sense when you look at them this way," she said.
He nodded. He bent low over the page, so low that the words couldn't possibly have been in focus, and stared long and curiously. Then he backed off a few inches, until the text was legible. Experimentally he turned the book sideways again. Miss Fellowes said nothing this time. He turned it back the right way.
"Some of these marks are the same," he said, after a very long time.
"Yes. Yes." She laughed with pleasure at this sign of shrewdness. "So they are, Timmie!"
"But how do you know which marks mean what word?"
"You have to learn."
"There are so many words, though! How could anyone learn all that many marks?"
"Little marks are used to make the big marks. The big marks are the words; the little marks are called letters. And actually there aren't that many little marks," she said. "Only twenty-six." She held up her hand and flashed her fingers five times, and then one finger more. "All the words are made up out of those few little letter-marks, arranged in different ways."
"Show me."
"Here. Look." She pointed to Sinbad on the page. "Do you see these six little marks here, between the two blank spaces? Those are the marks that mean Sinbad. This one is the Y sound. This is the*f and this is the 'n'." She spoke the letters phonetically instead of pronouncing their names. "You read them one by one and you put all the sounds together-Ess-ih-nnn-bbb-aaah-ddd. Sinbad,"
Did the boy even begin to understand?
"Sinbad," Timmie said softly, and traced the name on the page with his fingertip.
"And this word is ship. You see, it begins with the same little mark as Sinbad? Ssssss. The name of that mark is 's.' This time she pronounced it, "ess". "And this one is 'i,' from Sinbad, only here it is in ship, over here."
He stared at the page. He looked lost.
"I'll show you all the marks," she offered. "Would you like that?"
"It would be a nice game, yes."
"Then get me a piece of paper, and a crayon. And get one for yourself, too."
He settled down beside her. She drew an a, a b, a c, and right on through the alphabet, in two long columns. Timmie, clutching the crayon clumsily in his fist, drew something that he must have thought was an imitation of her a, but it had long wobbly legs that wandered all over the page and left no room for any other letters.
"Now," she said, "let's look at the first mark-"
To her shame, it had never occurred to her before this that it might actually be possible for him to learn to read. For all the boy's vast hunger for picture books and picture tapes, this was the first time that he had shown any real interest m the printed symbols that accompanied them. Something else that Jerry had inspired in him? She made a mental note to ask Jerry, the next time he was here, whether he had begun to learn how to read. But in any event Miss Fellowes had simply dismissed a priori the idea that Timmie someday might.
Racial prejudice, she realized. Even now, after having lived with him for so long, having seen his mind grow and flower and develop, she still thought of him on some level as not quite human. Or at least too primitive, too backward, to master so sophisticated a skill as reading.
And while she was showing him the letters, pointing them out on her chart and pronouncing them and teaching him how in his clumsy way to draw them himself, she still did not seriously believe that he could ever put any of that to use.
She went on not believing it until the very moment that he read a book to her.
It was many weeks later. He was sitting in her lap, holding one of his books, turning the pages, looking at the pictures-or so she assumed.
And suddenly he ran his fingertip along a line of type and said aloud, haltingly but with stubborn determination, "The dog began-to chase-the cat."
Miss Fellowes was feeling drowsy and was barely paying attention. "What did you say, Timmie?"
"The cat-ran up-the tree."
"That wasn't what you said before."
"No. Before I said, 'The dog began to chase the cat.' Just like it says here."
"What? What?" Miss Fellowes' eyes were wide open now. She glanced down at the slim book that the child in her lap was holding.
The caption on the left-hand page said: The dog began to chase the cat.
And the caption on the facing page was: The cat ran up the tree.
He was following the printing in the book, word by word. He was reading to her!
In amazement Miss Fellowes got to her feet so quickly that the boy went tumbling to the floor. He seemed to think it was some new game, and looked up at her, grinning. But she pulled him quickly to his feet and set him upright.
"How long have you been able to read?"
He shrugged. "Always?"
"No-really."
"I don't know. I looked at the marks and heard the words, the way you said."
"Here. Read to me from this one." Miss Fellowes snatched up a book at random from his heap and opened it to its center pages. He took it and studied it, frowning in that intense way that emphasized the great bony shelf that was his brow. His tongue came forth and wandered along his lips.