Tim (15 page)

"I was an ordinary primary schoolteacher until I went to England and got accidentally drafted into a school for mentally retarded kids," John Martinson said as he led her into the school. "It fascinated me from the very beginning, but I didn't have any formal training in the techniques and theories, so I just had to teach them the way I would any normal kids. These are the mildly retarded children I'm referring to, of course; there are many who are totally ineducable. Anyway, I was staggered at how much they learned, how much they responded to being treated like ordinary kids. It was terribly hard work, naturally, and I had to develop a massive storehouse of patience, but I persevered with them, I wouldn't give in, and I wouldn't let them give in either. And I began to study. I went back to school myself, I did research and went all over the place looking at other people's methods. It's been a very satisfying career."

The deep-set, dark blue eyes surveyed her keenly all the time he talked, but without curiosity; he seemed to accept her presence as a phenomenon she would explain herself in her own good time.

"So you think mildly retarded people can learn," Mary said thoughtfully.

"There's no doubt of it. Too many uninformed people treat the mildly retarded child as more retarded than he really is, because in the long run it's easier to adopt this line than spend the staggering amount of time necessary to coax a normal response out of him."

"Perhaps a lot of people feel they haven't got the special qualities needed," Mary offered, thinking of Tim's parents.

"Perhaps. These kids long for approval, praise, and inclusion in normal family life, but so often they're left sitting on some outer perimeter, loved but half-ignored. Love isn't the whole answer to anything; it's an integral part of everything, but it has to be joined to patience, understanding, wisdom, and foresight when dealing with someone as complex as the mentally retarded child."

"And you try to fuse love to all these other things?"

"Yes. We have our failures, of course, quite a few of them, but we have a larger proportion of successes than most schools of this kind. Often it's well-nigh impossible to evaluate a child accurately, either neurologically or psychologically. You have to understand that first and foremost this child is organically impaired, no matter what degree of psychological overlay may also be present. Something upstairs in the brain isn't working just as it should."

He shrugged his shoulders and laughed at himself. "I am sorry, Miss Horton! I haven't given you time to get a word in edgeways, have I? It's a bad habit of mine to talk the leg off my visitors without having the vaguest idea why they've come to see me."

Mary cleared her throat. "Well, Mr. Martinson, it isn't a personal problem really, it's more an interested onlooker's curiosity which prompted me to get in touch with you. I'm very well acquainted with a young man of twenty-five who is mildly retarded, and I want to find out more about his situation. I tried reading, but I didn't understand the technical jargon very well."

"I know. Authoritative tomes there are aplenty, but good basic books for the layman are hard to come by."

"The thing is, since I commenced taking an interest in him, which is over the past nine months or so, he's shown signs of improving. It took a long time, but I've even taught him to read a tiny bit, and do very simple sums. His parents have noticed the change, and are quite delighted. However, I don't know how much progress I ought to expect, how hard I ought to push him."

He patted her arm and put his hand beneath her elbows to signal her that it was time they moved on. "I'm going to take you on a tour of our classrooms, and I want you to look at all the children very closely. Try to find one who strikes you as similar to your own young man in behavior and attitude. We don't permit visitors to disturb our classes, so you'll find we do all our observing through one-way windows. Come with me now, and see what you think of our children."

Mary had never really taken much notice of the scant few retarded children she had encountered during her life, for like most people she was acutely uncomfortable when caught staring. It amazed her now to discover how varied they were in physical make-up, let alone mental capacity; they ranged from children who looked quite normal to some so terribly malformed it was an effort not to turn the eyes away.

"I used to teach a class of mental giants once," John Martinson said a little dreamily as he stood beside her. "Not one kid in the class who rated below 150 on the old IQ scale. But do you know, I get more satisfaction out of spending a month teaching one of these kids to tie his own shoelaces? They never jade or grow bored with achieving. I suppose because they have to work so hard to achieve. The harder anything is to attain, the more one prizes it, and why should that be any the less true for a retarded human being?"

After the tour John Martinson conducted her to his little office and ordered her coffee.

"Well, did you see anyone who reminded you of Tim?" he asked.

"Several." She described them. "There are times when I want to weep for Tim, I pity him so much," she said. "He's so aware of his shortcomings, you see! It's dreadful to have to listen to the poor fellow apologizing because he's 'not the full quid' as he terms it. 'I know I'm not the full quid, Mary,' he'll say, and just to hear him breaks my heart."

"He sounds educable, though. Does he work?"

"Yes, as a builder's laborer. I suppose his workmates are kind enough to him in their way, but they're also very thoughtlessly cruel. They get a terrific kick out of playing practical jokes on him, like the time they tricked him into eating excrement. He cried that day, not because he'd been victimized but because he couldn't understand the joke. He wanted to be in on the joke!" Her face twisted, and she had to stop.

John Martinson nodded encouragement and sympathy. "Oh, it's a pretty common sort of pattern," he said. "What of his mother and father, how do they treat him?"

"Very well, all considered." She explained the circumstances of Tim's life to him, surprised at her own fluency. "But they worry about him," she ended sadly, "especially about what will happen to him after they pass away. His father says he'll die of a broken heart. I didn't believe it at first, but as time goes on I'm beginning to see that it's very likely."

"Oh, I agree, very likely. There are many such cases, you know. People like your Tim need a loving home a lot more than we normal people, because they can't learn to adjust to life without it if once they've known it. It's a very difficult world for them, this one of ours." He considered her gravely. "I take it, from your choice among our children who remind you of Tim, that he's quite normal to look at?"

"Normal to look at?" She sighed. "If only he was! No, Tim's not normal to look at. Undoubtedly he's the most spectacular young man I've ever seen-like a Greek god, for want of a more original simile."

"Oh!" John Martinson dropped his eyes from her to his folded hands for a moment, then sighed. "Well, Miss Horton, I'll give you the titles of some books I think you'll have no trouble understanding. You'll find they'll help you."

He rose and walked with her to the front hall, bending his head down to her courteously. "I hope you'll bring Tim to see me one of these days. I'd very much like to meet him. Perhaps you'd better call me first, though, because I think it would be better for him if you came to my home rather than the school."

Mary held out her hand. "I'd like that. Goodbye, Mr. Martinson, and thank you so much for your kindness."

She went away thoughtful and saddened, conscious that the most insoluble problems are those which by their very nature can have no space within them for dreams.

Seventeen

Spring in Sydney was not the brilliant, burgeoning explosion of new growth and awakening it was in the Northern Hemisphere. All but a few kinds of imported deciduous trees retained their leaves throughout the brief, balmy winter, and there was always something flowering in Sydney gardens the year round. The greatest change was in the air, a sparkling softness that somehow filled the heart with renewed hope and joy.

Mary's cottage would have been the showplace of the district, could anyone have seen it. She and Tim had worked hard on the garden all through the winter, even going so far as to buy fully grown trees and having them planted by a specialist. So when October came there were flowers everywhere, massed in huge beds alongside the veranda and circling every tree. Iceland poppies, carnations, asters, pansies, phlox, sweet peas, tulips, wistaria, daffodils, hyacinths, azaleas, gladioli; flowers of every color, size, and shape splashed their crowded heads in sheets of beauty everywhere, and the wind carried their perfumes through the wild forest and out across the river.

Four exquisitely sad weeping cherries drooped their loaded pink branches down over pink hyacinths and tulips growing in the grass beneath them, and six flowering almonds creaked under a weight of white blossom, the grass around them smothered with lily of the valley and daffodils.

The first weekend that everything was fully out in flower, Tim went wild with delight. He capered from cherries to almonds, marveling at Mary's shrewdness in choosing only pink bulbs to surround the cherries and white and yellow for the almonds, exclaiming at how they looked as if they grew wild out of the grass. Mary watched him, smiling in spite of all her resolutions to be serious no matter how he reacted. His joy was so transparent, so tender and experimental; Paris wandering the springtime slopes of Mount Ida before returning to the drudgery of an urban Troy. It was indeed a beautiful garden, Mary thought, her eyes following Tim as he danced about, but how did he see it, how different did it appear in his eyes, that it awed and delighted him so? Insects and even some higher animals were supposed to see a different world through differently constructed eyes, see colors and shapes a human being could not; what shade was infrared, what hue was ultraviolet? Perhaps Tim, too, saw things beyond her ken; perhaps among all the other tangled circuits in his brain he saw a different spectrum and heard a different frequency band. Did he hear the music of the spheres, could he see the shape of the spirit and the color of the moon? If there was only some way to tell! But his world was forever barred, she could not enter it and he could not tell her what it was like.

"Tim," she said that night, as they sat in the darkened living room with the glass doors open to the perfume-saturated wind, "Tim, what do you feel now, at this moment? What do the flowers smell like, how do you see my face?"

He withdrew himself reluctantly from the music they were playing, turning his dream-clouded eyes upon her mistily, smiling in the gentle, almost vacant way he had. Her heart seemed to quiver and dissolve under that look, something unidentifiable welled up in her, so surrounded by sadness that she had to wink away tears.

He was frowning as he puzzled over the questions, and when he answered it was slowly, hesitantly. "Feel? Feel? Cripes, I dunno! Sort of happy, good. I feel good, that's it!"

"And what do the flowers smell like?"

He smiled at her, thinking she was joking. "Why, they smell like flowers, of course!"

"And my face?"

"Your face is beautiful, like Mum's and Dawnie's. It looks like Saint Teresa in my holy picture."

She sighed. "That's a lovely thing to say, Tim. I'm sure I never thought of myself as having a face like Saint Teresa."

"Well, it is," he assured her. "She's on the wall at the end of my bed at home, Mum put her up there because I like her, I like her. She looks at me every night and every morning as though she thinks I'm the full quid, and you look at me like that, too, Mary." He shivered, gripped by a kind of painful joy. "I like you, Mary, I like you better than Dawnie, I like you as much as I like Pop and Mum." The beautifully shaped hands moved, and said more in their moving than his poor, limited speech ever could. "But it's sort of different, Mary, different from Pop and Mum, Sometimes I like them better than you, and sometimes I like you better than them."

She got up abruptly and went to the doors. "I'm going outside for a little walk, Tim, but I want you to stay here like a good fellow and listen to the music. I'll be back soon."

He nodded and turned back to the record player, watching it fixedly, as though to do so helped him hear the music.

The scent of the garden was unbearable, and passing through the daffodils like a shadow she made her way down to the beach. There was a rock in the sand at the far end, just tall enough to serve as a back rest, but when Mary dropped to her knees in the sand she turned to face it, put her arms upon it and buried her face against them. Her shoulders drew together and her body twisted in a spasm of devastating grief, so desolate and despairing that for a moment a part of her held back from participating, horrified. But the grief could not be suppressed or denied any longer; she wept and moaned in pain.

They were like a moth and a bright, burning light, she and Tim; she the moth, endowed with senses and the dignity of life, he the light, filling her entire world with a brilliant, searing fire. He did not know how desperately she buffeted herself against the walls of his isolation, he could never comprehend the depth and urgency of her desire to immolate herself on the flame of his fascination. Fighting the uselessness of her hunger and knowing it was beyond him to appease it, she ground her teeth in rage and pain and wept incon-solably.

What must have been hours later she felt his hand on her shoulder.

"Mary, are you all right?" His voice was filled with fear. "Are you sick? Oh, Mafy, please say you're all right, please say you're all right!"

She forced her shaking arms down to her sides.

"I'm all right, Tim," she answered wearily, lowering her head so that he could not see her face, even though it was very dark. "I just felt a bit sick, and came out for a breath of air. I didn't want to worry you, that's all."

"Do you still feel sick?" He squatted on his haunches beside her and tried to peer into her face, stroking her shoulder clumsily. "Were you sick?"