“What—”
“Ssh. He’s okay. Watch.”
Any other time, she would resent being shushed, but she was so intrigued by Solly’s apparent concentration, she stepped into the room and lowered herself onto the nearest chair, perching right on the edge of the seat.
Mr. Rainwater continued to add dominoes to the snaking line he had formed on the hardwood floor. Solly’s eyes followed every careful motion of his hands.
“I noticed last night how he was playing with the spools. Stacking them, placing them in perfect juxtaposition.” Although Mr. Rainwater was speaking to Ella, he didn’t look up at her. His concentration on placing the dominoes just so was as intense as Solly’s. “Seeing that gave me this idea.”
To prevent any false impressions, she said quietly, “He does that with other things, Mr. Rainwater. Toothpicks. Buttons. Bottle caps. Anything uniform in shape.”
Rather than dim his enthusiasm, which she had expected, her statement seemed to validate his optimism. “Really?” Smiling, he continued to add to the column of dominoes. Solly remained transfixed. He seemed not to notice that his knee was touching Mr. Rainwater’s.
When all the dominoes had been placed, Mr. Rainwater withdrew his hands and then sat motionless.
Solly stared at the line of dominoes for the better part of a minute before he extended his index finger to the last one in the line, and nudged it. It toppled, creating a contagion until all were down.
Ella stood up. “Thank you for watching him.”
Mr. Rainwater raised his hand, palm out. “Wait.” Moving slowly, he stretched out his hands and began to turn the dominoes over so that they lay with the dots down. Then he shuffled them as though he was about to start a game. When they were all spread out, he sat back again. “Your turn, Solly.”
The boy sat, staring at the dominoes for a long time before he reached for one and stood it on its end.
Ella knew that her son had responded not to his name but to his mysterious inner urging to line up the dominoes. It was that trait, his insistence on uniformity and order, and his violent outbursts if things weren’t in that particular order, that had first signaled her that he was different from other children. Normal children left their playthings helter-skelter.
“He wasn’t always like he is now.”
Mr. Rainwater looked up at her.
“He was a perfectly normal baby,” she continued. “He nursed and slept on schedule. He cried only when he was wet or hungry or sleepy. The rest of the time, he was content. He reacted normally to voices and sounds. He recognized me and his father, Margaret, the boarders who were living here then. We played patty-cake and peekaboo. He laughed. He crawled at nine months and walked at thirteen. He was just like every other baby. Even exceptional, I think, because I had him toilet trained soon after he turned two, which is early for any child, but especially for boys. So I’m told.”
She looked down and realized that she was clutching her apron with both hands. She forced her fists to relax and let go, then smoothed out the wrinkles she’d made in the fabric.
“But during his twos, when most children are asserting their independence and revealing their personalities, Solly seemed to … to retreat. He stopped responding when we tried to play games with him. Once his attention was focused on something, we couldn’t draw it away, and he became very distressed when we tried.
“His interest in and awareness of what was going on around him decreased. His fits became more frequent. The rocking, the hand flapping became constant. For a time, I could stop him, but then each day my sweet, smart baby boy slipped a little bit farther away from me.” She lifted her gaze from her lap to Solly, who was still lining up the dominoes. “Until he disappeared entirely.” She looked at Mr. Rainwater and raised her shoulder. “I never got him back.”
He’d listened without moving. Now he looked down at Solly. “Murdy thinks he should be placed in a facility.”
Immediately regretting that she’d made an exception to her usual reticence and had spoken so openly to him, she went on the defensive. “The two of you discussed my child?”
“I asked him why Solly is the way he is.”
“Why?”
“Why did I ask? I wanted to know.”
“Mr. Rainwater, your curiosity is—”
“Not curiosity, concern.”
“Why should you be concerned about a boy who, up till a few weeks ago, you didn’t even know existed?”
“Because the first time I saw him, he’d pulled a pan of hot starch onto himself.”
Would she have preferred that he not be concerned about a child who’d burned himself? No. Nevertheless, his interest offended her. She’d thought he was different from gawking strangers. He wasn’t. He was merely too well mannered to ask rude questions and stare with flagrant fascination or repugnance. He was too polite to point and laugh, make jokes, say cruel things. But going behind her back and discussing Solly with the doctor was equally contemptible.
“If you wanted to know about Solly, why didn’t you ask me?”
“Because I sensed that you would react exactly as you are.”
His reasonable tone only emphasized how uneven hers was. She couldn’t help but wonder what else the doctor had told him about her. It was infuriating, the two of them talking about her. She felt heat rising out of her collar, up her neck, and into her face.
As though reading her mind, he said, “We weren’t gossiping, Mrs. Barron. I asked Murdy a few questions, and he explained.”
“Did he enlist you to persuade me to put Solly away, since all his attempts have failed?”
“No.”
“I will never have Solly locked up in an institution.”
He nodded, whether in agreement with her position or in understanding of it she couldn’t tell. “That’s a very courageous decision.” The statement was just as ambivalent as his nod.
She stood. “It will be dinnertime soon. I have work to do.” She knelt down beside Solly, ready to pick him up and, even if he pitched one of his fits, carry him from the room and away from Mr. Rainwater.
To her consternation, her boarder laid a hand on her arm. “Please. Look. Tell me what you notice.”
Solly had finished lining up all the dominoes and was staring at the serpentine row. As she watched, he gently poked the one at the end. It took only seconds for them to topple just as they had before.
Missing Mr. Rainwater’s point, she looked at him inquisitively.
He said, “Notice the dots.”
It took only a few seconds for her to see what he wanted her to, and when she did, gooseflesh broke out on her arms. Her heart hitched. She made a small, involuntary sound of astonishment.
The dominoes had been scattered on the floor, facedown. Yet Solly had selected them one by one and lined them up in numerical order, from the double blank to the double six.
Her breath coming quickly, she turned to Mr. Rainwater. “How did you teach him to do that?”
His smile widened. “I didn’t.”
SEVEN
“They’re called idiot savants.”
It was the day following the discovery of Solly’s remarkable ability. Last evening after dinner, Ella and Mr. Rainwater had tested him several times. He never failed to place the dominoes in ascending order, even though he selected them while they were lying facedown.
That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, Ella dispatched Margaret to the doctor’s office with a note briefly describing what had taken place the night before and asking if she could bring Solly in for a consultation.
She purposely didn’t use the telephone to communicate with the doctor, mistrusting the operator, who was notorious for listening in on conversations. Until she had an explanation for Solly’s rare talent, she didn’t want town gossips whispering about it.
People tended to fear anyone who was different. Some were particularly narrow-minded in their regard of simpletons, believing they should be isolated for the welfare and safekeeping of themselves and others.
From her childhood, Ella remembered a mongoloid man named Dooley. He was harmless, actually sweet and friendly. But he lacked the discretion that came from conditioning, and his overt friendliness made some people uncomfortable.
He wandered into a widow lady’s yard one day, Ella believed innocently, and happened to look into her bedroom window while she was undressed. She raised a hue and cry, and Dooley was sent away to a hospital for the insane in East Texas. He died there.
Ella harbored an ongoing fear that mandatory institution-alization would be Solly’s fate, too. One act, like poor Dooley’s innocent window peeping, could cause Solly to be taken from her and put away. So she safeguarded him diligently, knowing it would take only one incident to turn a tide of suspicion and fear against her son.
Dr. Kincaid had sent back a message with Margaret that he would see them at three o’clock, which was after regular office hours. Mr. Rainwater had asked if he could accompany them, and Ella had consented. It had been he, after all, who had discovered Solly’s ability. They rode to town in his car.
They’d been shown into a cramped office by Mrs. Kincaid, who told them that the doctor would be with them shortly. She’d offered them something to drink, but both had declined, although Ella had accepted a candy stick for Solly. They’d been waiting only a minute or two when the doctor came in, bringing a box of dominoes with him.
Ella felt her pulse rise when Mr. Rainwater went through the ritual of shuffling and turning the dominoes facedown on the doctor’s scarred desktop. But Solly performed as he had the day before. Dr. Kincaid shook his head in wonderment, then leaned back in his squeaky chair and made that startling and offensive statement.
“Idiot savant?” Ella repeated.
Correctly reading her negative reaction, he said, “It’s a disagreeable term, I know. But until the medical community comes up with a better one, that’s the name for this particular anomaly.”
“Anomaly,” she said, testing the word. “What is it, precisely?”
“Precisely, no one knows.” Dr. Kincaid motioned down to the medical book on his desk, which was opened to a page of finely printed text. “Are you familiar with the term IQ, intelligence quotient? It’s a relatively new term referring to the measurement of one’s mental capacity.”
She and Mr. Rainwater said they’d heard of it.
“Today we would deem a person with an IQ of twenty or below uneducably mentally retarded. But for centuries, someone with that limited a capacity was known as an idiot.” The doctor slid on a pair of reading glasses and consulted the text. “Late in the nineteenth century a German doctor studied individuals with classic mental retardation, either from birth or resulting from injury, who also possessed uncanny, even miraculous skills. Usually they were extraordinary mathematical, musical, or memory-related talents. He combined the term for people with extremely low intelligence with the French word for an extremely learned individual and derived the term idiot savant.”
“And that’s what Solly is?” Although Ella found the term objectionable, she was eager to know more.
Dr. Kincaid removed his eyeglasses. “I don’t know that for certain, Mrs. Barron. I’m just a country town doctor. I’ve heard about idiot savants, but until your note described to me what Solly did yesterday with the dominoes, I had very little knowledge of the classification. I looked it up in preparation for this visit.
“And frankly,” he continued ruefully, “I’m still largely in the dark. My research didn’t yield much. Information on the subject is scarce and often contradictory. Only a handful of doctors in the world have treated such patients, and even they don’t know why those patients have such disparate characteristics.
“In fact, no one has provided a definitive explanation of how this anomaly occurs, or why. Does something happen in the womb while the brain is being formed, or is it postnatal in origin? Does it occur as a result of head trauma, emotional impact, or environment?” He shrugged.
Ella hesitated, then said, “Rarely a day goes by that I don’t ask myself if Solly is this way because of something I did, or didn’t do, either before he was born, or after.” It was a hard admission to make. Dr. Kincaid gave her a gentle smile.
“I can almost assure you no, Mrs. Barron. If it happened in the womb, it was an unavoidable accident of nature. I assisted you with his birth, and nothing out of the ordinary happened. If, when he was an infant, Solly had suffered an injury or illness severe enough to cause brain damage, you would have known it.
“The theories concerning the causes of his condition are so widely varied that none have substance. At least not in my opinion. But if I were forced to guess, I would say that it happens as the fetus is forming but isn’t necessarily manifested in infancy.”
“Solly was developing as other children do.”
Dr. Kincaid laid his hand on the open text. “It’s a matter of record that symptoms generally begin showing up around the age Solly was when you started noticing them.”
Mr. Rainwater spoke for the first time. “Bizarre. That brilliant medical men can’t pinpoint the cause.”
The doctor said, “When they can’t explain an aberration, they often relegate it to the supernatural. Some theorize that this condition is spiritual in nature, that idiot savants have a direct pipeline to God’s mind. They speculate that people like Solly think on an entirely different plane from you and me, which is why they’re often unaware of their surroundings, other people, or any stimuli.” Again, the doctor smiled at Ella. “It might be comforting for you to believe that Solly is special because he communes directly with God and angels.”
“I don’t want to be comforted, Dr. Kincaid. I want to be educated on Solly’s potential, and what kind of life he can have. I want to know what I must do to give him every possible chance of reaching that potential.”
She looked at her son where he sat, rocking back and forth from his waist up, picking at a button on his shirt and sucking on the candy stick, locked inside a realm she couldn’t breach. Mr. Rainwater asked the question forming in her mind.
“Do these people ever recover, Murdy? With help, can they lead normal lives?”
Dr. Kincaid consulted the open textbook again, but Ella thought he was buying time, not really seeking an answer to the question.