The Eternal Wonder

  “Isn’t he—”

  “It seems so—”

  He said them over again very fast and laughing. “One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten!”

  They did not laugh. They looked at each other. Then suddenly the father took some small round objects from his pocket.

  “Pennies,” he said.

  “Pennies,” Rannie repeated. He repeated everything they said to him, remembering afterward which word belonged to each object.

  His father put down one penny on the carpet, where he knelt before Rannie.

  “One penny,” he said distinctly.

  Rannie listened without repeating. It was obvious that this was one penny. His father put down another penny and looked at Rannie.

  “Two,” Rannie said.

  And so on the game went until ten pennies finished it. They looked at each other, the parents.

  “He does understand—he understands numbers,” the father said, astonished.

  “I told you,” the mother retorted.

  AFTER THIS, OF COURSE, everything had to be counted. Apples in a bowl, books on the shelves, plates in the cupboard. But what came beyond ten? He demanded this knowledge of his mother.

  “Ten—ten—ten,” he said impatiently. What came after ten?

  “Eleven—twelve—thirteen—,” his mother said.

  He grasped the idea at once. Counting went on and on. There was no end to it. He counted everything and reached for the innumerable. He began to realize endlessness. Trees in the woods, for example, where they went for picnics—there was no use in counting them once he understood counting, so that it simply became more of the same.

  Money, of course, was different from trees or daisies in a field. By the time he was three he knew that money must be given in exchange for what one wanted. He walked with his mother to the grocery store down the street and he saw her give pieces of metal or paper in return for bread and milk, meat and vegetables and fruit.

  “What is?” he asked when he came home after the first time. He had found her change purse and, opening it, had laid in a row on the kitchen table the varieties of coins within.

  She told him the name of each and he repeated each after her. He never forgot anything he once knew. He asked endless questions and he always remembered the answers. But he did more than remember. He understood the principle. Money was only money. It was nothing unless it was given in exchange for what was wanted. This was its value, this was its meaning.

  His mother had looked at him strangely that day when he had repeated after her perfectly the names of the coins.

  “You never forget anything, do you, Rannie?” she had said.

  “No,” he had replied. “I might need to remember, so I mustn’t forget.”

  She often looked at him strangely, as though she were afraid of him.

  “Why do you look at me hard, Mama?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know,” she had replied honestly. “I think it is because I never saw a little boy like you.”

  He thought this over but without understanding it. Somehow it made him feel lonely, but he did not have time to think about it, because he wanted to learn to read.

  “Books,” he said to his father one day. “Why are books?”

  His father was always reading books. He was a college professor. At night he read books and wrote down words on paper.

  “You can learn anything from books,” his father said.

  It was a snowy day, a Saturday, when his father was at home reading books.

  “I want to read too,” he told his father.

  “You’ll learn when you start school,” his father said.

  “I want to learn now,” he said. “I want to read all the books in the world.”

  His father laughed and put down the book he was reading. “Very well,” he said. “Fetch me a piece of paper and a pencil and I will show you how to begin to read.”

  He ran to the kitchen, where his mother was cooking the dinner.

  “Pencil and paper,” he said briskly. “I am going to read.”

  His mother put down the big spoon with which she was stirring something in a pot on the stove. She went into the study, where his father was reading.

  “You aren’t going to teach that baby to read!” she exclaimed.

  “He’s no baby,” his father retorted. “If you ask me, he never was a baby. He wants to read. Of course I’ll teach him.”

  “I don’t believe in forcing children,” his mother said.

  “I’m not forcing him—he’s forcing me,” his father said, laughing. “All right, Rannie—give me the paper and pencil.”

  He forgot his mother and she went away and left them. His father printed a line of marks on the paper.

  “These are the bricks words are made of—twenty-six of them. They are called letters.”

  “All words?” he asked. “All those books full of words?”

  “All words, all books—in English, that is,” his father replied. “And each brick has a name of its own and a sound of its own. I’ll tell you the names, first.”

  Whereupon his father repeated clearly and slowly the names of the letters. Three such repetitions and he knew the name of each letter. His father tested him by writing the letters out of order, but he knew them all.

  “Good,” his father said with surprised looks. “Very good. Now for what they say. Each has a sound.”

  For the next hour he listened closely to what each letter said in sound. “Now I can read,” he exclaimed. “I can read because I understand.”

  “Not so fast,” his father told him. “Letters can say several sounds if they are put together. But you’ve learned enough for one day.”

  “I can read because I know how reading is done,” he insisted. “I know and so I can do it.”

  “All right,” his father said. “Try for yourself, you can always ask.”

  And he went back to his own reading.

  AFTER THIS SNOWY SATURDAY when he was three years old, he spent most of his time in learning how to read by himself. At first he had to ask many questions of his mother, running to find where she was in the house, making beds, sweeping floors and such things as occupied her from morning until night.

  “What is this word?” he asked.

  She was always patient. Whatever she was doing she stopped and looked where his small forefinger pointed.

  “That long word? Oh, Rannie, you won’t be using it for such a while—‘intellectual.’”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means liking to use your brain.”

  “What is brain?”

  “It’s your thinking machine—what you have in here.”

  She tapped his skull lightly with her gold-thimbled finger. She was sewing a button on his father’s shirt.

  “I have a brain in there?” he asked.

  “You most certainly have—so that it almost scares me sometimes.”

  “Why does it scare you?”

  “Oh, because—you’re only a little boy not four years old yet.”

  “What does my brain look like, Mama?”

  “Like everyone’s, I guess—a wrinkly gray something.”

  “Then why does it scare you?”

  “You do ask such questions—” She broke off.

  “But I have to ask you, Mama. If I don’t ask, I won’t know.”

  “You could look in the dictionary.”

  “Where is it, Mama?”

  She put down her sewing then and led him to the library and to a big book open on a small table and showed him how to find words.

  “‘Intellectual,’ for example—it begins with an i, doesn’t it, and here are all the i words but you have to see what the next letter is—ia, ib, ic—until you get to in—”


  He listened and looked, absorbed and fascinated. This big book, then, was the source of all words! He had the key, he knew the principle!

  “I won’t ever need to ask you again, Mama. I know now, all by myself.”

  HE LIVED IN A SMALL TOWN, busy with people much older than he. It was a college town and his father taught every day except Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday in the morning he went to church with his parents. At first when he was small, for he did not consider himself small now that he was nearly four years old, his birthday less than a week away, he had been left in the basement in the church nursery. This had not lasted long. He had soon looked at all the picture books, had solved all the puzzles, and had successfully intimidated all the children by appearing much their senior. He was large for his age and he assumed the other children were babies. He was humiliated by being left with them, he thought their prattle absurd, and after two Sundays he asked to be allowed to sit upstairs in the church with the adults.

  His father was doubtful and looked at his mother, questioning.

  “Can he sit still, do you think?”

  “I will sit still,” he replied quickly.

  “Let’s give him a try. He doesn’t like it downstairs,” his mother said.

  He did not really like it upstairs, either, but remembering his promise, he kept it. Inside his skull his brain busied itself by instinct. Not for a moment could it be idle. He pondered the words of the minister, ignoring sometimes their implication and considering instead their sound, their spelling, their meaning. His relentless memory imprisoned any word that was new and when he went home he consulted his constant companion, the dictionary. There were times when the dictionary failed him, nevertheless, and then he was compelled to resort to his mother, since it was intolerable not to know.

  “Mama, what does ‘virgin’ mean?”

  His mother looked up, surprised, from something she was stirring in a bowl on the kitchen table. She hesitated. “Why, I suppose it means not married.”

  “But Mama, Mary was married. She was married to Joseph. The minister said so.”

  “Oh, that—I suppose no one quite understands that. Jesus was born of what’s called the Immaculate Conception.”

  He went away with two new words. Finding them far apart in the dictionary, he tried putting them together. They made no sense. He copied them in the capital letters, as yet his only way of writing, and returned to his mother in the kitchen. She had finished her stirring, she was washing bowl and spoon, and a delicious scent of baking cake pervaded the atmosphere. He showed her the printed words and made complaint.

  “Mama, I still don’t understand.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t explain it to you, son. I don’t really understand it myself.”

  “Then how can I know, Mama?”

  “Ask your father tonight, son, when he comes home.”

  He folded the bit of paper and put it in his pocket. Before he could ask his father, however, he overheard, though by accident, a conversation between his parents. The kitchen window was open and he was in the backyard playing with his dog, or rather teaching him a new trick. Most of his play with his pet had to do with teaching him tricks and finding out what Brisk, the dog, could and could not learn. He had been laughing at Brisk’s obedient efforts to walk on his hind legs when he heard his mother’s protesting voice through the open window.

  “George, you will have to explain things to Rannie. I can’t do it.”

  “What things, Sue?”

  “Well, he asked me what ‘virgin’ meant and what ‘immaculate conception’ means. Things like that!”

  He heard his father’s laughter. “I certainly can’t explain an immaculate conception!”

  “You’ll have to try. You know he never forgets anything. And he is determined to know.”

  Thus reminded, he immediately left his dog and ran into the house to find his father with his question. His father was upstairs, getting into sweater and slacks. Spring was at hand and the garden had been ploughed.

  “Virgin?” his father repeated. He hung up his professional suit in the closet and looked out the window.

  “See the garden?” he asked.

  Rannie came to his side. “Mr. Bates ploughed it this morning.”

  “Now we have to plant seeds in it,” his father said. “But—”

  He sat down and drew Rannie between his knees, his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Until we plant seeds there in that ploughed earth, we won’t have a garden. Right?”

  Rannie nodded, his eyes upon his father’s keenly handsome face.

  “So,” his father went on, “it’s virgin soil—virgin earth. All by itself it can’t grow the things we want. Everything begins with a seed—fruits and vegetables, trees and weeds—even people.”

  “People?” Rannie asked, astonished. “Was I a seed?”

  “No,” his father said. “But a seed was your beginning. I planted the seed. That’s why I am your father.”

  “What kind of seed?” he asked, astonished.

  “My kind,” his father said simply.

  “But—but—where did you plant it?”

  Questions rushed to his lips. He could not ask them fast enough.

  “In your mother,” his father said. “Until then she was a virgin.”

  “Immaculate conception?”

  “I think so.”

  “Conception—”

  His father interrupted. “Comes from the Latin word meaning an idea—an abstract idea—something that is at first just a thought. Then it becomes more—it’s a concept—then a—”

  “I was a concept?”

  “In a way—yes. I saw your mother, I fell in love with her, I wanted her to be my wife and your mother. That was my idea, my concept. When you began, it was a conception.”

  “When Jesus—”

  His father interrupted again. “Ah, we know he was born of love. That’s why we call it the Immaculate Conception. It wasn’t Joseph who planted that seed. He was getting rather old for seed-planting. Mary was young—still a virgin, perhaps. But someone who loved her planted the seed. We know that—someone very extraordinary, or there wouldn’t have been the extraordinary child.”

  “Where did he plant it? Where did you—”

  “Ah, that’s the next question! Inside the mother person, the woman, there’s a garden, a little enclosed spot, where the seed falls—and starts to grow. We call it the womb. It’s the growing place for children.”

  “Do I have one?”

  “No, you’re a seed-planter, like me.”

  “How do we—”

  “The instrument is the penis, and there’s a passageway to the womb called the vagina. Look up both those words in the dictionary.”

  “Can I plant seed now?”

  “No. You have to grow up first. You have to be a man.”

  “Can you do it whenever you like?”

  “Yes—but I like to do it only when your mother is ready. After all, she has the work of growing the seed—taking care of it, and so on. The garden has to be made ready, remember.”

  “Can Brisk plant dog seed?”

  “He can.”

  “And we’ll have puppies? I’d like some puppies.”

  “We’ll find a mother sort of dog.”

  “How will we know?”

  “Well, she won’t have a penis as Brisk does. A penis is a planter, you know.”

  “Does Mother—”

  “No. I told you to look it up in the dictionary. Now, come out and help me hoe up the garden. That’s your job just now.”

  He never ceased to think of the seed, nevertheless. Everything in the world, all that lived, began with a seed! But what made the seed? “In the Beginning,” the minister intoned one Sunday morning in the church. “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was God.”
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  “Is God the same as the seed?” he asked his father on the way home.

  “No,” his father replied, “and don’t ask me what God is, because I don’t know. I doubt anyone knows, but everyone with any intelligence wonders, each in his own way. It seems as though there ought to be, or even must be, a beginning, but then again perhaps there wasn’t. Perhaps we live in eternity.”

  “How you talk!” his mother said. “The boy can’t understand.”

  “He understands,” his father said.

  The boy looked from one to the other of these, his parents, and he loved his father the better.

  “I do understand,” he said.

  WHEN HE WAS SIX YEARS OLD, he started school. It was on a crisp autumn morning that the new life began. His mother had bought him a suit of clothes the week before, a dark blue suit, and his father had taken him to the barber for a haircut.

  “Am I handsome?” he asked his mother as he stood in the doorway.

  She laughed. “What a funny little boy you are!”

  “Why do you say I am funny?” he inquired, wondering and even inclined to be hurt.

  “Because you ask such questions,” she retorted.

  “As a matter of fact, you are quite handsome,” his father said, “and you should be grateful, for it is an advantage to a man, as I have discovered.”

  His mother laughed even more. “O vanity—vanity, thy name is Man!”

  “What is vanity—?” he began, but his mother gave him an affectionate push.

  “Go ask your questions in school,” she told him.

  On the way to the school, which was only three blocks away in this quiet college town, so that he could walk, he pondered the gravity of the day.

  I shall learn everything, he thought. They will teach me how to make engines. They will tell me why seeds grow. They will let me know what is God.

  The peace of the morning pervaded him with joy and content. School was where he could learn everything. All his questions would be answered. He would have a teacher. When he reached the schoolyard, children were playing there, boys and girls of his own age. Some of them had mothers with them because it was their first day at school. His own mother had said, “Perhaps I had better come with you this first day, Rannie.”