Some reporter had obviously done his legwork.
SISTER UNAWARE OF MORON-GENIUS' WHEREABOUTS
(Special to the Daily Press)
Brooklyn, N.Y., June 14—Miss Norma Gordon, who lives with her mother, Rose Gordon, at 4136 Marks Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., denied any knowledge of her brother's whereabouts.
Miss Gordon said,
"We haven't seen him or heard from him in more than seventeen years."
Miss Gordon says she believed her brother dead until last March, when the head of the psychology department at Beekman University approached her for permission to use Charlie in an experiment.
"My mother told me he had been sent to the Warren place," (Warren State Home and Training School, in Warren, Long Island) said Miss Gordon, "and that he died there a few years later.
I had no idea then that he was still alive."
Miss Gordon requests that anyone who has any news about her brother's whereabouts communicate with the family at their home address.
The father, Matthew Gordon, who is not living with his wife and daughter, now operates a barbershop in the Bronx.
I stared at the news story for a while, and then I turned back and looked at the picture again.
How can I describe them?
I can't say I remember Rose's face.
Although the recent photograph is a clear one, I still see it through the gauze of childhood.
I knew her, and I didn't know her.
Had we passed on the street, I would not have recognized her, but now, knowing she is my mother, I can make out the faint details—yes!
Thin, drawn into exaggerated lines.
Sharp nose and chin.
And I can almost hear her chatter and bird-screech.
Hair done up in a bun, severely.
Piercing me with her dark eyes.
I want her to take me into her arms and tell me I am a good boy, and at the same time I want to turn away to avoid a slap.
Her picture makes me tremble.
And Norma—thin-faced too.
Features not so sharp, pretty, but very much like my mother.
Her hair worn down to her shoulders softens her.
The two of them are sitting on the living room couch.
It was Rose's face that brought back the frightening memories.
She was two people to me, and I never had any way of knowing which she would be.
Perhaps she would reveal it to others by a gesture of hand, a raised eyebrow, a frown—my sister knew the storm warnings, and she would always be out of range whenever my mother's temper flared—but it always caught me unawares.
I would come to her for comforting, and her anger would break over me.
And other times there would be tenderness and holding-close like a warm bath, and hands stroking my hair and brow, and the words carved above the cathedral of my childhood:
He's like all the other children.
He's a good boy.
I see back through the dissolving photograph, myself and father leaning over a bassinet.
He's holding me by the hand and saying,
"There she is.
You mustn't touch her because she's very little, but when she gets bigger you'll have a sister to play with."
I see my mother in the huge bed nearby, bleached and pasty, arms limp on the orchid-figured comforter, raising her head anxiously.
"Watch him, Matt—"
That was before she had changed towards me, and now I realize it was because she had no way of knowing yet if Norma would be like me or not.
It was later on, when she was sure her prayers had been answered, and Norma showed all signs of normal intelligence, that my mother's voice began to sound different.
Not only her voice, but her touch, her look, her very presence—all changed.
It was as if her magnetic poles had reversed and where they had once attracted now repelled.
I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.
Seeing her face in the newspaper, I suddenly hated her.
It would have been better if she had ignored the doctors and teachers and others who were so in a hurry to convince her that I was a moron, turning her away from me so that she gave me less love when I needed more.
What good would it do to see her now?
What could she tell me about myself?