The Gift of Numbers Read Online Free PDF

elbows on the table or clatter his dishes or commit any
other breach of etiquette (all things the Professor had done himself
at his earlier solitary meals), the Professor would gently correct
him.
    "You have to eat more," he said one evening. "A child's job is
to grow."
    "I'm the shortest one in my class," said Root.
    "Don't let that bother you. You're storing up energy, pretty
soon you'll have a growth spurt. One of these days, you're going
to feel your bones begin to stretch out and grow."
    "Did that happen to you?" Root wanted to know.
    "No, unfortunately, in my case, all that energy was wasted on
other things."
    "What other things?"
    "On my friends. I had some very close friends, but as it turned
out they weren't the sort you could play baseball or kick-the-can
with. In fact, playing with them didn't involve moving at all."
    "Were your friends sick?"
    "Just the opposite. They were big and strong as a rock. But
since they lived in my head, I could only play with them there. So
I ended up growing a strong brain instead of a strong body."
    "I see," said Root. "Your friends were numbers. My mom says
you're a great math teacher."
    "You're a bright boy. Very bright. That's correct, numbers were
my only friends.... But that's why you need to get lots of exercise
while you're young. Do you understand? And you have to eat
everything on your plate, even the things you don't like. And if
you're still hungry, you can have anything on my plate, too."
    "Thanks!"
    Root had never enjoyed dinner as much as he did when we ate
with the Professor. He answered the Professor's questions and let
him fill his plate to overflowing, and whenever he could, he looked
curiously around the room or stole a glance at the notes on the
Professor's suit.
     
    Root was a child who had rarely been embraced. When I first saw
him in the hospital nursery, I felt something closer to fear than to
joy. His eyelids and earlobes and even his feet were still swollen
and damp from the amniotic fluid. His eyes were half-closed, but
he didn't seem to be asleep. His tiny arms and legs, protruding
awkwardly from the oversized gown, flailed from time to time as if
in protest at having been left here by mistake.
    I was eighteen, ignorant, and alone. My cheeks were sunken
from morning sickness that had continued right up to the moment
I lay down on the delivery table. My hair stank with sweat, and my
pajamas were still stained where my water had broken.
    There were fifteen babies in the nursery and he was the only
one awake. It was before dawn and the halls were empty except
for the women at the nurse's station. His fists had been clenched
tight, but at that moment he opened them, and then awkwardly
bent them closed again. The small fingernails were dark and discolored
with traces of what I assumed was my blood.
    "Excuse me," I called, staggering down to the nurse's station.
"I'd like to cut my baby's fingernails. He seems to be moving his
hands a lot and I'm afraid he'll scratch himself...." Perhaps I was
trying to convince myself that I was a good mother.
     
    From the time of my earliest memories, I had no father. My
mother had fallen in love with a man she could never marry, and
she had raised me by herself. She worked at a reception hall that
people hired for weddings. She had started out helping wherever
she was needed—bookkeeping, dressing the wedding parties,
flower arranging, table coordination—and ended up managing
the whole place.
    She was a strong woman who hated nothing more than having
people think of her daughter as poor and fatherless. Though we
were, in fact, poor, she did her best to make us look and feel rich.
She asked the women who worked in the dressmaking department
to give us scraps of material from which she made all my clothes.
She arranged for the organist at the hall to give me piano lessons
at a discount. And she brought home the leftover flowers and
made pretty arrangements for the apartment.
    I suppose I became a housekeeper because I kept