Montaro Caine A Novel - By Sidney Poitier Page 0,1

happy for you,” Sarah said, then called to her son, “Montaro, dinnertime!” When Montaro entered the kitchen, he saw that his mother was beaming, and so was his father, who seemed almost stunned by his good fortune. Yes, to young Montaro, this all seemed like good news.

On his first day at Columbia-Presbyterian in New York, Robert Caine finally got to meet Dr. Andrew Banks, who turned out to be a tall, angular Gary Cooper look-alike. In a mostly empty examination room, Banks introduced Robert and his fellow observers, four men and one woman, all professors, to an autistic man who was said to have astonishing math skills. The man was named Tom Lund, and Banks referred to him as an “idiot savant.”

Lund was a blond, wiry, sharp-featured fellow with hooded green eyes, and he appeared to be in his early thirties, about the same age as Caine himself. He was seated on a metal folding chair in the center of the examination room, and he acknowledged the introductions with a lazy nod of his head while avoiding eye contact with anybody present. Dr. Banks and the members of his research team each sat on metal chairs that were arranged in a semicircle around their subject, while Dr. Caine and the other visiting professors seated themselves in a row of chairs behind the researchers.

Lund was consumed by nervous energy that drove his impatient left foot up and down in an anxious rhythm. He seemed to want to get this show on the road for yet another group of spectators hoping to gain some new understanding of his abilities. Even so, when Dr. Banks posed questions to him, Lund was unable to completely conceal how much he enjoyed being a star subject.

Banks began by presenting Lund with relatively simple problems, but those problems grew increasingly complex as he proceeded. The more Robert Caine observed, the more he became enthralled. In theory, he should not have been surprised that Lund was able to arrive at correct solutions to the questions that Banks posed. Having read Banks’s work, Robert knew that individuals such as Tom Lund would most probably be able to calculate the sum of the first one hundred integers as 500,500 or know that the hundredth prime was 541. But what amazed him was the computer-like swiftness of Lund’s calculations. Later that day, when Caine held his first one-on-one interview with Lund, he became only more awed by the man’s genius, which seemed almost otherworldly. Caine recorded in his notebook, “A stunning experience,” then added that there was always so much more to the world than what one initially perceived. The casual observer would have had no sense of all that existed beyond Lund’s nervous demeanor and those hooded green eyes; the world was much like Lund, he wrote, so full of unexpected depths, so full of mysteries for men of math and science to solve. Science and education—those were the two subjects that Robert Caine valued above all others; these were the two subjects, he wrote in his notebook, that he hoped would be part of Montaro’s future as well.

In New York, Caine spent the next three days interviewing Tom Lund and consulting with Dr. Banks in preparation for a paper he planned to write about his experiences at the hospital. The exchanges with Lund were exceedingly productive, at least according to what Caine wrote in his notes. He appreciated learning from a revered behavioral scientist such as Andrew Banks, and Dr. Banks, too, seemed to benefit from the insights offered by this comparatively young professor of mathematics.

After Caine’s final one-on-one interview with Lund, conducted on his third day at Columbia-Presbyterian, Caine participated in an hour-long discussion in Dr. Banks’s office with his fellow researchers regarding their observations and findings. Even though he knew he had to rush to get to Idlewild Airport to catch his plane back to Kansas City, he kept asking questions, holding the microphone of his Dictaphone close to Dr. Banks’s face. And even afterward, while he hurried down a long corridor alongside Banks, Robert Caine still wanted to know everything the scientist could tell him about Tom Lund.

Robert Caine was heading with Dr. Banks toward the hospital’s exit when he noticed a patient stepping into the corridor. The patient was a black boy with a twisted chin and a withered right leg, which caused a severe sideways tilt to his body motion as he limped forward. The boy was dressed in a faded gray T-shirt and