The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories - Plot & Excerpts
1940). Poet. Place of birth: Cleveland, Ohio. Born to Polish parents, Henry Richard Niles did not speak his first words until the age of seven. Originally, his parents had assumed that their son was born deaf, but hearing tests disproved this theory, and doctors suggested that the boy’s vocal cords didn’t work properly. The doctors then suggested that his parents teach him to read and write, and that the best way to communicate with their son was by way of pad and pencil. Rather than subject the mute boy to the ridicule and mismanagement that he would surely encounter in any school system, whether public or private, his parents kept him at home to teach him themselves how to speak, how to read, how to write, how to calculate numbers, and the uses of shapes. Niles could understand only the basics of the Arabic numbering system, never quite cognizant of the numbers past seven, and was oddly more adept at Roman numerals. Furthermore, as a child, he was unable to work either his left or right fist around the nub of a pencil comfortably enough to scratch out those words predominant in (and necessary for) communication through the English language—the, and, to want—and although he was able to place vowels correctly in between consonants and was able to place consonants correctly alongside one another, the combinations formed by his hands were both illegible and indecipherable as spoken language.
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