What seems to delight Rowan is being alone in it, out of sight of land, in all kinds of weather. Like many people who respond to the northern California climate, she seems to enjoy fog, wind, and cold.
All who have observed Rowan seem to agree that she is a loner, and an extremely quiet person who would rather work than play. In school she was a compulsive student, and in college a compulsive researcher. Though her wardrobe was the envy of her classmates, it was, she always said, Ellie’s doing. She herself had almost no interest in clothes. Her characteristic off-duty attire has been for years rather nautical-jeans, yachting shoes, oversized sweaters and watch caps, and a sailor’s peacoat of navy blue wool.
In the world of medicine, particularly that of neurosurgery, Rowan’s compulsive habits are less remarkable, given the nature of the profession. Yet even in this field, Rowan has been seen as “obsessive.” In fact, Rowan seems born to have been a doctor, though her choice of surgery over research surprised many people who knew her. “When she was in the lab,” said one of her colleagues, “her mother had to call her and remind her to take time out to sleep or eat.”
One of Rowan’s early elementary-school teachers noted in the record, when Rowan was eight, that “this child thinks she is an adult. She identifies with adults. She becomes impatient with other children. But she is too well behaved to show it. She seems terribly, terribly alone.”
Rowan’s psychic powers began to surface in school from the time she was six years old. Indeed, they may have surfaced long before that, but we have not been able to find any evidence before that time. Teachers queried informally (or deviously) about Rowan tell truly amazing stories about the child’s ability to read minds.
However, nothing we have discovered indicates that Rowan was ever considered an outcast or a failure or maladjusted. She was throughout her school years an overachiever and an unqualified success. Her school pictures reveal her to have been an extremely pretty child, always, with tanned skin and sun-bleached blond hair. She appears secretive in these pictures, as if she does not quite like the intrusion of the camera, but never affected, or ill at ease.
Rowan’s telepathic abilities became known to teachers rather than to other students, and they follow a remarkable pattern:
“My mother had died,” said a first-grade teacher. “I couldn’t go back to Vermont for the funeral, and I felt terrible. Nobody knew about this, you understand. But Rowan came up to me at recess. She sat beside me and she took my hand. I almost burst into tears at this tenderness. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said. She sat there with me in silence. Later when I asked her how she knew, she said, ‘It just popped into my head.’ I think that child knew all kinds of things that way. She knew when the other kids were envious of her. How lonely she always was!”
Another time, when a little girl was absent from school for three days without explanation and school authorities could not reach her, Rowan quietly told the principal there was no reason to be alarmed. The girl’s grandmother had died, said Rowan, and the family had gone off to the funeral in another state, completely forgetting to call the school. This turned out to be true. Again Rowan could not explain how she had known except to say “It just came into my head.”
We have some two dozen stories similar to this one, and what characterizes almost all of them is that they involve not only telepathy, but empathy and sympathy on the part of Rowan-
In 1966, when Rowan was eight, she used this telepathic ability of hers for the last time
The principal was horrified. She called Rowan’s mother and insisted that Rowan be taken to a psychiatrist. Only a deeply disturbed little girl would say “something like that.” Ellie promised to talk with Rowan. Rowan said nothing further.
However, the little girl in question was diagnosed within a week as having a rare form of bone cancer. She died before the end of the term.
The principal has told the story over dinner countless times. She deeply regretted her censure of Rowan. She wished in particular that she had not called Mrs. Mayfair, because Mrs. Mayfair became so terribly upset.
It may have been concern on Ellie’s part which put an end to this sort of incident in Rowan’s life. Ellie’s friends all knew about it. “Ellie was damned near hysterical. She wanted Rowan to be normal. She said she didn’t want a daughter with strange gifts.”
Graham thought the whole thing was a coincidence, according to the principal. He bawled out the woman for calling and telling Ellie when the poor little girl died.
Coincidence or not, this entire affair seems to have put an end to Rowan’s demonstrations of her power. It is safe to assume that she shrewdly decided to “go underground” as a mind reader. Or even that she deliberately suppressed her power to the point where it became nonexistent or extremely weak. Try as we might, we find nothing about her telepathic abilities from then on. People’s memories of her all have to do with her quiet brilliance, her indefatigable energy, and her love of science and medicine.
“She was that girl in high school who collected the bugs and the rocks, calling everything by a long Latin name.”
“Frightening, absolutely frightening,” said her high school chemistry teacher. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had reinvented the hydrogen bomb one weekend in her spare time.”
It has been speculated within the Talamasca that Rowan’s suppression of her telepathic power may have something to do with the growth of her telekinetic power, that she rechanneled her energy, so to speak, and that the two powers represent both sides of the same coin. To put it differently, Rowan turned away from mind and toward matter. Science and medicine became her obsessions from her junior high school years on.
Rowan’s only real boyfriend during her teenage years was also brilliant and reclusive. He seems to have been unable to take the competition. When Rowan was admitted to U.C. Berkeley and he was not, they broke up bitterly. Friends blamed the boyfriend. He later went east and became a research scientist in New York.
One of our investigators “bumped into him” at a museum opening, and brought the conversation around to psychics and mind readers. The man opened up about his old high school sweetheart who had been psychic. He was still bitter about it. “I loved that girl. Really loved her. Her name was Rowan Mayfair and she was very unusual-looking. Not pretty in an ordinary way. But she was impossible. She knew what I was thinking even before I knew it. She knew when I’d been out with someone else. She was so damned quiet about it, it was eerie. I heard she became a neurosurgeon. That’s scary. What will happen if the patient thinks something negative about her before he goes under the anesthesia? Will she slice the thought right out of his head?”
The fact is, no one reporting on Rowan mentions pettiness in connection with her. She is described as “formidable,” just as Mary Beth Mayfair was once described, but never small-minded or vindictive, or unduly aggressive in any personal way.
By the time Rowan entered U.C. Berkeley in 1976, she knew that she wanted to be a doctor. She was a straight A student in the premedicine program, took courses every summer (though she still went on vacation often with Graham and Ellie), skipped an entire year, and graduated at the top of her class in 1979. She entered medical school when she was twenty, apparently believing that neurological research would be her life’s work.
Her academic progress during this period was thought to be phenomenal. Numerous teachers speak of her as “the most brilliant student I have ever had.”
“She isn’t just smart. She’s intuitive! She makes astonishing connections. She doesn’t just read a book. She swallows it, and comes up with six different implications of the author’s basic theory of which the author never dreamed.”
“The students have nicknamed her Dr. Frankenstein because of her talk about brain transplants and creating whole new brains out of parts. But the thing about Rowan is, she’s a real human being. No need to worry about brilliance without a heart.”
“Oh, Rowan. Do I remember Rowan? You have to be kidding! Rowan could have been teaching the class instead of me. You want to know something funny-and don’t you ever tell anyone this! I had to go out of town at
