A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (13 page)

Summer 1958, and the Vineyard appears to be the same. The children have their daily life of swimming, sailing, biking, and tennis. The Irish girls say, “Sure, ‘tis just like Ireland.” But it isn’t the same, and I’m a fool to lull myself into thinking it is.

A friend and I decide to take the weekend off and go up to the Berkshire Music Festival. Dick says he’ll take charge of the children. Connie, an old friend, volunteers to run the children’s games for me at the Saturday night dance and to watch out for Temple. Temple knows Connie well and has run in and out of her house as long as she can remember. All appear to be accounted for.

When I return home from the weekend, I learn that Dick ordered Temple to stay home from the Saturday night dance. Why, I don’t know; everyone in the community always goes. Temple loves the dances, is well-behaved, and remembers with triumph the time when musical chairs got down to the last two contestants and she was one of them. She and the other contestant were blindfolded and had to grope for the one last chair, always moved, of course, from its original spot. Everyone cheered and threw out hints when one of them came near the chair.

“And I almost won!”

Remembering the excitement of it, hoping, perhaps, to win this time, knowing that I’d given her permission to go, Temple had dressed herself in her best, complete to scratchy petticoat, and walked three houses up the road to the casino where the dance was always held.

What happened next I learn from Connie. “All of a sudden, this frightened little face looks in the casino window at me. It’s Temple. ‘Help,’ she cries, rapping on the glass. ‘He’s coming to take me home.’ Next, Dick appeared, and he was livid. I put myself in front of Temple and said to him, ‘Look Dick, she’s afraid of you.’ He said something like ‘Nonsense, she’s over dramatizing.’ At that, Temple bolted and ran into Faffie’s house.”

I pick up the rest of the story from Faffie.

“I don’t recall where in my house I found Temple, only that she was terrified. I don’t remember what I said to her, but it worked and she calmed down enough to go home. I must have tried to put my arms around her because I remember she didn’t want me to touch her.”

What is hard to bear about this incident is that Temple, at this stage in her life, is happily gregarious and wants to please. Sadly, oddly, as she grows in confidence and poise, Dick is more and more obsessed to prove her uncontrollable, bearing down hard on her and frightening her. If I’m there, I can usually talk him out of it. If I’m not, temper, tears, and flight are all Temple has for a defense. Then Dick says, “See? She’s out of control. What more proof do you want?”

It’s Catch 22.

Grateful to Dedham Country Day School for their wisdom in guiding Temple, I volunteer to run the school fair. The fair’s a combination neighborhood event and school money raiser. I talk various parents into manning the game booths and buy prizes for the game from a carny shop somewhere in the bowels of Boston. I hire a carnival Fire Engine, a pony and a small Ferris Wheel. That’s it. That’s all? Shouldn’t we have something more, something new and exciting? I talk it over with another mother.

“How about putting on a show during the lunch break?” I ask her. “We could charge admission and make some extra money.”

“Something geared to the younger children? Maybe a story like
Ferdinand?
Why not?”

“Ferdinand!
Perfect! We’ll dress up the fathers and make them play matadors.”

“And sing a funny song to
Carmen.”

“What a hoot! The kids’ll love seeing Dad make a fool of himself!”

By now, the Wampatuck Gang has picked up on our giggling excitement and is hopping all around us.

“We want to be in it too! Can we make scenery? Real scenery?”

“Yes, yes, we have to figure it out first!”

“I’ll call George MacLeany.” George is a Boston stage electrician. “I’ll see if he’ll lend us stage lights.”

I call George and he promises to bring stage lights the day before the fair and hang them for us.

“We can’t pay you,” I warn him.

“That’s OK. I’ll charge it to the circus.”

“Real lights!” the children squeal. “Real lights from the circus?”

We make up a script from
Ferdinand
and cast it. For rehearsals and scenery building, the school allows us full use of the auditorium every day after 3:00 p.m. The day before the fair, George arrives with lights and, most amazing of all, a flash pot.

“I thought you might like to play around with this?” A flash pot is a little gunpowder explosive connected to wires and lit by a ground spot. George demonstrates. “You throw the switch here, the gun powder goes off and the ground spot lights up the smoke. What color smoke do you want?” He holds out colored light gels to the children. “Pick a color, any color.” The children choose green. George throws the switch and the flash pot goes off with a green puff. The children pound each other and shriek. We swear them to secrecy, knowing full well they can’t wait to run outside and tell the whole neighborhood.

The show’s a great success. The fathers cavort around in matador capes singing: “Toreador-a, don’t spit on the floor-a. Use the cuspidor-a.” Someone’s child plays Ferdinand and sits under the cork tree smelling flowers and refusing the bull ring. Somebody’s mother plays his mother the cow, and sings, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier.” Then, a kindergartner in a black and yellow union suit buzzes on stage and stings Ferdy. POW! The green flash pot goes off, and Ferdy leaps into the bullring. I forget the rest. Ask Temple. I bet she can still sing the songs.

As usual Dick is annoyed.

“Why do you have to put on a play? Nobody else puts on a play at the school fair!” I keep my mouth shut and churn. Taking my silence for contrition, Dick continues. “Why do you have all these ideas? I don’t have them. You shouldn’t have them.” Then, in the following breath, “Everybody wants you. The children want you, Dedham Country Day School wants you, Sunday School wants you, and I want you.”

I feel a stab of distress for him. He’s in bad shape these days, but his temper’s grown much more ominous, leaving me swinging back and forth between genuine sympathy and genuine fright. The siblings, aware of it, are suffering from the constant undercurrent of anxiety.

Except for Temple, who at this moment is bicycling furiously around Wampatuck Circle, oblivious to everything but the bicycle kite she’s constructed. She’s hitched it onto the back of her bike but, as yet, can’t get up enough speed to make it lift out of the dust behind her.

“Rockabye
Ferdy
under a tre-e-e-e,” she sings, this time pedaling with all her might, faster and faster round Wampatuck Circle. “When you sit down, don’t sit on a bee!” The kite lifts and soars.

I leave the house, start the car, and head for Route 1, to Cambridge and the Poets Theatre. Out on Route 1, I turn onto an abandoned dirt road, stop, pull off my suburban sweater and put on my black beatnik sweater, laughing at myself, knowing how dumb it is, still hoping against hope that the sweater will win me the Poets Theatre password. I top it off with my mother’s haughty expression, the nearest I can come to a “Nouvelle Vague” movie queen’s pout. But like the black satin evening gown, it doesn’t go with my face.

“Today,” I tell myself, as I pull out of the dirt road and back onto Route 1, “I’ll find out about auditions and, if I get a part, I’ll make it count for a year’s excitement,” knowing all the while that any role I play will be contaminated with guilt. I reach Cambridge, turn into a parking lot, and guilt evaporates. I love everything about the Poets Theatre including the rain or shine stage exits onto the fire escape and down Palmer Street to Morris Pancoast’s antique shop.

The Poets Theatre is preparing for a production of T. S. Eliot’s verse play,
The Family Reunion.
It’s the tale of a disastrously unhappy family, the plot based on the
Oresteia.
In the Aeschylus play, Orestes, after a series of blood baths, is pursued by the Furies until he turns and faces them. Only on facing them does Athena in her mercy change the Furies into the Eumenides, the Blessed Ones. Guilt, expiation and transformation. I’d read the play as a freshman, in F. 0. Mattheissen’s course on Greek drama, which my dean had urged me to take.

“You can always take Doc Davison’s music course,” she’d advised me. “But we don’t know how long we’ll have Professor Mattheissen with us.”

She was right. I was deeply moved by the
Oresteia,
and by Mattheissen himself, a small bald man who the next year threw himself out of a top story window in the Manger Hotel.

I climb the stairs to the tiny theatre space and learn that the Eliot auditions have been scheduled for the following week. I buy a copy of
The Family Reunion
at the Coop, take it home to read and think about Eliot’s own life, how he couldn’t cope with his wife’s glandular imbalance and, in desperation, banished her to an institution. Eliot, so the gossip goes, thought he’d killed his wife’s soul, and all these years has been lugging that guilt around inside himself like a dead fetus that can never come to term. When I read the play, I see how deftly he’s used his pain, woven it into the ancient
Oresteia
with the frayed threads of his unhappy WASP upbringing.

A few nights later, in the pouring rain, I go to hear Eliot in person at Sanders Theatre. I sit in the front row and listen to his urbane, self-deprecating observations on the staging problems of
The Family Reunion,
his guilty fetus reduced to an everyday theatrical task.

“The play doesn’t work theatrically,” he says, and, perhaps, it doesn’t. Even with its exquisite poetry, the story is too internal for drama. “There was no way to stage the appearance of the Eumenides without their looking silly.”

Trying to expiate pain with a verse play; perhaps that’s what is silly. Perhaps only a small recognizable pain should be cut and faceted for today’s theatre, a little gem set high in its prongs to catch the spotlight. Eliot’s pain is too appalling to be ornamental.

The lecture winds down. I notice that Eliot has kept on his rubbers and wonder if they’ve made his feet hot.

The next week I return and audition for the role of Agatha, though I know I’m too young for it. The lines vibrate in me, but their inference escapes, lodging somewhere among the things I’m still choosing not to understand. Yet in the act of auditioning, they set up an echo. If I do get the part, will I ever be able to return to the little girl with the grade B movie dream?

Does that mean divorce? I allow the reality of the word to sink in deeper than I’ve ever before allowed it. If I leave my marriage, will I destroy Dick’s soul, as Eliot thought he had destroyed his wife’s soul? What about my four children?

It is the conversations not overheard
Not intended to be heard, with the sidewise looks
That bring death into the heart of a child.
*

I am cast as Agatha, and Eliot’s words take hold. Frightened and immature, unaware that Temple will succeed beyond my wildest dreams, I only know that Eliot is singing and I must follow his song.

The knot shall be unknotted
And the crooked made straight
*

Summer’s over, and it’s not over. The weeds hang limp and the heavy September air is working up to a storm. We’re back from the Vineyard and, as usual, school has started up in a heat wave. Temple, now thirteen, has graduated from Dedham Country Day School and entered a much bigger, all-girl school. Her Viennese doctor is on the school board and thinks she can manage it, but, when I ask Temple how it’s going, she tells me what she’s had for lunch. A tip-off that she’s not too happy.

Dick, adrift and angry, has decided to write a book to prove that God doesn’t exist and all religion is meaningless. Is it to show me up for teaching Sunday School or because he’s angry at my Episcopalian mother, her remarks about his family’s loyalty to the Congregational Church?