A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (14 page)

“If you want us to go to the Congregational Church, I’d be happy to go there,” I reply, “But since you don’t want to go to
any
church, I’m going to go to the Episcopal Church.”

Dick chews his cheek. I’ve implied that I don’t take his religious project seriously, and he feels powerless. Without a job, family money is all that Dick has now for a sense of power. Family money makes him feel that whatever utility goes wrong in our house, he can always call some company manager and get quick redress. In truth, he can, that’s the power of old money. At the same time, with no job, he’s lost touch with the ordinary, power that comes from earning a daily living. As a result, he sees his family as draining him of power, and it makes him angry. In a sense, we are draining him. He has to pay for us.

I say nothing. I’ve learned to keep still in moments like this, lest the least retort or gesture trigger the violence that’s roiling in Dick just under the surface. Instinctively, the siblings, too, keep very still; they’ve learned to take refuge in each other. But it has never occurred to me to warn Temple.

The electrician arrives to repair the refrigerator. After opening up its innards, he shakes his head, puts it back together again, and says we need new parts. Dick overhears, comes pounding down the stairs, bellows at the electrician that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he’s going to report him and he won’t pay the service charge. The electrician, now equally worked up, tells me to tell Dick that neither he, nor anyone else from his company, will ever service the house again. In the interests of having a working refrigerator, I assure the electrician there will be no unfavorable report, soothe his wounded pride, and pay the service charge.

The storm does not materialize. Instead a late, hot sun beats in the dining room window. We sit down to dinner. I read a story aloud, but nobody listens, and the children get into a grabbing contest over a squeeze bottle of catsup. Temple squeezes too hard and catsup squirts across the table. Dick leaps up with an oath.

“You little bitch!”

Temple runs from the table into the living room, Dick catches her, throws her down into an armchair, and grabs her by the neck. She gives his tie a hard yank. The knot cuts into his throat. He yells. She’s out the door and down the road, Dick after her shouting, “Goddamn you! I’m going to kill you!”

The siblings and I quake on the front steps. “Is Daddy really going to kill her?”

“Oh God, I hope not.” Is that all I can say? Why am I standing on the front porch wringing my hands?

Temple scrambles over the stone wall and disappears into the woods. Dick comes back up the road, his mouth tight. I can’t tell if it’s from rage at Temple or shame that he’s come so close to brutality. I pretend nothing has happened and leave him to eat his dessert alone.

After a while Temple comes back and goes up to her room. “I hid in the poison ivy,” she tells me. “I knew Daddy wouldn’t want to get poison ivy.”

Is that how it played out? I can’t remember. The black hole has suddenly opened up again and swallowed the moment.

Later, Temple tells me that I did act, that I came screaming down the road, battered Dick’s chest with my fists, dragged him off her.

“He was going to smash me against the wall.”

Why have I no recollection of it?

Temple claims to have no emotions. That’s why, she says, she can remember it all with perfect clarity.

But she was terrified!

In that moment I struck. I, who’ve always feared that Dick would strike me. And in committing the physical act I’ve split apart all semblance of domestic partnership, so wide apart it can never be put together again. From now on, Dick will open fire on me with the full force of his festering humiliation.

Is that what I can’t bring myself to remember?

To all appearances, the September episode is behind us, and life is back to its old routine. Dick keeps office hours in the upstairs bedroom. When he isn’t working on his God book, he copies down stock figures, adding them up over and over. Stocks are his comfort; they’re what his father taught him, what the Grandin men discuss endlessly and are good at.

Then an angry thought catches him. Angry thoughts catch him often these days. He stops, writes his thought down longhand in a notebook. Next, he types out a letter to me and leaves it on my side of the bed. Later, when I try to defend myself, he takes my defense, shuffles it into another context, and round and round the old circle we go. I hear myself repeating the same words, “Yes, that’s what I said, but that’s not what I meant.”

To get us out of it, I suggest to Dick that if he’s undertaking a serious book on the value or lack of value in religious thought, why not study philosophy and comparative religion at the Harvard Divinity School? He says he doesn’t need any divinity school; he can find all the facts he needs in books. Later, I see what he’s underlined in red pen in our encyclopedia: extraneous bits backing up his convictions but not what’s cogent to the paragraph. Yes, that’s what the encyclopedia says, but that’s not what it means. Dick says he knows what it means: religion is a crock dreamed up by people who want to feel better about themselves.

I decide to return to the marriage counselor psychiatrist whom Dr. Meyer had recommended so many years earlier, and, this time, I persuade Dick to see him too. Like Dr. Caruthers, the counselor is stout and avuncular. I see him now, tipping back in his old desk chair with its roller wheels and worn leather arms, his feet dangling off the floor, his plump fingers fitting another cigarette into his black filter holder. This wise, kindly man who lets me weep out my alarm without urging me into insights or looking at his watch, who tells me it was a toss-up when he was young whether to be a psychiatrist or an actor, sensing perhaps that the two roles aren’t far apart. He holds in my heart much the same place as my singing teacher, also stout, also short, an old world voice teacher in whose worn baritone I always hear the great arias. Sensing my love of lyric, my need to sing to stay alive, he assigns me more French art songs and gives me half my singing lessons for free. The two men become my infrastructure.

I tell the psychiatrist I fear Dick’s escalating rages and long to be divorced.

“It’s getting to be like
Gaslight
. Dick unnerves me so. I no longer know if I’m right or wrong. I’m afraid not just for Temple but for all my children, and I keep thinking, if I lose it, who’ll protect them? Maybe the answer is to stay home all day. But when I’m out in the world, people seem to find me acceptable, even worthwhile. If I lose that, I’ll lose all sense of my own existence. Dick says it doesn’t matter what I do; I’m hopelessly neurotic. Am I?”

“No, but you will be if you stay home all day. Thus far, you’ve been able to be a buffer between Dick and Temple. But remember, if you get divorced, Dick will have visiting rights with the children and at those times you won’t be there to protect them.”

“I can’t believe Dick would actually hurt them. When all is said and done, he loves his children, and he loves me.”

“No, he doesn’t love you. He’s obsessed with you. That’s something quite different.” The psychiatrist gives me a look. “Never underestimate his desire to punish you.”

I don’t know how to answer, even how to think. I want to take a running leap down the black hole.

“Then it’s true; it really is
Gaslight
? For God sake, explain him to me!” The psychiatrist shakes his head.

“I can’t, really, I don’t understand him myself. I don’t even understand his humor. He tells me things, he laughs at them, but I don’t get what he’s laughing at. I do know when he’s angry; that’s when he puts off paying the bill.”

I go home. I find Dick waiting for me, ready with his anger over my extravagance.

“When I married you, you didn’t waste money.”

“Dick, when we married there were just two of us. Now we have four children and the two Irish girls. That’s eight people.”

“It’s not the house money. It’s that damn shrink. We have to cut down. We don’t need him.”

“We do need him. He’s on the board of Temple’s new school. He knows the headmaster. It’s only because of him that Temple’s been accepted there.”

“I’m not talking about Temple, I’m talking about you! You don’t need a shrink. You’re an egotist. That’s your trouble!”

I grope for an answer; fright garbles my tongue.

“Just say it in words of one syllable!”

“I’m trying to.”

“No, you’re not. You’re showing off your vocabulary!”

I try to grab the thread of my thought, but my throat tightens and the words are gone. My throat hurts all the time now, so whatever I say emerges stilted and over elaborate. OK, so I’m an egotist. An egotist with a sore throat.

I talk to Dick’s brother’s wife.

“Dick is alone all day now. Every day he’s in that upstairs bedroom, checking stock figures and poring over his religious documents. He needs a job, any job. Can’t his brother help him find work?”

No help is forthcoming.

Winter 1960. In spite of my sore throat, I accept a small role in a Poets Theatre production, an English translation of a Polish play brought from behind the Iron Curtain. The play’s action takes place in a Polish prison and revolves around the emotional lockhold between guard and prisoner, each so justifying the role of the other that the two ultimately change places. The director directs it as a farce. I play the guard’s unhappy wife.

During rehearsals, a man named Hermann Field comes up the theatre stairs to watch us. When we take a break he tells us, though the play’s premise may seem absurd to us, it’s actually close to the truth. And the madness of farce is the only way to play it.

Farce. Madness. Infant schizophrenia. Temple. My mind wanders off for a bit to wrestle with that perilous sequence. Forcing my attention back to what Field is saying, I hear him tell us that he’s just returned from behind the Iron Curtain where he went in search of his brother, Noel Field.
*
Because he was Noel’s brother, he was arrested by the Communists, and from then on, Hermann Field says, the days of his own life played out exactly like our play. Convinced that he must have vital U.S. State Department spy information, the Russians kept him closely jailed, taking him out every day for long interrogations until—what with the cold, the lack of food, and the interrogation process—he fell ill with a high fever. When the Russians brought in a doctor to dose him with penicillin, Field realized that they didn’t want him to die and take spy information with him to the grave. That much was good to know, Field acknowledged, but the problem still remained: he had nothing to confess.

“It began to be madness. My cellmate and I wrote a novel together on toilet paper to keep from going crazy.”

“Why didn’t you make up a confession?” we ask.

“I finally decided to do just that,” Field replies. “I worked out a confession that would tally with the gist of what the Russian seemed to be after. But when I told the guards I was ready to confess, the guards said that it was Friday afternoon. They were leaving for the weekend; I could confess on Monday. Over the weekend, Stalin died, and everyone in the prison was released, including me.”

Who exactly are Hermann and Noel Field, and do I really want to know? What with the Cold War and the recent McCarthy hearings, if Dick hears Field’s story, he’ll say the Poets Theatre is Communist. Resonating deeply at this moment is the similarity between the play, Hermann Field’s story, and the way Dick grills me. Then when the weekend comes, how Dick drops his grilling and goes back to being his old friendly self. Once again, I believe in his friendliness, believe he understands what I am trying to do for Temple, even sympathizes with it—then, whop! It’s Monday and he’s after me again, using my own words against me, taking them out of context, twisting them around to say something else.

Farce or madness? Either way it’s desperately awry. I know that I’m the lone community rebel in a Republican enclave. I know that the morning after Kennedy’s election, my car has been plastered with Nixon stickers because I voted for Kennedy. I accept all that. But I also see that the community accepts Temple and accepts me. The Grandin family accepts me; Dick’s sister keeps defending me.