A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (15 page)

Where are Dick’s rages coming from? Why do they erupt suddenly for no reason then for no reason disappear just as suddenly?

Dick has limited interests and limited insight. He lives and intends to live by a rigid social pattern he learned in his young days. He has money and financial ability but somehow, he missed out on the formal business education that would have led him to a suitable investment position. His job as a real estate agent never has been a calling; rather, it’s something he fell into at a time when everybody in the postwar boom was having babies and needed a bigger house.

He’s accepted my decision not to institutionalize Temple; and accepted Temple. He’s even grown fond of her. And Temple has thrived in his lifestyle. Better yet, she’s been accepted into it unconditionally. The Leave-it-to-Beaver world has been Temple’s salvation.

Nevertheless, there will always be a catch to both of us. Temple and I share that pushy little renegade gene. We’ll always chafe at a conservative leash and it has nothing to do with autism. We aren’t either of us cut out to be shy violets. Temple may have been fearful when she was little and speechless, and her fears may erupt again when she reaches adolescence, but right now she’s the first in the family to introduce herself to new neighbors. Self-abnegation isn’t her style.

Nor is it mine. However much Dick frightens me with his grilling—and he genuinely frightens me—I can never quite hold back the risible hoyden gene that wells up in uncanny opposition to his conservative nature. Oblivious to his genuine distress at having the Grandin name bandied about in cheap gossip columns, I’ve sung in a bookie joint and taken it as a joke.

Had Dick married a more conservative woman, siring only “normal” children—whomever they may be—he probably would have slid home safe. But he isn’t attracted to quiet homebodies; the hoyden gene delights him even when it throws him off balance. What he can’t see is that the very qualities he loves and hates are those that have enabled me to step outside the usual ethos of the Leave-it-to-Beaver world and make my own decisions about Temple. Temple’s Viennese doctor may be right. Oil and water don’t mix.

I have no problem playing the part in the Polish play of the guard’s defeated wife. I know the role by heart.

During the day when the children are in school, I sing to comfort myself. Dick, in his upstairs room, complains of the noise and has the living room soundproofed. Why now? I’ve sung for years and he hasn’t minded it. My sore throat is getting worse. Why don’t I just stop? No, I don’t want to. I can’t bear to.

A few weeks later, the taste of blood fills my mouth. I go to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, a friend and neighbor whose children play with my children. He seats me in his examining chair, wraps a piece of gauze around his hand, takes hold of my tongue and pulls it out. I gag. Gentle, but firm, he pulls it out further. I gag again.

“I need to look at your vocal chords.”

My vocal chords? The root of the sound of the complicated words? The doctor pulls again.

“Agggghhhhhhhh.” I choke and drool. A memory of Temple at three years old scums to the surface of my mind. She stands by my desk, unable to speak. She grabs at me, holds out her ball, tries to say the word “ball,” but it comes out “bahhh.” Like a protesting sheep. She knows the word, but she can’t get it out—”bahh, bahh—” over and over. Or is it me gagging?

The doctor peers down my throat, all the way to my “say-it-in-words-of-one-syllable” vocal chords. “Ahh-ahh”—that’s all I can say. Finally the doctor lets go.

“You’ve broken the blood vessels in your vocal chords.”

“Is that why I taste blood?”

“Yes.” He pauses. “I’m afraid you won’t ever sing again.” Silent, I swallow blood. My tongue throbs from the wrench of his pull. “You mustn’t speak out loud for six weeks.”

I can’t speak anyway. The doctor goes on.

“You’ll have to whisper. The point is to try to retain your speaking voice. You don’t want to end up talking like Louis Armstrong. He has broken vocal chords from blowing a trumpet, that’s what makes his voice gravelly.”

“I’ve agreed to direct a play next summer,” I whisper.

“You better not.”

I struggle with this. I swallow to ease my tongue into feeling like my own again. The doctor waits. He’s patient, he’s aware. His violation of my tongue is purely medical. Finally I whisper, “It’s my sanity or my chords.”

“OK, I understand. Summer’s a long way off. Please, for your own good, whisper for at least six weeks. And, then, maybe. But, remember, you can’t stand in the back of the hall and yell at the actors. You’ll have to figure out another way.”

He unfastens the bib from round my neck and gives me a towel to wipe the drool from my chin.

I go home, I tell Dick. He’s kindness itself. And why not? His mission is accomplished: no more acting; no more singing; no more words.

The next evening Dick listens attentively to a group from the theatre we’ve invited for dinner. We sit at the table, and he impresses them with his sincerity. For the moment he believes in it, believes sincerely he’s a man who wants to know, wants to understand.

A young black actor complains about the theatre director. The next production is now in rehearsal, and the director has staged a fight scene at a dining table.

“What a dumb way to stage a scene full of anger,” the actor says. “How can I express anger when I’m eating? I can choke on the food—like this—I can chew on it like this—” He does a brilliant improv. “What else can I do to express anger when I have to swallow food?”

I’m angry, but I have no trouble swallowing. I can sit here and swallow all this guff.

An older woman, a patroness of the theatre, secure in her high ideals and her sophistication, takes me aside after dinner to have an insightful talk.

“Your husband is a very wonderful man. He understands; he wants to understand. That’s very important you know.”

She sermons on, her words not a suggestion but a command. I can’t talk, so I have plenty of time to look her over: her expensive dress, her amber beads, the blood red lipstick running into the lines on her upper lip. She is “au courant” with culture fodder. Art, theatre, poetry readings: she consumes them all. That doesn’t mean she’s all accepting. Oh, no. I’m clearly not on her acceptance list. She’s seen me flirt with an actor and she disapproves.

There’s no way to explain it to her, even if I could speak. My throat aches; I swallow blood. Yes, I know: Dick wants to understand, but, more important, he wants to control me and, for the time being, he’s achieved it, so he can afford to be understanding. What does it cost him to impress this self-impressed woman whom he will never see again with his sincerely magnanimous desire to understand? To understand what? Me? Temple? His job loss? Does he feel safer now that I’m diminished? He can let down his guard, is that it? Loosen his stranglehold? And this woman believes him; her belief costs her nothing. Everybody feels fine. I listen, silent and shamed. Somewhere in this smirking round of sincerity, I feel Dick’s lash. I’ve been brought low. We’re even now, better than even. He’s top dog.

The next day I close the piano lid, put away the sheet music, buy a whistle to get the children to pay attention to my whisper, and pray that Temple will keep out of the range of Dick’s fire.

It will be three years before I can speak normally and seven years before I can act or sing. A minor miracle that it happens at all.

In the meantime, speech taken from me, as once, long ago, it was taken from Temple, I return to reading omnivorously. Whether to understand what’s happening or to retreat into the old habit of denial, I’m not yet sure.

I take down the Bible my grandmother gave me when I was a girl—my grandmother who listened to my ramblings, took my thoughts seriously, whom I now miss more than I can bear to think about—open the crumbling leather cover and look at the inscription: “Anna Eustacia Purves.”

It’s been years since I’ve seen my full name. I’d almost forgotten the “Anna” part. Anna was her name.

“September 12
^th
1935.”

She must have given it to me on my ninth birthday. Nine. That’s younger than Temple. Her handwriting is angular and I realize how, under stress, my own handwriting has turned as angular as hers. I leaf through the frail tissue pages with their worn gilt borders.

Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

Eve seems to have been an afterthought, not shaped from the dust by God’s potter hand, nor turned on His wheel, nor even given a name. The Lord God fashioned her from a rib stolen from Adam during a nap, dolled her up and gave her back to Adam to keep him company. Only after both are barred from Eden does Adam, not the Lord God, name her “Eve.”

“Eve, the troublemaker!” I can just hear Adam shouting it at her. “Eve, who can’t leave well enough alone! Who has to know. Who has to eat it!”

Tears, long held back, prick my nose with their salt.

No—wait—I refuse to weep. I did not originate sin. Imperfect, yes, but doing the best I can and not responsible for Adam’s name calling. If I can’t speak, can’t sing, can’t act, I’ll search out sin on my own: search through the vast army of unidentified maimed, find sin where it’s hiding and touch the wounded viscera for myself.

Me, the extravert and introvert. The show-off and the perpetual student.

The show-off has long since begun the search. For years I’ve entertained damaged GI’s in the wards of the local Vet Hospitals, singing to men who’ve lost their faces and are waiting for the skin grafts they pray will make them look human again. I’ve sung in the locked wards to the vets who’ve lost their minds. They’re still handsome, those young catatonics whose faces have turned to stone, whose bodies are frozen in any old posture like a game of “Statues.”

“If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.” I’ve sung that song and here and there I’ve seen a foot tap. Everything else is rigid; just one foot keeping time to the music, tapping on a cell wall, alive inside that cell, tapping out messages no one knows how to answer.

Now I, too, am reduced to tapping. I’ll tap on a typewriter. Yes, but where do I start, and what do I tap?

Sometimes a stroke of luck comes your way—not as my father thought through intense theoretical concentration, but through a friend. In this case, Temple’s friend, Lyman.

The phone rings. It’s Lyman’s mother.

“The Junior League of Boston is undertaking two television documentaries for WGBH: the first on retarded children; the second on troubled children. Would you consider rejoining the League and working on them?”

*
T.S. Eliot. The Family Reunion, 1939.

*
In preparing the frame-up of Hungary’s communist leaders, Stalin needed the image of American anti-Soviet intrigue as the supposed trigger for massive subversion within his ranks. The focus fell on Noel Field. © 1999, 2000 Hermann & Kate Field.

Chapter 6

And Start All Over Again

September 1960. 1 take the cue from Lyman’s mother, rejoin the Junior League and begin the long process of researching the mapless face of retardation. Every morning right after the children leave for school, I set forth for “terra incognita.”

First assignment: medical school instruction on retardation at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The doctor who’s guiding me admits that this one class is all the instruction the medical students will get on the subject. Future doctors are not much interested in studying retardation.

Next assignment: a clinic where the social problems of the retarded are addressed. A mother brings in her son, a gentle, blonde teenager with no visible sign of retardation. He’s been promoted through high school, she says, without ever being taught to read and write.

“He could have learned if the school had been willing to help him. I told them he was slow, but the school wouldn’t listen and now it’s too late. My son’s a good boy, but he can’t speak up for himself. He wants a job pumping gas but no one will hire him because he can’t write out a slip for the gas.”

The boy sits beside her, handsome, a little dim, but not too dim to hope.

Field work: Monson State Hospital. Monson, I’m told, harbors every variety of human imperfection: goblins, pinheads, cretins. The dictionary politely defines “cretin” as coming from the French word “cretin” meaning Christian, hence a human being. But the French dictionary avoids any such euphemism, bluntly translating “cretin” as “idiot or dunce.”

Armed with a road map and a notebook, I drive to the outskirts of a small New England town, park and find my way into a quadrangle of brick buildings enclosing the village green of Monson State Hospital.

As I walk up the path to the main building I see a group of children raking leaves. Coming closer I realize they’re “mongoloids,” so called because of the Asian cast to their faces. The next generation will call them “Down Syndrome” children, will raise them at home as part of the family, and star them in Special Olympics. But this is 1960. We banish them to remote institutions like Monson, and put them to work raking leaves, washing clothes, cooking, ironing, and caring for the more retarded.