A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (18 page)

“When the contractors laid out Route 128, they were told to build wider bridges, but the politicians wouldn’t listen. Now the state’s tearing down three-year-old bridges to build wider ones, and all that money’s wasted. State money goes to contractors, the politicians don’t care what happens to the kids. There’s no money in kids, no political glory, no votes!” The cop adds her rage.

“We can’t keep them here for more than two years, we have to make room for the next batch of kids. We feed them, we teach them, we love them and we raise their hopes. Then, just when they begin to see that maybe life is ok, we have to let them go. We send them home in a new jacket, the mother takes the jacket out and sells it for drugs.”

“Last month,” it’s the social worker again, “there was one boy we told the courts not to send him home, that something would happen, but they wouldn’t listen. Before the week was out he murdered his mother.”

What I carry away from that evening meeting with the psychiatrist, the social worker and the cop, is admiration for their gritty integrity, their mordant jokes, their fierce rage against feckless politicians. But more significant, I recall what the doctor said on our way home when I told him about Temple.

“If I had a kid who was autistic, I’d do what you’re doing. Just improvise, figure it out as you go along.”

In some fashion his remark dovetails with Temple’s Viennese doctor, whose diagnosis of Temple keeps shifting and turning into questions. It even fits in with the psychiatrist who’s begged me not to write about autism. One way or another, all three seem to be expressing an uneasiness with psychiatry’s diagnosis of autism as a psychosocial disorder.

My last visit is to the Emma Pendleton Bradley Hospital in Rhode Island. The headmaster/psychiatrist works with severely autistic children, but will accept only a very few.

“Severely autistic children,” he says, “cannot get well if they live only with other autistic children.”

His teachers use the same teaching techniques for math as Dedham Country Day School. The first grade teacher helps her children learn to add columns of figures just as Mrs. Dietsch taught Temple, by bundling matches into packets of ten to illustrate “carrying” from the digit column to the tens column. What Mrs. Dietsch called “doing numbers magic.” The Emma Pendleton Bradley teacher also teaches her children to recognize letters by giving them a set of wooden letters.

“If the children take the wooden letters in their hands and feel them,” she says. “then they can recognize the letters on a page of print. Because they have trouble with abstracts they need that literal ‘feel’ in order to get the hang of reading.”

I see a puzzling contradiction. The head of Emma Pendleton Bradley believes ardently in Bettelheim, which means he must believe that his severely autistic children are schizophrenic. If so, why does he feel it’s medically sound, in fact preferable, to mix them in with other so-called “normal” children? And if he’s right, what does that say about the private mental hospital where all the autistic children are warehoused together in the same ward?

Are Old Dazzle Bottle and Stubborn Child autistic? And the Fire Setter, his inability to recognize the threat of his father or the consequences of his fire-setting, is it, as the psychiatrist thinks, a learning block caused by parental abuse, or is he also autistic?

I see traits in the Emma Pendleton Bradley children that I associate with Temple, I think I know which of those children are autistic. But I can’t get a straight take on the state children. Instead, I hear over and over in my head the last tired words of the psychiatrist as we were driving home from the state school.

“I’m tired of parents getting in an emotional bread line, expecting me to figure out and decode their autistic children. I don’t know what the answer is. I haven’t got the answer!”

Thus far I’ve only visited schools and institutions for children between eight and twelve. Because Massachusetts also sponsors educational programs to help delinquent teenagers, I’m scheduled today to visit a boys’ high school on Deer Island, an island sitting in the middle of Boston Harbor. Perhaps deer once roamed it, though from the mainland dock where I’m waiting to be picked up, it looks too small for deer. Alongside of me sits a pile of provisions, also waiting to be picked up. Pretty soon, the school motor boat appears, and I climb aboard. A man stows the provisions; we cross the harbor, tying up at the Deer Island dock. I hear a halloo and see the school headmaster coming down the hill to greet me. A burly, friendly Yankee, he gives me a hand up out of the boat and orders two of his boys to unload the provisions. The boys banter with him, and I get the message right away that they like him. Better yet, they respect him. I tell the headmaster so, and he grins.

“I wasn’t a top Sargent in the Marines for nothing.” The headmaster’s accent, with its strong, flat “r,” is unmistakably New England. As he walks me up to the school, I ask how he came to be doing this job.

“I was the principal of a high school in Marblehead.” Again the flat “r.” “I told the parents who were sending their kids off to fancy prep schools that, if they’d contribute half that prep school tuition to their local high school, I’d use that money to raise their high school to a level competing with the best prep school. They wouldn’t do it, so I figured Marblehead didn’t need me. I’d go where I was needed and make my contribution there.”

I ask if I can talk to the boys. He nods and introduces me to the gangly blond boy who opens the door for us.

“This is Buddy. Buddy, show her around. Hey, if she wants you to talk, you can tell her anything you feel like.”

As we tour the school, Buddy admits openly that he’s there because he stole a car. I think of the Fire Setter and the psychiatrist’s prediction that at sixteen he’d steal a car.

“My parole officer said he’d get me off if I’d agree to come to school out here,” Buddy tells me. “He said he stole a car once. It wasn’t the end of the world.” Buddy likes his parole officer, has a dim realization that he’s been rescued, and thinks he’d like to be a parole officer himself. He worships the headmaster.

“He gives us all a fair shake. He tells me I have to make good in a job this summer, and I don’t want to let him down.”

Buddy talks about his old man who beats him. “When he comes home, he says ‘I’m the breadwinner, I bring home the bread.’ Then he acts like he’s king or something, and he beats me. I don’t mind it when he beats me, but I hate it when he beats my mom. Once when he did, I picked up the cat and threw it on his back. The cat clawed him, and left these big long red gashes.” Buddy laughs at his triumph. “I told my dad that was a present for my mom.”

Whether Buddy has learning blocks I don’t know, but I doubt it. Though his story and the Fire Setter’s are essentially the same, Buddy has been able to take the measure of his father and defy him. He sees his life at Deer Island as a second chance. Will the Fire Setter be able to make that leap or will he continue to signal for help by setting fires, unable to see his act as a felony?

How many adolescents with autism end up in jail?

I visit a private school in Cambridge for privileged teenagers who’ve also tangled with the law but whose parents can afford to keep them out of the courts and in a special school. The headmaster observes that troubled girls are rarely arrested. The community will tolerate eccentricity, he says, but won’t tolerate damage to their property, and boys damage property.

I join a class of sixteen-year-old boys with reading problems, who are slogging, painfully, boringly through a Chekhov play. The teacher asks me to read one of the roles. I give it my best dramatic shot and the boy reading opposite me immediately responds, picks up on his role and reads fluently with expression and flow. The teacher is startled. Deeply committed to analysis, her teaching technique is to stop the boy every time he stumbles on a word and ask him to explain what he thinks is the psychological reason for his stumble. Thus far, I’ve watched unimpressed. Perhaps the nature of the boy’s problem isn’t psychological; perhaps he’s nervously unable. Anyway, even if the teacher turns out to be right, why would the boy want to share his anxieties with a class of his peers? There’s a perverse withholding quality to the boy, as if he were deliberately keeping himself disengaged. I can see it irritates the teacher; yet, thus far, all she’s given him is her intention to force him to read. Her will against his. Now he’s shown her up, he’s handed over his reading ability to a total stranger who’s not teaching him, but enticing him with playacting.

Whatever the cause of his seeming defiance, in the brief moment of the scene reading, the boy has slipped out of his lethargy and come to life. It reminds me of singing in the vet hospitals, the times when I could see a catatonic man tapping his foot to the music. Then, as soon as the song was over how he became rigid again. I think of Temple, as a mute little girl of two, softly humming the Bach melody. Yet, when I looked at her, how she withdrew into silence.

Finally, truly baffled, the teacher lets go of her psychobabble and asks the boy outright how come he can suddenly read so well. The boy drops back into his sleepy demeanor, shrugs, avoids her eye, and murmurs, “It was interesting.”

Five years from now, I’ll think of the boy as a sign of the coming sixties rebellion—Bob Dylan and “the times, they are a’changing.” Forty years later, I’ll recognize him as Asperger’s.

All through New England, there are a surprising number of private boarding schools for special teenage students. I visit as many as I can, and we film the best of them. Though much of the footage turns out to be useless for the documentary, what I learn from these schools will turn out to be far more valuable than I have any idea at the present time.

But the times, they
are
a’changing. The Beat crowd is closing in on the Leave-it-to-Beaver world, and the sixties as we will remember them, are about to begin.

August 1945 - Dick and I are engaged.

September 1947 - Temple is six weeks old.