A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (22 page)

Whatever the future holds, I know Temple is safe.

Where does Dick stand on Hampshire Country School? He’s accepted it for the moment and is prepared to pay its stiff tuition. But he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek these days, and has cut me off from the funds his father gives annually to each daughter-in-law. A sure sign that he sees me as a poor investment. From now on, despite his protestations of love, he will keep me on a very short financial leash.

March 1962. Temple’s Viennese doctor stares down at the notebook in front of him, those pages incised once again with Dick’s familiar cramped cursive. What do they say now? What is the doctor reading and reading in? Once again fear and guilt clot in my belly as they did twelve years ago when first we met. I thought we two had come through the worst of it, reached an understanding, a kind of friendship. Dizzy with anxiety, I fight the indignity of fainting. Why have I been summoned to meet with him alone? What have I done now?

The doctor looks at me, his head slightly tilted, his mouth with its faint sneer that I can never interpret. He chooses his words as he might select a morsel from a passing tray of hors d’oevres.

“Mrs. Grandin,” he says—the hors d’oevres are clearly unappetising—“Are you aware that Mr. Grandin is trying to prove that you are insane?”

I stare, shocked.

“That he has been keeping a notebook on you for the past three years?” He flips the pages in front of him. “Every move you have made.”

The faintness vanishes. Three years of spying, watching me like a mole! Writing it all down and reporting it to the doctor! Why? What are the two of them cooking up? Three years—God knows what can be culled from the suburban mishmash of daily living. Does the doctor see me as an unfit mother? For an instant I wonder if I’m mad. Is this what madness is? Inquisitor and prisoner, the doctor and I face each other alone in his soundproof office. What are we talking about? What am I on trial for? Four children are riding on me.

“Mrs. Grandin.” The Doctor’s sibilance cuts in. “I think you better leave your marriage, and I think you better leave as quickly as possible.”

For a moment I’m deaf to the import of what he’s saying. All I can feel is the basement chill of his office.

“I do not like to testify in court, but I have done it before and I will do it again. If your husband tries to take you to court, I will testify to your sanity.”

The chill vanishes. The doctor continues in his brittle way.

“I understand that you have been seeing a psychiatrist, yourself. May I have your permission to talk to him?”

“Of course.”

The next time I see my own shrink, he tilts back in his creaky leather chair, his love of drama coloring his tale. It seems the two doctors, after consulting together, called Dick in and announced that should he try to take me to court to prove I’m insane, they are both going to testify against him.

“Dick left my office screaming, ‘All you goddam psychiatrists! You’re no goddam good!’”

Those two doctors, they’re my Sanity Clause.

Years later it finally will dawn on me that Temple’s doctor was indeed an Austrian Jew who escaped the Nazis, that he had recognized in the notebook a dangerously obsessive mindset, and understood the importance of rapid departure.

How much it must have cost this stiff little man with his faintly sneering mouth, to swallow his Viennese pride and conclude that he’d seen Dick the wrong way around, that he and his colleagues had summed up autism the wrong way around, and that, perhaps, he had looked at me the wrong way around.

The last time I saw him, he rose from his power chair. “Mrs. Grandin, you have done a job that has put the entire staff of Children’s Hospital to shame. Do you realize it is as rare as if Temple had recovered spontaneously from leukemia?”

I treasure his words. His blessing.

August 1962. Dick and I are divorced, and I receive full custody of all four of our children. It’s a huge release, carrying with it deep distress. I know the good man Dick wants to be, and is in part, and could be if the cards had fallen differently. And I know that I’m taking away his happiness. Somehow our conflict shouldn’t have reached such an appalling, head-on collision, but it has. I am too young, too green, too frightened, too angry to sort out my own wild plunges at life from what I see as important for Temple. And Dick is too impatient to listen.

Yet the story shouldn’t end on such a final and crushing note. Years from now I may be able to unravel what happened and why. But I can’t now.

Now I can only see as far as Temple’s mastery over the first hurdles of autism. And in the process of recalling them I’ve found my own coming of age. But those two stories are in part—a tragic part—Dick’s story. Autism became his nemesis, the wellspring of our endless, headstrong controversies. Have I done him an injustice, dwelling on his rage, his folly, honor upheld, and hopes dashed? Or have I only told my version of the family secrets, sung to my
con disperazione
tempo?

Each time I try to sum it up, the past darts away from me—fireflies in the summer dusk. Someone else may be quick enough to catch one and put it in a jar and for a brief moment it might give out its uncanny fire. But the trapped light dims, the creature in the jar is never quite the same.

Yet the private moments of our family life keep right on sparking. There, over there, see them in the grass? Ping pong matches on rainy afternoons, the flying horses at Oak Bluffs, another over there, miniature golf and nonsense names for the children. More, more, late Christmas Eve, Dick and I secretly stuffing the children’s stockings. One blazing August noon, Dick and I spotting a whale circling our boat, laughing as we watch it watching us, rolling and wheezing in the sunny chop of Cape Cod Bay.

The moments dart about in fiery swarms, their insect lanterns wink and flash—then suddenly they’re gone—and I must go too—and I’m taking the children—

I’m so sorry.

*
Reference to Bettelheim’s contention that autism is the result of a psychic injury caused by frigid mothering.

**
Reference to the camp episode and her warning to them.

*
What’s the difference between a neurotic and a psychopath? A psychopath thinks 2 and 2 make 5. A neurotic knows they only make 4, but “just can’t bear it.”

*
It will not be until 1965 that neurologists, in a study on epilepsy will stumble on the neural connections between epilepsy and autism. The first valid proof that autism is not a psychosocial disorder, reachable through psychiatry, but a bioneurological disorder.

*
Erik Erikson.
Childhood and Society
, Norton, NY, 1950.

*
Erikson, Erik,
Childhood and Society
, Norton, NY, 1950.

**
Recently learned through the grapevine: Jean’s mother underwent psychoanalysis while Jean, encouraged by her therapists to express her rage, covered her mother with bites. Eventually Jean did acquire a little speech and was moved to a state hospital where she took long walks on the hospital grounds, circling each tree as she passed it. Now in her sixties, she lives in an institution her mother began so that her child would have some kind of permanent home.

Chapter 8

Then What Happened?

Not without trauma, we move on. Temple is safe and happy at Hampshire Country School, the siblings and I are ok, but sadly, a new and serious lack of funds makes it imperative to dismiss the two dear Irish girls. We all miss them ferociously, particularly my youngest.

The Leave-it-to-Beaver world walks politely around me. No one so much as telephones. Dick, now single, is wined, dined and sought after by every hostess in Boston.

I run into Al Capp on Brattle Street. The Capps live in Cambridge and Al is a big shot in the Poets Theatre. I dump all the bad stuff of my life on him, and feeling sorry for myself, break my rule against weeping. Al hands me his silk paisley handkerchief, which produces more tears.

“I can’t blow my nose in thaaaaat! It’s siiiilk.”

Unimpressed, Al says in his nasal drawl: “Honey, start again. Don’t be one of those wistful types. Don’t say Paris must be lovely. Go there and find out.” And off he stumps on his artificial leg.

Since I’m still silenced by damaged vocal chords, I figure I’d better pick up where I left off on my education sixteen years earlier. I visit my old Radcliffe dean, who arranges for me to take less than a full academic load. A first for Harvard.

“It took some convincing,” she and another dean tell me. “But we finally persuaded the Harvard deans that the care of four children was the workload equivalent of two courses.” At that, the two of them throw back their heads and roar with laughter. “You’re our guinea pig. If it works, we’re going to let other mothers do it.”

Professor Harry Levin recognizes me from a Harvard Dramat production of
Much Ado About Nothing
, seventeen years earlier, and takes me into his graduate Shakespeare seminar. I submit an essay to Professor Theodore Morrison who takes me into his creative writing class. It’s from him that I learn about the thorn in Robert Frost’s pocket, an image I’ll carry with me the rest of my life.

Every morning the children and I leave for school at 8:30 a.m. and return home at 4 p.m., have early nursery supper, and do our homework together around the dining room table. The children all pull up their marks at school, and I feel like an old lilac bush that’s been cut back and fed.

My day student costs, including books and gas, come to $1,000 a year. Hard to believe today.

I wish I could say that Temple pulls up her marks at Hampshire Country School, but in truth she doesn’t do any school work at all. Instead she rides horses and mends bridles. Mr. Patey feels that Temple needs this freedom so she can find her way to a new emotional equilibrium, and respectful of his judgement, I agree. Adolescence is hard enough for any child, but autistic adolescence is something devised by the devil.

In 1965 I graduate from Harvard, marry Ben Cutler and move to Bronxville, New York. Ben is from New England and, like me, a rebel from the ranks of Waspdom. The product of Andover and Yale, he moved to New York as soon as he’d graduated from Yale, and parlayed his musical talents into a career as a popular “society” band leader in the style of Peter Duchin. Ben’s affection for Temple is open and positive. One of his children matches one of mine in age and interests. So I’ve suddenly acquired, along with a new husband, an extended family. A joy I’d never envisioned.

The siblings love their new life, and most of the Bronxville High School seems to take up residence with us.

Our Bronxville house had once been the carriage house and stable on an old estate. The horse stalls and stable roof had been torn down leaving the bricks of the stable floor to form an open courtyard. But the surrounding garden was still enclosed by a high stone wall with iron rings embedded in it. The rings must have been used to hold the horses before unbridling them and leading them back to their stalls.