A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (23 page)

Now that we haven’t the money for the full professional renovation that the house needs, we work on the house as a family project, led by Rudy Anderson, a superb local carpenter who constructs the major renovations. I attribute my children’s building know-how, including Temple’s—she works with us during school vacations—back to this period. The rest of their lives, all four children will be constructive, in every sense of the word.

All four will also be visualizers. While still in her teens, my youngest child will emerge as a fine artist, her paintings winning their first attention in a town exhibit.

Temple has already written about her summers with “Aunt Brecheen.” Ann Brecheen, now dead, was Ben’s sister. One day, when Ben and I were visiting her in Arizona, we came up with the idea that Ann’s ranch would be the perfect place for Temple to summer. And so it proved. Ever since her summer with Ann, Temple has loved the West. As well as being a rancher, Ann was a teacher, librarian, and charmer.

I take up teaching drama at the Westchester School of Music and Theatre. I also write school lessons for the television networks. The lessons, geared to specific TV programs, and called “Teacher’s Guides,” are coordinated to school curricula and sent to all USA high schools.

The next summer vacation Temple and I start in on covering the kitchen walls with four-by-eight panels of composition walnut siding. We buy the siding, are congratulating ourselves on how well it goes with the rest of the house—kind of an old world library-cum-kitchen effect—when, oops! We discover we’re two sheets short on the siding. By this time I’m up on a ladder gluing acoustic tiles into the ceiling and don’t want to stop.

“Temple, you’re free. Drive down to Webers and buy us two more sheets of siding.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? Of course, you can.”

“No, it’ll make me nervous and I’ll cry, and then what will the boy behind the counter think?”

“What do you care what the boy behind the counter thinks? He’s just some jerk selling lumber and you’ll never see him again. Cry, and buy the siding anyway.” Off she goes. Omigod, have I asked too much? After what feels like an eternity I hear the car pull into the drive. The siding is tied to the roof and Temple is triumphant.

“I cried and bought it anyway!”

Fall rolls round, Temple returns to school and wakes up to the fact that if she wants to go to college, she’ll have to settle down to some solid academic work. Guided by her science teacher, Mr. Carlock, she catches up to where she should be, graduates from school, and is accepted into Franklin Pierce, a recently established college close to Hampshire Country School. However, it should be noted that all this takes some doing.

Temple’s decision to progress from non-student to student is motivated by her fixation on her cattle chute/squeeze machine (more on that later), and her fierce determination to prove its value scientifically. Noting this, Mr. Carlock points out to Temple that, if she wants to achieve her goal, she’ll have to study college science. And, in order to get into college, she’ll have to graduate from high school. And in order to graduate from high school, she’ll have to fulfill the academic requirements that, up until now, she’s chosen to ignore.
*
Once the steps are clear, Temple sets to work, her fixation on her cattle chute motivating her to trudge through the courses that don’t hold her interest. Hampshire School tutors her to graduation, and Mr. Patey helps her to be accepted at Franklin Pierce.
**

Franklin Pierce turns out to be a blessing: friendly and flexible. Temple can visit Mr. Patey and Mr. Carlock whenever she feels the need or the mood. Once again, she discovers that, if she wants her classmates to respond to her project, providing her with the research data she needs for the validation of her cattle chute, she’ll have to take an interest in their projects. I keep in touch with her progress through her dean at Franklin Pierce. He likes Temple and wants her to succeed but is worried about her inability to do math.

“It will be a problem if she goes to graduate school.” He knows Temple wants to do that. He also understands that she’s autistic.

This kind of intense “special accommodation” teamwork, both at Hampshire Country School and Franklin Pierce College, is rare for the sixties. It will only begin to be accessible forty years later when Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, will offer college level assistance for bright young students who are struggling with autism.

Four years later, all of us, including Dick, go to Temple’s Franklin Pierce graduation. When the diplomas are given out, Temple receives top honors: magna cum laude, second in a class of four hundred. I’m ecstatic. Dick accepts “proud father” congratulations a bit stiffly. Four years earlier, as soon as Temple had graduated from Hampshire Country School, he’d tried to arrange for her to live in a private emporium for the dull witted.

After seven years of feeling as if there’s a fish hook lodged in my throat, I wake up one morning to find, when I swallow, that the fish hook is gone. Have the blood vessels in my vocal chords actually healed? Is it possible? I go to a doctor, who grabs my tongue, peers down my throat at my vocal chords, and says, “Yes, completely healed!”

I take a summer stock role to see if my speaking voice will hold up. Then, very cautiously, resume singing under the tutelage of a New York voice teacher and coach. Music is a big part of our lives now. Ben and his various bands are not only much sought after for weddings and dances, but Ben also books bands into prestige hotels like the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, the Elbow Beach in Bermuda, and the Pierre in New York.

What happens next is glorious serendipity.

At four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the girl singer at the Pierre calls Ben to say that her child is ill and she can’t make the gig. Ben looks at me.

“It’s too late to book any of the regular singers. Do you think you can swing it?”

Yes, yes, yes.

“OK, it’s yours. Be sure to sing some French songs, they love that French stuff at the Pierre.”

In I go, and sing the night away, where, by a lucky fluke, the manager of the Pierre is having dinner with friends. On Monday morning the manager calls Ben.

“Your wife sings beautifully. And in French, too. Would she be willing to take the off nights?” (Off nights are Sunday and Monday.)

Yes, yes, yes.

My next hurdle is Stanley Worth, the Pierre band leader. He’s not as ready as the manager to accept me. Nor is the piano player, whose only remark is, “Well, at least you look like a singer.”

However, the manager is the manager, so Stanley has to tolerate me, and I improve. After a few weeks, at the close of one night, there’s a rap on my dressing room door. It’s Stanley. He gives a nod and says, “You’ll do.”

I love the long hours of the Pierre job, and drive home each night singing at the top of my lungs. The lyrics that I write a few years later will come, I know, from those nights. Music is a different experience when you’re inside the harmony and rhythm. The men play their own variations on whatever pop song I’m singing. So from now on, I listen for a wonderful little counter melody that Stanley likes to play against “S’Wonderful.”

I call Professor Morrison in Cambridge to talk about the job, and his response is literary. “Ha! What yarns you’ll have to tell!”

After singing in the Pierre, Ben’s drummer suggests that Ben book me to sing on his big band jobs. Singing with the four Pierre men is a delight, but singing with a twenty-two piece band is frightening. I sit in front of three saxes, each sax blasting a different note in my ear till I lose all sense of where we are in the music. Now it’s my turn to sing. I have only the end of the last song chorus and the pick-up notes to the repeat, in which to signal the leader my key change,
*
get up to the mike, turn it on, and hear my key change. All this, along with a prayer that I come in with the right note on the right count.

After band singing I begin writing and performing songs and comedy on my own—very late sixties style—finally accumulating enough material to consider undertaking a full cabaret act. Frank Wagner, choreographer for Radio City Music Hall, helps me put the act together. An act is different from stage acting in that there’s no role to hide behind. You have to engage directly with the audience. I find that more terrifying than the twenty-two piece band.

Frank is not impressed. “Stop acting as if it doesn’t matter whether or not they like you,” he growls, “If you ignore them and keep pretending they aren’t there, they won’t give a hoot about you or your act.” Frank pries me out of the dressing room where I’m waiting to go on. “Stop hovering back there! Go out in the bar and make friends! Talk to anybody!” Advice that will prove invaluable when it comes time to lecture to autism societies.

I perform in various New York cabarets; I also work for the cabarets, auditioning and introducing their other acts. At the same time, I continue to teach drama at the Westchester Academy of Music and Theatre. Most of the students are in their twenties, with a smattering of late teenagers. Once in a while I get a twelve-year-old, but one particular child looks to be no more than seven. His grandfather, a bulky, white-haired man, brings him to me, looking at his grandson with his heart in his eyes. “I want my grandson to learn there’s no people on earth better than show people.” The man tells me that for years he was a high wire circus performer and reels off a series of names. Do I know them? Have I seen them on the high wire?

I haven’t.

“I caught them all, I was their catcher.” The names must be impressive, because he adds, “I caught the greats.”

I look at this man, his sturdy frame softened with age to the shape of a pear. He looks no more fit to perform on a high wire than a retired plumber. Yet once upon a time, the strength in those arms must have been great enough to catch another performer in mid-flight. And talk about precision. Over and over he had to be there for those greats he was so proud of catching. And always in the split second swing of the trapeze.

He leaves his grandson with me, and after a short workout, I can see that the boy’s extraordinarily talented.

Since he’s too young to work with the adult members of the class, I make up a monologue for him from the first scene of
Dark of the Moon
, a play about a witch boy who longs to be human. I give it to him to take home.

“Learn it by heart for the next lesson.”

In acting, there’s what’s called “sensory recollection,” which is, quite simply, finding an emotional moment in your own life that matches the one in the play, and using your recall of it to fulfill the scene. Easy to explain, hard to do.

When the boy comes for his next lesson, it’s 5:30 in the afternoon and already dark. Classes are mostly in my living room because it’s larger than the school studio. I tell the boy that his character, the witch boy, has to travel a long, frightening journey to get to the conjur man whom he hopes will make him human. And it’s only because he hopes, even though he’s scared, that he has the courage to make the trip.

“I have an idea to help you get into the witch boy’s heart. There’s a mailbox at the end of our path. See that path out there? It goes down those stone steps through the woods. The woods are dark now, full of dry leaves and rustlings and creaky branches. I’ll put the light on in the house, so you can see me in the window. Do you think you’re brave enough to go down to that mailbox alone and then come back up the hill alone?”

The boy nods and goes out the door. Omigod, again have I asked too much? I watch him out the window. I know, firsthand, just how scary that path can be at night. The boy makes it up the path, comes in the door, his eyes round.

“Now can you ask the conjur man to make you human?” Eyes still round, the boy starts in.

“I gotta see you, conjur man, I gotta ask you something.” He gulps and goes on. “Conjur man … Listen to me … I come a long way … I been askin’ and askin’….”

He’s magic.

The acting technique of using sensory recollection and empathy to get inside a character, will in time lead me to understanding something of what’s missing in people with autism.