A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (29 page)

One summer day on the Vineyard, her father (Dick’s father and Temple’s grandfather) brought me a poem he’d cut out of a Northfield School bulletin. He was on the board of the Northfield School and the poem, written by one of its students, had won a big poetry contest. He was proud for Northfield but wasn’t sure he understood the poem.

“It’s about empathy,” I said. “The girl writing the poem is asking the boy to understand her feelings.”

“But part of it is in French?”

“That’s because she is quoting a line from an old French nursery rhyme,
Au Claire de la Lune
. She’s asking the boy to open the door of his heart to her. But, then, to her sorrow, she sees that he’s not able to do it. Sometimes people don’t know how to open up to each other.”

Old Mr. Grandin sighed. He still wasn’t sure he understood the poem, but he thanked me for explaining it.

I think of my own parents. Beyond their mundane domestic exchanges over national politics and neighborhood behavior, I’m not sure that either had much insight into the other, certainly not into each other’s dreams.

During the thirties, my father, John Coleman Purves, and three other men invented an electrical coil that could sense direction through the earth’s magnetic north. The four men named it the “flux valve” because it registered the minute fluctuations in the earth’s force. Later, the Army Air Corps called it “the automatic pilot” and flew their World War II planes by it. After World War II, it took us all the way to the moon. When I look up at the moon, I think of my father, his quiet pride that his flux valve compass walks its bleak dust, registering the pull of our earth.

I wish I knew more about my father, whose documents are preserved in the Smithsonian Museum. How did he meet the three men he worked with? And when? And where? And who did what in those ten years, from 1932 to 1942, when we lived in Springfield, Massachusetts?

First of my father’s partners was Haig Antranikian, a small, sallow, sad-eyed Armenian, educated at the University of Cairo.

“Antranikian had the concept,” Father said, “but he didn’t know what to do with it. I saw how to make it work.” Note the word “saw.” The family visualizing gene was already in place. My father was both a civil and mechanical engineer, a graduate of M.I.T. and, according to one of his classmates, the brightest man in his class. But my father always said his gift was interpretive, not creative. Father brought in two other men as partners and established The Purves Corporation. The four men then set about to build a working model of Antranikian’s idea.

The first of the new partners was Ritchie Marindin, a Frenchman crippled with polio. Though his frame was slight, his shoulders had grown immense from years of swinging his legs between two wooden crutches that squeaked. The other new partner, Lenox F. Beach, was a dour Scot with a bristly sandy mustache, a tall thin man who marched in the Springfield Memorial Day parade in full Scottish regalia beating on the biggest bass drum I’ve yet to see or hear. He would never look directly at my father’s two little girls who watched him goggle-eyed as he marched past us, but his head would give an extra swagger and his arms a wider flourish as he whacked his drum with the huge padded drumsticks.

All through the Depression the four men tinkered away in a second story loft space of the barn housing the Springfield trolley cars. I remember the weeks when they couldn’t figure out why their gadget wouldn’t hold true, until it dawned on them that it was picking up electric current from the trolley cars parked underneath. Today when I’m in a plane and the pilot landing us asks all passengers to turn off their computers and cell phones, I think of my father and those trolley cars in Springfield.

Most of all, I remember the day when the flux valve compass flew an airborne plane from New York to Chicago with no one touching the controls. The call came through from a friend in New York. I see my father now on the old wall telephone in the back hall, his voice loud because it was long distance and that meant something important. And loud because he was excited. Father was not an excitable man, but he was that day.

Alas, Father’s gift and those of his new partners did not include business. It was still the depression. The men had devoted fifteen years to the flux valve and earned nothing: Father so longed for recognition that it rendered him guileless; he rented the Purves Corporation flux valve for a year to Bendix Aviation for $300. At the end of the year he got a another call from New York, from the same friend who’d called him about the flight.

“Jack, I’ve just heard a Bendix man boast at a cocktail party about their new gadget called a “flux gate.” You better get down here. I think they’ve copied your compass.”

They’d copied it all right. They’d turned their $300 rental into a profitable study on how to get round the patents. By now it was World War II, lawsuits were unpatriotic. Bendix put their “flux gate” copy into every American plane.

When the war was over, Sperry Company signed a legitimate contract with my father and built the flux valve into the instrument that took us into outer space. Though the four men finally came into a little money, the government managed to tax them retroactively. How and why I have no idea. Perhaps taxation favors the powerful; perhaps because my father lacked the ability to read the motives of the men with whom he was dealing.

By this time, Antranikian had disappeared. Father went searching for him in New York to give him his share of the profits, eventually locating him in a flophouse on the Bowery. The landlady said the police had carted him off to Bellevue. And there at last Father finally found him.

“I didn’t know how to reach you,” Antranikian said. “They wouldn’t give me paper and pen to write. They asked me what I did for a living. I said I was an inventor, and they laughed at me.”

My father told the doctors that Antranikian really was an inventor, got him released from Bellevue, and established him somewhere in the outskirts of Manhattan. After that, he and Father worked for a while developing a system for color television, but the fire had gone out of both of them and another system was put into play.

My father seems to have accepted Antranikian’s emotional breakdown without excitement, certainly not with the excitement he would have brought to an engineering problem. Did he ever ask Antranikian what had happened? Was Antranikian able to explain? The two men had known each other for more than twenty years. Was their friendship limited only to theory? Since then, it’s crossed my mind that Antranikian may well have been Asperger’s, that form of autism that produces mathematical genius coupled with an inability to function socially with the rest of the world.

My father didn’t have much of a social compass either. Cerebral, systemizing and reticent, he allowed my mother to impose her social code on his life. His only comment on Antranikian’s mental state was to say that it’s dangerous to keep theory too much to oneself.

“If you don’t have a cohort following the line of logic in your theoretical ideas, pretty soon nobody understands what you’re talking about.”

That could be, but it could also be that these two complicated men understood each other in the way that today’s engineers and computer nerds understand each other and are drawn together through mutual work. Father was more stable than Andronikian; he had a wife and family to tie him to reality.

I asked Father once why he and his partners had persisted with the flux valve for fifteen years against Sperry Company’s advice to desist. The head of Sperry was a personal friend of Father’s and, from time to time, would ask him, “Why do you keep puttering around with an electric coil? Everybody knows compasses work with needles.”

“Why did you?” I asked.

“Because I knew I was right.”

He was right, of course, and the flux valve ultimately changed the course of aeronautics. But it must have taken fantastic conviction to keep working on a gizmo that all the engineers at Sperry thought was absurd. Father had an answer to that.

“No original concept ever comes out of company men in a company lab. Those men are joiners; they’d rather be around men who think the same way they do. Given those terms, a company lab can only perfect what has already been conceived and pretty much developed. Original ideas and early development come out of loners—some man tinkering around by himself in a back shed and beating his wife.”

I don’t know where Father dreamed up “wife beating,” unless he was thinking about somebody he knew.

Father taught me calculus and solid geometry, but he was mostly theoretical with me, rarely personal. I like theory. I tend to spin off into it myself, but it must have been very lonely for my mother who hadn’t a theoretical bone in her body. Father’s answer to her when she took exception to his small social obstinacies was to say, “If it hadn’t been the right thing to do, I wouldn’t have done it.” An answer that enraged her.

My mother’s focus was social. She thought she’d married a handsome, suitable Philadelphian who would enhance her social life, never understanding that my father, who adored her, couldn’t possibly play out that role. I see her as she was in the thirties, young, pretty, and vivacious, flinging her arms around my father and asking him in a coy, joky way, “Poppa love Mama?” My father would draw away from her as if batting off gnats, “Yes, yes. Poppa love Mama.” And yet, when they both were in their seventies, and my mother was hospitalized with a small cancer, my father returned home after the operation and burst into tears.

“She looked so young.”

The habit of doing without casual affection became so engrained in my mother that, in later years, she didn’t want to be touched at all. I would try to embrace her, but she could only wait stiffly for me to let go. After a while, I stopped trying. My father embraced me only once, but it was heartfelt. I told him I was getting divorced; he put his arms around me and said, “Be brave.”

My mother minded the long talks I had with Father. I think because she wasn’t interested in what we were talking about and therefore felt excluded. From the time I was little, I had learned that the only way to get my father to talk to me was to ask him questions. His long habit of answering me and explaining made it easier for him in later life to tell me his ideas.

“Mutual attraction,” he would say, “lies at the heart of everything. Originality is mental energy focussed, long and obsessively on one, all-consuming goal. Thus focussed, it will attract the answer to it.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Newton not only saw the apple fall to the ground, he also saw the ground leap up to meet it.” In a corollary to this, he felt that the same new idea, the same new way of perceiving reality, would emerge in different parts of the world at the same time.

“In the thirties, there were other men in other countries fooling around with electric coils.”

This mutual attraction of ideas was Father’s explanation of luck, but his explanation didn’t include the human phenomenon of mutual spiritual attraction. As passionately as nature abhors a vacuum, most of us rush toward each other, mind, body, and heart, in what Lewis Thomas has called the bewildering and “pervasive latency of love.” That response was missing in Father.

Today’s statistics show that autism runs high among Silicon Valley nerds and in the families of engineers, where it tends to skip a generation, turning up in a grandchild. Father was very proud of Temple, her power of visualization. Perhaps, too, he sensed a kinship with her lacks.

When my father died he’d finished his battle with cancer and was ready to accept death. During his last weeks he lay waiting, stretched out on a wicker sofa, on the porch, his arms crossed on his chest like a crusader. When I woke him to say that I’d be back the following week, he opened one eye and smiled. His eye had the glazed look of a migrating bird dropped from the sky. Sometimes I could revive such birds with a drink of water from a saucer; sometimes the journey had been too much for them and they would look at me with the same glazed eye.

Then Father rallied, so I was ready to deny that look. In his last week at the hospital, the rallying and sinking rose and fell as he struggled each day with finality, and typical of Father, said nothing about it. Instead, he took an innocent pleasure in the hospital nurses, saying, “I’ve been powdered and petted by more pretty women.”

He was particularly fond of one nurse and she of him. She liked to ask him questions.

“Can you imagine?” she said to me, quite delighted. “While I’m helping him struggle to get up from the toilet, he’s explaining to me why the Nile runs north!”

How like Father to have found somebody in his last days who would ask him questions and he could explain.

The day before he died, he saw my children and was unbelievably sweet to them, his smile a blessing. The day was so peaceful, so resolved, that I deluded myself into thinking we would have him with us a little longer. The real resolution was Father’s.

The next day he waited for my mother and me, as he had waited for “Mary, dear lamb” so many times in his life. Though he was no longer conscious, I felt his concentration. With each hardly discernable breath, he gathered up from deep within himself that universal creative energy he so ardently believed in. Supremely dignified, his equation ready, he slid slowly from his skin, first his feet, then along his torso, his heart, his neck, till the last breath escaped, leaving his mouth open like a hatched egg. The room was full of spirit. I know his equation was received.