A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (3 page)

He returned after V-E Day, on leave before being shipped to California and the Pacific. On the warm summer night of his return we drove along the Charles River while he told me what had happened to his army commission and his tank unit during the Battle of the Bulge.

“I want you to know the story because that’s who I am.”

It was during the worst of the Battle of the Bulge. Dick was a 1st lieutenant in the tanks, attached to a reconnaissance group exploring the winter darkness to see if a unit advance was feasible or suicidal. In the process, he realized that the colonel above him was causing fifty percent of the casualties by commanding unit advances that were indeed suicidal.

Going over the colonel’s head, Dick reported to the higher-ups that the colonel didn’t know what he was doing. He, a lst lieutenant, planned to make an official report against the colonel. According to Dick, the higher-ups were sympathetic about the casualties but adamant about an official report. Perhaps they were worried about morale, perhaps the horror was too chaotic to assess, or perhaps they were under even higher orders. General Patton was known as “Old Blood and Guts.”

The higher-ups thanked Dick and told him they would move the colonel to another war zone. However, they warned him that if he did make an official charge, the colonel’s record would be kept under wraps and Dick would be moved to another tank unit. In addition, he would have to forfeit his advancement from lst lieutenant to major. Even in the face of that, Dick still insisted on an official report and had immediately been sent to another tank unit, never to fight again with the only unit buddies he’d known.

Was Dick’s charge an act of ethical bravery? I thought so then. It seemed courageous and noble, and I adored him for it. To undertake reconnaissance in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge was in itself heroic—the stuff of John Wayne movies, and my schoolgirl head was full of movies. Today I’m not so sure. Knowing Dick, I’m certain he produced rules and numbers; otherwise the higher-ups would never have taken him seriously enough to move the colonel to another war zone. Why hadn’t that sufficed? War calls for courage, resourcefulness, and total obedience. Dick must have known any higher war command would override his personal opinion.

“I want you to know the story because that’s who I am.”

Did that mean, “I want you to think of me as a hero, even though I may have done the wrong thing”? Or was he saying, “If you’re going to marry me, know that when I make a decision, whether you think it’s right or wrong, my decision stands”? Was he acknowledging a foolish rigidity, but as he recalled the scene, found himself, once again, unable to stop insisting that he was right?

Or was he merely explaining why he’d come home with a new unit number on his red, blue, and yellow tank triangle and still only the silver bars of a 1st lieutenant?

What neither Dick nor I knew on that warm summer night was that Dick’s glory days were behind him.

At Harvard he’d been among the dashing clubmen who lived outside the dorms in what was called a “rat house,” a separate rented house with a man servant. One of the rat-housers was Johnny Roosevelt who invited them all to Sunday night supper at the White House. Mrs. Roosevelt scrambled eggs for them in a silver chafing dish brought in by the maid and lighted ceremoniously. After supper, Gerswhin played them “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Graduation came and after it more glory. Dick joined the 101st Cavalry in New York, the famous Squadron A. Squadron A men played polo in the old Armory, polished their riding boots, and dated Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, “the ultimate debutante”
*
. Some of the men even had the squadron emblem tattooed on a bicep; all of them had nicknames. Dick was called “Sticky Dick.”

Then came WWII. Cavalry units became tank units, and the glory of Squadron A was forgotten.

In August, 1945, the war ended. General Patton was driven through Harvard Square, standing tall in an open jeep, his khaki helmet varnished till it gleamed like Churchill’s dome. Glory was in the air again, but it had changed; it held no place now for social princelings. Yet the Squadron A men would go on calling each other by nickname the rest of their lives. And somewhere along in the years, one of them would say to me, “We always knew Sticky Dick was crazy.”

March 1946. My mother loved the world of Jane Austen. During my engagement to Dick, she glowed like Mrs. Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice;
her daughter was making a good marriage. She had the wedding invitations engraved on the best vellum and addressed them all herself. No, I could not touch them. Each invitation must be free of smudge, the visible proof of my mother’s adroit social management.

The wedding presents arrived in white boxes. My mother helped me unwrap them: crystal, silver, and china. She laid them all lovingly on the dining room table, set off by her best white damask, and invited her friends in to see “the loot.”

The night before the wedding, I was removed early from my bridal dinner, lest I be fatigued for the ceremony on the morrow. The same went for the next day luncheon given in my honor. I was to have sandwiches at home with my mother and her best friend and then to nap. Again, the fatigue factor. After the nap I was dressed two hours early in bridal finery, handed a bridal bouquet and told to pose for the photographer, who twisted me first one way and then another, moving the bouquet first to one side and then the other. The sitting pose presented problems: lots of satin to arrange so the dress wouldn’t crease. My mother wanted a picture of herself in her wedding finery leaning over me, caressing my bouquet.

The wedding ceremony blended in somehow with the wedding reception line. Lots of hands to shake. A few friends from the Harvard Dramat came and were properly awed by the formality of shaking hands with me and mumbling appropriate words of congratulation.

Finally it was all over. I and the presents and the social glory departed from my mother’s life. When she came to and realized the extent of her loss, she took small revenge by frowning on any purchase I made in my new role as a married woman, particularly one she could construe as “frivolous.”

The first disapproval came with my purchase of a crystal hedgehog. She saw it on my mantel and drew in her breath.

“You bought yourself a crystal ornament? I never gave in to such an indulgence in my life!”

“The cleaning woman called in sick.” I was desperate to justify my frivolity. “I cleaned the house myself and spent the cleaning money on the hedgehog.”

My father, who was usually meek, came to my defense. “Mary, dear lamb,”—an endearment he used when he wanted to soothe my mother’s ruffled feathers—“you must admit we spend a great deal of money on cleaning.” My mother yielded not an inch.

I loved the crystal hedgehog and treasure it to this day, but as soon as my mother left, I hid it, as I was to hide so many pieces of my life.

Years later, when I learned how inherited traits ride on the DNA strands, I’d wonder if they added as much freight as my mother’s long-ago label of “feckless indulgence.”

Fear of her label spilled over into buying infant toys for Temple. The displays in toy stores were scant. The country was still tooling up after WWII. I stared at what little there was—a few cuddly bears good for nothing but a hug, clown dolls with big eyes, and a clear plastic ball with bright fish swimming inside. I stared and worried. Better not buy. Who knows where it could lead?

It took me nearly two years to get over the anxiety. It happened when I first brought Temple to the Judge Baker Guidance Clinic in Boston’s Children’s Hospital. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

May 1949. My second child is born, and I’ve carried her home myself. Again, a baby nurse has been hired, first to take care of Temple while I’ve been in the hospital, and then to help with the new baby.

The day is sunny and perfect. Temple and I are playing in the sandbox at the edge of the field behind our house. With us are my close friend, Veevee, and her little girl, Ceelie, a few months older than Temple. Temple is twenty-one months old now.

Ceelie fills her pail with sand and wets it down with the watering can. Chattering to herself, looking to us for praise, she begins turning out mud pies with a plastic mold. Mute, lost in her own private world, Temple gathers up handfuls of sand and watches the sand dribble slowly through her fingers. Over and over, unmoved by the praise we heap on Ceelie or the encouragement we offer to her—“Shall we make a patty-cake? See, here’s the way we fill the mold.” Temple closes out everything but the sand sifting through her fingers.

There it is again. What I’ve been watching, dreading, what even to my untutored eye looks odd. Finally, I blurt it out.

“Why isn’t Temple doing what Ceelie’s doing?”

“I don’t know, but I think she should be.” Veevee sees that her words have knocked the wind from me, but she doesn’t stop. She’s been a pediatric nurse during the war. “Of course, Ceelie’s a few months older than Temple, and two-year-olds don’t necessarily play together. But they like to play alongside of each other; they check each other out and imitate each other.”

That’s true. I’ve seen other babies do just that. But right now I want to hold back. Anything not to take that first icy plunge into what I’m not yet ready to face. I watch Ceelie: she hops up and down, gabbles, slaps at her mud pie cakes. I watch Temple: she doesn’t even look at us. Instead, she fixes on the sand and her fingers, her head drooping like a dahlia on a stalk.

Veevee, increasingly aware of my uneasiness, plunges on anyway.

“I know Temple can be taught to talk. I feel sure of it. I remember reading how in England during the Blitz, there were children who became speechless, but they found they could teach them to speak.”

I still can’t answer, but for the moment the problem moves back, not quite so suffocatingly close.

“There’s a clinic at Children’s Hospital. The Judge Baker Guidance Clinic. You could take Temple there. After all, how could it hurt?”

I finally find my mouth. “I’ll ask my pediatrician.”

My pediatrician looks Temple over: “You can take Temple to Children’s Hospital if you want to, but I think you’re being an anxious mother.”

Perhaps, but I make an appointment anyway, with Dr. Bronson Caruthers, head of the Judge Baker Guidance Clinic.

Dr. Caruthers is avuncular and unflappable. His shaggy white hair hangs over his forehead like Will Rogers’, his white doctor’s coat buttons tight across his belly. He examines Temple in a friendly way, making no particular comment, and introduces Dr. Meyer, a chic European woman. Dr. Meyer brings Temple and me into her book-lined office and spreads out some toys. I’m too nervous to notice how she plays with Temple, but I’m conscious of her gentleness. Together we watch Temple.

“Well, she is certainly a very odd little girl.” That’s all she says. Like Veevee, Dr. Meyer confirms my anxieties; like Veevee, she makes me feel Temple’s problems are solvable. From a cupboard she produces some colored plastic kitchen cups and holds them out.

“I think if you play with her with the bright colored cups … like so, see?”

Kitchen measuring cups: she’s showing me how to play “give and take” with colored plastic measuring cups! Surely no one could construe measuring cups as “feckless indulgence.”