A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (30 page)

At ninety-eight, after suffering a small stroke, my mother, who outlived my father by sixteen years, was still putting off dying in a girlish hope that her life story might yet shift in her favor. But it didn’t, and finally, within weeks of death, she said to me, somewhat to her surprise: “I’ve lived a life of privilege and I’ve been unhappy most of my life.”

What she felt in her final moments I don’t know. The nursing home said she died in her sleep. I had wanted so much to be with her, but I wasn’t, and she died alone as she felt she had been most of her life. She always said that the tragedy of old age was not that one felt old but that one felt young. A paraphrase she took from Oscar Wilde, without understanding how it revealed her aching disappointment.

A few nights after her death, I dreamed my mother came to me to tell me not to worry about her, that everything was all right now she understood. What she understood or whether the dream was just my own soul trying to garner comfort, I’m not sure. I only know that in life she gave me her love of poetry and her belief in ghosts.

Before my mother died, I told her about the ghost in the Bronxville house. She nodded, “Ah, the smell of cigar smoke.”

With that small vote of confidence, though she hated my pop singing, I decided to write John Damon’s ghost into a cabaret number and to enlarge it with a song I’d make up called “Briar Rose.” The song turned out to be a Victorian lament for lost love, but, since I couldn’t forget the feeling of the laughter that had always come with the presence, I gave John Damon a girl named Rose and said that he used to tease her with the song. Gordon Munford, my accompanist, and I worked on the number, but we were both anxious about it. It was so far off of the usual pattern. One night we decided to risk performing it anyway, just to see what would happen.

As the story and song unfolded, the club fell still. No tinkling ice, no murmur of voices. Totally still. When we came to the end, the place went wild, the cabaret equivalent of stopping the show.

As people got up from the bar and began hugging us, Gordon said, “You have to tell them it’s your own ghost. Tell them that bit about your son.”

At that time, my son owned a blue Nova he loved as only a cowboy loves his horse. He was always tinkering with it, to give it an extra bit of oomph. One day he had it up on cinder blocks and was crawling under it, jazzing it up to do his bidding. It was dusk. I was sitting in the courtyard finishing up the “Briar Rose” song when I heard the sound of his auto jack. I came round to the driveway to see him trying to raise the Nova up even higher. His white shirt was all that showed in the blue twilight.

“I wish you wouldn’t work on the car now,” I begged. “It’s too dark to see anymore.”

My son instead of saying “Oh, Mom,” said, “Yeh. Maybe you’re right.”

I realized at once that’s why John Damon’s presence had always manifested itself at twilight. Blue dusk was the hour when he’d been crushed to death, when it was too dark for him to see what he was doing.

Somehow the ghost, the story, the song, the performance—it was all a gift from my mother.

As was her acting talent.

When I was a child, I watched my mother perform in amateur productions. I found her thrilling, and named my first child “Mary Temple” after her. It’s the name my grandmother had given my mother, in memory of her own dead sister, the Mary Temple of Jamesian note. Whether Henry James knew my grandmother or even took notice of her is a moot question. She was still a little girl, sitting with her hands folded in her lap at her uncle’s dining table. But James certainly was aware of my grandmother’s sister. Known to him as “Minnie Temple,” she became the model for Isabel Archer, his heroine in
The Portrait of a Lady.
*

My grandmother and her sister used to stay with their aunt and uncle, the Tweedys, in Newport, Rhode Island. Mr. Tweedy thought little of “the James boys,” as he called them, declaring them “rude and conceited and always late to lunch.”

Temple likes to conceal the “Mary” part of her name, preferring the androgyny of “Temple,” but it was only by chance that she wasn’t called “Mary” for life. One of the Irish girls working for us was named Mary, so to keep the family cast of characters straight, there was “Mary” and “Mary Temple.”

“Mary Temple” soon shortened into “Temple.”

Temple likes to think of herself as an anthropologist on Mars, but, in truth, she’s very much part of the family tradition on this planet. Her concern for the well-being of cattle follows our generational commitment to those less fortunate. My mother’s grandmother, Clara Temple Leonard (the mother of Henry James’ “Mary Temple”) was one of a group of nineteenth century American women who dedicated their lives to improving the lot of the poor, achieving lasting changes in our welfare system.

Clara Temple Leonard was also the first woman in this country, perhaps on this planet, to be proved legally a “person.” In 1883, she served in the Massachusetts legislature on the State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity, a name mercifully shortened later to the Board of Health. The governor, seeking to replace her and expand his control base with one of his own men, demanded that she be removed from the board on the grounds that a woman was not legally a “person.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., already a judge, declared that, under civil law, a woman is
not
a “person.” However, since she’s accountable for her actions, under criminal law a woman
is
a “person.” The Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity, as a state board, comes under criminal law. Ergo, Clara Leonard is a person. Though Holmes’ legal argument was shaky to the point of absurdity, Clara Temple Leonard accomplished, in her time, a major step forward for women’s rights.

Temple, in her time, has achieved a major step forward for the rights of animals. Like her great great grandmother she, too, has a bold and altruistic streak.

As to the Grandin systemizing gene, I’m happy to report that it’s alive and well and living in Temple’s brother, a fourth generation banker and senior vice president of a distinguished New York bank.

Temple’s visualizing ability may have been enhanced by autism, but, basically, it’s a family gift, as is evidenced in the decorative wall paintings created by one of her sisters, and in the sculpture created by the other.

And me? Well, I used to think I was different from the rest of the family until I read my father’s carefully compiled genealogy. No, I’m not different. I’m just one more in a long line of preachers, teachers, and non-joiners. The renegade trait has been around for generations.

Traits are gifts. Dr. Hollander is right in noting that they survive because the human species needs them. Nevertheless, upon occasion they can combine and produce too much of a good thing, and that in essence, is what autism is: an exaggeration of the family traits. In our family, they’re splendid traits, with a splendid history.

All this character evidence should be enough to persuade Temple to let go of her notion about Mars, and lay claim to her earthly genes, which have been handed down to her as lovingly as her name.

*
The Grandin Brothers
, Grandin, North Dakota Centennial Publication, 1881-1981. Associated Printers, Grafton, ND.

*
Hiram M. Drache,
The Day of the Bonanza, A History of Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley of the North
. Concordia College, Interstate Printers & Publishers Inc., Danville, Illinois.

*
The name "Mary Temple" decorates various branches of our family tree, so there could be another Mary Temple laying claim to Henry James’ "Minnie Temple." If so, now’s the moment to step forward.

Chapter 11

What It Means to Be Human

My last job with the Poets Theatre was in the seventies, as part of an international convention of Jungian psychoanalysts. Harboring a certain anxiety about the nature of their work, wanting to go back to the origins of Jung’s thinking, analysts from America and Zurich had gathered in Vezia for a summer of lectures and demonstrations on the various disciplines drawn upon by Jung. It included Jung’s own studies, the novels of Hermann Hesse (a follower of Jung), tai chi, and the mythology studies of Joseph Campbell (then still relatively unknown). Since the analysts were also interested in understanding how actors come by their insight into character, a group of us from the Poets Theatre had been brought to Switzerland to perform for them in a series of theatrical readings, culminating in a full performance of Archibald MacLeish’s
Herakles.

Herakles
, a lesser-known MacLeish play, deals with the hubris of politics and, to me, it is a more powerful work than
J.B.,
which made a big Broadway splash. It’s the story of our own economic and scientific arrogance, reimagined through the old Greek myth of Herakles (Herakles is the Greek name for Hercules). Herakles, if you remember, asked the Delphic Oracle to tell him his destiny. The Oracle told him that, first, he must perform those well-known “seven labors.”

After performing the labors, Herakles, full of himself, returns to the Oracle to learn what glorious future lies in store for him. The Oracle refuses to answer, and in a rage, he tears her down from her three cornered perch shouting:

By God, I’ll give the oracles myself
I’ll say and say and say and say,
I’ll answer it!

For this the gods punish him. Unwittingly, Herakles kills his own sons.

It’s a powerful play, one that a nation suffering from hubris should pay attention to, before making the decision to “say and say and say and say.” The Jungian analysts are moved to wonder about the hubris of their own discipline.

Looking back on that 1973 summer in Switzerland and the analysts who were beginning to question their own techniques, recalling the 1962 doubts that psychiatrists were experiencing over their assessment of autism, I reread Erik Erikson’s book,
Insight and Responsibility
.

Erikson published the book in 1964, and the next year came to Harvard, where his acclaim was so great that every undergraduate was clamoring to enroll in his course. In order to winnow out the excess, we undergraduate clamorers were each asked to write a short essay on why we thought we deserved to have the academic rope lifted for us. I don’t remember who passed judgment, only that I was allowed in.

Insight and Responsibility
was required reading, but in 1965 1 didn’t take note of what Erikson was acknowledging in it. However, on rereading the book in terms of what I now know about autism, I spot a cautious shift away from his 1950 loyalty to Freud, expressed in
Childhood and Society
.

Somewhere between 1950 and 1964 (the years of my greatest difficulties with Temple and her father) Erikson had responded to a shrewd dig from the poet W.H. Auden.
*
Auden had noted in a review, (“Greatness Finding Itself,” Mid century, No. 13, June 1960), that psychoanalysts found it difficult to differentiate between action that affects others and private behavior that can be studied in clinical isolation. After puzzling through the interpretive tangle psychiatry had created over “deeds” versus “behaviour,” Erikson admits in
Insight and Responsibility
to the “Cartesian straight jacket we [psychoanalysts] have imposed on our model of man.”
**
Somewhere in this murky period, was the psychoanalytic world readying itself for major interpretive changes? If so, what’s startling is that it took so long, that Descartes’ concept of human thought as a little “homunculus” sitting up in our brain telling us what to do, persisted unchallenged for three hundred years. Not only persisted, but directly influenced the psychoanalytic notion that talk alone could unravel emotional disorder, even such a protean one as autism.