A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (7 page)

Well, if that’s so, then what’s going on between Dick, Temple’s new doctor, and me?

First, there’s the young Viennese doctor, disciplined in old-world Freud, seeing his future in the United States as a psychiatrist in the growing field of disturbed children. But, still a European, perhaps not fully acclimated to our culture, our particular subtleties?

Then there’s Dick, WWII vet, reared in patrician Boston, seeing his future as a paterfamilias, carving the Sunday roast as his father has before him, his children watching, their faces washed, their hands in their laps. Afterwards a Sunday walk perhaps, with the youngest child riding on his shoulders.

Last comes me. More than twelve years younger than either man, the first college female in my family, in my neighborhood, freshly hatched from postwar Harvard, from classes filled with vets on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Not college kids, but men in their late twenties who’ve left pieces of themselves behind on various battlefronts: Men who’ve faced the worst, who are afraid of nothing, and aren’t about to swallow Harvard whole. I’ve watched these men stand up in the middle of government lectures, challenge the professor, question his theories, even his facts. Their words are still in my ears. I’ve seen their crutches, their empty sleeves; I’ve caught their fever, their fervor, an under ripple of “beat” rebellion that won’t fully surface for another fifteen years. They’re my idea of the future.

What none of the three of us has yet noticed is that the fifties are already detaching into two separate futures: the bebop, beat world, and the suburban “Leave-it-to-Beaver” world. Each sees the other as worthless, neither speaking to the other. I see the “beat” world as exciting, immoral, and grungy. I see the “Leave-it-to-Beaver” world as serene, obedient and temptingly pretty, yet, somehow, never quite real. Part of me keeps thinking I can make it real simply by being obedient to it. The other part keeps breaking loose and running for dear life to the creative life of Harvard and Cambridge.

Two separate cultures. Can I live with a foot in each? Am I striking out on my own or am I, like Temple, a schizophrenic?

I begin a long slide into theory. I figure if I can tie the scary facts of autism in with what I’m reading, find in Henry James, Erik Erikson, and English eccentricity some kind of all-encompassing life vision, I’ll get a handle on the reality of our lives and be able to accept it. But reality keeps escaping behind the scenery, waiting to pop out and scare me again. I’m alone in the prim fifties with a child who doesn’t want me and a husband who isn’t sure he wants his child.

Ultimately, a hunger for meaning will lead me to a deeper study of autism but not until it has journeyed through my consciousness for many years. For now, it joins forces with myth.

The dictionary defines myth as a person or thing existing only in imagination, but when I come upon the old changeling myth, I know it’s no thing of imagination. A changeling must have been a child with autism.

According to Celtic mythology, changelings are fairy children. Endowed with mysterious powers—both generous and spiteful, friendly and malevolent—the one thing fairies lack is the capacity for human feeling. And, because of the lack, they want to join us, inspire us, but then will extract a cruel and capricious price.

Before a mortal baby is christened, the Celtic warning goes, don’t let her wear green ribbons, for the fairies will see the green and steal her away to replenish their empty hearts. They’ll put one of their own in her place; it will look like your child, but it will be sickly and odd and will want to be left alone. Remembering its forest home, it will cling to a block of wood, giving its loyalty only to the wood. Instead of speaking, it will hum and make strange croaking noises. And, if you are so unwise as to try to caress it, it will laugh and spit and take revenge on you with obscene tricks. A changeling baby has no Christian soul. It must be thrown on the fire. The purifying flames will strip it of its enchanted shape, so it will have no choice but to fly back to its fairy home.

Changelings, I learn, were part of the ancient Celtic earth rites which didn’t start to give way to Christianity until after 500 A.D. Green, the color of nature, was the fairy color. Fairies, like nature, were thought to be beautiful, bounteous with gifts, but capricious. Like nature, they could snatch away their bounty at a moment’s notice, blight your crops, sicken the livestock, and level your barn with a single storm.

The country folk of the Middle Ages understood physical deformity. Their countryside abounded in cripples and idiots. But a spiritual monster—hiding in the body of a beautiful child—that was demonic.

Temple is a beautiful child, but her beauty is uncanny. She still doesn’t speak, still won’t look at me, and if she does, she appears to look beyond me into some private land of enchantment. She no longer plays with her feces, but she still has tantrums, still goes into wild giggling and spitting. Though I must clean up after her, I’m not allowed to join her in that enchanted land.

Tantrums are hard to handle, and fecal smears are smelly, but exclusion breaks the heart.

I ride horseback early in the morning before anyone is up. The groom from the local stable has to exercise the horses then, and he knows all the bridle paths. Together we ride through the leafy woods and across an open meadow, later to become a mall.

In the meadow, a mother pheasant flutters in front of us trailing her wing in the long grass to fool us into thinking she’s wounded, enticing us to catch her, leading us further and further from her nest in the clover where her young are hidden. I feel a sudden love for her this soft green morning. She keeps on with her trick, dragging her wing, improvising a wound, risking her safety for the safety of her young.

To Hell with Bettelheim—and diagnosis—and myths! I, too, will improvise for the safety of my young.

June 1952. Miracle of miracles. Temple’s been with Mrs. Reynolds a little over two years, and she’s learned to speak! Not just single words, whole sentences are tumbling out! She’s also learned the rudiments of kindergarten: a little group discipline, a little waiting your turn to recite, your turn for a glass of juice.

Though Temple is not yet five, Mrs. Reynolds and the social worker from the Belmont School System both feel she’s ready for a month at St. Hubert’s, a camp for special children run by Mrs. Huckle, an English woman.

It’s a blazing hot afternoon. Dick, Temple, and I rattle down a dirt road through the pine woods and out onto a stubbled clearing. Long trestle tables are set under a solitary apple tree and behind them lie a cluster of low wooden buildings. From one of the buildings, her arms held wide to greet us, emerges Mrs. Huckle, the epitome of matriarchy in a vast pair of flowing, black velvet pajamas. Tilted on her gray shingled bob is a floppy black velvet tam, which gives her the look of the old British actress, Margaret Rutherford. I trust her from the start. Not only does she resemble Margaret Rutherford, she gives out the same aura of authority, good sense, and theatrical timing. She claps her hands, and a flock of children come running out. One by one, she makes them introduce themselves—easier for some than others. Next, she looks at Temple.

“Temple, you may come to my camp, but by the end of the summer you must have learned two things. You must learn to say the
Lord’s Prayer
and you must learn—always—to do your veddy, veddy best.” That’s a tall order for a little autistic girl who’s only just accomplished the nearly impossible feat of human speech.

Mrs. Huckle soon charms Dick with a description of her long-gone school on the Riviera for the sons of maharajahs. He, in turn, charms her with his story of World War II tank service in the Battle of the Bulge and his French girlfriend in Nancy.

Behind Mrs. Huckle, pacing amiably under the apple tree, is her small, white-haired, and totally silent husband. After introducing him, she gives him no further reference, so what role he fulfills, I haven’t a clue. Mrs. Huckle doesn’t say why or how her Riviera school ended, nor why she’s come to this country and not to England. But I feel certain that whatever her fortunes and whomever her enemies, she’s met both in her black velvet pajamas and tam, undaunted and unimpressed.

What a splendid influence for anybody.

By the end of the summer, Temple’s learned to say the
Lord’s Prayer
and to do her “veddy, veddy best,” something she’ll pretty much stick to from now on. In September, Mrs. Huckle feels that she’s capable of entering regular kindergarten in a small school, if the school understands her history.

I arrange to meet with Mr. Everett Ladd, headmaster of the Dedham Country Day School, and Mrs. Dietsch, the head of the first three grades. I tell them Temple’s story, and Mr. Ladd’s response is positive.

“Yes, of course we’ll take her. We’re educators; that’s what we think we should be doing.”

He has two requests: “First, let us stay in close communication. If there’s any kind of difficulty, we want to be able to talk it over with you honestly. If that’s not possible, then teaching will be impossible too.”

The second request comes from Mrs. Dietsch.

“If Temple has a bad day, may we send her home?”

“Yes, of course.”

Of course, Temple does have bad days, and Mrs. Dietsch does send her home—days of mortifying tantrums, the worst being the day she bit Mrs. Dietsch. Mrs. Dietsch uses the bad days to explain to the rest of the class that Temple has problems, and they will have to be understanding. With her intuitive sense of what a child like Temple needs, Mrs. Dietsch also teaches me.

“I always put my hand on Temple’s shoulder when I lean over to help her,” she tells me. “It makes her jump, but I keep it there anyway. Gently, but firmly.” Very plucky of Mrs. Dietsch, considering that Temple may well throw another fit and bite her again.

On the whole—give or take the fussing for extra attention, even the tantrums—Temple does amazingly well at Dedham Country Day, and manages to keep up with the rest of the class.

Temple and I visit her doctor together now. First, he talks to her alone and then to me alone. He’s delighted and puzzled by Temple’s progress.

“I do not understand why she got ill,” he says in his Viennese accent. “And I do not understand why she is getting well.”

Is he beginning to question the gospel of Bettelheim?

November 1953. A third sibling is born. I carry him home in my arms, and, sitting in the kitchen, unfold his blankets to show the two other children their new baby brother.

As the baby grows, Temple is not much interested, but her sister, enchanted to have a live, live-in doll, considers the baby her property, and takes over his introduction to life and friends. I see her now lugging him about, hardly bigger herself, talking to him, instructing him. He grins over her shoulder, his bare toes, scraping along the rug, the floor, the grass, the dirt, the gravel. He doesn’t mind his toes; he adores her company.