A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (9 page)

Dick and I decide to take a trip alone to Europe. Dick, with his usual zeal to account for every waking moment, arranges a precise itinerary with a travel agency, but somehow in total variance with his usual custom and to my delight, he’s also arranged a car rental. By ourselves, he tells me, we’ll motor from Paris, through the Rhône valley and the chateau region, all the way down to Nice. Dick speaks French; I speak a little, so between us and a good road map, he figures we’ll be able to arrive each night at the destination the travel agent has booked for us.

Paris is all that Paris is supposed to be. My uncle, Austin Purves, my father’s brother and a well-known artist, is creating a war memorial, commissioned by the French government, a mosaic Pieta honoring the WWII Americans killed fighting on French soil. Instead of the dead Christ, the grieving Madonna will hold a dead GI in her lap. My uncle has rented an atelier in Paris and is assembling the Pieta with the help of two craftsmen who work in mosaic. Great sheets of brown paper with the figures sketched in charcoal have been mailed from his studio in Litchfield, Connecticut, and are now spread out on the floor awaiting the mosaic squares. The squares have to be glued onto the brown paper sketches, back side to, and mirror fashion. Later, the brown paper with its glued mosaic pieces will be shipped to Draguignon, there pressed into wet cement, the brown paper peeled off and voila! The figures emerge from their mirror mode, right side up and right side to.
*

“What if you make a mistake?” I ask my uncle.

“You have to take a pickaxe to the cement.”

Dick enjoys all this, including an evening ride up the Seine in the Bateau Mouche, Uncle Austin and Aunt Ellen, Dick and I, all four of us singing at the top of our lungs. The next day in our rented car, we drive out of Paris and into the French countryside with its mackerel skies and wheat fields bordered with the flowers that wreathe little girls’ straw hats: daisies, buttercups, corn flowers, and poppies. Released from the strain of autism, Dick sheds his anxiety, and we throw away the travel agent’s itinerary. We drive off on an unplanned side trip into the fringes of the Alps, spend a night with a troop of hikers, share supper with them at a long trestle table and carry on in broken French.

When we finally reach Nice, it’s a startling disappointment. The stretch of pebbles that passes for a beach reeks of French perfume and sweat. Scrawny codgers, their withered loins ill-covered, totter about, ogling girls.

Now really throwing away the itinerary, we get back in the car to motor away the afternoon looping up and down and along and around the winding roads of the Riviera coast. Finally we come to an inn entrance that looks vaguely impressive, drive up and book a room, only to realize that by some miracle of beginner’s luck, we’ve found our way to Noel Coward land: the Hotel du Cap in Cap D’Antibes. The long and short of it is we end up cruising the Riviera with a couple from Chile who’ve chartered a boat out of Cannes and ask us to join them. Dick says yes and, for once in his life, enjoys improvising. We rove the Mediterranean, anchor off tiny islands known only to boats that can moor in shallow water, and sail to St. Tropez, already a destination for the great and glamorous but as yet untouched by hype.

Dick’s purchase a year later of a cabin cruiser for the Vineyard harks back, I feel sure, to this European trip. A recollection of total happiness.

*
The ability to see mirror-fashion is an Asperger’s trait.

Chapter 4

The Separate Worlds Begin

It’s late summer and we’re back in Dedham from the Vineyard. Temple’s turned seven, and family life has settled into a routine. I should have a sense of achievement, but, instead, I feel anxious and empty, longing for the old beckon and wink of Cambridge. I watch the children playing in the field behind our house and into my consciousness slides a recollection of myself at Temple’s age.

I’m exploring with my cousin on a golden afternoon like this one, pleased beyond words that he’s allowed me to tag along. We’ve climbed the stairs to a little windowed tower at the top of a once beautiful summer mansion, now abandoned and boarded up, a white elephant brought low by the Depression. Already we’ve roamed the peeling main floor: drawing room, dining room, butler’s pantry, kitchen, back pantry, and maids’ dining room. Up the grand front stairs to the second floor expanse of master bedrooms; then to the third, where the floorboards of the maids’ rooms squeak under our sneakers, scaring us silly. We brace ourselves, ready to run in case there’s a caretaker, praying it’ll be a caretaker and not a ghost lurking in these last shadowy rooms where cracks of sunshine beam through the broken window shutters. The house entices us up one last staircase, steps no wider than our feet and steep as a ladder.

Up we climb to a hot little turret, bright with sun and hung with spider webs long deserted by their spinners. We peer out the smudged turret windows and there, spread below us, is our countryside dusted with Queen Anne’s Lace: fields, hilltop, stables—all of it made strange from this wild height. On the turret window ledge is a wooden box with a glass cover; in it, nesting on wads of sun-yellowed cotton, a collection of blown bird eggs. Had they once belonged to some boy? Did he lose interest and leave them to the spiders? Carefully, we take out the eggs one by one, light as air, with their tiny pinprick holes at each end. The last egg gives out a papery thud when we shake it. Unable to bear not knowing, we crack it open and inside is the dried mummy of a baby bird.

Why now, twenty years later, do I remember the touch of that tiny mummy, brittle as the ancient flies upside down on the window ledge—flies that once bumped against the hot dusty windows, believing that because they could see the sun they could escape to it? Am I doomed like the bird mummy never to hatch, left to dry up in an empty tower room, turned to nothing but a papery thud inside a shell? I must make something happen, make life wink and beckon again. If I lose track of my own life, how can I coax Temple to look for hers? Temple is in school all day now. Though I can’t take on a full-time job, I can make the free afternoon hours count.

Everybody ought to have a tacky dream to start off with. Nothing distinguished like wanting to be Mrs. Roosevelt or Lena Horne, just a dream to get going. If anyone calls you dumb for wanting a Flokati rug or a rip-off copy of a Dior suit, tell them distinction will come later.

My tacky dream is film noir
:
a grade B movie dream, laid in cheap smoke-filled nightclub with me as the girl singer—but let me lead up to it.

I begin by singing in the afternoon for the Elks, I can’t remember exactly how I got there: something to do with the man in charge of putting on shows for hospital vets. He confuses my performance in the Vincent Club with the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Vincent Club is an old Boston institution that puts on the female equivalent of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Show in order to raise money for the Vincent Memorial Hospital (part of the Massachusetts General). It’s an honor to be in it, and the show’s run is a social plum. All this is too complicated to explain to the Elks’ man, and who am I to argue with him when he’s beckoning me in?

“Sure you can sing for us, I know you St. Vincent girls. You’re all right.” I sing him a calypso song in the auditorium of a veterans’ hospital. Very nervous, very bad, but the nurses applaud. Anything to break the monotony.

The Elks’ man sets me up with a guitar player and puts us to working the vet wards where the wounded from the Korean War are being stitched back together again.

I soon learn that every ward has a “card”; he’s the guy who leads the other guys into joking. Find the card, joke with him, and the rest of the ward will get behind you—or him, depending on how the jokes go. Then find the shyest boy in the ward, sit on his bed and sing, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”

The guitar player and I move from ward to ward. Sometimes he plays for me; sometimes he sings his own songs like “Who’ll Bite Your Neck When I Am Old, Dear, After My Teeth Are Gone?” In one ward the card turns out to be an elderly vet who lies flat on his back like an overturned turtle. Paralyzed since WWI, stretched out on a slanted bed board, he’s been looking out the same window at the same sunset for almost forty years now. The men love him. “He’s the greatest,” they tell me. “Always laughing.”

No one warns me about the handful of men whose faces have been shot off. Nor about the locked wards for vets who’ve lost their minds. They leave their mark, those men; you don’t forget them.

Meanwhile, far away in another galaxy, Temple continues to thrive.

Next, I study piano with Nappy Gagnon, who plays for acts in a Boston nightclub and teaches me pop chording. I tell Nappy I want to learn to play be-bop.

“You’ll have to play more Bach; all bop is based on Bach.” I remember that Bach was what Temple hummed before she could speak. It was how I knew her hearing wasn’t scrambled, that she was taking in the notes I was playing.

Along with playing two- and three-part inventions, I study legitimate voice with Dr. Wadsworth Provandie, pour German lieder and French art songs into my soul, wash them down with blues, jazz, and the sobbing cry of Edith Piaf, the “sparrow” of postwar Paris. I learn pop singing from Ray Dorey, a local radio star. Ray always opens his radio show with the words, “Good morning, this is Mrs. Dorey’s boy, Ray,” and closes it singing, “It’s a Big, Wide, Wonderful World We Live In.” Ray, who’s been a top band vocalist, teaches me how to phrase with the music.

“Let go the note. Even if the sheet music is marked to hold it, let go and let the music breathe around you.”

I catch onto the knack and find that song phrasing is like sailing in a little knockabout. Again I’m back in my childhood with my cousin, sailing with him in
The Golden Eye
. He’s teaching me how to tack close-hauled: “See the dark water up ahead? That’s the wind coming. As soon as the dark hits the bow, head the boat up into the wind, and we’ll go fast.”

I do and the old knockabout lifts on the wind puff, her bow rising up out of the water.

So that’s pop phrasing? The singer steers the boat, keeps the lyrics close-hauled; the band improvises, and the song rides on the beat? I learn to feel it, as long ago I felt
The Golden Eye
lift out of the water.

Pop singing turns me on to jazz—new and old; I listen to it at every chance. The Huntington Avenue music store allows customers to play a record before committing to its purchase. I sit in one of their glass-doored booths listening to Dixieland and boogie-woogie 78s, newly reissued on long-playing 33s, avidly reading the jazz histories printed on their shiny new LP covers. The store clerk doesn’t seem to care; he doesn’t pound on the glass door asking me do I really intend to buy or am I freeloading. I’m freeloading, of course, but so’s everybody else.

George Wein has taken over an old nightspot and is presenting the jazz greats. One after another they make their appearance: Art Tatum, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters—they’re all turning up there. One week it’s Pee Wee Russell. Pee Wee is a clarinet player from the twenties whose music I love.