In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (78 page)

His follow-through after hitting the ball was also one of a kind. Rather than let his club and body twist, lose momentum, and come to a stop on their own, he came to a shuddering stop the minute he made contact, and then immediately began to bounce up and down at the knees, scanning the sky for his ball. Only when he spotted it did he truly come to rest. Then he headed for his golf cart and his next swing.

Despite his rituals—or perhaps because of them—Donald’s golf game was not half bad. He had no trouble getting around the course, could handle the different kinds of clubs, and sank putts from ten or fifteen feet out now and then. It probably helped that proficiency in golf hinges on a certain mechanical repetitiveness. He was a man who was, more than anything, comfortable with sameness, and there are plenty of things about golf that never vary. The basic swing stays the same. And the ball is always sitting still at the moment the golfer has to do anything about it. And while golf is generally seen as a social game, it always comes down to the golfer against the course. If Donald wanted to, he could simply play alone.

And that was what he did. He almost always went golfing by himself, and was content to do so.

—

T
O HIS MOTHER
, part of Donald would always be a mystery.
“I wish I knew what his inner feelings really are,” Mary wrote in her last letter to Kanner, when Donald was thirty-six. But the letter was also full of optimism. All in all, Mary wrote, things for Donald had turned out “so much better than we had hoped for.” She had attained the goal every parent dreams of—to raise a child who would be just fine when
she was gone from this world. “If he can maintain status quo,” she said, “I think he has adjusted sufficiently to take care of himself. For this much progress, we are truly grateful.”

Mary was a few months short of sixty-six then. She became a widow ten years later, when Beamon was killed in a car accident. She died five years after that, at the age of eighty, of heart failure. At neither funeral did Donald show any particular emotion. He later said, in answer to a direct question about losing his mother:
“It was rather expected. I wasn’t really downhearted or weeping or anything like that.”

Yet when Donald was truly happy, it showed. His contentment registered in the smile that often lit up his face. Though he remained an enigma to his mother, she and anyone else who knew him could say with certainty that Donald was a happy man.

And how that came about is not much of a mystery, actually. Much of it was because of where he lived—Forest, Mississippi.

—

F
OR A MAN
with autism, life in a small community in Mississippi offered a number of gifts: familiarity, predictability, tranquillity, and safety. Forest was a place where the pace was slow, the noise level low, and where Donald could be confident that one day would be much like the next. There was also the embracing web of relationships endemic to small-town living, where everyone knows more than a little about everyone else.

Not that Forest was a paradise. The town was never without poverty, substance abuse, political disputes, or crime, including the rare murder every few years. It enforced segregation into the 1960s, and saw most of its once-charming downtown die a slow death in the 1970s. But Donald didn’t need to live in paradise to be happy. In Forest, he lived within a circle of Mississippians who were simply not bothered by the ways in which he was different. They were unbothered, hence he was unbothered, by fear, by ridicule, or by cruelty. And the more his social deficits were overlooked, the more they lost their relevance, while his strengths and abilities continued to develop and expand.

Yes, his family had money, which had a lot to do with his
circumstances and the way he was received. As a Mississippi newspaperman observed, in relation to how Forest responded to Donald: “In a small southern town, if you’re odd and poor, you’re crazy. But if you’re odd and rich, all you are is a little eccentric.”

But there was another part to it, where Donald was concerned. People just liked him. As he approached old age, it was fair to say that, in his little community, he was beloved.

—

C
ELESTE
S
LAY, A
regular congregant at the First Presbyterian Church of Forest, sat prayerfully among her fellow worshippers, attending to the minister’s parting words, her husband, Mervyn, at her side. Suddenly, she was stung in the back of the neck by a rubber band.

Celeste turned around, but she already knew who did it. Donald Triplett, from some rear pew, had just zipped a “howdy” through holy space, aimed at one of the ladies he liked. It was not the first time, and it was not just her. There was a small group of people in Forest—fewer than a dozen—whom Donald, in his seventies, had taken to pinging by rubber band, whenever and wherever they went. Some had been hit in church, some high up in the stands at a Forest High football game, some while turning the corner of an aisle at Walmart.

Donald’s rubber-band stunt was his way of flirting. Mary had misread him all those years ago, when she said that he took no interest in the opposite sex. Either that, or Donald had changed. Because when he was well past his middle years, he had begun, in a rather naïve way, to let women know when he liked them. Because it was Forest, where everyone knew him, no one’s feelings were hurt, and no one was offended. The women Donald tended to plink with rubber bands—all employees of the bank, and all middle-aged—knew what they were dealing with: a friend who was working out a mild sort of crush. They were charmed by the nicknames he came up with for each of them. Jan Nester—one of his favorites—was “Jan with a Plan.” Celeste Slay, the woman in the church, was “Celestial Celeste.” There were presents too. Donald would show up at one of their desks with a clumsily wrapped trinket of some sort—a refrigerator magnet or a spatula. Often the items carried their original price tags. Sometimes he would give the gift, and
then request immediate cash reimbursement for it. Some steps in this dance he would never master.

Still, in return for his exertions, Donald received something real: attention, which he had come to prize. The women mothered him, called him “Don darling,” and made him feel welcome and needed at the bank, where he dropped in every afternoon. By the early 2000s, he had not officially worked there for many years. In fact, Mary’s family no longer ran it. After the bank encountered financial difficulties in the 1980s, day-to-day control passed to a twenty-seven-year-old named Gene Walker, who gave his word to the family that he would always find something in the bank for Donald to do. For the next thirty years, Walker kept his word. He saw to it that new employees were briefed on Donald’s status in the office, and ensured that Donald never encountered anything but full respect. Though his job responsibilities grew smaller with the years, and income from a trust fund replaced a paycheck from the bank, Donald never stopped having a place at the Bank of Forest. In his seventies, he began referring to himself as “retired,” but he still came by daily to see his bank friends, who were nearly family to him in his later years.

—

W
HEN
D
ONALD WAS
about seventy-nine, Jan Nester from the bank insisted that he get a cell phone, and she showed him how to send text messages. Donald was hooked. It was as if some sort of interior barrier fell. Suddenly, he was tapping out words constantly, communicating with real fluency for the first time in his life. Nonverbal children with autism experienced a similar breakthrough when the iPad was introduced in 2010. By manipulating images and characters on the screen, some were able to express themselves without relying on words and grammar, which had always been obstacles. Likewise, when Donald texted, he could forget about the complex visual and physical requirements of spoken language, such as eye contact, facial expressions, and the neurological gymnastics of turning thought into sound. While texting, he “spoke” in a different voice.

Most of his texts were directed at his rubber-band friends. Once, in 2014, Donald texted Celeste from Texas:

D
ONALD:
Is it pretty in MS like it is in TX, Celestial Celeste?

C
ELESTE:
It is sunny and 80 degrees. Very pretty. Glad you made it safe…

D
ONALD:
See u on June 16

C
ELESTE:
Have fun and be careful Don!!

D
ONALD:
I shoot u with a rubber band Sunday

Sunday meant church, which Donald never missed unless he was out of town.

In fact, Donald was out of town a lot—probably more than anyone else in Forest—the result of a streak of wanderlust he had developed in his thirties. It was then that world travel became one of his two full-time hobbies, alongside golf.

Donald never went anywhere for long. The maximum length of his trips was usually six days, because he tried to be back in Forest for Bible class on Sundays at Forest Presbyterian. But at least a dozen times a year, he left town for points elsewhere. Traveling via highway, air, rail, river, and sea, by the time he was in his late seventies, he had been to at least twenty-eight American states—including Hawaii more than fifteen times—and more than thirty-six places abroad, including Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia. He took snapshots of the pyramids, went on safari in Africa, and wore a muumuu to dance opposite a belly dancer on a cruise ship off the coast of Morocco. Wherever he went, he went solo.

Notably, Donald made no friends while traveling. Doing so would have required small talk, for which he had no talent or interest. Rather, he appeared to travel with the aim of making contact with
things
—with all the iconic structures and statues and mountaintops he had seen in books, on the Internet, and on TV. When he got home from his trips, he organized all of his photos in thick albums, until his bookshelves were crammed with dozens of them. In the late 1990s, after he learned to use a computer, he went back through them all, assigning numbers to each of his trips, and creating a database and an index that made it easier to find specific photos. That was how he tended to his memories. As he approached eighty, he was still on the road several times a year, collecting more of them.

—

W
HENEVER, DURING HIS
later years, Donald needed to be well dressed for an event, Jan Nester, from the bank, took him shopping for clothes. He needed the help. Without any intervention, he would wear his pants extremely low, beneath his protruding belly. To keep them from falling down, he cinched his belt as tightly as possible. Because this often proved insufficient for the task, Donald usually went around with one hand reaching around to his backside, fidgeting with and tugging at his belt. Now and then, he wore suspenders, which solved that problem. But when he did wear suspenders, often as not, they were twisted in the back.

As for colors and patterns, Donald seemed indifferent to how they played together, and even choosing the right size was a hit-or-miss affair. Once he put on a particular shirt and pair of pants, he was as likely as not to keep wearing the same outfit for several days running. He was oblivious to staining, tattering, or accidental rips. Usually, it took a gentle suggestion from Jan to get him to realize that a well-used polo shirt, or a pair of Bermuda shorts, were too dingy to be worn in public. “Don, darling,” she would say, “you really do not need to wear that shirt anymore.”

Usually she took him to Burns Clothing, in Forest’s downtown. Burns happened to adjoin the building that housed Donald’s dad’s old law office, where Beamon wrote his letter to Leo Kanner in 1938. And it stood on the same courthouse square where Donald had once made the rounds memorizing license plates. Tom and Margaret Burns, the mom and pop of Burns Clothing, had hung on, even as most of the businesses around them had been shuttered. They were still thriving, thanks to their knowing how to cater to customers’ particular preferences.

Tom Burns was, for example, well acquainted with Donald’s low-belt situation, and took that into account when he positioned Donald in front of the double mirrors and knelt to get a waistline-to-shoe measurement. Burns knew that whatever trousers this customer bought, he would have to remake them, taking in the waist, cutting off the cuffs, and hemming the bottoms. But he was happy to do it for Donald. And happy to help him get ready to celebrate his eightieth birthday that coming Friday.

—

I
T WAS A
late-afternoon event. Everyone from the bank was there. And his brother, Oliver, and Oliver’s son’s family. And a good many people from the country club.

Donald smiled throughout the gathering, but as ever, he gave no speech. “I’m just glad I made it to eighty,” he told a newspaper reporter who covered the event. If the reporter was hoping for something more emotional, Donald disappointed. Of course, since it was a daytime party, Donald was missing that day’s golf. But he did not seem to mind. As he put it to the reporter: “The reception was a good idea…I sure thought a lot of everyone who put it together.” For Donald, that was a lot of sentiment.

Besides, he knew that on the next day, and the days to follow, he would be back on the course again, back on schedule, playing through the dwindling light of those September afternoons. Donald was embarking on his ninth decade. And as that autumn advanced, and on those days and hours when the sun dipped behind the pines along the fairways, and his shadow on the greens lengthened, it would be easy for anyone watching from the rocking chairs on the clubhouse porch to guess who was out there, in the dusk, playing golf by himself. It was autism’s first child, using the remaining light given him to get in a few last holes before dinner.

EPILOGUE

O
ne day in 2007, a thousand miles from Mississippi, two men on a bus noticed a teenager sitting alone, one row in front of them, rocking and grunting and making strange, repetitive movements with his fingers in front of his eyes. As the bus made its regular afternoon run through Caldwell, New Jersey, the men began to mock the young man’s “weirdo” behavior, in voices deliberately loud enough to be overheard by other passengers, whose heads turned in the direction of the noisy riders. The young man himself seemed oblivious to the commentary. He did not stop rocking. If anything, his movements and vocalizations became more intense, which made the men behind him angry. One leaned forward, close to the young man’s ear, and asked, sharply, “Hey, what’s your problem, man?” An altercation seemed imminent.