Silent Boy (8 page)

Unfortunately, by the end of that first year in first grade Kevin had given no evidence of learning. If he could read, he didn’t show it. The school psychologist was called in and Kevin was tested.

The report broke down then, the entries becoming sporadic. Kevin went on to a special-education class the next year. He was eight. At the end of that year he was reported to have a testable IQ of 40, which put him in a very low, uneducable stratum. He was institutionalized for the first time during this period, and from then on, it seemed to be nothing but a string of group homes and juvenile centers and residences. He was even in the children’s unit at the state hospital for a short time before being deemed too retarded and moved into a state-run program for the mentally handicapped. It was not clear when he was where or for how long or why he was switched from one place to another so frequently. But whatever the reason, it did nothing to liberate his power of speech.

There was nothing current in Kevin’s file except updated Garson Gayer reports of height and weight and that sort of thing. There was nothing more to tell why he had been institutionalized in the first place or where his fears had developed or why he had come to Garson Gayer, a residential treatment center not given to taking in severely retarded or welfare kids. And perhaps most sinister of all, there was no explanation anywhere for the single line penciled across the top of the intake sheet:
Voluntary termination of parental rights. Made ward of the state.

When I inquired, I found no one knew much more about Kevin. Almost none of the staff had been there as long as he had because Garson Gayer, like most institutions, was a victim of high staff turnover. Dana, who was my usual source of information about everything, had been at the home less than half the time Kevin had. She’d never thought much about his lack of history. With ninety – five other children to worry about and with a cast-iron belief in dealing with only the here and now, she was unbothered by it. Stay in the present, she’d repeat over and over to me. You’re living today, deal with today. And in my heart I knew she was probably right. The staff psychologist only shrugged when I asked him. What do you want? A leather-bound biography? There’s as much in his as in anybody else’s file.

What did I want? That was a stupid question. I wanted answers. I wanted to know why this kid behaved like this. I wanted to know how to fix him. I knew a file wouldn’t tell me those things, even if it had been thick as an encyclopedia. But I still wanted it, for me perhaps more than for Kevin. After all these years of casting my lot with the liberals and the freethinkers, saying how damaging such files were, how they fueled self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess I should have willingly taken a dose of my own medicine. But it felt awful. It left me feeling adrift in a wide sea with no chart. As the days passed, I thought how much nicer it would have been to be adrift with even a bad chart than with no chart at all.

We were reading a cookbook. It was a children’s paperback featuring different dishes of the world. I had used it with my kids in the classroom when I was teaching, and after I’d told Kevin about how we used to cook sometimes, he’d asked if I would bring the book in. So we were sitting on the floor, browsing through the pages together.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to an artist’s illustration.

‘Spaghetti with tomato sauce on it, I think.’

He was thoughtful a moment. ‘It looks kinda like brains.’

I hadn’t noticed that particular quality about spaghetti before and examined the picture more carefully.

‘Have you ever seen brains before?’ Kevin asked.

‘Yes. The grocery store up on 12th Street sells them sometimes. I guess you scramble them up with eggs or something.’

‘No, I mean real brains.’

‘Those are. From cattle, I think. Some people eat them. I guess they’re supposed to be very good but I haven’t been that brave myself yet.’

‘No,’ said Kevin. ‘I mean
real
brains. Like you got in here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘People’s brains.’

I paused. I had seen human brains before. When I was a biology student in college there were some pickled in formaldehyde up on a shelf in the science building. There’d been pickled babies up there too.

‘I have,’ Kevin said before I could comment. ‘They’re all red and sort of yellowish and bumpy. Like that spaghetti.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘Does that make you sick?’ he asked, studying my face carefully.

‘Is it supposed to?’

‘Does it?’

‘It’s not one of my favorite things to think about, if that’s what you mean,’ I replied.

He was still regarding me very closely. It was a penetrating expression and I could not tell what he was trying to glean from me. Then he looked back at the book. ‘I couldn’t eat spaghetti,’ he said. ‘Not if it looked like that – like brains, all squashed out.’

I nodded.

Relaxing a little, he sat back. ‘Let’s turn the page,’ he said. ‘Let’s look at something else.’

But mostly the days of October were a quiet time. The frantic first weeks when I had tried so desperately to get Kevin to talk passed and we grew familiar with one another. I learned his fears and how to ease them. He weathered my moments of restless impatience. I started bringing him things from the outside, things he liked to do, like paper-and-pencil puzzles and coloring books. I brought him candy bars and magazines and things he hadn’t seen in years. He talked to me mostly of little things, of all the personal minutiae he had saved up over so many years of silence.

Slowly, slowly we managed to creep out from under the table. It was not a fast change at all. I just kept moving back, a fraction of a step a day and Kevin, intent in conversation, would move toward me. Eventually we were both outside the perimeter of the tabletop, and once we were, we stayed. Kevin still couldn’t rise from the floor. He always had to remain there where he could dive for safety if he needed to. But under normal circumstances, he stopped finding it necessary to hide all the time.

The fear began to drop away from him too. Once inside the small white room, when the door to the outer world was shut, I noticed he would sit in a fairly relaxed position and talk to me with great animation. He then would look for all the world like any other sixteen-year-old might look. However, should someone appear at the door or a noise occur outside the room somewhere, the fear would leap up and hood him. His face would go pale, his pupils dilate, his breathing quicken. And he’d go silent. That never changed. He relaxed a little but he always remained alert, always wary.

I had brought him a joke book. Elephant jokes. They were horrid ones, so awful that you couldn’t even groan convincingly when you heard them. But Kevin relished them all. He had quite a sense of humor for a kid in his circumstances, more than I often encountered. So it was fun to joke with him. At the moment his favorite story had to do with frogs in blenders, and I had heard it at least twenty times, so I brought him the elephant joke book.

I had snatched some pillows from the therapy room down the hall. Pushing them up against the radiator under the window, I leaned back while Kevin sat cross-legged and read me the jokes. There must have been about thirty pages in the book with a joke or two per page. Kevin read them all to me and when he had finished, he went back through and read again the ones he liked best. They were so dreadful that I couldn’t even remember the answers the second time through, so I entertained him by making up my own, equally horrible.

‘Where’d you get this?’ he asked me when we finished.

‘Out at the mall. In one of those little cardshops.’

‘Do they have others?’

I nodded. ‘Not elephant jokes. But other ones with jokes in them.’

He regarded me for a moment. ‘Would you get me one? Another one?’

‘Yes, maybe. Later on. They cost a lot of money for their size. But I’ll get another one when I can.’

He continued watching me. It was a bright day and the morning sun flowed through the window. It grazed the side of his face and illuminated his eyes. Even in the sunlight, his eyes were a true gray. There was no other color in them at all.

And still he watched me. ‘You don’t hate me, do you?’ he asked softly.

‘No, I don’t hate you.’

A curious half smile touched his lips. ‘I didn’t think you did.’ His gaze wandered from my face. He looked above me to the window. Then slowly he rose up on his knees to see out. He stayed that way a minute or two before dropping back down.

‘You know,’ he said and then paused. He flipped through the joke book. ‘You know, I talked to you.’

I nodded.

‘I talked to you. I wanted to talk to you.’ He looked up. ‘You see, I knew you didn’t hate me.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I knew that. Even from the beginning. You didn’t hate me and I could tell it.’ The strange half smile was back, and once again he looked over my head to the sunlight. It was in his eyes but he didn’t squint. It bathed him. He sat and stared into it like a lean Buddha.

‘Kevin,’ I said, ‘may I ask you something?’

He looked back to me.

‘How come you talked? How come you decided to do it at all?’

He sighed and gazed into the sunlight. ‘Well, I talked to
you
because I said. Because I knew you didn’t hate me. I said that.’

‘But why’d you decide to talk at all, after all these years?’

He was silent. He remained silent so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. He just stared into the sun.

‘I used to have a cat,’ he said at last. ‘But it’s dead now. It’s in the ground. It’s just bones and dirt.’ He regarded me. ‘How can I talk about that?’ He looked back into the sun. ‘How can I not talk about it?’

T
here were two matters with Kevin that were going to have to be tackled sooner or later. First was Kevin’s hygiene. I realized right from the beginning that part of his difficulty with cleanliness was tied to his numerous fears. For instance, he was so afraid of water that there was no hope of getting him into a bathtub. However, lack of good hygiene made him generally so unpleasant to be with and so unattractive that I felt it should be given some priority. Beauty may be only skin deep but the judgments founded on it tend to go a lot deeper, whether we wished they would or not. No one was going to take to a kid who looked like the aftermath of Mount St Helens and smelled like a locker room after a game, regardless of how clever I or Dana or anyone else might be about changing his behavior. Ordinary people just aren’t that accepting.

Kevin never would set the world on fire in the looks department. He was sort of your basic model ugly kid. But if his hair hadn’t looked like someone had tested their lawn mower on it and his clothes fit and he washed, he had the potential to be a whole lot closer to average.

Unfortunately, I quickly learned that many of Kevin’s problems were beyond my control. His hair, for instance. It was the old buzz job up the back and around the sides, leaving one long lock hanging over his forehead. It looked like a grown-out Mohican. Unfortunately, all the boys at Garson Gayer looked like that. Zoe, the cook, brought in her clippers once a month and gave all the fellows a workover. But there wasn’t much to be done about it. She was free and she was there. I didn’t know any barbers at all, particularly ones who made house calls. And I couldn’t cut hair myself. I had tried once when I was a teacher at a state hospital, and one of my boys complained about looking like a girl. So I took the school shears from my desk and gave him a trim and, while he no longer would be mistaken for a girl, it ended any ideas I might have had about a potential future in hairdressing.

Kevin’s clothes were about as bad as his haircut. They were obviously thirdhand and at least ten years out of style. This wouldn’t have mattered much if it weren’t that they were so small for him. One shirt’s sleeves couldn’t be buttoned because they came so far up on his wrists that the cuffs wouldn’t fit around that part of his arm. He owned no pants that covered the tops of his socks. Worse, the pants were all too tight in the crotch. In the beginning, I had thought he was constantly masturbating. As it turned out, he was simply trying to pull the pants down a little to allow himself to sit comfortably. This daily torture was almost more than I could bear to watch.

Perhaps worst of all was Kevin’s skin. It could have kept a dermatologist in business for life. He had acne everywhere, undoubtedly aggravated by the fact that he did not wash. There were pimples on his cheeks, on his nose, on his chin, on his forehead, even on his ears. In the bad places, his pimples seemed to have pimples. It was gruesome to have to sit really near him, forced to view such devastation at close range, and I could only imagine, if it repulsed me, what it would do to strangers.

Clearly Kevin’s appearance and hygiene were areas for some definite overhauling, and as we grew more comfortable with one another, I mulled over methods of approaching it. However, before embarking on any wild schemes of improvement, I wanted to enlist the cooperation of Dana and the Garson Gayer staff who supervised the rest of Kevin’s day.

We were in a team meeting when I brought it up. I pointed out my reasoning on the matter, that it would make him more pleasant to be with, that it would reduce people’s negative image of him, that it would eliminate some of the prejudices surrounding this boy because he looked so retarded and disturbed when, indeed, I would not be surprised to find his IQ quite close to average, and that undoubtedly it would improve Kevin’s own self-esteem, since no one likes to think of himself as ugly.