A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (12 page)

June 1955. My fourth child is born, a baby girl, healthy in every respect, save for nightly bouts of colic. The colic pains strike her every evening between six and nine o’clock and with them come her decibel screams. I rush to the bassinet. Tears and infant drooling have already soaked the diaper under her, leaving her face and knees raw. I feel her tiny abdomen; it’s swollen hard. Tight as a drum—that’s colic, all right. I wrap a blanket round her, put her up my shoulder; and the vertical position gives instant relief. The drum belly lets go; her baby screams subside into gulps. Exhausted, she nuzzles into my neck, falls asleep on my shoulder, and together we watch the
Milton Berle Show
.

Six months later, Temple’s sister again takes charge. This time, since the baby’s a girl, baths are only the first step. After the bath comes choosing what the baby should wear, followed by an overlay of adornment. Beads, broaches, earrings, bracelets, scarves and headbands are draped over and around the baby until she looks like a miniature version of Dame Edith Sitwell. Needless to say, the baby loves it.

Four months after the baby’s birth, I’m cast as Célimène in a Poets Theatre premiere: Richard Wilbur’s verse translation of Molière’s:
The Misanthrope.
Célimène, so utterly sure of herself, so at home with the wiles of 17th century court life, is the antithesis of me; and Wilbur’s elegant couplets, rhymed as Molière rhymed his, are in total contrast to my own daily speech patterns. I find Célimène’s character a dramatic challenge, even a challenge to speak in Wilbur’s rhymed couplets without letting them jingle. But that’s only part of my problems.

“Take your thumbs out of your fists,” the director orders. “It’s a sign of dependence.”

Really?

“Yes, you must learn to act with enthusiasm. Do you know what the word means?” I thought I did, but it’s clear I don’t.

“It means ‘in
theos
.’ With the God spirit in you.” The director looks over the rest of me. “Lose ten pounds, and, face it right now: you can never act again without a girdle.”

The costume designer creates a ravishing costume for me of peach-colored satin. The embroidery painted on it is so perfect, one could almost take it for the real thing. We get into costume next door in Morris Pancoast’s antique shop, a Collyer Brothers’ jumble of Morris’ oil paintings, heaped together with broken rocking chairs and bureaus with no drawer pulls and whatever else Morris still dreams of selling. One performance night, while putting on a pair of antique gold and pearl earrings, I drop one and have to grope through inches of furry dust before I can find it.

The play opens, and Richard Wilbur wins accolades. Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman come to see it and immediately approach Wilbur to write the lyrics for their new work-in-progress based on Voltaire’s
Candide
, destined to become a musical classic.

At the time of
The Misanthrope
, neither Richard Wilbur nor I had any idea that the other had an autistic child. It wasn’t something you talked about in 1955.

Years from now, while studying acting in New York, I’ll learn how to use empathy and sensory recollection as ways to identify more effectively with a stage character like Célimène. In the process, I’ll catch my first glimpse into what an autistic person is missing emotionally. That glimpse will, in time, guide me to a fuller exploration of autism.

Sort of like traveling up the Nile to find its source.

It’s June and the Vineyard is in its blossoming glory. Every beach plum, privet hedge, mock orange, and lilac is putting forth an extravagant array of blooms.

The nanny has long since departed and a pair of Irish girls has joined our household. They teach us how to play Camogie.

“It’s a kind of field hockey. We’ve a cousin who’ll make us the Camogie sticks so we can play it right out front here.”

The siblings adore the Irish girls. “They’re like older sisters to us.”
*

Somewhere in the long summer stretches, I develop two family passwords. The first is a direct command which goes: “This is what we’re going to do. Do you want it nice or do you want it cross? I’d be happy to do it either way.” The children know it means there’s no room to bargain. The other is, “We’ll see.” That means, “I hear you, and I’m thinking about it, but if you whine and wheedle, I’ll get cross and say no.” “We’ll see” requires obedient nods followed by diplomatic circling, preferably in the form of jokes. The siblings, knowing I’m a sucker for a laugh, soon learn that, if they entertain me with their wants they stand a better chance of getting them.

It’s Temple’s first encounter with humor.

Temple’s younger sister, already a gifted little actress, longs to perform in something more advanced than a school play. We decide to stage another Molière work,
The Imaginary Invalid
, and cast it with other talented neighborhood children. As the play takes shape, I see that the three lead children are indeed exceptional and deserve first-rate costumes. A quick trip up to a costume house outside Boston and we have elegant miniature 17th century costumes. A local antique store lends us a chandelier, and our neighbor, Dr. Henri Peyre, head of the Romance Language Department at Yale, offers to introduce the play. He’s enchanted with Temple’s sister’s performance.

“That little monkey,” he says, bending double with laughter. “She is so funny, so talented.”

Temple isn’t quite sure what it is her sister does that makes her funny, only that it produces laughter, and she’d like to do that too.

“I want to be in the play, I really, really want to be in it,” she pleads.

“If I let you be in it, will you remember that the play is for your sister, not for you?”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

“One false move and I’ll kill you. Do you understand? The siblings will kill you, too.”

“I understand, I really understand, I really, really, really want to do it.” She sashays around me, almost catching the drift of what goes into the making of a joke and a performance.

She does perform in the play, not with the style of the others, but she manages to learn her lines, follow stage directions, and hold up her end of the bargain.

I miss those Vineyard summers, yearn for them as for no other place in time. Years later, when I return to the Vineyard and look out on the blue Sound with its scattered wisps of sail boats, when I listen again for the familiar thud of the ferry, I’ll be there and not there. The familiar will have grown odd, as Rip Van Winkle discovered when he finally woke up. I’ll drive past my old house, a huge Victorian summer camp with porches wide enough to ride a tricycle on, with three floors and fourteen beds—one of them still painted either red or a bilious salmon depending on which side of it you’re looking at—with a dining table big enough for ping-pong, and a sandy path leading through the scrub oaks and trumpet vine, beach roses and honeysuckle, down across a pebbly beach to a splintery dock, its barnacled piles bearded with brown seaweed where minnows dart.

The pier is gone, and, when I look up from the beach, I see that my house has been stripped of its scrub oaks and stands exposed on a carpet of imported sod, edged with hydrangeas. The battered screen door has been given a portico, the porch painted a blazing white and monogrammed with a wooden whale. The old matriarch, whose weathered shingles held us together for so many summers, is now buffed and bedizened beyond recognition.

The past, my beloved past, that time and place when we were all happy, where battles over Temple disappeared, and Dick and I found our way to a brief harmony. A handful of halcyon years before Dick lost his real estate job and his precarious emotional footing.

*
Dear Irish sisters: If you should come upon these words, know that we all think of you and get in

Chapter 5

Things Fall Apart

The Boston ethos is not always friendly. Early on, the Boston fathers laid it out: “To work is to pray,” they said, and setting to with it, found their prayers answered with industrial bounty. Contrary to the Biblical notion of “love thy neighbor,” such bounty led to self-interest and meanness of character, which surprised the fathers but was too good to stop. Soon, every river, every babbling brook was harnessed to a mill factory, where there was plenty of fourteen-hour-a-day labor for the impoverished immigrants pouring into New England. If the immigrants remained impoverished, the fathers said it was because they were godless and lazy.

The old Puritan prayer continued to produce income, but the income was moved into investment firms where it was less visible. Money and self-interest went unspoken like a facial mole; distinction was the new order of the day. The mill owners now sent their sons to Harvard, not to study for the ministry but to acquire an intellectual polish equal to that of Europe. Boston became the Athens of America.

However, there were then and always will be Boston scions who lack the acumen or fortune to make it into the ranks of the distinguished. Such a one was a small, mean man who’d spent his youth as a gentleman jockey and now sold real estate. Why he chose to woo Dick away from the real estate company Dick was working for and into his company, I have no idea. Somehow the two men impressed each other and Dick signed on.

Before the winter was over, Dick came home to blurt out a garbled tale of woe. Knowing Dick, he must have played a part in it, but I put most of the blame on the Puritan meanness-of-character trait. No doubt the little man hated his own hard-bitten jockey face, his skinny jockey frame, his career of non-distinction-flaws I’m sure his Yankee family had been quick to point out. A fight with a man of his own social rank, a handsome man who was bigger and more charming than he, but a man he could taunt and still keep the advantage, was a way to get back a bit of his own. Dick had never had to answer for his temper as Temple was learning to answer for hers. In confrontation with a man whose family he admired, anxiety must have triggered his rage, and for that the man made him pay the price. He broke Dick as easily as a bully breaks a terrier with a rolled up newspaper.

“He fired me. We had a fight and I lost my temper.” In a state of total defeat, Dick weeps gut-wrenching, small boy sobs.

Finally Dick’s old real estate company agrees to take him back, but with the reservation that he work only on commission. Then, in a few months, company word comes through that Dick is not to use their stationery anymore. In short, they dismiss him in easy stages.

Dick has no interests to lead him to another kind of work, nor the ability to figure out how and where commercial real estate sites are opening up. While other men are making property deals out along the new Route 128, turning the highway into industrial gold, as their forebears once harnessed the rivers of New England, Dick turns an upstairs bedroom into an office and spends his days poring over his accumulation of family assets. We all pretend he still has a job.