A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (17 page)

The Innocents
, wins an “Ohio State” award for subject matter and for “always being honest,” i.e. a first-time full-face presention of the retarded. Hard to believe, but up until now not even Down Syndrome children have been photographed for newspapers or television.

The Junior League, frequently ridiculed as an organization of Lady Bountifuls, deserves credit for originating an amazing first and producing it with WGBH—a documentary calculated to force their own comfortable, privileged world to face the hidden world of the severely retarded. Today at the screening I note to some big-wig that Eleanor Roosevelt began her life-long commitment to altruism as a member of the Junior League.

I brood on the separating out that we practice in our Leave-it-to-Beaver world. Doctors separate out the body organs, studying the heart, liver, brain, and kidney as if each were an entity unto itself with no relation to the other organs or the being who houses them all. Along with the biological separating out, goes the medical practice of separating out medical disciplines, each research project traveling parallel to the other with no cross reference.

But the most difficult are the social separatings. C. P. Snow has just published his 1959 Rede Lecture on the social division between science and literature. Straddling the two disciplines himself, Snow has learned firsthand how neither chooses to honor the imaginative understanding of the other. Instead, he says, “the feelings of one pole become the antifeelings of the other.”
*

A week later
The Innocents
is aired publically and Dick denounces it. I don’t know why, my name is nowhere in the credits. Someone tells me I’m a neighborhood joke: “Dick Grandin is criticizing his wife again.”

Despite local derision, I set to work to research the next documentary on “disturbed children” as most of us are still calling children with autism. This documentary is to be titled
The Disquieted
, from a passage in the psalms:

Why art thou cast down, 0 my soul?
and why are thou disquieted within me?

The state of Massachusetts, often educationally in the forefront, finances public school day classes for “special” children. Though the classes are excellent, the children attending them are mostly retarded. Autism, if recognized at all, is considered a psychosocial problem.

A psychiatrist takes me to a well-known psychiatric hospital with a residential unit for autistic children. As long as I live I will never forget stepping off the elevator onto that floor of silent, isolated children, each obsessed with some meaningless, repetitive preoccupation. The silence takes my breath away.

“Please don’t write about autism,” the psychiatrist says. “We don’t know what it is, we don’t know what to do about it. You will only hold out hope and there is none.”

That’s her sum total diagnosis? Rage stomps through me. Every imperfection I’ve witnessed among the retarded and brain damaged seems more bearable, more explainable, more humane than this quick dismissal. But I soon realize that it isn’t a dismissal, it’s a plea, an open admission of medical bewilderment. The psychiatrist is conscientious, she’s achieved good results with some of her less desperate patients, children whom she calls affectionately “sand in the machinery.”
*
But here her conscience stops.

I search the faces of these withdrawn children in their silent Bedlam, this huge private playpen where no child plays with another, and wonder is this another place where Temple might have been sent? I think of Temple’s nanny, her play sessions with Temple, her insistence that Temple be kept continually involved. I think of Mrs. Reynold’s speech classes and Mrs. Huckle’s camp. It’s the middle of the day, why aren’t these children in some kind of school set-up? What therapy and/or education are they receiving? Public school classes for the retarded look better than this.

But there my conscience stops, too. Fearing the label of “refrigerator mother,” I decide not to tell the doctor about Temple, and not to ask the questions I know I ought to be asking. It’s a cowardly act on my part, and one I will regret, but a feverish anxiety has come over me. The hospital is so impressive, the doctor is so impressive, and what I’m looking at is so appalling.

Instead I promise the doctor to leave the subject of autism out of the documentary, and cover only the disturbed children she and the other psychiatrists consider suitable, i.e. state institution children and court children who’ve been adjudicated delinquent.

I arrange an interview with a State House official, explain my project to him, and ask if I may visit the city’s juvenile courts and detention centers.

“OK, I’ll let you in,” the official says, “but don’t you dare come back to me with some pat little answer!”

I try to talk him into letting me into the high school system, one school in particular that I’ve heard bad stories about.

“No, I won’t let you in there. They just keep the lid on the garbage pail. You’ll go, you’ll write your sanctimonious distress, it’ll get in the paper and everybody will pay attention for a day. One day. Then it’s all forgotten and we’re back to the same old garbage pail. I don’t know what to do about it, so I just keep the lid on too.”

We settle for what he will let me see: a detention center in Jamaica Plain where juvenile offenders between eight and eighteen are being held before formal sentencing.

The Jamaica Plain Detention Center for Boys is brick. I show my pass at the entrance, someone escorts me up the metal stairway and unlocks the metal grill door that opens into the holding room: a cement walled room surrounded by metal grill cubicles where social workers can conduct interviews. It’s prison all right, reeks of Lestoil and sweat, reverberates nonstop with the milling crowd of boys. Some of them look like full-grown men, some, booked under the police catch-all “stubborn child,” look hardly the required eight years of age. “Stubborn child” is an old court term for a boy arrested between the ages of eight and twelve for charges that are not fully clear. He could be a battered child removed from home by a social worker in order to safeguard him. He could have destroyed property. He could be an habitual truant and a petty thief. Or he could be autistic.

An autistic boy destroying property? That’s understandable. Autistic children are good at destruction. Running away from school? If a child doesn’t have a clue what school is about, running away may be his only solution. But I wonder how well an eight-year-old autistic boy would understand what a “crime” is. Longing for friends, he could easily be inveigled into joining older boys in a larcenous act he doesn’t fully comprehend. Arrest might have no meaning for him either. To an isolated autistic child, arrest might feel like a bit more of what he hungers for: attention.

Court arrest means a boy has had three prior “booked” arrests. “Booked” arrests are not made until he’s had three street arrests. So the boys in this detention center have had a total of nine arrests and are now being held pending a court decision. The detention center, though an advance over past penal systems, is still a prison: part bullpen, part cafeteria, and part social worker office.

I enter the bullpen and no boy so much as glances at me. It’s assumed I’m a court social worker and none of them wants to be interrogated further. Then a small child spots me, runs across the pen and winds his skinny arms around my waist.

“Please lady. Tell her to come and get me.” His head smells of dirt and through his institution buzz cut, I can see ancient crusts of cradle cap. Gulping, sobbing he pours out a story I can’t make head or tail of.

A cop hovers nearby. “He wants his mother.”

“Please, lady, please.” The boy won’t let go.

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Don’t try to be the social worker,” the cop warns me.

“What’s he in for?”

“Stubborn child.”

In spite of the cop, I find a social worker in one of the cubicles and ask about his case. She doesn’t seem to know, so I ask if I can visit his mother. She disappears into her cubicle and comes back with an address scribbled on a scrap of paper. “If you go, don’t sit down, not unless you want to come home with bugs.”

I climb a stoop in South Boston and ring the bell. A grey doughy woman opens the door. I explain why I’ve come. Her eyes shift about, but used to obeying cops and social workers, she lets me in. I stand, there are no chairs. She looks too old to be his mother. Perhaps his grandmother?

“What’s the trouble?” I ask. She sighs, shifts her weight exuding the smell of unwashed fat. Cagey, subservient, she recites what she thinks I want to hear, as she’s recited it before to the cops and the judge. When I question her, she changes her story, winding up with the old catch-all. “Stubborn child.”

“I can’t do nothing with him.”

She calls out a name and a girl appears, perhaps in her late teens—pale and scrawny, her bleached hair piled elaborately on the top of her head. She tells me she’s his sister and recites a different tale. Nothing adds up. I keep hearing the word “truant,” as if they’re both glad to be rid of him.

I say goodbye and leave, weary with their hang dog evasions, their dingy survival skills, the whole sly mess. I’ve caught a whiff of the despair the State House official feels over his bad high school. That edgy moment when sympathy turns to irritation because you don’t have a solution.

Discouraged, I move on to the next approved state target: The Children’s Division of a State Institution.

Valentine’s Day is coming and a group of eight-year-olds are making valentines. Red construction paper, scissors, pencils, and paste are laid out on the long table along with thin white tissue paper. I sit down with them and together we watch the teacher show us how to fold and cut the tissue paper into valentine lace.

At the end of the table, apart from the others, sits a boy who, again, looks barely eight years old. In the chair beside him is an empty plastic Dazzle bottle, a popular detergent.

“I can’t get him to join in with the other children,” the attendant whispers. “He carries that plastic jug with him everywhere, he sleeps with it. Sometimes I kid him and call him Old Dazzle Bottle.”

I try to catch the boy’s eye, but he won’t look. I move down the table and sit beside him.

“How about a valentine?” He stares down at the table and pushes his sheet of red construction paper in front of me.

“Draw me a hundred hearts,” he says, his eyes never lifting. I draw them. “Are you sure there’re a hundred?” He won’t look, won’t count, so I count.

“Yes, they’re a hundred.” He pulls the red paper back and in the first heart he letters carefully the word “me.”

“Isn’t there someone you’d like for your valentine?” He shakes his head and continues to print “me” in the center of each of the hundred hearts. Finished, he slips off of his chair. I don’t want to let him go.

“Is there someone you’d like to send your valentine to?” Again he shakes his head. He has what he wants. He picks up his valentine to himself, picks up his Dazzle bottle and trailing it like a teddy bear, heads down the corridor on some private mission.

No response, no desire for one. And no eye contact. Even a puppy will catch your eye and bound over for attention. What about fear? A rustle in the dry leaves will send a squirrel up a tree. What’s going on in the growing emptiness of Old Dazzle Bottle?
*

My next stop is a state school where, if they’re lucky, the eight-year-olds, adjudicated delinquent in the Jamaica Plain Detention Center, are sent to be rehabilitated. A young psychiatrist, a skilled and friendly man from a top Boston clinic for disturbed children, takes me with him. He’s been assigned to help the boys fix the mess they’re in, and get them onto a new track. It’s a heartbreaking and nearly impossible task.

When we arrive the children have already had supper and baths. Now a handful of them will talk with the psychiatrist.

Before the “Fire Setter” arrives, the psychiatrist fills me on his background. The boy’s been arrested for setting fires, but he’s not a pyromaniac; the fire setting is a signal for help, for a relationship of light and warmth. It seems a social worker, acting as a surrogate parent, turned up at the boy’s home just in time to catch his drunken father brandishing a kitchen knife and bellowing he was going to do the kid in.

The Fire Setter, moist from his bath and in pajamas, slips through the door, climbs into the big chair by the doctor, and begins talking, nonstop, without any particular beginning or end. He, too, looks barely eight.

“Dad was just joking with the knife. He’s a big joker, see. The social worker, he don’t get it. It’s Dad’s joke, he always does that.”

After the boy leaves the psychiatrist fills me in further. The boy’s mother is an addict and a hooker, his father a drunken killer. The social worker saved the boy’s life.

“Right now the boy can’t bear to face the truth that Dad’s a drunk and Mom hooks for her habit, so he has to block out all truth, because if he learns one thing he runs the risk of learning something else that maybe he doesn’t want to learn. It keeps his body from growing, that’s why he’s so small. When he finally catches on—if he does—you’ll see it first in his face. Then his body will start to grow. Right now all he can learn is a little math. Math is abstract, but reading, writing, history—any subject touching human feeling—he has to block out. He can’t deal with feelings. Fires are the only way he can cry for help.

“Without someone—maybe a social worker who’s willing to be a surrogate parent—he’ll never learn, and chances are he’ll steal a car and wind up in the Concord Reformatory (a prison outside Boston). He may well spend most of his life in and out of there. Aside from the inhumanity of it, he’ll end up costing the state much more than an investment right now in social workers and psychologists who can speak the language of action.”

A cop and social worker join us. The social worker rages against the local politicians: state funds allocated for highways, but nothing for children.