She hung up before I could answer.
That night, when I’d finished work I went through my shelves and closets collecting materials that I thought might be helpful to Eric. I wasn’t quite sure what kind of work Mrs. Kroner wanted – or for how long a period – and I couldn’t find a great deal. I made up most of what I used out of my head, but I found a scope and sequence chart, a few readiness workbooks, and a teacher’s manual, and put them in a large manila envelope and took it home with me.
The next morning I followed the map to Grover, and Main Street was easy to find. The diner was at the far west end of the run-down street.
Mrs. Kroner had obviously been watching for me, and she came forward and led me to a back booth in the almost empty diner.
I ordered coffee for both of us and waited for Mrs. Kroner to explain. She wore her usual black cloth coat. She looked thin and tense, certainly not drunk, but I wasn’t exactly sure what to look for.
The waitress set our coffee on the red Formica tabletop, and as soon as she left Mrs. Kroner leaned across, reaching out, almost touching my arm.
“I need work for Eric, like I said. See, I’m leaving this afternoon, and I want him to keep on learning like he’s been doing and you’re the only one I can talk to.” There was a tremendous urgency behind her words, although she spoke in a hoarse whisper.
“Where are you thinking of going?”
“I don’t want to talk about that – just going, that’s all.”
“What about Eric?”
“He’s going with me. That’s why I need the work.”
“Mrs. Kroner,” I said. “I think you ought to think about this more. Eric’s been doing so well, making such progress, I don’t think it’s a good idea to take him out of school now. He’s already missed a week. I talked to Miss Selby.”
Mrs. Kroner leaned toward me, immediately alert. “What did she say?”
“Nothing. She didn’t know any more than I did.”
Mrs. Kroner relaxed, but only for a minute.
“Did you bring the work?” she insisted.
“Yes.” I put the envelope on the table. “But I think I need to tell you that I talked to Mr. Kroner and –”
“When?” she interrupted. “What did he say?”
“I’m trying to tell you,” I said as gently as I could. “He said that you often went off on trips, particularly around the holidays.”
“That’s not true. Where would I go?”
“He said,” I continued, “that you take Eric with you and that you go on these trips because you have a drinking problem. Now if this is true, please don’t leave. Stay and get help – think about Eric.”
Mrs. Kroner’s mouth was tight with anger. “I don’t drink. He tells everybody that, speaking so sweet, so nice. He does it so that if I ever – never mind. Thanks for the books.”
She stood up and reached for the envelope, and I put my hand on her arm.
“Why, then? Why do you have to go? You just said you didn’t have any place to go.”
“I meant for trips. I’m going for good now.” She sat down heavily, and her untouched coffee sloshed into the saucer.
“Do you know how hard it will be for Eric to start in a new school in the middle of the year?” I asked. “More than the middle – there are only a little over two months left. For Eric’s sake, couldn’t you wait that long?”
“It’s for Eric’s sake I’m going,” she said quietly, but no longer whispering.
I waited for her to say more, but she sat without speaking although she made no move to leave. Finally I said, “What do you mean, for Eric’s sake?”
She put down the paper napkin with which she had been wiping up the spilled coffee.
“All right,” she said. “I didn’t know for sure until this year. I had my ideas, but, see, Jack works the night shift – I told you that – and when Eric started school full time I began working days at the cosmetic factory.
“I liked it. I liked the company. I liked the money. But then one of the girls got some kind of bug or virus, and we all got it one after the other – headache, fever. Didn’t last long, but it came on fast.
“When it hit me, I tried to keep on working. I didn’t want to go home. To tell the truth, I didn’t like being around him, Jack, any more than he liked being around me. We just stayed out of each other’s way.
“But then I began to heave, so I decided I had to go home. It’s only about six blocks, and I made it all right. I let myself in – didn’t even stop to take off my coat, just wanted to get off my feet. Our bedroom door was closed, which was queer, because Jack usually sleeps on the cot in the back room – says its quieter there during the day – but I felt so sick I didn’t stop to think about it. I just opened the door – and there were Jack and Bella in the bed, both of them stark naked.
“‘Get out of here, the both of you,’ I yelled at them. But Jack picked up a towel by the side of the bed and wrapped it around him. He told Bella to take her clothes and go on down to the drugstore for a while, and Bella did like he said. Then he comes over to me and puts his hands around my neck. He’s strong, Jack is, even though he doesn’t look it. And he says if I ever tell he’ll kill me. Not only me – Eric, too. Says it’s my fault anyway ’cause I’m such a dried-up old crone.”
I didn’t want to hear this. It belonged in some scandal sheet or maybe a textbook. Not in Eric’s life. I wanted to think Mrs. Kroner was lying or making it up. But it was too real. I waited for her to cry, but she looked at me steadily and dry-eyed.
“So we made a deal,” she said. “I wouldn’t tell, and he wouldn’t bother me and Eric.”
“What about Bella?”
“She’s a born slut. She’d do it – and does – with any Tom, Dick, or Harry. She doesn’t care he’s her father. She likes the presents he brings her and all that pretty talk. I can hear them sometimes up in Bella’s room in the attic. I try to cover Eric’s ears.”
I looked hard at Mrs. Kroner. Bella was her daughter, still a child, no matter what else. Shouldn’t she have tried to protect Bella instead of making a deal? I started to say this to Mrs. Kroner but she interrupted.
“I know it wasn’t right. That’s why I didn’t want anybody testing Eric. I was afraid somebody would find out something. But life’s not easy, you know. You make do. You get through. A lot of it isn’t pretty. And I had Errol – Jack kept to his word and left us alone.”
I thought about Eric. How had he done as well as he had? Not only serious learning disabilities, but all this as well. But Mrs. Kroner was still talking.
“That is, he kept his word until last Wednesday. I came home from work in the late afternoon. Errol was watching TV in the kitchen, Jack was asleep in the back room, and Bella was out. Everything seemed like usual.
“I washed up like I always do before bringing Errol over to you. Then I called to Errol to come get his bath, like always. But he didn’t want to. Fussed and cried and carried on. I didn’t know what to make of it. Usually he wants to look clean and nice for you. So finally I just took his clothes off him, but before I got him in the tub I saw how his bottom was bright red and splotchy. Some kind of rash, I thought. Now what’s he coming down with.
“But then Errol started to cry, and I shut the door tight so he wouldn’t wake Jack, and Errol shows me, acting it out, how Jack made him take down his pants. And then when Errol wouldn’t get under the covers with him, Jack smacked him across the bottom with an old curtain rod. And when I looked close I could see the welts – the red wasn’t from any rash.
“I put Errol’s clothes back on him as quick as I could and went out the door calling that we were going to your place – just in case Jack had heard and was starting after us. Then I didn’t know where to go, so we took the bus here to Grover. But I couldn’t go on to you ’cause that’s where he thought we were going. So finally we just came here and waited till I was sure Jack would be at work.
“Since then we’ve been at the Tortonis’ – you kno
w her, she said you’d called. I had to stay till I could get back in the house when both Jack and Bella were out and get the money I had hid. I had to get bus fare.
“I don’t want to say exactly where we’re going, but it’s upstate New York, where I grew up. My mother’s still there, and she’ll take us in. But I gotta put Errol in school as soon as we get there. I know that. That’s why I had to talk to you. To find out what’s best for him.
“Well, I got the money late yesterday. That’s when I called you. And now I’m going back to get Errol from the Tortonis, and we’re leaving this afternoon.”
I left the diner a half hour later. I went over the books I’d brought and urged Mrs. Kroner to enter Eric in kindergarten when they arrived. He was so small, I was sure he’d fit in – and he’d have a better chance of handling first grade next year. I also urged her to contact a mental health clinic for support and help for both of them. All she really wanted was the books, as if they were some magic talisman. That was the last time I saw Mrs. Kroner, and I’ve never again seen or heard from Eric.
I did call Family Services about Bella, but by the time they got over to the house both she and Mr. Kroner had disappeared.
I saw Eric for only a few sessions, a fraction of the time I spend with most children, yet he is the one who haunts my dreams.
If our time together hadn’t been interrupted, could he have continued his growth? Over and over I ask myself why I didn’t realize what was going on. Eric tried to show me with his play – always the girl doll beside the father, always the struggle to decide whether he was a boy or a baby. Why hadn’t I asked Mrs. Kroner more questions? Did I think I shouldn’t intrude? If I had, could I have made a difference?
I’ll never know. But I’ll always wonder and hope that Eric got the help he needed and deserved. There are still six eggshells in a carton somewhere in my attic. The colours have faded, but you can see that each is marked with a different letter. I take this to be a good omen.
Changes
“You are squandering your most precious asset,” the lawyer said in a voice that was mildly accusing.
“What is that?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Time, of course. Time. You are throwing away almost two hours every day in commuting. You should find office space closer to your home or move closer to your office.”
I listened carefully. I’d come to this highly recommended, successful man for advice. My days had become too crowded, too full. There was never enough time, and yet I loved my work. Instinctively, I trusted this man and knew that what he said was right. Without the long commute each day there would be more time for both my family and the children.
Cal and I talked. Cal – inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, manufacturer, and my friend and husband – had operated his manufacturing plant for over twenty years in the same city where I had been born. We now rented an apartment almost an hour away from both our offices, and it made a great deal of sense to buy a house that would eliminate commuting for both of us.
We found a house that had been built by an architect as both his office and his home – low and quiet, surrounded by woods. The office, two rooms and a bathroom above the garage, would be mine, with only a five-minute drive to work for Cal.
I said good-bye to Rea Oldenburg with sorrow. I would miss our conversations and shared lunches.
“No, no,” she said. “The lawyer is right. It is a waste for you to be in the car so long. We will still meet, and now the children will drive to you.”
I moved my file cabinets and the secondhand desk and chairs (they had been lucky and I had no wish to change). I carpeted the stairs and the floors of the two rooms in blue, painted the walls a creamy white, and bought some new towels and a rug for the bathroom, a five-foot blackboard for one wall of the office, and a secondhand copy machine. The ceiling sloped down low from the roof, and the back window looked out over the woods. Two walls held deep cabinets, designed for architectural drawings but equally good for children’s games, books, toys, and testing material. I left the walls bare, except for the blackboard, waiting to fill them with the children’s pictures and stories.
Rea Oldenburg was right. Most of the children I had been seeing did drive to me; others were ready to graduate, and old friends sent new children to take their place. My practice seemed like a kind of garden, with children growing in place of flowers – always new ones shooting up as the older ones matured.
I bloomed along with the children. If I’d been happy before, I was even happier now working out of our home. I loved wearing my sneakers and blue jeans. I loved not having to spend hours on the crowded highways. And, to my surprise, I loved having the time to do more diagnostic educational evaluations than I’d ever done before.
Some of the evaluations were done simply because parents wanted to know as much as possible about their children – whether they were in the right school, what their interests and aptitudes were – and these evaluations were always a delight. No problems to uncover, no painful disclosures to parents – just the fresh, wonderful responses of the children. “What does the stomach do?” I asked. (This is a standard question on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale.) Seven-year-old Eva, bright as a dollar, looked at me with confidence. “That’s easy,” she said. “It digests the food.” Then, before I had finished writing the first word, she added with authority, “And from there it goes straight to the vagina where it’s excavated.”
But most of the evaluations I did were requested because a child was doing poorly in school and parents and/or schools wanted to know why.
The heart of my practice remained remediation, which is exactly the way I wanted it. The word “remediation” is derived from the Latin remederi, which means “to heal.” I believed in this. I did not think it possible to take a slice of a child’s head and merely try to fix up the reading part. I felt and still feel that the reading, or lack of it, must be helped and then integrated into the child’s whole being. My job, as I saw it, was not just to shore up reading, writing, or arithmetic skills, nor to ameliorate dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia, but to try to help children become successful in their place of work – school – and to improve the quality of their lives.
But I was becoming more and more convinced that the first step in the successful remediation of a child with a learning disability is a thorough diagnostic evaluation. How much easier to teach and heal when areas of strength and weakness were clearly defined. I became supersleuth, tracking strengths, ferreting out weaknesses, drawing hypotheses, translating to parents. I also found that the hour or two that parents and I spent together in conference, going over the tests I had given as well as discussing their deeper knowledge of the child, usually formed a bond of understanding between us that made it easier to help the child.
Yet, ironically, I could remember how I had once loathed testers and their testing. When I was teaching emotionally disturbed children, the children were required to undergo a kind of cursory testing once a year – and on this superficial testing, judgments were passed.
I hated these testers, and I hated their tests. Perhaps hate is too strong a word, but I certainly didn’t welcome them. Who were these people to tell us about our children? We teachers had only four children each. We were with them six hours a day, five days a week – teaching, playing, eating – intensely involved all day long. The testers were certified psychologists, but they came to our school for only a few hours a week, observing the children from doorways, discussing them at staff conferences, never really interacting with them. And then “testing” them – taking the children out to another room, the children protesting, hating to go; I had a strong sense that the feeling was mutual. I doubted that the testers had any more desire to be close to the children than the children had to be with them.
But test they did, and they reported back weeks later that our children were “subnormal.” What did these people know about the real child, I raged silently, when most of the time the children were frozen with fe
ar and couldn’t have answered the questions even if they had known the answers? I regarded the results of this testing with suspicion and disdain.
Then in graduate school I learned that the fault was not in the tests themselves, but in the way they were used. In a course entitled Individual Psychological Testing taught by Dr. George Kennedy – a tall, gentle man with a fringe of white hair – I learned how valuable testing could be.
“Each week I will test a child,” Dr. Kennedy told us. “You will observe the child and myself through this one-way window. The child and I will sit here at the table behind the glass.” He tapped the window with his fingers. “And you,” he gestured at the twenty graduate students his class was composed of, “will sit here in this classroom and watch and record the child’s answers. At our next session we will go over the answers and your scoring and observations.”
He smiled at us benignly. “It will be my job to furnish the tests. It will be yours to furnish the children.”
So each week, sometimes twice a week, we took turns bringing our own or a neighbor’s child to Dr. Kennedy and watched as he talked and tested and revealed to us the amazing amount of information that he discovered about each. If Dr. Kennedy had been at the school for emotionally disturbed children, I would have trusted his tests. He didn’t give one single test and make broad pronouncements. He gave a battery of tests, each one revealing a different facet of the child. He didn’t rely solely on the number of rights and wrongs for the final answer. His tests were covered with notes, and from these he taught us that observations were even more important than numbered scores.
Most important of all, the children loved him and opened up easily to him. This was not a painful ordeal for them, but rather a special time spent with a person who cared about them. The children sensed his genuine interest and responded to it.
I loved every minute of that course and the magical way Dr. Kennedy drew out the children, as well as his meticulous, careful scoring of each test and the conversion of the scores into meaningful statements and recommendations. It was then that I began thinking that maybe, someday, I might have an office of my own and do individualized testing that would form a solid base for remediation.
A Safe Place for Joey Page 9