The Siege

by Clara Clairborne Park

  Such questions have no answers, and we never found out the nature of that unique illness. But if we had waited for sure knowledge to determine our actions with Elly, we would have never acted at all. In a few months we would be moving again, to yet another house; we would spend the summer in Austria before we made our way back to America to show Elly that home was not for ever lost. How could I prepare her? Though Elly was acquiring single words, little by little, as the months passed, they were all simple nouns. There were none in which I could discuss with her such subtleties as place and time and cause-no ‘when’, no ‘back’, ‘again’, or ‘soon’; no ‘go’, no ‘because’; no ‘Austria’, ‘England’, or ‘America’; not even ‘home’. Without words, how can one convey a shared recognition of what is not present to the senses? Does one discuss past and future with a cat?

  It was at this time that I began to simmer in my mind the problem of giving Elly a usable memory.

  The operative word was usable. We knew she had a memory, and no ordinary one. We had become accustomed to its prodigies. One day, when she was a little over two years old, without speech, without comprehension, with no apparent capacity to attend to her surroundings, she had disappeared. This was unprecedented. She was a baby; she had been walking only three months; she had never gone anywhere alone. Where to look, when no direction was more likely than another? Then I remembered that the day before I had taken her, in her stroller (she was not yet a steady walking companion), a new way downtown, via the parking lot near her father’s office. She had been so enchanted with the stripes and arrows painted on the surfacing that I had taken her out of the stroller and let her crawl about on them. It was a frail clue, but there was no other. Without expectations, I began by looking there. I found her absorbed, on hands and knees, circling the one-way arrow, her tiny body less conspicuous to an oncoming car than a dog’s would have been.

  To reach that parking lot she had to cross three large backyards and two streets, to ignore two possible turnings and make a third. On foot, she had followed a route she had traversed only once before, and then not under her own power. She had moved fast; though it seemed longer, from the time I missed her to the time I found her was only a few minutes. A remarkable performance for any two-year-old; it is hard to convey its impact coming from a child who seems not to see, to hear, or to register impressions — who for days at a time shows none of the common signs of intelligence at all. I tested her. A mother with an abnormal baby is always testing. On our walks I would deliberately lag behind and let her lead me home. She never hesitated, never took a wrong turn. A single visit and her knowledge was infallible. What’s more, it needed no reinforcement; at three and a half she led me behind a screen of trees to find a house she had visited once only, and that six months before. After eight months, on her second visit to the Hampstead Clinic, she led us unerringly to Number 21 Maresfield Gardens, one of an endless row of identical houses — and those who know England know that row houses in England are more identical than anywhere else in the world. I had become so dulled to this capacity that only the most extraordinary instances startled me. I took it so much for granted that I was surprised when the bright, verbal children of my neighbour failed to remember the location of every room in my house. Elly needed no second lessons.

  Elly knew the whereabouts of every cookie shelf in every supermarket in the North Berkshire area of Massachusetts. There was not a location, not an orientation in her world that she did not have memorized. I knew, then, that I would not have to create a memory. She remembered her room, her house, her neighbourhood, her town. The experiences I wanted to make available were not lost; inaccessible to words, they must be there.

  How certain that sounds! The certainty is false. With Elly I was never sure even of what I knew I knew. That she remembered home might be an intellectual certainty, but the emotions counsel differently. These show you not the child you construct out of your rational knowledge of what she has occasionally done, sometimes seemed to know, but the child you see every day who does little and knows nothing. It is this child, wrapped in veils and mists, that one is working with; the mind inside it, however impressive it appears when all the instances are put together, seems at any given moment a figment, a creation of the wishes. The child has memories of home and we can unlock them? What optimism! The child is complete and untouchable, and has no past at all.

  Yet I began to think what I could do. Elly had a puzzle. It represented a large house, with four oversize windows in each of which a smaller puzzle could be assembled, the sub-puzzle showing four appropriate rooms and their furniture — kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath. Simple nursery ideas are hard to come by if you aren’t trained to the work. I had looked at that puzzle for weeks before it occurred to me: I would draw our house at home on a large sheet of paper, and see if through pictures I could bring Elly’s memories out where they could be shared.

  Together, as so many times before, we sat on the floor. I drew the house. Elly watched with quiet attention; her empty stare was growing rarer now. It had not, of course, occurred to me to bring a photograph. Uncertainly I reconstructed the facade in my memory, so much less sure than Elly’s. What was the pitch of the roof? Should I make the chimney visible? What was the orientation of the windows and their relative size? While I thought, I had to be drawing, steadily and confidently even if incorrectly. Elly was watching and I must not dissipate her attention by fumbles. I had no time, even if I had had the skill, to make a convincing architectural rendering. I settled for a schematic roof and the right number of windows and put my best efforts on the porch, which I did remember. Three steps, two columns (Doric), a plain pediment, a door with four panels, a mail-basket. I drew the shrubs and flowers. I made it spring and drew daffodils, a word which Elly knew. Elly watched with noncommittal interest. Following the lead of her puzzle, I started to fill in the downstairs window with the furniture of our living room, coffee table, couch. The window grew crowded, perspective was abandoned. I didn’t know whether Elly saw picture-perspective anyhow. Why should she? People in the Middle Ages didn’t. At last, deep inside the room, floating above the other furniture, I drew the record-player — the sliding doors, the turntable, the tone-arm, the needle, the record itself. Now Elly was more than attentive. Tense and excited, she began to jump up and down, her sign for approval and delight. She got down again and put her finger on the crude circle that represented the turntable and moved it round and round. Then she began to sing. At first I scarcely recognized the song, it was so many months since I had heard it — the song ‘Instead Of’, from The Three-Penny Opera.

  It was almost a year since Elly had heard that music. She had been obsessed with it; for two months and more she had asked for the record every day. Then, like so many other things, she had abandoned it altogether. No one had sung it since. We had left the record behind in America, and there it remained and the music with it, dissolved, extinguished, part of the irrecoverable past. But it was not wholly irrecoverable. We had recaptured a minute part of it. We could find more.

  Many of the things I drew evoked no reaction. Oddly enough, Elly showed little interest in her crib, however lovingly detailed the drawing. Instead it was the rocking chair that excited her, and again it was music that let me know she shared my memory, for as I drew she began to sing the melody of ‘Rockabye Baby’, which she had first learned as I rocked her, so many times, in that very chair in her old room at home.

  After that, I knew the way. Elly was happy when I drew a separate large rocker outside the house, and a mother with glasses to sit in it, and an Elly with straight hair and bangs to put in the mother’s arms. I would not only retrieve the house; I would try to put into it the human relationships, which Elly had tried so successfully to deny. I made crude portraits of the family, a face at each window, a figure standing at the door, and although Elly’s real interest was still in the house and furniture, the details of the bathtub and washbasin, she accepted the figures with placid attentiveness. We
drew often, several times a week, and time passed.

  We left England, put the Microbus and our eight selves (my mother had joined us) into the Channel plane, then into a train for Munich, then into the car for the ultimate destination, St Gilgen, an hour beyond Salzburg. Austria’s mountains and the unreal blue lakes were paradise for us after the flats of the English university town, but I had never seen any signs that Elly cared for scenery. How would the new upheaval affect her? As we settled into yet another orientation of rooms and fixtures, we watched Elly for any signs of shock. Would she be sick again? stop walking? refuse to go outside?

  The day after we arrived I started drawing. I drew the house in England (prepared for this, I could do a reasonably accurate job). I drew the bus with our eight heads looking out. I made the little plane with its open maw, and the bus going in. I made us all go in the door, and Elly recognized herself and jumped and squealed. I made the train with the eight heads at the windows, and Elly, who had never responded to a picture of a train before, was beside herself with delight. I made the Wagon- Lit, three beds, one above the other, and me and Elly’s grandmother and Elly each in one. Elly’s eyes shone, she laughed, she said ‘choo-choo’, and she had to have all the pictures again, people and things — all summer long.

  She was never sick again. She was perfectly natural outdoors. We had a wonderful summer, and at the end of it, just in time for the ten-day trek to Le Havre, Elly began spontaneously to use the pot. All of which, like all negative evidence, proves nothing. We might have had no trouble in any case. I do not know. But the human being is human in that he has a usable past. All human societies are built upon it; in even the most primitive cultures the poets and artists, the keepers of the memory, have an essential place. To be fully human, a child needs a past to which it has access. Even now, Elly and I have not reached a level of verbalization which would enable us to say ‘Do you remember?’ But one of her favourite pastimes is to watch while I draw her three houses — one in Austria, one in England, one in America. There are six pictures, for she insists on front and rear views, appropriate furnishings visible at each window. She can put in words now questions which before went unformed: ‘Becky’s bed?’ ‘Daddy’s bed?’‘St Gilgen House?’ Austria is almost four years behind us, already growing dim. Recently, however, I thought of a new possibility: I added a rough rendition of the lovely onion dome of St Gilgen, saying to Elly, ‘downtown’. Each onion dome has its own individuality; only charity would have recognized this one. But Elly did. She squealed ‘St Gilgen church!’ and I had to add, that very minute, the appropriate churches to accompany my pictures of Elly’s English and American homes. It was not a very skilful Perpendicular Gothic. But the New England neoclassical, luckily, is just down Main Street, so my memory can be daily refreshed. Elly’s does not need it.

  11. Professionals as Human Beings

  I have jumped ahead of my story. Let me erase the glimpse just given, to return to four-year-old Elly, just arrived in England. That Elly was not the child I have just described enjoying my renditions of comparative church architecture. That Elly had shown a capacity for seeing pictures only for the past six months. She was not yet able to ask even the crudest question or respond to the crudest answer. She had just recovered from the severest illness of her life and it had left her narrowed and subdued. It was this child that, as soon as we were settled, we made arrangements to take to the Hampstead Clinic.

  We had planned to do this even before we left. Dr Blank had written Miss Freud the day after we spoke with him. That had been a major reason for my anxiety when I found the Institute had not made out its report; I knew we would need it in England, and soon. My letter of appeal to the Institute’s director reflected the desperation and pressure of the last days before departure. I remained shrewd enough, however, to make it clear that we wanted the record, not for Dr Blank or for our small-town clinic, but for Anna Freud.

  An answer arrived by return mail; the silent psychiatrist himself wrote it. He quite understood my anxiety; he had delayed the report because he wanted to write it himself; he would make sure it went out promptly. I was past charity. I reflected that there was hierarchy in this profession as in others. The great provincial archdiocese need not exert itself for the little country parish — but now we were going to Rome. After six months I could still recall the reverential tone in which the Institute psychiatrist had spoken of the Hampstead Clinic.

  And Rome it was. No footsore pilgrim was ever welcomed in the holy city with warmer hospitality or more healing kindness than we experienced at Hampstead. Dr Blank had said that whatever our language was, Anna Freud would speak it. As things turned out, we did not see Anna Freud. We did not have to. What happened was something more remarkable still; her spirit so permeated her clinic that everybody spoke our language. The building was little different from what we knew already; clinics for disturbed children seem to run to shabby, ageing houses with many rooms. The examining team was the same — social worker, psychiatrist, and testing psychologist. As far as I know, their theoretical presuppositions were not markedly different. I even recognized the puzzles that Elly worked for the intelligence test — the same old-fashioned browns and pinks, the same nineteen-twentyish dress. Yet all was different. The chill, noncommittal professionalism that we had found in America was missing here.

  We could have guessed from the ease with which we made our appointments. The Clinic seemed to find no particular difficulty in answering letters. That was professionalism, in its proper place. For the rest, from the time we walked in the door of Number 21 Maresfield Gardens, we were treated, not like sick children, but like adults, human beings, and friends. Perhaps, as truly practised, this is professionalism too.

  What should one say further about anything so natural? Why should it be worthy of mention that the psychiatrist and social worker talked to us together as well as separately, that they asked questions and answered them, that they discussed with us matters of theory and nomenclature? We conversed with sensitive and intelligent people on matters of mutual interest. They picked up cues from our voices and manner and allowed us to do the same from theirs. We smiled and joked, although all concerned were aware that our errand was not funny. With everyone there we experienced that delicate progress of mutual adjustment which we call communication and which is one of the great pleasures. In our own land we had been treated by strangers as strangers, and strangers we had remained. We were not strangers here.

  The psychologist laughed with me as we watched Elly solve the now familiar puzzles. We went rapidly through the rest; they had the Institute’s report and they had obviously read it, and the medical history as well. The social worker asked if I had any photographs of Elly. I had not; remembering the Institute, I had left them in America. Encouraged, I mentioned my notebooks. Certainly, of course they would want to read them. I sent for the photographs and turned the notebooks over. When we came again a week later they knew what was in them.

  I had determined that I could not repeat my mistake of eight months ago; whatever it cost me, I would make sure they saw me play with Elly. It cost me nothing; playfulness was easy here. The social worker was interested in our play; she had read my records. Knowing that, I could elaborate on episodes I had only sketched. I described for her, much as I have described them in Chapter 4, the slow stages in teaching Elly to turn on a tap. This is the sort of thing, I suggested, that you can help me with. I will not forget her reply. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that we will be able to learn from you.’

  I could scarcely believe I had heard it. But it must have been so, for after more conversation about particulars came something for which I was even less prepared. ‘I suppose you’ve often been told,’ she said, ‘that this is a very interesting case.’ Often? Interesting? No one had told us anything, least of all that. I felt better at once; if one’s troubles are heavy it helps that someone finds them interesting. But I had not heard it all. What was unusual about the case — the words dropped into my mind
like balm — was the persistence and energy shown by the parents. Regressions had been kept temporary. ‘A massive regression now appears unlikely.’

  I did not, I think, begin to shake. Kanner’s control stood me in good stead, though my skin seemed a frail integument just able to impart its usual definition to the trembling chaos of animal gratitude within. One is less vulnerable to pain than to understanding and kindness. One develops defences against slights or insensitivity; against kindness, none. When one has been long in such straits, one has a terrible greed for kindness. Before one feels real pain one may think — I thought — that one would want people not to notice, to aid one in the attempt to carry on — business here as usual. It is not so. Business may seem as usual but it is not. What one wants is that people should know that. What one wants is sympathy, understanding, not tacit but openly given. What one wants is love.

  Too much to ask? It is surprising how freely it is given in some quarters while in others it is not given at all. I remember, I think, from those years everyone — everyone — who was kind to me. I should, for I lived on kindness, I consumed it like fuel. I remember the friend, herself a trained social worker, who telephoned me after a visit to her house where Elly, only two, had misbehaved and been disciplined and then loved, merely to tell me ‘how beautifully you handled that child’. I remember, from the chill months in England the loud-voiced checker in the local Co-op who called me ‘ducks’ and understood when Elly screamed because she couldn’t touch the candy, who asked after her when I left her at home, and who went out of her way to say how much she had improved. I remember the man who, when I apologized for some embarrassing caper of Elly’s with a muffled not a normal child’, smiled and replied, ‘Well, I’m not normal myself. My honour roll is long — too long for inclusion here. The list of those who have helped us contains the names of amateurs and professionals. What they have given us may have seemed to differ on its surface; at bottom, it has not differed at all. The measure of my gratitude is greater to those whose kindness, because institutionalized, has been more prolonged. But it does not differ in kind.