The Siege

by Clara Clairborne Park

  Her attitude towards dogs in general provides another illustration of the difference between fear, which envisages what is not present, and anxiety, which does not. Elly is anxious in the presence of rambunctious dogs, but she would never refuse to visit a house where from previous experience she might expect to meet one. Relevant here also is the absence of hallucinations that has been noted in autistic children. What is hallucination but imagination so vivid that it takes over the very mechanisms of the senses themselves? In contrast, Elly’s sense of what is and is not the case is unusually sharp; it is the main source of her humour. At four, her father taught her to pretend, mimicking bedtime, laying her on the floor with a sheet of paper for a blanket, a stick for a doll, while she laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. At seven and eight she could pretend a little for herself (significantly, ‘real’ and ‘pretend’ were adjectives she learned very easily). Seeing her suck her thumb, I told her it was chocolate; she herself added ‘strawberry’ and ‘vanilla’. Recently she stroked me, giggling ‘Furry, furry Mama!’ There could be no possible doubt that this was a joke, part of a constant and enjoyable interplay between truth and falsehood. ‘Is Mama downtown?’ ‘No!’ ‘Did Jill go downtown?’ ‘Yes!’

  No hallucinations, no fantasies. We could use some; they would make her play much richer. Nor have we ever seen any evidence of nightmares. Her focuses of severe anxiety all have the same characteristic — they are immediate and visible. I do not say that she is like the boy in the Grimms’ fairy tale who could not shudder. But it is certainly true that one of the reasons it is so hard to read her the simplest children’s story is that she is as yet incapable of understanding why Peter Rabbit was afraid of Mr MacGregor, because for her out of sight is out of mind.

  As with fear, so with other emotions. To attain its full human complexity, emotion must include an element of imagination. Jealousy would be a minor affliction indeed if we felt it only in the actual presence of the loved one. Without the power to envisage, to interconnect, to bring to bear past and future, we should experience only a very simplified version of hatred or affection or love. And if the deficiency in imagination is relevant to deficiency of affect, its relevance to the deficiency of exploratory activity is even clearer. Recently I played hunt-the-button with Elly and discovered that she could envisage no new hiding places. Though I restricted the hiding places to my own person, Elly could find the button only if left in plain sight, or in places I had hidden it previously.

  A final illustration of this matter-of-factness is her attitude towards blood. Blood can be a touchy subject for children and psychiatrists — for children, the focus of much emotion and fantasy, for psychiatrists, of much theory. Elly knows about menstrual blood. In the general lack of privacy attendant on life with Elly I made an effort to keep this inconspicuous, but over a period of years there are bound to be slip-ups. There was reason to worry about Elly’s reaction to blood, especially since there were no words for explaining the phenomenon to her. I was not reassured when to ‘Red blood, hurt!’ she added ‘Leave your tail alone’, showing that she had made a connection between masturbation and menstruation, which I was as far from being able to discourage as I was from having suggested it. But she exhibited no anxiety, let alone fantasy or fear, and subsequent developments showed that her matter-of-factness was not a blind. There are indeed patterns to be found in reality, as plausible as those we find in psychology books, but considerably less interesting. ‘Brush teeth, red blood hurt,’ Elly remarked soon after, and it was true. Mother has only to brush her teeth to produce red blood; Elly picks a scab and red blood comes. ‘Don’t pick-uh nose, ha’ red blood!’ — and Elly has in fact induced several nose-bleeds in this way. It is all of a piece, and the fabric is very simple.

  Where then are we now, and where are we going? The social worker at Hampstead told me we could never make up the lost years — and if there is a biological deficiency, we cannot make that up either. Yet Elly has improved and is improving. She has moved far beyond what she seemed likely to achieve in her early years, and a comparison of her case with other histories of children claimed as autistic could be used to support considerable optimism. Dr Bruno Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress, which appeared just as I was completing these final chapters, is a hopeful book. In it he describes children who at Elly’s present age were functioning far less well than she; he considers the condition of even such children curable if therapy is extensive, prolonged, conducted in a residential setting, and begun well before puberty. [37]

  Elly’s psychiatrist is encouraging too; a year ago he told me of a boy he knew of who seemed much like Elly and who ended up at Harvard. But then he adds that there is no point in looking even twelve months ahead. Neither he, nor we, nor anyone else knows what will become of her. The most we can say is that at one time the prognosis was nearly hopeless, and that now there is no prognosis at all.

  We cannot assess the results of our work, or even understand what we have actually been doing. Were we changing Elly’s assessment of the world? Were we slowly, painfully performing for the emotions what the strange new physical disciplines seem to do for damaged brains, as injured children and adults crawl themselves back to function? Were we too, by activities repeated a thousand times and more, training other brain cells and other nerves to take over missing functions? Were we indeed doing anything, or would what has happened have happened without us? There can be no controlled experiments with the same human being. We shall never know.

  It is a long time since we first recognized that ‘something was wrong with Elly’. Perhaps these common words are the best ones after all; they do not disguise under multifoliate terminology the plain fact that no one yet knows what. It has been a long siege. As a siege, it has been successful, for we have reached Elly. Whatever else she is, she is no longer walled off from affection. Yet we are not the first to discover that to reach another human being is not in itself to cure; we are not the first to learn that though the contact which seemed impossible may at length be made, it only opens the future to the work to be done. The expectation of cure is a luxury we have learned to do without. We work, and others work with us, and Elly grows and slowly she comes to do a little work herself. We work for what we can accomplish; we accomplish new things with each month that passes. We get our satisfaction from our motion forward. No more than Elly do we envisage the future.

  16. The Others

  When much effort is expended for a goal that remains uncertain, the detached mind is bound to wonder if it is worth it. We who are engaged in the labour learn not to ask such questions, since we can afford only such thoughts as strengthen effort and do not paralyse it, but even we cannot suppress them wholly. The child in the poem could not help asking, ‘And what good came of it at last?’ And of course we could not go on if we had not found some answer.

  If nothing more were accomplished than an expansion of the possibilities for one flawed human being, some might accept that the work was worth while. But more has come of it than that. Out of it has come, for ourselves and I hope for others, an increment of experience which is, I hope, implicit in every chapter of this book. It will not take many words to make it explicit; most readers who have penetrated this far will already have understood for themselves that what we have learned watching the slow-motion growth of one small rudimentary human being behind invisible walls has applications that go beyond this single child. We saw Elly as a citadel which it was our choice to attack, because the equilibrium she had found denied the possibility of growth. There are others, very different from Elly, who like her cannot meet the challenge of their world and who achieve an equilibrium at the expense of their potentialities. I am a teacher, and from Elly I have learned much about students-about normal students, many of high intelligence, who talk and read and understand and go about their business and yet who challenge our ideas of normal and abnormal because they are so like Elly. The severest problem of teaching — particularly in teaching those we coolly call the ‘cu
lturally disadvantaged’ — is in motivation, in the confrontation of the array of blocks against learning and against achievement itself. The blocks are many and their disguises are subtle — blocks against a subject, against an approach, against a necessary way of working; blocks against continuing education; blocks against seeking a job in line with ability. The personality whose major work is to deny or frustrate its own potentialities operates in ways more complex than Elly’s, though hers are perhaps no less refined. I have lived with learning blocks eight years, watched their inception, seen them so potent that they can inhibit not only learning but the primary faculties of sight and hearing as well. From a child who can counterfeit deafness there is much to learn about how human beings limit or destroy themselves.

  Strange Elly is so like us. In her the immobilization that afflicts us all, often or sometimes, temporarily or in full finality, before the task that seems impossible is seen magnified into full visibility. I watch her squint her eyes shut before a reality she doesn’t want to look at, and recognize my students and myself.

  I learn from Elly and I learn from my students; they also teach me about Elly. In the early years, I knew a student who was himself emerging from a dark citadel; he had been to the Menninger Clinic and to other places too, and he knew from inside the ways of thought I had to learn. ‘Things get too much for her and she just turns down the volume,’ he told me. I. remembered that, because I have seen it so often since, in Elly and in so many others. Human beings fortify themselves in many ways. Numbness, weakness, irony, inattention, silence, suspicion are only a few of the materials out of which the personality constructs its walls. With experience gained in my siege of Elly I mount smaller sieges. Each one is undertaken with hesitation; to try to help anyone is an arrogance. But Elly is there to remind me that to fail to try is a dereliction. Not all my sieges are successful. But where I fail, I have learned that I fail because of my own clumsiness and inadequacy, not because the enterprise is impossible. However formidable the fortifications, they can be breached. I have not found one person, however remote, however hostile, who did not wish for what he seemed to fight. Of all the things that Elly has given, the most precious is this faith, a faith experience has almost transformed into certain knowledge: that inside the strongest citadel he can construct, the human being awaits his besieger.

  Though I once thought of this as a long chapter, I realized in time that it could not be. I have not the right to be circumstantial here. Elly’s privacy I have not respected (though I have changed her name, and the names of my other children) because I thought that the good that might come from telling her story would outweigh the hurt she might suffer if one day she should grow well enough to read it. But to tell stories about anyone else is neither right nor necessary. Other besiegers — street-workers, doctors, ministers, teachers, lovers, and friends-know what I know and will supply examples for me.

  When I began this book I had an epigraph for it — the great sonnet of assault in which John Donne implored his God to batter his defences down. I decided that I could not put it at the beginning, since it would haze over this story with an atmosphere of piety which would be totally false. Yet this book is, among other things, a personal record, and if it is to be a true one I cannot leave out these words which sustained me so many times when I had little else:

  Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you

  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

  I, like an usurped town, to another due,

  Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end;

  Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

  But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

  Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

  But am betrothed unto your enemy:

  Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

  Take me to you, imprison me, for I

  Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

  Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

  It is all in theological terms, but let them stand. They are no more false than any others. I know no better description of the terrible imperative of the assault of love, which brings us godless ones as close as we can come to the experience that others call God.

  Yet it is not with myself that this book should end, but with Elly and with the others, and so I will tell one more story. I can tell it because it is not about a friend, but a stranger. One bright warm afternoon a year ago I was working in the garden when I was accosted by a student — not a student of mine, but one of the sheltered and fortunate habitues of my husband’s college. This young man, in his madras shorts, was naked to the waist and barefoot, he was leaning on a pretty girl, and he was staggering drunk. To my astonishment, he seemed to have something to say to me. All sorts of feelings rose up in me, as that college boys were losing whatever vestiges of shame they had ever had, that after all there were certain standards, that he ought to know better than to speak to a professor’s wife in his condition. If Elly had not taught me to wait and listen and look beneath the surface — if I had not learned from her that dignity is the most expendable of all satisfactions — I would have told him off, or moved away. Instead I began to hear what he was saying. ‘You don’t know me,’ he said, ‘and I wouldn’t be saying this if I weren’t drunk, but I think Elly’s beautiful. She makes something magic out of that patch of green lawn we think is just an ordinary world.’

  I forgot he was drunk and disorderly. I told him she was a fairy and that’s why she didn’t talk, and he smiled and staggered away. The next day he wrote me a letter. I copy it here.

  Dear Mrs Park,

  I am the drunk that you were so nice to as I passed by your yard Saturday afternoon. Even though sober now, I am no more capable of explaining to you just how Elly has affected me. Elly transforms our messy back yard into a wonderland. She makes a world that you and I can only see in daydreams. Sometimes when I look out the window and see her dancing to our music I can almost see that world with her. Elly can sit and watch my friends work on their motor cycles all afternoon and never say a word. Yet she seems to be as much in tune with them as I could be with all the conversation in the world.

  I know that being Elly’s mother must be a very discouraging, very frustrating experience. After only a few moments of a few afternoons I have felt die need to pressure her into talking — the need to break into her world verbally. I hope that someday Elly will become well and have a happy life. I’m writing you because I’m sure that because you’re Elly’s mother you don’t get enough chances to appreciate Elly — to only gain and not sacrifice — as I have. I thought maybe it would help to hear what I had to say. I wish I could express it better for you.

  P. S. I don’t usually talk like this so please don’t tell on me.

  It helps, of course. It helps a lot, in many ways. It helps to know that a stranger, seeing Elly, can look beyond her embarrassing defects to sense something of her strange integrity, and it helps more deeply than anything else can to know that stranger can touch stranger, in gentleness and love.

  Appendix: Tests

  I have no reports on Elly’s intelligence tests at three, if indeed any figures were arrived at. At seven years and ten months she was given the Wechsler intelligence test. The tester’s report follows.

  May 10, 1966

  I felt that the verbal tests of WISC [Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children] would be hopelessly inappropriate but agreed to give Elly die WISC performance tests. I do not regard these results as measures of Elly’s capacity in the usual sense but am sending diem as an account of what the child actually did within the (for her) rather rigid framework of die scale.

  Raw scores on Picture Completion, Picture Arrangement, and Coding were 6, 6, and 22, respectively. Test age equivalents for these are 5,5 and 6 years. Raw Scores on Block Design and Object Assembly were 16 and
19, respectively, with test age equivalents of 9,5 and 10 years.

  The half hour was apparently a pleasant one for Elly though two or three times she appeared to be diverted from the tasks by factors of which I was not aware. Picture Completion and Picture Arrangement presented many situations wholly unfamiliar to her. On Coding, she made 110 errors but was slow, perhaps because of what appears to me to be some confusion of handedness. [38]

  On Block Design, she worked rapidly, appraising and correcting her errors deftly. In Object Assembly, Face was disproportionately difficult for her. She placed the nose and mouth pieces correctly against the largest piece and, a few inches away, assembled a pair of the remaining parts. This required the time limit of three minutes. Mannikin was correctly assembled in 33" as against the time limit of 120". On Horse, she earned a time bonus. Auto was finished in 1 minute though the limit is 3 minutes. An inversion of the door piece lost a possible time bonus.