Phil and Jake would always be truthful during this small segment of the conversation set aside for personal matters; they would never pretend that things were great if they weren’t. But any information they supplied was presented merely as an update. Jake and Phil never turned to each other for advice and support. Up until Danny’s diagnosis, Jake thought that this was because he and Phil were men. But after subsequent reading on the subject, he decided that it was probably because he and Phil had Asperger syndrome, which was the diagnosis Ellen Camins gave Danny. Of all the explanations, the genetic explanation was the one we liked best. It seemed to offer the most hope.
Jake hailed Phil, and Phil responded with a distracted smile and a wave and he crossed the street. He said hello to Danny and patted him on the head.
“Danny,” I said, “do you know who this is?”
“Who this is?”
“It’s Phil, Danny. Do you remember Daddy’s friend Phil?”
“It’s probably a year since he’s seen me. I wouldn’t expect him to remember.”
“Well, Danny, say hello to Phil.”
“Hello to Phil.”
Phil laughed, as if this little fragment of our son’s “echolalia” had been an intentional joke on Danny’s part, like something out of a Burns and Allen routine.
Jake said we were on our way back from our marriage counselor, his throat catching for a moment on the word “counselor,” but Phil didn’t seem to notice. I remained uncharacteristically silent. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Phil to know what was happening; it was just too painful to speak of it. Jake asked about Sandy, and we parted soon afterward, with either Jake or Phil mumbling something about getting together sometime soon.
We ate at the Kiev. When we were seated at the table, waiting for our orders to arrive, we asked Danny which was bigger, an elephant or a mouse, and he said an elephant. Good. That was good. He was learning. Already. But other similar questions he answered incorrectly. We asked him how we had gotten to this part of town from our apartment in Washington Heights. He didn’t answer, so we supplied him with multiple choices: Did we walk? Did we drive? Did we go by airplane?
“Walk,” he said.
“Yes, Danny, we walked from the car to the restaurant, but how did we get from Stan’s office to here?”
“Walked,” Danny answered.
“Where did we go this morning, Danny? Did we go to Grandma’s house, or Stan’s office, or to school?”
“Grandma’s house.”
Outside, the streets thronged with young people who were tattooed all over, with hair in unnatural colors and unusual shapes, teenagers who had taken body piercing beyond what was currently acceptable, people trying, in a world saturated with shocking images, to stand apart, to be, if possible, more bizarre than the advertising. Mingled with all these young people were immigrants and working-class men and women, and even some middle-class people, carrying briefcases and dressed in business suits. Jake and I were in our forties, the age of the immigrants and the office workers, but even when we had been young enough to fit in here, we had never believed the claims the East Village made to freedom and tolerance and alternative ways of being. Now it comforted us to be here with Danny in this carnival-like atmosphere. It comforted us to think that we lived in a world in which differences were welcomed. It made us feel better to think this, even though we didn’t believe it.
As we walked from the Kiev back to our car, we pointed to storefronts and asked Danny what they were. “What kind of place is that, Danny?”
“Indian restaurant,” he said.
We looked at the place and then at each other, pleased because he was right about the ethnicity of the restaurant. But whether this was because we had pointed it out to him once before or because somewhere in his mind he knew that carpets hanging from the walls signified an Indian restaurant, we had no idea.
“You’re right, Danny. That’s an Indian restaurant. How did you know?”
Since he didn’t answer, we began, as we did so often that we hardly realized we were doing it, to present a menu of possible responses. “Did we tell you it was an Indian restaurant? Is it because it just looks like an Indian restaurant? Is it the way the letters on the sign look?”
“The candle is afraid of the white clock!” he responded with his magical smile.
We had been planning on taking Danny to the playground in Tompkins Square Park, as we often did on our Stan Shapiro days, but I told Jake I wanted to skip it. We didn’t have time for it now.
The Story of Annie Sullivan
A reporter for The Chronicle of Jewish Education once asked Teresa Thompson if she ever wondered what her life would have been like if it she hadn’t been the mother of a handicapped child. The question had come up many times before, and Teresa answered in her usual brisk, emphatic manner. “I would have been like all the girls I went to high school with. Once the kids were in school, I would have found myself a part-time job selling lipstick door-to-door for Avon or working behind the cosmetics counter at Macy’s. And that would have been fine with me.”
The wall behind her was sprinkled with testaments to her success as an advocate for the handicapped children of the Orthodox Jewish community of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. There were pictures of her standing next to rabbis and shaking hands with the head of the Sisterhood, and framed letters from grateful parents. “Every day I thank G-d for you.” “Because of you, my Pinny has a future.”
After the reporter left, Teresa looked at her son’s picture, which stood on her desk in a white wire frame of twisting vines, birds’ nests and angels. He was dressed in the three-piece suit he wore every day to his job at The District’s beautiful new headquarters in Dyker Heights, where he had been working as a mail clerk for the past eight years. That was quite a coup, getting Nathan that job.
Teresa’s thoughts wandered, leading inexorably to Lloyd Kennedy, Louise Kennedy’s son. Lloyd had just opened up his third dry-cleaning store—this one in Flatbush; he was the coach of his oldest son’s basketball team; every summer he took his family on camping trips to the Adirondacks.
Teresa and Louise had grown up together. They had been bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. When their children were babies, Louise, who was a seamstress, made the boys matching overalls. For all these years, Teresa had kept track of Lloyd as though he and Nathan were in a lifelong competition with each other. Would she be willing to trade places with Louise Kennedy? She couldn’t say she would. But she couldn’t say she wouldn’t either.
Nathan had been her first child. He didn’t roll over when he was supposed to, and he didn’t sit up when he was supposed to either, and at age two he still hadn’t started walking. The doctor told her not to worry. Children develop at their own pace, he said.
At two and a half, Nathan was walking, but with such a wobbly gait that once a woman accosted Teresa on the street and accused her of drugging her son. When she asked the pediatrician about Nathan’s walking, he reassured her that she didn’t have anything to worry about. Finally, Teresa took Nathan to see a neurologist, who diagnosed her son with cerebral palsy, a condition for which there was no medical treatment. Teresa consulted psychics and healers. She went to a laying-on-of-hands ceremony in a Pentecostal church in Teaneck, New Jersey. She took Nathan to see a naturopath in the Bronx, who told her to feed him nothing but white food and green apples. A Tarot card reader on West 42nd Street arranged ten 20-dollar bills in the sign of a cross, to cast off evil spirits.
When it was time for Nathan to go to kindergarten, The District wanted to put him in a class for mentally retarded children. Teresa told the psychologist who had tested him that her son wasn’t mentally retarded.
“How do you know?”
“I know. I’m his mother,” Teresa said.
“You’re going to have to face up to the facts sooner or later, Mrs. Thompson,” the psychologist said. “Numbers do
n’t lie. Your son scored fifty on the Wechsler.”
“I don’t care about your stupid test,” Teresa responded. “My son has cerebral palsy! That’s why he couldn’t do your stupid block designs.”
Teresa paid to have Nathan tested privately. He scored out of the mentally retarded range, and The District agreed to place Nathan in a regular class.
For the next two years, Teresa stood by helplessly watching her son flounder. When she heard about a speech and language school that had just opened up in Buffalo, she made an appointment to see it. The principal, a woman with a keen sense of marketing, had TV cameras and a real estate agent waiting for her when she arrived. Teresa was about to put a down payment on a house when a woman she met in the waiting room outside the admissions office told her that the principal was a cold-blooded bureaucrat who made her son wear a bicycle helmet all day because he had muscular dystrophy and she was afraid of lawsuits.
She decided to keep Nathan in the public school in Sheepshead Bay and fight. Over the years she managed to see to it that everything that could be done for Nathan—tutors, summer programs, occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy—was done. Butting heads with the people who worked for The District was fun for Teresa, who got a kick out of knowing that she, with her GED, was so good at fighting the professionals with all the fancy letters attached to their names.
Word of Teresa Thompson’s many triumphs spread quickly, and it wasn’t long before mothers in the neighborhood were appealing to her for help. Teresa had long ago lost interest in selling cosmetics door-to-door, and she got to thinking she could make a career for herself advocating for children whose mothers were too frightened or too timid to speak up for themselves. Outsmarting The District hacks, whose degrees in higher education had earned them the right to deny services to handicapped children, was even more fun when she was doing it for other people’s kids. If she won, she won, if she lost, she lost; but she liked winning more.
To express their gratitude, the mothers baked her cookies, cakes and pies; presented her with afghans, scarves and sweaters they had crocheted themselves; and sent her notes with heartfelt words of appreciation written on Hallmark cards embossed in gold and silver foil. Within a year, Teresa had enough homemade goods to open up a combination bakery and crafts store. She decided to go into the educational advocacy business instead. And so one day in early August, she hauled all the toys out of the basement, threw out the Ping-Pong table and pinball machine, painted the cement floor periwinkle blue, and using the money she had set aside for Christmas, bought a computer, a small Xerox machine, a secondhand desk and an office chair at a local stationery store’s going-out-of-business sale.
Her first client was a mother from a community of Orthodox Jews in a nearby neighborhood, who wanted The District to pay for her son to attend a special education yeshiva in Scarsdale. Mrs. Rabinsky said that a neighbor of hers, a nice Christian woman, had referred her to Teresa. Her neighbor had told her that if anyone could work it out with The District, Mrs. Thompson could.
Teresa called Greg Abrams, the head of The District, with whom she had had many dealings in the past on behalf of Nathan. When she told him that she had a client who wanted The District to fund a yeshiva, Greg said that he didn’t see why the taxpayers of New York should have to pay for Abe Rabinsky to learn how to daven.
Without missing a beat, Teresa responded, “You drive a hard bargain, Greg. How about we let Mr. and Mrs. Rabinsky foot the bill for the davening?”
Since religious instruction took up more than half the school day, this would bring the cost of the yeshiva way below what The District usually spent on special education schools. Greg was surprised at what a great deal Teresa Thompson, who was known around the office as The Barracuda, was offering him. But then again, it wasn’t her son she was fighting for this time.
Mrs. Rabinsky was delighted when Teresa told her that The District had agreed to fund the secular part of the yeshiva in full. It was fine with her when the advocate explained that for schools not recommended by The District, parents had to pay the tuition up front and then sue for reimbursement. Mrs. Rabinsky had a friend who wanted to send her son to Chaim Akiva, and she referred her to Teresa, and Mrs. Rabinsky’s friend referred a friend of hers to Teresa as well; and so it went. Her first three weeks in business, Teresa earned four thousand dollars, almost five times what her husband brought home from his job repairing elevators for Ace All-Service, Inc., in Queens.
Seven months after Teresa was in business, the yeshiva offered to put her on retainer. That first week Teresa received calls from six desperate mothers, all of whom complained that The District refused to cover the cost of Chaim Akiva just because it was a religious school, and they didn’t think it was fair for their children to be denied a Jewish education just because they had a few problems. Teresa offered The District the same deal she had offered Greg Abrams. It was always the same story, always the same deal.
Within a few years, Teresa had a flourishing business advocating for the disabled children of the Jewish communities in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island. She was on the payroll of four special education yeshivas, and with each new yeshiva, she raised her fee. She had long ago moved her office from the basement of her house to a storefront on Nostrand Avenue, the prime business district of Sheepshead Bay. But when parents started showing up at her house if they couldn’t reach her at the office, she decided to relocate both her office and her family to Kew Gardens, Queens.
Teresa was sitting at her desk eating a pastrami sandwich when Mimi Slavitt came to see her one hot and muggy day at the end of August. Joseph Priskin, the owner of the kosher deli two doors down, sent her the sandwich and a celery soda free of charge every day at one o’clock on the dot—his way of thanking her for getting The District to fund half the cost of a special education yeshiva on Long Island for his youngest son, Yossi. The air conditioner was on full blast, causing the papers covering Teresa’s desk to flutter.
Mimi told the advocate that her six-year-old son was going to be attending Chaim Akiva in the fall and that the principal had said Teresa would take care of getting The District to pay for the school.
After Teresa took a sip of celery soda, she asked Mimi if The District had recommended any schools for her son.
“Yes, they did,” Mimi replied. “A public school in the Bronx where the average IQ is below borderline. My son is not mentally retarded. He has what they call ‘high-functioning autism’ or ‘Asperger syndrome.’ He can tell you everything that goes into making a piano. He knows how to read. He knows the color combinations of every shade on the color spectrum. He can add fractions. He has a very large vocabulary. And except for a few quirks, his grammar is perfect. His problems are mostly social. He certainly doesn’t belong in a school for mentally retarded children.”
“Before you go on, Mrs. Slavitt,” Teresa said.
“Call me Mimi.”
“One small point, Mimi. The term is ‘cognitive disability.’ You don’t want to offend people,” Teresa said, thinking to herself as she took another bite of her sandwich that this woman, who seemed to think her son was a little Albert Einstein instead of a kid with an incurable neurological disorder, was going to be a real pain in the neck.
“Yeah. Right,” Mimi said. “They keep on insisting the school in the Bronx is quote unquote appropriate for my son. When I took Danny to visit the place, there was this beautiful little redheaded boy standing in the corner, flapping his arms. I mentioned to the teacher that I was glad Danny didn’t flap his arms like that and she pulled me aside and told me that the boy wasn’t doing that when he started there at the end of last year. It was something he picked up from the other kids. She made me swear not to tell anyone, but the little redheaded boy didn’t belong there any more than my son did. He was a smart little boy, like Danny. She made me swear again not to tell anyone. She said she was fifty-three years old and no
place else was willing to give her a job. This is the school they say is ‘appropriate’ for my son,” the woman concluded.
Teresa smiled. “I’m just curious. Why do you want to send your son to such a religious yeshiva? Chaim Akiva is the frummest of the frum, you know.”
“Yeah, well, none of the schools want my son. Except for the warehouse in the Bronx where that smart little boy with drug addict parents got turned into a bird. Apparently my son is too much for any of them to handle. Isn’t that their job? The yeshiva was the only decent school willing to take Danny. When Linda said Danny was in, I had to stop myself from kneeling on the floor and kissing her feet. As for the Judaism, we’re not religious but it’s okay with me.”
“I think I get the picture, Mimi,” said Teresa. “Now—”
“My understanding is that The District is obligated to pay for Chaim Akiva, since they have nothing else to offer,” the woman interrupted. “As I told Linda, I don’t expect to pay for the religious component. We’re not Orthodox.”
Teresa squeezed the paper bag on which the words joseph priskin’s kosher deli were printed and her empty soda can together so tightly she felt like Superman turning a lump of coal into a diamond. “Clearly, my dear, you’ve been very busy working on behalf of your son,” she said as she tossed the remnants of her lunch into the trashcan across the room. “From now on, you can leave everything up to me.” After sucking one last surprise strand of pastrami out from between the gap in her front teeth, she launched into the speech she gave new clients.
“Education is a business like any other, Mimi. Don’t waste your time thinking about what these people should be doing. Shoulds don’t exist in their world. As far as they’re concerned, your kid is a peg they have to fit into a hole. If you have a square-pegged kid, and all they have are round holes, then they’ll try to stuff your square-pegged kid into one of their round holes. But not to worry. I’ve been in this business for over ten years. I’m on to their tricks. And I have a few of my own.”
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