“What?” Mimi asked, confused. “You want us to leave?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. But, you see, Howard is very upset.”
“Why? What happened?”
Frank grimaced and looked behind him, where his wife stood with her lips pressed together and her legs planted like tree trunks on the shiny marble floor. “It’s something Danny said,” Frank said. “Something about Howard not being a man.”
“Oh,” Mimi said sadly. “I see.” Then turning to her son, she wrapped her arms around him protectively and told him they had to go.
“Why?” Danny said. “Why? Why? Why?”
“We’ll talk about it later. But right now we have to go.”
“I don’t want to go. I refuse to go,” he shouted. Every eye in the room was on them. “I refuse! I refuse! I refuse!” he kept on shouting.
“We have to leave, Danny. We have to leave,” Mimi said.
Danny continued to shout, “I refuse! I refuse! I refuse!”
She bent down and with tremendous effort managed to pick her son up in her arms and carry him out of the room.
When Aviva got back to Howard, he was surrounded by a group of her friends. He wasn’t crying anymore, thank God, and he seemed to be listening attentively to everything they were telling him.
“No one can tell you that you’re not a man,” her friend Mandy Shulman was saying.
“After the way you stood up there and said your haftorah!” Babs Landau said.
“I want you to forget all about Danny Slavitt, Howard,” Aviva said. “He’s gone. Now why don’t you go and watch the balloon maker. Look at all the fun your friends are having. You go over and join them. He can make anything you want. Anything at all.”
“Okay, Mommy,” Howard said, still slightly stunned, but feeling better. “Am I really still a man, Mommy, even though I’m not eighteen?”
“Of course you’re a man, Howard,” Aviva said, deciding that when she got back to work on Monday, she would have the art deparment create some kind of certificate of manhood for Howard to hang on his wall. “Just look at you in your suit and tie. And the way you said your haftorah—without a single mistake! And what did the rabbi say?” she said, forgetting in the desperation of the moment that it was she, not the rabbi, who had officially proclaimed her son a man.
“Now go to the balloon maker. Ask him to make you a unicorn. Or a bird. Or a bull. He can make anything you ask him to, in seconds flat. Anything at all.”
“Howard’s fine,” Babs said to Aviva fifteen minutes later. “See how much fun he’s having with the balloon man.”
Aviva looked over at the dance floor, and there was Howard, grinning in amazement as the balloon man made him a unicorn out of a red-and-blue-striped balloon. More friends came over to congratulate her and gradually she began to relax and enjoy herself.
The dinner was delicious and it was time for dessert. Aviva was telling a waiter she wanted the crème brûlée when she heard a strange popping sound coming from the dance floor. It sounded like artillery fire. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. She got out of her chair to investigate. The sounds seemed to be coming from the front of the dance floor, but it was difficult at first to make out what was happening. Weaving her way through a crowd of children, Aviva discovered what the commotion was about: Steve Hartman and his friends were sticking forks into the balloons. The closer she got to them, the louder the sounds became.
Aviva looked for Howard, but he was nowhere to be found. Then finally she saw him in a corner near the stage, crouched in the wreckage of torn, deflated rubber, cupping his hands over both his ears, and pleading over and over again, “Stop it. Please stop it.”
Aviva felt paralyzed by a combination of helplessness and despair and some other emotion she couldn’t identify. Howard had stopped crying, but his hands were still over his ears, his face frozen with fear. She looked around the room.
Her gaze was drawn to the other side of the dance floor, where she saw Mimi Slavitt standing next to one of the many cardboard cutouts of Howard she had placed around the room. In this one Howard was wearing a baseball cap and holding a bat, in striking position. The photographer had to take many shots before Howard could get the position of the bat right.
Earlier, when Aviva was making her obligatory visit to greet the outcasts in the section of the room she had reserved for them, she had noticed that Danny Slavitt had left his field guide to rocks and minerals on the table; apparently his mother had come back to retrieve it. She wondered if she had been there when Steve Hartman and his disciples were popping the balloons.
The sadness that had been in Mimi’s eyes when she carried her son away was still there, but mixed in with it now was something else. Something that Aviva found disturbing. What is it? she asked herself.
Then it came to her. Compassion. It was compassion. The idea that she, Aviva Brodner, could ever be the object of compassion infuriated her.
Then, as though being pulled by the force of an invisible magnet, she found herself locking eyes with Mimi Slavitt. There was almost an air of conspiracy in the way Mimi was looking at her. She seemed to be saying that the two of them, Mimi and Aviva, shared a secret that no one else in this room could possibly understand.
Frightened, Aviva turned away.
As she marched back across the room, she decided that first she would get rid of Steve Hartman and his friends. She would drag them by their arms kicking and screaming out into the street if she had to. Once they were gone, she would attend to Howard. She didn’t know exactly what she would say to him just yet, but she knew she would think of something. She always did.
Queen for a Day
Amy once told me about a time she was standing on the subway platform with her son. Ten feet away a woman carrying a blue suede briefcase was staring at her. Alec, ten at the time, had been pacing back and forth on the platform singing “Baby Beluga” at the top of his lungs, and Amy had been trying to get him to stop. But the woman wasn’t looking at Alec; her attention was focused entirely on Amy.
Finally the stranger approached her. She had an autistic son, too, she said. She had left him with his father five years ago when the child was four and she hadn’t seen him since. The tears in her eyes were tinted black with mascara as they streaked her cheeks with two symmetrical lines that reminded Amy of spider legs. She told Amy how much she admired her. Alec was still singing.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I told her not to be so hard on herself,” Amy answered. “I told her not to admire me.”
We were in a café on the Upper West Side. The original plan had been for us to meet there once a month to commiserate about our children. But Amy was always getting sick and would often cancel or she just wouldn’t show up.
Sometimes it was just the flu, or a bad cold, but often her illnesses were rare medical conditions I had never heard of before. Once she had to have an operation on her eyes, which were ironically incapable of producing tears. She had to convalesce in a completely sterile environment and had spent a week blind and alone in a disinfected hotel room. To me the idea of experiencing blindness, wow, what a nightmare. But Amy said it was fine; she had brought along her favorite CDs; it was like being on vacation.
Another time when I called, her husband answered the phone. He said that Amy would be out of town for several weeks. Apparently, every six or seven years her nerves would wrap themselves around her spinal column and the only surgeon who knew how to disentangle them was in Denver, Colorado. When she got back, Amy told me that although recuperation from the operation was painful, the view of the Rocky Mountains from her hospital room was spectacular and the nurses were all very nice.
Amy always seemed to take her illnesses in stride, but when it came to Alec, that was a different story altogether. Her grief would consume her; sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months; once an entire year went by before I heard fro
m her.
Amy’s strange disappearances happened so often that I suppose I should have gotten used to them, but I never did; the only explanation I could ever come up with was that she was dead. Either one of her mysterious illnesses had killed her, or she had been hit by a truck while crossing the street. I once read an article in the Daily News about a woman who had been dragged to her death when the belt of her raincoat got caught on the handle of the door of a speeding fire engine. The world was full of strange, unimaginable dangers; autism, apparently, was just one of them.
I met Amy during those critical first weeks following Danny’s diagnosis. Frantically crisscrossing the country by phone, I had spoken to Martha Gold, the mother of an autistic twelve-year-old in Madison, Wisconsin, who told me about a boy in Lower Manhattan who was on his way to recovery. His mother was “one of the lucky ones,” Martha said in those weary tones I had heard in the voices of so many other mothers. Everyone wanted to talk to Amy, she said. They all wanted her good luck to rub off on them.
Jake and I had chosen the same program for Danny that Amy had chosen for her son. It required him to put in the same forty-hour work week as the men and women I would see walking up and down the hill to and from the subway, whenever I took a break to glance at the world outside my window. Our expectation was that this therapy, which was an intensive form of behaviorism, would cure Danny, just as it was in the process of curing Amy’s son.
All Jake and I had to guide us was a manual we had bought off the Internet. We often felt we had no idea what we were doing, trying to fix Danny’s brain all by ourselves, and there were several questions I wanted to ask Amy about the program. Most of all, though, I wanted her to tell me that there was still hope for my son, who was just six months short of turning the magical age of five, after which the chances for recovery were greatly diminished.
I had been calling her obsessively, sometimes leaving messages, sometimes not. Martha Gold had told me that she was very hard to reach since parents were constantly calling her (to “touch the hem of her garment,” was how Martha had put it), and I was beginning to think that Amy would never pick up the phone until one evening at seven she finally did. The sound of her voice surprised me. It was not the voice of a warrior. It was sweet and soft and very feminine.
I was in our office in front of the computer. The muffled sound of Jake saying “Match” traveled through the wall to my left. I knew the program. Jake was sitting opposite Danny in a little chair in front of a little table before an assortment of blocks. When he said, “Match,” Danny was supposed to find another block the same size and shape and then place it next to Jake’s block. If Jake’s block was round, and Danny picked up a square block, or a triangular block, or a round block of a different size, or if he did nothing at all, Jake would take hold of Danny’s hand and direct it to the block that matched his, and then he would say “Good Job!” and reward Danny with a piece of potato chip. Later Jake would reward Danny only if he picked up the right block by himself.
The e-mail friend who had recommended this program to me said that unlike most other therapies for autism, this one did not require parents to abandon all reason. In fact, the major basis for its appeal was reason. There were scientific studies to back it up. It was a science. We had to use charts and graphs to track every minute of our children’s progress. All of us parents worshipped the mother with the cured kids; she was the shining example of the therapy’s success and she gave us what we needed: Hope. The book she had written was our sacred text. We were members of a secret cult and we were proud of ourselves for having been smart enough to recognize that this was The Answer. We were strictly forbidden to employ any other form of treatment. And that seemed to enhance the therapy’s credibility.
What no one realized at the time was that all of us—whatever therapy we happened to choose—were equally desperate; and our desperation turned us into fanatics. We were blinded by the conviction that if only we did what we were told to do, our children would be saved just like the children of the fortunate, intelligent author of our sacred text. Many of us clung to this hope for a lot longer than was logical for us to do so.
The major allure of the therapy for me was the fact that it was so time-consuming and so difficult. I thought that if there was a path to recovery—and there had to be—it would have to entail a kind of primal sacrifice of self; it would call for more hard work than most people—including my four-and-a-half-year-old son—could endure.
The day we were expecting FedEx to deliver the manual to us, I brought Danny’s baby table from his playroom to his bedroom in preparation for the start of his therapy. I scrubbed it clean of all the encrusted clay, glue and crayon marks. I poured Comet and bleach on it and sprayed it with Fantastik, and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and when, in spite of all my scrubbing, there were still some stains I couldn’t manage to get out, I remembered a magical cleanser I had once used to clean the bathtub of our first apartment in Washington Heights, which had been embedded with decades of dirt when we moved into it.
Jake was in the kitchen trying to train Danny to look him in the eye and I called out to him that I was going out to get something. I had to go to three hardware stores before I could find one that carried the cleanser I had in mind, and when I got home, I scrubbed and scrubbed some more and eventually I managed to wipe away all signs that the miniature table had ever been used.
It felt good to be doing something at last. It made me feel less helpless. It made me feel that Jake and I were taking charge. But it also made me feel very sad. In my obsession to make the table as clean as it had been when I bought it for Danny when he was two, I felt as though I were scrubbing away the old Danny, or at least the Danny I had thought he was, the Danny I had imagined he would grow up to be. I was erasing all signs of that Danny. I was making room for this new Danny that Jake and I were in the process of creating from scratch.
Before Amy had the opportunity to say more than hello to me, I went on and on about how relieved I was to have reached her at last. Then I proceeded to do what I always do when I feel uncomfortable—I talked too fast, too loud and too long. I told her about Danny and the nursery school’s warnings and the debacle with Stan Shapiro and the confusing diagnosis and how much I hoped that we would be able to achieve the same success with Danny that she had achieved with her son. And of course, I congratulated her. Over and over and over again. It still makes me cringe to remember how much I congratulated her.
“It’s been a while since I spoke to Martha,” Amy said after I had finished my monologue.
And then she told me what had happened with Alec—she just gave me the general outlines of it that day. I didn’t learn the details until later, when we became such good friends.
Amy was the eldest of ten siblings and she had had a lot of experience taking care of babies. This was why she knew almost from the moment of Alec’s birth that there was something wrong with her newborn son. If he wasn’t with her all the time, he would shriek the kind of blood-curdling cries that only babies can produce, except Alec’s cries were much louder and altogether more terrifying than any baby’s cry she or the nurses or the doctors had ever heard before. That first night, at three in the morning, when Amy was sleeping, trying to recover from thirty-two hours of labor, a nurse brought Alec to her and placed him at her breast. He couldn’t stay in the nursery because he was waking up all the other babies.
Amy and Steven started taking Alec to see neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists when he was two, but they could never find anyone to tell them what was wrong with their son. It wasn’t until Alec was three and a half that he was given a diagnosis and the diagnosis was severe autism. The psychiatrist told them the prognosis was grim. He said they should “put him away.” Another psychiatrist handed them a brochure for a residential home in Charlotte, North Carolina. When Amy told him that she would never consider sending her son away, he responded: “Are you kidding? You don’t k
eep a child like this. No one keeps a child like this.”
Her friends and parents, the brothers and sisters she had helped raise, all had the same message. Her father, who was a pediatrician, said: “You cannot and must not take care of this child.” He insisted that she send him someplace where they knew what to do with children like this. “His life is ruined, over before it has begun. But why should your life be ruined, too?”
Her closest friend, a painter with whom she shared studio space in Soho, said, “You have a career that is about to take off. If you keep Alec, you will be throwing everything away. And for what? To what purpose?”
Amy never spoke to her friend again. She packed up her things and found another artist to take over her half of the studio. She was about to embark on a mission that would demand all the strength and courage she possessed, and she could not run the risk of having anything like doubt get in her way. She had to surround herself with believers, people who had faith that Alec could and would be saved. As far as her family was concerned, Amy wasn’t willing to cut herself off from her parents and all her brothers and sisters forever, but it would be a long time before she had any contact with them.
When they started doing the therapy, Alec would refuse to sit in the chair and he would throw tantrums, falling to the floor, kicking and screaming. Amy would ignore the tantrums and repeat the instruction and put Alec back in the chair, which was the procedure mandated by the manual: Be strong! Be firm! Don’t weaken! It’s for his own good! And Amy would put Alec back in his chair and repeat the instruction over and over and over again until he was too exhausted to do anything but comply.
Within two months, Alec was mastering the programs rapidly. Once her father-in-law, a New York State Supreme Court judge, came over to their apartment, and observing Amy in action, he pounded the cushions of the sofa where he sat and declared, “You can do this! If anyone can do this, you can! You can cure this child!”
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