Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  Owen doesn’t disappoint. He’s immediately in character. Of course, he’s in character all the time. That means knowing his lines is not a problem, talking to the pot of tar—“What’s the matter with you? I said, ‘Howdy!’”—as he gets one arm stuck, then the other, then his legs, and finally his head, talking all the while and drawing laughs and nods from the audience. “How often has he practiced that?” a mom next to Cornelia whispers to her. “If only you knew…” she whispers to herself. It’s exactly the way it is in the movie, every movement and syllable.

  It’s strange to watch him do this in public. It’s his first performance—if you can really call it that. Not that he’s particularly attentive to the audience. Most kids are looking for their parents—one eye on the crowd, and its reaction, as they go through their lines. He’s not. But he’s mindful of the other kids, and we know it’s because they’re also doing dialogue that mostly comports with the movie. When they stray from it, so does he.

  Mostly it holds together, with the other actors playing their roles, if more interpretively and not quite as precisely. What we’ve been doing in the basement he’s now doing with other kids. This, after all, is the dream. We feel a wild aspirational uplift, and at the same time recognize how difficult it was to construct: this was months in the making.

  But it’s a victory won. At the end, they all bow together, hands joined, as the applause washes over them. Owen is not the straggler, struggling to keep up, not this time. And—as other parents applaud as lustily for their kids as we do for him—Cornelia and I realize that is all we really want: for him just to be in the mix.

  The show is followed by a reception for the visiting parents, and we mingle, warmed in the glow of this victory, this momentary easing of our concerns. The parents are all very nice. But after three years at this school, we aren’t really friendly with many of them—a result so different from the many friendships we’ve so readily forged with the parents of Walt’s friends and the so-called “neurotypical” kids at Owen’s previous school, even though those children were not nearly as inclined to be a friend to Owen—a genuine friend—as were his current classmates.

  As the years pass, we hold tightly, fiercely even, to carefully vetted locations and inhabitants on the continent of normal. We stick by old friends and bond with new ones, who are what might be called “context-astute.” They tend toward the eclectic and searching, questioning types, rather than the dug-in and reflexively certain. And if they don’t “get Owen,” if they are unsettled or impatient or dismissive of him, it was like a trapdoor. They are gone.

  But for the core group—a dozen or so families who were in the club—it is the opposite. Their familiarity with Owen, his habits, his rhythms, have grown across years. The fact that many of them were from Boston and know him from before the sudden change at two and a half places them in a mindset we still secretly embrace: of the old Owen, being trapped in some sort of neurological prison, someday to emerge. The attentiveness, both of these parents and their children, allows our quartet to move among them with ease and comfort. Walt has created lasting bonds with the other kids, we with the parents, and Owen takes on a role—much like he has within Cornelia’s extended family and mine—as the one kid in the mix whose demonstrable differences prompt a kind of generalized search for the special, the particular, the unique. Other people’s children, who stand by him and nose around for a way to look inside and then draw him out, are embraced as heroes. They usually know the path inside was Disney. And Owen loves their entreaties, even if it was sometimes difficult to express his excitement.

  Which was precisely the dilemma: the children with those heightened interpretive skills will eventually need a tenor of reciprocity that Owen has trouble providing if they are ever to develop a bond of true, mutual friendship.

  On a fall day in 2000, four families of our oldest friends meet at a working farm in Rochester, Vermont.

  This is the eighth year we’ve been meeting here at Liberty Hill Farm for a long weekend of hikes and hayrides, brilliant home cooking, and shared appreciation that none of us have to work anywhere near as hard as Bob, the dairy farmer, or his wife, Beth.

  And an appreciation of story. It’s not just that we all tell stories of what was going on in our lives. We’ve created a game. Tonight, like every night at the farm, twelve eager kids, including our two, gather in an upstairs bedroom. It’s about time for lights out. And everyone, by now, knows the drill. I go around the room as each child names a favorite character from any book or movie or TV show, and each does, with Owen offering a Disney character, as usual: Sebastian from The Little Mermaid. I invent a story, getting Owen’s Disney character in at the start—to keep his attention. The other kids, with the traditional capacities for anticipation and focus, listen intently, waiting for their character to appear…“and then Sebastian and Madeleine met the Tin Man!” The story builds, as the characters undulate along, a growing band, cresting toward a finale, which tonight, as usual, involves one invented character, a baby with an exploding diaper being toted along by the band. With kids this age, potty humor always works.

  Each character, of course, is the avatar for its child/patron. I mix them, just as I hope the kids will mix, with Owen’s character—his avatar—always right in the thick of it. The characters couldn’t be much more different—a crab, a little French girl, a woodsman of rusted tin. But they stumble forward, feeling their way, relying on each other, moving as one.

  That’s the story I want to tell. The one I want to be true.

  Sally Smith is also telling a story she wants to be true.

  I’m there to help her.

  She’d pulled Cornelia and me onto the gala committee in our first days at the school. As journalists, we were good at getting phone numbers and breaking through the protective webs around the powerful or celebrated. With Cornelia’s plate full, this was more my job. Smith and I bonded. We had many meetings each year about the gala, which became a passion—some might say, an obsession—for Sally.

  We swapped lists of possible learning-disabled achievers—a mention in a news story about difficulties in school, a tip from someone who knew someone—and I’d often make the call. In 1998, I worked the phones to get Rene Russo, who couldn’t make the gala. We defaulted to Vince Vaughn, then an up-and-coming star.

  On the day of the gala, we’d usually have the honorees visit the school and then attend a luncheon with big contributors, which is where, over the years, I saw a subtle tension in this equation of perception and reality as they gazed across classrooms with students who bore little resemblance to what they were like as children.

  At the luncheon atop the Mayflower Hotel, Vince Vaughn asked me about my son. I just said it outright—“He’s autistic.” Vaughn, a very tall and gentle guy who had mild LD issues, looked at me quizzically. “Are there a lot of autistic kids at the school?” he asked.

  Of course, there weren’t, and there were fewer each year. Which may be why I’d just said autistic—one of the first times I did. The game of labels—PDD-NOS, classic autism, Asperger’s—was one we’d grown tired of playing.

  The great gala—a signature night in the nation’s capital—has worked all too well. The school is being overrun with LD kids from moneyed Washington families or folks who moved to DC for Lab. Clear away the clouds of dyslexia or ADD, and many are off to good colleges; outcomes that easily advertise the school’s effectiveness, even if it is largely due to the much shorter distance for the children to travel.

  As I’m working on the gala honoring James Carville and Kelly McGillis in 2000 Cornelia is feeling a creep of despair. The springtime victory of Br’er Rabbit isn’t continuing into the fall. Owen is making progress—more than we could have imagined—but the other kids are moving faster. The brightest spot is his art. They let the kids draw whatever they chose and he is beginning to draw characters, including his Disney favorites, with a kind of joyful exuberance. But that’s as far as self-directed passions are expressed at schoo
l. The production of the play was a special event; energies that are hard to integrate into the daily curriculum.

  Disney is still a controlled substance, the lock in place, and he’s doing less self-talking at school. But with the school not channeling his budding creative urges, Cornelia steps in.

  She takes him aside after dinner—a time we often go to the basement for some Disney role-playing. “Owen,” she says, taking his hands and crouching so they were eye to eye. “We’re going to act out a movie, one of your favorites, with all the Kennedy cousins this coming Thanksgiving—and you’re going to be the producer, the director, and the star.”

  Owen lights up. He knows exactly what all those jobs are. And he immediately makes his selection, one of his favorite movies of that period: James and the Giant Peach, a Disney production of the Roald Dahl classic that mixed live action with Claymation, a technique using intricate clay figures. Move them a smidge, photograph, move another smidge, photograph again. This “stop-action” method has been going on for a while—that’s the way they did King Kong in the 1930s, with an eighteen-inch-tall puppet—but with the latest bonanza of animated movies, stop-action—easier, in a way, than drawing countless frames of animation—was taken up a notch.

  And Disney’s James and the Giant Peach, like Dahl’s book, is a beefy fable, with all the big issues—fear, loss, abandonment, redemption, maturation—and a strong array of evocative characters, led by the orphaned James, whose parents are dead. He is left with a pair of vicious aunts—Sponge and Spiker—conjured by Dahl in a nightmarish reach toward Dickens. Magic intervenes, making a peach tree in their yard grow a single, monstrous fruit. James crawls inside the great, moist vessel as it drifts off to sea and finds inside an array of talking, human-sized insects. James starts out withdrawn, battered, put-upon, but makes discoveries through his new firends—about himself and the wider world—as the peach makes it way to America, the place James dreams about.

  Of course, we want Owen to be the star, to be James. We egg him on, Walt included: “Owen, you’re the only one who knows all the songs and dialogue!”

  Owen will have none of it. “Brian is James; he’s the right one.” Brian, the son of Cornelia’s older brother Deane and his wife, Kathleen, is a year younger than Walt but having a tough go of it. Some trouble in school. Some discipline problems at home. And playing football with the cousins—games led by Walt—Brian was regularly battered. After a bit, we accede. Owen is the casting director. It’s his choice.

  Cornelia had long been wanting to have a colonial Thanksgiving—to have the extended Kennedy clan come to Williamsburg in a kind of reunion and retreat. This is the year, with the play as the weekend’s capstone.

  In a large, carpeted social room at the Williamsburg Inn, the family gathers on Thanksgiving Day—in all twenty-seven people with the eight siblings, including Cornelia, their kids, aunts, uncles, and her parents. Owen and Cornelia have made simple costumes, a telling prop or two for each—a hat, a cane, a vest—that identifies each character, and the kids receive some rudimentary scripts to play out scenes.

  And then, the metaphorical lights come up. Acting as the narrator/stage manager, I start by introducing each of our players, beckoning them to come forward from the wings, a nearby hallway, to introduce themselves.

  Matt—Owen’s confident and smart first cousin, a few months older than Walt—steps up first, cast as the tough-talking Centipede, who, under duress, eventually shows his soft underbelly. With a cap and cigar, Matt describes the character in a few, blunt twelve-year-old utterances and gives way to Walt, who steps up and introduces himself as the Grasshopper, a worldly arthropod who plays the violin but, with his powerful legs, can also pack a wallop. And onward, until all nine characters—boys and girls—have come forward, save one. “Finally, our producer and director is also an actor, playing the Earthworm,” I say with flourish, as Owen comes forward, wearing the rounded glasses of the meekest of the characters, who serves as the story’s improbable protagonist. In the movie and book, the Earthworm is reluctantly used as bait to draw hungry seagulls, who are then webbed by Miss Spider into a flying force that lifts the peach to safety, bound for America.

  Owen looks out at the familiar faces, the aunts, uncles, grandparents, from one face to the next, each looking back with some version of an encouraging smile, knowing and nudging, gentle and ready. In some ways, they’re all here for Owen, something the older kids sense, and even some of the younger ones—down to his four-year-old cousin, Grace, playing Miss Spider. She sees that Owen is standing closer to the audience than the others, only a few feet away, having missed the X taped to the rug. But she doesn’t say anything, knows better, though she’s seen—like everyone—Owen being helped, corrected, guided in doing some of the simplest things.

  Because that’s what happens when no one tells you about the moment the “special” kid arrives. How a whole extended family, top to bottom, gets changed by someone who stops the constant drumbeat of me and mine, who’s up, who’s down, the irresistible drama of bloodlines, birth orders, and familial politics. Why? Because the ways he’s different compels a minute-to-minute search, humanizing and heart-filling, for all the ways he’s not different. It’s us at our best.

  And now he stands before the group, to address them all, really, for the first time. There’s silence, but he’s looking down, or somewhere inside—the invisible places where he so often lives—to find something, to be the giver.

  “The Earthworm,” he says, quiet but steady, “is scared sometimes and confused. And he’s jerlous…jelerous…” There’s a word he’s seeing in his mind and trying to decode, something he must have read, or heard, but never said, and not one of the twenty onlookers, crowded close, can seem to finish it for him; until, after a second of silence, his aunt Marita—who’s especially close and often able to coax things from him—says, “Jealous?”

  Owen looks up and nods, the thread restored. “He’s jealous of the Grasshopper and the Centipede and characters who can do things that he can’t. And that’s why I’m the Earthworm.”

  It’s good now that he misses cues so he doesn’t see how the eyes of all the grownups are shining with tears.

  And the play commences, suddenly everyone in their roles, deep in them, led by Owen—both himself, in the lead, telling them lines they’ve missed; and as the straggling, terrified Earthworm—the two now joined in the fable of journey, adventure, facing fears.

  Until a discovery, well along, that they’ve missed a song. Yes, right. Cornelia hustles, passes out the song sheets—mostly for the parents, the kids know this one—of the movie’s theme, all in song.

  Take a little time,

  Just look at where we are.

  We’ve come very, very far, together.

  And if I might say so,

  And if I might say so, too,

  We wouldn’t have got anywhere if it weren’t for you, boy.

  The singing is strong, the song sheets allowing the parents to dive in, as Owen, knowing these lyrics and feeling them in ways that remain mysterious, dances in song—arms akimbo, reaching, swinging—at the very center of a crazy celebration that he’s unleashed. And this, with that last lyric—“if it weren’t for you, boy”—seems to cue the Grasshopper and the Centipede, who can do so very much, to lift the Earthworm onto their shoulders as all the kids crowd close, wanting to touch him. Voices rise with him—everyone singing out emotions, hoarded across years, finally freed—suffusing the room with light.

  Love is the sweetest thing.

  Love never comes just when you think it will.

  Love is the way we feel for you.

  We’re family, we’re family, we’re family,

  All of us and you!

  And this is how, on Thanksgiving of 2000, the plot of James and the Giant Peach shifts to make an earthworm the hero. No offense to Dahl, or to James. It is a family using a story to get what it needs. We live, after all, in a society that celebrates the winner; lifting one above all
others. We know what that looks like. Though Owen plays a supporting role, we make him a hero of the traditional caste—lifted, triumphantly. He is uncomfortable; this is not his way.

  But we are bigger than he is.

  On 9/11, Cornelia tries to pry the lock off the television to turn on CNN.

  In her panic, with the Pentagon in flames, four miles from Walt at Sidwell Friends and just one mile, across the Potomac, from the Lab School, she can’t remember where she’d hidden the key the day before—a day that suddenly seemed like an eternity past.

  I’m far off, on a reporting assignment. She’s on her game. And after grabbing both kids from school, she has a neighbor take a bolt cutter to the lock. There’d never again be a lock on the television. That era is over.

  Other eras were ending, as well.

  By Thanksgiving, I’m sitting in Sally Smith’s office.

  She says it just isn’t working out for Owen at Lab. I make my case. He’s making progress in his own fashion, improving by the day. I mention how the club for older kids in the elementary program—Greek Gods—is a cinch for him, building upon an interest he developed by memorizing Hercules, Disney’s 1997 feature.

  “He’s turning these movies into tools that, more and more, he’s using to make sense of the wider world,” I tell her.

  She looks at me sympathetically but doesn’t budge. “Many of these kids are just too hard to teach. Their affinities are too narrow. There aren’t enough handles to grab and use—at least not in a classroom setting.” She pauses. “Look, not picking up social cues is just too great a burden. They can’t engage with teachers or peers with enough ease, enough capacity, to push themselves forward.”

  I tell her I’m not going to argue with her. She runs the school. She decides what kind of students it should serve. Of course, we both know everything: that the gala, first created to bring much-needed funding to the Lab School, is now shaping it. The students are looking more and more like younger versions of the celebrated awardees, and less like the son she originally started the school for.