Читать книгу Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence - Torey Hayden, Torey Hayden - Страница 12

Kevin spoke. In the way I had found typical of most elective mutes, he came back with full powers of speech – grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure – as if he had been speaking all along. In the very beginning, his voice was hoarse and gritty sounding from lack of use. We went through a truckload of throat lozenges and hard candies, trying to ease the roughness, but soon he became accustomed to speaking again and the soreness went away.

Kevin was not a hesitant conversationalist. For the first few days our communications were limited while he experimented with his voice. However, he was speaking easily before the following week was out.

Our conversations were none too brilliant in the beginning. After such an ordeal, I think one is inclined to expect profundity at the very least. Thus it was anticlimatic to have most of our conversations revolve around things like crossword puzzles or Kevin’s day on the ward or my work at the clinic. I couldn’t tell how much he was guarding from me because I just did not know him very well.

However, simply because we had conquered his lack of speech did not mean that we had solved all problems. We were a long way from it. His fear, for example, was still of the same magnificent proportions. The only difference now was that he could make occasional comments about it. But we remained trapped under that damned table. In fact, we seemed more firmly stuck under it than before.

I compromised on the table issue, by not always going under it myself. Instead, I pushed the chairs to one side and sat down on the carpet just beyond the table. This was more comfortable because there was more room and I didn’t have to hunch up. But it did not entice Kevin out and he would not talk to me if I got very far away from him. So mostly, I lay on the rug on my stomach, half of me under the table, half of me out.

Kevin was able to make me captive to others of his fears, too. For instance, one morning someone had left a box of old schoolbooks sitting on the empty bookcase in the room. It was a largish cardboard carton, and when I noticed it, I could see old readers and workbooks sticking out of the top but I gave no thought to it. Kevin, however, focused on it right off.

‘What’s in that box?’ he asked from under the table.

‘Some old schoolbooks, I think,’ I replied.

‘What kind of books?’

I don’t know. I didn’t look.’

A worried expression crossed his face. ‘Go look.’ He nudged me. ‘Go look for me. Tell me what’s in it.’

When I didn’t move, he became more agitated. His speech gave him a new power over me because now he could be sure I understood what he wanted. Sweat beaded up on his face.

‘There might be spirals in there,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘On notebooks. There might be spiral notebooks inside that box.’

‘I don’t think so, Kevin. I think there’s just old schoolbooks.’

‘But sometimes there’s spirals on old books.’

‘No, I don’t think there are.’

‘There might be. You said you didn’t look. So you don’t know. There might be and you just can’t see them. They might be under there. Spirals might be in that box. Go look and find out.’

He could not concentrate. Once the terrifying thought had entered his head, he became obsessed with it. He knew those small, metal, spring like spirals were in there, lurking, waiting to shoot out and get him. All the little manifestations of fear began, the trembling, the chattering, the sweating, the shallow breathing. He wrapped himself up in a small ball way back in the safety of his table and rocked. Nothing I could say would relieve him. Tears welled up. His knuckles went white. And in the end I got up, took all the stuff out of the box, showed him all of it, just to prove that it was entirely safe with no spiral-bound notebooks to be found. Only then could he relax.

For the first few sessions after Kevin began to talk, I told no one. I’m not sure why. It seemed a secret trust for a while. But once his speaking began to take on all the proportions of normalcy and was no longer such a special achievement in and of itself, I started the usual procedures to generalize it to include other people.

Normally, I was able to quickly generalize an elective mute’s speech beyond the two of us. However, in Kevin’s case I soon realized that Kevin’s choice to speak had little to do with me, personally, and my techniques. Consequently, I had no ability to make him speak to other people. It quickly became apparent that I had not caused him to speak. Instead, he had simply opened his private world of one to include me.

And Kevin chose forthrightly not to speak to anyone else. That drastically narrowed the scope of our first victory.

It drove me mad for a while because I could do nothing. I had told Dana and the staff and Jeff what had happened, that Kevin was speaking to me, but try as I might, if Dana or someone else came into the small white room, I could not get Kevin to talk to them. I tried. There was war between us for a while. I tried my usual approach. I tried my backup techniques. I tried other methods afterward, which I had used with some success with other children. I tried other people’s recommendations, the things I read about in journals. When those all expired from overwork, I invented a few new techniques on the spot. In the end, I hoped to wear him down just by the sheer quantity of tries, if nothing else. But I didn’t. Nothing worked.

Nothing worked for a very simple reason, I suspect. Kevin wouldn’t let it. This was a very different kind of battle than the one that first week. Then, it had been him and me against the silence. Not so now. It was Kevin against me.

Finally I gave up. It had grown to be a power struggle between us and nothing more. I don’t know. Perhaps if I had persisted I might have worn him down eventually. But if I had, the objective would have been tarnished. To dominate, I would have had to let the real objective fall to the wayside, stripped of its integrity. So reluctantly I gave in. When the days passed and I could not generalize Kevin’s speech to other people, I had to face defeat. It was miserably hard to back down, but for whatever reason, this apparently was not the time for it to happen.

Undoubtedly, the most irritating aspect of the lack of generalization was that I don’t think everyone believed me when I said Kevin talked to me. I took a terrible drubbing from Jeff. He was absolutely merciless for a while until I actually got angry with him over it. But with Jeff, no matter how irritating, it was pure jest. He knew that if I said the boy talked, he talked. However, the staff at Garson Gayer really got under my skin. They made half-joking remarks and clustered around the door of the small white room and grew very keen for tapes and recordings, so that they could hear for themselves. Everyone knew that under normal circumstances I did a lot of video-recording of my work. That I wasn’t doing so with Kevin seemed to only strengthen the likelihood that I was fabricating the entire thing. But I couldn’t record. There was no way to disguise a recorder in the bare little room and even if I could have, I don’t think I would. It would have been a kind of betrayal to Kevin, who feared the world beyond the door so much. Winning the power struggle with him or asserting my position with the staff shouldn’t be worth that much. So I just held my tongue, stayed out of earshot when I could and pretended not to hear the insinuations or feel them.

So, as the hazy days of October passed, it remained just the two of us alone under the table.

One of the most remarkable things about Kevin was his almost nonexistent personal history. Previously, I had always considered files a nuisance. They prejudiced people against kids before they even met. They were filled mostly with bureaucratic nonsense and the self-important mutterings of little gods. But nonetheless, all my kids had come with them in one form or another and I had always read them. Usually, the worse the kid, the thicker the file. One time I had a fourteen-inch-thick file in my cabinet for one ten-year-old. For Kevin, however, this was not the case, a very remarkable fact in light of his long history with the state.

His folder was a small one, squashed amidst the fatter ones of other children. There was an intake sheet. His mother’s name was given and his stepfather’s. No mention was made of a natural father. A tick mark indicated that he had siblings, but they weren’t enumerated. Most of the rest of the sheet was blank, owing to the fact that he had been in state care rather than at home. There were a number of data sheets and anecdotal records of things that had occurred since Kevin had been living at Garson Gayer. They made interesting reading: accounts of his various fears, of his refusal to go outside, of his ‘tantrums,’ which had required seclusion and medication. But by and large, they were unremarkable. There were some medical reports of bouts with flu and ingrown toenails. Nothing special.

The only detailed report in the whole folder was his school report. Kevin had attended kindergarten at the far south end of the city. After the first year, he was retained because he didn’t talk. Since he still did not talk at the end of the second year but appeared to be progressing adequately, he was passed to the first grade. That whole next year was disastrous. First grade is designed for children who speak. Kevin didn’t. Subjected to behavior controls, tests, inquiries, Kevin failed to respond. He just sat and watched.

In this first-grade section of the report there were a few notes about Kevin’s home life. In a questionable state, the report said. Kevin had bruises and other evidence of physical abuse. I flipped to the front of the report. It was dated prior to the time when reporting child abuse to the authorities became mandatory. And apparently this abuse had never been noted. Scars. Burns. A bruise on the face. The teacher got salve to put on his broken skin and washed his sores, but she told no one. Only people like me, ten years on, found out. Kevin had a sister, a five-year-old at the time, in kindergarten. They were close, Kevin and this sister, and the teacher thought she had overheard him talk to the sister out on the playground. He was very protective of the child. The only time the teacher had seen him react was when someone threatened the little girl. A good sign, this teacher felt.

Unfortunately, by the end of that first year in first grade Kevin had given no evidence of learning. If he could read, he didn’t show it. The school psychologist was called in and Kevin was tested.

The report broke down then, the entries becoming sporadic. Kevin went on to a special-education class the next year. He was eight. At the end of that year he was reported to have a testable IQ of 40, which put him in a very low, uneducable stratum. He was institutionalized for the first time during this period, and from then on, it seemed to be nothing but a string of group homes and juvenile centers and residences. He was even in the children’s unit at the state hospital for a short time before being deemed too retarded and moved into a state-run program for the mentally handicapped. It was not clear when he was where or for how long or why he was switched from one place to another so frequently. But whatever the reason, it did nothing to liberate his power of speech.

There was nothing current in Kevin’s file except updated Garson Gayer reports of height and weight and that sort of thing. There was nothing more to tell why he had been institutionalized in the first place or where his fears had developed or why he had come to Garson Gayer, a residential treatment center not given to taking in severely retarded or welfare kids. And perhaps most sinister of all, there was no explanation anywhere for the single line penciled across the top of the intake sheet: Voluntary termination of parental rights. Made ward of the state.

When I inquired, I found no one knew much more about Kevin. Almost none of the staff had been there as long as he had because Garson Gayer, like most institutions, was a victim of high staff turnover. Dana, who was my usual source of information about everything, had been at the home less than half the time Kevin had. She’d never thought much about his lack of history. With ninety – five other children to worry about and with a cast-iron belief in dealing with only the here and now, she was unbothered by it. Stay in the present, she’d repeat over and over to me. You’re living today, deal with today. And in my heart I knew she was probably right. The staff psychologist only shrugged when I asked him. What do you want? A leather-bound biography? There’s as much in his as in anybody else’s file.

What did I want? That was a stupid question. I wanted answers. I wanted to know why this kid behaved like this. I wanted to know how to fix him. I knew a file wouldn’t tell me those things, even if it had been thick as an encyclopedia. But I still wanted it, for me perhaps more than for Kevin. After all these years of casting my lot with the liberals and the freethinkers, saying how damaging such files were, how they fueled self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess I should have willingly taken a dose of my own medicine. But it felt awful. It left me feeling adrift in a wide sea with no chart. As the days passed, I thought how much nicer it would have been to be adrift with even a bad chart than with no chart at all.

We were reading a cookbook. It was a children’s paperback featuring different dishes of the world. I had used it with my kids in the classroom when I was teaching, and after I’d told Kevin about how we used to cook sometimes, he’d asked if I would bring the book in. So we were sitting on the floor, browsing through the pages together.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to an artist’s illustration.

‘Spaghetti with tomato sauce on it, I think.’

He was thoughtful a moment. ‘It looks kinda like brains.’

I hadn’t noticed that particular quality about spaghetti before and examined the picture more carefully.

‘Have you ever seen brains before?’ Kevin asked.

‘Yes. The grocery store up on 12th Street sells them sometimes. I guess you scramble them up with eggs or something.’

‘No, I mean real brains.’

‘Those are. From cattle, I think. Some people eat them. I guess they’re supposed to be very good but I haven’t been that brave myself yet.’

‘No,’ said Kevin. ‘I mean real brains. Like you got in here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘People’s brains.’

I paused. I had seen human brains before. When I was a biology student in college there were some pickled in formaldehyde up on a shelf in the science building. There’d been pickled babies up there too.

‘I have,’ Kevin said before I could comment. ‘They’re all red and sort of yellowish and bumpy. Like that spaghetti.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘Does that make you sick?’ he asked, studying my face carefully.

‘Is it supposed to?’

‘Does it?’

‘It’s not one of my favorite things to think about, if that’s what you mean,’ I replied.

He was still regarding me very closely. It was a penetrating expression and I could not tell what he was trying to glean from me. Then he looked back at the book. ‘I couldn’t eat spaghetti,’ he said. ‘Not if it looked like that – like brains, all squashed out.’

I nodded.

Relaxing a little, he sat back. ‘Let’s turn the page,’ he said. ‘Let’s look at something else.’

But mostly the days of October were a quiet time. The frantic first weeks when I had tried so desperately to get Kevin to talk passed and we grew familiar with one another. I learned his fears and how to ease them. He weathered my moments of restless impatience. I started bringing him things from the outside, things he liked to do, like paper-and-pencil puzzles and coloring books. I brought him candy bars and magazines and things he hadn’t seen in years. He talked to me mostly of little things, of all the personal minutiae he had saved up over so many years of silence.

Slowly, slowly we managed to creep out from under the table. It was not a fast change at all. I just kept moving back, a fraction of a step a day and Kevin, intent in conversation, would move toward me. Eventually we were both outside the perimeter of the tabletop, and once we were, we stayed. Kevin still couldn’t rise from the floor. He always had to remain there where he could dive for safety if he needed to. But under normal circumstances, he stopped finding it necessary to hide all the time.

The fear began to drop away from him too. Once inside the small white room, when the door to the outer world was shut, I noticed he would sit in a fairly relaxed position and talk to me with great animation. He then would look for all the world like any other sixteen-year-old might look. However, should someone appear at the door or a noise occur outside the room somewhere, the fear would leap up and hood him. His face would go pale, his pupils dilate, his breathing quicken. And he’d go silent. That never changed. He relaxed a little but he always remained alert, always wary.

I had brought him a joke book. Elephant jokes. They were horrid ones, so awful that you couldn’t even groan convincingly when you heard them. But Kevin relished them all. He had quite a sense of humor for a kid in his circumstances, more than I often encountered. So it was fun to joke with him. At the moment his favorite story had to do with frogs in blenders, and I had heard it at least twenty times, so I brought him the elephant joke book.

I had snatched some pillows from the therapy room down the hall. Pushing them up against the radiator under the window, I leaned back while Kevin sat cross-legged and read me the jokes. There must have been about thirty pages in the book with a joke or two per page. Kevin read them all to me and when he had finished, he went back through and read again the ones he liked best. They were so dreadful that I couldn’t even remember the answers the second time through, so I entertained him by making up my own, equally horrible.

‘Where’d you get this?’ he asked me when we finished.

‘Out at the mall. In one of those little cardshops.’

‘Do they have others?’

I nodded. ‘Not elephant jokes. But other ones with jokes in them.’

He regarded me for a moment. ‘Would you get me one? Another one?’

‘Yes, maybe. Later on. They cost a lot of money for their size. But I’ll get another one when I can.’

He continued watching me. It was a bright day and the morning sun flowed through the window. It grazed the side of his face and illuminated his eyes. Even in the sunlight, his eyes were a true gray. There was no other color in them at all.

And still he watched me. ‘You don’t hate me, do you?’ he asked softly.

‘No, I don’t hate you.’

A curious half smile touched his lips. ‘I didn’t think you did.’ His gaze wandered from my face. He looked above me to the window. Then slowly he rose up on his knees to see out. He stayed that way a minute or two before dropping back down.

‘You know,’ he said and then paused. He flipped through the joke book. ‘You know, I talked to you.’

I nodded.

‘I talked to you. I wanted to talk to you.’ He looked up. ‘You see, I knew you didn’t hate me.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I knew that. Even from the beginning. You didn’t hate me and I could tell it.’ The strange half smile was back, and once again he looked over my head to the sunlight. It was in his eyes but he didn’t squint. It bathed him. He sat and stared into it like a lean Buddha.

‘Kevin,’ I said, ‘may I ask you something?’

He looked back to me.

‘How come you talked? How come you decided to do it at all?’

He sighed and gazed into the sunlight. ‘Well, I talked to you because I said. Because I knew you didn’t hate me. I said that.’

‘But why’d you decide to talk at all, after all these years?’

He was silent. He remained silent so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. He just stared into the sun.

‘I used to have a cat,’ he said at last. ‘But it’s dead now. It’s in the ground. It’s just bones and dirt.’ He regarded me. ‘How can I talk about that?’ He looked back into the sun. ‘How can I not talk about it?’