Twilight Children (5 page)

And he was a
very
charming child. Looking up with wonderfully smiley eyes, as he sat beside me, his expression was of eager, almost squirmy anticipation, like a happy puppy. It made me feel just as eager.

“Hi, my name’s Torey, and know what? I’ve come here today just to see you! You and I are going to do some interesting things together.”

More excited squirming, more gleeful smiling.

“And look. I’ve got a box all full of fun things for us to do. Shall we open it and see?”

Drake didn’t try to open the box himself, but he looked at it with anticipation. I reached over and pulled the box toward us. This was the “bag of tricks” I traveled with when I went to assess children or work with them in schools. The container had originally been a presentation box for a gift of fruit, and as the fruit had had to travel by carrier, it was sturdily made. It was low and flat with a lid that lifted off. Inside I kept a whole assortment of things I thought might be helpful in encouraging children to talk—puppets, paper dolls, plain and colored paper, a whole collection of different pens, pencils, and crayons in a smaller box, some stickers, a couple of picture books, a Richard Scarry’s word book, a joke book, a coloring book, a paperback full of puzzles, two Matchbox cars, a family of dollhouse dolls, an old, broken Instamatic camera, some plastic animals, some plastic soldiers, and whatever “clever” things currently had my fancy. At the moment it was a “fortune-telling” fish, which was really no more than a piece of plastic that flipped around when warmed by the heat of the hand.

I took out the Richard Scarry book. This was a favorite of mine, simply because there were so many pictures in such variety that I could do an infinite number of things with them.

Paging through, I came to two pages illustrating numbers. One whale. Two walruses. Three piggy banks. And so forth, with delightful pictures accompanying. “Look. Here’s counting. Can you count?”

Drake nodded enthusiastically.

“How far?”

He held up both hands. Then one by one, he put his fingers down, as if counting them. But, of course, he made no sound.

I nodded. “Okay, let’s do these. Look. One whale. He’s big, isn’t he? See how much of the page he takes up? Have you ever seen a whale?”

He shook his head but then stretched his hands way up over his head. The meaning of what he was trying to communicate was perfectly clear.

“And look, two walruses. Aren’t they funny-looking?”

Drake gave a breathy, noiseless little chuckle.

“Three piggy banks.”

Drake was hooked in the activity now. He was leaning forward. He had pulled Friend in close to join us, perhaps to show the tiger the book, too, and he pointed to the next row of pictures, which showed four bells. They were the sort that had handles, like old school bells. Drake tapped the page enthusiastically and then tapped my shoulder to get my attention. I looked up. Cheerfully, he moved his hand up and down to indicate he was ringing such a bell.

I hesitated, not speaking.

He tried again, imitating the movement of shaking one of these handled bells up and down. He smiled in eager anticipation of my recognition of his action.

I still hesitated. Truth was, I didn’t want to reinforce his gesturing. In my research I’d found children had a much harder time speaking to people with whom they had already formed a nonverbal relationship, so it wouldn’t be helpful for us to go that way. But it was hard not to respond to such a charming little boy.

And this, I was thinking, was perhaps a good deal of the problem. He was so engaging, so keen, and, indeed, so sociable that he didn’t really need words to get people to interact with him.

Then I thought: why? Speech is natural and innate. Why not do it? What was the payoff for Drake to stay silent when he so clearly wanted to communicate with people?

F
ollowing my assessment with Drake came a meeting with his parents. Only it turned out not to be his parents. It was his mother and Mason Sloane, his paternal grandfather. There was no explanation offered as to where Drake’s father, Walter, was.

Mason Sloane shook hands with me in a firm, businesslike manner. He was a short man, shorter than I was, mostly bald, and with a very red complexion. Despite being well over sixty, he was fit and muscular with the sort of physique one usually associates more with manual labor. Not in this case, however. His hands and nails were so well cared for that they looked professionally manicured. His clothes were precise and elegant, and he wore an expensive watch and two rings.

Drake’s mother, in contrast, was tall and very thin. She was quite a beautiful woman in the delicate, rather nervous way you find in thoroughbred horses. Her coloring was Mediterranean. She had long dark hair and the same liquid, deerlike eyes as Drake had, only deeper and darker. Her name was Lucia, and when she spoke, I realized she was Italian. Not an American of Italian descent but actually from Italy. Her English was heavily accented and, indeed, not very good.

No one had mentioned this fact to me. When I heard Lucia speak, my mind instantly leaped to Drake’s mutism. Did Lucia talk to Drake in Italian at home? Was this perhaps his problem? Could the mutism be due to language confusion? Was it possible he simply didn’t have a good enough command of English? Which would explain a whole lot.

All three of us sat down in the small child-sized chairs at the equally small table.

“You’ve seen Drake now,” Mason Sloane said. “I am sure you can tell what a very intelligent little boy he is.”

I smiled and nodded. “Yes, I’m very impressed. He’s lovely.”

“So what is your diagnosis?” he asked.

“I’m not really in a position to give a diagnosis at this point,” I replied.

“You’ve seen him?”

“Yes. But more is involved than just giving a label, because it’s important that the label be correct. Moreover, a diagnosis in isolation isn’t very helpful.”

“This is your specialty, isn’t it? You have a lot of experience with elective mutism. That’s what I was led to believe in that article,” he replied.

“Yes, I’ve had experience and I’ve worked with many elective mutes, but I’ve also come out here as part of a team. It would be inappropriate for me to give the impression I’m solely responsible for diagnosis or treatment. The hospital unit I work for doesn’t function that way.”

“Why? It’s straightforward, isn’t it? He doesn’t talk. Nothing else is wrong with him. He talks at home; he doesn’t talk at school. That’s elective mutism, isn’t it? Your article said that the vast majority of children you worked with spoke to you in the first session. So I was assuming it was just a matter of your coming out here and getting him started. So didn’t you get him to talk?”

“This was an assessment, Mr. Sloane. It would be inappropriate for me to come in and work with Drake without assessing what the problem is first.”

“All this talk of ‘inappropriate’ sounds like a smoke screen, if you ask me. Or a way to get money out of us. We’ve already told you what the problem is. We engaged you to come out, diagnose him with elective mutism, and fix that.”

“Yes, I know. But that isn’t quite the way things work,” I replied. “First there is an assessment.”

“So you didn’t get him to talk?” he said.

“No.”

“So was the article not right?”

“The article was right. But the article was about my research. This is an assessment. I came out to assess Drake. Because I’m employed by the hospital unit, I work as part of their team. So before I can work with a child, I have to go back and talk to the psychiatrist who will head the case. Assuming we want to proceed.”

Mr. Sloane frowned. “We
wanted
just you. We don’t need a psychiatrist. Drake isn’t mentally ill, for God’s sake. We were employing
you
. I thought we made that very clear.”

Drawing in a deep, rather frustrated breath, I sat back in the chair. Or at least as much back as one can sit in a chair designed for a three-year-old.

“We wanted
just
you,” he said again. “To come out here. To see him, get him to talk at school. I said money is no object. We’ll pay you whatever you charge. Whatever the costs of your coming out here. Just do what you said you could do in the newspaper.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Great!” he said and banged the table with his hand. “So it was all lies! You call yourself a professional! If people ran banks the way you damned doctors work, the whole country would be bankrupt.”

Before I realized what was happening, he leaped up from his chair. He stormed out of the room, slamming the door hard behind him.

Astonished, I stared at the door through which he’d just disappeared. Then I looked back. Lucia remained sitting, motionless. She had her head down, but then raised it and very briefly exchanged a glance with me before lowering it again. It wasn’t a revealing glance, however, so I couldn’t discern what she was thinking.

I had instant pity for her. It had to be hell living in the shadow of a man with such strong views, imperious demands, and an astoundingly short fuse.

Silence followed. It wasn’t very long. A moment or two, perhaps less than a minute, but it was acutely uncomfortable. I didn’t know whether to sympathize aloud with her and risk humiliating her or whether to express amazement at his behavior and risk putting her on the defensive. In the end I opted for no comment at all and decided to plow ahead as if this were all perfectly normal and I were used to it.

“Drake’s teacher says he talks normally at home,” I said.

Lucia nodded. She still had her head down. Her hands twisted nervously in her lap. I thought she was going to cry.

“Can you describe how he speaks to you?”

She shrugged slightly without looking up. “How do I describe that? I don’t know. He speaks normally. Like any boy. He says normal things.”

“How old was he when he started to speak?”

She hesitated. “When he was … nine months old?” It came out more a question than an answer. “Yes, nine months old. I think this is right. This is what I remember.”

“That’s quite young, isn’t it? Especially for a boy. What were his first words?”

Again, she seemed rather flustered. I was trying to puzzle out if it was due to shyness or perhaps difficulty coping in English. I couldn’t tell.

“‘Kitty,’” she said at last. “Because he much likes our cat.”

This seemed odd to me. The way muscle coordination works in the mouth, most babies’ first words begin with
D
or
B
. Combined with normal babbling, this produces “da-da” or “ba-ba.” The hard
c
sound that would be necessary to produce “kitty” comes quite a bit later.

“Does Drake speak in Italian with you?” I asked.

She reddened and looked away. I got the immediate sense that she’d been told not to speak in her native tongue to her son and was now embarrassed to admit to me she did. It wasn’t hard to imagine the grandfather making such a demand. Or perhaps others had already implied that bilingualism was at the root of Drake’s problems, and she was now reluctant to admit that, in spite of this, he and she still spoke Italian to each other. Whatever, she didn’t answer immediately.

I sat quietly and let the silence grow.

Finally she nodded. “Yes, I sometimes speak Italian to him.” However, she then backed off and corrected herself, saying, “No. No, I mean, he does not speak it.”

“You’re saying you speak to Drake in Italian, but he does not speak Italian back to you?”

“Sometimes. Only sometimes. I mean, only sometimes that I speak Italian. I too speak English. Much of the time. Most of the time.”

“But about Drake. Does he speak in Italian when he is talking to you? Or does he speak in English?”

“In English. Only in English.” Then a hesitation. “Although he can understand Italian.”

I nodded and smiled. “It’s all right if he speaks Italian at home. I don’t want to make you feel you shouldn’t be speaking to your son in your native tongue. I’ve worked with many bilingual children and I think the advantages of growing up with a second language far outweigh any problems it might cause in the preschool years. In my experience, while there may be a little confusion when they’re starting to speak, virtually all children outgrow that quickly and have no problems in the long run. Nonetheless, it’s important to know if this could be happening in Drake’s case. If bilingualism is causing Drake’s mutism, we need to know in order to help him. Because I would work with this differently than if the mutism were due to psychological reasons.”

A slight nod of her head, but she still didn’t look at me.

“So …?” I asked, waiting for her to admit to the Italian.

Head down and turned a little away from me, Lucia didn’t respond.

“Okay,” I said and knew to move on. “Does Drake speak to anyone outside the immediate family? Aunts or uncles, perhaps? Or cousins? Neighborhood children?”

“No. No one.”

“So, just you and your husband? Just at home to the two of you?”

“No.” Her voice became very meek.

“How do you mean, ‘no’?”