by Torey Hayden
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?
Chapter
5
Following 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 i
t.
“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’?”
“He speaks just to me.”
“Just to you?” I said, surprised. “You mean he doesn’t speak to his father either?”
She shook her head.
“What age was Drake when this happened? When did he stop?”
“He’s never spoken to his father.”
“Never?” This degree of selectivity caught me by surprise. It wasn’t unique in my experience, but it was very, very unusual and tended to point to a markedly more severe problem than Drake appeared to have.
“My husband does the work, so he is not in the house much,” she said. “He is in his father’s bank. And on the weekends he does the golf. And he does the boat on the lake with his father in the summer. These are all important for his work. So he does not spend much time in the house when Drake is awake.”
Our conversation continued. I asked a few more questions, explored a few more avenues; then finally I said, “If you want me to work with Drake, I’d be happy to. Unfortunately, we have to consider the distance. Normally I see children with elective mutism in their school setting, since that’s usually where the mutism occurs, and I work with them two or three times a week until we get the problem sorted out. But there really isn’t any way I could do that here, so far from the city. I’m afraid the only way I could work with Drake would be if he came into the unit at the hospital as an inpatient. It doesn’t sound like Mr. Sloane would be very agreeable to that. And to be truthful, Mrs. Sloane, I’m not so sure I’d be agreeable either. That’s a very drastic measure. Drake is young. Elective mutism with preschoolers seldom needs such a major intervention as hospitalization, so I wouldn’t be very comfortable taking him away from home unless it were really, really necessary. You might prefer to find someone here locally to work with Drake and, if you wish, my unit could offer to liaise with them and support whoever took it on.”
She nodded. “It was good of you to come so far and I am sorry it was for nothing, but I think you are right. We will leave it. I think Drake will be just fine.”
I felt disgruntled after the meeting. It hadn’t been a satisfactory visit for a variety of reasons. Mason Sloane’s actions, while they did not particularly upset me, had certainly impeded my opportunity to accomplish anything useful. His expectations were unrealistic and his attitude untenable. At the end of the day, the fact remained that there was a child who did need support.
I felt Drake’s mutism was worth further investigation simply because it did seem unusually extensive; nonetheless, experience told me that in all likelihood the problem was minor. I suspected Lucia was not admitting the degree to which she spoke Italian to Drake and that his mutism was influenced by his not being wholly comfortable in English. My hunch was that everything would come right quite easily with a bit of very gentle intervention in a supportive environment, but that was the key: “supportive environment.” Sympathetic adults, a relaxed atmosphere, and time for Drake to master two languages were crucial, if there were to be no long-lasting problems. Unfortunately, I went away from the meeting dissatisfied that Drake would receive that. Instead, I was left with the concern that Lucia and the grandfather were locked in some kind of battle of wills or in a series of accusations and denials over the use of Italian in the home and this was causing a poisonous environment, which Drake was reflecting with his mutism.
Anyway, that’s what I considered. However, having lots of time to think as I made the long drive back to the city, a couple of spare not-fitting-in thoughts refused to fall silent. One was Drake himself. He was an extroverted, charismatic little boy who gave such a clear impression of wanting to communicate. This was not at all the typical profile of an elective mute. Nor was it typical of children who had bilingual problems. In my experience with young bilingual children, the extroverted, confident ones would happily bull ahead with whatever mixture of the two languages they had available and not worry whether they were right or not. I had encountered more than a few who were electively mute due to bilingualism, but in all the cases these were very shy, private children by nature who feared humiliation when making mistakes. Moreover, of what I could remember, they had all come from homes where no English was spoken at all, so their problems came from having no chance to practice English outside the public arena of the classroom.
The other odd thing
was Lucia’s comment that Drake had never spoken to his father. This did not fit at all with bilingualism, and I had never encountered a bilingual child who did not speak to everyone at home. Moreover, not speaking to immediate family members in the privacy of the home is an unusual pattern, even when elective mutism stems purely from emotional issues. In my own research it had been closely associated with serious child abuse and severe family dysfunction. Again, Drake’s open, gregarious manner did not give the impression of such a traumatized child. However, I knew not to presume.
Chapter
6
Into my next session with Cassandra I took with me one of my favorite therapeutic props, a box of dolls. These were called Sasha dolls. They were about sixteen inches high with beige nonethnic-colored skin; smooth, stylized limbs; and wistful, enigmatic expressions that were neither clearly happy nor sad. That alone set them apart in an era when virtually all other dolls had vacantly delirious grins that would better suit a stoned hippie.
I now had eight of these dolls, three of which were baby dolls, and the other five—two boys and three girls—had the proportions of a child in middle childhood. Through the years I had made or acquired a large wardrobe of clothes, plus many other small accoutrements, so I now used an apple box to accommodate it all. Wanting to give the apple box a little more longevity, to say nothing of a little more style, I had covered it in bright green wrapping paper with tiny cartoon rabbits all over it that I’d found in a store one Easter.
