by Ron Suskind
She slips the twenty-two pages of charts and figures, raw numbers and hedged assessments, back into her briefcase and runs her fingertips across the buttery leather and the embossed C.A.K. A wry, levelheaded twenty-something named Cornelia Anne Kennedy once carried this Coach bag to magazine editing jobs in New York and then to a job at PBS in Boston, where she was working when Walt was born. Of course, by then, she was Suskind, but, beyond the changes a first baby brings, she was still the same. She still loved springtime as she always had. When she was ten years old she started babysitting for the next-door neighbor in Connecticut—an almost impossibly positive and buoyant family. There she helped a lovely, graceful mom raise her five children and eventually watched her send her boys off to a camp in New Hampshire each summer. She’d see them come back altered, settled, their calves thickened, gazes clear, and handshakes firm, and she said if she has a boy someday she’ll send him to that camp. She did, and that’s where Walt now goes in the summers. It all used to fit so neatly—the things she learned to want, the ways to get there.
Then nothing seemed to work quite so neatly. She’d tried a few part-time jobs since Owen was beset, nearly a decade ago now—anything to clear some space, a little headroom to breathe. She married a man who can be intense—she loves that—and who chose, with her encouragement, a career that swallows up everything in its path and is dizzyingly visible. Everyone can see and keep tabs—this story, that book—and have an opinion. She’s long needed an untrodden plot, something all her own to work and tend, that wasn’t either my landscape or the country mapped by Owen’s vast needs, which seemed to grow by the hour, even when she slept. There were days she wanted to run away. And when I saw it coming, I’d try to surprise her with a “run away with me” trip. So we could do it together—overnights somewhere, mostly. A few of those a year, and then back to it. No point in complaining—it is what it is. And the bar mitzvah, just a few weeks ago, was a great victory. Everyone now sees what we had glimpses of in the house, at dinnertime prayers, in passing utterances—that, beneath the surface, a deep inner life seems to be taking shape.
Forgot that one. Inner life. What IQ score would they give that, or the sidekicks concept? Huh? The world and its goddamn yardsticks. She checks her watch—it’s time. A moment later, she and Bill and Suzie are settled in his office. She loves Bill, too, just like she loves Suzie. They really are like family, and there’s nothing that they don’t know. That makes the discussions go so smoothly; difficult for her, but facile.
“So what’s latest?” Bill says, and Cornelia lays out a point-by-point assessment of five schools we have visited—three in Maryland, one in DC, one in Virginia—in the last three months. Each tends to have something valuable to offer—this one’s work with computers, that one’s art program. There’s a school near Annapolis, more than an hour away, and twice that at rush hour, which has a strong academic program. The one in Virginia has the best teacher-student ratio.
Suzie knows all the schools well; their strengths and weaknesses, mostly in accord with what Cornelia has found. “Owen’s a tough fit,” she says. “Some of his skills are deep, especially when he gets one-on-one instruction, but so are his challenges.”
They all nod. Everyone knows this. “If I could take a piece of each school, the part they do well that he needs, and put it all together,” Cornelia says ruefully, “we’d be set.”
“You could,” Bill replies. “Do it yourself.”
She’s not sure if he’s joking, so she chuckles.
“No, I mean it.”
“Are you talking about homeschooling?”
“Yep.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
He isn’t and neither is Suzie, who joins in. “You know, you’re someone who really could do it.”
Cornelia feels an urge to politely stand up, tell them some emergency has come up, and slip out the door. But she doesn’t budge as Bill and Suzie begin to describe how she might manage it. Say homeschoolers and she thinks of religious fanatics in Oklahoma. But, no. Both describe how parents of spectrum kids are increasingly resorting to it. There are materials Cornelia can buy, classes she could take, Web sites to tap. Suzie would help. Bill, too.
It’s indisputable that the whole team of half a dozen or so specialists who regularly work with him is about the best in the area. Now, two honored members are exhorting her to step up, on Owen’s behalf.
“No one knows what he needs or how to get through to him better than you,” Suzie says.
“Sometimes there’s no other way,” Bill adds.
Mostly, Bill and Suzie are talking excitedly across the table to each other—then she can do this, or she can try that—as “she” listens. And this person they’re talking about—what about her life? That is, if this is the right path, which is by no means clear, especially considering the social isolation of homeschooling, when one of his key disabilities is his problem with social engagement. She’d be with him all day, every day. Literally. She sometimes thinks of autism as a beast that swallowed her son, one she battles every day, trying to retrieve him, to pull him out. She’d be swallowed, too, she and her whole life. And what rushes into her head? The goddamn whale in Pinocchio, Monstro, and she’d be Jiminy Cricket going into the belly after him. Please someone get these Disney images out of my head!
She snaps out of it, looks at the clock. They’ve gone over. She stands abruptly. “This is a big step—I need to think this over and do a lot of investigating.” Bill and Suzie nod, looking tentatively up at her, both signaling that they hadn’t thought much about how Cornelia would react to this. She knows they have come to see her as a partner, co-investigator, kindred—which, God knows, is rewarding. But we’re not all talking about the same thing, here. This is their job, but it’s her life. For them, it’s a contribution; for her, total commitment. “Thanks, guys, really, I really have to think about this.”
She slips out into the street and decides three things. First, she won’t mention any of this to her husband, because he’ll go into his motivational speaker mode, saying, “You can do anything,” and it’ll make her want to strangle him. Second, she needs to sit in the quiet car, alone with her thoughts. And third, she whispers to herself, “Maybe I could just drive away where no one can find me.”
The teenage boys emerge from a thicket of bushes onto the small grassy area that serves as a stage.
They are thinly costumed, with swords, sheaths, and breastplates too snug for the bodies of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. There’s a hubbub. Props need to be moved into place. The parents are here.
This is the “Glade Play,” one of many productions put on each summer at Walt’s camp. It’s been going on for more than a century—the camp and the play—on this very mountainside overlooking a crisp, clean New Hampshire lake.
Walt is thriving so robustly here that it’s hard not to wonder what’s missing in his life inside our home. It hasn’t been an easy few months for him. He was grounded for a month after we had Owen turn state’s evidence against him. We didn’t feel good about that. In fact, we didn’t feel anything about it—a complete, parental blind spot. Owen’s reaction when I pressed him about whether there was a party—his lips pressed together, like there was war raging in his mouth—was a clear sign that something had happened and Walt had brought him in on it: a hugely positive thing in their relationship. In our anger and worry over the party, we made a big mistake. For the first time, Walt had created a separate brotherly pact with his young accomplice and, in one move, we torpedoed it.
Not that it seemed to affect Walt all that much. He took the hit—“manned up,” as he says—and then all but raced north to his third long summer at Pasquaney, a camp distinctive for being a throwback. It hasn’t changed significantly since it was started in 1895. That was the Progressive Era, when there were many admirers—including the Yale men who founded the camp—of Ralph Waldo Emerson and values like self-reliance, selflessness, care for others, simplicity, trust, humility, and mo
re self-reliance. Walt immediately took to the first and last virtues, and then filled in the rest, year by year. The change was stark, right off. When he won the award for best first-year camper at twelve, he didn’t tell us for three days. All those years ducking stares built in him a desire to go quietly about his business; get the job done without fanfare—a quality often seen in siblings of the disabled. They tend to earn accolades—fueled, early on, by an adult-strength dose of survivor’s guilt—but rarely want to receive them. What was indisputable is that living within our family’s day-to-day improvisations, with a conspicuous father and conspicuous brother, impelled him to dive into a firm structure, calibrated over 109 years, of one-size-fits-all rules and rituals.
Which is where he stands now—in a white tank top with a blue “P” on it and long gray shorts with a blue stripe, made fashionable during the McKinley administration—looking across the hillside amphitheater to find us in the audience.
Our eyes finally meet. He nods, barely, and looks away.
No noticeable smiles toward parents are in order. This is serious business, seriously played. Specifically, Henry V—Shakespeare’s drama about the young king who leads his nation into a war that, ultimately, ends in disaster.
Cornelia and I hardly know what to do with ourselves. We’ve sent Owen off to a regular camp in Maine, for artistic kids. They were blown away by his sketchbooks and, after many calls and memos to counselors and staff, it seems they’ll be able to deal with his “behaviors.”
On this splendid early-August afternoon in 2004, we can be just like everyone else. It’s something Walt appreciates—how could he not? And we do, too. For him. For us.
The campers begin to play out scenes—not the whole play, but quite a bit—chosen, as was the play itself, by the camp’s astute assistant director. He told Cornelia that he thought this play would be especially resonant with the kids because of the many obvious parallels to George W. Bush and the Iraq War, now a year and a few months along.
He’s right. The wayward young king—his advisers gathered close—frets over his troubled relationship with his father and the merits of attacking France. Connections swirl in an orchestral weave: a 400-year-old drama that could have been written, names changed, in any New York Times story about last year’s march to war; eternal issues of hubris, a young man’s search for respect, and, ultimately, of Oedipal wreckage. I think as I watch the play start, how would I even begin to explain this to Owen, if he were here? You’d have to write a novella, quick, and then recite it through the voices of Disney characters. But it is precisely those constant calculations that we’re free of—Cornelia and I, both—in this rare interlude. Our bodies rest on the steep slope of grass, free from a state of constant, low-grade tension of how to bind Owen to us and the wider world.
Of course, it’s one hell of a play, lurching forward as Henry rallies his men to action in the St. Crispin’s Day speech, saying that their deeds on this day of battle will create a story, told through time:
Then shall our names,
familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son.
And, finally…
But we in it shall be remember’d—
we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
They grab swords, boys in their mid-teens, playing out the Battle of Agincourt in moves most of them honed on the kindergarten playground—trying not to laugh as they shove and swing—until the boy playing Talbot cries out and falls at the very moment of victory. Now, they’re all back in character as celebration mixes with grief. The six of them, led by Walt’s buddy, Robbie, as Henry—with Walt, as Gloucester, right behind him—lift the dead Talbot, a thin camper named Vikram, onto their shoulders and begin carrying him up the center aisle. The dell falls silent. Past and present, literature and life, snap together like a trap; a context, loosed from time and place, that feels like a glimpse of indisputable destiny. They’re mostly not our sons, not at this moment; they’re young men—soon to arrive at the age of those now dying in Fallujah and Kabul. Together, they begin to softly sing a dirge as they march:
“Non nobis, non nobis, Domine Sed nomini tuo da gloriam” (“Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to thy name give glory”), the Latin prayer of humility and thanksgiving.
And it is we who suddenly feel humility, and thankfulness, that Walt has found such joy and release here. Parenting, it’s often said, is about loving and letting go. Just like all the other parents gazing on, breathing lightly, we’re doing our share of both.
“Look at him,” Cornelia says softly, her breath on my ear, as Walt marches by, his eyes flat, fixed. And we both feel it—a familiar emptiness, sad and sweet, when you feel life’s clock strike an hour. It prompts us to then applaud all the louder, the kind of cheering that tears at you. We want him to hear us. This is where he belongs, following whatever star he chooses, not bound by the gravitational field that envelops every house, and certainly ours. One boy, wandering so often in solitude, compels us to furiously shape our world to meet his needs; the other, among a band of brothers, now taking their bows, demands to be challenged and shaped by the wide world, with all the judgments and dictates and uncontrollable forces we fear.
We want that for him, though on this path his brother cannot follow.
I decide to first stop by the office—to hear the whole story.
The director of Owen’s camp in Maine greets me through the screen door—“Come on in, let’s talk.”
He seems like a good-natured, middle-aged guy, more like a loan officer than a guy who goes to work in short pants. He called me yesterday, said I ought to drive up.
“We just can’t handle him,” he says. “He’s much more distracted than we figured. So much is going on in his head. He’s gentle, that’s not it. The counselors are just kind of overmatched.”
I don’t argue. “Well, he made it five days—could be worse,” I say, trying to salvage an upbeat anything. Then I think of what Owen must be feeling and I feel like an idiot. We overreached, thrown off by the insanity of this damn thing, where he can give a bar mitzvah speech like that and then vanish inward on a whim, and barely know where he’s standing. Of course, they were impressed by the sketchbook—who wouldn’t be? I probably oversold Owen, and now he’s been whacked.
“Have you told him?” I ask.
“We told him to pack up his things.”
Owen’s sitting on his trunk outside the cabin when I walk up.
“Do I have to leave?”
“Yup, buddy, that’s why I’m here.”
He gets up and stands there, not budging. Something’s on his mind, churning. I know, by now, not to interrupt the silence.
“I’ll leave only if you promise someday I can come back.”
I’m caught short. I have no expectation they’ll let him return.
“You bet.”
God, I hate lying to him. He believes everything you say. Lying to him is like a crime.
We don’t say anything in the car for five minutes, then ten. He’s just looking out the window, the same look he had after the faux graduation from the Lab School. The Maine coastline is passing by. It’s now fifteen minutes.
He starts singing.
Come with me, and let’s go wander
Far beyond the wild blue yonder,
Out where stars roam free.
Though the journey’s far from breezy,
Stick with me, I’ll make it easy.
You can depend on me.
Oh, brother. It’s a song from Home on the Range, the Disney movie Owen saw numerous times last spring. The plot involves Roseanne Barr and Dame Judi Dench voicing cows who are trying to save their Patch of Heaven farm by outwitting an evil cattle-rustling speculator. There are quite a few well-developed sidekicks, including a character n
amed “Lucky Jack,” a wise, irascible jackrabbit.
Owen knows the movie was not well received but doesn’t care. He loves it and adores the sound track of prairie ballads sung by Tim McGraw, Bonnie Raitt, and k.d. lang. He watches it. He lives it.
With my mind wrapping around the selection of this song, it takes me a moment to realize what’s different. He isn’t singing in the voice of one of the characters.
It’s his own voice. A completely different tone than he usually sings in.
Yeah, there’s a long road before us,
And it’s a hard road, indeed.
But, darlin’, I swear,
I’ll get us there,
Wherever the trail may lead.
It’s a long road before us, a hard road, indeed.
For the next five hours, as we travel west across the northernmost reaches of the Appalachian Trail, he sings that song maybe twenty times—all five verses.
Finally, as we close in on Fairlee and the lake house, I’m reduced to pleading.
“Owen, you’ve got to stop. You’re killing me.”
He looks over.
“Okay—let’s have a discussion. Tell me why you’re singing that song; why do you like it so much?”
“Because it’s a journey song. I like journey songs the best.”
Cornelia and I talk that night on the dock. She’s upset about camp. Owen’s not happy. Can we fix it, make it right? This is our model—she cobbles together a plan, I sell it.
A week later, I’m on the phone with the camp’s director. I tell him what Owen said when I picked him up—about wanting to come back. It’s a long call, in which I go from cajoling to penitent to understanding to outraged, and then back to penitent. Owen had been to a few summer camps over the years, but always with an aide, a “shadow,” that we’d hire to guide him along. This was our mistake, I tell the director—sending Owen this time without one—but in the past few days we’ve found one, a shadow who could come back with him. I’ve worn him down. The man just wants to get off the phone.
