Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence. Torey Hayden
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aroused. He was leaning over my desk and staring up. ‘Why don’t you make a loop first?’ he asked.
‘Why don’t you move off?’
‘I mean, put the tack in, then make a loop and try to lasso it.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Jeff. I’ll manage fine.’
Jeff went over to his desk and picked up his new edition of The Physician’s Desk Reference and brought it back. He nudged my leg. ‘Here, Hayden, move over. Let me do it.’
Within moments we were both balanced on books atop my desk with cardboard bats swinging from our hands.
I liked Jeff. Everyone liked Jeff. There was something about him which was innately likeable, but it was a mercurial, undefinable quality. He was tall but not particularly handsome, at least not in the classic handsome-doctor way. He was more what you’d call cute, like a boy you’d take home to Mother when you were in high school. His hair was brown and wavy, a few freckles were still left on his nose and he had never had his teeth straightened, so when he smiled, it came out a cheerful, lop-sided grin. He had an unsurpassable sense of humor, brash, zany and somewhat more juvenile than one would expect from a doctor. Secretly, I suspected that was the reason Jeff and I had been sequestered off together. Between the two of us, we pretty much comprised the clinic’s contribution toward New Wave psychiatry. But for all his beguiling boyishness, Jeff was brilliant. Of all the people I had met in my career, I don’t think I had ever come across anyone with as much sheer intelligence as Jeff had. It glowed from him. We all knew Jeff was brilliant, including Jeff himself, which made him rather hard to live with sometimes. But he had the golden touch. And while he wasn’t modest about it, he took it casually, as if it were not something special. That made him likeable, that quality of off-handed genius, and it made the rest of us feel lucky to know him.
We were still standing there, nose to nose, atop books on my desk when Kevin weaseled his way back into my conversation.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Jeff, after telling him about the morning’s experience.
Jeff paused, fingering the paper honeycomb of the bat’s belly. ‘What’s he afraid of? Is he afraid of actually talking, do you think? Of hearing his voice?’ Another small pause and Jeff looked at me. ‘Or of what his voice might say, if he does talk?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘Or is he maybe not afraid at all of that? Could it be that he doesn’t want to talk and he’s discovered fear makes a convenient cover? People might not bother you quite so much to do something if they think you’re afraid of it. They no longer blame you and make you responsible.’ Jeff then stretched up and tied the thread into place. The bat flew between us.
‘I don’t know. He’s different from my other elective mutes. I don’t know what’s going on with him. I don’t know what he’s thinking.’
Jeff gave me an easy, very casual sort of grin. ‘No. But then do we ever know that?’
The one other person whose imagination had been captured by Kevin’s enigmatic behavior was the Garson Gayer social worker, Dana Wendolowski. She had been the moving force behind obtaining permission to keep Kevin at the home beyond the usual age limit and she had been the one to go to the trouble of searching for someone with expertise in psychogenic language problems.
I found a friend in Dana. She was an incredibly hard worker. The only social worker for all of Garson Gayer’s ninety – six children, she still managed to keep tabs on the progress of even the most hopeless ones and to do what she could to improve their situations both inside and outside the walls of the home. There never was a child I asked her about whom she did not know personally. And there certainly wasn’t a single one of them she didn’t care for passionately.
Although originally from a close-knit farm family in the distant rural reaches of Tennessee, Dana had been in the city since she had finished her graduate studies in social work. In her late twenties, she was a very attractive woman in a Scandinavian sort of way, although her fine, highborn features were at odds with her gentle personality.
In the past Dana had tried her own hand at working with Kevin and trying to get him to talk. She had repeatedly brought him into her office, tried to put him at ease by not forcing the issue and by being kind and reassuring with him. But she just had too many other obligations, and after a number of weeks of fruitless, one-sided interactions, she had been forced to give in. But she hadn’t given up on him.
I met Dana when I came into the back room behind the office the following morning. She had been retrieving some typing from the secretaries at the front desk and I was headed for the coffeepot to make some milky coffee. The sessions with Kevin were killing my voice, and even though I didn’t really like coffee very much, that seemed to be the only thing between me and hoarseness.
How was it going? she asked. All right? Was the room all right? Did I need anything? Did I have what I wanted in there?
I assured her I was fine.
She smiled hesitantly. ‘Guess what we found Kevin doing last night?’
I shook my head.
‘One of the aides went into his room unexpectedly and Kevin didn’t hear him. Kevin was standing in front of his mirror. He was working his mouth. Con – that’s the-aide – said he thought Kevin was trying to talk. You know. He was pushing his lips into shapes of words. He wasn’t making any sounds or anything but he was trying to form words with his lips.’ She smiled at me, paused, studied my face. She had her typing clasped against her breast like a shield. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it? Do you think it is? A good sign, I mean? That he wants to talk? That you might get him to?’
I returned her smile. There was anxiety in her voice. She’d been at Garson Gayer only two years – less than half the time Kevin had been there – and I could already hear the need for miracles gnawing at her. She’d invested a lot of herself in this brutal business, this job where there was always too much to do and too little to do it with. And I could hear it was weighing hard on a farm girl from Tennessee.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think it’s probably a good sign.’
‘Con came right down and told me. He told me what he’d seen and I very nearly called you. I wanted to. I was so excited. And I wanted you to know you were helping him.’
I worked my way down to the therapy room, balancing my cup of coffee on top of my box of materials and struggling to find the key in my pocket. It was a brilliant autumn day outside and when I opened the door to the small room, I was stunned by the piercing sunlight. It illuminated all the little dust motes floating through the air.
Dana’s report of Kevin’s making faces in the mirror was intriguing to me. It was hard to tell if it was much of a sign or not. I didn’t want to put much emphasis on it in my own mind because there was no way of knowing what he had been doing. Just making faces at himself maybe. Or perhaps really practicing. Who knows. But I filed the observation away in the back of my head. So little was known about this silent kid that I appreciated every small notation.
I’d arrived with a new-hatched scheme that morning. Instead of laboring over the dreary story book we’d been using, I thought I’d have Kevin read from the Pumpkin Carol book. We could relax with that. I’d read him some; we could laugh over them; he could try one. It sounded pretty easy.
Kevin appeared at 9:30 on the dot. The aide opened the door and Kevin scuttled in, half walking, half crawling with his knees bent and his arms stiff at his sides. Once the aide retreated, Kevin dived past me for the safety of the table.
Pulling out a chair, I dropped down to the floor, too, and came under the table. Quickly Kevin grabbed the chair and set it up, back against the table, seat facing out, in the way he seemed to find most reassuring. There we were