Twilight Children: Three Voices No One Heard – Until Someone Listened. Torey Hayden
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no, Friend’s much more than that. He’s a proper friend. You know. The kind you have to set a place for at the table. Drake is an imaginative little boy. We’re handicapped, of course, not having him say anything, but you can tell when watching him that he’s ‘talking’ to Friend. And he’s quite insistent that Friend be given his own paintbrush or crayons or cracker at snacktime. My guess is that Friend is more than just a security blanket. I suspect we’ve got a very intelligent, creative child here, and Friend’s the only one with access to his world.”
After lunch I was to spend half an hour of individual assessment time with Drake. I was shown into the room where the youngest children in the program – the two-year-olds – met, because they only came in the mornings, so the room was empty in the afternoons. It was a lovely room, bright and spacious, painted pale green and white, with a generous number of attractive toys. I was concerned that these would distract Drake, making him uninterested in one-to-one work with me, especially as he himself would be tired by that point. However, I needn’t have worried. He entered willingly with Martina and when she introduced me, he happily sat down in one of the small chairs beside me at the table. Well, he and Friend.
He was a very attractive child. Indeed, he was more than attractive. There was about him a cherubic beauty. Porcelain skin, delicate little Cupid’s-bow mouth, sparkly brown eyes with lashes so long they fell in the “to die for” category. He was like one of those dolls-for-adults, those “collectors’ pieces” that are never meant to be played with. His girlish haircut contributed to this rarified aura.
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 “fortunetelling” 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?
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,”