The pain was still there, but so was an empathy she’d never known. As long as she could, she’d deferred ringing special services. It was Jim who said casually,
“Might be some help to Serena-May.”
The realization that she might deprive the child of any or all advantage overcame fear. She’d picked up the phone. Her hands were shaking as she dialed the number. A woman with a cold voice answered. Cathy told her it was to do with Down’s Syndrome and immediately the woman said,
“You want the mentally handicapped section. Hold on, I’ll put you through.”
Cathy had stood transfixed. The dreaded words had been said... mentally handicapped... she felt sick to her stomach. A woman came on and was as warm as the other was cold. The services and help were outlined, and somebody would call at Cathy’s discretion.
After, she picked up Serena-May and great sobs tore from her. Now the reality was here. No matter what people saw or didn’t see in the child, thought or didn’t think... here was the cold precise classification. From here till doomsday she and Frank could clutch at, “mild.”
“She has mild Down’s Syndrome.”
The term had become a talisman. It now lay shattered at the end of a telephone line. Serena-May grabbed her finger and gave a tiny smile. Cathy said,
“Row the boat, do you think doodle-een you could go a blast of two of that.”
Serena-May could. Her face lit up in anticipation of the sound of her mother’s laughter. Heinz headed for the garden, he didn’t think he could take it one more time.
“Surely,” he thought, “there’s a cat out here that needs the living daylights shook from it.”
The tenderness Cathy was experiencing exorcised all remnants of the phone call. Salinger defined sentimentality as showing a thing more tenderness than God would give it. Who knows what God thinks, but an observer might have felt that now and then, a smile touches the mouth of any deity.
Mongoclass="underline" Mongoloid.
Mongol, Mongol, Mongol, Mongol, Mongol...
Frank tried the stunt of saying a word often enough to take its power away. As Lenny Bruce had attempted with obscenity. If there was a more obscene word than this, he didn’t know it. Cathy had mentioned the time when Serena-May would go to school and she asked Frank,
“How do you think I’d be if they taunted Serena-May?”
“I know how I’d be.”
“I’d burn the friggin’ school, do you think that’s extreme?”
“I’ll carry the paraffin... I nearly said I’ll carry the can.”
“That too.”
“If any of them nuns say a word, I’ll strangle them.”
“Nuns?”
“Yea, women in hoods who do a lot of polishing. I went to The Sisters of Mercy. Whatever else, mercy was the least of their assets.”
Frank smiled and this was followed by his literary look. Cathy hoped it wasn’t yet another Graham Greene story. Any mention of religion got him quoting Greene. But it wasn’t him.
“Scott Fitzgerald said in Gatsby that everybody suspects themselves of having at least one of the cardinal virtues. I strongly suspect that one of mine isn’t tolerance and I’m getting worse.”
Cathy added,
“Well, I don’t have any patience, and don’t agree with me, I know already, it doesn’t need endorsement. But with Serena-May, I’m never impatient. I don’t know what I used to think about before, but now, it’s our daughter. Good Lord doesn’t that sound awesome.” Heinz bounced in and thought,
“Surprise, surprise, they’re talking about the thing again.”
He went to his water dish and slurped loudly as he could. Usually it annoyed the hell out of them. But they gave him the sweet look that made him want to chew ankles.
Jim was surveying the wreck of his home. It looked like the aftermath of a tornado. He wasn’t really sure what happened, but he had vague flashbacks of running through the rooms trying to destroy everything. One vivid picture was him chasing a naked person with a meat cleaver. Their sex was indeterminate, but he wasn’t even sure if he had a cleaver. If it had happened, he hoped the person was fast. Some of the rooms he no longer checked just in case their speed hadn’t been up to the mark.
He looked down at his feet. Tins of dog food for Heinz he’d never delivered. Reaching in his pocket, he sorted various sheets of disheveled paper. These consisted of writing he’d once been especially fond of or moved by. A piece he’d earmarked for Heinz he read aloud, by the philosopher Henry Beston,
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. For the animal shall not be measured by Man. They are not brothers. They are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. Fellow prisoners of the travail and splendour of birth.”
He thought for a moment then crumpled all the sheets together and launched them across the room. They landed with a soft thud on a pile of dirty shirts and slipped down, lost to view. Aloud he roared,
“Who bloody cares, who gives a proverbial toss.”
Dragging himself to his feet, he tried to focus his mind. He had a letter to write.
It took Frank a long time to even know how to refer to Serena-May’s condition. He had been saying “Down’s Syndrome,”
and learnt that Down’s Syndrome was the term as Dr. Down did not have the syndrome himself.
“Lucky Dr. Down,” said Frank.
Nor did he own it. Frank was glad you said the child has Down’s Syndrome, not is a Down’s Syndrome. It wasn’t all the child was.
Or a child with Down’s Syndrome. A child first.
He felt he should know who this doctor was who held their lives in such a stranglehold.
Dr. John Langdon Down, 1828–1896, An Englishman working in Surrey. He first listed the characteristic features. But he didn’t understand the cause of the condition he had described. In fact, he thought it was a reversion to a primitive Mongoloid ethnic stock.
“Jesus,” thought Frank, “was the old doc ever off beam on that one.”
He discovered that two-thirds of all children with the syndrome are born to mothers under 35. Of all Frank read, the information that actually charmed him was unexpected. The reading, the seeking of information, he did to banish fear. It never occurred to him that any of would warm him.
The most enjoyment the child would get from anything was looking at the parent’s face, and would be more important to the child than any toy or object.
Frank was nigh child-like himself, as each successive time he gathered and presented the data to Cathy. One evening she said,
“Frank, I’m dizzy... I’m in a spin of statistics and research and theories. The truth is... I’m sick of Down’s Syndrome. Let’s just give Serena-May the best we can and use whatever help is available... what do you think?”
Frank didn’t answer, he picked up his mini library with both hands, shuffled to the bin and lifted his bundle high. As he turned to Cathy, he let the load go and said,
“They’re outa here... let’s tend to our daughter.”
Frank had told Cathy of one morning when he saw despair walking. Cathy was in the hospital with Serena-May at the time. He’d come early to visit. As he turned in, a couple were walking towards him. The man was walking slightly in front, carrying a suitcase and two plastic bags. Not a word passed between them. Frank glanced at the woman, her eyes were glued to the ground and she had the shuffled walk of the truly lost.