It was very encouraging while it lasted. But by the time two and a half months had passed, with perhaps ten drawing sessions in that time, Elly’s interest was waning. It was harder to get her to draw herself, although I have a sheet of rectangles that she drew using my inert hand as a tool. Three months after her first triangles I made another set and tried to get her to draw some. She wouldn’t. When I tried the old trick of leaving one incomplete, the line she provided to finish it was more frail and wavering than the first ones had been. I took her hand and made it draw a pattern of cross-bars. This was new and interesting, and after two or three sheets of it her own will took over and she drew some of her own. The last two times she drew, it was she, not I, who decided on a drawing session; she astonished and delighted me by getting out marker and paper her-self. Then too, she put each sheet aside as she finished it, instead of going on to blot out the figures with marking. It was a fitting valedictory. Not for six months would she voluntarily take up brush, marker, crayon, or pencil. Once only, in that period, I got marks on paper out of Elly. I spent five minutes slowly painting bars and circles before she took my hand and, using it as her tool, made two parallel lines, an E, and two L’s. I gave her the brush. She made a final E alone and would make no more.
I let it go. It didn't seem worth it. There were other things we could do together, more than there had been — puzzles, pictures, even a little music. Accept the retreat which qualifies each advance. Hope that instead of denying the advance it somehow secures it. Put the paints and markers away — for a long time, this time, so that when they appear again they will seem interesting and quite new. But even so, when Elly, nearly four, did at length employ her hand to make a mark again, it was with neither paint nor marker, but in a totally new situation and one that bears thinking about. Taken to her father’s office, Elly used chalk and blackboard for the first time. She found it a uniquely satisfying medium. Anything she drew could be immediately erased, denied, cancelled, made as if it had never been.
Elly could deny her abilities to herself. But we knew now at least a little of what she could do. She could use her body and her hands. She could draw. More important, she could see — not only shapes and objects, but people, and not only these themselves but pictured representations of them. It was that much more than we had known two years before. We would have to be content with it.
6. Willed Deafness
Elly’s inabilities, physical and visual, were evident to us. But once she had learned to walk they were not conspicuous to others. Only those who observed carefully would notice the behind the apparent alertness, the passivity behind the deftness and apparent vigour. As Elly grew beyond two, to most people who knew her the significant thing was not that she did not push or reach or climb, not that she did not look at things, but that she did not talk. When a child reaches two and a half, and three, and four, mouthing no more than a few unintelligible syllables, it is this that tends to seem primary — especially if the child appears alert and attractive. It is natural to wonder if there has been some specific damage to the speech centres of the brain.
To us who knew her well, however, tis was only the visible part of the iceberg. A speech disorder? Anyone who had lived with her must have felt it was much more far-reaching than that. Even if one did focus solely on the failure of speech, what seemed significant was not so much that she didn’t talk as that she didn’t understand, and not so much that she didn’t understand as that she didn’t seem to hear you at all.
It is not uncommon for autistic children to be diagnosed initially as deaf. Surrounded by mystery, one is always trying out hypotheses. Retardation? The child seems sharp when it wants to be. Deafness would explain almost everything — Elly’s failure of speech, her failure of comprehension, even her withdrawal, which would be natural if she lived in a silent world. She not only did not respond to speech; more often than not, she did not respond to sound either. I remember her sitting on the law none day, her back to the driveway. An astonishing thing was happening; one would think any small child would notice it. Our neighbours had a chimney fire. Up our small court came a genuine red fire engine, making the usual amount of fire-engine noise. I remember that Elly did not even look up. So cautious in everything involving direct bodily danger, for years she paid no attention to the sound of the car motors which could bring her the greatest danger of all. The signals came from outside herself, they did not impinge directly on her body, so she ignored them as if they did not exist.
Yet, like all the other hypotheses, deafness did not seem to fit all the facts. For those few signals that she had invested with significance, her hearing could be preternaturally acute. For some reason she disliked the dishwasher; if it was in operation she would not even remain on the same floor. Naturally we avoided turning it on in her presence, but that was not enough. Elly could hear the sound of the switch through a closed door. A little click, and she would already be on her way upstairs.
Once — Elly was not yet three — as we all sat at table, talking, eating, a dog barked outside. No one registered it, of course; the general noise level was high. Five minutes later, when our quiet Elly suddenly barked, we remembered it in our laughter.
But things like that did not happen often. Written down, they take on significance we dared not give them as we lived through a tangle of events, many of which pointed in the opposite direction. As we looked for evidence that Elly could hear, far more significant than such rare occurrences was the fact that Elly did, on occasion, speak. Now and then — sometimes three or four times in a day — Elly did say a word. The words indicated her imperviousness was not absolute. They had to come from somewhere. Deaf children have no way of acquiring words.
We had not even had to wait particularly long for Elly’s first word. She had said ‘teddy’ at fourteen months, as normal as you please. A month or so and she said ‘mama’. The next month, ‘dada’. Another month, another word. It takes sometime to realize that the new word is not added to the old words but substituted for them; that at any given time she has a one-word vocabulary. It takes time, too, to realize how strange it is that though she may say ‘teddy’, and right in her bear's presence so you know it is no accident, she shows no sign of comprehension if you say ‘teddy’ to her. A normal child’s passive or recognition vocabulary is larger — even much larger — than the vocabulary it can itself make use of. One is unprepared for the phenomenon of a child whose active vocabulary is pitifully small, but whose passive vocabulary is smaller still.
Elly was twenty-two months old, fresh from her first hospital examination, when I began to keep the record of her speech which forms the basis of this chapter. My rule was to enter a word only after Elly had used it at least three times in a convincing context; the single exception I made was for that strange, unmistakable, one-shot ‘scissors’. It was not hard to be accurate, there was so little to record. By the time she was two years old, Elly had spoken six different words — those mentioned above, ‘walk-walk’, ‘no-no’, and her own name. Of these, however, she gave signs of understanding only two. She would turn in response to ‘Elly’, and she would stop what she was doing if you said ‘no-no’. She intermittently responded to ‘come’, though she did not say it. That was all. A six-month puppy can do as much.