So Elly grew, and though we look back and remember one incident or another, the onset of the condition was imperceptible. We perceived we had a child who, at twenty-two months, was not toilet-trained — but neither were most of our neighbour’s children. She did not walk, but the little boy down the street had sat contentedly in his playpen until he was two. She did not use a spoon — but she fed herself efficiently with her fingers. She spoke only a few words — but the onset of speech in children is notoriously variable, and every parent of a slow talker is aware that Einstein didn’t talk until he was four. The various signs that now seem so clear then seemed easily attributable to individual differences. One should not, after all, push one’s children. How many times did someone remark that of course I was so used to bright children that when I got an ordinary one I thought it was slow? Elly seemed alert, beautifully co-ordinated, and contented. We stored up the differences in our minds but we did not worry, having learned in ten years of parenthood that events usually render worries irrelevant, and that worry itself can harm a child more than most of the conditions one worries about.
Only we began gradually to be aware that we had begun to think of Elly as a ‘difficult’ child. She had been such an easy fourteen-month-old. Since she didn’t walk or even crawl upstairs it had been simple to keep track of her, although it was hardly necessary. Extreme in her caution, delicate in her judgement of levels and edges, she seldom fell and rarely hurt herself. I could be sure she would open no bottles, turn on no faucets, teeter on no high stools. And for some time, busy with my other children, I was pleased that she made so few demands on my patience. She crawled contentedly about, never very far away; she took long naps and bounced gaily in her crib when she woke up. She did not attempt to climb out, but neither had the other children at that age, and if she did not call me, I thought nothing of it. This was independence. She made few demands upon me and I made few upon her. She was so self-contained, so cheerful in her limited round of activity, that there were none of those battles of wills that take place between mothers and more active children. I began to put her on the pot at thirteen months, after breakfast, with a cookie, as I had Becky and Matt. There was some response for the first week or so, then nothing more. I let it go ‘until she was ready’. I could afford to be relaxed, with a mother-of-four relaxation. I did not know she would not be ‘ready’, even partially, for four more years. I made no issue over her learning to spoon-feed herself. She ate neatly, and since she took all her meals at the table with us it was easy to feed her the sloppy foods her fastidious fingers would not touch. Least of all, in our family, did it seem necessary to urge her to walk. So life with Elly was easy — until some time in the second half of her second year, when gradually we began to feel it wasn’t easy any more.
Not that she had changed. She was as undemanding as ever. But parents’ expectations of a child approaching two grow more pressing. As she grew older, though we were relaxed about her talking, we expected her to understand the simple things we said to her. Yet we would ask, or forbid, offer a cookie, ask her to come or to go, and there would be no response. It was as if she had not heard us. Had it always been so?
It became increasingly difficult to leave her with baby-sitters; they expect a child nearing two to respond to simple commands. They expect a child nearing two to respond to a lot of things — a tone of voice, a smile, the sight or sound of children entering a room. Elly, contented on the floor, would not even look up.
We have photographs from this period too. One shows a plump blond baby looking into the camera with an expression that is curiously tense. Not at all the serenity I remember, certainly, but I also remember the struggle we had to go through to get those pictures. David took them as always, and the rest of us, the children and I, put our whole effort into attracting Elly’s attention and getting her to look at us. Such unusual, persistent goings-on — no wonder she looked worried. Another picture is relaxed enough — Elly limp as a rag doll in her sister’s arms, her lovely face looking beyond us into space. Another is quite a success — at first glance. Elly is smiling, even laughing. But she is laughing at no one. The picture shows a forest of arms — Sara’s, mine — two of us tickling her to achieve that gaiety which even in the pictures looks somehow frenetic.
Not that she never laughed spontaneously. She did, and if we could have caught it, it would have made as normal a picture as you please. But that laughter was indeed spontaneous — it welled up from nowhere, it related to no human situation. Nothing in our words or our expressions would generate it, save that wild tickling, the direct bodily invasion of her privacy. The children tried it a little, for the picture’s sake, and the laughter, and the closeness to the pretty baby sister. But they tried it less and less, and at last where they were not noticed rarely intervened. She did not bother them and she did not need them. On all fours, from room to room, from back yard to front, down the path, up the driveway, she followed her different drummer. I remember one sunny spring day, the yards filled with playing children, my neighbour and I standing and watching Elly as she crawled serenely away from us all. Something about her isolation — she was so tiny, and already so far away — made me say, only half joking, ‘There’s nothing the matter with Elly. She just has a distorted sense of what’s important.’ My neighbour laughed at the application of such inflated language to a baby. But it is I who have had the last laugh, if you could call it that.
3. Doctors and Diagnoses
What the doctor said was, ‘If you’re not worried, I am.’ I do not have the novelist’s ear for remembered dialogue, but some words I have not forgotten. Elly was twenty-two months old, and she was in a doctor’s office for the first time in nearly a year. Only once had a doctor seen her in the interim — for the ear-ache mentioned in the last chapter. Then, Elly had been cheerful and secure in her favourite place, her crib; he was not her regular doctor, and he had never seen her before. He had exclaimed, as recorded, that she was a lovely baby.
A house call is an unusual thing for us; we have had perhaps four in fifteen years. We are lax about doctors, having been lucky enough to be able to take health for granted. We were never ones to bother a doctor with monthly check-ups of patently healthy babies. Unlike most of our friends, we had no paediatrician. We didn’t think we needed one. I had no obstetrician for Elly; I didn’t think I needed one. The excellent general practitioner who delivered her, saw her three or four times in her first year, checked her progress, and gave her routine injections. She had a mild eczema at thirteen months; he cleared it up with the only shot of penicillin any of my children has ever had. It was time for her vaccination, but because of the eczema the doctor suggested we defer it. Characteristically, months had gone by before we got around to taking Elly back to him. Hard to believe as that seems now, we went to get her vaccinated, not to ask about her strangeness. I was expecting nothing eventful when I carried Elly into the office and set her on the examination table. The doctor asked if she was walking. I said no, but that I wasn’t worried. Becky and Matthew had both walked late, and besides, Elly was already beginning — she’d walk with me if I held her hands. I tried to show the doctor. Elly’s knees buckled and she relaxed into a crawl. ‘Does she talk?’ ‘A couple of words.’ Not suddenly, but slowly and mercifully, the realization began to take form. Any one symptom might be insignificant. Children differ. But add them up…