Fathermucker (12 page)

He can identify all nine planets by sight. He can name some of the moons—Charon, Pluto's lone satellite, being his favorite—as well as comets and the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt. With some prompting, he can go through the twelve signs of the zodiac.

We haven't observed the actual night sky, because we've only been reading the books during the late summer, when it gets dark long after he goes to sleep, and already bright when he wakes up.

One morning in the late fall, just before Thanksgiving, I bring Roland out as dawn is breaking to gaze upon a gorgeous heavenly conjunction: against a backdrop of still-visible stars, the planet Venus rests in the lap of the crescent moon (this identification of the planet Venus is the sort of thing I knew nothing about before Roland evinced an interest, and my subsequent subscription to
Sky & Telescope
magazine). You can see it perfectly from the front steps. It's like an IMAX movie playing just for us.

“That's the moon,” I tell my son. “And that's Venus.”

I lived in New York City for ten years; the only star I saw in all that time was Cindy Crawford, so the wonder of a glimpse of a different kind of heavenly body has not worn off.

After a few minutes, I bring him into the dining room, where Stacy is drinking her coffee. “Tell Mommy what we saw,” I tell him, strapping him into his booster seat.

“Saw Venus,” says Roland. “The moon . . . and Virgo.”

“Virgo?” Stacy says.

I shrug. “Don't look at me. I didn't say anything about Virgo.” I dig the latest issue of
Sky & Telescope
from beneath a stack of
Poughkeepsie Journals
on a stray dining room chair, and flip to the “Map of the Sky” section. The stars that formed a backdrop to the Venus and moon conjunction, the stars that to my eyes looked like patternless white dots, were part of a constellation. The constellation of Virgo. Which Roland somehow recognized and identified (or managed to guess correctly).

He is not quite three.

Hans Asperger opens a school for “autistic psychopathic” children with the help of a nun, Sister Victorine.

Just months after opening, the school is destroyed by a stray Allied bomb. Sister Victorine is killed, and all of Asperger's early research is consigned to the flames.

It is 1944.

Roland likes Thomas the Tank Engine, a creepy anthropomorphic train who, with his creepy anthropomorphic-train accomplices, chuffs hither and yon across the mythical Island of Sodor, doing the bidding of Sir Topham Hatt, his bloated, bald overlord, who bears a passing resemblance to the monocled plutocrat of Monopoly fame. I think the original concept was to teach British children to bow to the king.

Roland knows the names of all the engines, but he's more interested in the tracks than the trains. He makes me construct elaborate tracks. Eventually he builds them himself.

He also enjoys dollhouses, but does not care for dolls.

He needs to work on his pretend play
, Gina says.

He is three.

The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, a professor at the University of Chicago, invokes Freud, suggesting, in his influential book
The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self
, that the eponymous complaint is the fault of the mother. Autistic children are hapless victims of early rejection from the women who gave birth to them—
refrigerator mothers
, as Bettelheim calls them. To prove his point, he conducts a study and finds that mothers of autistic children show higher instances of stress and depression than mothers of neuro-typicals. (It does not occur to him that it is the autistic children who cause the stress and not the other way around.)

“The difference between the plight of prisoners in a concentration camp,” he writes, “and the conditions which lead to autism . . . in children is, of course, that the child has never had a previous chance to develop much of a personality.”

Bettelheim is himself a survivor of the Dachau camp.

It is 1967.

The diagnostic pediatrician is based in Woodstock. Roland and I drive up one afternoon. The thermometer on the dash reads ninety-eight degrees.

On the way there, he wets himself. Pees right through the diaper (he's one of the few kids in his class not yet potty trained). I have to change him from his shorts to the only other clothes in the car, a pair of heavy sweatpants.

The diagnostic pediatrician, Dr. Archer, looks more like a baby-boom poetess than a physician. She wears a long flowing skirt and a beaded necklace.

She takes us into her office, a small room stocked with toys and books. She watches Roland play. She has him do puzzles, which he completes quickly. She asks him questions, which he mostly ignores.

He is not quite three-and-a-half.

She recommends speech therapy and occupational therapy. She recommends the Thornwood School.

She doesn't say he's autistic. She diagnoses him with Asperger's syndrome.

I don't really know what that means.

Leo Kanner concurs with Bettelheim's refrigerator-mother theory, remarking to an interviewer, in his thick Freud-like accent, that autistic children are the sad result of their parents “just happening to defrost enough to produce a child.”

A syndrome, I learn from Wikipedia, is “an association of several clinically recognizable features, signs (observed by a physician), symptoms (reported by the patient), phenomena or characteristics that often occur together.”

Asperger's has four such signs, according to the book
Asperger Syndrome and Your Child
:

Roland demonstrates the first three, I begrudgingly admit, but odd interests? Wikipedia says: “Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest is one of the most striking features of AS. Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic such as weather data or star names, without necessarily having genuine understanding of the broader topic. For example, a child might memorize camera model numbers while caring little about photography.”

Well, I tell myself, he doesn't do that. Dr. Archer must be mistaken. It's a sensory issue—that's all.

Although Roland's fascination with astronomy is, I allow, cause for some concern.

I'm changing the door knob in the bathroom. My father, who owned an auto body shop, had a gift for this kind of thing, but I have not inherited his mechanical inclination. I'm puzzling over the jangly pieces included with the actual knob—I had no idea there were so many!—and quickly become frustrated. I take a break, walk to the kitchen, have a glass of water.

I come back to the bathroom to find that Roland has taken the latch piece out of the box and inserted it into the proper hole in the door. Correctly.

It skips a generation.

He is three and a half.

In her 1981 work
Asperger's Syndrome: A Clinical Account
, Lorna Wing, a British physician and mother to an autistic daughter, is the first to attach Hans Asperger's name to the disorder he described.

Her intention is to make a clear distinction between Asperger's syndrome and mental illness.

We're at a red light on the corner of Main and North Manheim. Roland asks, “Why does that sign say ‘No Turn on Red'?”

Only after I answer him do I realize that he just read the sign.

He is three and a half.

At the sixty-first annual Academy Awards,
Rain Man
wins for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Dustin Hoffman), Best Original Screenplay (Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass), Best Director (Barry Levinson), and Best Picture. It is 1989.

The character of Raymond Babbitt (the titular “Rain-man”) is based on Kim Peek, a Utah-born “megasavant” with an astounding memory. Diagnosed with Opitz-Kaveggia syndrome, Peek had no corpus callosum connecting the two halves of his brain, and was, emphatically, not autistic—unlike Babbitt, who is described in the film as an
autistic savant
.

Nevertheless,
Rain Man
becomes, and remains, autism's cultural touchstone, and it is presumed that all autistics can count a pile of toothpicks.

A Pottery Barn catalog arrives in the mail; years ago, I bought someone's wedding present there, and because I may do so again one day before my demise, they keep me on their mailing list. Roland pulls the catalog out of the recycling bin (which is more a huge pile of cardboard boxes than a bin). Perusing the catalog, he is fascinated by the chandeliers. He has me read him the names of the various styles: Edison, Camilla, Armonk, Verona.

I sing him a silly song (I am a veritable Rodgers and Hammerstein of silly songs):

Soon he graduates to catalogs that feature lighting exclusively:
Lamps Plus
,
Shades of Light
. He has me read him the various styles. The model names. The features. He knows the difference between a floor lamp and a torchière.

Odd interests? Dr. Archer, it seems, was on the money.

She was right
, Stacy says, her eyes moist. Then she locks herself in the bathroom.

He is three years, nine months old.

The developmental psychologist Uta Frith, of University College London, translates Hans Asperger's
Die “Autistischen Psychopathen” im Kindesalter
into English.

It is 1991.

Later, studying two-hundred-year-old court documents, which provide her ample testimony from a host of character witnesses, Frith concludes that the eccentric Hugh Blair was, in fact, autistic.

I buy a children's atlas of the world. We spend hours reading it, at Roland's insistence. Continents, countries, states, cities, flags: he commits them all to memory.

He is not quite four.

Asperger's syndrome is included in the tenth edition of the World Health Organization's diagnostic manual, the ICD-10, published in 1992.

Two years later, it is appended to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, fourth edition (DSM-IV).

There is a loud crash, so I run to his room to investigate. His torchière—which is a floor lamp with the concavity pointed upward, like a bird bath—has toppled to the ground, thick chunks of frosted glass on the carpet. More distressing is that Roland is playing with the lamp. He's taken out the lightblub, and is unscrewing the on-off knob.

The lamp is still plugged in.

“Oops,” he says, without looking at me. “Sorry, Daddy.”

I don't want to stifle his mechanical creativity—being able to assemble a torchière, unlike being able to recite its model number from the
Lamps Plus
catalog, is a useful life skill—but I don't want him to die, either.

“Roland,” I tell him. “You're not allowed to play with your lamps. But if you do—you have to unplug them, okay? Seriously. It's not safe when they're plugged in.”

I'm not sure if he understands.

A week later, he breaks his sister's floor lamp.

He unscrews the lightblub.

The lamp is still plugged in.

Maude, a precocious two, is crying.

The writer Liane Holliday Willey coins the term
aspie
, meaning someone who, like her, has been diagnosed with Asperger's.

It is 1999.

For Christmas, which is also his fourth birthday—and which, to my mother's extreme annoyance, we observe—Roland gets some puzzles of the United States, including the foam-rubber one that will emerge as his favorite toy.

New Year's Day, my sister is on the floor with him, doing one of the puzzles. Laura attempts to place Nebraska directly over Oklahoma.

Roland snaps at her. “No, you stupe! Kansas goes
there
!”

Stacy hollers at him to be nice, but her heart isn't it in.

Christopher John Francis Boone, the fifteen-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's novel
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, attends a special-needs school. He is smart but has difficulty reading faces, and he cannot function in the outside world. Although his formal diagnosis is not revealed in the novel, and Haddon himself does not elaborate, the book jacket describes Boone as having Asperger's.

It is 2003.

An international bestseller—and the choice for the maiden
One Book, One New Paltz
event—the novel serves as the (somewhat misleading) introduction of Asperger's to the popular culture.

Thornwood prepares an IEP—an Individualized Education Program—with specific goals for Roland's development. He is four years old.

Roland is expected to
appropriately attend to speaker-listener responsibilities for five verbal exchanges
, and during those five exchanges, to
control vocal intonation and body language to accurately match the intent of the message—e.g., to smile when conveying good news
. To help him do this, he will
practice with various conversational scripts to maintain a normal exchange
.

As for fitting in with his classmates, Roland will
play and engage in activities near other children
. He will
play spontaneously with other children
. He will
participate in small-group activities with an adult present
. When approached by others, he will
respond in a socially acceptable manner
. He will
appropriately display affection toward another child
.

Periodically, we get reports of his progress.

Most of his “grades” are NPS—
Not Progressing Satisfactorily
.