Nor is routine incompatible with creativity; routine maintains the growing beauty of her paintings. Once a commission is received and a painting begun, it must be completed, perfectly, to the last barely visible detail. Is that all there is to it? Here too the years have been about growth, not just growth in technique, but growth in what for want of a better word I must call sociality. When her work was first exhibited, years ago in a little local gallery, she was interested only in the refreshments. She is still interested in the refreshments, but now she also enjoys the praise. When people come to the house, she says, „Do you want to see my paintings?“ and makes sure they look at every one. In 1993 a tiny reproduction of one of them was chosen to represent Massachusetts on the White House Christmas tree. When we showed her the story in the paper, she exclaimed, „So it’s the first time the president to hear from me!“ Let this be the measure of her entry into the world we share.
The point, of course, is not to make her a willing drudge, at home, at work, or at her painting table. The point, now as always, is to maintain and expand the range of activity that makes her what we never thought she could be, a busy, useful member of the household and community. She’ll be late in her forties, probably, her siblings into their fifties, when her future becomes their responsibility. Whether she stays in her own home with a companion or moves to a group home or a sheltered village or lives with a brother or sister, her active usefulness will make the road smoother both for her and for those around her.
It is not only because she is useful, however, that I can write these words with a faith in a future I will not see. Usefulness is a tremendous achievement — her own, and that of all who have accompanied her on the difficult road to activity and self-control. But it is not for her usefulness that people love her, with a love that is that future’s best guarantee. They love her for her otherworldliness, her simplicity, her utter incapacity for manipulation or malice. They love her for her childlike purity.
Childlike. I have held off from using that word, although it must have occurred more than once to anyone reading my careful transcriptions of things that Jessy has said. For all the talk of „discovering the child within us“, it is thought condescending, lacking in respect, to compare a mentally handicapped adult to a child. But those who have lived with Jessy know that the truest respect lies not in the wishful insistence that she is really just like other people, but in the recognition, and the valuing, of what she is.
Arbeiten und lieben — to work and to love; were these not Freud’s measures of success? Jessy has learned to work, even to prefer activity to idleness. A golf counter made this possible, and it seemed a miracle. But no clicking mechanism can teach love.
When I first wrote the Jessy story, thirty-four years ago, I made „love“ the final word. Love, ours and other people’s, is the condition of Jessy’s life, little as she would be able to understand that. What, then, does love mean to her, and what does it mean if I write that she has learned to love? Twenty years ago, when her sister was long away and Jessy had shown no sign of noticing, she said out of nowhere, „I am missing her“. She didn’t say the word „love“ then; like other emotion-words, it’s not part of her effective vocabulary. But I can guess how she loves, or rather, I don’t have to guess. She made it plain ten years later, in one of her „I hope you will feel better“ responses to the unwelcome fact of illness. She said it, for some reason, not with annoyance but unusual sweetness. She even elaborated: „I can’t give you a hug, because you have a cold“. I told her that what she said was a verbal hug, that it made me happy because I love her and she loves me. She picked it right up, generalizing, exploring: „And my brother loves me, because he got up from my favorite seat“. That was all, and I haven’t heard her say the word again. But it was enough; love for her is its concrete manifestations. And she’s not wrong. „He that would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars“, wrote William Blake.
The anecdote that must end this account is about love, and an event that told me more than I knew about where Jessy is today. Though Jessy is a happy person, it is not a happy story, but it is a good one. It comes in two parts.
Of all the young people who have loved Jessy and helped her grow, there is no one who helped her more, and loved her better, than Marilyn. Marilyn lives in Oakland now, working with the deaf; we like to think Jessy contributed to that. In 1991 there was a fire in Oakland. We pointed out the picture to Jessy when the TV news came on, making sure she knew Mai was safe. The next day, when she asked, „Should I cry if I found out Mai is dead?“ we were startled but not surprised. Jessy, who must try so hard to control her crying, often asks, „Is it a good reason to cry?“
A few seasons later, she was enjoying a new acronym — one of the repeatable, manageable formalisms that help her gain a hold on the uncertainties of the world. TBA: she knows that from the college calendar — To Be Arranged, so helpful when things may not occur as scheduled. She had been planning to go visit her friend Scooch, one of the dearest of the long succession of those who’ve lived with Jessy. Scooch didn’t forget her when he graduated from Williams. As his own career carried him into the art world, he made her career his project. He commissioned a painting of his grandfather’s house. He took her to sketch it, but it was raining and she couldn’t. He was going to take her again. But he was busy and troubled, more troubled than we knew. The weeks wore on. Jessy doesn’t like to wait, but she can handle it with TBA; TBA makes her smile.
Then comes the telephone call I can still hardly believe. Scooch is dead.
Shall we tell Jessy? We decide we must; she’ll have to know sometime. She doesn’t say anything, but goes to her room. I don’t know why I don’t follow her. I guess my own emotions are too raw. I can’t bear to hear what she might say. The next day she tells me she „cried silently“; that’s how she’s supposed to cry at work, if she must cry, and certainly I didn’t hear her. She asks some questions about what she’s calling „the death“. They are factual, neutral; they are at least endurable. She doesn’t want to go with us to the funeral, and we don’t press her.
We’ll have a memorial gathering, it’s decided, just his closest friends, here at the island he loved. We’ll plant a flowering bush.
Jessy will be with us. They all know about her. So she won’t get bored or impatient, I tell her what’s going to happen; we’ll dig the hole, plant the bush, and stand about it and remember Scooch. Anybody who wants to can say something.
I consider feeding her something appropriate to say, but decide against it. The rest of us speak what we feel, then are silent.
Minutes pass. And then Jessy begins to speak. I paraphrase; it was not a time for note-taking. Quietly, factually, she tells the things Scooch did for her, that he organized her first one-man show, that he got her a commission to paint the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, that he took her to sketch the Flatiron Building and the beautiful church, that he took her to New Jersey to sketch his grandpa’s beautiful house but she couldn’t because it was raining and even the photographs weren’t good, that they were going to go back but it was TBA. In her tone was neither the cheerfulness none of us could have borne, nor autistic desolation, but quiet sadness.
Happiness isn’t everything. Jessy knows, I think, in her own concrete way, that her friend did those things for her because he loved her. He loved her innocence, her pure transparency; he saw it in her paintings. He loved the fact that words like „innocence“ mean nothing to her; that transparency to her is only a property of glass. He loved her, he made her happy, she won’t see him again. And that is a good reason to cry.
Afterword
Jessy cannot tell her story for herself. Though she can speak nothing but truth and her memory is unerring, I
