Now I was primed for them, the syllables for ‘low-uh-cay’ became recognizable. Where could she have got them? I did not use them. I was sure they did not use them at school. Then I remembered. We had taken her to try the ‘talking typewriter’ at the hospital in Cooperstown, where Dr Mary Goodwin was using it with children with autistic symptoms and getting some strange and interesting results. Elly had enjoyed her half hour with it, and although she had produced nothing strange or interesting in this single visit, Dr Goodwin’s understanding and encouragement had been well worth the trip. We did not repeat it; the five and a half hours in the car was too long, we thought, for Elly and for us. But I remembered the typewriter now. Developed by Dr O. K. Moore for the rapid teaching of reading to prekindergarten children, it combined sound with visual stimuli — when a child pressed a letter or a symbol, a recorded voice identified it. Elly had spent a half hour with the typewriter, six months before. She must have learned ‘upper-case’ then. Without any reinforcement, she had preserved it over the months between. Intrinsically without significance, it was significant to her.
The more meaningless a convention, the more purely formal, the better Elly liked it. She liked punctuation. She liked her letter set, but she liked it far less when I used it to spell the words she knew from cards. She never used it this way herself; she preferred to make arbitrary arrangements, or to mix the letters up together and sift them through her fingers. She was fascinated by a book of different type fonts; predictably, she learned the word ‘serif’ at once, and had I wished I would have had no difficulty teaching her ‘black letter’ and ‘Gothic’. Spontaneously, long before handwriting was introduced in school,she tried to turn her capitals into cursive by supplying florid connections, saying ‘handwriting’ as she worked. She noted that the top of the printed numeral four is closed, whereas most people write it open; from then on she insisted on a ‘different four?’ She took to Roman numerals at once; recently she spent a happy hour typing out the numbers from I to L. Her sisters, having learned the deaf-and-dumb alphabet from their high- school production of
It was difficult enough to put meaning into the symbols Elly knew already. The phenomenon I noted in the preceding chapter is again relevant here: she could learn the look of a new word overnight; the job was not to retain the word itself, but its meaning. None of her words began as rote acquisitions — with pictures and action, I saw to that. But as soon as I abandoned orderly word-card drill (cards set out in rows on a drawing board, print- side up, reversed to show the pictures as she identified each one, correct identification of them all rewarded by a new word-card) and tried to make of words an avenue to meaning, Elly resisted. I would point them out in familiar picture books or assemble them in statements meaningful in her experience, and she’d look away, or shut her eyes, or slow her activity to a crawl. Correctly identifying sixty word- cards according to a settled routine — that was a pleasure. Reading for meaning was not — so definitely that she no longer likes to look at books with me, lest I should ask her to recognize a word.
If I follow her lead now, even the pictures that I draw are reduced to number. ‘Draw Elly cry?’ ‘Draw Elly 2 tears?… 4 tears?… 6 tears?… 8 tears?’ — all accompanied by the cheeriest good humour, unless, of course, I should refuse to complete the series. When her baby doll lost both its legs I thought she might mind, remembering the horror of deformity I felt as a child. Not at all; she was delighted. ‘Draw baby zero leg?’ ‘Draw baby one leg?… two leg?… three leg?’…
‘Draw baby eight leg?’ To me it looks nastier with each addition. Dead-pan, I suggest it is a spider-baby and meet with enthusiastic assent.
I recall an incident so characteristic of Elly that it can stand as an archetype of what she seems to be. Elly was six and a half. I had been gone all day, and returning, coming into the bedroom, I found Elly at the typewriter. Leaving it, she ran to me at the door and for the first time in her life said ‘Hello, Mama!’ Then, back at the machine, she chirped ‘Comma!Exclamation point!’ In my happiness I had still to reflect, ‘It is the “hello, mama”, that surprises you. The “exclamation point” does not.’
What kind of child was this, who could take six years to learn to greet her mother (a greeting she has seldom repeated) but whose mind unerringly recorded meaningless terms mentioned once without emphasis weeks or months before?
It was, apparently, an autistic child. Dr Blank had first thought of autism, long ago, at Elly’s first visit, when he heard of her interest in arrangements. Autistic children were often good with numbers; some showed extraordinary abilities, far beyond Elly’s. Elly’s exact shape discrimination and her acute perception of the missing members of a set were not isolated phenomena, but typical of the condition. So was her ear for music, most abstract of the arts. Even the concern with the preservation of sameness, which Kanner considered a primary symptom, can be thought of as part of the autistic commitment to order; the patterns established, whether in space with cookies or washcloths, or in time with rituals and routines, must be preserved and completed. Elly could accept my outright refusal to draw for her, say, the numbered series of triangles with which she ended every day. We have had some success in moderating her compulsiveness, and I could, especially as she grew older, say that it was too late for the usual twenty-six, but that we had time for twelve. But if I once began the series and was interrupted before the twelfth one came, Elly would be beside herself with distress.
Series must be completed, order reaffirmed, limits observed.
This was still the same child who at three had sought out fences and enclosures. At first it was I who coloured the pre-bedtime triangles, for though Elly wanted them done, she did not want to do them herself. As I coloured, of course, I used the full spectrum that Elly’s crayons provided; it never occurred to me to do otherwise. Gradually I was able to draw her into the colouring routine; I coloured one triangle, she the next, until all were done. At first I chose my colours while Elly chose hers; later (and there are some hundreds of these sheets of triangles, one for each bedtime; much of Elly’s arithmetic has been learned from them) she chose my colours and handed them to me. ‘Only two colours?’
Her voice grew urgent as I reached for a third crayon. ‘Just green and yellow-green, yes!’ Inspecting the traingle sheets after weeks, I realized what had escaped me as we coloured night by night. Not only was Elly using a strictly limited palette, she was providing the same colour combinations every night in almost the same order. The first five would be successive combinations, two at a time, of orange, red, peach, and pink. The next four would combine green, yellow-green, and pale green. The next would be orange and blue. Only after that would she choose with any flexibility, and even then she would allow no third colour.
Some such limiting principle seemed to lie also behind her tendency to stereotype her environment and activities. When Elly was three I could see no trace of Kanner’s prime symptom, the committent to the preservation of sameness. Elly had no routines then. But the symptom lay in waiting (it should be noted that Kanner did not always see his patients as early as three). It developed later, with the capacity for self-assertion — the pathological symptom accompanying what we take as a sign of health. When Elly was three and four, more withdrawn and less assertive, she would walk with me anywhere. At five she began to want to turn right or left at a certain corner, if we had done so before. At seven and eight — today — she will, if not opposed, reduce any walk to sameness. There is one path to take downtown, one for our return. If we pass a landmark where I have previously invented a game Elly has liked, Elly will repeat the actions even if I have forgotten them. If I have spoken words there, Elly will repeat them for me and cue my mouth to make me speak my lines. She is not unyielding about it; by introducing minor, tolerable variations I and, still better, others, are able to maintain some flexibility. She will now readily accept a deviation introduced for a reason — lateness, or a changed destination. But if I merely suggest that we walk home a new way, her anxious ‘no?’ vetoes it unless I decide to make it an issue — and if I do, the new option will probably be incorporated in the next walk. The commitment to an environment that can be kept track of remains.
Recently Elly spent more than an hour making a series of pictures — twenty-one sheets of carefully crayoned paper, each displaying a large numeral, starting, of course, with zero. Upon the zero, inside it, a small figure sits. She is standing against the one. The numbers continue to twenty. In each of them the same figure stands or climbs or sits or hangs. Sometimes the figure is ‘Elly’, sometimes ‘girl’. Elly enjoys talking about them; she explains with delight, ‘Girl hang-uh seven.’ (The hanging figure’s hair, obeying gravity, hangs straight down.)
A new series carries the process one step further. The body has disappeared and the girl has merged completely into the numeral. Only her schematic head remains.
Girl into number. Elly, I fear, is a natural Platonist. Though she no longer lives in it, she prefers a world stripped bare of the adventitious accretions that to ordinary minds make it interesting and precious — a world
