on hindsight. We noticed nothing then.
One looks for a trauma and finds none. She was rarely sick, never severely so. A few stopped-up noses, unaccompanied by fever. Chicken pox at six months — an unusually mild case. At seventeen months, an earache. We guessed because she whimpered and rubbed at her ear, for she was not talking. We played safe and called the doctor — for the first time in her life. She was already better when he came, leaping up and down in her crib and laughing. I remember he exclaimed, ‘What a lovely baby!’ Yet surely it had begun by then.
She was not ill, nor was I. No one was hospitalized. We left her only once, when she was nine months old, and then only for a weekend. Nonplussed, one looks for less obvious causes — events and experiences that went unnoticed at the time but that could later reveal their true significance. Once a child ran with her in her stroller, hit a bump, and pitched her out on her head. An injury? But I picked her up undazed, crying lustily, her eyes not even crossed. Then there was the trip we took in Elly’s second summer, a month after her first birthday. It was a typical station-wagon safari from friend’s house to friend’s house. The first part of the trip had been pleasantly uneventful. We had driven to Rhode Island, stayed there a week, and were now on our way to Maine. We broke the trip in the middle, staying with a student who put up all six of us in a room of his boarding-house. Two beds, floor covered with mattresses, Elly in her car-bed, by now too small for her. She didn’t like it, and cried, and I spent most of the night rocking her, though ordinarily she was a good sleeper. Nobody slept well, and the next day’s drive was one of those trivial nightmares that any family lives through on occasion. The children were intermittently crabby, we ran out of gas, we even lost a five-dollar bill out of the window. Elly was fretful from the start. She wouldn’t go to sleep, and by the time we had been going half the day she was crying steadily. We arrived exhausted, and spent the next three days confined to the house by a nor’-easter as seven children who didn’t know each other interacted in one not-very-large living room. Elly fretted constantly. I had never seen her like this. Then the weather lifted, she crawled outside, alone in the quiet garden, and we had no further trouble. Did it start then? Was that cramped and crowded week the beginning of her retreat?
I doubt it. Nothing so ordinary should be able to cause a major psychological disaster in a baby — not if the baby were healthy to begin with. But I record it nevertheless, as I record here everything I know of those first two years — the measles and the colic and the bump on the head and the fact that I was an intellectual mother by no means totally accepting of her feminine role, who did not at all want another baby. Out of these come the possible explanations — out of these, or out of whatever may in time be elucidated in the complex balance of a baby’s metabolism or the choreography of the electrons in its brain. Every piece of potential evidence must be recorded in this account, not least the evidence that can be used against me. We need to know all we can if someone someday is to understand at last what is relevant and what is not.
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
