Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence. Torey Hayden
the freedom of movement and washability jeans provided, more to the point, my legs were not covered with bruises from being kicked constantly.
Association with my new colleagues at the clinic was reason enough to take the job. All of them were well educated, experienced, intelligent and expressive. There was always someone to kick an idea around with. In addition, there were other good points. I had magnificent facilities at my disposal, including a large, airy, sunlit therapy room, brand-new toys and equipment, a video recorder that worked, a computer down the hall and a statistician to go with it who spoke genuine English. Moreover, I had recognition for my work. I had a good salary. And I had more free time than I had ever had before. So, all in all, I was happy enough.
Then came Zoo-boy.
I hadn’t especially wanted the case. Right from the beginning the hopelessness shone through. One morning a social worker named Dana Wendolowski from the Garson Gayer Home had phoned the clinic in search of me. We have a boy for you, she told me, and the weary despair was a little too clear in her voice.
His name was Kevin Richter, although no one seemed to call him Kevin. He had earned his nickname because he spent all his waking hours under tables, chairs lined up in front of him and around the perimeter of the table until he was secure behind a protective barrier of wooden legs. There he sat, rocked sometimes, ate, did his schoolwork, watched TV. There he lived in his little self-built cage. Zoo-boy.
But Kevin’s problem went deeper than just an affinity for tables. He did not talk. He made no noise, even when he wept. The files claimed he had talked once upon a time, a long time ago. According to the sketchily drawn past in the Garson Gayer records, Kevin had never spoken at school when he’d attended. He was retained once and then twice because he did not talk to the teachers and no one knew whether or not he was learning. He had talked at home, at least that’s what the report said. And then he’d stopped. First he stopped talking to his stepfather, then a little later to his mother. Supposedly, he continued to speak to his younger sisters but by the time he was committed to the first residential treatment program, at nine, someone noticed Kevin was not speaking at all. No one could say exactly when he stopped talking. One day someone asked, and no one could remember the last time they had heard Kevin. And no one had heard him since.
Far more apparent than his lack of speech were Kevin’s fears. He lived in morbid, gut-wrenching fear of almost everything, his life was consumed by it. He feared highways and door hinges and spirals on notebooks and dogs and darkness and pliers and odd bits of string that might fall on the floor. He was too terrified of water to bathe; too superstitious of being without clothes to change them. And for the last three years Kevin had refused to set foot outside the door of the Garson Gayer residence. He had actually stayed inside all that time. Kevin’s fears had trapped him in a far more secure prison than he could ever have built with tables and chairs.
As the social worker told me these things I braced my forehead on one fist, the receiver of the phone in the crook of my neck. With my other hand I filled the margin of the desk blotter with doodles. The woman’s voice had a hurried desperation to it, as if she knew I would cut her short before she had said everything she needed to say.
Garson Gayer was a new facility, a model progressive institution. They had a full staff, including a resident psychologist, speech therapists, nurses and teachers. Why did they want me? I asked.
She had read about my work. She’d heard I worked with children who did not speak. I wondered aloud, Why, when there was so much wrong with this boy, had they decided to tackle his lack of speech? Well, you have to start somewhere, she replied, and her laugh was hollow. The phone grew quiet for a moment. Truth is, she said, it’s not quite like that. Kevin would be sixteen in mid-September and here it was, already late August. Garson Gayer only took children up through their fifteenth birthdays, so the rules had already been bent for him to allow him to stay this long. The state had custody of Kevin. And so far nothing they’d done for him at Garson Gayer had produced any improvement. If they couldn’t come up with something soon, well … She did not say it. She didn’t have to. We both knew the places boys like Kevin went, who had no family, no money, no hope.
He sounded like a lost cause right from the beginning. He had a lousy past. Very little useful data was recorded in the Garson Gayer file but there was enough to make Kevin’s childhood sound like so many others I had known. School failures, financial difficulties, physical abuse of Kevin and other children in the family, marital troubles, friction between Kevin and his stepfather, alcohol abuse, and perhaps most sinister of all, the fact that Kevin had been voluntarily given into state custody by his mother. What must a kid be like when even his own mother did not want him? Moreover, Kevin had spent seven years already in institutions, more than eight totally mute, and almost sixteen learning to feel comfortable being crazy. If that wasn’t the portrait of a loser, I didn’t know what would be.
I didn’t want this case. As it was, I already had too many children to become involved with one who would obviously be a black hole-a maw to dump time and energy and effort into with no return. And as I sat and listened and drew geometric designs on the blotter, I had an even more shameful thought. This was a private clinic; we usually didn’t get the welfare kids. All I had to do to get rid of this case was mention money in a very serious way. While Garson Gayer would obviously foot the bill for my initial work with Kevin Richter, if I didn’t want the case, well, that would be the easiest way.…
It was tempting. It was a good deal more tempting to refuse this case than I was ready to admit. Yet I couldn’t. I could think such thoughts but I couldn’t make myself act on them. It would have been so different in the schoolroom. Ed or Birk or Lew simply would have rung me from the Special Ed Office and told me, ‘I’ve got a new kid for you.’ And I would have groused because I always groused, and they wouldn’t have noticed because they never did. Then he’d be mine, that loser, that kid with no hope, who couldn’t make it anywhere else, and we’d try there in my room, amidst the battered books and the rummage-sale toys and noisy finches and the stink of unchanged pants, to build another chance. We didn’t succeed very often. Our triumphs, when they did come, were few and small. Sometimes no one else even noticed them. But it didn’t matter. I never thought of not trying, only because I never had the godly privilege of judging if I should. Or if I could. Or if I would. So, while not wanting this case, I took it and agreed to come. Given the option and seeing the odds, I sure wasn’t keen about it. But I did not think that should be my decision.
Because of my classroom experience and my research, I had evolved therapeutic techniques which varied a little from those of my colleagues at the clinic. I preferred to see the more seriously disturbed children daily over a shorter period of time, rather than once a week over many months or years. Also I often went to the child instead of having him come to the clinic, so that we could work in the troubled environment. In the initial sessions, I was very definite about setting up expectations for the child. From the beginning we both knew why I was there and what things we needed to accomplish together. On the other hand, the sessions themselves tended to be casual, unstructured affairs. This approach worked well for me and I was comfortable with it.
My research had yielded a reliable method for treating elective mutes. I set up the expectation that the child would speak, gave him the opportunity to do so and assumed he would. However, I was not sure what I could do for Kevin-under-the-table. While the technique had always worked before, I was concerned about its applicability to him. The most critical question, I thought, as I hung up from talking with the social worker, was whether or not Kevin was an elective mute. Had he ever really talked? To a worried or wishful parent, so many noises could sound like words. By my calculations, he would have been a very young child when anyone last actually heard him speak, and then it had only been his immediate family. Could a five-year-old sister be a trusted judge of speech? Could a mother assess the quality of her preschool son’s words, if she only occasionally heard him talk at home? And there was no evidence at all that anyone who might be considered a reliable judge of normal speech had ever heard him. Kevin wasn’t deaf; that had been checked repeatedly by the various institutions he had been in. He could gesture his basic needs but he did not know true sign language. Someone had tried to teach him at Garson Gayer, but a suspected very low IQ was cited when he didn’t learn. For all intents and purposes,