Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
tell that not being able to see the door from the main part of the classroom was going to drive me mad. “Come on in,” I called and waited for someone to appear.
“Just me. How did it go? Okay?” It was Carolyn, the special education teacher from the class in the basement.
I nodded. “Pretty good.”
She grinned. “You want to come to Enrico’s with us? That’s where everybody here goes at noon.”
“Thanks, but I’ve brought my lunch. I need to catch up on all this stuff before the afternoon. Maybe I’ll join you tomorrow.”
“Who all have you got?” she asked, coming over and leaning down to look at the names on the files.
I liked Carolyn. I’d liked her instantly, which was fortunate, since we were the only two teachers in the building. She was about my age, still single and unabashedly concerned about it, easy-going, gregarious and inclined to speak before thinking, which gave her a refreshing naturalness.
Suddenly Carolyn whistled under her breath. “You got Considyne? Is this the Considyne?”
“I wouldn’t know. Have you had Leslie too?”
“Oh God, no. Thank God, no. The kid is absolutely wacko, which is all right, because it makes her fit in with the rest of the family. You live here for any time at all and you’ll know all you need to know about the Considynes. Or rather, Tom Considyne and Dr. Taylor.”
“Yes, believe it or not, I’ve already had that pointed out to me.”
Carolyn flipped open Leslie’s file. Pointing to the father’s name, she said, “He’s an artist. Supposed to be famous, although I’ve sure never heard of him anywhere.”
Then a wicked grin creased Carolyn’s features, and she pulled out a chair and sat down. “You want to hear the gossip about them? It’s pretty hot.” She reached over and helped herself to my potato chips. “She’s supposed to be this absolute genius; anyway that’s what people say. She’s a scientist of some sort. God knows how they met one another. But talk about a father fixation. She’s like twenty-five years younger than he is. Anyway, she was working back East at some university or other and commuting back and forth. They had their own private plane, jetting all over creation and part of Canada. She was even in Moscow once. Then all of a sudden it stopped. She got fired off what she was doing; that’s what I heard said. She has this fairly dramatic drinking problem, as you’ll no doubt discover, and I’m sure that’s what happened to her.
“So now we’ve got her, and she’s a pretty lively case, believe me. She has all these affairs. She isn’t even discreet about it. I know for a fact that she’s had an affair with Dr. Addison from up at the children’s clinic. It’s got to be humiliating for Mr. Considyne, because everybody knows she’s doing it. I suppose it must be because of the way she looks. I mean, if I looked like that, I’d probably have me a sugar daddy and keep a string on the side too.” Carolyn laughed.
I regarded my cheese sandwich glumly. This was the kind of thing you liked to hear about people you didn’t really know, not the parents of the children in your schoolroom.
“Trash with class, that’s what it boils down to,” Carolyn said. She leaned across the table and helped herself to my grapes. “She puts on all these airs. I mean, look at this silly business about Dr. Taylor. She thinks she’s too good to even talk to the rest of us. She’ll never even say hello. And who is she? What would she be if she weren’t Tom Considyne’s little bimbo? He’s the one who’s famous. He’s got all the money. But he’s nice. He’s real friendly, if you run into him down at the Co-op or something. If he’s been introduced to you, he’ll always remember your name. If he’s got any fault, it’s that he’s too casual about things. He tends not to follow through. He drove Rita wild last year. She was Leslie’s first-grade teacher. She was always arranging things with him to try and help Leslie, and he was always promising to do them, but he never did. That, and also he never answers his phone. If their help’s out, you’ll never be able to contact him, short of knocking the door down. He’s got a studio out in back of his house where he does his painting, and last year when Leslie went into a diabetic coma, Rita stood outside his studio knocking on the window, and he never even bothered to turn around and see who it was.”
“This sounds like a soap opera, Carolyn.”
“Ooooh, it’s better,” she said, with a gleam in her eye. “It’s real.”
I grimaced.
Carolyn smiled knowingly and pulled over the rest of the files to look at them. “You want me to fill you in on these too?”
“You know about them?” I asked incredulously.
She laughed. “No. But I’m sure I could think of something.”
We both dissolved into giggles.
After Carolyn left, I opened the Considyne file. There was nothing in there that hinted at the steamy stories Carolyn had been telling me. Dr. Taylor was a physicist. Mr. Considyne was listed simply as a painter. The first time I’d read it, I’d thought it meant house-painter. The only thing to have caught my eye initially was Dr. Taylor’s first name: Ladbrooke. The peculiarity of it had not struck me so much as idle curiosity over what, in intimate moments, one would call someone with such a formal name.
There was a fairly extensive sheaf of papers on Leslie and her disturbance. As in so many cases of severe handicaps of this nature, there was little certainty about exactly what her problem was and what had caused it. Apparently her birth and early infancy had been normal. She was a full-term baby and, while placid and not particularly responsive, she’d been easy to care for. Her progress past the usual milestones had been slow, but within normal limits. Then, somewhere around two and a half, she had begun to deteriorate. What little vocabulary she did have disappeared. What progress she’d made in terms of toilet training and self-care was lost. A futile round of doctors and psychiatrists started soon after Leslie was three. Autism, one report said. Mental retardation, said another. Childhood schizophrenia, said a third. No one seemed to know for sure, but everyone was willing to guess.
Amazingly, to my way of thinking, Leslie had had no special treatment program and, indeed, was kept in a regular classroom for two years. She had, in fact, spent more time in the classroom than had Mariana. There were a few acerbic jottings from Rita Ashworth, Leslie’s previous teacher, about the challenges this presented, and I got the impression that in the end, Leslie had been left pretty much to her own devices.
There was nothing written anywhere to suggest how Leslie’s parents had come to terms with their daughter’s handicap nor anything about what the home situation was like. There was a brief mention of two older stepchildren and how the younger of them, a teenaged girl, had a poor relationship with Leslie, but there was nothing else.
The first week passed. The three children were very different from one another, and I did nothing more than scuttle among them those first days, trying to keep order. Both Leslie and Dirkie could have done with a teacher apiece. Dirkie was fairly advanced in comparison to many other schizophrenic children I’d encountered. He was toilet trained, could express himself quite well, could follow simple instructions, and even had mastered a fair number of academic skills, although at a level way below what would have been expected for his chronological age. However, he still needed virtual one-to-one teaching to stay on task.
Dirkie’s worst problems came from an assortment of obsessions with things that were very commonly encountered, such as cats, hair, old men and women, fire engines and door hinges. Discharging the excitement generated by the obsessions took the better part of most days. First, an obsession would come to mind—perhaps he’d see a picture or hear a sound, and that would start him off. Then he’d become excited, then agitated, then frenzied, needing desperately to fulfill elaborate rituals before he could free his mind and think of something else. I became able to discern when one of the obsessions was overtaking Dirkie, because he would begin to talk in an odd voice. He spoke in a weird manner most of the time, with his voice deep and gravelly, like