Saving St. Germ (27 page)

The magnitude of what we’d come up with seemed undercut suddenly by feelings of doubt: What if L.R. had found something shockingly wrong with my calculations, so wrong she was embarrassed to tell me—no. What if ... I stopped myself. I sat down in my desk chair, but I could not relax.

I’d taken enormous risks. I’d sacrificed my status quo for this work. I’d actually thought I was doing what no woman scientist had ever done: writing my own life. I’d waited for L.R. to take the lead, given her age and experience, in determining where to submit our results for publication, deciding who should be notified and in what order. Now, in her wake, I wasn’t sure how to proceed: On my own? Solo but noting both our names?
How?

For the first time in all the previous dark twisting weeks, I let myself weep for myself, my life. What had I done, where was this going to end? I’d been unstable, unrepentant, heartless, single-minded about my goal. But somehow I’d had faith; the world of theory is touched by God, it had provided me a halo tunnel—I’d felt blessed, invincible. Now the walls were starting to fall and there was no longer that sense of invincibility, the giddiness of privileged vision.

Earlier, through a friend at UGC Law School, I’d located a lawyer who agreed to represent me. I was terrified that Jay was going to sue for temporary custody of Ollie while the divorce was in progress.

On the phone the lawyer had asked me several questions, about my marriage and Ollie, and though I sensed her sympathy and willingness to understand, I felt she’d had trouble grasping the heart of the conflict between Jay and me—our polar views of Ollie. I arranged a time the next day to meet with her and I set myself the goal of appearing strong and collected by the time the meeting took place.

The next morning Ollie chattered away at breakfast, then climbed down from her chair, picked up her crayons, and settled on the floor to draw while I did the dishes.

“Mom,” she called after a while, propping herself up on her elbows. Then she beckoned with one hand, urgently.

“These are the same ones turned.”

I wiped my hands on the dish towel, then knelt beside her. She had been drawing the shapes I’d shown her: first the symmetric, then the asymmetric. Her renderings were careful and exact, lined up on the page—but then she had flipped them. That is to say, she’d shown how two enantiomorphic (one left, one right) polygons could be superimposed. That was easy. But since the other day’s science lesson, she’d been obsessed with two enantiomorphic corkscrews, one left-handed, one right-handed. To imagine superimposing these two guys you’d have to be able to visualize four dimensions—that is, to see them not in a Euclidean, 3-D manner, but topologically. One of them would have to be cranked around, rotated, flipped over in a fourth dimension (disappearing!) and then it would reappear as the “other side.” If you had 4-D eyes you could view the corkscrew as a left helix from one spot and as a right helix from another. Ollie had drawn a loop from “behind” the left-handed corkscrew, knotted it “overhand,” then brought it up behind the right-hander.

“I believe you can see this,” I said to her bent head. “I believe you see hyperspace.”

She looked up at me and nodded. “Ollie is a very turning eye,” she said proudly. She got to her feet and began spinning slowly, gradually faster and faster. Then she stopped abruptly, shaking herself like a puppy. She steadied herself, then turned toward me.

“I am Ollie,” she said, and smiled. It was extraordinary—the first time I had ever known her to refer to herself in the first person.

“Yes. You’re Ollie.” I laughed and hugged her and kissed her. She wrinkled up her face and smiled.

“You are most definitely Ollie. The only such Ollie on earth.”

An hour or so later, the doorbell rang again. In a zombielike calm, I opened the door.
This
time the messenger was a young black kid; he had a dreamy look on his face and he wore a lime-green satin baseball jacket. He kept checking his watch, annoyed. It was a fake too-gold Rolex—I wondered if he’d been conned into buying it and now it was running badly.

He’d looked up smiling when the door opened and he handed me the envelope in a very delicate, hesitant fashion. As if he knew—or did that slightly cringing behavior come with the territory?

“Have a good one, if you
can,
man!” he called over his shoulder, loping away in his hightops.

I took the papers out to the kitchen, so Ollie couldn’t see my face. I sat down and read the words slowly: “... temporary custody of Olivia Tallich, during divorce proceedings.”

I restacked the papers neatly. I looked up at the clock and went to the phone.

T
HE GLASS DOOR
is right in front of me, reading TUO: Walk out, tuo klaw, I think, into the fourth dimension. Did I think Ollie was a genius? No. But I think she saw the world differently from everyone. Was she an autistic savant, one of those strange children with little or no language ability who can paint like Leonardo or add up and multiply columns of figures in their heads? No.

But I thought she really did see things differently—therefore her powers of description were different—therefore language was a tightrope for her, from here to there—and sometimes she rose up off the tightrope and walked a glittering trail on air. Around, all the way around shape. I wrote her phrases, her word-collages down and I recorded the consistencies—she was always making her own kind of “sense.” Whenever we went out—I mean left somewhere, said goodbye, exited—she spoke in more orderly sentences, as if she recognized doorways in experience through which she came and went.

Jean Piaget believed all kids see the world topologically, four-dimensionally,
first,
as infants, before they are
taught
to see things in three-dimensional Euclidean geometric space. Squares, rectangles, triangles, you see, don’t come to us naturally—we have to internalize the cookie-cutter. But fluid, unending, curving hyperspace—it’s our first visual home. That’s why a palette, a circle with dots of paint in colors moving clockwise around it, and a
reverse
palette, with the colors going counter, will be looked on as the
same
by those little minds that can “flip” the spheres with no effort. A triangle and a circle look the same—it’s the closed curve that likens them in a child’s mind. “Handedness” exists only for those minds trapped in space-time.

These thoughts, far extended, kept me busy in the hours before my meeting with the lawyer. Ollie was back in school and I felt lonely—I sat filling up pages of my yellow legal pads.

I’d had a letter from Faber. His tone was still woundedly imperious, but slightly chastened. He was interested in talking to me about continuing my work in the lab, even if I didn’t teach. He mentioned my original negotiations with UGC—how surprised they’d all been when I wanted to teach Organic. Maybe, he said, that hadn’t been such a good idea after all, though I’d convinced everyone it was. A research specialist like myself needed time to work uninterrupted; I hadn’t had that time. Wow, I thought. The funders must have gotten to him. My contract with them still stood. Maybe they’d said: “Cut her some slack, Walter.”

I was feeling stronger somehow; it was weird, the more I was threatened, the more I believed I felt strength shoring me up. I got up and stared out the window. It was another beautiful day. Faber was terrified of losing the lab funding. He was going to have to make peace with me. Jay would never get Ollie. Ollie would be fine, I’d find a school for her. Lorraine Atwater would be back soon. Sometime in the future I’d see Jesse again. We’d fall through that gold-lit cloud again. We’d die and go to heaven. I sighed a big sigh. I realized that I loved Jesse. I smiled to myself, then I looked down and noticed my hands shaking.

The lawyer, Terry McMahon, was youngish, brisk, and efficient. She was a graduate of UGC Law School, and we shook hands in that self-consciously solemn manner of the new woman professional, straightening our shoulders, looking each other squarely in the eye.

She offered me coffee, turning to a gleaming white Mocha Maker tucked into a walnut niche behind her desk, beneath shelves of thick leatherbound volumes: torts, precedents. Near the Mocha Maker stood a silver trophy: women’s soccer. She lifted the glass pot and poured as the sun came out from a cloud and flooded through her windows. She had long brown hair pinned back, and a strand came loose. She set the half-filled coffee mug down and reanchored it.

We sat down with our mugs of coffee and she went to work.

“So he’s made the move for Olivia?”

“
Ollie.
Yes. He’s asked the court for temporary custody.”

I asked her what would happen next and she told me that under California law, an evaluation of our situation would take place. This was called mediation. A “mediator,” usually a therapist, would take a look at the problem, then (most likely) refer each of us to a psychiatrist for separate evaluations. Ollie might receive a court-appointed attorney or a “guardian ad litem.”

“If it goes to that point,” she added. “This person becomes Ollie’s advocate; her best interests will be determined by him or her. However, usually these things are settled in mediation, so it never gets to that stage.”

She watched me closely. I was trying not to get upset, as the idea, so alien, of someone else deciding what would happen to Ollie struck me with force.

She sipped her coffee, looking at me over the mug.

“On the phone you said that Ollie is not like other kids—what did you mean by that?”

“I meant that she is different from her peers. Well, she’s different from almost
everybody.
She hasn’t developed along predictable lines—her speech, her mannerisms, her behavior, everything she does is unconventional.”

“You keep using the word ‘unconventional’ to describe her to me. This implies that you think her behavior is a kind of
choice,
is that true?”

I hesitated. “No. Her behavior is not a choice.”

“So her development is not so much unconventional as
unusual,
would you say?”

I nodded, suspicious.

“As a matter of fact, your husband has characterized her behavior as disturbed.”

“That’s right.”

“And what is your response to his characterization?”

“I don’t think that he really
knows
Ollie. He doesn’t observe her and he doesn’t talk to her because her manner frightens him.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he lacks imagination?”

“Come
on,
Esme.”

“No, I’m
serious.
That’s where our views of Ollie differ. Imagination. Hers, his, mine. Ollie imagines
everything
and expresses it. He wants her to imagine things within limits.”

“To be fair, his view would strike me as responsible. We cannot, as parents, let our children live in a world of imagination, now can we?”

“Right. Well then, my question to you would be, How do we limit their imaginations? In our responsible fashion? What do we take away? And when? And
how
do we do it? How do we convince them that they don’t see what they see—that they see only what we tell them?”

“You’re getting a little beyond me here, Esme. Your approach is theoretical—I’m talking about
your
child. Your husband’s view is that she needs help to function in the world. Yours is, I take it, that she does not.”

I put my mug down on a convenient desktop coaster. A glossy little Audubon: the Least Tern.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve had questions about Ollie always, from the beginning. Her manner is very strange. But I do not think it is pathological. As a matter of fact, I think that she
needs
to be the way she is in order to survive.”

“I wonder if you can give me a description of some of Ollie’s behavior patterns.”

“She likes to spin—around in circles—and she repeats things to herself. She describes her own actions under her breath as she does things. She usually refers to herself in the third person. When she speaks, her word order is primitive but the ideas she expresses are ... surprising, often complex. She seems to think in images, even shapes. She doesn’t seem to like playing with other children much. Her ... way of expressing herself manages to set her apart from others, children and adults. But she isn’t unhappy. She’s always thinking, all the time, and this thinking excites her. She talks to me about what she thinks. Oh yes, she also wears a TV, I mean, something she calls a TV, that she made from a cardboard box, over her head a lot. She thinks the TV is funny.”

“This repetitive behavior—the spinning in circles and the word-echoing—have these patterns ever struck you as symptoms of autism?”

“No. They did strike a specialist we visited as something like that. I mean, he didn’t think that she was autistic, but he did think that she might have some dysfunction: learning and emotional disability.”

“And you, again, disagreed?”

I looked down at the Least Tern, then up at her, sighing.

“Yes.”

There was a silence. The telephone on her desk rang twice, mutedly, then stopped.

“I guess you know what I’m going to ask you now. Why, when both your husband and a children’s specialist suggest that her behavior is not normal, do you persist in your belief that she is OK?”

“I know my daughter. Better than anyone. I
told
you: She needs to be the way she is in order to survive.”

“You mean to survive as
herself.
”

“Yes.”

“Does Ollie read—or write?”

“Both. She’s left-handed so there’s some reversal of letters when she writes, but her motor control is normal. She reads quite well. Again, she sees words backwards sometimes. But it’s not a major problem. She’s been categorized at Sixth Street kindergarten as ‘gifted’ as well as ‘attention-deficient.’”

“Both?”

“Both.”

Terry got up suddenly, folded her arms, and walked around her desk. She began to play with a brass letter opener, slapping it into her open palm. A very TV-movie gesture, but she seemed entirely unconscious of this.

“Esme, I don’t doubt your sincerity as the mother of this quite exceptional child—I mean, in maintaining that she is special and that her situation must be treated with special attention. But it seems to me that it would be very hard to convince a concerned social worker, or anyone else for that matter, that you had her best interests at heart when you ignored both your husband’s and a physician’s
and
her school’s warnings about her behavior. I think that they would see this as irresponsible on your part.”