A Safe Place for Joey

A woman’s voice came from one edge of the room. “Mrs. MacCracken? Is that you?”

She pushed herself up from the sofa with effort, at the same time pulling her worn black coat more closely around her. She must have once been a handsome woman, but now as she came closer I could see that her face was gaunt and deeply lined and there were dark circles beneath her eyes.

She spoke to me, but she was looking at the boy. She walked past me toward where he huddled against the wall, hands across his eyes. She pulled him toward her, gently cradling his head against her thigh, crooning, “Shhh, Errol. Shhh. It’s all right now.”

She turned to me and said, “He doesn’t like the light.”

They made a strange picture here in the lamplight – the black-cloaked figure bending over the tiny boy, her knobby fingers entangled in his limp brown hair, his face buried in her coat.

I glanced at my watch. Almost eight o’clock. More than a half-hour drive back home. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s very –”

“Please,” the woman interrupted. “Don’t go.” She moved closer to me, her dark eyes searching my face, the boy clinging to her leg. She looked too old to be the mother of such a young child, but her next sentence implied she was.

“Mrs. Tortoni told me to come. You helped her Frank. She said you’d help us, too.”

I felt a small rush of pleasure. When I’d begun my private practice as a learning disability consultant, Frank was one of my first students. Frank was dirt-poor, streetwise, smart as a whip. His father was a mechanic at the garage I used. Frank had been easy to help, mainly because there was nothing really wrong with him. No signs of any learning disability, no serious emotional problems. He’d just fallen through the cracks of the huge, inefficient school system in the economically bankrupt city where he lived. Someone had equated poor with dumb and placed him in the lowest track of skills classes. Each year he was passed on to the next grade in the same slow, dull track. But given a chance and a little outside help, Frank was off and running, eager to show what he could do, his parents cheering him on.

“I get it,” he’d shout. “That stupid factoring! Ain’t nothin’ but doin’ times and matchin’ ’em up. Whyn’t they just say so?”

I coached Frank before the state competency tests and called the school to see how he’d done.

The next year he was in the second-highest track in the middle school and flourishing.

Seduced by my thoughts of Frank and how little it had taken to help him, I hesitated.

“Please,” the woman said. “Please just let me talk to you for a few minutes.”

“Do you live near the Tortonis?” I asked, knowing they lived almost an hour away.

She nodded. “Two blocks down.”

“How did you get here?”

“Bus,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We changed at Grover.”

A long, cold bus ride, particularly at this hour of day. This worn, weary woman must care a great deal about this strange boy or she would never have bothered.

I unlocked my office door, and they followed me back inside.

Now she sat silently. The effort of getting them both to my office seemed to have used up all her strength. I walked around the room collecting toys for the boy who sat on the floor by her feet. He was tiny, the size of a four-year-old, although his pale, pointed face seemed older. He turned away when I leaned down to place the cars and trucks and dolls beside him, and hid his face against the couch. I was tempted to stay on the floor myself, but then decided that right now I needed to talk to his mother – if indeed that was who this woman was.

I pulled a chair beside her and reached for a pad and pencil. “Why don’t you begin by telling me both your names?”

“Kroner,” she said. “I’m Blanche Kroner and this is Errol. Well, his name’s really Eric. I just give him the name Errol, like a nickname. You know – like the movie star. Handsome and all.”

I watched as Eric began to push one of the cars back and forth across the rug, never looking up, his little peaked face serious and intent. Did she really think him handsome?

Gradually Eric’s story emerged bit by bit. Eric had one older sister, Bella, now fourteen. She had been born on the Kroners’ first anniversary. Mrs. Kroner had vomited every day of her pregnancy with Bella, and after a labor of eighteen hours she’d sworn she’d never have another child. And she hadn’t for eight years, although she said she had “lost two when she was two or three months along.”

The summer after Bella’s seventh birthday, Mrs. Kroner began to feel sick, and when the vomiting started she knew she was pregnant again. She thought about having an abortion, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She counted the days until the baby would be born, not because she wanted it, but to get relief from the pain and exhaustion. Then, to make matters worse, the baby was two weeks late, and when he did finally come he weighed only five pounds – so little and weak he couldn’t even suck right.

Mrs. Kroner sighed. “I had to get him a bottle with a hole in the nipple so big I could practically pour the milk down him.”

Unexpectedly, her face lit up, and for a few seconds there was a radiance that eliminated the weariness. “Even so, he was a sweet little tyke. The nurses were all crazy about him,” she smiled, remembering.

As she talked I glanced at Eric from time to time. If he understood any of what was being said, he gave no sign. He was moving around a little now, lining up the cars and trucks in a straight row. He turned each car over and over, inspecting it carefully. Then, evidently having made a decision based on some standards of his own, he placed it in a certain spot in the row. There was something enormously appealing in his serious concentration. Sometimes he used his right hand, sometimes his left. When the cars were all properly aligned, he began lifting the dolls out of their carton, which was designed to look like a dollhouse.

There were five small figures made of soft, bendable plastic – their felt clothes somewhat torn (they had been with me a long time), but still completely recognizable – father, mother, girl, boy, and a diapered baby. Eric took them all out and laid them on the rug.

The bottom of the box was divided into compartments, representing rooms. I watched as Eric picked up the father doll and sat him in a room at the back end of the box. Next Eric placed the girl beside the father. Now he put the mother standing up in a room at the opposite end. Only the boy and the baby remained. He picked them up – holding one in each hand – and then put the baby next to the mother, but only for an instant, replacing the baby with the boy. He tried the boy doll in several different positions – standing, sitting, lying down – but evidently none was to his satisfaction. Finally he stashed the boy doll under one of the cushions of the couch and put the baby back beside the mother.

I had become so absorbed in Eric’s play that I missed some of Mrs. Kroner’s words. Now her voice reached me again, saying, “… never was one to say much, but he didn’t get into things or talk back the way Bella did.”

She hadn’t sent Eric to nursery school. It had seemed like a waste of money, and besides, she liked having him around. Bella and her didn’t get along, and Mr. Kroner slept days and worked nights at the factory, so it was kind of nice to have some company.

Eric had started kindergarten a year ago, when he was five, and everything seemed to be going along all right, although he was smaller than the other children and he was sick a lot. Just colds, earaches – nothing serious.

He didn’t want to go back to school after summer vacation, but Mrs. Kroner had taken a job in a cosmetic factory a few blocks from their home, knowing Eric was going to be in first grade and in school all day. So she had to insist that he go, and after the first week or so he got used to it and stopped “crying his head off. But he still doesn’t like school. He doesn’t act up, but he can’t wait to get out.”

Neither she nor Mr. Kroner had ever gone for a parent conference, until last week. His first-grade teacher, Miss Selby, was “just real pushy” and said if they didn’t come in, she’d come see them.

“So last Thursday I went, but now I wish I hadn’t. All she did was say Eric didn’t know this, didn’t know that, didn’t do show and tell, didn’t follow directions, didn’t talk right, couldn’t learn his sounds. Said she wanted him tested. Well. I don’t want any tests. I’ve had plenty of tests myself over the years, and if there isn’t something wrong with you when they start, there is by the time they’re done. So now I make Errol do his sounds at home with me every night.”

It was not a happy picture. Mrs. Kroner had been in her late thirties during her pregnancy with Eric. She had a history of a difficult earlier pregnancy and subsequent spontaneous abortions. During Eric’s gestational period she had severe nausea and vomiting. Eric was a low birth-weight baby with a weak sucking reflex, and he was colicky. He lacked the stimulation of nursery school. There was a history of ear infections, and Eric had disliked school from the beginning. Besides, there were intimations from Eric’s play and Mrs. Kroner’s comments that there was something odd about the family configuration. And yet there was a magnetism – I could feel myself being drawn to him almost against my will.

“What does Mr. Kroner think about all this?” I asked. She shrugged. “He leaves Eric to me. Says he has enough trouble keeping bread on the table. Says the school is probably making a fuss over nothing.” Mrs. Kroner sighed. “But I don’t know,” she said. “I got to thinking about Mrs. Tortoni and Frankie, and I got thinking maybe you could help Eric with his schoolwork. You know, help him sound it out. Like I do at night.”

I looked over at the little boy. He was holding the baby in the palm of his hand, stroking it rhythmically as he rocked back and forth, his eyes closed. It was my turn to sigh. Whatever it was that Eric needed, it was a lot more than sounding it out. Suddenly Eric opened his eyes, and I could see that they were filled with tears, his long dark eyelashes wet and clumped together. Why was he crying silently to himself?

“Suppose I go over to Eric’s school and talk to his teacher. Miss Selby? Is that her name? Maybe she can give me some more information about the kind of help Eric needs.”

“No!” Mrs. Kroner spoke sharply. “I don’t want the school to know I’m here. Then they’ll be even surer there’s something wrong with him. Or else they’ll say it’s the tutor what’s doing the work, not Eric.”

“Mrs. Kroner, I’m sorry.” And I really was. Despite the hour, despite the obvious problems, there was something about this little boy and his mother that drew me to them, and I was moved by how much she obviously loved her son and how desperately she wanted to help him. Still, I couldn’t work behind a cloud of pretense. I tried to explain. “I can’t work that way. I need your help and Eric’s teacher’s, too. We all have to work together, be a team, if we’re going to help Eric.”

“What would you say to her?” Mrs. Kroner asked. “I wouldn’t want you talking behind Eric’s back – or mine neither.”

“I would ask about the kind of things Eric does in school – where he does well and where he has trouble. I would ask about the other children and how he gets along with them.”

“No,” Mrs. Kroner said again.

I sighed – half weariness, half exasperation.

“Then I don’t see how I can …”

I stopped speaking as something touched my right foot. I looked down and saw that Eric had put the baby in one of the trucks and was crouched beside his mother’s legs, pushing the truck back and forth. The truck had bumped against my shoe. An accident, or was this Eric’s way of asking for help? He was as pale and silent as before, but now he looked steadily up at me and pointed at the truck. My heart capitulated.

“What is it, Eric?” I asked, bending down. But the moment was gone. I had lost him. He buried his head back against the couch. But during that one brief instance of eye contact I could feel the intelligence behind those eyes, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I could reach this little boy, I could teach him.