A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler

Vineyard summers, yearn for them as for no other place in time. Years later, when I return to the Vineyard and look out on the blue Sound with its scattered wisps of sail boats, when I listen again for the familiar thud of the ferry, I’ll be there and not there. The familiar will have grown odd, as Rip Van Winkle discovered when he finally woke up. I’ll drive past my old house, a huge Victorian summer camp with porches wide enough to ride a tricycle on, with three floors and fourteen beds—one of them still painted either red or a bilious salmon depending on which side of it you’re looking at—with a dining table big enough for ping-pong, and a sandy path leading through the scrub oaks and trumpet vine, beach roses and honeysuckle, down across a pebbly beach to a splintery dock, its barnacled piles bearded with brown seaweed where minnows dart.
    The pier is gone, and, when I look up from the beach, I see that my house has been stripped of its scrub oaks and stands exposed on a carpet of imported sod, edged with hydrangeas. The battered screen door has been given a portico, the porch painted a blazing white and monogrammed with a wooden whale. The old matriarch, whose weathered shingles held us together for so many summers, is now buffed and bedizened beyond recognition.
    The past, my beloved past, that time and place when we were all happy, where battles over Temple disappeared, and Dick and I found our way to a brief harmony. A handful of halcyon years before Dick lost his real estate job and his precarious emotional footing.

    * Dear Irish sisters: If you should come upon these words, know that we all think of you and get in

Chapter 5

Things Fall Apart
    The Boston ethos is not always friendly. Early on, the Boston fathers laid it out: “To work is to pray,” they said, and setting to with it, found their prayers answered with industrial bounty. Contrary to the Biblical notion of “love thy neighbor,” such bounty led to self-interest and meanness of character, which surprised the fathers but was too good to stop. Soon, every river, every babbling brook was harnessed to a mill factory, where there was plenty of fourteen-hour-a-day labor for the impoverished immigrants pouring into New England. If the immigrants remained impoverished, the fathers said it was because they were godless and lazy.
    The old Puritan prayer continued to produce income, but the income was moved into investment firms where it was less visible. Money and self-interest went unspoken like a facial mole; distinction was the new order of the day. The mill owners now sent their sons to Harvard, not to study for the ministry but to acquire an intellectual polish equal to that of Europe. Boston became the Athens of America.
    However, there were then and always will be Boston scions who lack the acumen or fortune to make it into the ranks of the distinguished. Such a one was a small, mean man who’d spent his youth as a gentleman jockey and now sold real estate. Why he chose to woo Dick away from the real estate company Dick was working for and into his company, I have no idea. Somehow the two men impressed each other and Dick signed on.
    Before the winter was over, Dick came home to blurt out a garbled tale of woe. Knowing Dick, he must have played a part in it, but I put most of the blame on the Puritan meanness-of-character trait. No doubt the little man hated his own hard-bitten jockey face, his skinny jockey frame, his career of non-distinction-flaws I’m sure his Yankee family had been quick to point out. A fight with a man of his own social rank, a handsome man who was bigger and more charming than he, but a man he could taunt and still keep the advantage, was a way to get back a bit of his own. Dick had never had to answer for his temper as Temple was learning to answer for hers. In confrontation with a man whose family he admired, anxiety must have triggered his rage, and for that the man made him pay the price. He broke Dick as easily