The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown Page B

recognizes him, I don’t know how because he doesn’t see his grandfather often. It isn’t that my parents don’t like him; they simply can’t take the worry. They send him cards on his birthday and ask us to buy appropriate presents at Christmas, and they ask after him every time I visit, but the chaos of Walker coming to their house and aiming straight for a vase of calceolaria on my mother’s antique game table—no, that is not relaxing. His nose alone can drive my germ-warrior mother to distraction.
    She loves him, there is no doubt of that. She—her name is Cissy—loves him like a thing in nature, like her clematis plant or her roses or the river at the foot of her garden, as if he ran in her veins as a thick, normal residue. It’s the farm girl in her, the labourer who takes nature as it comes. But the farm girl—stout, strong, brave, even fierce—is also intimidated by his scientific needs, by his tubes and doses. She is afraid she will hurt him more. The day I told her just how disabled Walker would be—this was after our trip to the children’s hospital in Philadelphia, after we learned his reading and many other abilities would never progress much beyond those of a two-or three-year-old—she was sitting on the small love seat in the television room of her impeccable house. She looked at me, her hands in her lap, expressionless, then she shifted to the edge of the seat.
    “Well, we’ll just have to love him as he is, then.”
    Not a gift she extended my way, when I was growing up: perhaps Walker has made her more tolerant. (If so, he’s a miracle worker.) It’s not much of an answer: We’ll just have to love him as he is . But it is the only answer that is always there, waiting. My mother has a talent for striking the flinty bottom of the truth.
    My father, on the other hand, is his grandson’s friend. They sit hand in hand. If Walker whimpers, he will hear a brisk and nautical “Come on, now!”—my father’s years as a lieutenantcommander in the Royal Navy called back to service. It often works. The grandfather and the grandson are content to wait with each other. Maybe they are waiting for the same thing—but what is it? That is the sort of thought you have when you see them. This man who became me who became Walker. That stumbling, that hesitation, that indecision—the old man’s, the boy’s, and mine.
    My father is not an emotional man: he was sent to boarding school in 1918 at the age of four. His favourite brother, Harold, died on a ship in battle; another brother left home, was never heard from again; neither is ever discussed. But Walker softens him. The older my father gets the truer this is. He sees the broken boy, and begins to understand that power isn’t all he thought it was cracked up to be.
    And now I am preparing to put his grandson in a home.

    Mid-April 2004
    Another meeting at Surrey Place, a Toronto institution that specializes in autism, where a behaviour therapist has been working with Walker .
    These meetings are always the same: playroom, indoor-outdoor carpet, pastel walls, half a dozen smart women with clipboards, all between thirty and fifty, all dressed in denim shifts or loose-fit stone-washed jeans with elasticized waists—good for working on the floor with children who drool .
    Today’s meeting is about Walker’s head-bashing. There’s always new lingo to be harvested .
    “So it’s intrinsic?”
    “He is intrinsically motivated. He’s obviously getting something out of it.”
    “His motor skills aren’t fine enough for sign language.”
    “Pointing may be better for low performers.”
    For Walker to communicate by pointing, he needs ten sessions of “pointing instruction.” It’s a new “implementation,” requiring new “intake” and therefore new forms .
    One of the therapists tells me she spends half her time negotiating the bureaucracy of the rehabilitation world. But without these women to light the tunnels, I’d have succumbed years