Life, Animated (14 page)

She’s keeping me up. It’s usually the other way around.

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Look, I have to get on this—this could change things.”

“It could,” I murmur. “It could.” She’s attacking the “social piece” head-on. Her concept is a weekly event, a social, something a few of the boys in Owen’s class would have on their schedules for every Thursday night, say, or Saturday afternoon. They’ll go bowling or catch a movie and pizza. The activities could change, the kids could decide, all together, and the parents would rotate as chaperones. If it was just four kids or five, it would be a once-a-month commitment for a parent. A group makes it special and with more kids there will be more avenues for interaction, opportunities to connect. With the holiday season upon us, there’s so much to do. the
Washington Post
is full of great activities.

The next morning, she’s revved and ready, working the class phone list, calling the moms.

A week later she’s sitting in the kitchen, wondering if her cell phone would break if she threw it. Must have been a dozen calls, at this point. It sure was a good idea. Everyone acknowledged that. Their kid will be so happy.
Let me get back to you.
And most of them did, laying out a few problems. Cornelia was sympathetic. They had lives like ours, with many of the moms and dads both working outside the home, and facing a full complement of stressors. Call by call, the brittleness of family life, with kids needing support—and the parents, too—became a theme. Every family was locked in a set of crafted rituals that they dare not break: when one parent drops a son off at therapy; when the other picks him up; a day reserved for a special family activity, an afternoon when he’s always tired, especially with some medication they’re just trying.

By this morning, she’s cut her hopes and losses, figuring if she could start with just Owen and one other kid, maybe it would grow. Social connections are about finding one’s level, a level of comfort or kinship, whether it’s the jocks finding their table, and the nerds finding theirs at a typical school, or kids in Owen’s realm who often will pair up with kids who match their capacity to engage. As his social skills were growing at Lab, he found some of that, building friendships with kids of similar, if slightly stronger, capabilities. He was rising to meet them. This is harder to find at Ivymount, a lifeboat to kids with a wide array of disabilities, many of them quite severe. But there’s one mom left to call, of a kid—Phillip—who Owen seems to like. He’s also one of the more able and interactive kids in the mix. This could be his match.

The mom has been away on business but is now back and taking the day off—and is in good spirits when Cornelia calls.

They seem to hit it off, which is encouraging, even if not all that surprising. After all, Cornelia cut her teeth on the mean streets of Fairfield, Connecticut, where Catholic dads—many of them commuting to Wall Street—filled large houses with broods of Matthews, Marks, Johns, and Marys; homes with eight, ten, or thirteen children, who ran freely, house to house, kitchen to kitchen, and then out across driveways and sidewalks to the trusty woods. It was a kid’s world. You learned how to get along.

And Cornelia did. She could tell a ribald story—voted Best Sense of Humor in her senior class, her social skills were admired and her manner—gentle, steady, and attentive—had built friendships to last up and down the East Coast.

But you live through your kids; a circumstance, here, that created acute distress for a woman who could always find a friend. Now she couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal one for her son.

She and this very nice mother, Helen, have been talking, all warm and willing, for fifteen minutes. Every subject is crossed, both telling their stories like seasoned pros—upbringing, college, husband, work, kids, and then the special-needs battles both families face. Their life is very much like ours, Cornelia thinks. Like Owen, Phillip has also mixed a bit into the mainstream and has one brother, too, a year younger. Helen says they wrestle with the same issues we do, of trying to find ways for the little brother to include Phillip, whenever possible, in groups of typical kids.

Cornelia lays out her original idea, runs through how it’s been a difficult week, and then drops her last card. Actually, throws it down with a laugh: “At this point, if someone just invited Owen over, I’d be happy.”

Helen pauses. “The problem is that the only night that’s possible, with our crazy schedule, is Friday.”

Cornelia cuts in, excitedly. “No, Friday’s a great night for Owen.”

Helen seems to regroup as Cornelia tries to close it. “You know, Helen, he’s always talking about Phillip.” Okay, he did one time, but close enough.

“No, and Phillip always talks about Owen. But as I was saying,” Helen continues, “Friday evening we always have a pizza party with Phillip, his little brother, and his brother’s friends.”

The line goes quiet for a few seconds. Cornelia’s on her knees, but she will not beg or speak the words forming in her tightening gut:
“Would it kill you just to have him come over and eat pizza, just
to sit with Phillip and his precious little brother, with his precious little
oh-so-normal friends, and just be? He’s gentle as can be, he really is, he
wouldn’t hurt anyone. And we’ll reciprocate, tenfold. For God’s sake, he
just wants to have a friend.”

But, of course, she doesn’t say that—no one would.

And Helen shuts the door: “So that’s the problem, Cornelia. That one night is already taken.”

Cornelia’s not sure she can speak. But she does.

“Right, Helen. I understand.”

O
n an early March evening in 2004 I slip down into the basement and settle on the couch. I’ve started to spend more time down here with Owen, just the two of us, watching movies, talking about his sidekicks. It’s not so much for him.

I’m feeling some acute stress and this helps. Specifically, I’m under investigation by the U.S. government for supposedly making off with an unspecified number of classified documents among those nineteen thousand.

It’s been going on for nearly two months since Paul O’Neill and I were on
60 Minutes
in early January, two days before
The Price of
Loyalty
was published. On the show, they flashed the cover sheet from a classified packet from January 2001, the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush presidency. I didn’t have that document or any classified documents—they were all cleaned off the discs I received from O’Neill. But the cover sheets weren’t, and I used this cover sheet to discover that from his first weeks in office, long before 9/11, Bush was intent on finding any rationale to complete his father’s unfinished business and overthrow Hussein, including capturing Iraq’s oil fields. I told Leslie Stahl to make sure the broadcast noted I didn’t have the underlying classified packet. They didn’t. And the next morning an official from the U.S. Treasury Department called our house. He asked Cornelia if she was my wife (after some hesitation she acknowledged matrimony) and then told her that agents would be coming over to seize documents believed to be in my writer’s studio in the backyard.

The ten seconds it took him to explain all this was plenty of time for her to summon her “How dare you?” impulse—finely tuned from years with Owen—telling him that her husband was protected by the First Amendment and that “no one will be coming to my house to seize anything.” But if he left his phone number, she’d be happy to find me and have me call him back.

She did find me—in mid-interview for a taped segment on NPR—and we talked for a few minutes about lawyers I might call. I did, and several five-hundred-dollar-an-hour Washington lawyers called the Treasury Department back by the end of business that January day, starting a legal battle that’s still raging by early March, when Owen and I settle in for a screening.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Whatchya watching?”

“
The Lion King
—I love this movie.”

“And you know what it’s based on?” I ask.

“Hamlet!”

We’ve often talked of this movie’s roots and he likes getting that answer right. I think it’s because knowing what’s behind a movie that means so much to him is satisfying, in the same way he relishes trolling through the deep data of film credits—about the careers of James Earl Jones (the lion king, Mufasa) or Jeremy Irons (his villainous and fratricidal brother, Scar). Knowing this is Shakespeare with lions gets behind the wall of flickering light, where the makers of this thing he loves are hiding, winking at him.

Or maybe it’s just to please me. I like Owen to summon this Hamlet reference when friends—both Walt’s and ours—come by. He often has, almost always at my bidding. I want people to see him as smarter, and more able, than they might otherwise. I figure they’ll treat him then with more care, or interest, or respect, and that he’ll respond to that. It’s about binding him to what pretty much everyone in America north of early childhood is supposed to know. Because connecting him to all that, strand by strand, is my definition of self-awareness, and those who are not self-aware are swiftly identified and preyed upon.

So when Owen, now splayed across the black leather chair, asks me, “Is George Bush angry at you?” I’m perversely delighted he knows what’s happening in the world and how it’s impacting our household. After interviews with media across the globe, I’m forced to answer him plainly, in a way that doesn’t induce concern. I say I’m just doing my job and the president is doing his—a simple, frank response that’s better than almost anything I’d said in all those interviews. He asks, “Are we okay?” I say we are. And he turns back to the movie. He believes Cornelia and me when we tell him things. Doesn’t poke around for subtext, agenda, or hidden meanings.

So I don’t either, a moment later, as we watch that marching hyena scene. Did Owen ask me that question about Bush, knowing this scene was coming? Can’t really say. His prayer a few nights after the Iraq invasion helped shed any remaining doubts that he absolutely breathes in ambient tension, from inside the house or beyond it. He can’t process much of the spoken word that’s offered face-to-face—too stimulating in some way, his therapists say—but have Cornelia whisper something to me with the slightest emotional tone, and, from even two floors away, we’ll hear a polite but urgent: “Everything okay?” “Yes, Owie!” Cornelia will shout back. “Dad and I are just having a discussion.”

On the screen, Simba—exiled after his father’s murder—is having a heart-to-heart with the meerkat, Timon, and the warthog, Pumbaa (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), who help him forget his troubles. Owen laughs, singing the African-themed song, “
Hakuna
matata
…it’s our problem-free philosophy,
hakuna matata
.” I’m there, singing beside him. And when Owen dances before the screen, I do that, as well. He’s forgetting his troubles down here. I am, too, by entering the context where he lives—a river of symbols that flow in this half-light, far beneath the noisy surface-world of passing events and impressions.

Drawing him to that surface, connecting him to the wider world of conventional knowledge may be futile. There’s a hook for Hamlet that spurs his interest. That’s a gift. Try asking him who invented the light bulb or why it rains or when the Civil War was fought (right century gets you credit) or what seven times three is, and you’ll often get a blank stare. Some of this type of general knowledge was beginning to stick in the last days at Lab, when he was prompted to know things of no particular interest to stay in the mix with new friends, but that—along with his skills in writing and math—have since slipped.

I want to fix that, fix him, but lately Cornelia is saying, maybe we have to think more about just enjoying him for who he is and not trying to improve or repair him every minute of every day.

It’s a difficult impulse for me to control. I want to fix everything, make it just so, make it right. But singing “Hakuna Matata” with him eases me and my corrective impulses. The movie comes around to the scene where Mufasa’s ghost comes to Simba, now maturing into young adulthood, and beckons him to fulfill his destiny. We watch it, silently, the ghost of a dead father hovering over a teenager, telling him who he is meant to be.

“I had another dream about Big Walter,” Owen says quietly, referring to my father, who, of course, he’s never met. His eyes stay on the screen.

There had already been a first dream, a few weeks earlier, which he’d told me about when we were flipping through some animation books in his room. He just blurted it out: “Big Walter visited me in my dream.” It took me a second to get my bearings. I don’t dream about my father and have often wondered why. I just asked Owen what my dad looked like in his dream; he said, like the picture of him (full-bodied, smiling, just before the cancer hit at forty-five) that hangs on the wall in the den. That was it, all he said.

This time, I don’t respond, wanting to figure out some perfect thing to say that’ll encourage him to tell me more. So we just watch as Simba fulfills his destiny. His sidekicks—the protective hornbill, Zazu, the wise old baboon, Rafiki—make it possible. They usher him forward. Owen drinks it in, gets up, and stretches, requited, now, in this underground universe, his safe place of family and fable.

“You said Big Walter was in another dream,” I mention casually. “So what happened?”

Owen hadn’t sensed I was waiting to hear more. He just got involved in the movie.

“Well, he was an old man this time with gray hair. He had lived his whole life. He was gentle and kind, and we talked and played. And he told me he loved me.”

The crowd gathers on a splendid spring afternoon—April 17, 2004—in a modernist synagogue, all blond wood, soaring asymmetrical ceilings and skylights, built for sunny days.

It will be one for Owen—got to be. Though we, like the two hundred or so well-wishers now settling into their seats, are not sure what to expect.

Almost anything could happen. Which is why many kids like Owen don’t go through anything like the formal bar mitzvah ceremony, a ritual that rests on study and performance and meeting expectations of what a thirteen-year-old boy can—and now must—do to be accepted as an adult in a Jewish community.

Being blissfully and sometimes disastrously self-directed, either Owen feels it or it doesn’t happen. He could easily decide to say a prayer, nod in affirmation, and walk off the stage.

We’ve spent six months trying to ensure otherwise. It has been an almost frenzied struggle for the entire family, from the moment—the previous fall—when I asked Owen if he wanted to have a bar mitzvah like Walt’s, or something simpler. He said, “Like Walter did it. Now it’s my turn.”

Between those two sentences stretched an uncharted landscape and a set of deep chasms. Bridges needed to be built. Strong ones. Bar mitzvahs actually do justice to that well-worn phrase “rite of passage.” They’re every bit as fraught as weddings, but with unpredictable adolescents, who generally need a lot of urging.

For Owen, we naturally start with the movies. Were there movies with Jewish themes that could provide handles, anything to work with, to draw him in?

We went with one indisputable favorite:
An American Tail
, a 1986 Universal animated film about mice from Russia, with thick accents, who come to America because “the streets are paved with cheese.” It’s Jews as mice, led by one of Owen’s most beloved characters, Fievel, the young mouse who is separated from his family and wanders through the gritty circus of 1890s New York. He has lots of sidekicks helping him fulfill his destiny, most of them among a set of Jews/mice that pretty much match—mouse for Jew—my ancestors who came through Ellis Island. After several viewings, this offered a strong opening hand: “The Jews, Owen, have always been history’s sidekicks.” That, he definitely got!

As for the portion of the Torah that bar and bat mitzvah boys and girls read in mid-April, we got a lucky break: a passage from Leviticus where Moses receives the Ten Commandments. There, too, was a convenient animated movie:
The Prince of Egypt
, the 1998 DreamWorks rendition of the Exodus story. It was a movie he’d seen and didn’t like, because, he said, “There were no sidekicks for comic relief.” But we forced mandatory viewings—our version of Hebrew school—and eventually talked through the commandments and issues of right and wrong. He took to this, to a structure of dos and don’ts. This is common among spectrum kids. They like a rule, which, by its nature, narrows the many options of unpredictable behavior. We read through the English translations of the Ten Commandments and other rules listed in his passage from Leviticus. He nodded along. Some seemed to strike him, especially the ones that prohibit preying on the weak.

But then he went about on his own business, writing up a speech—each bar mitzvah boy or girl has to give one, based on what they read in Hebrew from the Torah. He wrote down rules that he felt were important to him in colored markers on a few pages of his sketchbook. We told him to do what he does in prayers before dinner—now, just to write it down—and that we’d have to hear it at least a week before the big day. He’d been offering prayers at the dinner table a few nights a week for almost a year, ever since the Iraq prayer. We knew he had it in him, but only if we got out of his way and he really felt like he was talking to God.

But the central task—applying study skills that most kids pick up in school to learn to read from the Torah—was simply untenable. He was never going to read Hebrew. My skills peaked precisely thirty-four years prior at my bar mitzvah and had diminished steadily since. We needed a tutor; one with the patience of, well, a saint. What we found was a gray-haired, Justice Department lifer, a lawyer/prosecutor exuding a quiet, no-nonsense firmness that would’ve impressed Eliot Ness. Miriam, who went by Mim, was also the granddaughter of the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, our fast-growing slice of the faith that weaves traditional worship with a progressive sensibility, embraces mixed marriages (like ours), and advances its founding credo of making religion more relevant to daily life. As for a personal credo, Mim tapped an even deeper well: in the 1920s, her mother was the very first girl in the United States to have a
bat
mitzvah.
Ever
. This left her sixty-something daughter, who’d volunteered with special needs kids, with a powerful affinity for boosting someone many folks would not consider suitable for participation in such a rigorous, ancient ceremony; a purpose and patience that guided her, hour after hour, as she sat—reciting Hebrew and discussing it, in a way Owen could understand.

All of this is pretext, a behind-the-curtain drama that is invisible to the expectant, mixed religion crowd now settled into the sanctuary of Adat Shalom in Bethesda: a gathering of Suskinds from New York and Florida, Kennedys from Connecticut, and a far-flung array of friends from Boston to Washington, many of Owen’s teachers and therapists, along with a few classmates and their parents. Just about everyone he knows in his life and a few folks from the congregation, who came around out of curiosity. This was the temple’s first-ever
mincha
service, what the ultra-orthodox, who pray all day, call their afternoon worship. For us, it was a way of meeting a basic requirement: that the bar mitzvah take place in an official capacity before the community into which a boy or girl is now to be accepted as an adult—without the prospect of things going haywire in front of the temple’s whole congregation.