Sunward

It was a still, humid day in late summer. Bill and I held our little boy's hands as we entered the hospital wing and climbed the steps to the reception area. William was almost three years old. With a wistful expression on his little square face, he walked into the waiting room without seeming to notice anyone or anything. We checked in at the window. I smoothed back his thin, white-blond hair that lay close to his head as we sat down to wait. My eyes and my heart focused on our beautiful young son. He looked so healthy with his tanned complexion. He looked so loved and cared for. In his navy blue shorts and suspenders and his white cotton shirt with tiny navy polka dots on it, he might have been any little boy anywhere. But he was our little boy. And he was here! Waiting to be examined in the psychiatric wing of the university hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Our William! Our pride and joy! Our firstborn son who came into the world seemingly as an affirmation of our love and the joining of our lives. We had felt that same affirmation in the spring of 1959 when our second son was born, a bright and happy baby who soaked up our love and tenderness and returned it to us in full measure. But William was somehow different. This little child, so eagerly awaited, so deeply loved, was not responding as he should. We could no longer ignore the fact or make excuses, or live on the food of hope that one day it would change. Something was wrong. A nebulous something that defied our understanding. Our family doctor had pronounced him physically healthy. But William seemed somehow distant and apart from all the world around him. What would the psychiatrist say about William? What was the truth about our son? A bullet of fear shot through me. I looked over at a little boy sitting on the floor in front of his mother. "Was the sky dark when it shot out fire?" he asked as he studied a Life magazine picture of a flaming volcano. "How high did the fire shoot? How far did the lava go? How many people were killed?" Would our son be like this child? I wondered. His mother looked much as I did – tall, slender, dark blond hair. She answered his questions in a reassuring manner. A few adults sat reading magazines. Children here and there were quietly sitting with a parent. One child, visibly agitated, was climbing into and out of a chair beside his mother. The sounds and silences made me feel isolated and more anxious. I turned my attention back to William, sitting in a child's rocking chair, rocking methodically back and forth, humming "Rock-a-bye Baby," the tune his rocker played at home. His little face was blank, emotionless. He seemed locked away in a world of his own, surrounded by an invisible wall that neither our love nor our tenderness could easily penetrate. William had never talked. In his whole life, he had said only four words. One day, when he was eighteen months old, upon awakening from a nap, he called "Ma-ma" – once. But by the time I got to his room, he was standing in his crib, his stuffed animal held high in his hand, all but oblivious to the fact that he had just accomplished for himself an astounding feat. Nine months later, when we were walking into a drugstore to buy him an ice cream cone, he exclaimed in delight, "Ice cream!" Then months later still, after visiting Bill's parents in Maryland, on the way home we stopped at Washington's big National Airport so he could see the planes come and go. For a half-hour, he watched with delight. Then as we drove away, standing in the back seat of the car, he looked back and with a smile as if in happy reverie, said "Airplane." And silence closed in again. Mama, ice cream, airplane! And each of them just once! Our physician, and our friends as well, kept telling us not to worry. "In time, he will talk," they said. "In time, he will be fine." But when we talked to him, his sole response, if there were one at all, was a wisp of a smile that vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving him once again a silent, solitary little boy. For nearly three years we had watched helplessly as he fell like Alice in Wonderland down a dark hole beyond our reach. There had to be a cause – and a cure. And Bill and I were determined to find it. Even if it meant bringing William here, a hundred miles from home, to a psychiatrist in one of the South's most renowned medical facilities. Surely we would find answers here! Surely William would be all right.