for a hatrack?”
Hesitantly, Thomas let go of his sister. He and Bobby embraced. After
all these years, Thomas was still not entirely comfortable with Bobby,
not because they had bad chemistry between them or any bad feelings, but
because Thomas didn’t like change very much and adapted to it slowly.
Even after more than seven years, his sister being married was a change,
something that still felt new to him.
But he likes me, Bobby thought, maybe even as much as I like him.
Liking DS victims was not difficult, once you got past the pity that
initially distanced you from them, because most of them had an innocence
and guilelessness that was charming and refreshing. Except when
inhibited by shyness or embarrassment about their differences, they were
usually forthright, more truthful than other people, and incapable of
the petty social games and scheming that marred so many relationships
among “ordinary” people.
The previous summer, at Cielo Vista’s Fourth of July picnic, a mother of
one of the other patients had said to Bobby,
“Sometimes, watching them, I think there’s something in them-a
gentleness, a special kindness that’s closer to God than anything in
us.”
Bobby felt the truth of that observation now, as he hugged Thomas and
looked down into his sweet, lumpish face.
“Did we interrupt a poem?” Julie asked.
Thomas let go of Bobby and hurried to the work table, where Julie was
looking at the magazine from which he had been clipping a picture when
they’d arrived. He opened his current scrapbook-fourteen others were
filled with his creations and shelved in a corner bookcase near his
bed-and pointed at a two-page spread of pasted-in clippings that were
arranged lines and quatrains, like poetry.
“This was yesterday. Finished yesterday,” Thomas said.
“Took me a looooong time, and it was hard, but now it… is… right.”
Four or five years ago, Thomas had decided that he wanted to be a poet
like someone he had seen and admired on television. The degree of
mental retardation among victims of Down’s syndrome varied widely, from
mild to severe; Thomas was somewhere just above the middle of the
spectrum, but did not possess the intellectual capacity to learn to
write more than his name. That didn’t stop him. He had asked for paper
glue, a scrapbook, and piles of old magazines. Since he rarely asked
for anything, and since Julie would have moved a mountain on her back to
get him whatever he wanted, the items, his list, were soon in his
possession.
“All kinds of magazine he’d said, “with different pretty pictures… but
ugly too. all kinds.” From Time, Newsweek, Life, Hot Rod, Omni,
Seventeen, and dozens of other publications, he snipped whole pictures
and parts of pictures, arranging them as if they were words, in a series
of images that made a statement that was important to him. Some of his
“poems” were only five lines long, and some involved hundreds of
clippings arranged in dearly stanzas or, more often, in loosely
structured lines that resembled free verse.
Julie took the scrapbook from him and went to the armchair by the
window, where she could concentrate on his newest composition. Thomas
remained at the worktable, watching her anxiously.
His picture poems did not tell stories or have recognizable thematic
narratives, but neither were they merely random jumbles of images. A
church spire, a mouse, a beautiful worn in an emerald-green ball gown, a
field of daisies, a can of Do pineapple rings, a crescent moon, pancakes
in a stack with syrup drizzling down, rubies gleaming on a black-velvet
drape play cloth, a fish with mouth agape, a child laughing, a nun
praying, a woman crying over the blasted body of a loved one in some
Godforsaken war zone, a pack of Lifesavers, a puppy with floppy ears,
black-clad nuns with starched white wimples-from those and thousands of
other pictures in his treasured boxes of clippings, Thomas selected the
elements of his compositions.
From the beginning Bobby recognized an uncanny rightness to many of the
poems, a symmetry too fundamental to be defined, juxtapositions that
were both naive and profound, rhythms as real as they were elusive, a
personal vision plain to see but too mysterious to comprehend to any