for my son. Béla would yell in frustration over Johnny’s challenges.
(He yelled in Czech, so the children, who had picked up a little
Hungarian in our home, despite my wish for them to speak only
flawless American English, wouldn’t understand the words—though of
course they understood his tone.) I would retreat into our bedroom. I
was a master hider. In 1960, when Johnny was four, I took him to see
Dr. Clark, a specialist at Johns Hopkins, who told me, “Your son will
be whatever you make of him. John’s going to do everything everyone
else does, but it’s going to take him longer to get there. You can push
him too hard, and that will backĕre, but it will also be a mistake not to
push him hard enough. You need to push him to the level of his
potential.” I dropped out of school so that I could get Johnny to his
speech therapy appointments, his occupational therapy appointments,
to every kind of clinic I could think of, to every kind of specialist who
might help. (Audrey says now that her most vivid childhood memories
aren’t in the swimming pool—they’re in waiting rooms.) I chose not to
accept that our son was forever compromised. I felt sure that he could
thrive if we believed he could. But when he was young, eating with his
hands, chewing with his mouth open because that was the best he
could manage, Béla gazed at him with such disappointment, such
sadness, I felt I had to protect my son from his father.
* * *Fear pulled a current through our comfortable lives. Once, when
Audrey was ten, she had a friend over, and I walked past the open
door of her room just as an ambulance raced past our house, siren
wailing. I covered my head, a stubborn habit from the war, something
I still do. Before I had consciously registered the siren or my reaction
to it, I heard Audrey yelling to her friend, “Quick, get under the bed!”
She threw herself on the Ęoor and rolled under the bed skirt. Her
friend laughed, followed her down, probably thinking it was a peculiar