Our Baby Was Blind

1

THE hospital noises flowed in and out of my consciousness as I stirred drowsily in the late afternoon; I felt blessedly detached from pain, stretching each leg stiffly into the cool, smooth corners of the hospital bed, testing the suppleness of my body. My second child, a baby girl, had been born, strong and squalling, early that morning, and all day I had been luxuriating in the fulfilled sensation of maternity.

The door opened and the doctor came in. He was a young man who was exempt from war service since he had three small children of his own and a tremendous practice. His voice was soft-spoken and his eyes had the directness a woman looks for.

“Mrs. X,” he began, sitting on one of the stiff maple chairs by the bed. “ You know you have a fine, healthy child, but I am sorry to tell you there’s something the matter with the baby’s eyes.”

I felt Time stop. “What is it, Doctor? What have you found?” I humped myself up on one elbow. “ What is it ? ”

“ We are not sure yet. I have called in a specialist for tomorrow.” He crossed his arms over his blue smock. “I was examining her an hour ago. She opened her eyes, and I found something that wasn’t usual.” He hesitated a moment.

“Go on, Doctor.”

“The eyes are too small.”

“I have always been very nearsighted,” I said.

“This has nothing to do with that. This goes back to something that happened when the eyes were being formed, in the first three months.”

“Does my husband know?”

“Yes, I have called him at the Pentagon. All there is to do is wait for the eye man’s diagnosis.”

He rose to go, and I was grateful for his impersonality. When the door had closed I dropped back on the flat, unyielding bed, my previous mood totally shattered. Surely things would resolve themselves, I kept telling myself. The pregnancy had been so normal; everything in Bill’s background and in mine was normal. How could they be sure?

I was still groping when I heard a little cry, and a nurse came into the room bringing my baby. “Such a beautiful baby,” she said, laying the shapeless white bundle on my lap; she paused for a moment and then left the room. I looked at the miniature pink face and the delicate reddish fuzz over the tiny head which was cupped in my hand. A pink fist appeared suddenly out of the white wrappings and waved about in the air. I forced my finger into the tight fist and uncurled the long, already tapering fingers, noticing the perfection of the tiny white moons on the fingernails not yet a day old.

Then the child opened her eyes and closed them. It had been as quick as the flash of a camera’s shutter, but time enough for me to see. The eyes were small, small as a baby’s pearl sweater-button. In one there was an odd triangular wedge of opacity which had caught the light, and glinted minutely like a scrap of milky glass, and there weren’t any pupils. There weren’t any pupils.

The days that followed till the ophthalmologist could conclude his diagnosis fused themselves into an endless, sleepless agony. During the day, when my husband came and the nurses chattered in muffled tones at the hall desk, and visitors came and went, and maids brought in great clusters of scarlet roses, the hospital routine and my own rationalizing mind controlled my emotions. With a man’s comforting objectivity, Bill reasoned with me that out of modern and wartime medicine would arise developments which could eventually help our child, if indeed she were blind.

But at night reason was powerless over imagination. My thoughts went over and over the same pictures. I saw our other child, Dorothy, such an adorable healthy three-year-old. I saw a cold redbrick building with straggling ivy over tight walls, housing an awkward blonde child in blue gingham, one of many others clad the same monotonous way, groping grimly through the years of institutional life. These thoughts never seemed to exhaust themselves in repetition. It was aeons until the nights finally ground themselves out and there was a first gray feeling of dawn through the blinds.

Four days after the baby was born, the ophthalmologist came in with his diagnosis. He did not smile. He did not mince words.

“Your baby was born with microphthalmus, which means smallness of the eyes,”he said. “They are only 50 per cent normal size, and she will have very little, if any, useful vision. She may have light perception. We shall know when she is a bit older and we can give her simple tests.”

“But Doctor, how could it happen?” I asked, trying to be objective. “There is nothing in the family anywhere of such a thing.”

“There have recently been cases,”he continued implacably, “cited by an Australian doctor, who found that mothers who have had German measles in the first three months of pregnancy have sometimes produced children with congenital cataract and lens opacity. Did you have anything like measles?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“Otherwise there seems no explanation.”

“Heredity had nothing to do with it?” I asked.

“No, that is certain.”

“But Doctor—” There was one other question, and I had to face up to it. “Will the brain be impaired?”

“ We don’t know,”he replied. “We have to wait. There is no certainty one way or the other. This happens so seldom, and we have so few records to follow.”

“Is there anything to do?” I said finally.

“No, possibly operations later to improve the vision slightly. But right now, nothing.”

The intense shock killed all my joy in the baby. For weeks I felt an aversion to little Connie. But gradually, as spring brought the dogwood and cherry blossoms to Washington, this black thing came to be taken for granted and was even forgotten with the growing sweetness of the child. Moreover, we had been fortunate to find a wonderfully efficient nurse.

As the year passed, Connie grew normally. One day she reached for the rattle, shook it in her ear. In time she sat up, rocking her buggy until every squeak and joint in the cart was discovered. She squashed the spongy, oozy oatmeal through her fingers, slapped and scratched every flat surface within reach — the screened sides of her bed, the rough plaster walls. Gradually I came to realize that we must make a constant effort to expose this child to what was beyond the horizon of her fingertips. At an age when a normal child would be taking in new sensations and knowledge of his surroundings at a phenomenal rate, Connie was too readily satisfied with the little area where she was confined, whether the high chair, the play pen, the buggy, or the crib.

I began to wonder how a child’s curiosity developed. Was there a natural urge to learn, which would lead her on to crawl, to explore the furniture, to discover with her fingers the contours of her mother’s and father’s faces, eventually to walk, ask questions? How far does the urge to learn take a child’s intelligence? How could one encourage the development of this urge? The doctors seemed satisfied with Connie’s progress, but they checked her physically, they didn’t see her day after day, playing like a healthy puppy with her toys, mouthing them and shaking them. I was beginning to want more from her.

This led to constant friction with the nurse. I found her consistently opposed to everything I suggested beyond the child’s current capabilities. She was tender and compassionate; she was reliable, but she was also unimaginative, and as stubborn as an old Mississippi mule.

I had wanted to build an enclosure out in the yard, twice as large as the play pen, where Connie could get used to a bigger space around her, a different surface underfoot, and would have to crawl to get to the sides.

“But she will fall on the ground and hurt herself,” the nurse immediately objected.

“Well, we could put a small rug down,” I countered. “How will she ever learn to go anywhere under her own steam if she doesn’t crawl and take some bumps? It’s natural for babies to crawl.”

“No, she is happy now. Let her be happy. If you push her, she will have a fall, and we’ll be set way back.”

2

DISTRUSTING this protective routine, Bill and I determined to seek out some reputable child psychologist for advice. The nurse, Connie, and I boarded the train from Washington and arrived at the clinic one rainy April morning.

We were ushered into a neat little room, a clinical replica of the child’s nursery, with a play pen, a small table, a crib, and shelves with a few toys. Little Connie, her yellow curls clustering about her head, was placed in the crib, where she played happily with a rattle. She seemed so detached from the problem of the immediate visit that the possibility of the Doctor’s finding her a normal eighteenmonth-old child, given due allowance for her handicap, seemed altogether probable.

The Doctor was a grandfatherly-looking figure, with a fine thatch of white hair, a capable, brisk air and seasoned appearance. “Good morning, Mrs. X,” he smiled cheerfully. “So you’ve come all the way up from Washington!” He turned to Connie. “ And this is little Connie,” he said, taking the child from the crib and speaking gently. “Connie, Connie, Connie,” he repeated several times in a low, almost mystical tone.

He jingled a little bell out of her reach. She instantly groped for it, following the tinkle until she located it. Then, resting and standing against his knee, where he had placed her, she put the bell to her mouth and examined it with her tongue, deftly twisting the handle till her tongue had manipulated the clapper and tested the smooth upper inside of the bell and the sharpness of the rim. She then shook the bell vigorously and laughed over the sound. The doctor gently retrieved it and tested her hearing by ringing it at various distances, and her span of attention by alternately giving it to her and retrieving it, trying to induce her to give it back to him. Presently she dropped it, and he handed her to the nurse.

The first test was over and I relaxed. Successfully, I told myself. Connie should have handed the bell back to him, but the fact that she hadn’t done so was really immaterial, unimportant. She had certainly extracted every tactile and auditory sensation out of the thing.

“And now for the information I want,” he said, taking a questionnaire from the table drawer. He adjusted his bifocals and began the history of Connie’s first eighteen months, which I had given so many times.

“All right, young lady,” the Doctor suddenly said, tapping all the papers straight on the table. “Now we’ll take Connie into the laboratory.”

I went in and took a chair. The perforated screen through which I looked transformed the scene in the laboratory into a strange picture. The doctor was beginning his experiments, was crouching over the square green table between him and the baby. He offered her different objects: blocks, a white enamel cup, a pellet, a ball, a large ring with string attached, then a pile of blocks, a music box. She took them all up, putting each to the same test as the little bell earlier in the morning. Occasionally she would grasp the nurse’s skirt and sleeve to reassure herself. The doctor’s monotone droned on as he dictated his memoranda.

“ Block is presented, puts to mouth, casts to floor; several blocks are presented, feels, does not pile up but mouths a few, casts to floor. Pellet is presented, feels with palm, picks up with thumb and index, puts to mouth, tastes, spits out. More blocks presented, along with cup, puts nothing in cup, tastes again, discards. Feels for nurse, slaps hands flat on table, likes noise, slaps table again. Music box is presented, approaches her, goes to right, left, hand follows, gropes, finds it, puts to mouth, drops to table . . .”

Finally, exhausted with all the relentless attempts to probe her mind for a response, Connie picked up a block and threw it at the doctor. It hit his glasses and bounded back onto the floor. Connie began to whimper and turned to the nurse. The doctor could do no more with her, and that was the end of the experiments.

For a moment I couldn’t move. Thank God, it was over! Those hateful, detestable blocks — why should the child put them in the cup? If you couldn’t see, the idea might never occur to you. Yet with a dark intuition I could feel the emphasis of the visit shifting in my mind, and the question of whether Connie had a useful mind entered my thoughts, though I quickly erased it. Surely it was too soon to make a judgment, no matter what this doctor was going to tell me in a few minutes. She was only a year and a half.

“Now, Mrs. X,” the doctor was saying, “if you will come with me while Nurse gives Connie some lunch, we can have a chat alone.”

I followed him into his office. It looked cheerless and smelled of stifling radiator heat.

“Well,” he began, “I think I have a fairly clear idea of her mental quotient. Naturally it’s not up to the eighteen months norm.”

“Of course, Doctor,” I agreed.

“Her motor behavior — that is, her physical coördination — is good, but her adaptive behavior is quite backward.”

“But Doctor, can’t we do something to bring her along, stimulate her curiosity, develop her selfreliance?” I asked.

He hesitated, picked up a pencil, and drew a circle within a circle on the pad by his hand. “If there isn’t curiosity to develop, how can you develop it ?” He went on to suggest that she be given a box, some clothesline, blocks within blocks, and simple objects in her pen. “Do this and then see if anything happens.”

I felt a growing exasperation. “Do you mean, keep her in that pen, Doctor? How will she ever learn about her surroundings if we don’t take that wretched pen away and let her crawl? ”

He got up from his chair to terminate the appointment. “Of course you must recognize, Mrs. X, that ocular defects of this type sometimes go on back into the brain. You must not expect too much of this child.”He opened the door and laid his hand on my shoulder. I shrank from his touch. “If possible, I should like to see Connie in a year. There may be some development then.”

3

WHEN we were settled again in Georgetown, the family drifted back into the familiar groove. I had tried not to let myself dwell on the interlude with the psychologist. And then one day something happened which put a new complexion on everything. The nurse had her day off, and it occurred to me to put Connie in the middle of the living-room floor with her toys. She had never been in that particular location before, out of her pen, where the horizon of her fingertips was only space, and where she touched only herself, her toys, and the rug on the floor under her.

I found myself silently imploring her to explore the Oriental carpet to locate the newspaper just beyond her reach and to play with it, to search for other things.

At first the child whimpered at the strange new position, then she began to grope around. I held my breath. She at once found the paper, crushed it in her arms, and giggled happily over the sharp crackle. She kneaded it, crumpled it, scratched her face with it, bit it, smelled it, banged it on the floor, rubbed her fingers together, feeling the grimy residue of the print on their tips. She found another sheet and threw it. It sailed crazily to one side of the couch, then settled in a tricorne on the ground with a stiff crackle a few feet beyond her reach. To my amazement, Connie shifted onto her knees for the first time in her eighteen months and crawled. She crawled directly to the paper and pounced upon it like a cat, locating it exactly. She hugged it again, played with it, threw it, crawled and found it again, squealing over the novelty of the game.

When the nurse came home at dinnertime, I told her all that had happened — how Connie had learned to crawl, to pull herself up against the furniture. Then with a new self-confidence, tempered by the remembrance of all she had done for Connie, I explained to the nurse that she would no longer be needed in the family.

“You have been devoted and wonderful,”I said. “ You have helped me more than I can say, to adjust to everything. But I feel it is time now for me to care for Connie myself.”

In the weeks that followed, the world of sensation began to unfold before Connie like a puzzle that she could put together piece by piece. I let her crawl everywhere about the house, let her open the cupboards, dismantle the bookcases, and explore the kitchen, the back yard, the bathroom, the playgrounds across the street, the bustling sidewalk life of Georgetown. Gradually she solved the geography of the house, learning in one morning to climb onto and off the couch, inching along the table hand over hand to the easy chair, and around the chair to measure its girth. What an ordinary sighted child gains in one glance around the room, it took little Connie a whole crawling, touching, climbing, groping winter to learn. When at last she discovered the staircase, with the vertical uprights in the banister, she spent an entire day laboriously clambering on her knees up and down until she had mastered the problem of balance on the risers, and found the exact location of the three loose spokes.

She seemed so happily detached from her blindness and so busy exploring the possibilities of the other four senses that her handicap lost entirely for us the tragic significance Bill and I had first attached to it. I visited schools for Braille and SightSaving, and marveled at the speed and accuracy with which the Braille students, running their fingers over the dots and using the stylus and slate, could read and write.

Connie might never drive a car or ride a bicycle, but we consoled ourselves by thinking that she could learn to ski, swim, roller-skate, travel anywhere with a Seeing-Eye dog, and come to know books and music. She could go through college, marry, have children and a home. It had all been done before by many courageous blind persons with a zeal for life magnified many times just because of their handicap.

But underlying my hope for Connie’s future was a recurring mood of depression. The child was two years old and still had made no effort to talk or identify, with the simplest of sounds, either Bill or me. She still refused to step out on her feet alone. Her play pattern remained exasperatingly simple; she never put anything into anything else; each new toy was played with in the same elementary way. She would take the pegs out of the cart, turn them over in her fingers, put them into her mouth, and drop them down to the floor. She never seemed to grasp the relationship between the hole the peg had been in and the box that held the ball.

Deep down in my common sense it was impossible for me to ignore the psychologist’s prognosis, when I caught Connie again and again going through that same simple play pattern.

4

AT LAST came the spring when, the war over, we could move out of the diminutive Georgetown house back to our home and our hilltop apple orchard in Wisconsin. I thought with joy of the airy, spacious modern house, the sturdy modern furniture which a little blind girl could bump and not tip over, and best of all the wind and space and green sloping lawn where Connie could learn to walk by herself, run, and ride a tricycle.

And it happened just that way. We had not been back long when, one sunny afternoon in May. Connie stood up from her pad on the lawn and walked off. It was as simple as that. I ran out to her, incredulous, and watched. The wind was billowing out the little girl’s red and white checked dress and tossing the blonde curls. She hurried, head forward, groping everywhere with tiny tripping steps, finding the white chairs, the white picket fence, her pad light pink against the dark lawn, finding me, whose knees she grasped and hugged tightly.

The first words came two days later when the child said “Connie play pat-a-cake,” and within a few days she was repeating simple nursery rhymes. This was really parrotry, but to Bill and me it was as if a door had been opened.

That was a marvelous summer. With every new day Connie was fitting fresh pieces into the puzzle of a vast new world. Sensations flowed into her brain and memory, through fingertips, tongue, and feet. Words were absorbed like water into a sponge, and when she sat down to lunch it was amusing to hear her call out the list of things on her plate entirely by benefit of smell, “Peas, chicken, nice apricots, chocolate cookie, tomato juice.”

It was enthralling to observe the delicate tactile discernment of her hands when there was unfamiliar territory to explore. She would cautiously follow the wall from the entrance doorjamb until her fingers found a table; then on tiptoc and with hands fluttering delicately as butterflies over the surface, she would reach out to locate the lamp, pull the chain, pat the shade to test its resilience, touch the silver boxes, finger the ash tray, riffle the magazines. The adjacent chair had to be scratched, rubbed, smelled, cushions tested and pillowy corners probed. If her foot rubbed lightly against a wastebasket, she identified the thing immediately, calling it by name and bending down to examine all the contents, and picked out a paper to wave or crackle in the air. Or if, in her vagaries, she approached some bulky piece of furniture, that mysterious sixth sense seemed to warn her, and she stretched her hands out to it unerringly. She could thread her way through a cluttered room at night easily and deftly, slowly and surely, with tiny steps, waddling slightly from side to side to reinforce her balance.

But as time wore on and the little girl of two and a half developed into three and a half, there seemed to be no appreciable mental growth. True, the physical development was there, and memory too. Words were absorbed and used, and a sense of balance and awareness and coördination was developed which made me marvel. But her child’s mind seemed to be numb, to fumble with small things and never to grasp the bigger relationships. She never asked questions and never comprehended her relationship to her parents and her sister Dorothy. The sense of possession, so outstanding in children of this age, was never demonstrated. She grew more and more detached, and if that detachment was disturbed, she immediately became fretful and lost her short temper. She was like a cat in her independence, her self-sufficiency, her aloofness, her solitary ways.

One night during the summer, Bill brought home a black Cocker puppy. It was bouncing about when Dorothy came into the living room.

“Daddy, what have you got?” she cried. She picked it up, and it wriggled right out of her hands, plopping to the floor.

“A present for you and Connie,” he answered, pulling the puppy away from his shoelaces. “Go get Connie and bring her in to see it.”

“Daddy, it’s the cutest thing I ever saw,” Doro-

thy called as she ran into the playroom where Connie was in her rocker. This rocking chair had come at Christmas time, and the child had used it so continuously that the music box under the seat had already begun to miss on several notes. When she rocked it, the abrupt, disconnected little tune seemed to have no place in the gay, friendly atmosphere of the house. It recurred monotonously — a thin, lonely, orphan-like tinkle, which seemed to express in a poignant way the isolation that was a part of Connie’s happiness.

“Come on, Connie, come see the new puppy,” said Dorothy, leading her out of the playroom.

Bringing her to the couch by the windows, Dorothy helped her up onto the cushions and dropped the puppy in her lap. It squirmed around till it settled in between the child’s legs, and then was suddenly quiet. Her sensitive fingers passed lightly over the rough, warm little body. Then without a word she slid out of the couch, upsetting the pup onto the floor, and slowly walked back into the playroom, her hand trailing the intervening table and chairs to give her direction.

As I watched the grace of the child’s body in her dark blue corduroys, the straight sturdy set of her shoulders, the upright tilt of her curly head, my throat tightened into a hard knot. The pathos in the sight of this little creature, so engaging and so appealing to the eye, and yet unconsciously cutting herself off from those who most wanted to love her, was heart-rending. I followed her, and saw her settle herself again in the rocker, her hands gripping the curved handles till the knuckles showed white, and her face puckering up in a tiny moue and smile of contentment. She resumed her rocking, and the tinkle of the music again stippled the air.

5

WHATCHING the child, I had to fight the indelible, haunting memory of the psychologist’s prognosis. It seemed to bear an increasingly accurate fulfillment. What was in the child’s mind? Was there a mind, and did she have anything more than memory to develop? What was intelligence in a child, anyway?

I remember one summer afternoon when Dorothy tried to draw her younger sister into the children’s group. “Connie, come play in the sandbox,” said Dorothy, taking her hand to lead her across the lawn. The summer afternoon was drowsy, the crickets were whining in the shrubbery, and a lively wren was burbling in the elm tree. The children, two little boys and Dorothy, cool in brief playsuits, all came to bring Connie from the swing.

“No, no, Connie wants to swing,” said her light, reedlike voice, and she petulantly shook off Dorothy’s hand. Digging her fist into her eye, she began to whimper.

At a window in the kitchen overlooking the play yard, I overheard the children talking about her.

“Doesn’t she ever play with you?” one of the boys asked.

Dorothy explained that Connie liked to be by herself.

“What’s it like not to see?” the boy continued. “I bet I’d bump into everything. Let’s try it.”

With his eyes closed, he began groping his way across the lawn, hands extended. Soon they were all making a game of it. Whenever they banged into a tree or the fence, they squealed with laughter. Connie, in the swing, lightly pushing herself up and down with her foot on the ground, was aloof and unaware.

When Dorothy came in after the boys had gone home, she said, “Mother, when can I have a little sister that sees? When can I, Mother?”

I continued shelling peas. “I can’t say, darling. I hope some day you will.”

“All the other children have brothers and sisters who play with them. If Connie would just play with us. But she’s always by herself. I hate to have them make fun of her,” she ended rather defiantly.

Incidents like this came with increasing frequency. Bitterly we had to concede that despite the love and affection lavished on Connie, the child never sought out any of the family, never called us by name, was happiest when left to herself. The only recognition she ever gave her older sister was to push her away when Dorothy tried to include her in the house and doll play with the little girls of the neighborhood. This aloofness became an increasingly difficult thing for Dorothy to understand.

I felt helpless. It was agonizing to watch this wall of detachment growing, and to find myself unable to check its growth or even to penetrate it with a constant love and affection. I spent an icy winter driving Connie three times a week, fifty miles a round trip, to a small nursery school in a near-by city, hoping the companionship of other children and the teaching of trained instructors would bring the little girl out of this hardening shell. But she derived no benefit from the group, and the aloofness grew and grew. I took constant care of Connie myself, believing that tenderness and affection would hurdle this isolation and bring her more closely into the circle. But this only heightened the child’s self-preoccupation to the point where, if she didn’t receive everyone’s undivided attention, she kicked and screamed, quieting down only if put in her rocking chair. So immature was her understanding, that it was impossible to reason with her. She was apparently unaware of all our efforts to weave her into the family life.

Bill and I finally concluded that we must seek outside help. We corresponded with various institutions in the hope of finding a trained instructor who would live with us, work with Connie tenderly, and attempt to develop the child’s capabilities at home. But these efforts were fruitless, and after many conferences with Connie’s doctors, we decided that the alternative was to place her where she would be well cared for by women whose training was in the field of blind children.

At last we found a nursery geared to normal blind children, where Connie could have the benefit of expert guidance, a fine nursery school, excellent physical care, and twenty other little tots like herself for companionship. With Connie emotionally secure, if there was a spark of intelligence in that sweet little blonde head, they would know how to ignite and nourish it into a lasting flame.

Connie, Bill, and I arrived at the nursery with a suitcase full of a winter’s clothing. It was a day of crisp, invigorating sunlight and scurrying swirls of dry September leaves.

The nursery was a cheerful, sunny place, set back from the street in a large, well-kept lawn, and the people in charge were cheerful, sunny people. There was a big dormitory on the third floor and the sun was pouring in the large frame windows in deep warm rectangles on the floor. The spicy aroma of ginger cookies floated in the air as I went upstairs with the head nurse and Connie. The whole atmosphere of normalcy and good care was reassuring.

When we went into the room, Connie began her customary explorations about an unfamiliar place.

“She seems right at home,” commented the nurse as the child was passing confidently from one piece of furniture to another.

“Yes,” I answered briefly, unable to trust my voice. Now that the moment for leaving my child had come, I felt at a complete loss. I had counted on my rationalizing mind to see me through, but I hadn’t known the degree to which this little personality had interwoven itself into my affections.

Connie was sitting happily on the floor, clanging a toy telephone vigorously on the linoleum, picking it up and dropping it, smiling and giggling at the satisfactory clatter it made. She was perfectly contented, entirely oblivious of Bill and me. Lingering by the wicker gate, I yearned to take Connie in my arms one last time, to feel the well-knit, supple little frame and the cool cheek against mine. But we turned away toward the staircase, conscious of a deep, deep sadness.

When we came downstairs and were talking with the nurse, a brisk tinkle of music suddenly dappled the air with its small, thin metallic staccato. I recognized the tune, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It was coming from Connie’s room.

“Connie has found a rocker,” I said to the nurse. “I am so glad, for I know she will be happy with you.”