RSS 2.0 FeedThe Winter of the Goldfinch
What would it be called today, “Asperger’s,” or “semi-autistic?" “Landau-Kleffner Syndrome,” where the child hears but doesn’t respond? No one knew what to do for Charlie. Nor would they today I suppose, not really. It was a mix of things, all of them wrong. It didn’t really matter what you called it.
Charlie was blind, perhaps partially deaf. Images were little more than shadows to him, I know; sounds were often inaudible. And what’s more, by the time I was born, he found it impossible to speak an intelligible sentence. He spoke normally until he was three or four, then words began coming out of his mouth as high, thin cries, not intended apparently for the human ear. I, alone, could understand him.
Family lore has it that our mother and father first recognized this one night at dinner. I was big enough to speak, but not big enough to be at the table without use of a high chair. Charlie, recalled our mother, was acting up, crying out, carrying on. Mother’s prodding was fruitless. Father’s attempts were still worse. Nothing could calm Charlie. The harder they tried to reach him, the more disturbed – then provoked – he became. My mother asked my father what could have possibly gotten into the boy, and without looking up from my plate, assuming, I imagine, that the question was meant for me, I answered that Charlie didn’t want what she’d set before him. He wanted an apple. And he wanted it peeled.
My earliest memory is of my brother at my crib. My parents have just put glasses on Charlie, flesh-colored rims with flat, opaque lenses, and I’m just of an age to be taken by my own reflection, not only skewed in the glass but doubled as well. This is not something that was told to me, a memory that comes by way of family lore like the one about peeling the apple, but my own, I’m sure of it. As an infant I became aware of my brother’s presence as distinct from the presence of others, yet completely aligned with my own, inseparable in some ways. Compare it to déjà vu, setting foot in a house you know you’ve been in before, or perhaps a mirror that multiplies your dimensions through some optical sleight of hand. That’s what it was like when Charlie was near.
We were living in Northampton, Massachusetts, then, home of one of the oldest schools for the deaf in the country, and it was to this school that my parents wanted him sent. But nothing could persuade the proctors or headmaster that my brother was educate-able, or that they were the ones to educate him at least. Eventually he was sent to a hospital, this on the assumption that Charlie couldn’t learn, and more hospitals after that, at least one of these – as memory serves – with beds made from white tubular metal. Drugs were dispensed from a cart delightfully – and deceptively – called a medicinal trolley by nurses in starched, rustling uniforms.
I recall a variety of odors medicinal and human. Charlie died in one of those places late in the afternoon of an October day in 1953. A blood clot broke loose. A cerebral hemorrhage. My last memories of him are not of Bedlam, in other words. They were as bright as they could be, these places, and my brother was cared for. But by then he had ceased to exist for me in the way I remember him best, as whole in ways I was partial, for where certain natural laws were concerned, he came into this world ready-made and prepared, whole in ways we are inchoate one and all.
The winter of the birdfeeder and the goldfinch was the last winter my brother Charlie spent at home. He hung a birdfeeder that winter from a post outside our window and filled it with thistle seed, which our father kept in a bin behind our house in small burlap sacks. Charlie was trying to attract the Southern-bound goldfinch.
Beyond our house, lining the street, were Dutch elms, ash, Norway maples. Normally they turned by Halloween, and goldfinch filled the branches once the leaves began to fall, feeding each night on the insects. But this year something had happened. The leaves remained fresh and stubbornly in place despite changes in the season.
My brother became anxious that the goldfinch would succumb to this, become confused, be overtaken by the winter. From the window he pointed out their plumage, not the right color for this time of year, not grays and murky olives, but rather the whites and blacks and yellows left over from the summer.
I watched with him at the window as the females and juveniles pecked at the seed along with the chickadees and house finch, their heads seemingly attached to their bodies by tiny metal bolts. Squirrels skittered across the roof above our heads as we watched, making a tinny, rustling sound.
Each day as I tried to locate the canister, I would see Charlie waiting for me at the window when I came home from school. He waited for me as a pet might. He came to the window on the side of our room where the light was strongest in the afternoon. On one day in particular I could see he was holding a book, one of my less desirable Christmas gifts from some forgotten Christmas-past, an oversized book about hot-air balloons. So vivid is this memory that I can make out the colors of the book jacket even today, white amidst purples and golds.
That evening, as the light dimmed beyond the window and the glass became mirror-like, I caught my brother trying to decipher his own reflection in the pane. That night, as I was doing my lessons, I saw him do this again. I’d been trying to teach him to read, carrying my lessons home each day, and he had the book to his nose, moving his nose around the page rather than his eyes across the print. But every now and then he would prop the book on the window sill and put his face to the glass, as if he were gazing beyond it.
“What do I look like?” he asked me.
“You look like you, what you think!”
“I have a fool’s face, don’t I.” By this time he seemed to be looking at his own reflection as much with his fingertips as with his eyes, for he was running his fingertips along his features in the glass.
“A what?”
“A fool’s face. A fool’s face!"
“You know you look okay. Hey, is that my book? Here. Give it back. You can’t read it anyway.”
The goldfinch fed at Charlie’s canister until the first snow after his death, then we never saw them again, nor learned of course how they’d fared. Ice gathered on the tiny overhang, serving in the moonlight as a prism. From the street during the day the canister was barely visible. But just the same, we never took it down. It hung from its peg, filled with seed, fastened to the house through the steely depths of winter, and when I came home from school each day, I would crane my neck to see if the goldfinch had returned before reaching the door of our house.
J. Boyer teaches in the creative writing program of Arizona State University. “There are no short stories, all of our stories are long – it's how we tell them to ourselves and others that make them short in the telling.”