I stared at the door through which he’d just disappeared. Then I looked back. Lucia remained sitting, motionless. She had her head down, but then raised it and very briefly exchanged a glance with me before lowering it again. It wasn’t a revealing glance, however, so I couldn’t discern what she was thinking.
I had instant pity for her. It had to be hell living in the shadow of a man with such strong views, imperious demands, and an astoundingly short fuse.
Silence followed. It wasn’t very long. A moment or two, perhaps less than a minute, but it was acutely uncomfortable. I didn’t know whether to sympathize aloud with her and risk humiliating her or whether to express amazement at his behavior and risk putting her on the defensive. In the end I opted for no comment at all and decided to plow ahead as if this were all perfectly normal and I were used to it.
“Drake’s teacher says he talks normally at home,” I said.
Lucia nodded. She still had her head down. Her hands twisted nervously in her lap. I thought she was going to cry.
“Can you describe how he speaks to you?”
She shrugged slightly without looking up. “How do I describe that? I don’t know. He speaks normally. Like any boy. He says normal things.”
“How old was he when he started to speak?”
She hesitated. “When he was … nine months old?” It came out more a question than an answer. “Yes, nine months old. I think this is right. This is what I remember.”
“That’s quite young, isn’t it? Especially for a boy. What were his first words?”
Again, she seemed rather flustered. I was trying to puzzle out if it was due to shyness or perhaps difficulty coping in English. I couldn’t tell.
“‘Kitty,’” she said at last. “Because he much likes our cat.”
This seemed odd to me. The way muscle coordination works in the mouth, most babies’ first words begin with D or B. Combined with normal babbling, this produces “da-da” or “ba-ba.” The hard c sound that would be necessary to produce “kitty” comes quite a bit later.
“Does Drake speak in Italian with you?” I asked.
She reddened and looked away. I got the immediate sense that she’d been told not to speak in her native tongue to her son and was now embarrassed to admit to me she did. It wasn’t hard to imagine the grandfather making such a demand. Or perhaps others had already implied that bilingualism was at the root of Drake’s problems, and she was now reluctant to admit that, in spite of this, he and she still spoke Italian to each other. Whatever, she didn’t answer immediately.
I sat quietly and let the silence grow.
Finally she nodded. “Yes, I sometimes speak Italian to him.” However, she then backed off and corrected herself, saying, “No. No, I mean, he does not speak it.”
“You’re saying you speak to Drake in Italian, but he does not speak Italian back to you?”
“Sometimes. Only sometimes. I mean, only sometimes that I speak Italian. I too speak English. Much of the time. Most of the time.”
“But about Drake. Does he speak in Italian when he is talking to you? Or does he speak in English?”
“In English. Only in English.” Then a hesitation. “Although he can understand Italian.”
I nodded and smiled. “It’s all right if he speaks Italian at home. I don’t want to make you feel you shouldn’t be speaking to your son in your native tongue. I’ve worked with many bilingual children and I think the advantages of growing up with a second language far outweigh any problems it might cause in the preschool years. In my experience, while there may be a little confusion when they’re starting to speak, virtually all children outgrow that quickly and have no problems in the long run. Nonetheless, it’s important to know if this could be happening in Drake’s case. If bilingualism is causing Drake’s mutism, we need to know in order to help him. Because I would work with this differently than if the mutism were due to psychological reasons.”
A slight nod of her head, but she still didn’t look at me.
“So … ?” I asked, waiting for her to admit to the Italian.
Head down and turned a little away from me, Lucia didn’t respond.
“Okay,” I said and knew to move on. “Does Drake speak to anyone outside the immediate family? Aunts or uncles, perhaps? Or cousins? Neighborhood children?”
“No. No one.”
“So, just you and your husband? Just at home to the two of you?”
“No.” Her voice became very meek.
“How do you mean, ‘no’?”
“He speaks just to me.”
“Just to you?” I said, surprised. “You mean he doesn’t speak to his father either?”
She shook her head.
“What age was Drake when this happened? When did he stop?”
“He’s never spoken to his father.”
“Never?” This degree of selectivity caught me by surprise. It wasn’t unique in my experience, but it was very, very unusual and tended to point to a markedly more severe problem than Drake appeared to have.
“My husband does the work, so he is not in the house much,” she said. “He is in his father’s bank. And on the weekends he does the golf. And he does the boat on the lake with his father in the summer. These are all important for his work. So he does not spend much time in the house when Drake is awake.”
Our conversation continued. I asked a few more questions, explored a few more avenues; then finally I said, “If you want me to work with Drake, I’d be happy to. Unfortunately, we have to consider the distance. Normally I see children with elective mutism in their school setting, since that’s usually where the mutism occurs, and I work with them two or three times a week until we get the problem sorted out. But there really isn’t any way I could do that here, so far from the city. I’m afraid the only way I could work with Drake would be if he came into the unit at the hospital as an inpatient. It doesn’t sound like Mr. Sloane would be very agreeable to that. And to be truthful, Mrs. Sloane, I’m not so sure I’d be agreeable either. That’s a very drastic measure. Drake is young. Elective mutism with preschoolers seldom needs such a major intervention as hospitalization, so I wouldn’t be very comfortable taking him away from home unless it were really, really necessary. You might prefer to find someone here locally to work with Drake and, if you wish, my unit could offer to liaise with them and support whoever took it on.”
She nodded. “It was good of you to come so far and I am sorry it was for nothing, but I think you are right. We will leave it. I think Drake will be just fine.”
I felt disgruntled after the meeting. It hadn’t been a satisfactory visit for a variety of reasons. Mason Sloane’s actions, while they did not particularly upset me, had certainly impeded my opportunity to accomplish anything useful. His expectations
