Drake nodded enthusiastically.
“How far?”
He held up both hands. Then one by one, he put his fingers down, as if counting them. But, of course, he made no sound.
I nodded. “Okay, let’s do these. Look. One whale. He’s big, isn’t he? See how much of the page he takes up? Have you ever seen a whale?”
He shook his head but then stretched his hands way up over his head. The meaning of what he was trying to communicate was perfectly clear.
“And look, two walruses. Aren’t they funny-looking?”
Drake gave a breathy, noiseless little chuckle.
“Three piggy banks.”
Drake was hooked in the activity now. He was leaning forward. He had pulled Friend in close to join us, perhaps to show the tiger the book, too, and he pointed to the next row of pictures, which showed four bells. They were the sort that had handles, like old school bells. Drake tapped the page enthusiastically and then tapped my shoulder to get my attention. I looked up. Cheerfully, he moved his hand up and down to indicate he was ringing such a bell.
I hesitated, not speaking.
He tried again, imitating the movement of shaking one of these handled bells up and down. He smiled in eager anticipation of my recognition of his action.
I still hesitated. Truth was, I didn’t want to reinforce his gesturing. In my research I’d found children had a much harder time speaking to people with whom they had already formed a nonverbal relationship, so it wouldn’t be helpful for us to go that way. But it was hard not to respond to such a charming little boy.
And this, I was thinking, was perhaps a good deal of the problem. He was so engaging, so keen, and, indeed, so sociable that he didn’t really need words to get people to interact with him.
Then I thought: why? Speech is natural and innate. Why not do it? What was the payoff for Drake to stay silent when he so clearly wanted to communicate with people?
Following my assessment with Drake came a meeting with his parents. Only it turned out not to be his parents. It was his mother and Mason Sloane, his paternal grandfather. There was no explanation offered as to where Drake’s father, Walter, was.
Mason Sloane shook hands with me in a firm, businesslike manner. He was a short man, shorter than I was, mostly bald, and with a very red complexion. Despite being well over sixty, he was fit and muscular with the sort of physique one usually associates more with manual labor. Not in this case, however. His hands and nails were so well cared for that they looked professionally manicured. His clothes were precise and elegant, and he wore an expensive watch and two rings.
Drake’s mother, in contrast, was tall and very thin. She was quite a beautiful woman in the delicate, rather nervous way you find in thoroughbred horses. Her coloring was Mediterranean. She had long dark hair and the same liquid, deerlike eyes as Drake had, only deeper and darker. Her name was Lucia, and when she spoke, I realized she was Italian. Not an American of Italian descent but actually from Italy. Her English was heavily accented and, indeed, not very good.
No one had mentioned this fact to me. When I heard Lucia speak, my mind instantly leaped to Drake’s mutism. Did Lucia talk to Drake in Italian at home? Was this perhaps his problem? Could the mutism be due to language confusion? Was it possible he simply didn’t have a good enough command of English? Which would explain a whole lot.
All three of us sat down in the small child-sized chairs at the equally small table.
“You’ve seen Drake now,” Mason Sloane said. “I am sure you can tell what a very intelligent little boy he is.”
I smiled and nodded. “Yes, I’m very impressed. He’s lovely.”
“So what is your diagnosis?” he asked.
“I’m not really in a position to give a diagnosis at this point,” I replied.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yes. But more is involved than just giving a label, because it’s important that the label be correct. Moreover, a diagnosis in isolation isn’t very helpful.”
“This is your specialty, isn’t it? You have a lot of experience with elective mutism. That’s what I was led to believe in that article,” he replied.
“Yes, I’ve had experience and I’ve worked with many elective mutes, but I’ve also come out here as part of a team. It would be inappropriate for me to give the impression I’m solely responsible for diagnosis or treatment. The hospital unit I work for doesn’t function that way.”
“Why? It’s straightforward, isn’t it? He doesn’t talk. Nothing else is wrong with him. He talks at home; he doesn’t talk at school. That’s elective mutism, isn’t it? Your article said that the vast majority of children you worked with spoke to you in the first session. So I was assuming it was just a matter of your coming out here and getting him started. So didn’t you get him to talk?”
“This was an assessment, Mr. Sloane. It would be inappropriate for me to come in and work with Drake without assessing what the problem is first.”
“All this talk of ‘inappropriate’ sounds like a smoke screen, if you ask me. Or a way to get money out of us. We’ve already told you what the problem is. We engaged you to come out, diagnose him with elective mutism, and fix that.”
“Yes, I know. But that isn’t quite the way things work,” I replied. “First there is an assessment.”
“So you didn’t get him to talk?” he said.
“No.”
“So was the article not right?”
“The article was right. But the article was about my research. This is an assessment. I came out to assess Drake. Because I’m employed by the hospital unit, I work as part of their team. So before I can work with a child, I have to go back and talk to the psychiatrist who will head the case. Assuming we want to proceed.”
Mr. Sloane frowned. “We wanted just you. We don’t need a psychiatrist. Drake isn’t mentally ill, for God’s sake. We were employing you. I thought we made that clear.”
Drawing in a deep, rather frustrated breath, I sat back in the chair. Or at least as much back as one can sit in a chair designed for a three-year-old.
“We wanted just you,” he said again. “To come out here. To see him, get him to talk at school. I said money is no object. We’ll pay you whatever you charge. Whatever the costs of your coming out here. Just do what you said you could do in the newspaper.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Great!” he said and banged the table with his hand. “So it was all lies! You call yourself a professional! If people ran banks the way you damned doctors work, the whole country
