Deirdre Without Sorrows   You ask how I won my heart’s desire.  It was Deirdre who made me into a singer: I owe her everything I am.  In the abyss between the Hillman School of Music and the South Falls Light Opera Company, I raised two children, and though my husband was canoodling around, I put up with him.  That was when I met Deirdre.  This wasn’t that legendary queen, Deirdre of the Sorrows, of whom men dream, and for whom women weep.  No: my Deirdre was only a child of five or six, squat, lumpy, a face like a half-buried rock no man would dream of.             There I was, unformed clay at best.  My husband was the real artist.  Maurice was going to show his work in galleries, sell constructions and installations, tables set with machine parts and severed heads, if the critics ever saw his genius.  I was just a young mother who’d studied singing, and gave it up when the children came.  Well, my grandmother’s voice, as I remembered her--that crackling voice-- told me, the children come first, as they had for her. My time would come later.  While my Maureen was at school, I’d take Roddy to the nearby playground.  There, one day I saw Deirdre and her cleaver-faced nursemaid.  Deirdre harnessed into her stroller, never taken out, with whom children weren’t let play.  Deirdre, the half assembled, with jaundiced skin, angled eyes, thick, protruding tongue: a sculpture the artist didn’t trouble finishing.  Deirdre, with Down syndrome, crooning tunelessly to herself.             I sat with the mothers and nursemaids.    When Roddy got fractious, I pushed him on the swing, and sang to him.  But all the while I could see that lumpy child confined to her stroller.  The woman who cared for her never held her.  Back at the bench, when Roddy pulled himself up against my knee, I felt suddenly selfish, ashamed, as if my healthy baby had no right to laugh, while this other child sat uncomforted, unfinished, untouched.  Then, one day a big crow swooped down to perch on the fence rail behind my shoulder, and squawked, with the living voice of my dead grandmother, “Yours, yours.”  She must have been a grandmother bird, and she was right, as those grandmothers are.  Next morning, I made first contact with the nursemaid, who was eager to tell me everything, as if her mind would burst.  Deirdre, whose mother and father, on their doctor’s advice, from the moment of her birth had never held her or looked at her, lest they grow attached.  Deirdre, whose mind was deficient, whose heart was defective, destined to die before she was twenty.  Deirdre on a waiting list for an institution, signed up even before they brought her home.  “Well,” Mrs. Mulcahy said, “at least they named her.  And it’s a private institution.  It’s pricey.  They’re not just throwing her on the state.”   That child, to be put in some warehouse, as soon as her space opened up.  That child, on her nursemaid’s day off, left in her crib with a bottle and a box of crackers.  The child, when Mrs. Mulcahy returned at nightfall, alone in the cracker crumbs and her filth.   Not that the child was hard to take care of, in fact.  “She’s been given nothing,” Mrs. Mulcahy said, “and she expects nothing.   She hasn’t the brains for it.”  “I can see you’re right,” I agreed, although what did I know.  “She hasn’t the sense to annoy you, not like my Roddy, getting into things and setting up a howl now and again.”  I wiped some sand from Roddy’s cheek.  “Just the same,” I said, with my grandmother bird behind my shoulder, nipping me on, “just the same, my dear Mrs. Mulcahy, you must find the child unrewarding.  Never to have her call you, or know your name?  Now, you know, on swings two are no more work than one.  I’ll be glad to take her off your hands, if you’d like to go for coffee.”              Well, my clever old bird must have known; that Mrs. Mulcahy was out of the playground faster than a greyhound after a rabbit.  If I could have bet on her, I would, and she’d have taken the prize.  I’d have woken the next day rich, and retired to my own green island.  But she was a cranky old woman and not a keen racing dog, more’s the pity.  So, with my grandmother bird behind my shoulder, I set Deirdre and Roddy next to each other, and swung them both, sang Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, to them both.  When I blew kisses to him I blew kisses to her.  When I stopped for breath, Roddy called to me, “More,” so I sang a little Mozart to him.

In her swing, Deirdre clutched the suspension wires with her chunky fists.  Her shapeless mouth opened in a wet smile.  The grunt that came out of her sounded almost like a laugh.              Every morning, my grandmother bird and I swung the children, while Mrs. Mulcahy went out for coffee.  I practiced my voice lessons, so I wouldn’t forget them, as Roddy laughed and kicked. I began to see that Deirdre’s grimace was a laugh too.  When she leaned her whole body to me, as to a magnet lifting her, I felt welcome.  When she clung, her heavy fingers hooked around my arms, I felt her trust. In the lips I had once found ugly, I learned to read the most radiant smile.             I don’t know how many days it was.  I’d been trying out trills, imagining myself all the while a star, in silk and feathers.  But, as I lifted the bar of the swing to take Roddy out, my grandmother bird flew to Deirdre and let out a squawk.  Deirdre’s mouth hung open.  A grunt or bleat came out.  For sure, that sound was shapeless, but I understood it.  It was a word, and the word was “More.”             “One more,” I said to Roddy.  “Then we’ll play in the sand.”  “More, you angel,” I said to Deirdre.  “Of course I’ll give you more.”  Deirdre’s wide mouth opened in a smile, and her feet kicked a rhythm under the swing. Back at the bench, I held Deirdre on my lap, her head against my shoulder.  That must have been her first word, there, on the swings.             Two days later, Deirdre spoke her second word, “Song.”  Maybe only someone not her own family, with no stake in her, could have distinguished words in those two bleats of hers, or have told one from another.  But I heard the difference.  I understood why sometimes she said “more” and sometimes “song.”  There were two different kinds of music I sang for the children, so she learned two different words to ask for them.  “More” meant simple songs, nursery rhymes, folk-songs, or even voice exercises.  But when I brought out my scraps of opera, my glitter and feathers, then Deirdre said “Song.”  “More” meant lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly. “More” meant Mother Goose.  But “Song” was for enormous feelings, soaring melody that lifted your soul out of you.  When I sang my opera arias, however inexpertly, Deirdre’s whole body leaned forward, as if those notes could carry her up into a world of power, of endless, unsayable feeling.  Who knows, maybe part of what she heard was my own hunger, the dreams I’d put aside.              But why, I wondered, did this severely limited child prefer my most difficult arias, instead of the simple, childlike tunes Roddy loved most?  Her speech, after all, was no better.  She still had only the two words, “more” and “song,” and only I understood them.  But, my grandmother bird picked up a seed in her beak, cracked it open, then spat out the shell.  That showed me.  Deirdre’s thickened mouth and tongue made speech an obstacle, with no reward for trying. She had to spit sound out like the hard shell of the birdseed.  The wordless language of music never asked her to talk back.  The silent intelligence she had, music could wake.  What an infancy this child must have endured, her mind starving.  She must have felt like one of the wild children in stories, raised by beasts, Tarzan the ape-child or Mowgli the wolf-boy, or that actual child they tell about raised by wolves in France.             Of course, you can see my next move.  If Deirdre loved the shapes in music, what other shapes would she understand?  Next day, I brought one of Maureen’s outgrown puzzles for which Roddy was too young.  It was just a board with geometric spaces cut in it, and the jigsaw square, circle, and triangle, with knobs in their centers to pick them up.  My grandmother bird stalked back and forth, picking up seeds, dropping them, to make the child see.  Deirdre picked up the square, chewed on it, pushed it around on the puzzle board, tried to fit it into the wrong outline, moved it to another, and then I heard the intake of her breath.  She shifted the piece and it went in.  She took another, made a little wordless mutter like someone playing a continuum to her own thoughts, and then a satisfied grunt when the shape clicked in.              I tried her with harder puzzles: farm animals, cars and trucks.  Now that she had the idea, she snapped them in at once.  I brought jigsaw puzzles made for children seven through ten, then for teen-agers.  While she worked on a puzzle, nothing distracted her.  When another child scattered the pieces, she gathered them and rebuilt.              At last, in an adult hobby store, I bought an abstraction, the most intricate jigsaw puzzle I could find.   The swirl of loops and whorls by Jackson Pollack gave no clue how to rejoin them once their logic was broken.  I laid this puzzle out on a tray.  It took a few nights.  Maurice, the one night he came home, joined me, for what good that did us.  Once we’d assembled it, I wasn’t at all sure I’d ever be able to do it again.  I covered the completed puzzle with plastic wrap and then another tray, so that the pieces would stay in shape when I brought them out.  I would wrap the puzzle each day, however Deirdre had left it, and next day bring it back.  I laid it down, and gave her a few minutes to fix the pattern in her mind.  Then together we knocked the puzzle apart.  Deirdre went to work at once with an eager grunt, her thick tongue protruding, her hands scrambling to follow her mind along those free curves.  She got about an eighth in two hours, and did another eighth or tenth the next day.             The third day, wasn’t I on edge to get back, lay the tray down, and watch my triumphant little queen work?  But I found no Deirdre.  Well, she must have caught cold, I thought, or maybe Mrs. Mulcahy has.  Two or three days, a week, ten days, and they’ll be over it.  But two weeks stretched into a month, two months.  “Jerk!” my grandmother bird croaked.   “Thoughtless! Jerk!”  She was right.  I’d never thought to ask the child’s surname, the names of the parents, the address.  It never crossed my mind that the child would be taken away, or that I’d grow so interested, so attached.             Interested?  Attached?  You must be laughing at me, for surely we know better.   I had grown to love Deirdre.  I was caught up by her.  I couldn’t have felt prouder of my own Roddy when he took his first staggering steps.  “Lost,” the bird cawed at me.  “Lost!  Too late!  Lost!”  What was always going to happen had finally happened.  She’d been packed off to the institution that was her fate. My Deirdre: if I’d followed her home just one day, my grandmother bird would have flown right in with me, told her people what she was.  “No more shame,” she’d have croaked at them, using my human voice.  “Your girl’s a beauty.  Your girl’s a miracle, a creature of legend and magic.”  “My lost girl,” I said to my grandmother bird.  “When will I ever see her again?” “Call,” cried the bird.  But there was nobody to call. I searched every building in walking distance.  I described the child and nursemaid to janitors, to doormen, to old women on stoops in the morning sun. Nobody gave me a name, or even a guess.  It was as if those two had never been at all: ghosts, shadows.  They must have come by bus or car from some distant neighborhood, so that nobody who knew the family would ever think this damaged bit of child-flesh was theirs.             “I’ve done a terrible thing,” I said.  “I’ve harmed that child without meaning to.” “Wrong, wrong,” my grandmother bird squawked.  But it was worse than wrong.  Think of a mind lost in the country of silence, the thickest silence there is.  Think of the blind, deaf Helen Keller with no Annie Sullivan to teach her.  That was my Deirdre.  Without me, she would have known nothing of loss, for what had she to lose?  But now think of Helen Keller if Miss Sullivan, that devoted teacher, had left the job after the first month: the key given and then taken away, water and no cup to hold it.  I gave Deirdre a key. I unlocked the door.  And, from the other side of that door came two bright angels, music and shape.  With music and shape, I gave her “more” and “song,” two words to hold her soul.  And when she went back alone into the silence, with the music and the shapes ripped from her: my Deirdre, my radiant Deirdre, my brilliant child.  Isn’t there despair with no word to know it, anguish with no power to name it, sorrows as sharp as the sorrows of any legendary queen?   “Wrong,” my grandmother bird squawked again at me.  “Wrong.  Don’t you turn into such a mean old crow.  Our Deirdre wasn’t just an empty container waiting for us to pour thoughts into her.  Her mind was awake every moment.  She was looking at the world, making her own sense of it.  She was never just a clod like you, thinking your silly old grandmother had the last word, moping and martyring yourself, while that Maurice of yours canoodles about, not our clever Deirdre.  Not a moment she gave you was lost or wasted.”             Is that true, do you think?  True that once anything is in you, it’s in you always?  Maybe, then, at the institution, somebody was singing.  Somebody let music into the room on a speaker.  They played dance music, or they played love songs.  Maybe that child paid attention and someone noticed.  Maybe, they had puzzles, and when she saw them she went to them quick as a racing greyhound after a rabbit.  Maybe, then, she did what she knew how to do.  Maybe, that day, people were doing their jobs with love and attention, the way my grandmother and I did ours, the way we all do, every soul in the world, with all the good will in us.  Maybe somebody saw what Deirdre could do and went on with the work.  Then, when she went into that place, she could keep on going, show them what a splendid creature she was, what stuff she was made of.             And the stuff my Deirdre was: she was a genius, I’m sure of it, trapped in a mind without words.  They call those children idiots savants, but that isn’t true.  What could Deirdre have been, with her will and intelligence?  What courage she must have needed, ripped away into some strange emptiness.  If she could make something of herself standing alone there, one damaged child against the silence, as she did with me, can’t even less gifted creatures like us find our own courage and will?  Then, maybe, our time together was not lost for me either.  Not lost, I thought.  Not wrong, either.              There isn’t a day when I don’t think of Deirdre.  When I threw my foolish man out to go live with his chippies and make do with them, I remembered Deirdre.  Those days I cleaned houses, those nights I carried my children to singing lessons, looking over Maureen’s Latin between turns with my teacher, I remembered Deirdre.  When Roddy stood up in school and won the spelling prize, I remembered Deirdre.  And that night when at last, after years living on beans, rice, and watery soup, saving the meat and fresh fruit for my children, after patching every bit of cloth until there was no inch a thread could hold to, the night I stood up on stage myself, sang for my place at last, sang for my chance and got the part, got it, you hear me, won it fairly because of my voice and my will, I remembered Deirdre.  At the back of my shoulder, then, no grandmother crow flew squawking at me to spur me on, but my lost girl’s voice cried triumphantly, “More! Song!”  Not a piece of work I’ve done, that wasn’t hers.  Wherever she is, if she’s still alive, she’s made me, opened my art to me, given me the strength to win through to it, so much more than I ever gave anything to her.

Have we lost out, my grandmother bird and I, and my poor Deirdre?  Never believe it: ours was the most heroic triumph, against all the odds, going however far we could for joy alone.  My grandmother, that wise old bird, told me once that the tears the world holds for any one of us are counted exactly.  If you or I use too many of them on ourselves, we use up all the tears that were measured out for us, and then there are none left for anyone else to feel for us.    The converse must also be true.  Say that all the tears the world held for Deirdre were counted, measured out one by one into the cup: say the tears I’ve given her are all there were for her.  Then there are none---there never were any--- that she herself needed to shed.  She can go out stepping proudly wherever her adventure carries her, Deirdre without sorrows, my clever girl.             And if she died young, as those long ago doctors said she would?  Why then, I’ll sing for her right here a lament fit for the proud queen she was.  Deirdre, my Deirdre, of whom (good friends, do you really think so?) no man dreams now, and for whom all women weep!   In the solidity of some buildings, in a night sky whose shadows wrench themselves into outlines, in a mess of fragments shaking themselves out of chaos, sometimes I can still trace her clear smile.  Did I tell you she was no beauty, a lump of unformed clay?  I lied, I lied.  Hers was the face that launched every dream I had.  With her smile she could put out fires, claim worlds, with one look float you over the tides far past your falling Troy or Babylon.  She was more beautiful than anyone I ever loved.  Through the earth that fills her mouth, she speaks to us still.            © Judith E. Johnson