The Civically Engaged Reader

He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded

I sit down on the floor of a school for the retarded,  a writer of magazine articles accompanying a band  that was met at the door by a child in a man's body  who asked them, "Are you the surprise they promised us?"  It's Ryan's Fancy, Dermot on guitar,  Fergus on banjo, Denis on penny-whistle.  In the eyes of this audience, they're everybody  who has ever appeared on TV. I've been telling lies  to a boy who cried because his favorite detective  hadn't come with us; I said he had sent his love  and, no, I didn't think he'd mind if I signed his name  to a scrap of paper: when the boy took it, he said,  "Nobody will ever get this away from me,"  in the voice, more hopeless than defiant,  of one accustomed to finding that his hiding places  have been discovered, used to having objects snatched  out of his hands. Weeks from now I'll send him  another autograph, this one genuine  in the sense of having been signed by somebody  on the same payroll as the star.  Then I'll feel less ashamed. Now everyone is singing,  "Old MacDonald had a farm," and I don't know what to do  about the young woman (I call her a woman  because she's twenty-five at least, but think of her  as a little girl, she plays the part so well,  having known no other), about the young woman who  sits down beside me and, as if it were the most natural  thing in the world, rests her head on my shoulder.  It's nine o'clock in the morning, not an hour for music.  And, at the best of times, I'm uncomfortable  in situations where I'm ignorant  of the accepted etiquette: it's one thing  to jump a fence, quite another thing to blunder  into one in the dark. I look around me  for a teacher to whom to smile out my distress.  They're all busy elsewhere, "Hold me," she whispers. "Hold me."  I put my arm around her. "Hold me tighter."  I do, and she snuggles closer. I half-expect  someone in authority to grab her  of me: I can imagine this being remembered  for ever as the time the sex-crazed writer  publicly fondled the poor retarded girl.  "Hold me," she says again. What does it matter  what anybody thinks? I put my arm around her,  rest my chin in her hair, thinking of children,  real children, and of how they say it, "Hold me,"  and of a patient in a geriatric ward  I once heard crying out to his mother, dead  for half a century, "I'm frightened! Hold me!"  and of a boy-soldier screaming it on the beach  at Dieppe, of Nelson in Hardy's arms,  of Frieda gripping Lawrence's ankle  until he sailed off in his Ship of Death.  It's what we all want, in the end,  to be held, merely to be held,  to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips,  for every touching is a kind of kiss.)  Yet, it's what we all want, in the end,  not to be worshipped, not to be admired,  not to be famous, not to be feared,  not even to be loved, but simply to be held.  She hugs me now, this retarded woman, and I hug her.  We are brother and sister, father and daughter,  mother and son, husband and wife.  We are lovers. We are two human beings  huddled together for a little while by the fire  in the Ice Age, two thousand years ago.