In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (12 page)

Whether it was true or not, the episode fit the larger story about Donald that took hold when he was in high school, and that no one who met him doubted: this Triplett boy, odd as he was, just might be some kind of genius.

—

T
HE MOST UNUSUAL
thing about Donald’s experience at Forest High in the early fifties was how his fellow students, their families, and the school community treated him—this eccentric teenager who had disappeared from school for so many years.

They simply let him be.

That is saying a lot when, almost everywhere else in the United States, children as different as Donald were still banished from school and frequently deposited in institutions. It is not immediately obvious why things were different in Forest, a town with no special claim to enlightenment. When it came to race relations, Jim Crow, and civil rights, the white residents of Forest were not known to protest the status quo. None of them questioned the separate “whites only” and “colored” drinking fountains at the town courthouse. The trains Leo Kanner had ridden to Forest enforced segregated seating. Forest High itself was, by law, a “whites only” school well into the 1960s.

Given all that, it seems unlikely that Donald was permitted to enroll in high school and treated kindly by his classmates out of a commitment to inclusiveness, an idea that did not have much currency at that time. Rather, Donald’s remarkably good high school experience was one of the benefits of the relative privilege he was born into.

First of all, there was the Triplett family name. In the 1950s, it carried more clout in Forest than ever. Beamon Triplett was considered the town’s best lawyer and, as he moved into his fifties, was often tapped for dignitary roles such as board director of the Lions Club or chairman of the local Boy Scouts.

Mary’s profile mirrored her husband’s. During the 1940s, when
Donald was away, she had reengaged with her old life, returning to the rounds of luncheons and garden parties that were the backbone of conviviality among the town’s female upper class, and where she was something of a queen bee. She became a member of the Fortnightly Club, a group that attracted intellectually curious women who had been discouraged from attending college. They put on plays for one another, read poetry aloud, and staged dance
and piano recitals.

The Triplett home was its own social hub, and Mary often took her turn as civic hostess. In addition to women’s gatherings, the Presbyterian choir sometimes came to the house to rehearse. But while most of these visitors were acquainted with the Tripletts’ son Oliver, few had ever laid eyes on Donald, because he had been living on the farm all those years.

Now that Donald was home, his presence was unmissable. The Tripletts apparently refused to be shamed into hiding him—not from the choir, not from the ladies of Forest’s upper crust, not from whoever might cross his path. If Donald happened to yelp from his bedroom in the middle of a poetry reading in the living room, if he gawked at a matron’s bosom, if he took too much of a visitor’s time talking about
Time
magazine or the calendar, then so be it—that’s who he was, and guests would just have to make allowances. Implicitly, Beamon and Mary were making a clear and definitive statement:
Donald belongs. And he belongs because we say he belongs
. Done wavering, they made it clear to the community that, from now on, they expected their son to be treated as an equal.

The evidence suggests that the message was received. Forest’s size was an advantage for Donald. In 1950, the population was only 2,874, so it did not take long for word to travel. It is easy to imagine parents around town advising their kids, “Don’t mess with the Triplett boy. Be nice to him.” Such was the social authority of the Tripletts.

But credit for Donald’s happy run at high school also belongs to the teenage boys and girls who accommodated this strange kid in their midst on a day-by-day basis. It fell to them to do the simplest thing, which was to be kind to Donald, who would have been easy to tease. After all, he was two years older than everyone else in his grade and could barely hold a conversation; he could be mocked without
even being aware it was happening. He walked with his arms held stiff and apart from his sides, like a big letter A. Plus, he was basically defenseless; if someone wanted to get physical with him, he was small and knew nothing about how to handle himself in a fight.

Fortunately for Donald, there were enough students at Forest High who were prepared to keep that from happening to him. The Theriot sisters in particular—Celeste, Yvonne, and Jean—kept an eye out for him. They had moved to Forest only a few years earlier, when their father was hired by the railroad to water the engines of the trains coming in and out of town. They were Cajuns from Louisiana who showed up at school speaking only French, so they were still figuring out how to
blend in themselves.

It did not help that their mother, whose commitment to their education was spotty, frequently kept them home from school to assist her around the house. As a result, all three, and a brother named Paul, fell behind academically, to the point where, like Donald, they were a good year or two older than their classmates. But the girls had a streak of fierce decency, and whenever they saw Donald being teased, they put themselves in front of him, using their seniority to get the bullies to back off. In time, the lesson stuck, and picking on Donald went out of fashion. He became accepted, and more kids found it in themselves to get to know the strangest-seeming boy in the school, until he wasn’t really a stranger at all. It was around this time that people stopped calling him Donald and began to call him D.G.—from Donald Gray Triplett, his full name. That was because Donald called everyone else by his or her initials.

Still, it was a challenge to be friends with Donald. He got along so well with just himself for company, and he still mostly seemed to prefer it that way. This was not so obvious when everyone was in class together and he was anchored to his desk, doing the same exercises as they were. But it was different between classes, when the hormone-hyped social swirl of Forest High was let loose. Donald moved through the hallways saying little, seemingly oblivious to the chatter, the teenage hierarchy, the cliques. None of it mattered to him.

At lunch, he ate alone, unless one of the Theriot girls plopped down beside him. When kids congregated outdoors, Donald usually
wandered off toward the edge of the yard, where he stood by himself, looking upward. After a few moments, using his right index finger like a pencil, he commenced waggling it up and down and left and right, drawing figures in the air. After a while, this became such a regular sight that no one paid much attention. But kids who watched him were able to figure out what the figures were. They were numbers. Donald was doing arithmetic in the sky.

This obsession with numbers became a ticket to some extra respect from his classmates. When they saw him, usually off to one side, scribbling away in a notebook, they would peek over his shoulder and see that the book was filled with numerals, column after column, page after page. Not understanding the cipher, they leapt to the conclusion that Donald must be practicing some higher form of mathematics. More likely, he was back to making up his own peculiar number lists, which he had been doing for years. But the other kids didn’t know that; to them, he was a math wizard wandering among them.

In some respects,
Donald
was
a numbers whiz. He had practiced mental calculation for so long that he could instantaneously spit out an answer to any two-digit multiplication problem. Kids would approach him in the yard, clutching a slip of paper with the correct answers worked out ahead of time.

“D.G., what’s eighty-four times seventeen?”

Donald would stop, close his eyes for the briefest moment, then open them again and speak.

“Uh, uh…One thousand four hundred and twenty-eight.”

A glance down at the paper. Correct.

“What’s forty-two times ninety-three?”

“Uh, uh…Three thousand nine hundred and six.”

Right again.

Donald also had a photographic memory for numbers. He was often seen walking the square around the courthouse near his father’s office, studying the license plates of the cars parked there. One time, some boys from his class bumped into him and, on a hunch, one of them asked, “So what’s the number of that Plymouth?” He pointed out a car at the far end, parked at a diagonal to where they were all standing. Donald closed his eyes, took a beat, and then spit out a set
of letters and numbers. The boys hustled across the square and around the back end of the Plymouth.

“Hey, D.G.,” one of them called out, “you got it, D.G.!”

Before long, it was understood in Forest that Donald had a list in his head of the tag number of every car in town.

—

H
E ALSO HAD
a list in his head of all the people in town and
their
numbers—numbers he had personally assigned to them.

For example, Janelle Brown was a freshman when Donald,
then a senior, approached her. They had not previously spoken.

“Uh, uh…Janelle Brown, from now on your number is one thousand four hundred and eighty-seven,” he announced, then turned and walked away. The next time he saw Janelle in the hallway, Donald approached again, but this time, he greeted her not by name, but by her number. “Uh, hello, fourteen eighty-seven!” And then he wandered off.

Donald continued doing this, all over the school and always the same way. Those who were chosen were mystified, never sure how they had attracted a Donald number or what it meant. It seemed random, as did the numbers themselves. Some, like Buddy Lovett, got a three-digit number. He was 333. Others, like Janelle, got the full four digits. Various theories made the rounds. Some heard that Donald gave out numbers based on what he thought a person’s chances were of getting into heaven. Others suspected the figures somehow related to the recipient’s physical attractiveness.

One classmate, John Rushing, didn’t think either of those explained his own number. He had his own ideas about where it came from.

John and Donald had known each other since they were little. They had grown up a few houses away from each other, and John was often invited over to play on the Tripletts’ swing set. It was at John’s house that Donald had made a mess of that wall calendar. Later, before Donald went to live with the Lewises, the two boys belonged to the same first-, second-, and third-grade classes at school. By the early 1950s, though, when both boys were at Forest High, John was two grades ahead of Donald and a star player on the football team, the Forest Bearcats. Compared to his schoolmates, John had turned into a
giant, hard as a rock, and he was as solid morally as he was physically. Like the Theriot girls, he could not abide seeing Donald picked on, and he always intervened to stop it when it happened.

Donald may have been reciprocating when, one day, he walked up to John and announced, “John Rushing, from now on your number is one hundred ninety-three.” Rushing wondered, Why 193? For days he puzzled over it. Then, one Friday night, just before a big Bearcat game, he got a look at the official program for the event. It listed the two teams’ players, along with their numbers, heights, and weights. He ran his thumb down the column looking for his own name and found it; his game weight for the season was posted as 193.

Donald himself never explained what the rules were. But in his quirky way, he had invented a social interaction for himself, a transaction that took few words but was an exchange just the same. Donald’s numbers were harmless, intriguing, charming, and they certainly got people’s attention.

Forest was a safe place for Donald not only because he knew his way around but also because the community had been learning his ways. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, he was often seen taking long treks down the edge of the highway leading out of town, still scribbling at the sky. People driving by would slow down, greet him, and check to see if he wanted a lift somewhere, or suggest that it might be time to head back toward town. If he said he wanted to keep walking, that was fine too. Donald had become theirs to protect, because they understood he needed it. He was a fixture and a favorite.

—

D
ONALD
’
S SENIOR YEAR
at Forest High turned out to be his best ever. Outside of math, where he was strongest, his grades were mediocre. History and English—subjects with a human story at their hearts—were hard for him to master. Still, he was getting C’s. He joined a club or two—the Future Farmers of America and the school chorus. But his crowning achievement came halfway through the second semester, when he tried out for and landed a part in the school play.

This was a landmark in his life. Among all school activities, few were more socially collaborative than a theatrical production, and
suddenly Donald was fully involved. The play was called
The Monkey’s Uncle
. It was a popular farce about a pretty young woman pretending to be a boy, a skunk, and some romantic mismatches. Donald played
“Billy Bob Hefferfield,” the thirteen-year-old son of the town busybody. Ironically, Billy Bob was also a notorious bully.

Learning lines and delivering them on cue was probably easier for Donald than for some of his fellow actors, since it played to one of his strengths: memory. And in the performance, it didn’t matter that his vocal tone was a little flat and mechanical. It was a local audience, accustomed to Donald’s way of talking. Townspeople knew instead to listen for the comic content of the words. No one had ever heard Donald say so much all at once as he said on that Tuesday night in 1953, when the words came from a playwright’s pen. One other thing was clear by the time the curtain came down and the bows were taken: Donald did not suffer at all from stage fright. To the contrary, he seemed to like the attention.

When he graduated that June, Mary and Beamon had the entire class over to the house for a parent-sponsored “Good Luck Buffet Supper.” Each of the attending graduates received a penny for good luck, and the evening gave the class of ’53 one more chance to mingle. Everyone signed everyone else’s yearbook. Donald did not get everyone’s signature, but he managed to get to most of the young women, some of whom would be married within a year or two. Each found a different way to sound loving, almost motherly, toward their older classmate. Dorothy “Dot” Stroud took the pen and wrote, “To one of the sweetest boys I know.” Margaret Smith echoed this: “To a sweet guy, remember always do as well as you have done this year.” Margaret Ann Weems, who was class co-president: “Don, you have much ability and in the past year you have put it to good use…”