Vincent Zandri - The remains

“It’s a joke,” she said, eyes wide. “Get it? Strange? Autistic? When you stand in my shoes, young lady, you don’t expect normalcy from a boy like Francis. You expect something new and weird and quite wonderful with each new day.”

I couldn’t help but take notice of her referring to a man pushing fifty as a boy. But then Franny was a boy. He would never grow old despite his body.

“Listen Rebecca,” she said, “I can tell something’s got you upset, so perhaps I should explain a little about Francis’s condition. It might shed some light, help you to understand why he does the things he does-why he paints the way he does.”

I nodded. It was worth a shot.

She sat back, both hands wrapped around her mug, deep eyes peering into it as though it were a crystal ball that revealed the past instead of the future.

“Not long after Franny was born he was diagnosed with retardation,” she said in an almost exasperated tone. “As harsh as that sounds even today, I can’t begin to tell you how devastating it sounded almost a half century ago.”

“I thought he was autistic?”

“They didn’t know what autism was. Back then, they often confused it for insanity. In those days, the most my husband and I could expect for Francis was for him to perhaps live a relatively comfortable existence inside a facility. Or what they used to refer to as an asylum back in the day. But that would have been a disaster. Autism was only one of his problems. He was also affected by heart and lung problems. Congenital ailments that still plague him and force the daily intake of blood thinners.” She paused, eyes still focused on her tea. “In all honesty, Rebecca, Franny is not long for this world.”

Her revelation hit me like a punch to the belly. Franny had always seemed so healthy to me. I also could not imagine a world without him.

“In any case,” she said, “I- we -resolved to raise Francis here, on the farm. Give him as normal a life as possible, for as long as his life lasted.” Finally she raised her face and looked me directly in the eye. “And thank God we did. Because it didn’t take long for us to discover that the doctors had been all wrong.”

I wasn’t sure I understood her, so I asked her to explain. But she got up from out of her chair.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

I stood up, began to follow her.

“What exactly did the doctors have wrong?” I asked while being led to an old wood door at the far side of the kitchen.

She brushed back her long hair, opened the door to reveal a dark basement. Reaching out for the string that ignited an exposed overhead light bulb, she said, “Francis might have been different, but he was far from retarded. Down in this basement is the evidence.”

Turning, she wiped away a spider web and began to climb down the old wood plank stairs.

Ever the cautious twin sister, I followed.

With its exposed damp dirt floor surrounded by fieldstone foundation walls, the basement felt more like a cave than the foundation for an old farmhouse. A single overhead light bulb sprayed a dull beam on the gray-brown dirt. The smell of old raw onions and mold permeated the moist air. Caroline led me across the length of the open floor to a large closet-like room that had been built out of plywood, its walls covered over with clear plastic over Styrofoam boards. Protruding from out of the side of the room was a long section of rubbery ductwork that snaked itself all the way up to an opening at the top of the foundation wall.

This was a room built inside a room-a space independent from the house that contained it and that maintained its own atmospheric ventilation system. As an artist, I wasn’t ignorant of such specialty rooms. Lots of artists and art collectors had them built inside their homes and galleries in order to better preserve their precious treasures. Because after all, art never decreases in value, no matter what.

When Caroline opened the door to the room, I could immediately see that she possessed quite the collection. The brightly lit space was stacked full with original art pieces. Every bit of wall space in a room I estimated to be twelve by twelve feet was covered with paintings, sketches, and black and white drawings, the largest of which was a full-sized self portrait of Franny himself. The artist was dressed in his usual uniform of baggy jeans, Converse high-tops and a fire-engine red T-shirt. In the painting, his face was noticeably younger, but just as round, just as smooth and chubby. His hair was thicker but mussed up. Thin arms hung down straight at his side, almost like a toy soldier standing at attention.

The expression on his face was nothing less than stunning. The piercing gray eyes cut holes in my chest. The image seemed so real to me, so life-like and vivid, I half expected him to open up his mouth and speak.

Caroline must have taken notice of my amazement.

“Francis painted that ten years ago,” she explained, breaking me out of my spell. “Some of these paintings he did as early as three years old.”

That’s when she reached out, took hold of my hand and led me to a small, post-card-sized pastel drawing of a hobby horse. Its execution was as detailed and photographically rendered as a Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell, but as distorted, distant and disturbing as a Van Gogh.

“He was three?” Had I heard her right the first time?

“Three,” she said. “It was an exciting time for us. Because we knew then for certain that Franny was no idiot. He was gifted.”

“The G word,” I said. “I don’t use it often. Never at the art center. Except for one very special artist.”

Caroline pursed her lips, nodded.

“Tell me something, Rebecca, how much do you know about Savant Syndrome? Autistic Savant Syndrome in particular?”

I shook my head, breathed in the room’s strong scent of paint, turpentine and alcohol. “Other than what I’ve learned from my direct contact with Franny over the years, not a whole lot.”

Crossing her arms, Caroline focused her eyes not on me, but on the eclectic pieces of art that covered the wall behind me.

“In layman’s terms,” she went on, “autistic savants are born with miss-wired neurons. In a few scattered cases, this miss-wiring affords them extraordinary gifts.” She raised her hands as if to say, Just take a good look around at all these gifts.

“Not long before Francis painted that hobby horse, we were told that he would never be cured. Francis would never be mainstreamed and would for the duration of his life require constant care.”

I looked over her shoulder at Franny’s face, looked into eyes that seemed to lock on mine from wherever I stood inside the small square-shaped room.

“Not the most optimistic of outlooks.”

“Until he started painting,” she said. “That’s when everything changed.”

“But how exactly?”

“Maybe he can’t communicate with us the way we want him to. Maybe he can’t stand loud noises or closed in spaces. Maybe he can’t look us straight in the eyes. But one day he picks up a pencil and paper, he starts to draw like an artist ten times his age. My husband and I were floored, to say the least.”

“We showed his drawings and sketches to his doctors at the Parson’s Center in Albany. They in turn found them remarkable and immediately labeled Francis a savant, which was a new word for the time. Francis possessed an unusual gift. This wasn’t the era of PET scans where doctors are able to see computer pictures of someone’s brain. But they did subject Francis to a grueling series of diagnostic tests. At the end, it was determined that because of his autism, Francis was able to use far more of his creative mind than normal people like you and me could ever hope for.”