It was hard to tell who was more frightened, Hannah or the boys. They stared at each other silently until the Director called out cheerily, ‘Well, Hannah, I see you’ve found your room. Good enough. Now that we’re all set, I’ll get back to work. Phone never stops ringing, a thousand things to do. Have a good day.’
The Director was out the hall door and gone before any of us moved, but just as the door clicked shut Hannah ran towards it. Brian and Rufus had huddled together in front of the outside door. Jamie whimpered and ran to where I stood by the hall door and buried his head against my legs. Without previous planning, we had formed a barricade to the exits. There was no way out for Hannah. Like it or not, she was with us.
Hannah backtracked and then made one dash for the hall door, and I captured her as she came by. ‘Gotcha. Enough now, okay?’
I said it as much to reassure the boys as to steady Hannah, but while it may have helped them to hear a familiar tone in the room it did nothing for her. She slid out of my arms to the floor, propped herself on her hands and knees inside her long housedress, and with a moaning, keening noise began rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a tormented infant in a crib.
The safety we had begun to build was gone. Trouble, trauma, violence and fear had invaded our room. I muttered a silent expletive in the direction of the departed Director, but it wasn’t of any use. She was gone; Hannah was here. We’d just have to get through somehow.
I turned to the boys. ‘Hannah’s going to be in our class this year. She feels badly about missing her old teacher and some other things. It’s going to take a while for us to get used to each other, but it’s going to be okay. We just need a little time. Now let’s get busy. Rufus, Brian, bring your books on over here and let’s see what we’re going to be working on.’
As I spoke there was a dull, heavy thud and I turned back towards Hannah. She was not only rocking, she was banging her head, bringing it down hard against the black tile floor at the end of each forward thrust. I knew that part of this head hanging was to test us, but part of it was also an attempt to destroy the torments inside her.
I sat down on the floor next to Hannah and pushed my leg beneath her head to cushion the blow. ‘No. In this room you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. And no one hurts you. You can rock if you have to, but no banging.’
She brought her head down again, drove it hard into my thigh – and then, as the noon whistle wailed, suddenly she was still. We sat without speaking. I leaned against the wall with Hannah spread out, drenched in sweat, inert against my leg, while the three boys watched us silently from the other side of our room.
Jamie was the last to leave our room that first day. We were both limp from emotion and heat, and we sat in a chair by the windows watching for his bus. But as soon as his driver arrived and he was safely aboard, I went down to the office, unlocked the file cabinet, and took out Hannah’s folder.
The Director was in the office, a calm oasis in the midst of confused bus drivers, anxious mothers and tired teachers. She was at her best here, soothing and at the same time encouraging. She had founded the school fifteen years before and had worked harder and harder each year, raising money to keep the doors open, raising standards, coping with the ever-increasing publicity, the long waiting lists of children. Finally, with the death of her husband, the school had become her life. For years it had existed in rented and borrowed buildings, but now the dream was almost reality: within a few months ground would be broken for a spacious new school building, built to the Director’s specifications. Nothing escaped her, and she nodded to me as I took Hannah’s file back to the quiet of my own room.
I spread the folder out on one of the tables before the open windows. Small air currents stirred through the room and riffled the edges of the papers. I was eager to read the reports, hoping to discover what had happened to make Hannah so angry, so frightened. She was more like a young animal than a little girl. Why wouldn’t she let anyone near her? Where had the rage and self-destruction come from?
The folder contained a school form filled out by Mrs Rosnic, a health form from the paediatrician, a report from the principal of the public school Hannah had attended; there were also a joint report by a psychologist and a social worker at a mental health clinic, a final report by another psychologist from the public school, and a half-page year-end report written by Hannah’s teacher from last year. From these I gradually pieced together Hannah’s history.
She had been born eight years earlier in a hospital in New York City. Her life had been filled with violence from the beginning. She had cried constantly through her first days and nights, eating little at first, finally refusing to eat at all. In desperation, Mrs Rosnic took her back to the hospital where she had been born. They discovered an abdominal obstruction which had caused food blockage and dehydration. Hannah was operated on and hospitalised for several weeks.
When she returned home she was able to eat and some of the screaming stopped, but she rocked back and forth in her crib, banging her head against the end panel.
Her brother, Carl, three years older, was resentful of the new baby. One day soon after Hannah came home from the hospital, Mrs Rosnic found Carl by Hannah’s crib, hitting her on the head again and again. In spite of everything, she grew; she walked at thirteen months and completed toilet training at age two. However, Mrs Rosnic continued to bottle-feed her until she was three years old, and although no connection was made, it seemed pertinent to me that Hannah didn’t try to talk until then. Her speech consisted primarily of grunts and monosyllables that only Mrs Rosnic could understand.
When Hannah was four, her family moved to the run-down industrial city where she still lived. They occupied a two-family house in a derelict section of town. Mrs Rosnic’s father lived downstairs; the Rosnics themselves occupied the second floor.
Hannah’s father had been a strange, brutal man. He must have been tortured by both emotional and physical ailments. The records showed that he had been in and out of mental institutions over the years, yelling, shouting, beating his children when he was home. Later he was confined to a wheelchair, from which he berated the world and everyone in it. He died in the same bizarre manner in which he had lived. Rising suddenly up out of his wheelchair at his mother’s funeral, he was stricken with a heart attack and died the next day, two years before Hannah came to our school.
At the time of her husband’s death, Mrs Rosnic was pregnant with a third child. Still in her early thirties, a widow with little money and no training, with an ailing, demanding father, two young children, and another child soon to be born, she became ill herself, overcome by a deep depression.
She turned to her church for help; they put her in touch with a community mental health centre. Here she was interviewed jointly by a psychiatric social worker and a psychologist, who judged her to be of ‘bright normal intellect with a fair insight and judgement, but with a feeling of being unable to cope’.
I got up from the table and began to pace as I read. Who wouldn’t feel ‘unable to cope’ under similar conditions? The report ambled on, bleak and without compassion. Carl, Hannah’s brother, was summarised and dismissed in two brief sentences as having ‘a childhood adjustment problem with the unusual phobia of fearing the key to an old clock’. Hannah was described as ‘a seven-year-old Caucasian female –’
I put the report down, hating the stilted language. Who could write that? And why? Was it to impress some invisible audience or was it simply the way psychologists had been taught to write reports? Hannah