Compensations of Love : With Their Compound Disabilities, Bill and Myra Run Their House Like Partners

They were afraid of each other at first. Myra wanted to know why Bill wore braces on his legs and Bill wondered why Myra had been “locked up” for 23 years.

She worried he would take emotional and, perhaps, physical advantage of her. He worried she would abuse him the way his last girlfriend had.

Like a lot of couples falling in love, Bill and Myra were afraid of the risks.

But Bill and Myra are not like a lot of people who fall in love. They are mentally retarded and physically disabled.

Loving for them meant begging their parents’ approval and overcoming the attitudes of people who assume intimacy is not among the rights of the handicapped. It took them 16 years to advance from acquaintances to romantic friends to live-in companions.

With steps both tentative and small, they made their way to each other.

“When I met Billy I said, ‘Billy, what’s wrong with you? Did you break your legs?’ ” says Myra, her voice timid as a child’s.

“He said, ‘No, I can’t walk.’ And I was scared. I didn’t understand what happened to him until he explained about the epidemic of polio.”

That was back in the 1970s, soon after Myra was released from a state mental institution at the age of 38. “They brought me out and I said, ‘Geez. This is big. What’s out here,’ ” she recalls.

Myra had long felt the tug of that most common of human yearnings, the desire for companionship. She was looking for the kind of home and love her sister and brother-in-law shared. In Bill, she finally found that companion.

Protective parents and counselors watched closely as the pair moved uneasily toward romance. Bill’s father worried about an accidental pregnancy and Myra’s mother worried her daughter’s Social Security would be cut off.

But all also wanted the couple to have a chance.

“Basically all they really want is a sense of touch and caring,” says counselor Linda Buchanan, who has educated Myra about birth control. “We have an obligation to protect them, but we also believe it’s their right to live like they want.”

Myra is among more than 60,000 mentally retarded adults who over the last two decades have rejoined America’s communities because of new laws that promote education rather than institutionalization.

There are no firm figures on the number of disabled adults living together, but Myra and Bill are among the couples chipping away at old misconceptions about what mentally retarded people can and cannot do.

They live together in a red-brick apartment house on a blue-collar block in a Boston suburb.

“She’s good to me and I’m good to her,” says Bill, 40, a burly man with an enormous face.

Bill has two huge hands to compensate for the one that was withered when Myra was born with cerebral palsy. Myra has the legs Bill lost to polio at the age of 5.

They run their house like partners.

Myra reaches into overhead cabinets, runs quick errands, hauls groceries. Bill opens jars, folds clothes, takes his braces off to sprawl on the kitchen floor and scrub.

He knows how to get around on the bus; she knows how to read. With the help of local counselors, they budget their combined federal and local aid allowance of about $125 a week.

On the wall of the couple’s tidy living room is a 5-foot list to guide them through their daily chores: brush teeth, make bed, clean kitchen.

Both Bill and Myra have worked from time to time, but given their compound disabilities they have had a hard time maintaining schedules and meeting a boss’s demands.

But they keep busy with errands, doctors’ appointments, meetings with friends. They are in daily contact with counselors at the state-financed Cooperative for Human Services, a community-based residential service for developmentally disabled adults.

“It’s an adventure for the two of them, like kids on their own for the first time at the age of 18 or 19,” says counselor Buchanan, who asked that the couple’s hometown and last names be withheld to protect their privacy.

Neither Bill nor Myra has matured much beyond the mentality of a young adult, Buchanan says. But together they have achieved what each wanted so badly for so long: independence and intimacy.

“At night, when I come home, he’s sitting there,” Myra says. “There’s somebody to talk to, somebody in the house.”

There’s somebody to help figure out the microwave, turn off the television or share a funny story. “There’s someone to call ‘Hon’ or ‘Sweetie,’ ” says Diane Barbee, residential director at the cooperative.

As in any relationship, Bill and Myra have their problems. Through therapy, they have learned how to control the frustrations that quickly turn to anger.

They’ve also learned how to turn to each other when faced with the sudden pain of an insult, perhaps issued by a mocking stranger in a passing car. But still they are sometimes unprepared.

“One time there were some people in a car and they said they were going to a party, did we want to come along,” Myra says. “So we did, but it wasn’t good. They were religious people and they wanted things.”

That’s where the Cooperative For Human Services staff comes in. Counselors such as Barbee and Buchanan are on hand to intervene when someone--perhaps a peddler--tries to capitalize on Bill and Myra’s naivete.

The staff is also there to explain the daily prejudices and bolster morale. They are part of a civil rights movement embodied by the proposed Americans With Disabilities Act which, if approved by Congress, would guarantee equal opportunities to the nation’s more than 35 million adults with mental and physical handicaps.

It would help people like Bill and Myra when they confront old stereotypes, such as the common assumption that parents with disabilities will necessarily bear similarly disabled children.

Dr. Pasquale Accardo, co-author of “When A Parent Is Mentally Retarded,” says it depends on the individual whether retarded parents are able to give their children a well-rounded upbringing. But he says his studies indicate that less than one-third of their children are born retarded.

“People still have irrational fears,” says Accardo, a professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine.

Bill and Myra are helping educate the public.

They are familiar fixtures in their hometown just outside Boston, meeting people while on their weekly trip to the supermarket, standing in line to catch a “Batman” matinee or having a hamburger at the Brigham’s coffee shop.

“A lot of people look at someone like Myra and Bill and think it’s nice they can do for themselves,” Barbee says. “But others think differently.”

Some people underestimate what Bill and Myra can do for themselves. They think they have to speak louder or gesture wildly. Some people don’t understand that retarded adults are not exempt from the human range of emotions.

Disabled people can be scary--even to each other.

Bill, much like Myra, had reservations when they first met in 1974 at a supervised workshop. After four decades of living in his parents’ home, he wanted to prove he could live on his own.

But he also harbored memories of a previous girlfriend who had whipped him across the face with a belt and threatened his one good eye with a lit cigarette.

“I wanted to know why she was in the hospital for all those years and she explained how she used to be really nervous and did damage to her mother and friends,” he says.

“I just looked at her and thought, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ ” he says. “And then I said to myself, ‘I’m going to try it again.’ ”

Soon they were sharing Cokes at a nearby Holiday Inn, listening together to the songs of Elvis Presley or taking the bus to spend sunny days at Salisbury Beach. Sometimes they would take drives with Myra’s parents up to Vermont or Maine.

They were growing closer, and soon they became lovers.

“When I was growing up I figured I would never move out on my own and always be a burden,” Myra says, reaching for Bill’s hand.

“I’d never know how to cook or sew. I’m dumb. I’m stupid. That’s what I thought. Now I know some other things. And Billy does, too.”