The Sunday Gentleman (27 page)

She could not take it any more. When she had first come to the Cassidy household so long before, and even when she had married Larry in Albuquerque, she had been a happy,’ bouncy, enthusiastic extrovert, full of health and hope. Now she was thin, jittery, thoroughly crushed in spirit. She confided to Jack that she had reached the end of the road. She was leaving Larry. She would not divorce him, since she was Catholic. She told Larry that she had to leave. He was upset. But not deeply. He was incapable of deep feeling or hurt. He told her that she was inconsiderate. And two days later, he had forgotten the whole matter. She moved to New England, where she now lives and works. Larry rarely speaks of her and never writes.

After Harriet left, Jack took Larry into his own walk-up for a week. He had intended to keep him longer, but it was impossible. Jack, working as an insurance salesman, would allow Larry to accompany him on his rounds. When they would reach a call, Jack would say, “I’ll only be five minutes, Larry. You wait right here for me. Don’t move.”

Larry would nod agreeably. When Jack would emerge, five or ten minutes later, Larry would be gone. He would be at least six blocks off, in any one of four directions, strolling aimlessly.

At the time, Jack was in love with a pretty, saucy model named Susan, who had time to spare and tried to give Jack a hand. She took Larry to movies, museums, walking in Central Park. But this was not enough. Jack, and his brothers, who had been kept informed, felt that Larry needed full-time care. They arranged for his readmittance to the Veterans Hospital in Lyons, New Jersey. Larry accepted his new address with complete docility. After several months in Lyons, Larry was transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Roanoke, Virginia, where the Veterans Administration was carrying out a special program for the rehabilitation of lobotomy cases.

Early in 1949, Jack married Susan, and they decided to try their luck in California. On the way, they stopped over in Roanoke to see Larry. He wanted to go along with them. His reasons were not sentimental. “I want to write again,” he said. “I want to write Alan Ladd movies for a hundred thousand dollars.” Jack promised to have him transferred to California, and this was accomplished in the summer of 1949.

Larry has been in Los Angeles ever since and lives there now. He is committed, by his own signature, to the Brentwood Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, which is connected with the Sawtelle Veterans Hospital. He was first kept in an open ward, which was neither guarded nor enclosed, but after two attempts to run away, he was more closely confined. The first time, having saved his veterans’ disability checks, he left in the middle of an afternoon for San Francisco, but soon returned voluntarily. The next time, he took off without funds for Phoenix, where his brother, Tim, lives.

Like most of the inmates in Sawtelle, Larry keeps army hours. He sleeps in a room with other patients, rises at dawn, now shaves promptly and efficiently, almost never bathes or showers in the hospital, and carelessly wears the same clothes day after day. There are work therapy groups and various classes for the patients, but Larry is disinterested in them. Once, he promised the doctors and his family that he would attend classes. He went for two days and never returned to them. Because he had the highest I.Q. in the ward, he was made a library attendant. He stayed on the job two hours and then wandered off: “We don’t want to force him to do anything,” a hospital psychiatrist told Jack. “This isn’t a penal colony.”

There are two things that Larry is faithful about—movies and food. Regularly, without fail, he goes to the two movies shown weekly and sits through them both. And he is always on time for meals and cleans his plate. Since the lobotomy operation, his appetite has been enormous. He is actually capable of eating six or seven full-course meals a day. But he has little patience for other activities. He used to enjoy golf. Recently, when Jack led him to a pitch-and-putt green, he took a couple of pokes at the ball, on the second hole tried to hit it using one hand, and finally threw down his clubs and walked off to sit in the parked car. He still carries two or three paperback books in his pockets all the time, a hangover from his old reading days, but he rarely does more than scan them. What he likes to do most, still, is walk. He tramps the hospital grounds constantly, tirelessly. Jack estimates that Larry must cover thirty miles a day. He never thinks much, when he walks, or if he does, he never remembers what he was thinking about.

He has few friends in the hospital. He likes only the patients and doctors who respect his intelligence, believe his claims of suffering petty persecutions, and who accept his own high opinion of himself. When another lobotomy case doubted that Larry had ever gone to Princeton, Larry refused to speak to him again. He likes to say that he is smarter than the doctors, because after all he is a Phi Beta Kappa. In arguments with other patients, he propounds flash opinions formed from glancing at a headline, and is extremely dogmatic about them. He likes to give advice to other patients. When he observed one patient being considerate of another, Larry interrupted, “Don’t be so damn considerate, mister. Look where I wound up being considerate—in a booby hatch.” He likes to call the hospital a booby hatch or a nut house.

He has mingled contempt and respect for the hospital staff. When the family noticed that his teeth were bad, though he suffered absolutely no pain from them, he refused to visit any army dentist. “Those guys,” he said contemptuously, “I can buy and sell them ten times.” One day, he regards the hospital staff as so many dedicated Arrowsmiths, and thinks he will write an epic movie dramatizing their courage. The next day, down on them for some fancied slight, he mutters threateningly of the book he will write. “It’ll make
The Snake Pit
look sick,” he says. “It’ll blast the Veterans Administration apart. It’ll let everyone know how they treat their patients.” The harassed army doctors, aware that Larry needs some way to work off his constant if momentary grudges and aggressions, accept his mutterings with good-natured tolerance.

Larry has long forgotten his dream of becoming a teacher. However, he still wants to write. When Burt, who is editing a Hollywood quarterly published in New York, heard this, he sent Larry a simple assignment. He sent him material about a famous film star and told him to write it up into a five-hundred-word picture caption. Larry managed to finish the task and send it to New York. The caption had to be completely rewritten, but Burt mailed him a check, nevertheless. For months after, Larry refused to cash the check, keeping it instead, to show to the patients and doctors as proof that he was a writer. Whenever Jack and Susan visit him, he promises to deliver at least a paragraph of a story by the following week. But he never does. “I don’t want to write in this nut house,” he says. “I want to do screenplays for Alan Ladd. I’ll go over to Paramount one day and tell them I’m Larry Cassidy, and you watch and see if they don’t roll out the red carpet.”

Most every weekend, either Susan, who now writes about interior decorating, or Jack, who works for a large public relations office, picks Larry up at the hospital and brings him to their newly purchased bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, about a twenty-minute drive from Hollywood. Often, when the weekend begins, Larry is angry with Jack. For a while, it was because he remembered that Jack did not invite him to his wedding in the East. “You were afraid Susan would like me better,” he told Jack. More recently, he felt that he was being confined in the hospital because Jack feared that Larry might take his public relations job away from him. When he suffers these brief delusions of persecution, he will wag his fist in Jack’s face, until Jack says, “But, Larry, I’m your brother. I love you.” Then Larry will lower his fist, and break into a childish grin. “That’s right, Jack,” he’ll say, “and I love you, too.”

During these weekends. Jack is able to see the degree to which Larry has changed, for better or for worse. Dr. Goldsmith had promised that Larry’s behavior would level off after three years, and however he was then would probably be the way he’d remain for the rest of his life. Today, at thirty-seven, with four years behind him since the lobotomy operation, Larry’s new personality has probably solidified.

Unquestionably, today, he is happier than he was before the operation. His face is round, young, cherubic, and he’s getting plump about the middle. He is never depressed, rarely moody, and when moody, only for fleeting moments. Emotionally and physically, he is free of pain. His occasional complaints of persecution, his pretended belligerences, and his continued social impatience do not alter the fact that he is carefree, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky.

The price of this contentment, of course, has been the loss of many of his old powers. His intelligence is still high, but this brilliance is erratically mixed with terrible streaks of childishness and unreality. When he has bright periods, behaving as of old, and his family begins to think he is recovering, he suddenly lapses into irrelevant fantasy or moronic soliloquy. In his pre-lobotomy days, he used to listen to the radio program
Information, Please
, and in several years missed only one or two questions, a record which matched John Kieran’s. He knew, for one thing, the most obscure passages from Shakespeare. Recently, when someone asked him to recite the routine “To be or not to be” passage from
Hamlet
, he was unable to recall it. Yet, a few days after that, walking with Jack past a library, he read the Latin inscription etched above the entrance and accurately translated it. On another occasion, when Jack was writing a publicity story about a burlesque queen, and trying to remember a synonym for striptease that had something to do with insects, Larry looked up and said, “Ecdysiast, just call her that.” Jack went to his Webster’s and found “ecdysis” defined as the “act of shedding an outer cuticular layer, as in the case of insects, crustaceans, etc.”

Now the family has learned neither to underestimate nor to overestimate Larry’s intelligence. They accept the fact that he has stupid days and smart days, without rhyme or reason. They also accept gratefully the fact that his sense of humor seems largely unimpaired by the operation. One afternoon, driving in Beverly Hills, Jack committed a minor traffic infraction. A motorcycle policeman rolled up alongside and bawled Jack out. The moment the policeman left, Larry exclaimed, “Somebody ought to give that cop a lobotomy.” Around the hospital, arguing politics, he will often get steamed up at the national administration and say .that the President ought to have two lobotomies a week. Leaving the hospital for his weekend recently, he realized that he had forgotten something, and blurted in exasperation, “Gee, I should have my head examined.” Then, looking about the hospital corridor with quick humor, “Matter of fact, I’m in a great place for it!”

While his mind still has roots in the past, his memory is badly scrambled. Infrequently, he recalls his lobotomy operation. “I’m glad I had it done,” he will say. But if someone asks him if he ever talks to the other lobotomy cases in his ward, he will snap, “Who can talk to those idiots?” He remembers all his relatives and friends, though without much depth of feeling toward them one way or another. He still regards Burt as his best friend, and writes him a letter every week. Occasionally, he remembers special days and is exceedingly thoughtful. On Jack and Susan’s last wedding anniversary, he quietly rose at dawn, hiked from their Valley bungalow the many miles into Hollywood, found a store that was open on Sunday, selected and bought a pair of beautiful bookends, and hiked all the way back with the gift.

People who meet him for the first time, and have not heard of his lobotomy operation, always accept him as a perfectly normal citizen. They regard him as intelligent, jovial, although somewhat egotistical and impatient. After they meet him a second or third time, they begin secretly to suspect that something is wrong with him, that perhaps he’s a little eccentric. His continued’ impatience, irresponsibility, and lack of restraint are usually the final giveaways.

For months, for example, Larry had spoken of going to Ciro’s, an expensive night club. Jack and Susan decided to surprise him on his birthday. They brought him in from the hospital. They peeled his old suit off him and forced him into the bathtub. They presented him with a new suit.

Then, with a party of friends, they took him to Ciro’s. After ten minutes, he was ready to leave. He had no patience even for Ciro’s. Later the same night, an incident occurred that revealed his attitude toward the opposite sex. He had long begged Jack to line him up with a lusty woman, and Jack had obligingly paired him off at Ciro’s with an uninhibited redhead. After they had driven the redhead home, Jack and Susan settled down in the car for a long wait, while Larry led her up to her door. In two minutes, he was back. Jack was amazed. “Why so fast? Didn’t you even kiss her?” Larry was genuinely shocked. “Kiss her? Do you think I’m a cad?”

Larry’s lack of social control, above all else, causes those around him constant consternation. He is not supposed to drink, even though in recent months he has been permitted an occasional sip. One Sunday morning, when Jack and Susan were out, some neighbors down the block spotted Larry out walking. They invited him to join them in an early morning drink. He gulped down one shot, then two, then three. The whiskey tasted like tea to him, and by the time Jack located him, he had had six and was thoroughly potted. Jack put him to bed, and when he woke up. Jack lectured him. “They’re nice people,” Jack said, “but I don’t want you drinking with them. They’re dipsomaniacs and that’s not for you.” The following Sunday, Larry was on his eternal walk, when the same neighbors saw him and invited him in again. Larry was agreeable. They inquired if he would like to join them in drinks again. He primly refused. “My brother says I can’t,” he announced. “He says you’re a couple of dipsomaniacs and I mustn’t drink with you.”

That same Sunday, a few hours later, Larry again exhibited his lack of restraint. Susan, who is Catholic, took him to church with her. He sat beside her in perfect silence throughout the sermon. When it was done, he broke into wild applause. The priest looked startled, and everyone in the church turned and glared. Susan blushed, and whispered that he must not applaud in church. “Why not?” he asked. “That guy makes a lot of sense!”