The Sunday Gentleman (26 page)

Doggedly, Jack reiterated that they all wanted the operation performed at once, before Larry went insane or committed suicide. Dr. Goldsmith promised to let them know as soon as he was free, as soon as a scheduled operation was canceled. The very next day, in New York,’ Jack received a telegram stating that a cancellation had come through.

Two weeks later, during the late morning of April 14, Larry, accompanied by Harriet, Jack, another brother who dwelt in New Jersey, and his old roommate, Burt, boarded a Boston-bound train in Newark. As the train sped on, Larry became more and more agitated. They all took turns sitting beside him, trying to distract him. But his mind kept coming back to the operation. He was afraid to have it; he was afraid not to have it. “I’ll wind up an idiot,” he kept muttering. Burt tried to reassure him. “Larry, this operation is the most wonderful thing in the world.” Larry shrugged. “I don’t care, don’t care if it kills me. Anyway, if it doesn’t, at least I won’t have to be myself any more.”

They reached Boston in the afternoon. It was an overcast day. They took a taxi to the hospital, where a bed had been reserved for Larry. The hospital telephoned Dr. Goldsmith. Before the doctor arrived, the others in the party were permitted to see Larry once more. They tried to give him pep talks.

It was early evening when Dr. Goldsmith appeared, carrying photographic equipment. Dr. Goldsmith was alone with Larry for an hour. Later, they were joined by Dr. Rogers. Talking to the doctors, Larry was severely depressed. He alternately cried, perspired, and choked out his desire to die. When the talks were ended, Dr. Goldsmith set up his photographic equipment and took several shots of Larry. The portraits showed a fearful, haunted man.

The next morning, it rained. Burt had returned to New York to go to work. Jack, Harriet, and the other brother, who had spent the night in a hotel across the street, were in the waiting room of the hospital early. Dr. Goldsmith and Dr. Rogers had a prior lobotomy scheduled for nine o’clock. Larry was second on the list. At eleven o’clock, the first operation was completed. At eleven-fifteen, Larry, head shaved, drowsy under a basal anesthetic, was swiftly wheeled past his wife and brothers into the operating room.

Harriet gasped, then began weeping. She cried almost steadily during the next two hours. The worried brother from New Jersey watched her in stunned silence. Jack fought tears, as he saw Larry disappear into surgery. Jack remembers, to this day, the thought that went through his mind that last, helpless moment. He thought: I will never see him again as I’ve known and loved him all my life. He will soon be returned from that room, the same name, the same face, the same body, but a different human being, forever, for the rest of his life and ours.

While the three sat in dreadful silence, in the lonely waiting room. Dr. Goldsmith and Dr. Rogers bent over Larry inside the operating room. Dr. Rogers had marked out areas on Larry’s shaved scalp for the trephine openings. These areas had been injected with Novocain. Nothing that followed physically hurt Larry. The localized anesthetic, as well as the fact that the human brain is insensitive to pain, fortified him. Following his earlier markings. Dr. Rogers made the necessary incisions at each temple, above the ears. A button of bone, smaller than a dime, was removed on each side of his skull and now the brain lay exposed. Silver clips were applied to bleeding vessels, as excess blood was sponged away.

Now Dr. Rogers probed inside the holes in Larry’s forehead with a special type of cannula rod. This done, he inserted another instrument, the leucotome, a long thin dulled knife. He moved the knife in a fan-shaped arc, downward, then upward, slicing into the nerve fibers that connected the frontal lobes with the thalamus to the rear. As Dr. Rogers made his drastic incision, Dr. Goldsmith talked continuously with Larry, who lay drowsily awake. Dr. Goldsmith kept questioning Larry, who tried to answer as best he could. This question-and-answer session, during the operation, was part of the technique. From Larry’s answers. Dr. Rogers could tell when he was sufficiently disoriented, when the cutting was deep enough and should be halted. As the operation proceeded, Dr. Goldsmith asked Larry, “Why are we operating?” Larry answered, “I don’t know.” Dr. Goldsmith asked, “Where are you now?” Larry answered, “Baltimore.” Dr. Goldsmith asked, “Do you know who I am?” Larry squinted up, saw the gaunt face, and replied, “Yes, you’re Jesus Christ.”

The cutting was done. The prefrontal lobes had been sufficiently disconnected from the other brain centers. The cutting had been deep—a profound lobotomy—and Larry would no longer be dominated by fears and anxiety. The thin knife had removed his worries. It had also removed his old personality. After the wounds were given a final check, to be sure all bleeding had stopped, the buttons of skull were replaced and the flesh stitched. The prefrontal lobotomy was over.

It was now afternoon, ten minutes after one. The operation had taken almost two hours. Dr. Rogers emerged first He went directly to Harriet, Jack, and the other brother, and said, “It’s all done. It went well.” Harriet and the brother both cried. Jack turned away, walked hurriedly down the corridor to the men’s lavatory, pushed inside, leaned against a wall and sobbed for twenty minutes.

A short time later, they had all composed themselves. They waited anxiously to see Larry. He was wheeled out of the operating room. He was asleep and his head was bandaged. They could tell nothing. They returned to their hotel until evening, then crossed back to the hospital again. Larry was awake now, and they were admitted to his room. They stared down at him. He opened his eyes, met theirs, then averted his eyes. They were led out of the room. The following morning. Jack went in to see Larry first. He looked at Larry, who still seemed faraway, then asked, “Who am I?” Larry’s eyes fastened on him a moment, then he whispered, “Hello, Jack.”

Larry, attended by special nurses day and night was in the hospital two weeks in all. Jack and Harriet visited him twice a day, and though he never spoke unless spoken to, he gradually became more responsive. His docility shocked Jack, who could not forget his wild agitation of a few days before. Jack thought that he seemed entirely too disinterested, but Dr. Goldsmith explained that Larry’s mind was disoriented and that it would take some months to reintegrate itself.

Jack says he first fully realized the remarkable change that had come over Larry when, a week after the operation, he tried to converse normally with him. During the years of Larry’s illness. Jack had adopted a bantering manner. Also, before ever saying a single word. Jack had learned to censor his conversation automatically. “I was careful never to say anything that might upset or depress him, or make him moody,” Jack recalls. “I learned never to ask him, ‘How are you feeling mentally, Larry?’ Well, when I saw him in the hospital, I was still conditioned by the past. I said, ‘How’s about a set of tennis, Larry?’ I’d wanted to ask how he felt, but from habit suppressed it. When he didn’t react to my patter, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have to be evasive. On impulse, I asked him, ‘How do you feel mentally, Larry?’ He simply nodded, quite normally, and replied, ‘Fine, fine.’ Then, the full impact really hit me. I knew he was a changed person.”

On the day that Larry was released, Jack and Harriet were waiting for him. Dr. Goldsmith photographed him before he left. Without urging, Larry gave the camera a broad smile. The resultant photograph, of a relaxed, cheerful young man, seemed incredible when laid beside the photograph snapped two weeks earlier, with its tortured, emaciated face. Before the three departed, Dr. Goldsmith warned Harriet that Larry’s home care was important, that he must not be allowed to drink alcoholic beverages, that he would have to be retaught personal habits of cleanliness like shaving, bathing, and remembering to use the toilet.

As they left the hospital, Larry seemed to be in a good mood. His head was unbandaged, and the scars, on both temples, were clearly visible. They would be concealed, however, when his hair grew back. Larry’s face was pleasantly animated, and he appeared at peace with the world. Harriet was taking him back to her family in Ohio, where he’d have care while recuperating. There were several hours before the train left, and Jack and Harriet debated how they could best occupy them for Larry. They decided to visit the State House on Beacon Hill, and then sit in a park and rest. At first, both Jack and Harriet were very restrained with Larry. They could not relax. They kept expecting him to become annoyed by something they’d said. It was not until they went into a restaurant for breakfast, that they realized almost nothing could annoy him. In the restaurant, Harriet asked Larry what he would like to eat. He glanced at the menu without reading it. “Anything,” he said finally. “It doesn’t matter.” He ate heartily, and after the meal Jack asked him how he felt. “Just fine,” he said, good-naturedly.

While Jack went back to New York to find a job, Larry and Harriet boarded the train for Ohio. They lived with her family again. The family only dimly comprehended what the whole thing was about. They were not sure why or how Larry had been ill, or what the operation with the funny name involved, but he was Harriet’s husband and he had been sick and that was enough. They treated him, as they had before the surgery, with consideration.

The operation and care had cost between $1,000 and $1,500, and there was only a small share of Larry’s inheritance and of Harriet’s savings left. Harriet invested this money in opening a neighborhood bakery. Larry lacked the patience to help her. When he visited the bakery, he was only in the way. He took to accompanying his brother-in-law on the delivery truck again. Sometimes he hung around a nearby confectionery store, playing the pinball machine or glancing at newspaper headlines. Dr. Goldsmith had thought that he would read comic books. He never picked one up, although he loved movies, anything and everything, indiscriminately. Nor did he ever urinate outside of the bathroom.

Often, Larry went on long walks for mile after mile. When he returned to the house, Harriet found large blisters on his feet. He said he had not felt them. He seemed immune to pain. Once, when it was very cold, he wandered outdoors in his shirt-sleeves, obvious to the weather. Harriet’s mother chased him, calling out, “Larry, why don’t you put your jacket on?” He halted, then said, “Why yes, good idea.” He ran back into the house for his jacket.

He had no interest in his personal appearance. Harriet always reminded him to shave. When he prepared to shave, and had turned on the faucet, he would frequently stand staring at the running water for a half hour or more. He usually thought that he had been there only a minute or two. Harriet had been warned that most lobotomy patients lose their concept of time, and many are fascinated by water. He never drank whiskey. Harriet told him he could not, and he never disobeyed her. He was satisfied to sniff her beer, when they were out.

He was difficult in many ways. He seemed to have lost a certain social awareness. In the street several times, he abruptly confronted strangers with his hands raised in a pugilistic pose, and threatened, “Want a fist full of knuckles?” He was always good-natured about the way he did it, actually kidding, never aggressive, but people did not know that and they were constantly startled.

Harriet’s family had a five-year-old boy in the house. Larry played juvenile games with him and enjoyed teasing him. He’d make funny faces, and invent fantastic names to amuse the boy, saying “Look out for Goofus Gerhardt, the bear! He’s under the bed!” Then he’d steal the five-year-old’s ball from him, and when the boy complained, Larry would playfully pinch him. When the family, irritated, protested, Larry would tease them, too. Everyone’s nerves began to fray. Meanwhile, Harriet’s bakery, which had done wonderfully the first month, steadily declined. Harriet was forced to give up and sell. She’d lost most of their money in the ten months that had passed. She decided that a change might do them both good, and so she took Larry to New York.

Jack, informed of their coming, rented a room for them from a French landlady in Manhattan. After they were settled, Jack and Harriet twice took Larry to see Dr. Goldsmith. In Larry’s presence, Harriet related some of his difficulties and habits. She could not understand the things he did. Still in Larry’s presence, Dr. Goldsmith replied, “Well, Larry is only three and a half years old socially.” Jack thinks he said this merely to test Larry’s reaction, but Larry did not react. Later, as the conversation continued. Dr. Goldsmith turned to Larry and said, “Certainly you can shave yourself, Larry.” Larry stared at him a moment, then suddenly spoke. “I’m three and a half years old, doctor. How could I possibly know how to shave?” The doctor blinked, and Harriet and Jack were agape.

In New York, to support Larry and herself, Harriet took a job in a Schrafft’s kitchen. It was heavy work, hard work, from seven-thirty in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon. She went about, daily, in a daze of exhaustion. Larry, with no one to look after him full time, was constantly in trouble. One day, alone, he went into an expensive restaurant and ordered the best meal. When he was done, he told the manager that he could not pay. The manager was decent about it, and there was no incident. A little later, Larry ran into an old acquaintance and invited him to lunch. They both ordered expensive meals. When the check came, Larry admitted that he did not have a penny.

Once, Harriet returned home to find Larry nursing a black eye and bruised cheek. She wanted to know what had happened. “I met a man and called him a sonofabitch and he hit me,” Larry explained proudly. “He knocked me down.” Harriet was aghast. “What did you do after you got up?” Larry answered seriously, “I didn’t call him a sonofabitch any more.”

Also, he had taken to bragging. Before the surgery, he had been gentle, shy, self-effacing, never once mentioning his educational attainments. Now, if he met someone, and chanced to get into a discussion or friendly argument, he would suddenly terminate it by shouting, “I’m a Phi Beta Kappa man! You’re just a shoe clerk!”

When Harriet returned from Schrafft’s every day, she was physically depleted. Yet she had to prepare dinner, look after household affairs and Larry’s clothes, and give him a bath. She had to face the aftereffects of his latest escapades, and listen to his complaints. In the evening, though she was half asleep on her feet, he would want her to go walking with him until two or three in the morning. Sometimes she tried. Usually she could not, but if she could not, she would toss in bed wondering what was happening to him. They had been married six years, and in those six years she had not had a single full night’s sleep.