The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  “I’m trying to help Lyle,” I broke in. “So are the police. Only there are certain things he won’t talk about. I can’t help him unless I have all of the facts. I need the facts.”

  “Facts about what?” she asked.

  “About whether or not he had shock therapy. About what’s wrong with him—if anything.”

  They exchanged a frightened look. My heart beat a little faster.

  “Maybe,” Herb suggested carefully, “he don’t want you to know.”

  “I have to know.”

  “But if the boy don’t want you to, it’s not really our place to—”

  “I have to know.”

  “What’s this got to do with somebody trying to kill him?” asked Aileen.

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I can’t tell—without knowing.”

  They were silent a moment.

  Aileen broke it. “This isn’t some dirty film for people to read about in the checkout line at the supermarket, y’know. This is our personal heartbreak.”

  “A family matter,” agreed Herb, nervously fingering his shirt pocket.

  “I know that. And nothing will go in Lyle’s book unless he wants it to. I’m on Lyle’s side. You must believe that.”

  “Why the hell should we?” she demanded, turning hot on me. Lyle had her temper, too.

  “Now, simmer down, hon. We have no reason to tussle with this young fella.” Herb patted her knee reassuringly. “How do we know we can trust you, Mr. Hoag? That’s what we’re wondering.”

  “You don’t know.” I leveled my gaze at him. “But you can. I’m trying to help Lyle. He needs help. Just like …”

  “Just like what?” Aileen demanded, leaning forward.

  “Just like he always has,” I said quietly.

  They exchanged another look.

  “Has it occurred to you,” Herb said slowly, “that maybe there are some things Lyle doesn’t know himself? And that he’s better off for it?”

  I nodded, though it’s been my experience that, when someone close to my celebrity says those words, they’re the ones who’d be better off, not my celebrity. “That’s a chance I have to take. We have to take.”

  Aileen reached for her cigarettes. “Is Lyle happy?”

  “Well, someone’s trying to kill him, like I said.”

  “But how are his spirits?” asked Herb.

  I sipped my tea. “He says he’s never been happier. And Lyle tends to believe what he says, whether it’s true or not.”

  “Is it true?” she asked.

  “I’d have to say no.”

  “Any women in his life?” She lit her cigarette and kept it cupped in her palm, like a night watchman patrolling on a windy night.

  “Several.”

  “One in particular?” persisted Herb.

  “Yes.”

  “Nice girl?”

  “She certainly has plenty to offer.”

  “And is he seeing a good man these days?” asked Herb.

  I tugged at my ear. “Good man?”

  “A doctor,” she said, drawing on her cigarette.

  “Do you mean a psychiatrist?”

  Neither of them responded to this. They just sat there, waiting me out. The elderly can be exceedingly patient.

  “He’s not seeing anyone,” I replied. “He says he’s into self-therapy.”

  “Dear God,” murmured Herb, paling visibly.

  Aileen poured him more tea, dumped four packets of sugar in it, and made him drink it down. When his color began to return she said to me, “Just exactly what has Lyle told you about his boyhood?”

  “That he was a rebellious kid. A rockhead, as he put it. Constantly fighting with the other kids. Getting into trouble at school.”

  Aileen cleared her throat. She was clearly ill at ease now. “Anything earlier than that?”

  “His earliest memory is biting the mailman.”

  “He was three,” she recalled dejectedly. “But we’d already been through so much with Lyle by then, Mr. Hoag. Night and day, day after day, from the moment we brought him home from the hospital. He cried constantly, see. Screamed with red-faced anger twenty-four hours a day. Cried when he was hungry. Cried when he was full. Cried when he was wet. Cried when he was dry. That child would not be pacified. Rocking him didn’t help. Holding him didn’t help—he pulled away from me if I so much as tried to touch him. I tried music, long rides in the car … Nothing worked. He would not sleep. Cried all night long, every single night. Occasionally, he’d pass out for an hour or two out of sheer exhaustion. But soon as he woke up he’d start in screaming again. He wore both of us ragged, Mr. Hoag. And frustrated me to the point of tears. I just didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I tried everything, believe me. But he just wouldn’t stop.”

  “What did his pediatrician say?”

  “That he wasn’t sick,” she replied. “That he wasn’t in pain. That he was just … angry.” She flicked her cigarette ash into the ashtray with a red fingernail. “I began to have fantasies about checking into a hotel all by my lonesome and taking a hot bubble bath and just sleeping for two whole days. That’s how tired I was. Finally, when Lyle was four months old, the doctor gave him something so he’d sleep.”

  “So all three of us would,” Herb chimed in.

  “Liquid phenobarbital, wasn’t it, Herbert?” she said to him.

  He nodded. “Poor boy was on medication before he could even walk.”

  “And after he could walk?” I asked. “What happened then?”

  “He ran around the house like a little demon,” Lyle’s mother recalled, in her singsong voice. “Crashing headfirst into tables, chairs, walls. Herbert had to make him a little foam helmet with a chin strap so he wouldn’t knock himself out. If the weather was nice I’d let him out in our little yard, and he’d just run around and around in a circle until he collapsed, limp, from exhaustion. Then I’d carry him inside and put him to bed. That was the only time Lyle’d ever let me hold him.”

  “Was he hyperactive?”

  She put out her cigarette and sampled a tea cake. “Doctor said no. Said Lyle was healthy and normal—just full of steam. As a baby, he had no way to let off his steam, other than to cry. Or run into things. When he got to be two or three, he began to turn it on the grown-ups around him.”

  “Such as the mailman?”

  “Such as Aileen,” Herb replied darkly, glancing at her.

  She brushed at a crumb in her lap, growing more and more uncomfortable. Then she shifted her bulk on the sofa, wheezing from the effort. “Herbert needed me full-time down at the store in those days. We couldn’t afford to have a woman stay with Lyle, so I brought him with me.” She shook her head at the memory. “He was a holy terror, Mr. Hoag. Chasing our customers out with his screaming. Mixing up all of the piles of clothes in the back room, hurling them around, stomping on them. Once … Once I even caught him back there making pee-pee on all of the dress shirts. He ruined hundreds of dollars in shirts. I—I just had to keep him at home. So Herbert got an older woman to help out at the store and I stayed home with Lyle. It was …” She reached for another cake. “It was living hell. I—I can’t even begin to tell you.”

  “Try, Mrs. Hudnut. Please.”

  She gazed off at the window. “He’d get this smirk on his face. What I used to call his Holy Terror look. And there’d be no dealing with him. If I wanted him to sit down and eat his lunch he’d throw his food on the floor. If I wanted him to take his bath, he’d hide from me—for hours sometimes. If I wanted to take him to the park, he’d want to stay home. If I had to stay home, like if the TV repairman was coming, he’d want to go to the park. And if he didn’t get his way he’d holler, scream, kick … None of this sounds too terrible, I guess, but it was so constant. Every single thing was a fight with Lyle. And I—I swore he was willful. Purposely tormenting me. He wasn’t, of course. How could he be? He was only two, three years old. A baby. But he was so . , .” Her eyes filled with tears. Herb reached over to take h
er hand. She yanked hers away roughly.

  “When did you start beating him, Mrs. Hudnut?”

  She didn’t flinch. Just swiped at her eyes and sniffled. After a moment, she glanced imploringly over at Herb, her face etched with pain and guilt. His was, too. I waited them out, saying nothing more. They were ready to unload. I knew it and they knew it. Because they wanted it off their chests. And because they had nothing to lose at this point in their lives. Their relationship with Lyle couldn’t get any worse.

  “My problem was I took it personal,” she finally said, her voice quavering. “I took his behavior as a personal rejection of me. All I ever wanted was for him to be a healthy, happy little boy. I wanted to help him. I wanted to love him. I did love him. But with Lyle, there was never enough love. He’d just wring you dry. One day I just couldn’t take no more of him, Mr. Hoag. I lost it. Once. Just that once. But it was horrible, what I did to him. He was just a baby.” She shook her head. “I’ve regretted it every single day of my life. The shame’s never left me. I just thank God he don’t remember it.”

  “Remember what, Mrs. Hudnut?”

  She ducked her head. “I—I threw Lyle down the basement stairs when he was two. Threw him on his head. Hard. I tried to kill my baby. I—I just couldn’t stand any more of him! Not another second! At first he didn’t move at all. Just lay there on the cement floor. I thought he was dead for sure. Then his arms and legs began to twitch a little. But he wouldn’t come to. I—I came to my senses and called his doctor. Told him Lyle tripped and fell down the stairs. He called an ambulance. At first, they was afraid he had a fractured skull. But it was just a concussion. He was okay in a few days.” She paused, reaching for her tea. “I just thank God we didn’t have no gun in the home.”

  “We do now,” Herb pointed out.

  “I know, Herbert,” she said patiently. “But we didn’t then. That’s my point.”

  “Do you think you would have used it on him?” I asked her.

  “I know I would have.” She reddened, her eyes avoiding mine. “That’s a terrible, awful thing for a mother to admit. But it’s true … At first, I—I kept the truth from Herbert. Told him Lyle fell. Then I—I locked myself in our room for weeks and cried my poor eyes out. I was so ashamed. I finally told him the truth when I couldn’t stand it no more.”

  “What did you think, Herb?”

  “I thought she needed help,” he replied, tight-lipped. “So we went to see her doctor. She didn’t want me to go with her, but I insisted.”

  “And what did he put you on, Mrs. Hudnut? Miltown?”

  “How’d you know that?” she demanded, startled. “Lyle tell you?”

  “Hardly. In fact, Lyle recalls surprisingly little about you. Except that you had to lie down a lot. It’s Herb whom Lyle remembers most. Herb saying, ‘Your mom is tired, Lyle.’ Herb saying, ‘Your mom’s not as strong as we are, Lyle.’ Of course, that’s a rather typical family pattern, given the nature of Lyle’s illness.” They didn’t react. Didn’t so much as blink. I took that as a green light, and kept right on going. “It all fits, actually. What Lyle told me about his childhood, I mean. He merely glorified it a little. Gave it a heroic spin. But there’s really nothing heroic about it all. It’s a sad story about a little boy who was hostile and incorrigible, who kept getting into fights with the other little boys, who had a lot of trouble with authority figures, who felt persecuted and pressured. Trapped was the word he used. This little boy got harder and harder for the public school to handle. His doctor prescribed Thorazine. But it didn’t help much. Eventually, he ended up in a residential treatment center. He showed some progress there, enough so that he could go to the public high school, only he got into trouble with drugs. That’s often the case with kids like Lyle. And then a major episode presented itself. That’s often the case, too. An episode that Lyle can’t or won’t talk about. An episode that was serious enough to prompt his doctors to administer electroconvulsive therapy. I’m told that ECT came about from studies that found that people like Lyle, people who suffer from manic-depression, seem to show a marked improvement after undergoing a seizure.”

  Herb stopped me. “They never said that to us at the child guidance center. They never said Lyle was manic-depressive.”

  I nodded. “They’re very reluctant to pin those labels on children—for fear it’s a stage they’ll outgrow. They don’t want to stigmatize them. But with Lyle it wasn’t a stage, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Aileen said quietly. “They made the diagnosis later—when he was in high school.”

  I poured myself some more tea. “When a child turns up manic-depressive like Lyle, the professionals look at what kind of family environment caused it to happen. They look at the parents. At the genes. These days, they feel it is a gene, passed along from generation to generation. They look for a parent who’s, say, a depressive. Or a grandparent. Not that it’s necessarily so obvious. Depressives often self-medicate. Mask their symptoms. Their illness might, for example, present itself as a drinking problem.”

  Aileen reached for her cigarettes. “You’re describing my daddy, Mr. Hoag,” she said, lighting one. “He got drunk every Saturday night and beat up Mommy. When he got tired of hitting her, he’d hit me. He was a rough, tough, two-fisted workingman. And he had his moods. That’s what Mommy called them—his moods. Real black and angry, they was. He’d go off on his drunken toots. Get in fistfights down at the corner tavern. Disappear for one night, sometimes two. God knows where he was—a brothel, jail, the gutter. We never knew. He’d show up all bloody and sorry. Mommy would wipe his face and send him off to work. Then she’d go to church and pray for him. But nobody ever gave a second’s thought to how he was. Nobody said, “That Frankie O’Reilly, he’s a depressive.’ No sir. Not in Elmhurst, Queens, in the thirties. All they said was, ‘Watch out for Frankie O’Reilly when he’s been drinking.’ And he wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood they said it about, believe me.”

  “And how about in your case, Mrs. Hudnut?”

  She gave me The Scowl over her cigarette. “I got his temperament. It’s true. Mommy used to say to me, ‘Aileen, you’re just like your dad—born under a gray cloud.’ But I never had no trouble with alcohol. Sure, my girlfriends and I liked to have fun. We’d take a drink now and then, dance with the boys. Maybe I drank a little more than the others did. Why not? It made me happy. I liked being happy. I liked a good time.”

  “First girl I ever met who could drink me under the table,” Herb kidded, winking at me.

  “Still could if I cared to, Herbert,” she sniffed. “But I was never a drunk. Just a social drinker. And I stopped cold when I was carrying Lyle. I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted it more than anything in the world. But I just … I just …” Her voice became choked. “I could … not … please him.”

  “So they started you on tranquilizers?”

  She stared down at her meaty hands. “First Miltown, like you said. To improve my spirits. And it did help some. Only, the doses kept getting bigger, and the stuff they gave me more powerful and … Half the time, I was in this never-never land. Just sort of floating. Felt real strange, but real comfortable, too. And after a while, it was the only way I knew how to feel.”

  I nodded. This was what Fiona had meant when she said Mrs. Hudnut had seemed dazed to her, that day at the apartment.

  “I was hooked on them pills for over twenty years, Mr. Hoag,” Lyle’s mother stated matter-of-factly. “Seconal. Dalmane. Valium. Quaaludes. …” She blew some cigarette smoke up in the air. “The kids used to take Quaaludes to get stoned. My doctor prescribed them to me. I was an addict—plain and simple.”

  “Not that she knew it,” Herbert pointed out in her defense.

  “No, sir,” she agreed. “Not until I went in for my gall bladder in … when was that, Herbert?”

  He sat there fidgeting while he tried to remember. “I think it was ’77. Carter was president.”

  She said, “It’s common procedure
for ’em to make note of the drugs you’re on. The surgeon was the one who said to me, ‘Madam, you got yourself a problem.’”

  “And do you still?”

  “I haven’t taken anything stronger than aspirin in over ten years, Mr. Hoag,” she replied, stubbing out her cigarette. I guess she didn’t consider nicotine a drug.

  The air was getting stale from her smoke. I got up and opened a window, filling the room with the sounds of East Sixty-fifth Street. Then I sat back down. “Did Lyle know that you were drug dependent?”

  “Lyle was never able to see past his own anger and pain,” she replied. “He couldn’t understand someone else’s.”

  “The subject never came up in family therapy?”

  Aileen glanced at her husband. “We figured it was best to keep it between ourselves.”

  He took her hand. This time she let him. “It’s like Aileen said, young fella. All we ever wanted was for Lyle to be healthy and happy. To have pals, play sports, do well in school. Only, it never seemed to work out for him. That boy was always getting in fights with the other kids on the block. He was a bully. And big for his age. They were scared of him. I could see it in their eyes. Their fathers came to our door on more than one occasion to tell me I oughta control him better. And then, once he started school, we was always getting calls at the store from the principal about something or another that he’d pulled.” Herb shook his head sadly. “I kept telling him: ‘Lyle, ya gotta learn how to get along with other people in this world.’ But he just couldn’t.”

  “Were you ashamed of him?”

  Herb recoiled at this. “Now why would you ask something like that?”

  “Because Lyle believes you were,” I replied. “Above all else.”

  Herb looked down at the carpet. “Look, neither of us enjoyed getting bawled out by the neighbors, or hauled down to the school to pick him up. Who would?” He moistened his mouth. “But ashamed? Nah, that was never how we felt.”