Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [28]
Nicholas Wetzel, a partner of Loyal Davis’s in his Chicago practice. “He modeled himself very much after him. One of the funny things was that when he was with Dr. Cushing, he came in one day wearing a blue shirt—
Oxford cloth probably—and Dr. Cushing made a snide remark: ‘Well, that’s what you’d expect from the son of a railroad engineer.’ Dr. Davis never wore a colored shirt, as far as I know, from then on. He wore white-on-white, which I think is absolutely atrocious.”57
In his memoir, Loyal Davis defends Cushing’s strictness: “He rigidly disciplined himself and was unsparing in demands upon his energy and talents. It is difficult to find fault with him when he drove his residents and nurses relentlessly, because he asked even more of himself. . . . He could not help trying to direct the lives of everyone around him, trying to make them discipline themselves so they would be working at their greatest possible efficiency. . . . His philosophy was that those who did not like the work well enough to stay in spite of his treatment were not suitable to stand the rigors of a surgical practice in later years.”58
According to Cushing’s records, Loyal Davis was his junior assistant associate in surgery from March to October 1924. Upon his return to Chicago, he was given an assistant professorship under Kanavel at Northwestern. Kanavel, who was best known as a hand surgeon, generously turned over his neurological practice to Davis. “Dr. Davis was the first full-time neurological surgeon in Chicago,” Wetzel explained. In 1926 he became involved with the reorganization of the Passavant Memorial Hospital, where he would become an attending surgeon in 1929, when its new Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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building on the Near North Side was completed. The new Passavant, with its private suites facing Lake Michigan, was the city’s most luxurious hospital, and Loyal Davis would remain associated with it until the end of his career.59
Things should have been looking up for Loyal and Pearl. Richard was born on June 15, 1925. “Our apartment was small,” Loyal wrote, “and we moved to another, farther north, so the baby could have a separate room.
Pearl’s girl friends, her sister, and Willa, a black housemaid, helped her take care of our son.”60 But, according to Wetzel, “Pearl was very unhappy with Dr. Davis. I think she wanted him to be a general practitioner. In his first years, he would operate in the morning, work in the laboratory in the afternoon, and then take care of his patients in the evening. So I think they had very little of a life. She just didn’t like that at all. She kept calling him the ‘little professor’ and all that sort of thing. He was extremely ambitious, Dr. Davis was.”61
By the summer of 1927, when Loyal went to England without Pearl, the marriage was clearly in trouble. He was apparently in no hurry to return home after his London conference, for he joined the Pollocks for a week on the French Riviera and three days in Paris. The problems he left behind were still there when he returned to Chicago.
In retrospect, I am sure that my desire to excel in my profession contributed as much as, if not more than, Pearl’s disinterest in my professional life, ambitions, and friends to the slowly progressive and ultimate disintegration of our marital relations. I accept the onus of not having insisted strongly upon her accompanying me on our trip to England. In an effort to try to save the situation, I agreed to move to Evanston, Illinois, to a larger, nicer apartment. Still, Pearl’s use and reliance upon her girl friends and Willa in the care of our son became more pronounced. Suddenly, she made the decision to take Richard and visit friends in Los Angeles. It was but a week or so later that she informed me that she was going to Reno, Nevada, to seek a divorce.
I had never discussed my domestic affairs with Dr. Kanavel, but one day he took me into a patient’s empty room at [the hospital]
and without preamble said that he had been aware of the difficulty I was experiencing in my marriage and said, “Never hug a bad bargain