‘I don’t see any connexion,’ Mary-Jane said. ‘But never mind,’ and she came up off the edge of the bed and embraced him tenderly.
‘That was the Second Step. “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” ’
‘Sanity?’ he was resentful, ‘who was insane? I could have talked to my students and given the lecture easily, I’ve done it fifty times in worse shape.’
‘But you had a convulsion a few days later?’
‘Completely abnormal, one chance in ten thousand.’
‘And you think you should have risked your life for your students? Alan, you’re a sweet guy but you are still lost.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘We’re not supposed to Give Advice in this game, but I’ll tell you the score. Maybe, anyway. Your trouble is the Third Step.’
Extract from Dr Severance’s journal
Incredible. Changes everything. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t told me before. ‘I didn’t know whether you were going to leave me. Or me you.’ Ugh. But it’s marvellous. In May, eh? Name up to me again. David or Rachel. Rebecca n.g. Consider.
Funny I can’t remember the interview with Dr Rome Tuesday. See him, hear only his word ‘numb’ at some point and, ‘You’ll be like this for some time.’ That’s what he thinks.
God’s doing.
Group all on Les’s leaving. Him: ‘disappointed’ and ‘no progress after six weeks.’ Poor show, poor guy. Problems: 1) business, 2) family, 3) sobriety, 4) self-misinterpretation. I wish I had more hope for him.
Will power is nothing. Morals is nothing. Lord, this is illness.
6
SEVERANCE HOPED everyone else was as well prepared as he was. He looked around the room eagerly. Maybe they could pop through this in fifteen minutes at the outside—it wasn’t likely that anybody else would have a list of disciplines as long as his, after all—and get down to business at last. He burned to level and confront, be confronted, learn, suffer, and break through.
Keg at the blackboard held a piece of chalk in the air and said, ‘We’ll go around the room. What have you decided you have to do to get better, Wilbur?’
Wilbur looked up surprised at the tall rather grim figure standing almost over him, hesitated until the atmosphere was tense with exasperation, began to say something, began again, and Keg wrote.
Severance picked up something about his fellows as the master-list of disciplines lengthened down the board and started a second column and started the third column. Both in Wilbur’s long, defensive face and whited eyes under the bald dome, and in the hunched-over elbows-on-knees defeated ingrown posture, he read: Self-pity. He was pleased to hear anticipated, confirmed, some of his own disciplines, though not many. Mary-Jane was extremely definite: (1) Accepting Ward responsibilities (Severance uncomfortably could see her sitting on his unmade bed yesterday—in fact he hadn’t made it today either), (2) After the day’s page in the 24-Hour Book, read 20–30 pages in the Big Book, (3) Seek people, (4) JUST FOR TODAY (she told Grant to put it in caps, and he grinned) I will have a Programme. Severance was impressed, against his will; his opinion of his own great list weakened. Only Jeree was diffident and vague. ‘Try to think good about people,’ she said, and, ‘not to eat too much at meals or between meals.’ Several patients laughed at the second, Severance among them, for Jeree was hardly over-weight, but he was touched, even in some way humbled by her first proposal. So this mild creature had been sitting across from him in the Snack Room bristling with criticism. Of him? He was suddenly aware of a great distance between himself and her, of her independent existence, with problems he didn’t know of and making efforts he ought to make himself, for she could hardly be as censorious as he was, and yet there was nothing of the sort on his list. Nothing like Letty’s either: ‘Tell myself three times a day I am not a bitch, though I know I am.’
Severance’s list, when Keg got to him, was grandiose and tyrannical. Four hours’ reading a day, thirteen physical exercises every morning (seven isometric, four barbell, hopping, running in place), and so on. Eleven in all (and he had omitted many more). He was rather proud of it, to tell the truth, though he tried not to feel pride in anything. It covered everything. A man would have to be Jack London to drink with disciplines like that!
‘I don’t suppose, Alan, you expect everybody to keep up with all these?’ said Keg sweetly, as he turned back from the board finally. ‘God no, it’s just for myself,’ Severance said with some insincerity, since that had been exactly what he did expect. He didn’t want to lead anything at all but he had his duty to the Group as well as to his recovery.
Keg wound up at last with Marge, who snapped out her ideas as if she hated him and everybody. Then he stood back and considered the columns. So did they all.
‘Let’s get rid,’ he said suddenly, ‘of everything we can. St Francis and Napoleon put together couldn’t run such a Programme, or he’d go bats on the third day trying to. You are suffering alcoholics. Some of you are still in deep withdrawal, without even knowing it. None of you has been dry a month. All of you are hospital patients in treatment for at least the second time. Almost the only thing I do not see on the board is, “TAKE IT EASY.” In fact the whole preposterous accumulation attacks that primary law by merely filling the wall the way it does. I’ll begin with “thinking good about people.” Do it if you can, Jeree—I personally can’t—it may get you to Heaven; but in my worthless opinion it will not help keep you sober. Well, help maybe. But what happens? Say you succeed even, then somebody slobbers on you or wipes you out—as does occur in this world—you’re back to booze. We’ve got to lower our sights, all of you, except Mary-Jane. Alan, you are the most deluded person in this room. Eleven disciplines, eh? Some with many parts each. Perhaps you think you are pitching for the Nobel Prize? You are only trying to create a minimal possibility, my friend, that you won’t be drunk ten days after you leave hospital this time. You were drinking by the end of the first week, last Spring, weren’t you. Can’t you see that you’d simply fail at all this noble crap, grow discouraged with yourself, despair of the Programme, and—guess what.’
Severance, who had aged somewhat during this speech, stared at his terrible demands flashing and rocking on the board. He wished he was elsewhere, and did not hear anything for a while. Then he took in that Keg had prefaced Mary-Jane’s ‘JUST FOR TODAY’ to groupings from other patients’ items and was calling for comment. He heard intermittently, ‘I will do at least two things I don’t want to do —just for exercise,’ and, ‘I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out; if anybody learns, it will not count,’ and, ‘I will have a quiet half hour all by myself, and relax,’ and ‘ask for help,’ and ‘trust my impulses,’ and ‘not tackle my whole life problem at once,’ and, ‘self-forgetfulness.’ The more he heard, the more uncomfortable he felt; at one moment he wondered dazedly whether he had somehow wandered into the wrong room. He seemed to have nothing in common with these sensible and aspiring people. Then Letty, the wide-eyed Jewish young-looking grandmother on his left, leaned over and patted his knee, murmuring, ‘Never mind, dear.’ His pained eyes met Mary-Jane’s quiet eyes and she winked. By twelve-ten when they rose to say the Lord’s Prayer, he was able to seize Letty’s hand with a feeling that the unusual comfortless morning had not after all been wasted. There was plenty of time after all. Glad it wasn’t worse.
7
Extract from Dr Severance’s journal
Thurs. Interested, happy.
1st Step: Gus and Mike alike: Humility
Must be: I am at the end of my resources: Help me.
R with all my mail—Pride! letter from V, R. Cantor’s letter, Heisen’s.
My job is somehow to conquer my Pride. I have been getting away with murder all my life—not only allowed to but vehemently encouraged to. (making up for my lost childhood?? irresponsible, counting on overlove??) Only here’s a subject, liquor, where I can’t.
Friday afternoon found him writing laboriously. ‘Comm
ent: If this statement has literary merit, that I think is not a con, only the product of the fact that a lifelong effort to put things shortly and forcibly is unbreakable, and harmless, except insofar as it may persuade others to share the patient’s delusion and so support his illness (any writer’s, or even scientist’s permanent message perhaps is really just this: come and share my delusion, and we will be happy or miserable together) THIS ATTEMPT is right here. Otherwise I have made no conscious effort to impress you, only to tell you how I see myself with the First Step at this moment. I am certain to improve that relation as every morning I include it with the 5 to 30 min. I spend (with whatever courage and every trace of humility I can summon) on the 24-Hour Book. That, at any rate, does lie within the power of my eroded but surviving will: I am almost bound to skip some mornings at first, but I hope to notice it and gradually make the habit instinctive—wake up, out of bed, book & 1st Step—I’ve done it four mornings anyway, deluded as I am. Every now and then, lately, a few scales seem to fall from my eyes. Maybe, with your help and God’s, I will some time see something as it is, then something else, and finally enough to keep me sober.’ He stopped there, too tired to select any more from the wealth of observations and conclusions that were roaring in his mind, and it was twenty-four hours before, looking at it again with a view to going on, he was horrified to find that it was crap—mere evasion—delusion, in short, pretending to recognize itself but actually having its feet planted firmly in mid-air, as one of the counsellors had once said about somebody. Atrociously written too, and that mattered.
‘This is my last chance,’ he said grimly to Ruth that Saturday evening. ‘If I don’t make it this time, I’ll just relax and drink myself to death. There’s no better treatment available, I couldn’t be in better condition. That would be it.’ Fanatical determination.
‘I don’t agree.’ She looked solidly at him. ‘There’s hope until you’re dead.’ And he didn’t buy that either, but it made him feel better, and after she left, when the gong went for visitors out, he slaved on.
At half past ten he jotted down, ‘I seem to be moving with the speed of light but I also seem to be standing stockstill,’ and went off to the Snack Room for coffee. Eddie was jittering by the freezer, Jeree looked softly up, Jasper and Mike were arguing. Eddie had come in about four o’clock, in frightful shape, and driven everybody crazy by trying to hold conversations when he could hardly stand up or jabber intelligibly. His white face was spectral and lopsided, thin lips working, shoulders shaking in a torn light blue dressing-gown, hands twitching, knees tottering. He was not in DT’s but otherwise he reminded Severance of a cadaverous lawyer he had seen on the locked ward at Werewolf Hills, jiggling back and forth along an imaginary tenfoot runway gibbering to his imaginary wife. Asking the orderly about him, with dismay, he was told carelessly, ‘Oh he comes in two or three times a year like this. In three days he’ll be back in his office giving orders.’ It was hard to see Eddie back anywhere in three days. Somebody had gathered, and reported at dinner, that Eddie had drunk most of a case of Scotch since Tuesday. Charley Boyle, in whose room he had been put, came in now and persuaded him back. Everybody sighed.
‘Still, it doesn’t seem to be the amount you drink,’ said Mike. ‘A woman in my Group was minimizing as usual, yesterday, and Sandy couldn’t get through to her. She thought: no bottle-a-day, no Skid Row: no alcoholic, she. It’s pathetic. But what is the story?’
‘Intake has nothing to do with it,’ Severance declared out of his lore acquired from a hundred and twenty lectures at Howarden and Northeast, and much dogged reading, ‘so far as they can tell. It seems to be Loss of Control. That’s the only pinpoint difference between your heavy social drinker, as I thought I was until a year ago, and the alcoholic, like me and I suppose all of you. There’s a marvellous Churchill story to this effect.’ He was happy not to be slogging away at the goddamned First Step. Truth in wit. ‘The great man was introduced to a big audience over here, after the War, as a great brandy-man. “Yes,” the jerk concluded, indicating with his arm a point halfway up the sidewall of the auditorium, “it is estimated that if all the brandy bottles Sir Winston has emptied were collected in this hall, they would fill it halfway full!” Churchill rolled to the lectern—his son’s biography says he had a natural sailor’s gait that made him look intoxicated, along with his slur—anyway, he studied the audience, then shifted his gaze to the indicated point on the wall, studied it, lifted his eyes slowly to the juncture of the wall and the ceiling, and rumbled into the mike: “So much to do. So little time left to do it in.” ’
But in the midst of their laughter—even Jeree smiled —a strange thought came to him. Or did it? What was it? He steadied and looked. It was lack of control. That characterized the alcoholic. As an alcoholic he had no control over the First Step. He had been wasting his time, without ever even reaching the Step itself. Put-ons, nailed by himself a day or so afterward. Three of them, with all his (deluded) strength. Clearly this matter was beyond him at this time. The thing to do was admit it. He felt lurched by his guardian angel into business. With his head on fire he said goodnight abruptly, patting Jeree’s shoulder, and went out down the corridor.
‘I doubt’ (he wrote hurriedly) ‘if this will be an acceptable First Step; and I don’t care. I doubt if any man can exactly “take” the 1st Step; maybe some can, but I know I tried hard and failed. Last Spring I wrote one which Gus Larson—a severe judge—recently called one of the best he had ever seen (it was a comprehensive account of twenty-three years of alcoholic chaos, lost wives, public disgrace, a night in jail and a lost job, injuries and hospitalizations, a blacked-out call to a girl student threatening to kill her, involuntary defecation in a public building, DT’s once, convulsion once, etc., and it was completely sincere); and a month later I had a slip, four or five more over two months, two months’ sobriety, six days drinking, and here I am again—in spite of dead seriousness, never missing either an AA meeting or Dr Rome’s Encounter-Group, always confessing all, and every sort of other help, including daily prayer and the 24-Hour Book.’ He struck out the last phrase, as being not quite true. So screw that First Step.
‘This is only a short true account of my present thinking on the subject.
‘It seems that the memory of experience will not keep me sober; and determination will not; and reliance on God, and all the other helps available will not. But what else is there? So my case seems hopeless. But I refuse to submit to the view that it is, because I do not wish to die insane and in fact I even desire the remainder of my life to be very different from the last twenty years.
‘On Riverside’
But somehow there he lost heart and broke off, took a new sheet and scribbled at the bottom: ‘As you comb your hair in the morning, say to the mirror, “Severance, you are going to have to make out today, as usual, with one arm. You are lucky to have it. God is interested in you, and conscious of your struggle and your services. Good luck.” ’
His elation had faded, and he couldn’t understand it, because he seemed to have reached terra firma at last. Hardly happy ground, admittedly, but real. His week of failures hadn’t been wasted after all. He was making progress. Mike had said to him last night, ‘You’re too ambitious, Doctor. I figure if you pick up just one thing a day, really get it, say you’re in treatment the average four to five weeks, that’s thirty-odd things: you’re in business.’ He expected to shock Gus etc. but he was doing his duty. Okay. Free now to concentrate, amid the gruelling ward routine, on his Contract with Line—nothing had happened there —and on the new (old) problem increasingly worrying him and threatening his treatment.
Going down at midnight for an Eskimo Pie, only that pig Herb had cleaned them out, he learned that Eddie had had a seizure. ‘In and out of bed ten times he was,’ Charley grumped amiably, ‘staggering over to the window, as if there was anything to see. Get him back down in, up again. Arita looked in presently with the news that he had had another seizure and been taken acro
ss to Intensive Care, ‘God bless the sinner.’
Severance slept like the dead for a change and only Buck and Delores were still eating when he drifted down for breakfast—ad lib on Sunday, eight to ten. ‘Do I look as if I self-destructed at 3:18 a.m.?’ he asked them gloomily. ‘Eddie died,’ said Buck, ‘about then.’
‘So he made it,’ said Severance.
‘God damn it,’ angrily, ‘I said the nurse said he didn’t make it.’
‘Exactly. What we’re all up to, aren’t we? Suicide.’
Then the softboiled eggs were cold and hard. He made it, all right.
III
CONTRACT ONE
Change your life.
8
WHEN AMONG nine or ten other patients Severance pushed through the heavy doors into a bright cold afternoon, he felt excited, relieved. Deep breath, cigarette hack. So the world still existed! Both Wednesday night and last night the lectures had been across in the main hospital building, but the dark short mob-scurry gave no sense of freedom, only two minutes’ realization of the universal oppressive ward-fug, absorption in all the facetings of treatment, para-military constriction hardly less than Howarden. Out! The sun was by no means burning down and the grass was greying but the air was rich with leaf-smoke in this rundown neighbourhood. Fall was his season, had always been. So you still wish to get famouser, one of the eleven or how many Franckens of Antwerp, every one of them a noted painter enough in his age, mostly now inextricable? Delores’ long legs were pretty ahead, smoothly. The other women were slacksed except the nurse. Towers above the trees across the river reminded him he was University Professor Severance not the craven drunk Alan S who had been told by an orderly that his room smelled like a farmyard (‘you, you … you, you utter/You wait!’) He fell in step with Mike M, hunching a little—outer coat next time—against ruffles of wind. Mike was a heavy-set black-haired attractive man of thirty-four or -five, with his head lowered. Mike had problems: whether his stunning new wife would leave him like the first and go back to airline hostessing (eight months later, to everyone’s dismay, she certainly would), whether to kick his business partner out on his ear after six years of tyrannical but faithful service, whether his AA group, called the Whitney Chapter (who ever heard of such a thing?), would take him back.
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