It did not happen.
But in mid-afternoon little Sherry, from Vin’s Group last Spring, walked into his bedroom. She had been drinking for three days. Not much—less than a bottle of wine—but she hadn’t been to work and her Civil Service job was imperilled for the nth time, though her supervisor (also an alcoholic) protected her—that is, enabled her. Little Sherry was tall, slender, very pretty if colourless, very sweet, entirely passive and fearful except when drinking. In bars she had tried several times to strangle the man sitting on the stool next her. One night stole a bar-stool around closing time, simply carried it out, it was foolishly sitting in the minute kitchenette of her pathetic apartment when Alan visited her once. She was alone, except for a mother in Chicago whom she hated and a boyfriend, also alcoholic, to whom she lent money and laid whenever he got around to it. One day they had decided to marry but were both too drunk to negotiate. She hated him, sex, her job, and herself, though apparently neither Rochelle (another out-patient, a blonde sexpot also from Vin’s Group, now making it) nor Severance. Her life, at thirty (manner: fourteen), was emptier than any life hitherto presented to him for inspection. During over a month in treatment he had explored her lack of interests with the same unbaffled energy useful to him in lab, and it was rewarded: she was interested in something. Forty days of denial fell to the ground when he discovered that not only was she interested in the history of North Dakota, she had actually gone into two bookshops asking for books on it. He had supported (in vain) this hummock almost lost in the general quagmire of her apathy, and once lent her a hundred dollars without wishing repayment. Now he did a Dutch uncle on her dangerous three days. She accepted everything (haha) but showed spirit when he urged her to pour the remaining inch-and-a-half of wine down her discoloured sink. ‘But I’ll need it,’ she cried, ‘the next time I have a slip! That’s money.’ ‘Forty cents. Do you want to have to come back into treatment? You’re as far out of line as you were six months ago. You’re setting yourself up. You’re at work on your next slip already.’ ‘I am not,’ she said vacantly. But he kissed her forehead with helplessness and squeezed her thin shoulders strongly before she wandered out.
And after Dr Rome’s classic lecture on the effects of alcohol on the brain and central nervous system in the evening, talking with another out-patient he heard with horror the recent history of Little Marv. His wife after sixteen years of battling it had finally given in and was drinking with him. They had flown madly around two States in his Cesna, landing in Akron with Marv derelict and babbling. Strapped on a stretcher he was rushed off to a straitjacket. ‘The brain damage must be something,’ Severance said sick. Even last Spring he had noticed Korsakow’s syndrome. Little Marv had then already been in treatment all over the Middle West five times, and he was resolute, nobody on the Ward comparable for determination, and his terrible I’ve-got-to earnestness seemed to pay off with immense real strides, reconquest of reality, submissions, relaxation achieved. He went out happy, into a forest of gin and narrow, wide, slowly wheeling airstrips.
17
Confrontation
HARLEY SWUNG his hooded eyes lazily around the Group after they sat down following the Serenity Prayer —Keg was staring at his knuckles in his lap, long legs outstretched in a straight line towards the center of the circle—and they came to rest on Severance’s, and stayed. The scientist tried to look as if he had absolutely nothing in the world to hide, but his heart rose throat-ward, and the smile he hoped for failed. Once, doing a two-week summer job in Salt Lake, he had been driven with another of the visiting stars to Guardsman’s Pass at ten thousand feet in the Wasatch Range by some Utah scientists, they parked, ridge-walked, dropped down a little to a tarn. He and Herb decided to go in, and stripped, while the natives broke out the whiskey, jeering. Herb dived in and came back in a recoil that may have lasted six or seven seconds, splashing on Severance the coldest water he had ever felt. There was Maine, way Down, and there was the north shore of Lake Superior: kid stuff. He had gone in too, stayed a bit. He braced himself.
‘Alan, what sort of fellow do you see yourself as being?’
That was all, but that was enough and too much. What a question. ‘Well, I do science. Write books, lecture and so on. Sometimes I give seminars in the Arts College, or away. Serve on boards, train younger men. Various things. I don’t do much Government work; some.’ His voice sounded to himself defensive, and the list had gone on longer than he intended.
‘I didn’t ask what you do. We don’t give a damn what you do. I asked what you are.’
Alan knew that he ought not to get annoyed, still he bristled slightly. It was undeniable that he was not used to being talked to like this, or asked to give an account of himself, except career summaries for reference works (and they went in the wastebasket). He looked around mentally for a wastebasket. No wastebasket.
‘I don’t know, Harley.’ (He wished he could sign his name, as Unamuno did in the hut-book on top of a Spanish mountain, and write under ‘Profession’: ‘A humble man, and a tramp.’) ‘I’m a useful man, in some ways, rotten with certain successes, hopelessly arrogant. I try to be a decent husband, when not stoned. I’m faithful, except once. No, twice, now. I love my daughter. I work like a maniac. I have a drinking problem.’
‘You have a life problem.’
‘Excuse me, I have published thirteen books.’ Despite himself, Dr Severance’s voice was very hard.
‘And how many unpublished?’
My God, how could he know that. Usually Severance gloried in all his invisible (so far) achievements, like an iceberg—when not tortured by them. But not just now. ‘Some,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Come on, give.’ This was Keg, leaning forward from the waist with bright eyes.
‘How should I know?’
‘“How should I know.” You mean you actually don’t know how many books you have under way?’
Severance felt rattled. ‘Damn it, I work. No. I have no idea. There’s one lifelong one, and another twenty years now. Another. Two more far advanced. A new one.’ He was sweating as he walked through his monsters.
‘That’s it? Six?’
‘Call it six. No doubt there are others.’ (One more jumped to his mind, curse it.)
‘You’re irritating me. How many unpublished books do you have around?’
‘God knows,’ he gave up. ‘I can’t think.’
‘Do they matter to you?’
‘Matter? They’re my life work.’
‘You are deluded. They are not your life work.’
Severance burst into flame, and stamped it out. There was a silence. ‘If it weren’t for my drinking they wouldn’t be unfinished.’
‘I wonder. But what about the rest of your life?’
‘I have terrible trouble with young women. That’s a fact, and it isn’t all my fault. I love my wife and daughter. I support my mother.’
‘Is that your whole family? You’re very hard to track today, Alan.’
‘I have a son by a previous marriage.’ He felt trouble coming but he was determined to hold nothing back.
‘How old?’
‘Thirteen. I think.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘He may be fourteen.’
‘“He may be.” What’s your relation with him like?’
‘Very poor,’ Severance said miserably. ‘He lives in the East. I only get there maybe three times a year.’
‘And always see him, of course?’
‘No. No. I’m always pressed for time. It’s awful.’ He brooded. ‘His letters are very childish, I can’t find out anything about him.’
‘It doesn’t sound as if you try very hard. When did you see him last?’
Severance had to think. He thought, and he hurt. ‘He came for a visit once. Two years ago? Three years?’
‘Well, which is it?’
‘God almighty, I don’t know.’
‘When did you see him last at his home?’
‘I’
ve never been there. She brings him to New York.’
‘Well, in New York.’
Severance thought in vain, felt backward for his son’s face. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Leave me alone!’
‘That’s the trouble, Alan. You are alone.’
‘It’s the drinking. I always drink on trips.’
‘Horseshit in all directions all over the place,’ said Keg with contempt. ‘But it does sound as if you always drink, period.’
He pivoted from pain to rage. ‘That’s what my goddamned wife said, in a dyad last Spring. It’s crap.’ He glared at Keg’s long hard face. ‘I’ve done an incredible amount of work in spite of my drinking. Sober work.’
‘Exactly: “incredible.” ’
‘It’s true,’ he shouted.
‘Say it is. What kind of a life do you have? You go East how often—three times a year—and you can’t remember when you saw your son last? You don’t know how many years it is.’
Severance felt tears coming. He couldn’t deny it. What kind of a father was he? He stared at his boots. He wished with all his heart that he could feel sorry for himself, but that was out of the question. It was simple: he was an utter bastard.
There was a long silence. He didn’t know whether anyone was looking at him or not. He hoped, without hope, not. He would have liked to shrink into his chair-back taking his shame with him.
‘Your life-style,’ Harley said gently, ‘seems to leave something to be desired. Do all these great accomplishments of yours give you any great pleasure, Alan? You’re proud of them?’
‘No,’ he heard his voice weary and low. ‘No, I’m not. I’m ashamed of them.’
‘Why are you ashamed of them?’ Keg asked robustly.
‘You ought to be proud of them. Why not?’
‘It’s not my doing, except the work. I do work some times. But all my priorities are wrong. I see that.’
‘You see it’s not just drinking?’
This was hard, very hard. He couldn’t think, he just felt. ‘I see it. My whole goddamned life is a fucking mess even apart from the drinking.’
‘Me too!’ said Stack suddenly. ‘The wife confronted me last night, about all everything I did this last time after I lost my job. I was a beast in sex. I did awful things! The wife forgave me!’ He raved on—and Severance, who was also a beast in sex, besides being off the hook now, felt an obscure gladness to find out that all his trouble was not just drinking. In some way that he could not have stated, he felt a new hope not just about his son—something could be done about that!—but also about everything, including his drinking. If that was not the whole business, maybe it could be put to rights—that is to say, obliterated—after all. The Third Step. He took his mind off Stack’s outburst long enough for two violent, grieving prayers.
18
THURSDAY AFTERNOON cannot be declared a glorious time for Severance. Re-reading the 24-Hour Book for the date, he flooded on his daughter Rachel, ways he had hurt her almost beyond bearing to him. Then he found that at some unnoticed point he had fouled himself behind, and had to change his clothes and shower. Then, scheduled at last for his First Step Confrontation and believe me ready for it, he found himself when Gus called on him—they were meeting downstairs in an unaccustomed room—unaccountably equipped with a sheaf of papers that were not his First Step. Chagrin, suspense, incomprehension, shame, deafness.
He found the right sheets—just two, with a prefatory note—and put them on his bureau by the door and looked at them every time he went in and out for the next twenty hours. But shaken by a dyad with Mary-Jane at two o’clock when both had wept with fear of ‘playing Group’ and the self returning and drinking or popping pills, a savage quarter-hour, at the last minute he wondered. about the First Step set down with such care and okayed, for the last time, each sheet, Wednesday night. Frantically he searched for the merely circumstantial Step that had satisfied Gus One last Spring, just in case. Nowhere. He grabbed his scratchpad and threw onto it rapidly, with no feeling whatever but haste, what he remembered of it. He only hesitated once, over whether to mention that that lecture in Vermont though unpublished had been quoted a year later in a Life editorial somebody showed him (‘A man can live through his whole life in this country at present without ever finding out whether he’s a brave man or not’) and rushed on without. All the Repeaters had assembled when he got to the lounge. Julitta was not there, only his friends, and Gus.
‘Okay, Alan,’ said Gus. ‘If you have it.’
‘I’ve got two.’ He found himself very cool, after all. ‘One satisfies me, but God knows, so I wrote another one.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘There’s a covering note,’ Severance said, and he read it. ‘“I have lately given up the words ‘sincerely’ and ‘honestly,’ as mere con-words designed by my diseased brain to support its lying products. So I won’t say this is a sincere attempt—though, friends, it is. I haven’t knowingly lied, minimized, or omitted.”
‘Here it is. “I am powerless over alcohol. That is not only an historical fact, but an account of the present moment, and an absolutely certain prediction—I can no more ever safely drink than I will ever again play a decent game of tennis.
‘“I have know this for a long time; but (possibly) I only felt it as fact last Thursday night, when I wound up, telling Gene Snyder about my six days’ drinking two and a half weeks ago, ‘So you see, I can’t accept the powerlessness because if it hadn’t been for the taxi’s accidental route and the mere whim of stopping off for a drink or so, I would have been safe.‘He said: ‘Until next time.’ This simple truth came with the force of revelation. It wiped out the final escape clause: I felt trapped. Weirdly enough, this came as a great relief, and I have even been feeling rather free ever since, in spite of many other troubles. They seem minor. I have thought, for the first time, all this two-plus weeks, that Step One was basic and indispensable, only a foundation for sobriety, but that.
‘“With the second half of Step One (which weirdly enough I used to think the harder half) I have no problem. Walking down after Vin’s Group one noon a few days out of treatment, I remember wondering whether I would turn off right to the Library and the bus home or continue on down to Cleaver and have a drink or so, and thinking that this was an insane way to conduct one’s life, to let one’s very existence depend on whim or abstract chance; as if one were not even one’s own actor but only a spectator. All right, now I would turn straight back to Northeast for help, knowing that I was doomed; in fact I drifted on in a sort of trance from which I came to in front of the Library feeling immense relief at what I thought was my narrow escape. A few days later, of course, I started drinking. My life is completely unmanageable. The fact that I have a highly developed and strong will is absolutely irrelevant.” ’ Ignoring a note to himself (analogy of the uselessness of his checkbook on the locked ward at Ansel) he turned to the third sheet, a postscript set down at noon. ‘“My connexion of unmanageability only with alcoholism is far too narrow a view as I picked up from Harley as lately as this morning (to my mingled dismay and relief). It’s the whole story and I know it, as my word ‘actor’ back there shows. I need a manager, I’ve hopelessly failed as my own. So: Third Step—to which in recent days I’ve given almost as much thought as the First. With only the First Step one might not drink but one might kill oneself.” ’
He stopped, a little tired, sharply disappointed. He knew audiences inside out, and with this one he was nowhere. It was without surprise, but with heavy discouragement, that he heard Gus.
‘We’d better hear the other one,’ sounding restless.
He turned to the other one, and began to read it aloud without interest. ‘It’s called “Data for Monomania.” ’
‘“A life centered around whiskey (gin, ale, vodka, rum, brandy) may have by products but clearly it is insane. The first evidence I remember is 1950, when I gave a public lecture drunk; I did not know I was drunk and do not now recall being drunk;
I know it because somebody wrote down all my replies during the question-period and a friend of his showed them to me years later: they were incredible—irrelevant, violent, long silences, incoherent—’ (Severance realized he was gasping, choking, also his vision was blurred with involuntary tears—why, he had no idea, he must be in despair but actually he felt nothing, only the necessity to get on, he forced his voice ahead through the strangling) ‘if my chairman had been up there, I would have been fired immediately. A day or so earlier, I staggered up and down a narrow parapet eight floors above the street, until the headwaiter threw us out. Three years later my beloved first wife left me after eleven years because of liquor and bad sex. I then drank fifteen hours a day in New York, once very seriously planning suicide if by a certain date money had not turned up—it turned up, or I would not be here—jumping off the George Washington Bridge cannot fail. I gave academic lectures so hungover that I was afraid of falling off the platform; once threw a chair down to the floor of the auditorium to emphasize a point. I had a drunken quarrel with my landlord, he called the police and I spent the night in a cell, press and radio picked up the news and I had to resign. Here, the following winter, my chairman told me one day I had telephoned a girl student at midnight threatening to kill her—no recollection, blacked out. I lost when drunk a manuscript containing scandalous facts about well-known friends’ (he was sobbing rapidly, voice coming out in hard jerks) ‘—couldn’t remember where, retraced steps of night before—anxiety so terrible that finally I went to an analyst. Many injuries drunk, three weeks one mental hospital, half a dozen times another. Four or five incomplete homosexual episodes when drunk. Lost all night once abroad, drunk, walking streets, couldn’t remember my address. My second wife left me because of liquor and bad sex, taking our son with her of course—nearly killed me. Hallucination once, DT’s once (six hours). I had an involuntary bowel movement in my clothes, in a corridor of a public building; got home unnoticed. Drinking a quart of bourbon a day last Fall. Too ill to give an examination myself; had to cancel a lecture. Ruth in despair. Howarden six weeks, discharged December tenth—only two AA meetings—first drink, New Year’s Eve party—moderate drinking several months, began a new book, gradually up to a quart a day. Northeast last Spring—on the second Tuesday, amazingly rescued by a personal God—full belief for the first time since childhood—loved Vin for it—first convulsion in third week—happy and overconfident in the last of six weeks. See now that though I conned (without meaning to) Gus Larson, an astute man, I never took the First Step” (my note here in the margin though says, “Not sure about this, maybe I just lost contact with it”), “made no progress except spiritual. In four months never missed AA or Encounter-Group, reporting: five or six slips in eight weeks. Sober almost two months, I suppose out of spite and rage against Dr Rome, then drank six days here and in New York State—new back, blacked out, hiding out forty-eight hours, on the last day (Sunday) planned suicide for next morning when gun-shops opened, in afternoon decided I would have to go home—postponed it with half a dozen drinks downtown, went home, argued with assembled authorities—campus cops, my Dean, Ruth—gave in and was brought here, on a stretcher I’m told. Some management of some life.” ’
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