The Lois Wilson Story
Page 18
The first meeting in Gardner’s office went swimmingly. Wheeler and Winans, however, while gutsy investors, were cautious when it came to choosing partners. It didn’t take them long to discover Bill’s rather unsavory drinking background. Still, they were enormously impressed with his credentials, his past record of success, Gardner Swentzel’s recommendation, and the fact that Bill was now sober and obviously eager to give his all to this new venture. So they offered him a handsome long-term contract with their syndicate with only one proviso—that if he ever drank again, the contract would become null and void. Bill had so much confidence in himself at this point and was so excited about his prospects that he readily agreed.
Lois was overjoyed upon hearing the news. She clearly recalled their talks about finding their own place just as soon as the syndicate’s deals started paying off. It would be a while but they could be patient now; life at Clinton Street had become far more comfortable and hospitable with everyone getting along. In fact, over dinner each night when Dr. Burnham eyed his son-in-law, he would lose a little more of his skepticism. He shouldn’t have—for everything came apart suddenly, unexpectedly, and incomprehensibly.
Arthur Wheeler had gotten a line on a hot new investment possibility in Bound Brook, New Jersey: the Pathe Company. He asked Bill to round up a few engineers and investigate the firm’s new photographic process and growth prospects. Staying at a small hotel near the company, the engineers began playing cards after dinner one night. Bill hated card games. He found them boring. Lois had once tried to teach him bridge but he had trouble distinguishing between the jacks and the kings. So instead of joining the engineers, he sat in the corner reading a book.
Soon he found himself distracted by the card players passing around a large jug. Curious, he inquired as to its contents. One of the engineers described it as real applejack, better known as Jersey Lightning. He was offered a swig but turned it down and went back to his reading. Suddenly he found himself thinking about all the various kinds of drinks he had had in the course of his thirty-seven years. He recalled that first Bronx cocktail during his encampment in New Bedford, Dr. Burnham’s finest Scotch whiskey on his wedding day, the brandy he had on the ship to Europe to prevent seasickness, and of course those fabulous French wines that fortified him at the Front. But he never remembered drinking Jersey Lightning.
Just then another one of the engineers leaned toward him and offered a sip from the jug, which now seemed sparkling and alluring. What harm could one small sip do? thought the maniac in his head. So he reached out, grabbed the jug, and took a long swig.
That night in Bound Brook, New Jersey, Bill Wilson learned one more important lesson about the disease of alcoholism—that for a drunk, there is no such thing as just one drink.
The engineers could not rouse him the next morning after he had helped finish their jug and then some. They left to check on the company themselves and then reported directly back to Arthur Wheeler, who naturally inquired about his chief investigator. When Bill finally arrived back at Clinton Street, Lois was standing at the front door, her face pale, her eyes red and filled with despair once again. She handed her husband a telegram. His contract with Arthur Wheeler and Frank Winans had been cancelled.18
At that moment, it seemed as though Bill Wilson were standing on a trapdoor that suddenly opened beneath him. He plummeted into the deepest abyss of alcoholism he had ever known and continued that downward plunge over the next two years. He went from speakeasy brawls to drunk tanks, from park benches to jail cells, from pitiful crying jags to horrible hallucinations. As Lois recalled that period in her life, her words were frank and direct:
“[He] became a drunken sot who didn’t dare leave the house for fear that Brooklyn hoods or the police would get him.”19 She wrote, “I became more and more discouraged, and I feared I would have to look after him and support him all the rest of our lives.”20
But if things were bad while Dr. Burnham still resided at Clinton Street, one could imagine just how much worse they got once he moved out. In May of 1933, to Lois’s great displeasure, Clark Burnham married a lady by the name of Joan James, the ex-wife of their former minister. Concerning that relationship, Lois once commented to a very close friend, “My father had become interested in Joan while my mother was ill. At the time, he and his lady friend went together to church functions she had never attended when married to her minister husband. When I spoke to him about hurting my mother so, he said he loved mother more than anyone else in the world, that he always would, and that she understood his attention to Joan.
“Perhaps my mother did understand as she lay dying, but that was certainly not true of others in our family. They were greatly distressed by the relationship. In fact, I was the only one in the family who accompanied our father to the civil wedding ceremony, joined him and his new wife for dinner afterward, and wished them well as they left for Florida. When I returned home that night, I realized that it would be just Bill and I alone together now in the large brownstone. That much of the financial burden would be on our shoulders and that I would have to care for him all by myself. I suddenly felt overwhelmed.”21
Bill now drank to escape and to block from his mind all the terrible, pathetic, inexcusable things he had done and the mistakes he had made. He was unemployed and unemployable. To him, in his sodden, alcoholic brain, his whole life was blown apart, and in the days and weeks and months that followed he could gather no inner strength to think about or create new ideas or plans for his existence. Nothing but guilt-tortured episodes of the past and horrific fears of the future filled his very being.
He continued to bum handouts from old buddies to pay his “admission fee” into speakeasies where he still had a tab; he talked “softies” like neighborhood druggist Barry Slavin into one more bottle of booze even though last week’s “fix” hadn’t been paid for yet; he stole money from Lois’s purse, pawned her and her mother’s jewelry and silver, and hid bottles all over the house. Finally, when all else failed, he wrote his mother, Emily, the sob story of his bad luck and failed attempts to start anew on Wall Street. Sure enough, she sent him some money “to tide him over.” When Lois found Emily’s letter on their dresser, minus the cash of course, she was furious. She screamed and hollered and beat on her drunken husband when he staggered in two nights later.
When Bill was off on a binge, Lois created many ways to keep herself busy. She might make over one of her mother’s discarded dresses, reweave a frayed oriental rug, find some of Matilda’s old fabric in a dusty closet and sew herself a new blouse, or reupholster an old chair from the webbing to the finishing gimp. Through her work in Macy’s home furnishings department, word soon spread of her expertise in interior decorating. She was offered occasional jobs, which she undertook during the evenings or on weekends. But as much as she needed the money, when Bill’s drinking grew worse and the resulting problems escalated, she became more and more hesitant to do anything but hurry home from work and be there as much as possible. Soon, she began missing work on days when Bill was climbing the walls, hallucinating, or shaking so badly he couldn’t eat or drink by himself. Embarrassed by her absences, she resigned her job early that summer. She still had some jewelry left to pawn and things to sell if it came to that. But she was absolutely terrified of leaving her husband in his worsening condition.
“Bill had become very careless the more he drank,” she once confided to some friends. “He wouldn’t bathe unless I forced him to or put on clean clothes unless I did it for him. And he was still a very heavy smoker which frightened me no end. There were more than several occasions when he fell into a drunken sleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and almost set the bed on fire. Because of that and his threats to leap from our bedroom window should ‘those people’ come after him again—he was now hallucinating quite frequently—I decided to drag his mattress down into the basement where he would be safer and I would have more peace of mind.”22
Lois still had her needs and desires, and when he held her close, her feelings were aroused. She wanted him. She needed him. He would try to make love to her. He wanted to make love to her—but the huge amounts of booze still in his system kept him impotent. For her, it was more than mere frustration. It was emotional torture.
It was even worse when he was drunk and would awaken in the middle of the night filled with his own lustful desires and sexual urges. He would roll on top of her, grunting and snorting until he himself realized the futility of it all. These were the kinds of experiences it pained Lois to share until later in life, when she came to understand how much it could help others in similar situations.
“There’s very little sex life with an active alcoholic,” she would say. “When he’s in his cups, he’s far from enticing sexually. I found it very difficult not to get filled with disgust, no matter how much I loved him when he was sober. For almost two years, from 1932 to the end of 1934, there was no sex at all.”23
When asked once if, being married to a hopeless, loveless, sexually impotent alcoholic, she ever had the desire or felt she had the right to seek another man’s arms, Lois replied, “I can understand some women using this as an excuse, but no, I was never interested in any other man in that way—in a sexual way I mean. Yes, there were many times I yearned for affection. I would see young couples holding hands on the subway train or embracing in the park and I would feel empty and angry. Perhaps I knew deep down that if I ever sought the emotional support of another man, it might lead me to places I was afraid of going. So I simply continued to hope and pray that things would somehow get better—even just a little bit better.”24
And she continued trying to make them better, sometimes in strange or even stupid ways, she later admitted. For example, there was that one weekend when Bill was struggling again to get sober. While gathering the laundry together, she found one of his bottles of gin stashed behind the laundry basket. She took a glass from the kitchen cabinet, walked into the parlor with the bottle, sat across from her husband and proceeded to fill her glass and drink it. As she later said, “I wanted my husband to see for himself just what liquor does to you. How foolish you look and act after drinking it. He tried to stop me. I don’t know if it was for my sake or because he wanted the bottle for himself.
“Anyway, I told him since I was never able to stop him from drinking, he wasn’t going to stop me. So he didn’t. He let me drink until I got tipsy and then very sick. He carried me upstairs and put me to bed. The next morning I woke up with an atrocious hangover. Bill took very good care of me that day and it was the first time I heard him laugh out loud in months. However, it was all for naught. All I did was get sick and he was drunk again himself within a few days.”25
It was early that summer, only a few months after her father’s departure, that Lois reached out in desperation to her brother-in-law Dr. Leonard Strong. Bill had become so physically and mentally debilitated that Leonard took only one look and immediately insisted on having him admitted to Towns Hospital and put under the care of his good friend Dr. Silkworth. Seeing Lois’s hesitation and knowing it had to do with her scarce finances, not his medical recommendation, Leonard insisted on paying for Bill’s care since, over the years, he had made him so much money in the stock market—most of which the shrewd young physician had wisely withdrawn before the crash. For Lois, it was simply one more case of swallowing her false pride.
This was to be the first of four trips Bill would make over the next eighteen months to Towns Hospital, a well-known and well-regarded institution that specialized in the mental and physical rehabilitation of alcoholics. It was located at 293 Central Park West in New York City and had been owned and operated since the early 1920s by the strapping and effervescent Charles B. Towns, who was later to become one of Bill Wilson’s greatest admirers and supporters in the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Charlie Towns may have owned the facility, but Dr. William Duncan Silkworth ran it. He was a white-haired, blue-eyed, soft-spoken Princeton graduate with a medical degree in neurology from New York University–Bellevue Medical School. By the time Bill was admitted to his hospital, Dr. Silkworth had already formulated his theory concerning uncontrolled drinking—a theory much disputed by many of his colleagues—that alcoholism was an allergy not unlike hay fever, whose sufferers gradually become sensitized to certain types of pollen.
As he described his beliefs in a 1937 article in the Medical Record entitled “Alcoholism as a Manifestation of Allergy,” he wrote, “We believe . . . that the action of alcohol on . . . chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.”26
But it wasn’t his theory so much that impressed Bill and Lois when they first met Dr. Silkworth; it was more his obvious love and concern for each and every alcoholic under his care. In fact, Bill was so impressed, he was convinced when he finally left Towns that he would never drink again. It was almost catastrophic when he did. As Lois recalled:
When Dr. Silkworth, such a highly respected specialist in the field, couldn’t help my husband, I began to think that my whole life had been wasted. All my love, the affection I had constantly tried to show him, all the times I had forgiven and tried to forget, it was all for nothing. It made me realize that my love was not enough.
No matter what, I kept ending up in the same old rut doing the same old things, and like my father had said, expecting different results. I felt like I was a complete failure in what I had tried to do just as Bill was a complete failure in what he had tried to do. Here we were just two complete failures sinking further and further down each day and not knowing any way out.
But as I look back, my reactions to it all seem so strange now. Even though I saw no way out, I discovered that hope springs eternal. I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone who loves as deeply as I did, but every time I felt like I was ready to give up, a flicker of hope would return. Maybe I was so sick I didn’t know how sick I really was. But I think, truly, it was my faith in God even though at times I was so bitter that prayers seemed like ashes on my tongue. Perhaps it was also my mother looking down on me, giving me strength to go on. Or maybe it was simply watching my dear husband weeping in despair as he came off another binge, begging me for the thousandth time to help him. Yes, in the face of absolute failure, hope always seemed to return. If it hadn’t, I’m sure I would have given up for good.27
In the summer of 1934, Lois was to receive news that would have left almost anyone else with no hope at all. It came as Bill was being admitted to Towns Hospital for the third time. His own confidence in any possibility of recovering was at its lowest ebb. He had even told his wife she would be better off without him and that if he came out of the hospital and drank again this time, she should divorce him.
It was a sultry summer night when she left her husband in the detox ward and found her way to Dr. Silkworth’s office. By now they knew each other quite well and had always talked until now in very optimist
ic terms. Tonight, however, she needed to know the truth—the absolute truth. She sat in front of his desk and asked the kinds of questions the spouses of many alcoholics had asked him before. “How bad is this? Why can’t he stop? Where . . . is he heading? . . . What’s to be done now? Where do we go from here?”28
Dr. Silkworth, “the little doctor who loved drunks,” as Bill was to call him later on in sobriety, came around his desk and sat next to Lois. He took her hand and in his quiet, gentle manner answered her questions honestly and forthrightly.
“I thought at first Bill might be one of the exceptions. Because of his very great desire to quit, because of his character and intelligence, I thought he might be one of the very few. But this habit of drinking has now turned into an obsession, one much too deep to be overcome, and the physical effect of it on him has also been very severe, for he’s showing signs of brain damage. This is true even though he hasn’t been hospitalized very much. Actually, I’m fearful for his sanity if he goes on drinking.”29
Lois shuddered. She had heard all this once before, several years earlier from her own father’s lips. She wouldn’t believe him then and she didn’t want to believe Dr. Silkworth now. It just couldn’t be so. She was afraid to ask the next question. The doctor understood. He took both her hands, held them tightly, and looked warmly into her eyes.
“Just what does all this mean, doctor?” she asked, fearing with every fiber in her body what the answer would be.
“It means,” he replied softly, “that you will have to confine him, lock him up somewhere if he is to remain sane, or even alive. He can’t go on this way for another year.”30
When Lois finally left Dr. Silkworth’s office and walked out into the hot, humid night air, she had no tears left to shed. She was completely numb and totally oblivious to the many motorists and passersby on Central Park West. She took the subway back to Brooklyn, walked up the steps of the brownstone, opened the door, and entered the kitchen. The coffee Bill had tried to drink before leaving for the hospital that morning was still on the kitchen table. She carried it to the sink and simply stood there for a long moment.