The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Bill wobbled downstairs and into the kitchen. After a brief search, he found what he was looking for—another untapped bottle of gin, wrapped in a towel and stashed amid the cobwebs under the stove. It was after two o’clock now and should Lois come home early, he didn’t want her to see a naked bottle of booze on the kitchen table. That’s when the thought struck him—a pineapple punch. It was one of Ebby’s favorite “morning-after fixes.” So what if it was already afternoon. He’d get a kick out of it, provided it contained more gin than juice.

  The punch was now ready. The glasses were on the table. He had another quick swig, then lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling but not nearly as badly as they were an hour ago.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  No matter how many years went by, Lois could always clearly remember how her husband described the events that took place that afternoon when a man she once didn’t particularly care for brought a message to her home that would save her husband’s life.

  “Bill always said he was absolutely stunned when he opened the door and saw the look on Ebby’s face that day,” she recalled. “He said there was something very different about him from the last time they had been together—in fact, from the many years they had been drinking together. It took Bill several moments to comprehend exactly what it was. Then he realized that Ebby was sober, not merely dried out, but completely sober. I can only imagine what went through Bill’s mind at that point.”10

  One of those thoughts, which he later shared with his wife, was that he felt awkward and uncomfortable for a moment. He said he felt almost as he did when the police pulled him out of a doorway, drunk and covered with puke, and looked at him as if he were something less than human. That’s the way Ebby seemed to be staring at Bill’s red eyes and trembling hands as he stood at the front door. But Bill’s uncomfortable feelings were only temporary, for somewhere in his head that ever-present maniac kept saying he could even the score by bringing Ebby into the kitchen and pouring him a few glasses of that punch.

  There was something else different about his friend that afternoon. When Ebby smiled, it was a warm, serious kind of a smile, sort of an “I’m here on a mission” smile. And when he shook hands, it was a firm and clasping kind of handshake, not the slap-on-the-back type these two drinking buddies always used to exchange. It wasn’t until Bill led him into the kitchen, offered him a seat, and poured him a glass of punch that he began to comprehend what was behind all these changes in his now-sober friend. Ebby pushed the glass away and said quietly but with great confidence, “No, thanks, Bill. I don’t need this stuff anymore.”

  Bill laughed out loud, thinking at first Ebby was joking with him. But there was no laughter in return. So he poured himself a drink, chugged it down, and then asked, with a deep frown on his forehead, “Ebby, what on earth has got into you? What is this all about?”11

  So Ebby told him. He told him that after his family’s cast-iron stove business finally went belly-up, he drank so much that he spent more time in Albany’s drunk tanks than he did in his own house. The local authorities, thanks to his straight-laced older brother, suggested he get some help for his problem, so he moved into the old Battenkill Inn in Manchester, Vermont, to dry out. The elderly owner had been a good friend of the Thacher family for years, so he helped by warning his employees not to serve his special guest any alcohol or they’d be fired on the spot.

  Ebby managed to stay dry for almost six months. Then the owner of the inn suddenly died. Ebby had to mourn his passing. This led to another long drinking binge and total depletion of whatever family assets he had left. He went from one job to another, even working as a housepainter to get money for booze. After many more failed attempts to stay sober, he wound up in a vacant cabin in the Green Mountains, where he nearly drank himself to death.

  Officials of the local lumber company that owned the cabin were about to ship him off to the insane asylum in Brattleboro when word reached two of Ebby’s old friends in Manchester, men he used to drink with and who were now sober members of the Oxford Group. The two men brought him home with them, cleaned him up, and shared the newfound philosophy that was keeping them sober. Having hit bottom, Ebby began absorbing the movement’s principles like a sponge, especially the four basic principles of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. He soon found sobriety, a new kind of sobriety he called “a sobriety of the soul.” And now, just four months later, here he was trying to share what he found with his drunk and disbelieving boyhood chum.

  “You mean . . . you got religion?”12 Bill half-snarled, staring across the table at the man he suddenly decided had become a ludicrous convert and, even worse, seemed about to break one of the oldest laws in the book of scams: try to con a con artist. What Bill couldn’t see was that Ebby was on a mission and wasn’t about to give up that quickly, especially when he stared back across the table and saw a man he always loved and admired now desperately in need of help.

  “It was really more of a spiritual than it was a religious movement,” Ebby tried to explain. “It was what I had been taught as a child and what I inwardly believed but had laid aside.”13

  Because of their long history together and Ebby’s obvious sincerity, Bill listened to his story for another hour or so while he himself continued to drink and smoke. Without his realizing it, something was penetrating, something was getting through, something was lighting a small flame that would eventually burst into a gigantic spiritual fire. But for the moment, the gin-laced punch was etching it all in his subconscious.

  Finally, as Ebby rose from the kitchen table, he urged his friend one more time to seek the help of Dr. Sam Shoemaker at the Calvary Mission where he himself was staying while in New York. Bill promised to give it serious consideration while thinking to himself that he had heard enough about God and religion for one day and, with the pitcher of punch depleted, he needed to find another bottle hidden somewhere in the house to get him through the night.

  On his way out, Ebby noticed Lois seated in the parlor, ostensibly sewing, although her mind had been focused on the happenings in the kitchen. He entered to say good-bye.

  “I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that Ebby was still completely sober,” Lois recalled. “I wanted desperately to ask him how he was managing to do it and what he had said to Bill. So I walked with him to the front door and out onto the front porch.

  “He told me briefly about the Oxford Group and where I could go myself to get more information. But then my heart sank once again when he said Bill didn’t appear too receptive to the idea. When I asked why, he explained that as far as he knew, Bill had always wanted to stop drinking mainly to please me. Now the shame and guilt for not being able to do so only increased his need to keep on drinking, to drown out those feelings.

  “Ebby also told me that night that Bill was never really concerned about hurting himself but that it tore him up inside each time he realized how much he was hurting me. Then, after the disaster on Wall Street when we lost everything and he really wanted to stop drinking for himself in order to turn his life around, he couldn’t. By that time he was totally addicted mentally and physically just like Ebby had been until he found a spiritual solution in the Oxford Group.

  “Then Ebby hugged me and said all we could do for Bill now was to pray for him. I thought to myself as I watched him walk down the steps, what good would more prayers do when they hadn’t worked all these years. I didn’t know at the time I had a soul-sickness too.”14

  When Lois walked back into the kitchen, Bill was still seated at the table, smoking. He appeared deep in thought.

  “Without my even asking,” she remembered, “he willingly related to me the story of Ebby’s introduction to the Oxford Group. He admitted he was quite impressed that Ebby was sober and said he just might look into the things he told him about.”15

  Lois wanted to reply. She wanted
to urge her husband to do just that . . . to do exactly what Ebby had suggested. But she was afraid of what his response might be, especially since she could tell he had been drinking rather heavily. So, not wanting to raise any more false hopes, she made herself a cup of tea, kissed him on the cheek, and then went upstairs to read herself to sleep.

  Though inebriated, Bill could still recognize that all-too-familiar look in his wife’s eyes, the look that said what’s the use of trying anymore, of even attempting to share her painful thoughts and feelings with the very man who caused them in the first place. And now, Bill pictured her thinking, along comes their longtime friend from Vermont, sober and filled with hope and optimism. She has to be wondering why it can’t be him, why this spineless, weak-willed excuse of a husband couldn’t have found what Ebby found—and isn’t willing to accept it even now.

  He lit another cigarette, took a deep drag, and waited until he felt Lois was settled in her bedroom upstairs. Then he rose and quietly sneaked down into the basement. After another brief search, he found a half-empty bottle of booze hidden in an old storage bin. He sat down on the now-familiar mattress near the coal furnace, leaned back against the cold cement wall, and proceeded to ponder Ebby’s visit as he poured the burning liquid directly from the bottle down his throat.

  Sure, Ebby believed all that stuff he was spouting—but then his old drinking buddy often played it fast and loose with the truth. On the other hand, he, Bill Wilson, used to be a terrific professional investigator. He still could be if only some lame-brained idiot on the Street would give him half a chance. Anyway, maybe he ought to check out this Oxford Group himself, he thought. Go right to the source, the head man, this Dr. Shoemaker fellow over at this Calvary Mission place. As he continued to drink, his mind conjured up the deep theological and philosophical questions he would stump Dr. Shoemaker with. Soon the bottle was empty, and he passed out in the chilly cellar.16

  Before leaving for work the next morning, Lois came down and covered her husband with a warm blanket. Then she briefly searched for more hidden bottles. She couldn’t find any. As she stood there staring down at this man she once thought would conquer the world or at least achieve some kind of greatness, her head kept telling her she must soon decide about committing him to a sanitarium. If Dr. Silkworth couldn’t help and now his closest friend couldn’t get through to him, what hope was there left?

  She remembered Ebby’s last words to her. “All we can do for Bill now is to pray for him.” But she had pleaded to God so many times she felt as if she had worn out her welcome. Nevertheless, she lowered her head and murmured the words she had said so often in the past: “God help me to help him, my husband, my boy.”17

  Then she wiped her eyes, tucked the cover up closer around his neck, and left for work. Lois was soon to learn that the God she had put her faith in often works in very strange ways—even in ways she might not agree with. But the prayer she had just uttered and the many prayers she had whispered, shouted, and cried out all these years were about to be answered . . . in a very strange and very powerful way.

  It was around noon when Bill awoke, shaking and desperately in need of a drink. He could find nothing in the basement. He staggered upstairs and, despite his weakened condition, almost tore the kitchen apart looking for a bottle he knew he had hidden in one of the cabinets—unless Lois had found it. He wracked his brain but couldn’t remember where he had stashed it. Then an idea struck him. Perhaps this was a sign, some kind of an omen, he thought. Maybe as a result of Ebby’s visit, something was trying to tell him he didn’t have to drink today. And if he turned himself over to that Oxford Group bunch, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink at all, just like his old pal.

  But then he remembered the kicker, the real stumbling block—this God thing. Sure, he believed there was something out there, some kind of unexplainable intelligence or power that ran the universe. But a personal God? One who watched over his life? He had given up on that idea a long time ago. Still, Ebby was sober. There was no denying that. So on that score alone it was something worth looking into, with a keen investigator’s eye.18

  He quickly washed up, threw on some clothes, and took off. He remembered Ebby saying Calvary Church was on Twenty-third Street, somewhere near Fourth Avenue in Manhattan. Back then, Twenty-third Street was a drunkard’s paradise, with bars lining both sides of the busy thoroughfare. Bill managed to make it halfway down the block before some strange magnetic force emanating from an Irish pub pulled him inside. He was loaded by the time he staggered into the mission a few hours later, arm in arm with another drunk he met at the bar.

  The mission was filled with men in every stage of decay, most bearded, filthy, and tipsy, seated on rows of wooden benches slopping down beans and bread from dented tin plates.

  “I never will forget,” Lois once said, “Bill telling me about his first impression of the old Calvary Mission. Even though he was quite drunk himself, he said all he could see was a roomful of victims and losers. Bill always had a great deal of pride. He never considered himself a victim since he was honest enough to admit he brought most things on himself. And while he might have been a loser at that time, he always believed he would one day turn things around and become a winner again.”19

  Dr. Shoemaker wasn’t there that night, but Ebby was. He cornered his friend and forced some beans and black coffee down his throat and then began introducing him to a few fairly well-dressed men he kept referring to as “part of God’s army.”20 This turned Bill off—this and the smell of society’s rejects and discards, the bedraggled waste of a country in despair seated all around him . . . men who, his investigator’s nose said, were as phony about their intention to stay sober as he was. He knew they came for the grub.

  But Bill stayed anyway just to please his old friend. He even rose up and staggered to the front of the hall when “confession” time came. Standing among a crowd of sweating, stinking, but seemingly eager penitents, he shouted above the group for all to hear—that if Ebby Thacher could stay sober, so could he.

  Lois was surprised when she came home that night to find Bill seated in the living room staring off into space. He was deep in thought. Ebby had brought him home from the mission, and they had talked for several hours over coffee until he left. Bill told his wife he might give the Oxford Group a try, even though there was much about the movement he didn’t like or agree with. He said he had to do something because he couldn’t stand the hurt look in her eyes every time he got drunk.

  “I remember how I hugged him and cried in his arms,” she wrote. “As hard as I tried not to, I began to hope again. He didn’t drink for the next several days even though he was shaking so badly I thought I would have to call Leonard Strong for help. But Bill got angry every time I mentioned it. He grew more and more restless and found it hard to sleep. Then I came home from work early one evening and he wasn’t there. I didn’t want to believe he was drinking again until I went upstairs and saw that he had gone though my bureau apparently looking for some of my jewelry to sell. I was devastated.”21

  Lois thought it was around nine or ten that night when she heard the front door slam and footsteps coming down the hall. She was in the den off the dining room sewing, trying to keep herself busy so she wouldn’t have to think. She rose and started for the hall when Bill was suddenly there in the doorway. He was very drunk, angry, and incoherent.

  “I don’t know what you and Ebby have been cooking up,” he ranted, “but nobody’s shoving religion down my throat. Nobody! Not even you!”22

  Then he began babbling about “God’s army” chasing after him . . . that he wasn’t like all those “bums and losers” at the Calvary mission . . . that she was among those religious fanatics who brainwashed Ebby but weren’t going to brainwash him. He demanded she tell him where she had hidden all his booze and said he was sick and tired of living with someone who didn’t respect him and always treated him like a helpless chi
ld.

  Lois had witnessed many of her husband’s hallucinations in the past, but nothing like this. It frightened her and crushed whatever hope she may have had left. But then suddenly something snapped inside her. Those emotions she had always tried to keep in check now loosened her bitter tongue.

  All those years of loving and caring. All those years of living her life for him. All those years of people asking her why . . . why did she suffer this almost sick devotion to a man who showed her a thousand times that he didn’t care to help himself so long as she was always there to comfort him and nurse him back to health? She had become not only his wife but his mother, his nurse, his excuse-maker, his caretaker, and his financial support as well. As he stood in the doorway raving at her, all those seething emotions rose to the surface and poured out in the most hurtful, vindictive words she could find.

  “You are nothing but a drunken sot just like those other bums you keep talking about,” she recalled screaming at him. “But I don’t have to live like this anymore. I should have put you in a sanitarium a long time ago, when my father told me to do it and then Dr. Silkworth. That’s where you belong—in an insane asylum—because you’re crazy. You hear me! You’re crazy!”23

  Bill’s eyes widened and his face filled with even greater rage. He glanced around the room, then charged toward the sewing machine. He picked it up and threw it against the wall. Lois had never seen him lose control like this before. She was petrified. She shrank into a corner and began crying hysterically. Her husband glared at her, then suddenly turned, ran down the hall, out the front door, and into the night shouting, “I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!”24