The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Lois was with a customer when he finally arrived at her department. She was surprised to see him and waved that she’d be finished shortly. He paced impatiently back and forth, casting urgent glances in her direction. Fearing something might be amiss, Lois excused herself and led her husband off to the side. There he exploded his news on her.

  The look of sheer joy and delight he expected to see on her face didn’t appear. Instead, she reacted calmly, mulling over what she had just heard as though she hadn’t fully understood. So Bill repeated himself. She smiled politely, gave his comments some further thought, then looked up at him and asked:

  “Have you talked to Bob about it? . . . What does everyone else think?”3

  Bill frowned down at her. Why should she be asking about Dr. Bob? he wondered. Surely his Akron colleague would see the obvious benefits to such a move. And besides, who launched this ship in the first place? And “everyone else”? If Lois was referring to his recovering alcoholics at Clinton Street, what doubt was there that they’d go along with whatever he suggested? They always did. Well, maybe not always, but certainly most of the time.

  The real enigma for him was his wife’s attitude. Bill simply could not understand why Lois was not overjoyed at the prospect of his success and the financial rewards it would bring. Then he thought, perhaps it’s because she’d heard all of this before, at other times and in other forms. And once booze had taken over his life, it had never panned out—his grandiose schemes, his promises of laying the moon and stars at her feet. So why should she believe him this time?

  But as he stared into his wife’s eyes, he sensed it was more than that. She seemed preoccupied, distant, not the woman who would always throw her arms around him anyway and root him on no matter what. He suddenly began to realize how much about her he had taken for granted all these years. When he left the department store that afternoon, not only was the bloom slightly off his rose, but he had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, a worrisome overall sense that his wife’s feelings toward him were changing.

  If the offer from Charlie Towns had been a surprise to Bill, and Lois’s reaction to the news a deep disappointment, that was nothing compared to the stunning, cold silence he received from the group that evening when he tried with as much enthusiasm as he could muster to depict the benefits he saw in this proposal for all concerned. But halfway through his pitch, he regretted not securing Dr. Bob’s endorsement first. It would have reinforced his stance.

  Lois stood in the back of the living room listening. The new man with the Irish brogue was sitting nearby. The place was packed. Another woman was also in the room that night, Marty Mann, the first female alcoholic to join the Fellowship. After several “slips,” Marty had become a firm believer, a sober member, a good friend of Lois, and a very successful businesswoman who, twelve years later, went on to found the National Council on Alcoholism—an educational organization still working in the recovery field today. Recalling her initial reaction to Bill’s news, a skepticism that the group members were now about to share, Lois once told a close friend: “As much as I realized Bill needed to earn some money to pay our bills and get us out of debt, I felt like the others that night. This didn’t seem to be the way.”

  After a while Bill found himself addressing a roomful of impassive faces all frowning up at him. Long before he finished his presentation, Lois noticed her husband’s voice wavering. He was stumbling over his words. When Bill finally finished, Fitz slowly rose to his feet and began shifting nervously. He admitted that everyone at Clinton Street and all those who came from the outside to the meetings were sympathetic to Bill’s financial needs and had been for some time. But, he added, while he couldn’t speak for the others, he felt what was being suggested didn’t seem like the best answer and could possibly lead to complications of all sorts in the future. Fitz wasn’t challenging Bill. He was simply expressing his anxiety.

  “Bill, you can’t do this to us,” he said. “Don’t you see that for you, our leader, to take money for passing on our magnificent message, while the rest of us try to do the same thing without pay, would soon discourage us all? . . . Why should we do for nothing what you’d be getting paid for? We’d all be drunk in no time.”4

  Chris then stuttered from his chair that Charlie Towns was not an alcoholic and therefore couldn’t possibly know what makes their Fellowship work. Why was it that he himself could get sober among the drunks at Clinton Street when he was never able to stay dry anywhere else? Because of their trust and support, that’s why. Chris wanted to say more until Bill’s challenging stare sat him back in his seat.

  Everyone began whispering to each other when suddenly a short, squat fellow with a graying beard slowly rose from the other side of the room. His name was Buddy Hackler, and he was a former derelict who hadn’t had a drink now for almost five months. Bill knew that Buddy’s sobriety meant everything in the world to him. He had great respect for this middle-aged man whose words whistled through three broken teeth as he apologized for not being a very good speaker. That night, however, he held the entire room in rapt attention, trying to explain in simple terms why the proposal at hand could never work.

  Everyone around him had this “thing” that bound them together, one to the other, the short, nervous newcomer said. He couldn’t find the right words to describe it, Buddy went on, with all heads nodding at him in support, but it was something that could not be bought and paid for. No doctor or nurse or therapist ever got him sober. He doubted if they ever could, because drunks were not “cases.” Drunks were people with an addiction to booze that few understood except here at Clinton Street and on Ardmore Avenue in Akron. What Bill and Dr. Bob discovered, Buddy summed up in a voice now filled with confidence, what this “thing” was based on, was one poor drunk bastard coming eyeball to eyeball with another drunk bastard and telling it like it was. With no BS, they could trust each other, bare their souls, and stay sober—and that was something you couldn’t put a price tag on, he concluded.

  Before sitting back down, the relative newcomer reminded Bill of something he was always telling others—that the good was often the enemy of the best. Drunks, Buddy said, needed the best and they had it in spades at Clinton Street.5

  It was after midnight when Bill finally came into the bedroom. He stood at the window looking out at the full moon. Lois was still awake. She watched him for a moment, then climbed out of bed, walked over, and stood next to him. He told her he had phoned Dr. Bob after the lengthy meeting broke up and everyone had left, some offering their apologies for speaking out against the Towns proposal. He said Bob reminded him of something they had discussed very early on in Akron when laying out their ideas for the Fellowship. They had agreed that the only authority would be the group itself. Bill admitted he had forgotten that in his desire to solve his economic problems and probably also to satisfy his own big ego.

  Lois squeezed his hand to let him know she understood. She told him it was probably all for the best, and they’d find their way out of their financial maze somehow or other.6 Bill wanted to reach out and take his wife into his arms and ask her why he felt they were growing apart. Where was the warmth she had always exuded toward him even in the worst of times? Yes, he was constantly busy with his drunks and now his book, but she always said she understood. Was he simply taking her for granted again? Was it his imagination, or was her seeming preoccupation the result of her being the breadwinner, the one who was truly keeping things together? So he hesitated. He simply stood there holding her hand and sensing this was not the right moment, especially since the evening’s events—whether he agreed with the outcome or not—made him feel like a huge failure.

  The next morning Bill phoned Charlie Towns to thank him and to say rather reluctantly that he couldn’t accept his generous offer.

  Lois could also sense the distance that was opening between her and her husband and wondered just when it began. Yes, she was of
ten hurt when he paid more attention to his drunks than he did to her, but by now she was used to that. Yes, he needed her, but was it more for her cooking and cleaning and financial help than for her emotional support? It sometimes seemed that way. But somewhere deep inside she sensed her feelings toward Bill really began to change the day the tall, handsome newcomer from Bellevue Hospital showed up at Clinton Street.7

  His name was Russell, and she remembered how, as the days went by and he became more sober, his delightful gift of gab returned and she found him great fun. They were drawn to each other so quickly that she never gave it a second thought. However, the more she saw of him, the more she began to question her every thought, her every action, her every feeling, especially the guilt that suddenly came over her each time she was with Bill.

  A County Cork man from a well-to-do Irish family, Russ decided America offered a more challenging and exciting life. So after college in Dublin, he came to the states and settled in New York City. He became an apprentice at Time-Life. He moved up the ladder quickly, and soon he was a correspondent for Life magazine, writing about everyone from Al Capone to J. Edgar Hoover. But the bright, good-looking Irishman loved the night life and the ladies. Soon he was known in every speakeasy from Manhattan to the south side of Chicago. Then one day a wealthy uncle died back home and left Russ a considerable sum. He decided to quit his job and play—and for him, playing meant drinking up a storm.

  Before long, instead of being well known in the most popular saloons, he was becoming well known in drunk tanks, drying-out hospitals, nut wards, and finally among the lowest of the low at the Bowery Mission. By the time his money was almost gone, he had become a frequent guest at Bellevue Hospital. That’s where Bill found him, believed he sincerely wanted to stop drinking, and brought him home to Clinton Street.

  “He was not only quite handsome,” Lois once shared with a close friend, “but he was also very intelligent. He could do a crossword puzzle in no time. He was perhaps one of the brightest men I ever met.

  “After getting sober, he was so happy he had another chance at life that he seemed to be laughing all the time. He was so much fun to be with. He once told me he played the piano in a college band, a dance band. He asked me if we could go out dancing some time. Just the thought of it brought back so many wonderful memories. The dances we would go to in Vermont. The hayrides. But he knew by the look on my face that I couldn’t go so he just laughed again and pretended he was just joking all along.”8

  Russell often dropped by Loeser’s department store unexpectedly. He waited for Lois if she was busy, and then they would sit and have lunch in a nearby park. Afterward they walked along the street window-shopping until it was time for her to go back to work. One day as they were walking, Lois recalled, he took her hand. She felt awkward and nervous. After a few moments, she eased her hand away, turning a soft shade of pink in the process. Russell simply grinned and began chatting about something or other to quietly dismiss the unease of the moment.

  Here was a warm, charming, caring man who wanted to be with her, to be near her, to spend time with her, who needed her trust and confidence so that he could share his innermost feelings. And here was a fragile, vulnerable, unhappy lady who needed someone to care about her, to pay attention to her, to let her know she was lovable, attractive, and sensuous still. That she was a woman.

  “I was so terribly unhappy at the time,” Lois admitted later. “I tried so hard to hide it from myself but deep inside I was terribly unhappy. And now this emotional feeling I suddenly had for this man began to frighten me because it went against the ideal I knew I should be living up to, the ideal I was raised with.”9 One belief that Lois still clung to was that advances from men were most often caused by the woman’s attitude, so now she questioned her own attitudes. Was she encouraging Russell’s affection by her willingness to spend so much time with him? Was she less concerned about her husband’s needs now that she had another man to look after? Or was she unconsciously playing a game, hoping Bill would notice, get jealous, and finally give her the love and consideration she craved? One of the most important traits Lois inherited from her mother was self-honesty. She might be able to fool herself for a little while but not for very long, not with that gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach. And so it was this time. She was forced to admit to herself that the answer to all these questions was yes. The only question that remained was, what should she do about it?

  “Looking back,” she once said, “I must admit that for a woman of my age then, I was still very naive. I smugly thought I knew so much about life and the world, love and relationships and how it should all be. But when it came right down to it, I knew very little.

  “I soon became convinced that Bill suspected something the way he would look at Russell and then at me. So to get rid of this guilty feeling and that gnawing inside of me, I decided the best thing to do was to tell him all about it without mentioning anyone’s name, although I felt sure he knew.

  “I told Bill I was very upset with myself for becoming so interested in another man regardless of the reasons. I said instead of it making me happy, the guilt I felt was making me even more miserable. I told him I didn’t plan to spend any more time with this man ever again.”10

  Looking back at this whole affair some years later, Lois said she could see more clearly that, while she had come to care for Russell rather deeply, she was mainly screaming out for her husband’s attentions. She might as well have been shouting, “Bill! Pay attention to me. I’m your wife and I have a problem. I want you to think about me for a moment instead of yourself, your drunks, your Fellowship, and your damn book! This is me, Lois, and I have something going on here that could get out of control. You better pay attention to me. I need you to pay attention to me!”11

  As she suspected, Bill had been paying attention. But perhaps his own guilt, the recognition of his own failures, and his seeming lack of concern about their relationship prevented him from saying anything right away—from asking questions and getting answers he didn’t want to hear—or quite possibly being afraid of how he might react. As it turned out, he was right, for when Lois finally told him what had been going on, even she was shocked by his sudden and bewildering reaction. Lois had no idea she was reminding him of his past, those times when people had left him, walked out of his life—his father, his mother, Bertha Banford—and he had felt “unlovable” all over again.

  “We were in the bedroom,” she recalled. “I had just gotten home from work and said I needed to speak with him. I had been thinking all day about how I should put it. As I began to tell him, he turned away and faced the wall. When I finished, he yanked open the door, shouted that he might as well be drunk and ran down the stairs. I was desperately afraid that he meant it—that he was going out to get drunk. All I could do was cry.”12 After more than two years of not drinking, after leading dozens of helpless alcoholics along the path to sobriety, after creating so much hope in the lives of so many, Bill Wilson was about to follow in the footsteps of his sponsor, Ebby Thacher. He was about to let those character defects of anger, jealousy, and resentment get him drunk. As he would later share with Lois and a few members of the Fellowship, he ran through the streets of Brooklyn Heights until he found a bar. He went in and stood looking into the barroom mirror. As he stared at the rage filling his face, he saw out of the corner of his eye a man flopped over a corner table in a drunken stupor. In an instant, the sight brought back his every binge, every hangover, every catastrophe in the company of John Barleycorn. Then, as the bartender approached, he turned and rushed out the door.

  Bill wound up that evening at the Hotel St. George, where Charley the plumber had restarted his business and now roomed with another Clinton Street graduate. They all talked late into the night. Bill left grateful to his friends for reminding him of his own words to them—that alcohol was only the symptom of their disease and that unless one works on his character defects
and shortcomings, he would always be in danger of drinking again.

  Lois was so worried and regretful for having opened Pandora’s box that she couldn’t sleep. It was very late when Bill walked into their bedroom. His eyes were red, but she could tell immediately that he hadn’t been drinking. As she started to beg for his forgiveness, he took her gently into his arms and said he was the one who needed to be forgiven. He was the one who had to make amends for his selfish, insensitive behavior, for not showing his love and gratitude often enough for all she had given to him. They hugged and they kissed. Then they got undressed, turned out the lights, and went to bed. They made love again for the first time in many, many months.13

  Russell heard the buzzing going on around Clinton Street that evening, talk that Bill had stormed out of the house red-faced and angry and no one seemed to know why or where he went. Later, when he saw Lois going upstairs crying and avoiding his glances, Russell sensed that whatever might have happened had something to do with him. After all, he was a very bright man who by now had seen the jealousy in Bill’s eyes whenever they passed each other. So the charming Irishman went upstairs himself that night, but not to see Lois. He went to pack his suitcase. He was gone before Bill returned from the Hotel St. George.

  A few weeks later, after everything had settled down, Lois wrote a poem for her husband, a tongue-in-cheek ditty to let him know that she not only still loved him, she was very proud of what he was accomplishing.