Recovery (19 page)

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Authors: John Berryman

BOOK: Recovery
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AFTER MENTIONING some official's estimate that it would take, with present facilities, five hundred years to treat all the alcoholics in Iowa alone—this was the fourth time Alan had heard this talk but he was listening, listening-Father Krueger leaned forward a little over the lectern. Tall, gentle, black-robed, he did not lecture to the patients, but merely spoke quietly towards and in them, with the kindness of a recovered priest dry now twelve or fifteen years, God knew how long. He was the most beloved of the lecturing staff of Ward W; Alan wondered, often, whether his fate would have been different if he had been able to take his Fifth Step with Father Krueger—whose schedule had made it impossible—instead of with the perfunctory priest he had taken it with, Father Grame, who hardly listened to him, asked no questions, told him to pray, and extolled AA-one hour or less, and out. He thought with satisfaction of the high news that Charley Boyle had
confronted
Grame during his Fifth Step, a new world record. ‘It's not how much,' Father was saying, ‘or over how long, we drink, but
why
we drink—in our case, we drink because of what it will do for us,' and he told the story of his sacramental wine. Over-estimating the spiritual readiness of the congregation, he had found himself left once with a whole half-chalice-ful. ‘I was appalled, but it was necessary to drink it down, and I did. It was not until four hours later, when next I thought of the circumstance, that I realized that it had had
no effect
on me.'
Alan suspected that he had in fact prayed and had his prayer answered, suppressing this out of humility. He thought of his shame over his own pride the day before, alleviated only, and not much, by a chat in the Snack Room with Charley at 3 a.m. ‘Why, the whole world's as proud as Satan, Alan. I'm a very proud man meself.' The cheery cocky furrowed blue-eyed eyebrows-lifted old face grinning up at him across their white paper coffee-cups comforted Severance in the silent night. Still he remembered what his counsellor had said to him angrily at Howarden—‘Alcoholics can't afford pride'—and he identified heavily with Stack's shame when it emerged in Group later that morning. Stack had been raging at his step-daughter for her bedroom walls festooned with film stars. Very high-minded and explosive he was, until under Keg's and then Harley's pressure he switched sharply round. ‘I'm a hypocrite!' he cried. ‘I have bad thoughts myself! The daughter's okay! I don't know what's wrong with me, Harley!' I'm a hypocrite myself, thought Severance, I only pretend to take pride in anything, actually I'm ashamed of it. And besides it's all self, self.
‘The Third Step,' Harley said sideways in his lecture after lunch, his right hand as ever in his back pants-pocket, sounding like an older brother, ‘is to go from where we know what the answer is to where we don't know—now, or ever will know. That is, it involves taking the biggest risk of our lives. We do it: out of utter misery with our
self-
government, and out of trust in God.' Harley was one of the few speakers, clergymen apart, ever to name Him, and Alan felt comfortable. ‘The Fourth Step is
where I am.
The Fifth equals “Here's the material
You
have to work with, Lord.” '
ARABELLA was a bright-faced, plain, tidy woman of forty, short, dressed in a grey sweater and black slacks, who had sat quietly in Mini-group for two weeks looking, except that she smoked as compulsively as Alan, as if she hadn't a care in the world. She had a care in the world, it appeared when Linc asked her on Tuesday morning if she had been thinking about her Contract. She had.
‘Tell us about it.'
‘It's this thing inside me.'
‘When is it inside you? Right now?'
‘All the time.'
‘How does it make you feel?'
‘I want to scream.' Her voice was flat but some of the colour had left her face. Severance was dumbfounded.
‘Is it there when you're asleep?' Linc asked casually.
‘I guess so. Anyway it's here whenever I wake up.'
‘And you want to scream?'
‘All the time.'
‘For how long now?'
‘God knows. Years.'
‘You don't remember a time when you didn't have it?'
‘Drinking sends it away.'
‘But you can't drink, can you? You know that?'
‘Yes.'
Linc reflected. ‘It's in your body. Can you say exactly where?'
‘In the lower part of my chest and stomach.'
‘How big is it?'
‘Bigger than I am.'
‘It's bigger than your whole body?'
‘Oh no. Just bigger than inside.'
‘I see,' he said as confidently as if he had been a banker arranging a small loan with a valued depositor. ‘Can you see this thing?'
Hesitation, then: ‘Sort of.'
‘Suppose you take it out and station it in midair, facing you, your arm's length out in front. Can you do that?'
‘It's very heavy.'
‘Sure, but we're just imagining making it float out there. Can you do that?'
‘I guess so.'
‘Do it.'
She closed her eyes, and a little tremor moved her narrow shoulders. Her eyes opened slowly, fixed.
‘Is it out there?'
‘Yes.' The word came out half relief, half fear, with a sigh.
‘What shape is it?'
‘It's square. It's a cube, sort of.'
‘Has it any colour?'
‘Oh yes, it's black. It's very ugly.'
‘Shiny black or dull?'
‘Dull black.'
‘Rough or smooth?'
‘In between.'
‘What does that mean?'
‘Well, it has smooth ridges all over it.'
‘And how big is it now?'
She put her hands out, about eighteen inches between the palms.
‘The same distance high and wide and deep?'
‘Yes.'
‘How does it make you feel, hanging out there?'
‘Well, it's nice to be rid of it for a minute.'
‘You don't sound as if it was nice.' Severance, too, had picked up an undertone. ‘How does it really make you feel?'
‘Scared.'
‘Scared of what?'
‘When it comes back in.'
‘But you know it has to come back in.'
‘Does it have to?'
‘Of course.'
‘Okay. Now listen to me.' Line re-crossed his long legs and leaned forward. ‘Before you put it back in, I want you to make an agreement with me. You spend a great deal of time worrying about this thing, don't you? You wish it wasn't there inside you, right? You pretend it isn't, but in fact it is, and nothing you can do will make it go away, right?'
‘That's true.'
‘Okay. I want you to quit. I want you to put it back in, and instead of trying not to think about it, I want you to think about it as much as possible, without worrying about it. Just carry it around with you, for the next twenty-four hours, till we meet tomorrow morning, giving it your whole attention. Don't try to forget about it and don't pretend anything. Keep saying to yourself, “Here it is, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.” Do you think you can do that?'
‘I can try.'
‘I don't want you to try. I want you to do it. Will you?'
‘Just till tomorrow, you say?'
‘Twenty-four hours. After that, you can go back to worrying your head off. Is it a bargain?'
‘Where's the bargain? What do I get out of it?'
‘I don't know. That's up to you.'
‘All right. I'll do it.'
‘Good. Now put it back in.'
Arabella closed her eyes, and the thing seemed to Alan to be sucked off into nothingness, as he felt himself in the grip of an inspiration like Pope John's when wondering what use to make of his brief power he said suddenly one day to an attendant
‘Consilium!
' He Severance would call an anti-Council all by himself. For weeks he had been worrying sweating torturing his problem with no result that he could see but extensions of mystery. He would give it a twenty-four-hour rest. What was one day lost? He determined, with joy, to do
nothing about it.
The rest of Mini-group and Group and lunch and the lecture passed with such a rare sense of freedom, energy set loose, that by mid-afternoon he decided to extend the moratorium by an extra day, to forty-eight hours, and as he climbed into bed that night he felt so unusually comfortable that he resolved to abandon the problem forever. He slept like a baby, poor Severance. When he announced to Linc that he was giving up Contract Two, the long man nodded with satisfaction, ‘Okay,' and Alan found himself with no new contract to propose and he felt that he had never done anything so wise before in all his harried dishevelled wicked life as here finally to confess failure. Long afterwards, dry through many difficult months and wondering one evening how
that
had been so easy, he was tempted to ascribe the major praise, not to himself of course but to the luck of this renunciation, and he thought for the first time in many years of a story told by St Augustine—apparently a joke making its way round the churches of North Africa in the last decades of the Fourth Century. Question: Why did God create Hell? (It was, Alan swore to himself, a damned good question.) Answer: He needed a place to put the impious who enquire into his mysteries. The great sweet Bishop does not find this funny, but Severance considered it a riot—best explanation available, though of course nearly all significant human behaviour, like his sobriety, was over-determined too, Freud
was right about that. Einstein might once have been whimsical enough, in a letter to Bohr lately published, to venture doubts about causality altogether, but the universe sparkled and geared with it, with Command, the order of intimate forces. As a crypto-medievalist Severance had always been impressed by the scholastic warning against multiplying causes beyond necessity, indeed he found this useful in his work, but in the bewildering worlds of bio-psycho-socio-spiritual disease and recovery one went as far as possible, with Freud, and then surrendered to a self-respecting nescience. The disappearance of the drive was as weird as the drive itself.
DRY-DRUNK
Z
ING, AND EVEN VOOM, distinguished Severance from this moment in his (no doubt about it) ultimate treatment for chronic alcoholism. Afire with goodwill, he welcomed new patients limping in, entertained his friends with outrageous stories, confronted in Group and out, took—privately—everybody's temperature, assessing their degree of progress like the veteran he was, who had been told ten days ago he was about to be discharged. He felt ready, now. But with his tender feelings towards most of his fellow-Repeaters restored, he was in no hurry. He wanted
everybody
to get well, or well-er. He was not alarmed by a minor setback on Wednesday morning.
Joining in a confrontation of Letty, his expression ‘my little students' was picked up by Keg as significant. Alan defended it as merely habitual and affectionate. But when the matter recurred to him late that grey afternoon he wondered. By an arrangement between the two deans concerned, Severance sometimes gave eccentric courses in one or another of three departments or programs of the Arts College and the Graduate School, and one afternoon the previous winter, teaching
Hamlet,
he had lost his temper with half his seminar when, first, they couldn't see a fully justifiable fatherly concern for Ophelia's chastity in Polonius'
forbidding her to receive the Prince's visits (they thought it was none of the old man's business) and, second, when one lofty young man characterized Polonius' famous parting advices to his son Laertes as ‘a series of clichés.' He tried, patiently enough, to make clear to these midwestern democratic children the threat posed by royal amorousness to the nubile daughter of an inferior, but at the sneer ‘clichés,' smoldering, he scrawled, ‘Give thy thoughts no tongue,' on the blackboard and glossed it for ten minutes with everything from the Greek sage sitting against the wall with his left hand on his genitals and his right over his mouth, as the worse danger to Christ's, ‘Let your communication be Yea, yea, and Nay, nay, for whatsoever is beyond these cometh of evil.' No visible effect, and he blew up. He read them the riot-act for smugness, immaturity, inability to apply their knowledge of life (most were in their early, some in their middle, twenties) to literature, disrespect for traditional wisdom, gross willingness to take for granted what was in fact profound, and other abnormalities. He calmed himself in short order, and went on to expound the gap between Hamlet's political hostility to the usurping King's tool and Shakespeare's half-contemptuous half-sympathetic serial presentation of the anxious father and decaying-statesman-turned-sneak (necessary, the first, for a family-group to spotlight the Prince's isolation, and the second, for the plot), but Ruth when he described the affair that evening was less sympathetic than he expected, and two students dropped the course. (Question: Had he had one or two drinks before the seminar, as sometimes in recent years he did, and if so, had he got partly out of control because of drinking?) On the other hand, several students troubled to tell him in conference that his charges had been true and that they personally intended to approach things differently from now on. The lofty boy apologized for ‘clichés' and wound up with a splendid paper on the source, for some of Polonius' aphorisms, in
Sidney's
Arcadia
; four other student-papers were so much abler still that Severance planned to publish them as a symposium in a new Texas quarterly that had sought his counsel. Still, a sorry business. Was he really far less sympathetic with his students than he liked to suppose? Examples down the years of impatience contempt intolerance thronged nervously to him until he sat huddled in his chair an image to himself of Mr Generation Gap. Was the strain of suppressing the aggressive (lower) half of his feelings for them responsible for the fact that he
always
drank after teaching? This idea came with a certain force of relief, as of a menace that could be handled, out in the open. But then he reflected that it wasn't so: when drinking he drank every afternoon anyway. He taught hard, as he experimented, as he researched, as he wrote, hard; the strains were the same.
Besides, the picture was wrong. He had been made uneasy again and again, uneasy to the point of disdain, by younger colleagues around the country fulminating against their students; just as, at a faculty luncheon for him after a guest lecture at CCNY, long ago, he had been disagreeably impressed by the professors' complex attitudes to their students, who had just asked him such brilliant questions, the professors sitting in around the lecture-room. Themselves tweedy types, socially anti-Semitic to a man, they were yet partly boastful about their able young Jews, and above all fearful of their superiority—correctly, if the level of the two discussions, before and at lunch, indicated fairly the intellectual thrust of the taught and the teachers at City. Severance was amused but disgusted. And now contrary instances of his care and call it love for his students came happily to him—the suicidal boy recovering at Berkeley whom he walked up the hill every afternoon to visit in hospital-warring young husbands and wives reconciled (one failure though)—a boy in the Arts College supported in his resolve to join the police, against the united
rage of his girl-friend, his parents, and his best friends one of whom offered him a $10,000-a-year partnership in a liquor supply business—two suicidal girls, one of whom barely made it back from forty Vallium. His office hours over the years a sort of clinic. Vulnerable young faces, alternative-haunted, anguished, glum. Canada or jail? Practice or research? Science or religion? Service or money? Here or abroad? Sometimes he could pass them on, but mostly he was a last resort and mentally he had Mr Truman's desk-sign on his desk: ‘The Buck Stops Here.' Absolving himself, for a change—he had generally done his best, and forgotten about it. Letters came from ex-students thanking him for this or that long-past ‘generosity' or ‘salvation' without awakening memory. A note passed to him in flight from somebody invisible further down the plane had begun, ‘I just wanted to say that fourteen years ago …' This rare recollection calmed him now, and dismissing the subject he turned to Judaic study with fresh humility.
He smoked and read, quietly, until he came to a sharp sentence about ‘obligation.' Feeling brought up short, he realized it was high time he did something about the ‘amends' Steps—got on, altogether, with his Programme. He looked them up in the back of his 24-Hour Book. Step Eight was, ‘Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.' Well, he had done that at Howarden a year ago, a gratifyingly short list, too. He was almost never violent, drinking. It wasn't until last Spring at Northeast that he noticed the Step said nothing about ‘while drinking' or ‘by drinking' and the shock of this so lengthened his list that when he went on to Step Nine he quailed. He read it again: ‘Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.' He had
not
done so, except, some, to Ruth and their daughter. A large smooth face drifted before him, cold, detestable. Alan could not remember
anyone he had ever hated but Graham Weeks. At one time, when he first moved to C——, they had drunk together at parties, once the Weekses had taken him home with them and he and Graham had drunk and laughed till breakfast. What had happened to chill the relation he couldn't say, never knew, but later when Weeks had shifted into administration a far from unusual change had come over the scholar, power transformed him into a tyrant. A complication of appointment brought Severance partially under his authority for several years: he was in a position to do the scientist harm, and he did it. At a large garden party, Severance very drunk, they had quarrelled —what about?—he recalled chaotically saying to the taller man's face, ‘We'll never speak to each other again,' before his wife dragged him away. Then his final promotion put him out of Weeks's power, his rage died, and he was actually sorry when general discontent forced the man out as associate dean and he returned to harmless teaching, though his abuses and injustices particularly to some of the younger men Severance was glad to see at an end. What harm had he done Weeks? He had hated him—that was wicked—never mind the long-standing provocation, his drunken outburst (nothing was right done drinking) could by inflaming have assisted the other's moral deterioration. He felt guilty. Begin here. It was true that they were often warned, the patients, against beginning amends until their sobriety was well established, for fear of the effect of the occasional inevitable rebuff, but here on the Ward he ran no risk there. Moreover, his eyes dropped to Step Ten. ‘Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.' Promptly. An image, frequent and adorable to him, of Charles Darwin's alacrity in this, came before him: the great man, old, knocking on a house-guest's door in the middle of the night to apologize for some mistaken view. He leafed his scratch-pad to a fresh sheet and wrote painfully.
One of Severance's bad habits was reading his letters over and over before enveloping them. He was made uneasy now by the end of one sentence: ‘though many others, to my knowledge, besides myself, felt that you strained justice in the exercise of the authority of your office'—without, however, being aware that it was this surviving hostility, expressed under the guise of doing his duty to the truth, which caused counsellors to warn against precipitate amends. He also felt vaguely ashamed of giving the hospital as his address, lest he seem to make a claim on Weeks's sympathy, but he wanted to hear back immediately.
He needn't have worried. The reply was icy, hypocritical, complacent. ‘I do not remember the occasion you refer to with such shame. I am entirely familiar with the University regulations for its administrative officers, and am not aware that I ever in any degree deviated from them in the performance of my duties.' Severance, though disappointed and hurt and outraged, recognized at once that he had been an ass to hope for a different response. But it was weeks before he tried any more Step Nine, months later still before he concluded that he had been partly grandstanding, even seeking revenge. He got what he asked for.
 
 

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