Читать книгу September Remember - Eliot Taintor - Страница 8

Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. Rick turned his head slowly to look at Joe. Joe’s hands on the wheel were relaxed and steady, his wrists flexed, letting the car have its head through the skiddy darkness. The way you let a mule pick his own path over the side of a mountain, your rein loose but your hand ready for a quick firm pull. Funny, how smart men always seemed to treat cars and boats and planes like animals, humoring ’em a bit, coaxing ’em along. Joe was smart all right. He’d been smart this morning at the police station.

“You’re a hell of a good friend, Joe.” Rick managed to get the words out. And felt like a fool. You can’t thank a guy for the sort of thing Joe had done for him. He slumped back watching the endless black road, his past pulling at him, a long wet black ribbon, heavier, blacker than the ebony asphalt … as if the asphalt had melted into a dark, pervasive liquid, oozing into every crevice of his existence, tarring everything it touched. Which was everything. It engulfed not only the present but the past.

He had never been happy. He knew that now. Never in all his life. His mind scurried around like a faithful dog, bringing sticks for his approval. “You were happy playing first base at Exeter,” his mind would bark hopefully. “And that summer after the war … a Friendship sloop in a little land-locked harbor and a slim colt of a girl with a forehead like a Greek temple. How about that? Skating with Adelaide at Lake Placid … the sharp snow-cleared air and the bonfires around the lake at night and the music … and Adelaide in a short black velvet skirt and white fur jacket and small round muff … professionals toe-dancing in the spotlight, but the crowd watching Adelaide and Rick waltz, because they were young and in love and Adelaide was beautiful.” No not even that. He rejected them all. They didn’t seem real now. They didn’t have anything to do with him.

The Winged Victory had asked him once how he kept going when the black monster of a hangover clutched him. It was just before they broke up in a furious argument, he blaming her hypochondria, she pointing to his drinking as the cause of their intolerable relationship.

“You hang on like a beaten prize fighter, hoping for the gong,” Rick had said. “Your mind tells you the damn depression will end sometime. It has ended before. You don’t believe your mind. You hear it only dimly, as a punch-drunk fighter hears advice yelled from his corner.”

Dimly. You hear only dimly. Had Joe actually said just now, “Sure, I’m a friend of yours, Rick. But that isn’t the point.” A funny thing for Joe to say. There was a quizzical smile at the corner of Joe’s wide mouth. The smile stretched to a grin as Joe turned for a quick look at Rick’s startled face.

“I thought that might get you,” Joe laughed, “You haven’t heard a damn thing I’ve been saying. But it’s true. Friendship is beside the point.”

“You mean …” Rick puzzled over the statement, “that you’d have done what you did this morning for any drunken bum?”

“Well, I might not have pulled quite so many wires for any other guy,” Joe admitted, “but I’d have gone to bat just the same. Every A.A. would. It’s part of our program.”

“I don’t get it, Red,” Rick said. Not that it mattered. He had seen a picture of five men on a rubber raft in the middle of the Pacific—one of them just a kid with a thin, haunted face who looked as if he might jump overboard before a rescuing ship turned up. He felt like that now. Too damn exhausted and hopeless to care about the meeting they were heading for in White Plains.

Joe had dragged Rick into a drug store near Times Square when they walked out of the jail; had filled him up with coffee and tomato juice and suddenly started talking about a bunch of ex-drunks who called themselves “Alcoholics Anonymous.” Joe was one of them and proud of it. His voice had boomed out in the small booth, making Rick’s head pound harder than ever—if that were possible.

“It’s the God-damnedest organization, Rick … it’s like seeing Lazarus rise from the grave … ‘dead drunk’ isn’t any figure of speech, it’s a fact. We say ‘sober fact,’ and ‘dead drunk,’ and boy we’re right … you are dead when you’re drunk … dead to the world. There isn’t just one Lazarus in A.A., there are a thousand Lazaruses, not one miracle—a thousand miracles … you see them with your own eyes every time you go to a meeting … swine being turned back into men….” He had tugged at his wild red forelock. “I’m not exaggerating, Rick. I haven’t been so happy since I pitched that no-hit game against Yale.”

Rick had held his head in his left hand and lifted the shaking cup to his mouth, taking small careful sips of coffee. When Joe said, “You go over to my room at the Harvard Club and sleep it off. I’ll pick you up late this afternoon and take you to a meeting in White Plains,” Rick had agreed. His resistance had been so low that if Joe had suggested jumping off Brooklyn Bridge he would have agreed to that too.

Clockwise. Counter-clockwise.

Joe pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped so abruptly that a Packard skidded around them with an indignant blast of its horn. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. The busy arms jerked to rest.

“Helping other drunks helps us, see?” Joe said, “Reminds us of the messes we used to get into ourselves. Keeps us on the beam.” He got a cigar out of his breast pocket, struggled with the cellophane wrapping, bit off the end, struck a match and finally spoke while the flame died and darkness came back over his strong humorous face with its high beak of a nose.

“Look, Rick. You’re serious about laying off the stuff, right?”

“Right.”

“And I gather you’ve tried to stop plenty of times on your own?”

“I’ve tried,” Rick said. God, how he had tried. For the last five years. Cutting it down … cutting it out … drinking nothing but beer—until a case of beer caught up on him—never drinking alone … never drinking in the bush … never drinking except in the bush … never drinking before dinner … never drinking except before dinner … never drinking with women … never drinking without women … going on the wagon … and falling off the wagon…. Time and Time and Time and Time. “I stuck it once for fifty-nine days.” That was his record. Before and since, the twenty-first day always threw him. It was a damn queer jinx. “I’ve been aiming at a year, but I’ve never made it.”

“The wagon isn’t any good. Not for a real alky, it isn’t.”

Joe was making the same point he’d insisted on at lunch when he had refused an old-fashioned. “What the hell difference does it make what you call not taking a drink?” Rick protested feebly.

“One whale of a difference. When you’re on the wagon part of your mind is always looking forward to the bender you’ll go on at the end of your stretch. The A.A.’s go at it another way. We’re only dry for twenty-four hours. That’s all. Any dope can lay off liquor for one day. Different psychology, see?”

It probably made sense. Rick heard himself asking how the hell anyone could tell whether he was a “real alky” or not, but he felt as if someone else were saying the words. His despair had changed suddenly to a conviction of unreality, which was even more frightening. Usually the sensation that he was not there at all, the need to pinch himself to establish his identity, was a separate mood. Tonight it had hit him in the middle of the familiar depression. He turned down the window and let the dark damp air blow across his face.

Joe was saying, “You have to answer that yourself, Rick. Put it this way: do I control liquor? Or does liquor control me? Can I walk into a bar and take one drink and walk out? Or does one drink make me feel there’s not enough booze in the whole world to satisfy me? And how about a shot in the arm in the morning? That’s a pretty sure test. If you need the hair of the dog, you’re an alcoholic.”

“I guess I am.” Rick spoke slowly, almost indifferently. After last night, after other nights and days of fear and misery, he was ready to admit that he couldn’t control his drinking. It seemed pretty obvious, but he couldn’t see how it helped.

Joe, however, sounded pleased. “Good for you, Rick. That’s the first step and you’ll be surprised to find what a tough one it is for most A.A.s. It was for me. I kept kidding myself that I was just a hard drinker, telling myself I could handle it. I didn’t tumble to the truth until I realized that alcohol is a poison to some people. Yup, just the way sugar is to a diabetic … or pollen to an asthmatic. The point is nobody blames a diabetic. Nobody scolds him, or preaches at him. If he wants to stay healthy he damn well avoids sugar. Right? Okay, so Joe Kelly avoids liquor.”

“How?” Joe was trying to help, but he seemed to be talking all around the point. Rick turned the window up and shivered, his body shaking as if in an attack of malaria.

Joe gave him a sharp, anxious look and pressed his foot on the starter. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. The windshield wiper leapt into its routine. “What you need is coffee. Good hot coffee and plenty of it. Ought to be a dump along pretty soon.”

It was a dump all right. A lonely-looking Greek was reading the funnies behind a deserted counter. “Hi, Aristotle.” Joe called all Greeks Aristotle and they all responded with bewildered grins. Rick stretched his legs in a narrow booth and moved a tall sugar-shaker and a napkin holder across a spotted table top … an empty beer bottle, a glass, and a mustard jar … a bartender grumbling as they lurched into the street. He wondered what had happened to Pete … and Dora … the patriotic whore. Joe put two thick white cups of coffee on the table and went back for a couple of slices of coconut pie. Rick gulped the coffee. It wasn’t bad. Strong and bitter but not bad. He could feel the heat rushing through him, thawing him out as if he had been half frozen in a snow bank. He straightened his shoulders and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“More mocha, Aristotle,” Joe shouted and pulled at his wild red hair. “That’s better, Rick. Couldn’t have you falling asleep at your first meeting.”

“I guess I’m not much of a prospect, Saint Augustine. I couldn’t seem to keep my mind on your lecture.”

“Guess I’m not much of a lecturer,” Joe laughed. “I’m so full of this A.A. stuff that I don’t know where to begin—or where to stop. But don’t say you’re a bum prospect—yet. Wait till you see some of the other guys who’ve made the grade.” He laughed again and his voice boomed on in the small stuffy room. His voice that was like Saint Patrick’s charming the snakes out of Ireland. It wasn’t Irish really, and it wasn’t a brogue at all, but an intonation of vastness. A vast melancholy and a vast humor. “It’s that voice of yours, Red, not your wit that got you on the Lampoon.” Rick had kidded Joe their sophomore year at Harvard. Now he felt Joe’s voice seeping through his mind the way the coffee had rushed through his body. Warming it. Waking it to life. Joe was talking about the town drunks who’d done fifty stretches in the County Jail; about the rich bastards who’d been in and out of fancy institutions; about the men who’d been lawyers and engineers and ended up behind the eight ball, sleeping in Bowery flop-houses, spending their days on the “Beach,” panhandling nickels to buy “smoke.”

The rain had stopped and the lights of White Plains were clear in a suddenly opening sky. As if by the same miracle the blackness of Rick’s depression had lifted … the outer world matching the inner … what the devil was that called? Rick puzzled over man’s pathetic attempt to fit the prodigal indifference of Nature to his own small moods … Pathetic … Pathetic fallacy. Joe maneuvered past a crowded bus and pointed out the County Center where the A.A. meetings were held. The parking lot was jammed with cars.

“All these belong to ex-drunks?” Rick asked.

Joe laughed. “Mostly Bingo addicts. Me, I’d rather be an alky. More interesting.”

They climbed a wide flight of stairs to the second floor and looked down from a balcony onto a room where hundreds of people sat hunched over little squares of cardboard. The announcer would call a number in a bored, emphatic voice and hundreds of eyes would shift anxiously from left to right; hundreds of hands reach tentatively toward a pile of lozenges. There was none of the reckless gaiety of roulette; none of the compelling excitement of the whirling wheel, the click of the ball, and the clipped fatality of the croupier’s, “Messieurs, Mesdames, faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits.” Rick turned away from the stupid mediocrity of this timid game of chance and followed Joe up the stairs. His hands were cold and clammy. He wiped them furtively on his trousers, not wanting to shake hands with anyone, not wanting to meet these screwy strangers after all.

Fifty or sixty men and women filled a small smoky room with loud voices and laughter. Cheerful crowd anyhow, Rick thought. He’d been afraid they’d be a dreary-looking bunch of self-righteous reformers. Then his mind side-tracked illogically. Hell, they didn’t look like drunks. Too damn normal. They could never have known his crazy despair … never have done the fool things he had done … Gail…. He must telephone Gail. She ought to be home now.

“Hi there, Joe.” A stocky man, with round brown eyes and a flute player’s curved upper lip, detached himself from a group near the door.

“Kidd Whistler—Avery Rickham. It’s Rick’s first meeting,” Joe said.

“That so? When were you drunk last, Mr. Rickham?” Whistler had the aggressively strong grip of short men.

“Last night.” Rick was surprised that he felt no impulse to add, “None of your damn business.”

Whistler balanced on his toes like a cheerleader getting set to jump up and down in front of the grand stand, “Good for you, Rickham. Got to be honest about it. I could have told anyhow from your hand. Clammy. Sure sign of the jitters, eh, Red?”

Joe gave a quick look at Rick to see how he was taking it. He wasn’t blowing up for a wonder. You couldn’t miss Kidd’s exuberant good will. “Kidd has done a swell job on a lot of pretty hopeless drunks from here to Georgia. Sat up all night with a guy who had a loaded gun and was planning to use it on himself. I’ll give you his phone number in case you ever get that way, Rick.”

Phone. He had to call Gail. Now. “Is there a telephone booth in the building?” Rick asked.

“Downstairs. On your left. Want me to show you?”

“No, thanks. It may take quite a while.” Rick hurried off, missing Kidd Whistler’s wink at Joe.

A distant hopeless whirr buzzed in his ear like a late November fly against a window pane. He jangled the hook impatiently. “The line is busy. We will call you back in twenty minutes.” “Hell, no,” Rick shouted into the mouthpiece and banged up the receiver. He had been annoyed when he had tried to reach Gail earlier in the day by the mechanical indifference of dial phones, nostalgic for a human voice saying, “Number, please.” Now, the cheerful assumption that he had nothing else to do but hang around for twenty minutes—and why always twenty? Why not fifteen? Or twenty-five—sent him pounding furiously up the stairs.

People had started to settle down on rows of folding chairs, but Joe and Kidd Whistler were still standing near the door.

“You owe me a buck, Kidd,” Joe shouted, slapping Rick on the back. “Good boy. Kidd bet me a dollar you’d never show up … or turn up stinko in a coupla hours.”

Whistler pulled out his wallet, and his flute player’s mouth rippled into a wide grin. “Glad to pay up on that bet,” he turned to Rick, “I figured your call was a phony … no pun intended … had the same stunt pulled on me once. Drove to hell and gone to pick up a drunk whose wife wanted him to go to an A.A. meeting. Never works out right when a wife or mother tries to shove a guy into A.A. You got to want this thing yourself, brother, and don’t forget it. Well, this fellow seemed okay in the car. A bit over-hung, but okay. When we got up here, first thing he asked, just like you did, is there a phone in the building … and vanished. Boy, when he came back you could smell his breath clear across the room, but he acted real nice and quiet till he started to snore. In the middle of Hank Frost’s speech—I think it was Hank’s—he rolls off his chair and into the aisle.”

“What the joke, boys?” A tall, slender woman joined them. Rick had noticed her when he first came in—a lovely pointed face like a Medieval saint—and wondered how any husband with a wife like that could be a drunk. Joe introduced her as Sylvia Landon and added that he and Rick had been friends, drunk and sober—but mostly drunk, since college.

“Joe’s a real friend,” Sylvia Landon smiled at Rick and slipped her arm through Joe’s, “the kind of a friend who’s always there when you need him most.”

“He was around when I needed him this morning,” Rick agreed, “yanked me out of jail.”

“I don’t see any prison pallor,” Sylvia smiled, “your stay must have been brief. I did a ninety-day stretch two years ago for heaving a rock through a stuffed shirt’s window.”

Rick looked incredulously at the lovely pointed face with its luminous spiritual quality, but he could find nothing baffled and angry in the serene blue eyes, nothing belligerent. “Sounds like a pious idea,” he ventured.

“The judge didn’t think so.” Bitterness edged Sylvia’s low voice. “Joe knows what a mess I made of things. He got my sentence reduced.”

“Good old Joseph Saint Augustine Fix-it Kelly,” Rick reverted to the phrase which had always gotten Joe’s goat at Harvard.

“Hey, cut that out.” Joe sounded the way he had at college. He looked at his watch. “Time to get going, Kidd. Keep an eye on Rick, will you Sylvia? No phony phone calls, boy.”

The two men ambled down the aisle together. Kidd Whistler rapped on a large oak table and went up on his toes in a cheerleader’s gesture. “Well, folks, this is the regular Wednesday evening meeting of the White Plains Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. I guess you all know me, but for the benefit of any new members I better say that I am an alcoholic—and how. Sorry I can’t tell you my sad story tonight because we’ve got a good friend here from the Greenwich group and in just a minute I’m going to turn the meeting over to him. First, I’ve got a couple of announcements to make.” He picked a bunch of papers off the desk. “Here’s a letter from New York about the Annual Dinner. It’s going to be a bang-up affair with swell speakers. If you missed it last year, don’t miss this one. I’ve got a stack of tickets right here, so be sure to come up after the meeting and get yours. Now here’s a …”

Rick squirmed in his chair. It was small and the back stuck into his spine. What the hell had he gotten into anyway—a God-damned Rotary Club?

With quick perception Sylvia Landon leaned toward him and whispered, “Kidd’s a bit too much of an organizer, but he’s a salesman. When he gets through selling shoes he sells A.A. He’s started groups all over the country and he keeps in touch with them, puts pep in the old ones. He really does a lot of good.” She seemed to be persuading herself as well as Rick and he relaxed gratefully, stretched his long legs into the aisle, and decided to stick it out.

Joe was standing next to the oak table now. His reddish hair on end, his red-brown eyes alert as a setter’s, his voice booming out with its rich intonation of vastness—a vast melancholy and a vast humor. You could feel the crowd respond. Liking Joe. Liking what he was saying.

The crowd in the Roosevelt bar—New Orleans, not forty-fifth street—had liked Joe too. The way he had flourished his wallet, pulling out a wad of fifty-dollar bills, handing Rick a bundle. “A little expense money, pal,” he had shouted and the crowd had felt good about it. People never seemed to envy Joe his luck, never complained that he got all the breaks. He had a way of making them forget the “quiet desperation” of their own lives, of swooping them up and into his wild, adventurous world. A tired-looking jobber from Kansas City had attached himself to Joe like an elderly Saint Bernard to a frisky young setter. He had insisted on treating them to Ramos fizzes till they finally broke away and settled down in Joe’s room where a huge fan zoomed like an aeroplane over their heads.

“Here’s the story, Rick.” Joe had flung his panama in the general direction of the bed.

“Shoot.” Rick had made himself comfortable by throwing his legs over the arm of a dust-covered chair. “Your cable didn’t give me much of an idea what was up.” It had come at a fortunate moment though. Rick was about due for a vacation and at loose ends as to where to go, since avoiding New York had become almost a mania, so Joe’s “On big Hollywood assignment. Chicle Camp story. Fat salary for you technical advisor. Meet Roosevelt New Orleans. Cable how soon you can make it,” had seemed like a good gamble.

“You know my firm handles one of the big chicle accounts….”

“I ought to.” Rick’s eyes had darkened with the memory of the week after Adelaide’s death when he had rushed into Joe’s office demanding a field job somewhere—anywhere—so long as it was far enough away from New York.

“Right,” Joe had hurried on, “but you didn’t know—only a few pulp editors know—that Joe Kelly has been trying to crash the fiction market. I figured the pulps would be an easy way to start.” He gave Rick a sheepish grin. “Well, I’d just sold a chicle yarn when I happened to hear that Paradise Pix was planning a big picture on some American enterprise in the Tropics—coffee—fruit—sugar or…. Boy, why not chicle?” Joe’s grin widened into confidence. “I grabbed my manuscript, hopped me a plane to the Coast, and did the Movie Magnates ever fall for it, especially the ants in the bush.”

“Ants in whose what?”

“Don’t get funny now. You’re my technical expert, not my gag man. The ants are the big scene. Wait till I come to that. It’s terrific.” Joe reached for his briefcase, pulled out a luridly covered magazine. “You can read it later, I’ll just hit the high spots now. The heroine, a beautiful Maya Princess, is writing her senior thesis at College on chicle, the sacred confection of her ancestors. The sapota tree was the only wood used in the great Maya temples, or haven’t you run into any archaeologists? Anyhow, this gal wants to see how gum is produced and the company invites her to visit a modern chicle camp. It’s a swell layout, everything as clean and fancy as a dairy at the World’s Fair, situated on a narrow peninsula jutting into a big silvery lake. Romantic. Only there’s a drought which is holding back the flow of sap in the middle of the rainy season….”

“Oh yeah,” Rick protested.

“Don’t be so damn literal. The drought is important. You’ll see why in a minute. Now for the hero. He’s a handsome young timber cruiser who’s in trouble with the boss. He falls for the Princess. And how! The villain is a Maya Indian who worships the beautiful Princess and is even crazier about the beautiful sapota trees. He’s a religious fanatic, see? He can’t stand the idea of the sacred sap being wrapped up in neat little packages of gum and chewed by alien people in strange cities. So he starts a forest fire on the other side of the lake with the wind blowing toward the camp. He knows the woods are full of army ants, the big man-eaters. They can’t swim and their only way to escape from the flames is to make for the peninsula. But he isn’t leaving anything to chance. Ants love honey as much as bears. In the night he spills a trail of wild honey right down to the edge of the camp.

“Now the villain is close to the drainage ditch just outside the camp. His work is nearly done. Soon the ants will smell the gringos and go for them. Then he will rescue the Princess in a cayuca. But his foot catches in a root. He falls. Furiously he slashes at the root with his machete and cuts his heel. The ants smell his blood, they’re on him, his screams wake the camp. A tethered mule neighs in agony as the ants reach him.

“‘Ants!’ yells the chiclero on watch. The Princess wakes from her hammock to a scene of wild confusion. Enter our hero. He shouts to the men, points to the chicle. Silvery, snow-clean chicle bubbling in great pots. They swing the kettles and spill the boiling chicle into the drainage ditch. As the ants hit the chicle they curl up like paper in a plumber’s torch. The Princess is saved.”

“Very realistic!” Rick laughed, “Screen credit to Joseph Augustine Kelly.”

“Nope.” Joe tugged at his red cowlick. “My name isn’t big enough. Paradise dragged in a real writer, Jay Karnes.”

“Tough luck,” Rick could feel Joe’s resentment like a blast from the zooming overhead fan. The fun was knocked out of things for him, too. “Is this guy Karnes working with us?”

“Hell, no. He’s got too much pride and money. Last week he had to get an armored car to move his bonds from one New York bank to another.” Joe laughed. “We’ve got a free hand—practically. And the chicle people are all for it, so long as we give an honest picture of the business. That’s where you come in. Paradise plans to do the shooting in Central America. They’ll want ‘takes’ of natives climbing trees….”

“Chicleros zig-zagging sapotas.”

“That’s the stuff,” Joe approved. “Now you sound like a technical expert. We might have one of the poor bastards fall and show how the company takes care of him and his family. Sorta corny, but I’ll want you to work out a lot of real ‘shots’ to give the public the story of chicle. I’ve got three months leave on full salary, plus our pay checks and expense account from Paradise. Boy, are we all set.”

“Where do we start?” Rick asked. His trip to New Orleans struck him as pretty screwy if Joe was planning on going right back to British Honduras.

“Right here, in a whore house in New Orleans!” Joe howled. “Paradise is paying Jay Karnes plenty to sign the story and the bordello is his idea. It’s his only idea so far.”

It had been hot that week in New Orleans, hotter than British Honduras. And they never did find the whore house Jay Karnes had suggested—liquor and women and gambling all in one spot. But they had a whale of a time looking. There had been bagnios with women and liquor, joints with liquor and gambling. They had done a thorough job of investigation and had wired Hollywood every night to report their progress. Then Joe had hit on the idea of using Lee Christmas in the story. Rick couldn’t see what Lee Christmas had to do with the Epic of Chewing Gum. Joe had said, “You just don’t recognize Hollywood genius when you see it, Rick. Hell, he’s perfect. He was a filibuster, wasn’t he? And he met these spig revolutionists in the Red Light District of New Orleans, didn’t he? After running a train through a red signal because he was color blind and thought it was green. And Bonilla declared he was the engineer they were looking for because there weren’t going to be any stop lights in their revolution. Jay Karnes wanted the story to begin in a brothel in New Orleans, didn’t he? And Paradise hired us to do a chicle picture, didn’t they? Okay, you have to pull the two things together somehow. Lee Christmas would do the trick. He’d fought in Central America, hadn’t he?”

Rick had said he thought Joe had hired him as a chicle expert, but he guessed he was turning into a technical adviser on rum and whore houses. It had been one hell of a bender from New Orleans to Honduras, into the bush and out. Then Rick had gone back to his job and Joe had headed for Hollywood. Nothing had ever come of the picture, so far as Rick knew, but something had happened to the crazy, red-headed Irishman.

The flimsy chair creaked as Rick straightened to look at Joe now.

“Yes, sir,” Joe was saying, putting one leg over the edge of the speaker’s table and pushing aside a stack of A.A. pamphlets. “I come by my boozing ways honestly. Nothing illegitimate about it. My old man was a Saturday night drunk. He’d come out of the mill with his pockets bulging and stop with the gang for a coupla beers….” There was a quick burst of laughter and Joe looked around with a grin. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? He ran true to form all right, rolling home at five a.m., boiled as an owl, shouting fit to wake the dead—and the neighbors. My mother would get him to bed, warn us kids to stay away from him, and go off to early mass….”

Rick could hardly believe his ears. In all the years he had known him, Joe had never mentioned his family. Rick had met Joe at baseball practice freshman year and asked him around. Some of the snobs in Rick’s crowd had tried to high-hat the skinny red-headed “Irish.”

“Prep?” Joe would laugh. “Sure and I attended the Loyola Parochial School and Lowell High.” But there would be a “want to make something of it, pal?” gleam in his red-brown eyes. By the end of sophomore year Joe Kelly in his old brown sweater, with his famous left-handed curve, and his odd squibs in the Lampoon, had become one of the Big Shots in the class. It could happen even at Harvard. A few die-hards had continued to mutter that there must be something damn fishy about Kelly’s family, others accepted the romantic legend, which had somehow got around, that he was an orphan, but for the most part, Joe was invited everywhere and not expected to reciprocate with weekend invitations. Only Rick had worried secretly, afraid that Joe was ashamed of his family. Now, here was Joe talking openly about them at his cockeyed meeting.

“Sure, I inherited the taste for liquor and the inability to handle it, but I went my old man one better. I didn’t just get drunk Saturday nights. Neither did he when he came up a bit in the world. You know how the Irish are at politics—a kind of natural talent like putting a hook on a ball.” Joe swung his left arm as if he were winding up for a pitch. “My father’s cronies set him up in a cigar store when I was twelve where he could sorta keep an eye on the ward heelers. It meant that we kids had to keep an eye on him and the store. It meant that he had a fine chance to close up early and slip around the corner to a saloon, but I never saw him reach for a bottle in the morning. He left that improvement to his oldest son. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that Joe Kelly would’ve been the last guy in the world to become a drunk. I saw what a mess it made of my mother’s life, what tough going it was for us kids. It stands to reason that I—well, there isn’t any reason in an alcoholic’s mind. I didn’t touch the stuff in college—partly because my sister and I pricked our fingers and made a solemn pact, signed in our blood, at the ages of nine and seven, never to touch a drop, mostly because I was in training and broke all the time anyhow. But in France it was different. You’ll hear a lot of guys say they started drinking in the last war, blaming it on trench nerves. It wasn’t like that with me. The Latin way of drinking appealed to me—wine and cognac. I kidded myself that it was different from my old man’s beer with Rye chasers—the poor man’s potion—but it was poison just the same. It took me years to find out that one drink is dynamite for me. One drink is too much—and it is never enough. That’s what we alcoholics are up against. We can’t be moderate drinkers. Ever. Maybe if Bill Griffith had started A.A. twenty years earlier, my old man wouldn’t have been run over by a beer truck. Maybe. He was a stubborn cuss. I get to thinking about him sometimes and the Flexible Flyer he gave me for Christmas when I was eight and the ball games we’d go to and then I know how lucky we A.A.s are. It’s a funny thing to call a bunch of rummies lucky, but I mean it. We’ve found a way to live without liquor. Sounds sorta negative, like a guy who’s learned to walk without a leg.” Joe looked around with his wide, confident grin. “Okay. I’ll make it stronger. We’ve found a way to live. Period.”

Rick heard the applause; heard Joe introducing the next speaker, a large Italian who worked as a chef in a Stamford hotel and who kept marching across the platform with an imaginary book in his hand, saying, “I reada the book, see? Paja seven-one where they tell about the twelva step. I say to myself, ‘Tony Trombetta, thatsa right. You are powerless over the alcohol,’ and I taka the number one step. So Then I taka the number two step. For me that is easy. I knowa God since I been small as a young olive tree. God will helpa me out. For Tony the number two is small step lika this. For some is biga step lika this….”

Rick wasn’t paying much attention. He was thinking about Joe. And his family. It explained a lot of things—why Joe used to vanish out of their lives every summer vacation, with never a post card from a ranch in Arizona or a camp in Maine—why he got such a kick out of handing out those fifty-dollar bills in the Roosevelt bar.

The man across the aisle was getting to his feet. He had a thin, scholarly face and a careful look. Not timid but careful. He put his feet down precisely as he walked to the front of the hall, removed his spectacles and wiped them carefully.

“My name is Duncan MacKenzie and I am an alcoholic.” He made the statement without emotion, as if he were about to testify in a court room. “I have been thinking over what Joe Kelly said about his father—or to be exact….”

Rick was sure MacKenzie would always be exact. He didn’t need to make a point of it. There was an exact crease to the trousers of his grey pin-stripe, an exact part to his thinning grey hair. MacKenzie would be the morose kind of drunk, the kind you saw sitting alone at the end of a bar. Not kidding with anyone. Not getting any fun out of it. Hell, what fun had he gotten himself the last five-six years?

“I’ve been thinking about my own father,” MacKenzie continued. “He was a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished drinker. I always wanted to be like him. I got kicked out of my first prep school for my unsuccessful experiments with alcohol, but I worked like the devil at college and law school, where my father had made a brilliant record. When he took me into his firm I imagine most of our friends thought I drank too much because I had an inferiority complex. They were quite right. I did have one. Not so much because I lacked my father’s brains, as because I did not have his head for liquor.” He gave a wry smile. “You see my ambition had transferred itself, I knew I could never be as good a lawyer as my father, but I kept on trying to be as good a drinker. I was a failure at that too.”

He took off his spectacles, wiped them with a neatly folded white handkerchief and put them back in his breast pocket. “I have sometimes been called a typical Scot, which usually means in the popular mind a dour, reserved, solitary person. I was not, however, a solitary drinker. I wanted to be the center of a crowd. A few drinks made me feel as popular and witty as my father—at first. I seemed to have a great many friends when I was drinking. I seemed to be a regular fellow. I even became a member of the 11:40 Club.

“This remarkable organization had half a dozen members in the town of South Orange where my wife and I were then living. We were all alcoholics—although, of course, none of us admitted that self-evident fact. We thought we were getting by. We were pleased with ourselves. We made sounds of somewhat contemptuous pity when we heard about friends who got tickets for drunken driving—or were carted off to sanitariums. We could handle liquor. We got to our jobs every day. On the 11:40. We took a curious kind of pride in passing by the saloon near the ferry on the Jersey side. And usually we made a point of skipping the first one on the New York side. Conscious of having demonstrated enormous self-control, we would stop at the second or third saloon on Chambers Street for our eye-openers. At this stage of the game I had not started the drink-before-breakfast habit, but I should have guessed by the reek of cloves and peppermint that some of my boon companions had.

“Eventually we would reach our offices. Whether we arrived at two or at four o’clock depended not on our business appointments, but on which side of Chambers Street we happened to be—one had a lot more saloons than the other. When I finally got to my office I would be a fiend for work—most of it unnecessary. I would rush through the motions of looking up briefs, looking up minute points of law, dictating long unimportant letters. I was absolutely no good.

“Often several members of our Club would meet after, quote, work, end quote, and have a few pick-ups on the way to the ferry. Or we might even stay around New York and make an evening of it. But it was a point of pride with all of us to telephone our wives, and to get home at some hour of the night and catch the 11:40 the next day.

“This program continued for a surprising number of years. Thanks to my secretary who would say in a convincing voice, ‘Mr. MacKenzie will be in conference all day tomorrow. I am sorry the only time he could see you is between four and five.’ It is amazing how many good-for-nothing drunks are protected by the loyalty of secretaries and wives. Maybe, the answer is that the men who don’t get this extraordinary loyalty end up in asylums, or morgues—so you never hear of them. You can guess what happened in my case. After a while I couldn’t wait till I got off the ferry for my first drink; after a while my secretary couldn’t even make appointments between four and five. Finally, a long stretch of D.T.s disqualified me for membership in the 11:40 Club. Then a lot of doctors in a lot of expensive sanitariums tried a lot of ‘cures’ on me….”

Rick wondered why there was a sudden burst of laughter at this. The crowd certainly had a grim sense of humor, but MacKenzie gave a dry chuckle.

“Evidently some of the rest of you have been ‘cured’ too. I didn’t stay ‘cured.’ As a last resort I came to High Pines. Someone had told my wife about Dr. Wales. Gradually he got me to a point where I could recognize my own infantilism and he advised me to go to an A.A. meeting in Greenwich. You could say that A.A. did the trick, but I don’t think that would be quite honest. I owe a lot to A.A. and to psychiatry. It was the combination that worked with me. I know some of you feel that A.A. is the one and only answer to this problem of alcoholism. As I see it that is a childish and dangerous form of group egotism. Dangerous because your justifiable pride in the A.A. program may turn into a stupid resentment of psychiatry. And you know what the book says about the dangers of resentments to an alcoholic….” He stopped speaking abruptly, as if he felt that he had lost touch with his audience, and walked down the aisle, his precise eyebrows pulled into a frown.

Joe pulled at his red forelock, his voice jerking people back to attention. “I’m glad Mac said that. I think he’s right. I wonder how many of you know that the Greenwich Chapter started out by meeting at High Pines. One of the finest women in the New York group was there and some of the New York members used to come out regularly every Friday night to see her. Hank Frost would join them from Cos Cob. I’m sorry he isn’t here tonight because he still doesn’t hold with foolin’ around with psychiatry. I’d like to hear him and Mac argue the subject. There’s nothing I like better than a good argument. Maybe that is a hangover from my drinking days. I was the greatest argufier in ten States. But Hank had to work late tonight at his boatyard, so I’ve asked Sylvia Landon from the New York group to tell us about women alcoholics.”

Rick pulled his long legs out of the aisle and shoved back his chair for Sylvia to pass. She moved with an easy grace, looking in her deep blue linen dress like a Medieval saint returning unhurriedly to her place in a stained glass window.

“I am an alcoholic.” She made the statement in a quiet voice as if she were announcing her faith before a flaming pyre. “It was very hard for me to say those four words at first, so now I say them to myself every morning when I wake up. And now they give me courage. I think it is harder for a woman to admit that she is a drunkard—or is that just an alibi of my sex? Society seems to be rather indulgent toward a man who drinks too much, but promptly and thoroughly disgusted by a lady in her cups. It isn’t a pretty picture, I grant you, but Society makes it very easy for a woman to become an alcoholic. We women have too much leisure—oh, not now, during the war—now, there is never time to do all the work we want to do.” Rick noticed the tensing of her jaw and the way her hand tightened on the corner of the oak table. “But usually even women who call themselves busy have time on their hands. Leisure is a lovely word, but a dangerous one for a potential alcoholic. Look at Duncan MacKenzie. He at least got the 11:40—some strong habit kept him that much on the beam. Then look at your average woman. Average—there’s a word I could never face.

“My family brought me up to believe that I was something special. That I had a beautiful, special destiny waiting for me. Not that I had to make any great effort to achieve it. Just that they made me feel I was prettier and cleverer than the ‘average’ girl. It was easy to agree with them. When I married the most eligible young man in our small upstate New York town everything seemed to be working out according to my stars. Remember that line—‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.’ I not only wouldn’t admit that, I couldn’t. It was a wonderful discovery that liquor could make my dream world seem real. The crowd we played around with did a good job of Saturday night drinking at the Country Club. It was fun for them. For me it became fantasy. I could pretend that I wasn’t just a young married woman at a small town dance. I could be a femme fatale in the International Set. A few drinks took me from the Riviera to one of those fabulous English country house weekends. But it wasn’t enough to feel like a Far-away Princess only on Saturday nights. There was the whole dull week to live through—shopping—going to lunch with the girls I grew up with—playing bridge in the evenings. Pretty soon I found I could keep the Saturday night dream world going all the time. It was a lovely discovery. At first I used to get up for breakfast with my husband and talk conscientiously to the maid about meals, but it really hardly seemed worth-while. It was easier to stay in bed in the morning; pleasanter to start drinking as soon as I woke up. I told my friends I was writing a novel. I couldn’t waste my time going to luncheons. That was a fine idea too. It made me sound special. Feel special. I bought a typewriter. I bought reams of white paper and yellow pads and carbon and soft pencils and boxes of paper clips and folders and envelopes. But there wasn’t any place where I could keep the, any place where I could work—drink—undisturbed. I needed a studio. I got one. A wonderful room over the garage with a fireplace and a big table and a big couch. I’d go out there in the morning—if I could get up in the morning. I kept a bottle in the drawer of the desk. At first I used to rush back to the house at five, take a shower, slip into a dinner dress, and have a shaker of cocktails ready when my husband got home from his office. If he smelled liquor he would think I had just been sampling the martinis. Then, one day he found me passed out on the couch in the studio with an empty gin bottle beside me and the cover still on my typewriter.

“You see what I mean about women and leisure. A man would have had to get up and go to a job. I had all day with nothing to do. I didn’t blame my husband for divorcing me after the passing out on the couch in the studio became a regular scene. The funny thing is that I was really relieved in a way. I told myself I didn’t want to live in that dull little town all my life. It was the town’s fault. I didn’t want to write a novel anyhow. I wanted to go to New York. I wanted to be an archaeologist. My mother sympathized with me. She was sure my husband had never understood me. I was sensitive. Special. She blamed him for my drinking. I had never touched anything stronger than sherry at home. Her daughter could not have acted like that without cause. I must have been terribly unhappy. Of course, I agreed.

“I wasn’t going to drink in New York. Everything would be different in New York. It was for a while. I found an apartment near the University. I enrolled for graduate classes. I met new people. I was excited and happy for a while. Then I failed an exam in physical anthropology—you can imagine what happened. A few drinks made me feel sure that my professor had been unfair. She was a brilliant woman with a thin ugly face. Obviously, she was jealous of me. A few more drinks put me back in my glamorous dream world, a few months put me in an alcoholic ward. Jane Post visited the ward. She talked to me. She left me a copy of the A.A. pamphlet. When my mother rushed to my rescue, telling everyone I had had a nervous breakdown from overwork, Jane talked to her. My mother got me out of Bloomingdale. She took me to a hotel. I stood at a long window looking down into a narrow court-yard lined with neat rows of garbage cans—I wanted to jump….”

Rick clutched at the arms of his chair—and there were no arms. He could feel the abysmal compulsion of a street below him. Once in a hotel room in Havana he had crawled out of bed before dawn and shoved a great carved chest in front of a balcony window. His knees had been shaking from rum and malaria but he had managed to add a flimsy wicker chair and a solid table to his barricade. It had been a slow fumbling process in which his frantic instinct of self-preservation had not once been impeded by a doubt. Only when he woke late in the day had he surveyed the barricade with a mingled horror and a detached curiosity. Why the hell should a man who felt the impulse to jump go to all that ridiculous trouble to save himself? Yet he had repeated the same crazy performance the next night and the next.

The palms of Rick’s hands were wet with fear—fear for himself, fear for the slender woman in the blue linen dress. She had stretched out her hands in a spontaneous gesture of gratitude, “A.A. has held me back from that window. A.A. is teaching me how to live with myself—I don’t mean that I am cured of alcoholism—none of us are—but A.A. has given us a reprieve.” There was applause and Sylvia hesitated, “I never told anyone about wanting to jump out of that window,” she added, “I didn’t know I was going to tell it to you tonight, but that is another thing A.A. does for us—it helps us to be honest with ourselves … to tell the truth about ourselves….”

That was it! Rick sat up suddenly. He felt as if a Venetian blind had been pulled up in front of his eyes. He had been looking at the world through slats, seeing only streaks of light, narrow glimpses of people. These A.A.s let you see them through a clear pane of glass. They were real. More real than anyone he had ever known. He knew them better than the Winged Victory, better than the slim colt of a girl with a forehead like a Greek Temple, better even than Adelaide. He knew Joe as he had never known him in Harvard or New Orleans. He was among friends. He was not alone any more.