Recovery

by John Berryman

  ‘He is really drinking himself to death?’ Linc asked lazily, his long fine-booted legs crossed, turning the tape-recorder on. ‘There’s no doubt about it?’

  ‘I guess not. He puts away two fifths a day, sometimes more. Our doctor gave him a year, this summer.’

  ‘What are you doing about it?’

  ‘I can’t do anything about it. I just get drunk too, and shout at him, and then we both cry.’ Her voice was savage.

  ‘You don’t see him very often. Do you telephone?’

  ‘Three or four times a week.’

  ‘What happens on the telephone?’

  ‘I beg him. It’s almost as bad as being there.’

  Line ruminated. ‘How would you like to have a talk with him face to face but with both of you stone sober?’

  ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘But you must be sober at the beginning, each time.’

  ‘No,’ she sounded shamed, ‘I have a few before I go, and he’s always loaded.’

  ‘Well, you’re dry right now. Suppose we put him in the chair here’—he swung an empty chair around to face the girl—‘at, it’s nine-oh-seven a.m., and he’s still sober.’

  ‘No,’ she said bitterly, ‘he’s not even up yet. He’s still passed out.’

  ‘Not this morning. Or some time in the past when he was sober. You’ve seen him sober a thousand times, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s true,’ reluctantly.

  ‘Well, here he is, sober as you are. What would you like to say to him?’

  ‘There isn’t one thing on earth I would like to say to him.’

  ‘Look at him, and think. Nothing whatever?’

  Linc’s lowered, other-worldly voice had its usual effect. The girl looked at her father. Her face softened. ‘“Why are you doing it, Daddy?” ’

  ‘And he says?’

  ‘“Can’t help it, Fran!” ’

  ‘His voice sounds cheerful?’

  ‘Yes. He’s grinning at me.’

  ‘And you say?’

  ‘What can I say?’

  ‘What do you say?’

  Her voice tumbled out: ‘“Daddy, you remember one morning you took me canoeing up at the lake? It was a blustery day, sun coming and going, but we stayed out hours and you told me about your first wife. I felt so grown-up. Do you remember how close we were?” ’

  ‘And he says?’

  Silence. Her mouth opened, closed.

  ‘And he says?’

  ‘He doesn’t say anything.’

  ‘All right,’ Linc’s voice brightened, ‘he’s gone and you’re back here with us. Right? Tell us something about your childhood relation with him.’ He drew her slowly through a dizzy, sorry tale of savage rejections and unpredictable intimacies alternating in a general cold desert of indifference, and then made her talk to her father again, with the same result, silence from him answering or not answering a plea of hers. Linc shifted to the mother—‘She’s given up too. She’s just waiting’—and then seated the frightful old man in the empty chair again.

  ‘Now. You know he’s not going to answer you, right? so you can say anything to him that comes into your head, without any fear of its effect on him. What would you really like to say?’

  ‘Just tell him I’m sorry, and say goodbye.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I don’t think I can.’ Her voice broke on the last word.

  ‘You can.’

  She sat up, back into her customary stiff, almost back-leaning uprightness, and stared at the air above the chair facing her. ‘“I’m sorry for everything,” ’ she said suddenly, ‘“I’m sorry!” ’

  After a pause, Linc prompted her: ‘And?’

  ‘“Goodbye, Daddy,” ’ came softly out, then strongly, ‘“Goodbye.” ’

  ‘Hey, who’s goodbying?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Yes. You’re the boss. You’ve decided to live your own life, not his death. This is your place, you’re in treatment here, not him. Would you like to point your finger at him and tell him to go?’

  Silence, immobility, stare. Linc kept at her. At last Fran lifted a thin arm, sweater bunched above her elbow, and pointed a long forefinger. ‘“Go, Daddy.” ’

  ‘Does he hear you?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He’s gone.’

  ‘How did he look when he heard you?’

  ‘He had … a little devilish smile …’

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Maybe … to con me back in again,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Exactly. Are you going back in again?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Good. Now I want you to put yourself in the chair, your old self, and tell her goodbye. Can you do that?’

  ‘It seems I can do anything,’ she said without humour. ‘All right. I’m there.’

  ‘No. She’s there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell her goodbye.’

  She looked fixedly and resentfully at the spectre, and said firmly: ‘“Goodbye, Fran.” ’

  ‘Is she gone?’

  ‘She just disappeared. I can’t see her.’

  ‘But she’ll always be with you, too. Only not in control any more, unless you let her back. She’s more dangerous to you than your father is. Was.’ Linc re-crossed his long legs as always before exposition.

  Alan had been mysteriously moved by the final scene. He felt that there must be something in it for him, if he could find out what. But he was not threatened by a dying father. Farewells with fathers affected him anyway. It was one of his crosses that he had not been able to say goodbye to Daddy. One of his most acute memories was of his son’s baby face contorted through the back car-window as his mother drove the boy away from the mental hospital where Severance had been confined for two weeks, on the visit when she told him she was divorcing him and wanted him to move his stuff out as soon as he was discharged. A stunning afternoon. He had ground-privileges by then, and had walked out to the curving driveway to see them off, feeling at the end of the possible. David, two, had been all right when he kissed him through the open side-window, but then his little face had broken up, waving through the glass. Severance heard nothing but the car accelerating.

  Linc was talking about the Victim (‘I feel worthless’) getting strokes from Rescuers (wife, doctor, Fran) and then defying them. ‘When he dies, he achieves final victory—equals “I am worthy” your sacrince—“Sorry I had to make you all uncomfortable, but—” ’

  Severance could see an insane game, played for keeps, but where in his case were the Victim and the Rescuer? Daddy in hell (if there was Hell), himself fighting for life not death. He walked away gloomy and baffled from Fran’s lonely triumph.

  VI

  SELF-CONFRONTED

  BECOME A METHODICAL MAN, seeking non-chemical salvation, Severance had taken to reading with all his strength a Psalm or two every morning along with the 24-Hour Book and his modern Jewish studies later in the day. He had once familiarized himself with Gunkel’s revolutionary typology, but paid no attention to it or pre-Exilic or post-Exilic now; he was listening for the word of God and the inspired cries of genuine sufferers. He marked ‘O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes!’ But a little they were, at last. Wishing no credit for it, he had confronted Hutch, kept Luriel in treatment, worked almost a month daily on Jeree to speak out in Group, and she had. He marked, ‘I will keep thy statutes: O forsake me not utterly.’

  He found himself back in what he thought of as his pre-Casey or post-Casey days, full of trust. He read as if the whole truth might lie open before him in the next verse. Casey was a legendary teacher at the College in Alan’s time, in the Thirties: a tall, spare man, remote, most of a large white handkerchief dangling out of his breast-pocket, who not only paid no attention to the students who jammed his lectures but was said never to have looked directly even at his assistants. His course appeared in the bulletin as Sociology 3-4, Severance recalled, but was widely known as Caseyology. The r
eadings were conventional —Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As lf, Lippmann’s Public Opinion, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—and the examination was based on them. He never referred to them in lecture, or to any intellectual source, indeed, except a detective magazine called The Shadow and the letters, from correspondents all over the country, of which he kept a selection in his inside coat-pocket. His lectures were devoted, one by one, unpredictably, to problems. The most devastating was on Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ Sparkling aggressively with terms like ‘cortex’ and ‘negative feeling-tone’ and ‘referent,’ it climaxed against ‘faery lands forlorn,’ and its listeners gave their English instructors a hard time for months afterward. He would stalk in, with the bell, at ten o’clock, stare out over the silent assemblage crowding even the windowseats, and announce with an edge in his high voice: ‘Today, we’ll be investigating The League of Nations Problem.’ Ah! the students rubbed their hands with glee, leaning forward with destructive joy, in the certainty that by the end of fifty minutes there would be no League of Nations Problem—no further enquiry necessary, that is, into why the United States had never joined the League. At a certain high point, after salvos of irony towards both partners of this historic non-cooperation, he reached conclusively inside his jacket and drew out a letter. Ah. ‘I have here,’ he said solemnly, ‘a letter from a farmer in Wisconsin.’ Now this might not be impressive in Ohio, but in upper Manhattan?—grass-roots! And he read part of the letter aloud, a denunciation of the Prince of Wales for being unable to stay on a horse. ‘The worthy farmer,’ Casey intoned, ‘is unaware that the Prince is in fact an excellent horseman, but’ and so on—‘Hence we never joined the League of Nations!’ with crushing finality. Alan had partaken of the course, he considered later, at exactly the right time, in the first half of his sophomore year, and recovered by the following summer. The spellbinding amalgam of analytic method and theatrical sampling remained, strongly subordinated, one corner of his approach, and it was useless here, against his addiction, against his Christian doubts, against the mystery of his occluded teens. No sampling there: the question, the genetic question, was how the two towering failures of his life, the negative one and the positive alcoholic one, were connected—if they were—and they had got to be. They seemed to hover before him, as he sat musing, smoking, in his hospital chair, like the Platonic essences Professor Edman used to intuit in midair at Wednesday night seminars. High in the air, left, dull and black, formless: the four-year hiatus, while his contemporaries in various countries were thriving their way ahead towards careers. Why had Alan Severance, after joining the League of Nations at eight or nine, resigned at fourteen? Why, for that matter, had he ever rejoined? Above him on the right, nearer and lower, opposite, glowing rich brown, three-quarters full, the globular decanter his mother had given him, crystal, flat-stoppled, shimmering with silky drifting snakes of light, inviting and repellent: the alcoholism that seized him fifteen years later, spawning all his failures since, Father of Lies. He shuddered. In the dark of the left and the bright horror of the right, how had he ever contrived to accomplish anything, much less what he undeniably had done? Did it matter? Straining to hold both images, wall-eyed, losing them, he felt as they slid away and the breakfast bell came faintly through his closed door an unaccountable thrust of actual joy that sat him upright. He was going, this time, to make some connexion, or break, break some fantastic connexion, and get out of the whiskey business altogether, clear quite off, empty of urge and fear, his own man again, a decent servant. He could see it, guidance would come, he looked ahead at dry dry dry.

  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?’