When Si came home, I screamed at him. “Woman to woman!” I said. “You sent your whore here to tell me you wanted a divorce because you didn’t have the guts to tell me yourself!”
“I simply thought the two of you could have a rational conversation about the future. But I see that in your case a rational conversation is not possible.”
“She’s the same as all your other whores,” I said. “I know about them too, Si. You’ve been cheating on me ever since we got married. I thought maybe having a baby would change things, but it hasn’t. Does this new whore know about all the others, Si? Shall I tell her about all the others?”
“You’re drunk,” he said.
I denied it.
“Connie told me you threw your drink in her face.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m drunk!” I said.
“Whenever you drink, you get drunk. You’re always drunk.”
“So I threw a drink in the whore’s face! That’s all she is—a whore,” I told him.
“This discussion is getting us nowhere,” he said.
“Oh, I know why you want her, this new whore of yours,” I said. “You want her because she’s younger and prettier than I am, and because she’s a so-called famous socialite! You want her because you think she’ll be good for business. You want to use her as a shill, a decoy, a come-on for your customers! All you want her for is decoration! You don’t want her for a wife!”
“Well, you’re not very decorative at this point, are you, Alice?” he said. “As a wife or as anything else.”
“What do you mean by that crack?” I said.
“Look at yourself,” he said. “You’ve lost your looks, and you’ve lost your figure. You can’t even get your skirt buttoned in the back.”
My eyes were streaming now. “I lost my figure bearing your child,” I sobbed.
“You lost your figure drinking,” he said.
“It was bearing your child,” I repeated. “Bearing your child!”
“Look,” he said, “you can stay in this apartment for as long as you like, at least until everything’s settled between our lawyers. I’ll move to a hotel.”
“No!” I cried. “I’m not staying here another night! I’m leaving, and I’m taking Blazer with me!”
“No. Blazer stays with me,” he said.
“You can’t take him away from me! I’m nursing him!” I said.
“I don’t want my son drinking the milk of a drunken mother,” he said. “He’s ready to go on full formula now. I checked with the pediatrician.”
“No!” I cried again, and I ran out of the room and down the hall to the baby’s nursery, which I’d decorated all in blue and white, where Blazer lay sleeping on his stomach, one side of his face against a blue satin pillow, his thumb in his mouth.
Si followed me. “Don’t wake him!” he commanded.
I reached into the crib and lifted Blazer from the pillow, cuddling him against my chest. “I’m taking him,” I said.
“Alice, you are not running out into the night with the baby,” he said. “It’s below freezing outside. Put him back in his crib.” He stepped toward me. “Do as I say!” he said.
“No!” I said, moving back toward the wall. “Stay away from me! Don’t touch me!”
“Put the baby back in his crib, Alice,” he said evenly, stepping toward me again. “Give the baby to me, Alice. Give him to me, Alice—now.”
“No! Never!” As I spoke, I suddenly felt the baby begin to slide out of my arms. He was just slipping through my arms. I tried to catch him by the armpits, and then by the neck, and then I slipped to my knees on the floor, still trying to clutch at my baby, at his pajama bottoms, at anything, and when I fell to the floor the baby landed, face forward, on my lap. My lap cushioned his fall.
My husband stood over me in a rage. “Do you see what you almost did?” he said. “You almost dropped him. You could have killed him. Do you see why you can’t be trusted when you’re in these drunken states? Do you see why I don’t love you anymore?”
But I still clutched the child, moaning, “No, no!”
“Don’t hold him like that, Alice! You’re choking him!”
“Oh, Erick,” I sobbed. “Oh, Erick, why did you have to die? Why did you have to die, Erick? Why did you have to die?”
And now Blazer was wailing and screaming—high, shrill screams—and struggling in my arms, kicking his feet and waving his arms, and from the odor I realized his diaper was full, and the destruction of my day was complete.
22
Mrs. Alice Markham Tarkington (interview taped 9/15/91)
Yes, the divorce was pretty awful, though there weren’t any more scenes between Si and me as bad as that one. The awfulness was all handled through lawyers after that, and of course I blamed Si and was very bitter about what he was putting me through. But I shouldn’t have blamed Si, should I? I should have blamed myself and my mortal enemy, alcohol. I know that now.
The next day, I found a small apartment on the East Side, and my lawyer got a temporary restraining order allowing me to keep Blazer with me. But Si had this shyster lawyer, Jacob Kohlberg, and they were determined to take Blazer away from me. Si wanted absolute full custody of his son and said he’d accept nothing less. I was to have only very limited visiting privileges. They were saying I was an unfit mother, a hopeless alcoholic who had almost killed her baby once.
“It’s very rare for a court to take a child this young away from its mother, Alice,” my lawyer told me. But he looked dubious. “Still, they’re sure to have put detectives on you. I want you to be sure you keep your nose clean.”
“You mean my sex life?” I said with a laugh. “It’s not me who has affairs.”
“I’m not talking about that,” he said, and he made a little jiggling gesture with his hand, as though he were holding a glass in it. “I’m talking about the booze.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said.
“They’re saying you drink a bit more than is good for you, Alice. You do drink a bit, don’t you?”
“Hardly ever,” I said. “Sometimes I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner, but that’s the extent of it.” Of course I was lying.
“Do you ever drink in bars?”
“Never!”
“Good. Meanwhile, you do keep liquor in your house, don’t you?”
“Of course. In case friends drop by.”
“Where do you buy it?”
“Sherry-Lehmann delivers it.”
“Watch those deliveries, Alice. Detectives will be keeping track of those deliveries.”
How was I going to get vodka into my apartment if detectives were watching my deliveries? I wondered.
“What do you do with your empties?” he asked me.
“Throw them out with the garbage.”
“Does your building have an incinerator?”
“Yes, but we’re not supposed to throw glass or tin cans into it. Only flammable things.”
“Figure out some way of disposing of your empties without putting them in the garbage,” he said. “Detectives like to go through garbage.”
“Really, you’re making much too much of this,” I said. “All these things they’re saying about me are nothing but lies.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Well, just as long as you’re aware of what they’ll be looking for. Think twice about anything you put out with your garbage—bills, receipts, letters. Your husband’s lawyers will be very interested in seeing things like that.”
My immediate problem, of course, was how to get liquor into my apartment and empty bottles out. My friend Beverly helped me out. Every few weeks, Beverly would come to spend the night, and in her suitcase would be my vodka. When she left, she’d leave with the empties in the suitcase. See how clever we alcoholics are?
One day Beverly arrived at my place practically squealing with excitement. “You really do have someone watching your building,” she said. “When I got out of the taxi today, this man said to me, ‘That’s a pretty
heavy suitcase you’ve got there, little lady. Can I give you a hand with it?’ I said, ‘No, thank you.’ I was sure he’d try to jiggle it to see if he heard bottles in it.” She set the suitcase down on the floor, and we heard a clank. “Anyway, here’s your stash,” she said.
We thought all this was terribly funny. But it really wasn’t funny, was it?
I’d told my lawyer I didn’t want any alimony. What I wanted was some sort of trust fund set up for Blazer’s education. College tuition costs were escalating in the 1960’s, and who knew how much it would cost to send a boy to Yale by 1980, when Blazer would be starting college? My lawyer thought we should ask for a fund that would yield an annual income of fifty thousand dollars. That meant about a million dollars. I told him I wasn’t sure Si had that much to set aside, but my lawyer said, “We’ll start with a demand that’s on the high side and let them bargain us down.”
Well, naturally that demand infuriated Si, and Mr. Kohlberg came back to us saying that there would be no trust fund at all unless Si was given custody. I was damned if I was going to give Si custody, because he’d begun saying that when he and Connie were married they planned to adopt Blazer, and I couldn’t let that happen.
So the battle lines were drawn. For a year and a half I hardly ever left my apartment unless it was to go to a court hearing or a meeting with my lawyer. I was followed everywhere. I was sure my telephone was tapped, so my friends and I talked in code. For instance, when I’d invite my friend Bev for the weekend, I’d say, “Are you bringing your boyfriend?” That meant, Are you bringing me some vodka? She’d say, “No, he’s going to be out of town.” That meant, Yes, I’ve got you half a case.
Finally, after what I gather was a particularly heartrending performance by my lawyer, the court-appointed referee granted custody of my son to me, and we all heaved a great sigh of relief. I’d won that round.
With that victory, I had a considerable bargaining chip on my side of the table. If Si wanted to see his son at all, he was told, he was going to have to come up with some sort of trust fund for him. Dickering over that took several more months.
I’d wanted the income from the fund to be available at age eighteen, which would have been in 1981, when Blazer would presumably be starting college. Si’s side wanted the income to start three years later, when Blazer was twenty-one. In the end, Si agreed to pay all Blazer’s college costs and to set up a trust that would start paying Blazer an income when he reached his twenty-first birthday. An elaborate schedule of yearly contributions to the fund was worked out, so much each year, until the fund reached a ceiling worth of half a million dollars. It was only half what we’d originally asked for, but my lawyer thought it was a good compromise. In return, I agreed to allow Blazer to spend two weekends a month with his father until he was eighteen, when he’d be on his own.
My divorce from Sol was final in September of 1965, and my lawyer and my friend Beverly Hollister and I all celebrated in my apartment that night, and I’m sorry to say that all three of us got very, very drunk.
Sam, my lawyer, gave us a souped-up rendition of the heartrending performance he’d given before the court referee that got me custody. “Your Honor,” he said, standing on a chair, “I ask you to consider the heartache and emotional torment my client has been put through. The young widow of a United States Air Force hero, she came to this cruel city to find employment that would put bread on her table. Here she was taken up by the suave, polished, sophisticated and ten-years-older millionaire Silas Tarkington, the possessor of a twenty-two-room duplex luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue, New York’s most prestigious address. Seduced by this older man’s blandishments and promises of riches, she agreed to be his wife. But no sooner had the couple entered into the bond of matrimony than the young wife discovered evidence of her faithless husband’s philanderings—late nights in expensive nightclubs with ladies of the evening, other women’s lipstick smeared on his pocket handkerchiefs, and, yes, Your Honor, in one instance on her husband’s underclothing. And yet, despite the humiliation and the heartache caused by these discoveries, the young wife determined to keep up her end of the solemn marriage vows.”
His voice broke. He pretended to shed a tear.
“A year later, a child, a son, was born to this marital pair. Added to the travails inflicted upon her by her husband’s blatant infidelities were now the duties of sweet young motherhood. Ignored by her faithless husband, she made her infant the center of her life. Today, Your Honor, that infant is barely a toddler. Surely you would not deprive a child of such tender years of its mother, nor a young mother of her only child. Since the outset of this divorce action, Your Honor, my client has devoted herself full-time to the care of her little one, forsaking all social life. In the meantime, she has been forced to hear herself vilified by opposing counsel as a woman of loose morals, an unfit mother, an uncaring parent, and a woman addicted to alcohol, to the demon rum, to the devil’s brew.… By the way, Your Honor, I’m ready for another drink!”
He had Bev and me rolling on the floor with laughter.
Sam and Bev later got married, by the way. I’ve lost track of Bev, and it’s too bad, because she was my best friend. But she was a friend from my drinking days. That often happens to us alcoholics. When we get sober, the friends from the drinking days just sort of disappear. Today, most of my friends are members of my support group.
Of course my victory over Blazer’s trust fund turned out to be a Pyrrhic one, didn’t it? By the time Blazer’s twenty-first birthday rolled around, there wasn’t any trust fund. Si told Blazer I must have raided it, but I swear to you I did not. I never touched any of that money. I never even saw it. Maybe I should have paid closer attention, but I was drinking during all those years, and I let other people handle details like that. In that sense I am to blame for the missing funds—me and my old friend alcohol. Remember, I’ve only been sober now for six years—six years, three months, and eighteen days, to be exact. And that’s a very short time, compared to all those drinking years.
Around 1970, a young man named Thomas Bonham joined the store, and Si placed him in charge of the trust fund, of the annual contributions that Si was making to it. Once a year, Mr. Bonham would come to see me, to go over the trust figures with me and give me pieces of paper to sign. I assumed that everything was going well. Mr. Bonham is a charming man, very intelligent and well-spoken. I have a theory that Si brought him in to be the eventual replacement for Moses Minskoff as his financial detail man. Mr. Bonham was certainly a cut above Mr. Minskoff.
When Blazer found out that his trust fund had somehow evaporated, he was furious. His father had accused me of stealing it, and Blazer actually asked me if I had. “Did you, Mom?” he asked me.
“I swear to you I didn’t!” I told him. “I had no access to it. How could I have done it? All I ever did was go over the figures with Mr. Bonham once a year.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure, Mom, that maybe sometimes when you were a little drunk you didn’t write out some checks, or whatever you do to get at money like that, and then forgot about it?”
“Why would I have done that?” I said to him. “I fought hard to get that trust fund for you, all during the divorce. I wouldn’t have fought so hard to get that for you, and then have taken it away.”
The issue of the vanished trust fund very nearly drove a permanent wedge between my son and me.
There was no way I could get through to Si, so I called Mr. Bonham to find out what had happened. “I thought everything was in perfect order,” I said to him.
“It was,” he told me. “Everything was in perfect order until a couple of years ago, when Si made some bad investments in it. I warned him at the time, but he insisted. Then this last recession hit us hard, and there were debts to be paid, and calls for more collateral. I’m sorry, Alice.”
I told Blazer about this.
“Then the old man stole it,” he said. “He must have.”
Blazer and his father had had many disagre
ements and quarrels in the past, but the missing trust fund drove the final wedge between them. “I hate him,” Blazer said at the time. “I really hate him now. I’d like to kill him! I’d really like to kill him!”
Well, even though it was awful to hear Blazer talk like that, one good did come out of that trust fund episode—my sobriety.
When Blazer said that to me, about my maybe having done something when I was “a little drunk,” I realized that my son had never before used the word “drunk” about me. It woke me up. My son thinks of me as a drunk! I thought. It opened my eyes. And I took a good, hard look at myself for the first time.
I realized a number of things all at once. I realized how dependent I’d become on alcohol. I realized how it had come to control my life. My job, for instance. I’d begun editing a weekly fashion newsletter, to give me extra income, to supplement Erick’s pension and his $200,000 life insurance policy. It permitted me to work out of my apartment. I didn’t have to worry about how I looked or what I wore. I could sleep late on mornings when I had hangovers. In other words, it was a job designed to accommodate itself to my drinking hours.
Other than my job, every minute of my waking day was spent planning on when it would be sundown and time for the cocktail hour. “The sun is over the yard arm, Bev!” I’d say to my friend, and we’d bring out the bottle and the ice and glasses. During the day, I’d check my liquor supply, counting the bottles. Today is Saturday, I’d think. Do I have enough for Sunday, when every liquor store in town will be closed? If I went to a party, I’d stick a flask in my purse, in case the hostess’s drinks weren’t being poured fast enough. I’d even dream about drinking. I began to have dreams in which a certain seven-digit number kept appearing. I was certain that I was dreaming a winning lottery-ticket number, and one night I forced myself awake and wrote the number down. It was Sherry-Lehmann’s telephone number.
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