8
THE LATE NOVEMBER SNOW WAS BEGINNING TO STICK TO THE bare branches of the tall elm in the backyard of Clinton Street. Dr. Clark Burnham stood at the kitchen window staring out, his deeply lined face reflecting the white glow emanating from the heavy downfall. He had much on his mind.
Clark had just returned from the hospital, where his colleagues had given him the terrible news about his wife. The cancer was terminal. Matilda had but a few weeks to live. Now he must gather his family together and tell them in the most gentle and loving way possible in spite of all these mixed emotions stirring inside.
But first he must talk to his daughter Lois, who was standing at the stove only a few feet away making them both a cup of tea. Dr. Burnham rubbed the back of his neck, stiff and aching from the growing stress and tension suddenly filling his life. After another moment, he turned and sat at the kitchen table. Lois handed him a cup of tea, then sat down across from him. She fidgeted nervously with the wrinkled collar on her housedress, appearing too ashamed and embarrassed to look her father in the eye. Dr. Burnham sipped the steaming tea. Then after a moment he spoke. His first question was simple and direct, for he had no time or patience for sugarcoating, even with his oldest and dearest daughter.
“What do you plan to do now?” he asked.
Lois cast a quick glance toward the outside hall, then back at her teacup. Her father knew she was thinking about her husband, who was asleep in an upstairs bedroom having just arrived back from Montreal. Her whispered reply was also simple and direct, “I don’t know, father. I just don’t know.”1
It was the sad and hopeless look in his daughter’s eyes that finally took the sting out of his anger. After all, the damage had been done. There was nothing he could possibly do at this point about his drunken son-in-law. He wanted to throttle him, yes, but how would that help his Lois who, he knew for some inexplicable, insane reason, apparently still loved the lout?
Despite his deep resentment, it was quite obvious that Clark Burnham, in spite of being a doctor himself, understood little if anything about the disease of alcoholism. Few did in those days. He was simply one of the many who considered drunkenness immoral and a weakness of the will. It was perhaps the biggest bone of contention between himself and his wife, who for some strange reason always knew her son-in-law had a “sickness of the soul.”
But now, filled with empathy for his daughter, Dr. Burnham reached out, took her hand, and said with as much warmth and understanding as he could muster under the circumstances, “You and Bill are welcome to stay here until he gets back on his feet. I’m sure that’s what your mother would want, too.” Then after a brief pause, he added: “We’ll talk more later.”2 Lois squeezed her father’s hand. No other words were necessary. Dr. Burnham got up, came around the table, kissed her cheek, then quickly left the kitchen. She watched him for a moment as he disappeared down the hall. Then she rose, walked to the window, and stared out.
Watching the snow continue to fall, Lois thought about her husband’s humiliating return from Canada, the despair in his bloodshot eyes, the futility of the pledge he made to her again as he stumbled in the door. She wanted to ask him as her father had just asked her: “What do you plan to do now?” But she knew it wasn’t the time and that the answer would simply involve another empty promise.
Her mind was racing again. Many times in the past when she wanted to capture her thoughts, she would write them down so she could look at them, consider them, glance back at them as her life continued to change from one day to the next. She found a pencil and some paper in a cabinet drawer. Sitting back down at the kitchen table, in the soft, gentle quietness a snowfall brings, Lois began taking an honest and painful inventory of her situation. She wrote the following:
What is one to think or do after so many failures? Is my theory of the importance of love and faith nothing but bunk? Is it best to recognize life as it seems—a series of failures—and that my husband is a weak, spineless creature who is never going to get over his drinking?
If I should lose my love and faith, what then? As I see it now, there is nothing but emptiness, bickering, taunts and selfishness, each of us trying to get as much out of the other as possible in order to forget our lost ideals.
I love my husband more than words can tell, and I know he loves me. He is a splendid, fine man—in fact an unusual man with qualities that could make him reach the top. His personality is endearing; everybody loves him; and he is a born leader . . .
. . . The morning after he has been drunk, he is so penitent, self-derogatory and sweet that it takes the wind out of my sails, and I cannot upbraid him.
He continually asks for my help, and we have been trying together almost daily for five years to find an answer to his drinking problem, but it is worse now than ever . . .
. . . How can he ever accomplish anything with this frightful handicap? I worry more about the moral effect on him than I do the physical, although goodness knows the terrible stuff he drinks is enough to burn him up completely. Where can he ever go but down when he can’t control this habit? And his aims have always been so high! . . .
I believe that people are good if you give them half a chance and that good is more powerful than evil . . . Francis Bacon said that the human mind is easily fooled; that we believe what we want to believe and recognize only those facts which conform to that belief. Am I doing that identical thing? Are people bad, is love futile, and Bill doomed to worse than mediocrity? Am I a fool not to recognize it and grasp what pleasure and comfort I can? 3
Lois did not write an answer to that last question in so many words that snowy morning at Clinton Street, but she did answer it by her actions. Instead of leaving and seeking “pleasure and comfort” somewhere else, she stayed with her husband, not knowing how long it would take or if ever such qualities would come into their lives. She could only hope and pray they would.
Perhaps without realizing it, what this deeply committed and benevolent lady decided to do at that moment in her life was to love her husband “unconditionally.” It wouldn’t be “I’ll love you if only . . . ” or “I’ll love you once you . . . ” No. With Lois Wilson, it was now: “I will love you no matter what.” This principle of unconditional love was to become the cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon—the unconditional love of one alcoholic for another, of one suffering spouse for another.4
But is love, no matter how strong and how unswerving, enough to get an alcoholic sober and keep him or her sober? Lois was soon to find the answer to this vital question in her own painful way.
After rereading her scribbled notes, she folded the paper and put it into her pocket. Then she went upstairs, got dressed, and left for the hospital to see her mother. Bill continued to sleep it off.
Lois had been back in Brooklyn Heights since mid-October. She had returned to help care for her mother, who wanted to be home with her family, not “locked away in some lonely hospital all by myself.” Dr. Burnham had arranged to have his wife brought to the medical center weekly for radium treatments until her condition suddenly worsened and she required more frequent treatments and intensive pain medication. Matilda finally relented and just two days ago was readmitted to the hospital.
While caring for her mother at Clinton Street, Lois rarely went out. At the same time, she was so consumed by her husband’s abject failure and the humiliation of their move back into her father’s house that she had given little thought to what was happening in the world around her. It wasn’t until she boarded the crowded bus to the hospital that day and glanced around at her fellow passengers that a strange awareness came over her. The looks on their faces seemed to mirror how she felt inside—sad, bewildered, and frightened. And each time she caught someone’s eye, they would look away—as did she.
Lois exited the bus at Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s main thoroughfares. The snow was still falling, but it didn’t blind her from suddenly noticing the effects of last year’s stock market crash on the ordinary hard-working men and women she began passing on the street . . . families in the long breadline in front of the First Presbyterian Church . . . clusters of men huddled in doorways, going nowhere . . . two elderly men across the way picking through trash barrels.
Having been in Canada for almost a year, Lois was essentially unaware of the shocking collapse of the U.S. economy. Certainly she heard stories from family members and friends, but she was so engrossed in trying to keep her husband sober and employed that she didn’t entirely comprehend the catastrophic consequences of the crash.5 Apparently neither did Herbert Clark Hoover, who succeeded Calvin Coolidge as the thirty-first president of the United States. Hoover and his cabinet had failed to recognize early enough that European countries had borrowed far too excessively from American banks. Now, with the collapsing stock market having worldwide impact, these countries were in no position to repay their enormous debts. Almost overnight, U.S. banks began to fail. Even the building and loan organizations, which had been established to help homeowners like Dr. Clark Burnham meet their mortgage commitments and the nation’s farmers sustain their crop investments, were forced to close their doors.
The country quickly spun into a deep depression. Before the end of 1930, businesses were going bankrupt, family farms were being auctioned off, factories were firing thousands of workers, and once-wealthy investors were wallpapering their bathroom walls with worthless stock certificates. It was an economic nightmare of gigantic proportions that would take years to repair.
The wind was now blowing the snow into swirling gusts. As Lois turned into High Street and headed toward the hospital, she spotted a man standing in front of a boarded-up bakery shop selling apples from a cardboard box. He was in his thirties, about Bill’s age. His clothes were shabby and he appeared ashamed that life had dealt him such a cruel blow. He stared at the ground as Lois passed. She hesitated for a moment, touched by his hopelessness, but then walked on. She wanted to help but had only enough change in her purse for bus fare back home. So she quickly continued on her way.6
Lois had always hated the smell of hospitals, and today for some reason the antiseptic odor seemed to fuel her anxieties even more. Her younger brother Lyman was at their mother’s bedside when she arrived. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year. He was now a doctor himself and had an active practice out of his home in New Jersey, where he lived with his lovely bride of less than two years.
They hugged warmly. Then after Lois hugged and kissed her mother, Lyman whispered that he would wait for her in the corridor outside. He knew his sister and mother needed to be alone together at this crucial juncture.
While Matilda had been back in the hospital only a few days, even she knew at this point the treatments were not working. She could no longer eat, and the pain medications were becoming less effective. No one had to tell this intelligent and compassionate woman that the end was drawing near. Still, she smiled through her suffering and fought to make her final days meaningful.
Lois sat at her mother’s bedside holding her hand and chatting about the weather, the Christmas decorations already up in the stores, how quickly the holiday season was upon them. There were so many far more important things she wanted to say, so much she wanted to ask, so much she wanted to share—but for some inexplicable reason, only this stupid, meaningless small talk kept pouring out of her mouth. It had been the same way at home, too, never talking about dying. Then suddenly Matilda squeezed her daughter’s hand and pulled her close. Lois never forgot what her mother said that afternoon, perhaps because of how she struggled to speak or because her words forced her to make some important decisions about the direction of her own life.
“Lyman told me Bill has finally come home,” her mother began, speaking in a hoarse whisper. “I know how things still are and I have been wondering lately . . . can this really be enough for you? Yes, I know how much you say you still love him and want to take care of him and I admire you for that. He is a very sick man . . . and may get even sicker . . . and certainly he needs you. But Lois . . . you also have a life of your own to live . . . and you must live it. You must find what can truly fulfill you, otherwise . . . one day you will wake up and be consumed by anger and resentment for being cheated out of that life. Please don’t let that happen to you, my child. Don’t let that happen to you.”7
Matilda touched a nerve. She verbalized frankly and honestly what her daughter had been refusing to face for several years now. For a long moment, they simply stared at each other, their eyes filled with tears. Finally Lois broke down and admitted her mother was right, that something must change and it had to be her. She promised then and there to heed her mother’s advice: she would care for her husband but also take care of herself. She was a strong, well-educated woman with many talents and abilities, and there was no reason why she couldn’t succeed in life and find some enjoyment for herself regardless of what happened to her husband. Yes, she would continue to try to help him but would also seek to help herself and improve her own life at the same time. As she shared these most intimate thoughts and feelings, she could tell by the wisp of a smile on her mother’s face that she could be at peace now, knowing her daughter was ready to pull her life together and not be dragged down by her son-in-law’s alcoholism. While she sensed her daughter’s determination, even Matilda Burnham, who believed to the depths of her soul that alcoholism was a spiritual malady, had no idea what a powerful influence it could have over someone . . . even someone as strong and determined as Lois Burnham Wilson. But for now at least, having shared her deepest concerns with her daughter, Matilda could rest more comfortably as she waited for her God to take her.8
They continued to talk for a short while before Lois noticed her mother becoming totally fatigued. She urged her to rest, but the pain was returning. Just then the nurse entered with a timely dose of morphine. Lois waited as her mother dropped into a deep sleep. Then she kissed her on the forehead and walked quietly from the room. Lyman was still waiting in the corridor. He invited his sister to join him for some coffee in the hospital cafeteria. He said there were some things they needed to talk about.
While never one to point fingers, Lois’s younger brother had grown up to be the most serious sibling in the family and, though tactful, always said what was on his mind. Over coffee and a sandwich, he told his older sister something she was completely unaware of—that their father had suffered heavy financial losses as a result of the 1929 crash and that he was also carrying most of his patients on credit since so many of them had lost their jobs or businesses. Lyman also revealed that a very close friend in Vermont had told him the good doctor was quietly inquiring about the possibility of selling the cottage on Emerald Lake and that he had already remortgaged Clinton Street.
They both knew their father was too proud to discuss any of this with his family, but Lyman thought Lois should know the entirety of the situation. Then he tactfully remarked that with her and Bill now living at Clinton Street and with Bill possibly finding a job, perhaps they could help lessen the financial burden on their father, who was carrying the mortgage on the large brownstone all by himself.
While her younger sibling’s revelation of their father’s financial misfortunes came as a shock, the more Lois thought about it, the more she sensed that her father’s plight could be the reason for Dr. Burnham’s quiet demeanor ever since she had returned home from Montreal—followed by Bill’s sudden arrival in his somewhat inebriated condition. Then, the more she considered all her brother had said, the more embarrassed and ashamed she began to feel.
After all, if Lyman knew all about their father’s situation, then so did the rest of the family by now. And as much as she had tried to hide the seriousness of her husband’s drinking problem and his inability to hold a job, she felt certain that they, like Lyman, had their suspicions and probably shared the same attitude—that her and Bill’s presence at Clinton Street was simply another burden their father shouldn’t have to shoulder, especially in the midst of his current emotional and financial travails.
Lois sensed her younger brother was a bit uncomfortable as they said their good-byes. He offered a halfhearted apology in case he had said anything that might have offended her and then quickly dashed off. This was a conversation she wished they hadn’t had, but then, she told herself, she had to stop running away from reality if she was sincere about finding and living her own life. She pulled herself together and went back upstairs to her mother’s room. She sat quietly by her bedside for several more hours. When the sky began to darken outside the window, the nurse returned with some more pain medication. Then Lois finally left.9
There was much to think about on the bus ride home. Even though every nerve in her body and every thought in her brain told her to move from Clinton Street as quickly as possible, down deep she knew how foolish these urges were. Where could they go? What could they afford? Even a furnished one-room flat was out of the question right now, even if they sold all their clothing, silverware, dishes, and furnishings that Bill said were being shipped back from Canada. Besides, this was something she didn’t want to do. She would put those things back into storage and find some way to pay for it. She would simply have to swallow her pride for the moment while trying to find a way out of this terrible mess.
By the time she reached Brooklyn Heights, this young woman who felt that she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders had already made two very important decisions. First, tomorrow she would begin looking for a job in order to pay her father a modicum of room and board for her and Bill. And if he wouldn’t accept it, she would quietly pay for the food, the utilities, and other such bills without him knowing about it. Second, when she was financially able, she would go back to school and start studying for a career that had always fascinated her and one in which she truly believed she could excel—a career in interior decorating.10 As Lois stepped from the bus into six inches of snow, the stark beauty of the streetlights glistening onto the white roadways and swaying trees, along with her newfound resolve to change the course of her life, somewhat lessened her feelings of shame and anxiety. However, by the time she trudged through the drifts and arrived at the steps leading up to the brownstone, her thoughts of her mother’s pain, her father’s troubles, and her husband’s drinking quickly brought some of the world’s weight back onto her sagging shoulders.
Her father had already left for his rounds the following morning when Lois entered the kitchen to find her husband bent over the table sipping a cup of coffee. His hands were trembling too much to lift it to his lips. Joining him at the table, she calmly explained her mother’s condition, her father’s predicament, and the decision she had made about finding a job. But Bill, who always prided himself in being the great provider, wouldn’t hear of it. He said he had already made some phone calls before leaving Montreal and would have a new position himself before the week was out.
For a short while, Lois remained insistent. She wouldn’t allow them to be a burden on her father. Then, even though she didn’t believe Bill’s continuing assurances of getting a new position, she decided to briefly postpone her own job search. After all, the holiday season was already here. She could put up a few Christmas decorations and spend more time with her mother while at the same time combing through the newspapers’ employment ads, sparse as they were.
As for Bill, the truth was he had an old drinking buddy at a company called Stanley Statistics who said he could always find him a spot there. For a former Wall Street big shot, the “spot” in question was a rather nondescript job as an assistant bookkeeper for one hundred dollars a week. For many at that time, this was a rather goodly sum, but not for the still-haughty Bill Wilson. However, given the circumstances, he knew he had little choice. He accepted the job as “temporary.” Lois was both surprised and pleased. Dr. Burnham was skeptical, and rightly so.
Just three days before Christmas, Bill got himself involved in a barroom brawl. The altercation wasn’t much different than the many other drunken fights he had been in over the past several years—a torn jacket, a black eye, a bloody lip. But this time when he woke the following morning, he suddenly realized that the set of company books he had taken with him to work on over the holidays was missing. He must have left the books in the speakeasy after the fight. But which speakeasy, and where? He began searching his favorite haunts all over Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. He even called a number of places where he was now persona non grata. The company books never turned up. He was finally forced to call his drinking buddy at Stanley Statistics, who immediately informed his manager, who immediately fired Bill. So he cashed his last paycheck and set off on another binge—the day before Christmas.11
Matilda Spelman Burnham died that Christmas evening, 1930, surrounded by her husband and her children. The only close family member who wasn’t there was Bill Wilson. In spite of the fact that he truly loved and respected his mother-in-law, and in spite of the fact that his wife needed his solace and his arms around her at the time, he never made the wake nor the funeral. He was in his own private, drunken world, oblivious to anyone else’s pain and sorrow except his own.
For some baffling reason, the more her husband hurt and disappointed her, the more Lois seemed to understand the depth of his illness. Recalling her feelings at that tragic time in her life, she said:
As much as I was hurt and embarrassed, deep down I felt that for anyone to do such a thing—especially a man whom I knew sincerely loved my mother and myself—he had to be very sick and in need of much help.
My family and friends kept wondering why I didn’t express my anger and condemnation of my husband for not being with me at the funeral. But at least there was no longer anything to hide, nothing more to cover up. Now everyone close to me knew what I had tried so hard to keep secret—that Bill was a terrible drunkard who did things few could understand or tolerate.
It took me a lot of years and a whole lot of soul-searching before I finally came to understand that I had been trying to hide and cover up his drinking problem mostly for myself—because of my own shame and humiliation. But now with people finding out, especially those who knew and cared for me, I found myself playing the martyr. Although, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time. But Bill would go on his binges and I would bathe in the pity and admiration of others for being such a loving and self-sacrificing wife. I never understood until much later how sick that was.12
Perhaps the shock of Bill’s absence at the funeral, and his terrible condition when Lois brought him home from the drunk tank four days later, helped Dr. Burnham comprehend that it had to be more than a weak will and a bad case of immorality to make a man act this way—a young man he once knew as charming, kind, caring, hardworking, and courageous. As a result, and despite his lack of understanding, the good doctor’s attitude toward his son-in-law began to soften from that point forward. He sought, almost against his better judgment, to help his daughter care for her husband, particularly in times of crises.
As the new year of 1931 rolled in, Lois found a job at Macy’s department store in Manhattan. Since she had no experience at selling, she was hired to demonstrate folding card tables and chairs for the Leg-O-Matic Company. They paid her a salary of nineteen dollars a week while Macy’s chipped in a 1 percent commission on sales. But her goal was still to become an interior decorator, a goal she had now shared with her father, who offered his encouragement and his blessing, in addition to any financial help she might need. She insisted she could do it on her own.
One day when Dr. Burnham found his daughter paying some household bills out of her meager salary, he became rather cross. Actually, it offended his pride. He insisted she use her hard-earned money to pursue her career goal and offered again to help her. With her father’s encouragement, Lois enrolled in the advanced course at the New School of Interior Decorating in Manhattan. Because of her training and experience in painting and design, she only had to attend classes two nights a week for two semesters; she could be home most evenings. The very idea of moving in the direction she and her mother had discussed boosted Lois’s morale greatly and also bolstered her confidence that, should it be necessary, she could make her own way in life.
Bill, on the other hand, was getting occasional “handouts” from some old friends on Wall Street, which usually entailed some simple research projects. As soon as the task was completed or as soon as he got paid, he’d be off on another toot. Often he’d come home so physically ill that Dr. Burnham would have to inject him with a sedative to calm his nerves and put him to sleep.
But Lois kept plodding ahead. By early 1932, she had not only finished school, but she had proven to be such an effective Leg-O-Matic demonstrator that Macy’s offered her a sales position in the novelty furniture department, raising her salary to twenty-two dollars a week. However, she now found herself with a department manager who tried to become much too friendly. In fact, when he somehow discovered she was supporting a drunken husband, he became quite forward and overt in his propositions. Despite her angry protestations, the man was relentless. Finally she realized she would either have to file an official complaint and chance being fired, or she would simply have to quit.
Fortunately, her hard work and excellent sales results had come to the attention of the store manager, a gentleman named Guy Kolb. When Lois also told him she had studied interior decorating, he immediately moved her into the home furnishings department, two floors removed from her would-be paramour. His attentions toward her soon ceased, especially when he saw Lois now in the good graces of top management.13
It was around the middle of June when Lois came home one evening to find her father pacing the living-room floor. Asking her to remain calm, he explained that Bill had staggered in that afternoon sweating and shaking. He appeared on the verge of delirium tremens, so he rushed him to Kings County Hospital for treatment. He would be there for at least a week to “dry out.”
As his daughter sank onto the sofa weeping, her father quietly suggested that Bill might require much more than a week of detoxification from alcohol. For a long time now, the good doctor posed, his actions seemed to border on the edge of sanity. Perhaps Lois should at least consider the idea of committing him for a while to a mental institution for psychiatric help. He said he was so concerned, he would be willing to sign the commitment papers—for her sake as well as his.
“You can’t keep going on like this,” Lois recalled her father saying in a voice filled with utter frustration. “There’s nothing more you can do for him, not if he wants to keep on drinking like this.”14 Lois was shocked to hear her father even suggest such drastic measures. She would not hear of it and told him so. Bill was sick, yes, but certainly far from insane. What he needed was to get out from under all this pressure, his constant struggle to find a position back on Wall Street to prove he wasn’t a failure. He needed to get away from people who were whispering behind his back, always putting him down. She would take some time off from work, that’s what she would do. They would go back up to Vermont, back to the lake and the mountains he so loved. There he could find some peace and solace and get well again. Then he could start over. They could start over again. It was not too late. She would be there with him, to help him, to convince him that all was not hopeless—that he was still young and bright and capable and could begin a whole new life.
Dr. Burnham simply shook his head. He tried to explain to his daughter that she was simply doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. If it didn’t work before, why should it work now? But Lois wouldn’t listen. The good doctor finally threw up his hands and left the room. As she sat there all alone, something deep down inside whispered that her father was possibly correct, but she wasn’t ready to hear it—at least not right now.
Because summer was the slow season at Macy’s, exacerbated now by the Great Depression, Guy Kolb was willing to give Lois a three-month leave of absence, especially when he learned her husband was ill and needed to be nursed back to health.
Since Dr. Burnham was now negotiating to sell the cottage at Emerald Lake, Lois called Bill’s sister, Dorothy, and her husband, who had purchased a farm in Green River, Vermont, not far from Manchester. Because they had managed their finances well, the Strongs planned to be abroad with their children for the summer, so they were delighted to have her and Bill use the place.
Fearing Bill might try to wiggle out of the trip, Lois showed up at the hospital with their bags already packed. The next stop was Vermont. By the time they arrived at Green River, Bill was smiling again, happy to be back out in the country he so loved. Soon Lois felt hope return as her husband seemed to have no trouble staying sober for the next four months.15
As the weeks went by and Bill regained his strength, both he and Lois began to adopt Dr. Burnham’s philosophy that hard work in the clear Vermont air makes for a healthy body, a healthy mind, and a healthy spirit. The couple began fixing up the farm as though it were their own. They repaired the plumbing pipes, refurbished the water system, and created a beautiful waterfall by damming up the brook that ran across the meadow below the house. As they hiked through the mountainside, they gathered wildflowers, which they planted in a garden near the front porch. And in the evenings after frolicking in the brook, they made love in front of the fireplace.16
“Bill’s sister and her husband were pleased as punch when they finally returned and saw all the improvements we had made,” Lois recalled years later, “but it was the new start I had hoped for. Bill never thought about drinking all the time we were there. At least he didn’t mention it if he did. A friend of mine had given me a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health, which I left next to Bill’s pillow the first night we arrived. He read it and reread it and told me before we left for home how much it helped to strengthen his willpower and resolve to stay sober once and for all. That summer our love was renewed once again as we camped in the mountains and made love under a heaven filled with radiant hope. Both of us regretted the day we had to pack up and return to Brooklyn.”17
Had they known what was about to happen, however, those regrets would have turned into shouts of joy. For almost immediately upon arriving back at Clinton Street, Bill was given one more tremendous opportunity that could have changed the direction of his entire life—had he parted company with John Barleycorn once and for all.
Lois’s sister Katherine had married a gentleman by the name of Gardner Swentzel who also happened to be a Wall Street financier. Despite the crash, Swentzel was still doing quite well at Taylor, Bates and Company, a firm closely connected to J.P. Morgan and its far-flung financial enterprises. Katherine’s husband had always liked Bill and, more importantly, had always respected his research theories and his ability to make money. Still, he was puzzled by Bill’s willingness to throw it all away for booze. But now he heard his brother-in-law was sober and that the whole family was buzzing about the “miracle” that had taken place in Green River, Vermont. Even Dr. Burnham was amazed and told his oldest and dearest daughter so.
One of Gardner’s closest friends and clients was Arthur Wheeler, the only son of the president of American Can Company and a man he considered one of the gutsiest investors he had ever met. He knew that Wheeler and another wealthy gentleman from Chicago named Frank Winans were putting together their own private investment syndicate. They had the notion that if one could overlook the present timidity on Wall Street, gather enough capital, and take a long-term view, a vast fortune could be made from the stock market recovery that was bound to come eventually. They sought Swentzel’s advice about choosing the right companies to invest in. That’s when he suggested they meet his brother-in-law, Bill Wilson, whom he described as an “analytical genius.”
The first meeting in Gardner’s office went swimmingly. Wheeler and Winans, however, while gutsy investors, were cautious when it came to choosing partners. It didn’t take them long to discover Bill’s rather unsavory drinking background. Still, they were enormously impressed with his credentials, his past record of success, Gardner Swentzel’s recommendation, and the fact that Bill was now sober and obviously eager to give his all to this new venture. So they offered him a handsome long-term contract with their syndicate with only one proviso—that if he ever drank again, the contract would become null and void. Bill had so much confidence in himself at this point and was so excited about his prospects that he readily agreed.
Lois was overjoyed upon hearing the news. She clearly recalled their talks about finding their own place just as soon as the syndicate’s deals started paying off. It would be a while but they could be patient now; life at Clinton Street had become far more comfortable and hospitable with everyone getting along. In fact, over dinner each night when Dr. Burnham eyed his son-in-law, he would lose a little more of his skepticism. He shouldn’t have—for everything came apart suddenly, unexpectedly, and incomprehensibly.
Arthur Wheeler had gotten a line on a hot new investment possibility in Bound Brook, New Jersey: the Pathe Company. He asked Bill to round up a few engineers and investigate the firm’s new photographic process and growth prospects. Staying at a small hotel near the company, the engineers began playing cards after dinner one night. Bill hated card games. He found them boring. Lois had once tried to teach him bridge but he had trouble distinguishing between the jacks and the kings. So instead of joining the engineers, he sat in the corner reading a book.
Soon he found himself distracted by the card players passing around a large jug. Curious, he inquired as to its contents. One of the engineers described it as real applejack, better known as Jersey Lightning. He was offered a swig but turned it down and went back to his reading. Suddenly he found himself thinking about all the various kinds of drinks he had had in the course of his thirty-seven years. He recalled that first Bronx cocktail during his encampment in New Bedford, Dr. Burnham’s finest Scotch whiskey on his wedding day, the brandy he had on the ship to Europe to prevent seasickness, and of course those fabulous French wines that fortified him at the Front. But he never remembered drinking Jersey Lightning.
Just then another one of the engineers leaned toward him and offered a sip from the jug, which now seemed sparkling and alluring. What harm could one small sip do? thought the maniac in his head. So he reached out, grabbed the jug, and took a long swig.
That night in Bound Brook, New Jersey, Bill Wilson learned one more important lesson about the disease of alcoholism—that for a drunk, there is no such thing as just one drink.
The engineers could not rouse him the next morning after he had helped finish their jug and then some. They left to check on the company themselves and then reported directly back to Arthur Wheeler, who naturally inquired about his chief investigator. When Bill finally arrived back at Clinton Street, Lois was standing at the front door, her face pale, her eyes red and filled with despair once again. She handed her husband a telegram. His contract with Arthur Wheeler and Frank Winans had been cancelled.18
At that moment, it seemed as though Bill Wilson were standing on a trapdoor that suddenly opened beneath him. He plummeted into the deepest abyss of alcoholism he had ever known and continued that downward plunge over the next two years. He went from speakeasy brawls to drunk tanks, from park benches to jail cells, from pitiful crying jags to horrible hallucinations. As Lois recalled that period in her life, her words were frank and direct:
“[He] became a drunken sot who didn’t dare leave the house for fear that Brooklyn hoods or the police would get him.”19 She wrote, “I became more and more discouraged, and I feared I would have to look after him and support him all the rest of our lives.”20
But if things were bad while Dr. Burnham still resided at Clinton Street, one could imagine just how much worse they got once he moved out. In May of 1933, to Lois’s great displeasure, Clark Burnham married a lady by the name of Joan James, the ex-wife of their former minister. Concerning that relationship, Lois once commented to a very close friend, “My father had become interested in Joan while my mother was ill. At the time, he and his lady friend went together to church functions she had never attended when married to her minister husband. When I spoke to him about hurting my mother so, he said he loved mother more than anyone else in the world, that he always would, and that she understood his attention to Joan.
“Perhaps my mother did understand as she lay dying, but that was certainly not true of others in our family. They were greatly distressed by the relationship. In fact, I was the only one in the family who accompanied our father to the civil wedding ceremony, joined him and his new wife for dinner afterward, and wished them well as they left for Florida. When I returned home that night, I realized that it would be just Bill and I alone together now in the large brownstone. That much of the financial burden would be on our shoulders and that I would have to care for him all by myself. I suddenly felt overwhelmed.”21
Bill now drank to escape and to block from his mind all the terrible, pathetic, inexcusable things he had done and the mistakes he had made. He was unemployed and unemployable. To him, in his sodden, alcoholic brain, his whole life was blown apart, and in the days and weeks and months that followed he could gather no inner strength to think about or create new ideas or plans for his existence. Nothing but guilt-tortured episodes of the past and horrific fears of the future filled his very being.
He continued to bum handouts from old buddies to pay his “admission fee” into speakeasies where he still had a tab; he talked “softies” like neighborhood druggist Barry Slavin into one more bottle of booze even though last week’s “fix” hadn’t been paid for yet; he stole money from Lois’s purse, pawned her and her mother’s jewelry and silver, and hid bottles all over the house. Finally, when all else failed, he wrote his mother, Emily, the sob story of his bad luck and failed attempts to start anew on Wall Street. Sure enough, she sent him some money “to tide him over.” When Lois found Emily’s letter on their dresser, minus the cash of course, she was furious. She screamed and hollered and beat on her drunken husband when he staggered in two nights later.
When Bill was off on a binge, Lois created many ways to keep herself busy. She might make over one of her mother’s discarded dresses, reweave a frayed oriental rug, find some of Matilda’s old fabric in a dusty closet and sew herself a new blouse, or reupholster an old chair from the webbing to the finishing gimp. Through her work in Macy’s home furnishings department, word soon spread of her expertise in interior decorating. She was offered occasional jobs, which she undertook during the evenings or on weekends. But as much as she needed the money, when Bill’s drinking grew worse and the resulting problems escalated, she became more and more hesitant to do anything but hurry home from work and be there as much as possible. Soon, she began missing work on days when Bill was climbing the walls, hallucinating, or shaking so badly he couldn’t eat or drink by himself. Embarrassed by her absences, she resigned her job early that summer. She still had some jewelry left to pawn and things to sell if it came to that. But she was absolutely terrified of leaving her husband in his worsening condition.
“Bill had become very careless the more he drank,” she once confided to some friends. “He wouldn’t bathe unless I forced him to or put on clean clothes unless I did it for him. And he was still a very heavy smoker which frightened me no end. There were more than several occasions when he fell into a drunken sleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and almost set the bed on fire. Because of that and his threats to leap from our bedroom window should ‘those people’ come after him again—he was now hallucinating quite frequently—I decided to drag his mattress down into the basement where he would be safer and I would have more peace of mind.”22
In spite of these nightmarish episodes, there also were, strangely enough, some days when Bill was so sick he couldn’t drink. He would sit in the kitchen trying to sip coffee or stand at the parlor window staring out at people passing by. After a while, they would talk, he and this woman who put up with more than even he could comprehend. It was always the same conversation, perhaps using slightly different words. In those moments, those times in between hope and hopelessness, she would caress him, hold him. He would kiss her and gently run his fingers through her hair. They would always pledge that somehow, together, they would find their way out of this alcoholic malaise.
Lois still had her needs and desires, and when he held her close, her feelings were aroused. She wanted him. She needed him. He would try to make love to her. He wanted to make love to her—but the huge amounts of booze still in his system kept him impotent. For her, it was more than mere frustration. It was emotional torture.
It was even worse when he was drunk and would awaken in the middle of the night filled with his own lustful desires and sexual urges. He would roll on top of her, grunting and snorting until he himself realized the futility of it all. These were the kinds of experiences it pained Lois to share until later in life, when she came to understand how much it could help others in similar situations.
“There’s very little sex life with an active alcoholic,” she would say. “When he’s in his cups, he’s far from enticing sexually. I found it very difficult not to get filled with disgust, no matter how much I loved him when he was sober. For almost two years, from 1932 to the end of 1934, there was no sex at all.”23
When asked once if, being married to a hopeless, loveless, sexually impotent alcoholic, she ever had the desire or felt she had the right to seek another man’s arms, Lois replied, “I can understand some women using this as an excuse, but no, I was never interested in any other man in that way—in a sexual way I mean. Yes, there were many times I yearned for affection. I would see young couples holding hands on the subway train or embracing in the park and I would feel empty and angry. Perhaps I knew deep down that if I ever sought the emotional support of another man, it might lead me to places I was afraid of going. So I simply continued to hope and pray that things would somehow get better—even just a little bit better.”24
And she continued trying to make them better, sometimes in strange or even stupid ways, she later admitted. For example, there was that one weekend when Bill was struggling again to get sober. While gathering the laundry together, she found one of his bottles of gin stashed behind the laundry basket. She took a glass from the kitchen cabinet, walked into the parlor with the bottle, sat across from her husband and proceeded to fill her glass and drink it. As she later said, “I wanted my husband to see for himself just what liquor does to you. How foolish you look and act after drinking it. He tried to stop me. I don’t know if it was for my sake or because he wanted the bottle for himself.
“Anyway, I told him since I was never able to stop him from drinking, he wasn’t going to stop me. So he didn’t. He let me drink until I got tipsy and then very sick. He carried me upstairs and put me to bed. The next morning I woke up with an atrocious hangover. Bill took very good care of me that day and it was the first time I heard him laugh out loud in months. However, it was all for naught. All I did was get sick and he was drunk again himself within a few days.”25
It was early that summer, only a few months after her father’s departure, that Lois reached out in desperation to her brother-in-law Dr. Leonard Strong. Bill had become so physically and mentally debilitated that Leonard took only one look and immediately insisted on having him admitted to Towns Hospital and put under the care of his good friend Dr. Silkworth. Seeing Lois’s hesitation and knowing it had to do with her scarce finances, not his medical recommendation, Leonard insisted on paying for Bill’s care since, over the years, he had made him so much money in the stock market—most of which the shrewd young physician had wisely withdrawn before the crash. For Lois, it was simply one more case of swallowing her false pride.
This was to be the first of four trips Bill would make over the next eighteen months to Towns Hospital, a well-known and well-regarded institution that specialized in the mental and physical rehabilitation of alcoholics. It was located at 293 Central Park West in New York City and had been owned and operated since the early 1920s by the strapping and effervescent Charles B. Towns, who was later to become one of Bill Wilson’s greatest admirers and supporters in the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Charlie Towns may have owned the facility, but Dr. William Duncan Silkworth ran it. He was a white-haired, blue-eyed, soft-spoken Princeton graduate with a medical degree in neurology from New York University–Bellevue Medical School. By the time Bill was admitted to his hospital, Dr. Silkworth had already formulated his theory concerning uncontrolled drinking—a theory much disputed by many of his colleagues—that alcoholism was an allergy not unlike hay fever, whose sufferers gradually become sensitized to certain types of pollen.
As he described his beliefs in a 1937 article in the Medical Record entitled “Alcoholism as a Manifestation of Allergy,” he wrote, “We believe . . . that the action of alcohol on . . . chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.”26
But it wasn’t his theory so much that impressed Bill and Lois when they first met Dr. Silkworth; it was more his obvious love and concern for each and every alcoholic under his care. In fact, Bill was so impressed, he was convinced when he finally left Towns that he would never drink again. It was almost catastrophic when he did. As Lois recalled:
When Dr. Silkworth, such a highly respected specialist in the field, couldn’t help my husband, I began to think that my whole life had been wasted. All my love, the affection I had constantly tried to show him, all the times I had forgiven and tried to forget, it was all for nothing. It made me realize that my love was not enough.
No matter what, I kept ending up in the same old rut doing the same old things, and like my father had said, expecting different results. I felt like I was a complete failure in what I had tried to do just as Bill was a complete failure in what he had tried to do. Here we were just two complete failures sinking further and further down each day and not knowing any way out.
But as I look back, my reactions to it all seem so strange now. Even though I saw no way out, I discovered that hope springs eternal. I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone who loves as deeply as I did, but every time I felt like I was ready to give up, a flicker of hope would return. Maybe I was so sick I didn’t know how sick I really was. But I think, truly, it was my faith in God even though at times I was so bitter that prayers seemed like ashes on my tongue. Perhaps it was also my mother looking down on me, giving me strength to go on. Or maybe it was simply watching my dear husband weeping in despair as he came off another binge, begging me for the thousandth time to help him. Yes, in the face of absolute failure, hope always seemed to return. If it hadn’t, I’m sure I would have given up for good.27
In the summer of 1934, Lois was to receive news that would have left almost anyone else with no hope at all. It came as Bill was being admitted to Towns Hospital for the third time. His own confidence in any possibility of recovering was at its lowest ebb. He had even told his wife she would be better off without him and that if he came out of the hospital and drank again this time, she should divorce him.
It was a sultry summer night when she left her husband in the detox ward and found her way to Dr. Silkworth’s office. By now they knew each other quite well and had always talked until now in very optimistic terms. Tonight, however, she needed to know the truth—the absolute truth. She sat in front of his desk and asked the kinds of questions the spouses of many alcoholics had asked him before. “How bad is this? Why can’t he stop? Where . . . is he heading? . . . What’s to be done now? Where do we go from here?”28
Dr. Silkworth, “the little doctor who loved drunks,” as Bill was to call him later on in sobriety, came around his desk and sat next to Lois. He took her hand and in his quiet, gentle manner answered her questions honestly and forthrightly.
“I thought at first Bill might be one of the exceptions. Because of his very great desire to quit, because of his character and intelligence, I thought he might be one of the very few. But this habit of drinking has now turned into an obsession, one much too deep to be overcome, and the physical effect of it on him has also been very severe, for he’s showing signs of brain damage. This is true even though he hasn’t been hospitalized very much. Actually, I’m fearful for his sanity if he goes on drinking.”29
Lois shuddered. She had heard all this once before, several years earlier from her own father’s lips. She wouldn’t believe him then and she didn’t want to believe Dr. Silkworth now. It just couldn’t be so. She was afraid to ask the next question. The doctor understood. He took both her hands, held them tightly, and looked warmly into her eyes.
“Just what does all this mean, doctor?” she asked, fearing with every fiber in her body what the answer would be.
“It means,” he replied softly, “that you will have to confine him, lock him up somewhere if he is to remain sane, or even alive. He can’t go on this way for another year.”30
When Lois finally left Dr. Silkworth’s office and walked out into the hot, humid night air, she had no tears left to shed. She was completely numb and totally oblivious to the many motorists and passersby on Central Park West. She took the subway back to Brooklyn, walked up the steps of the brownstone, opened the door, and entered the kitchen. The coffee Bill had tried to drink before leaving for the hospital that morning was still on the kitchen table. She carried it to the sink and simply stood there for a long moment.
That’s when Lois Wilson found more tears to shed.