The Trip to Echo Spring. Olivia Laing
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doctor and a failed stockbroker, Dr. Bob and Bill W., both of whom suffered from alcoholism themselves. Among its central tenets are the beliefs that recovery depends upon a spiritual awakening, and that alcoholics can help one another by sharing their experiences: a kind of bearing witness that proved from the outset astonishingly powerful. As a statement by AA World Services puts it: ‘Together, we can do what none of us could accomplish alone. We can serve as a source of personal experience and be an ongoing support system for recovering alcoholics.’
I’d come to an open meeting. We all joined hands in the little room to singsong our way through the Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. I had a flash of that tiresomely English reluctance to join in, the suspicion of group identities.
The speaker was a man in his forties, with fine dark hair and a beautiful, ravaged face. He spoke in a meandering, elegant way. Alcohol was the family disease. His father pushed him to succeed. He was gay, attempted suicide as an adolescent and at a late stage in his drinking stopped going out entirely, barricading himself in his apartment with crates of red wine. He used to suffer from blackouts and as he explained this period of vanishing from society he used another of those images that lodged itself painfully in my mind. He said: ‘It was like my life was a piece of cloth that I had shredded down to lace and then I tore the connections away until there was nothing left.’ Eventually he checked into a recovery programme and after that he stayed sober, even when – and here, for just a minute, he looked exhausted – his partner killed himself. No alcoholic ever dies in vain, he said then, because their story might be the one thing that catalyses someone else’s recovery.
After he’d finished speaking, which might have been half an hour, the group gave their responses. Each person began by saying their first name, the nature of their addiction and the length of their sobriety, with the rest chanting back in unison, ‘Hi Angela, Hi Joseph . . .’ At first it seemed theatrical. There was evidently a clique at the front, and their responses were annoying a man beside me. ‘Oh GROSS,’ he kept saying. ‘Oh fuckin’ love, love, love.’
I had some sympathy for him, but the next stage made me change my mind entirely. People were asked to put up their hands if they were celebrating a sobriety birthday that month. Some hadn’t touched alcohol for years; some for decades. An Indian man stood up and said: ‘I can’t believe my son is eighteen this week and that he’s never seen me or my wife drunk.’ It hadn’t really dawned on me before how much of a fellowship AA is, or how powerfully it depends on people wishing to pass on the help and friendship that’s been offered to them. By the time the closing prayer began I was close to tears. ‘Right?’ Andi said, nudging me, and I nodded back. Right.
We said goodbye at the kerb and I walked to the subway alone. I’d forgotten my coat but it didn’t matter. The air was almost warm and the moon was very high in the sky, bright as a nickel, ripe as a peach. On the corner I passed a little girl of eight or so roller-skating outside an apartment building. She was hanging on to the hands of a Puerto Rican woman I assumed must be her nanny and whirling in circles, calling out in an imperious voice: ‘Again! Again! I’ll just do one more!’ One more. It must at some time or other have been the rallying cry of every man and woman in that meeting. As I turned down towards the Elysée I could still hear her shouting ‘Seven! Eight! Ten!’ as she completed each triumphant, greedy circuit.
I’d made these two small pilgrimages as a way of immersing myself in the subject of alcoholism (an approach, now I came to think about it, not dissimilar to John Cheever’s preferred method of swimming in cold water: leap in, preferably buck naked, no namby pamby fiddling about on the side). What hadn’t occurred to me, foolishly, was that spending a day listening to people talk about drinking might trigger corresponding memories of my own.
My room at the hotel was very plush. The Italian influences of the lobby had given way to a French chateau (later, when I went down to breakfast, I found an English country house library, complete with hunting prints and a piano). There was a painting of smugglers huddled around a bonfire above my bed, and I slumped beneath it and tried to order my thoughts. I had ducks on the brain. I knew why, too. When my mother’s partner was in treatment she sent me a card. She must have been somewhere between Step Eight, which requires one to make ‘a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them’, and Step Nine, which is to make ‘direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others’.
What I remembered, lying on the overstuffed bed, was sitting by the bookshelves in my mother’s study, reading a card with a duck on it. It wasn’t a cartoon. It was a serious, sporting drawing of a mallard or pintail, its feathers marked with immaculate gradations of colour. I remembered the duck and I remembered that both sides of the card were filled with small dense writing in black ballpoint pen, but I had no idea now, beyond the vaguest sense of an apology, what it actually said.
I had only very recently become aware of these gaps in my memory. For years, I’d steered well clear of the period in which alcohol seeped its way into my childhood, beneath the doors and around the seams of windows, a slow, contaminating flood. I was aware of various exhibits tucked away in the lumber-room of my skull; the hippocampus, I suppose. Duck card, air rifle, the night with the police. I’d assumed that if I wanted to I could take them down and bring them out for scrutiny. Now, however, I was beginning to realise that they weren’t dissimilar to that piece of decomposing lace the speaker had referred to in the meeting. There is a school of thought that says willed amnesia is an effective way of dealing with trauma, since neurological pathways grass over, so to speak, with disuse. I didn’t buy it. You aren’t fully human if you can’t remember your own past. I put the duck to one side, to return to by way of daylight.
I woke to the sound of horns and lay in the big bed, luxuriating in the warmth. I was getting the train to New Orleans the next day, for the Tennessee Williams Centenary Festival, and so I had thirty hours or so on the loose in New York. I hadn’t made any particular plans. The next few weeks were very full and I wanted a day to orientate myself before plunging south. In the end, I did what I always do: I walked. I got a subway train to East Broadway and worked my way up the flank of the island, through the havoc of Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
The city impressed itself on me by way of a repeating currency of images, a coinage of yellow cabs and fire escapes, brownstones hung with wreaths of conifer and ornamental cabbage tied up with tartan ribbon. Delis stocked with smoked pigs’ legs and wheels of giant cheese. Plums and mangoes stacked in crates. Fish on ice, heaped in delicate, slippery piles of coral, silver, flint and grey. In Chinatown I passed a shop that sold lobsters in tanks brimful of greenish water, the glass murked by deposits of slime and God knows what else. I only looked for a second, enough to catch a queasy glimpse of armoured bodies lurching over one another, striped claws ticking in the insufficient space.
I got a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s and went on up Second Avenue. The city was dirty and beautiful and I was entirely seduced by it. I walked almost all the way to the Queensboro Bridge, where John Cheever once saw two hookers playing hopscotch with a hotel room key. The East River was pleating in little folds of blue and gold and I leaned beside it and watched the boats chug back and forth.
After returning to St. Louis, his hated home, at the end of the European tour, Tom Williams didn’t fetch up in New York again until 1939, when a play he wrote for a competition won him the attention of an agent. He’d shucked his born name by then, and loped away from his intolerable family. In a few years he’d get them down on paper for the first time with The Glass Menagerie, the play that made his reputation. For now, though, he was travelling: hitching and bicycling across the country, writing in the mornings and swimming and indulging himself in the afternoons, a pattern he’d stick to throughout his roaming life.
That first autumn he stayed mainly at the YMCA on West 63rd Street. ‘New York is terrifying,’ he wrote to an editor in Princeton. ‘Even when motionless the people seem