The Judgment (47 page)

How long did she continue? Not long, probably, but she had succeeded in bringing me to some degree of wakefulness. I got up, relieved myself in the bathroom, and sat down in the living room again and finished off the half-full glass of Scotch I’d left. There was a football game on television, Dallas and some other team. Dazed, I tried to give some attention to the progress of the game. Failing that, I could at least find out the score, or what team Dallas was playing. But no, even that proved too much. After another drink, a short one this time, I stumbled back to the bedroom.

Bad dreams. Maybe it was the violence of the football game, or maybe I failed to drink enough to obliterate those images I’d tried to escape earlier. Whatever the cause, along with sleep came something like a movie montage of all the worst I had known and seen in these past weeks. There were monster football players pulling apart children. There was a hanging man, eviscerated, trying to talk without a tongue. There were angels in the snow—Catherine Quigley and Richard Fauret—rising, trailing their plastic shrouds. There were other horrors, too, which were, I guess, just the product of my alcoholic state, fantasies unconnected to memories.

They seemed to last a long time, but how could I tell? It was enough to wake me in a sweat about half sober. It was dark out. I threw off my clothes and took a shower and realized I was hungry, a good sign. Wrapped in my bathrobe, I had a cheese sandwich and a glass of orange juice, a strange combination, but the orange juice tasted good. And so, when I’d finished, I kept on drinking orange juice with vodka. There went the rest of the evening and a good deal of the next day.

I’m not going to prolong this account because the truth is, I don’t remember much of the rest of it. I do know that sometime during the day on Saturday I drank the last of the Johnnie Walker Red and, having also finished up the
vodka, went out and bought some more. I managed to eat something each day and kept drinking orange juice with the new bottle of vodka, because I’d made up my mind that no matter what condition I was in, I had to get into the office on Monday. During the weekend I must also have replaced the telephone receiver, because later on the calls started again, though I didn’t answer them. I was doing a pretty good imitation of Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend.

Late Sunday afternoon or early evening, I was dozing in the living room chair in front of the television. Another football game, this one from the West Coast, was rocketing to a finish. There was a knock on the door, followed by another one, followed by another and another. This couldn’t be Sue. Whoever this was at the door wasn’t interested in making a fuss; he intended to break it down. He beat it. He kicked it. But he didn’t say a word.

I struggled out of the chair and made it to the door.

“Who is it?” I yelled, trying to sound gruff. “Who’s there?” Actually, I was kind of frightened, knowing how incapable I was at that moment.

“Bob Williams. And you’d better open this door while it’s still in one piece.”

He was the last guy in the world I wanted to see. My best friend? My AA sponsor? Forget it. When he saw me in the condition I was in, he’d be my worst enemy. I couldn’t deal with him. I didn’t want to try.

“Go away, Bob. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He let fly a great kick right around the lock. I saw it give. A couple more like that, and it would fly open. I could put on the chain, but the damage would still be done. And so I surrendered, unlocking the door, opening it, and I saw him poised to deliver the next threatened kick. A couple of doors were open down the hall. My so-called neighbors peeked out at us. They didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them.

Bob rushed in, perhaps fearing I might change my mind
and close the door again. He pulled it shut behind him, and then he looked me up and down.

“Just what I suspected,” he said, his face filled with concern.

I didn’t answer. At various times in the last few days I knew I’d been in worse condition than I was then. There was no point in telling him that.

He swept past me, picked up the glass of vodka with its faint orange coloration, and headed for the kitchen. Without a pause, he dumped its contents down the drain of the kitchen sink.

“Hey,” I said, “who gave you permission?”

“You did, when you joined the program. Or have you forgotten? I’m your sponsor. Remember?”

He turned and looked at the table with its array of bottles, then he shook his head in disbelief.

“Did you drink all that?”

“It was a long weekend.”

“You ever hear of alcohol poisoning?”

He grabbed the quarter-full bottle of vodka and the supplementary fifth of Johnnie Walker Red, just about half full. “Go on,” he said. “Take a shower. You smell bad. Shave, if you can manage it. If you’ve got an electric razor, it might be safer.”

Arms folded, feet planted wide, I stared at him, trying to decide whether to tell him to go to hell and get out of my kitchen. But in the end, I turned around, went into the bathroom, and did as I was told. On my way, I heard the gurgle from the bottles as he emptied them down the drain.

On the drive to St. Jude’s Church, Bob surprised me by saying that he blamed himself in large measure for my fall from grace.

“I take responsibility for my own acts,” I said, “my own failures, too.”

“Okay, tough guy, but the way I see it, you’ve been
heading for this for about a month, maybe longer. I remember the night of that big early snow when you saw that little girl’s body out on Clarion Road. You were shattered, had to talk. And what did I do? I gave you a pat on the back and told you to go talk to Father Phil.”

“You gave me more than that, Bob.”

“Let me finish. Then there was last Sunday. You wanted to have dinner after the meeting. What you really wanted to do was talk about all these things that were bothering you. But then that priest came along, the one from Hub City. We had dinner, and that’s all we had. We had to listen to his loony ideas on how Double-A really ought to be run. Then, finally, on Wednesday I got a message from you on my machine, very innocuous—‘just checking in,’ you said. No, you weren’t. You were asking for help, and I’ve been too damned busy to give it to you. It’s been a fault with me, Charley. I get too involved in details, administrative bullshit. I seem to have forgotten the program is about people. A fine psychiatrist I am.”

We drove along saying nothing for a while. Having listened to Bob’s mea culpa, I had no wish to add to his indictment. It seemed to me he was being much too hard on himself. I decided to move him away from the question of blame.

“How did you know what I’d done?”

“Sixth sense, I guess. No, actually I’d put some of this together and came up with a guilty conscience. I started calling you and not even getting your answering machine. Somehow that didn’t seem right, so I came over and knocked on your door.”

I chuckled appreciatively. “That was some knock.”

“Your response through the door told me my hunch was dead-on.”

“You mean if I’d been a little more polite, you might have gone away?”

“I mean here we are at St. Jude’s just in time for the regular Sunday meeting in the basement. Amazing how these things work out, isn’t it?”

He turned into the parking lot and pulled in close to the door. It looked like there was a pretty light turnout that night.

“And you may or may not be happy to learn, Charley, that I got on the phone while you were in the shower and made an appointment with Father Phil for right after the meeting.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.” That was an honest response. It was no good feigning enthusiasm I didn’t feel.

“He’s a good man. He’ll talk to you straight. I don’t think he’ll pretend to have answers he doesn’t have.” He nodded and opened the car door. “Come on, let’s go.”

It’s true the meeting that night wasn’t very well attended, yet it was good for me to go, even in my condition. In spite of the shower and shave, and notwithstanding the reasonable manner I’d conversed with Bob, I was still about half trashed. I’d long ago learned how to fake sobriety. I sat in back and listened as Bob ad-libbed a brief sermon on the duties of a sponsor. Just as he was about to wind things up, he happened to pause, and I took that opportunity to rise. Bob recognized me.

“My name is Charley, and I’m an alcoholic,” I said, then I waited, not knowing quite how to continue. “I made quite a speech here last Sunday about how those big problems of life, the ones we share with everybody, have to be faced along with the particular problem we have here. Well, no big speech tonight. I’m just going to say that one of those big life problems caught up with me and gave me a big kick in the behind. I tried to get away from it in the old way, the way all of us here know so well. I just want to tell you that the answer to any problem can’t be found in a bottle. So now I start over again, counting the days, one at a time.”

I sat down. Bob nodded, looked around to be sure that each had had his say, then ended the meeting with the familiar prayer. A moment later, in the midst of the shuffling
of feet and the scraping of chairs, he appeared at my side, eager to rush me out.

“Ready to see Father Phil now?”

I sighed. “Okay, I guess.”

I grabbed my coat and was taken by the elbow, up the stairs to the exit. And outside. It was a chilly night. If there had been a cloud in the sky, there might have been snow in the air. But there were only stars and an enormous three-quarter moon. Somehow the right sky made the walk to the rectory in the cold more tolerable.

We hurried up the stairs to the entrance of the old brick building.

“I’ll come by for you,” said Bob, “just as soon as I drink some coffee with those guys and clean up the place.”

He rang the bell.

Only moments later the door opened, revealing the Reverend Philip LeClerc. He must have been hovering nearby. Father Phil was a slender man of about forty who, except for the fact that his hair was beginning to gray, looked quite youthful. Wearing gold-rimmed glasses, he had an almost ascetic appearance. We shook hands. I’d met him on a number of previous occasions, of course, and we’d had a couple of conversations about nothing in particular. If anyone had asked me what I thought of him, I would have said simply that he seemed like a nice man.

Bob left us alone, promising to be back in about half an hour. I entered the rectory and was shown directly into a small room right off the hall. It was lit by a single desk lamp, but that was enough to reveal the floor-to-ceiling shelves, crowded with hundreds of books.

“So I’ve got just half an hour to restore your faith?” he asked with a wry smile. “Sit down. We’d better get to work.”

“I’m afraid there wasn’t much there to begin with,” I said, taking a chair across the desk from him.

“Lapsed Catholic?”

“A long time ago, Father.”

“Divorced?”

“More than once. I’m the undisputed king of divorce.”

“And of course as a trial lawyer, you’ve seen your share of rough stuff.”

“More than I’d like to have seen.”

“Close up?”

“Close up.”

He took a moment, folded his hands loosely before him on the desk, and gave me a hard look with his soft eyes. “You are in a state of crisis, though, aren’t you? Or at least that’s what Bob said. What brought it on, Charley?”

And so I told him. I told him about Catherine Quigley out on Clarion Road, my unsatisfying discussion with Bob Williams afterward, and about the recent episode that sent me into the bottle. I didn’t indulge in emotional rhetoric, just laid it out before him: These are the facts of the case. I did take my time, though, and cited Sue Gillis as my direct connection with these two incidents, and I even mentioned my so-called debate with Father Charles Albertus. All in all, I thought I did a pretty fair job, considering the volatile matter I was dealing with. It took a while to tell it, but I made it through without breaking down. My eyes were a bit wet at the end of my recital.

Father Phil knew how to listen—good eye contact, sympathetic nods, but no interruptions. He sat back then, frowning in concentration, as if trying to organize his response. This, as I recall, is how it went:

“Charley, in theological terms, what has put you through the wringer is that you can’t reconcile the attributes of God. You know what I mean? God is good. He is just. God is omnipotent. He’s also omniscient. You remember that old canard they use on high school kids to demonstrate that man’s free will isn’t in conflict with God’s omnipotence or omniscience? Sure you do. You’re on top of a mountain, and there’s a narrow, winding road below; you see two cars hurtling along, invisible to each other. You see they’re certain to crash. In that sense, you see the future. Yet the driver of each car has chosen to drive at an excessive speed on this dangerous road, and
you can’t stop either one of them. That’s supposed to be God up on that mountain, looking down in dismay at us.

“Yet this supposed analogy doesn’t hold water at all, because God, if He’s God, is truly omnipotent, and He could cause one of the cars to run out of gas and the other one to get a flat tire. He could do this if He chose to, and what God chooses to do gets us into that very nasty problem of Divine Providence. You remember that one? Nothing happens that God does not will to happen. It’s all in God’s plan, and it’s not for us to understand. Remember? Or maybe, God writes straight with crooked lines. You recall being told that?

“That may work in the classroom, but when you grow up, and you go to war and see what happens in war, or you go out with the police on a country road and see the murdered body of a child lying beside it, then it’s time for a reality check. Is God good? Is He just? If He’s omnipotent, would He permit such things to happen? Worse yet, does He will them to happen?”

At this point, he stopped, raised his hands, and shook his head in a gesture of bewilderment.

“I’m not much help, am I? You know why? Because I can’t give you an answer that either you or I would accept as valid, or consistent with human experience. You think I haven’t had these same problems myself? I used to try to work these things out by some complicated equation that made allowance for God’s omnipotence, His omniscience, and God’s will. I gave up on it, because I was beginning to have doubts. When you have doubts about the existence of God, well, that’s unfortunate; you might go back to the bottle, but somehow you soldier on. But when I have doubts, I’m out of a job.”