Not-God (6 page)

Wilson needed time to think. Further, he faced yet another frustration. Family friends, of whom there remained precious few, had begun making snide comments about his “missionary endeavors.” Lois’s plight, they not too delicately suggested, had become worse since he had sobered. Previously she had had to support one drunk; now she was supporting a zealot and never even knew how many drunks she would be coming home to each day. Lois herself did not complain. Bill’s sobriety was the most important thing in her life, the one thing she had always worked for. Bill knew this, but the remarks stung: a real man was not supported by his woman. Was it for such a life, after all, that he had gotten sober?
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So Bill Wilson began again to frequent Wall Street. In early May, a slim opportunity arose. A proxy fight in Akron, Ohio, required a small group of aggressive hagglers on the scene, and Bill jumped at this chance to demonstrate his skill. The proxy struggle proved brief and was resoundingly lost. Discouraged, the others left Akron, but Wilson’s persistence — and the realization that he had no job to which to return — moved him to stay on in search of some last loophole.
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Any city can be a lonely place for a traveling man, and grimy Akron was no exception. On Saturday, 11 May, the day before Mother’s Day, Wilson moped in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Akron. He began to pace. At one end of his lobby track the bar gleamed dimly as it filled with late Saturday afternoon revelers. At the other, Bill noted with little interest, stood the hotel church directory. As Bill paced, the friendly buzz from the bar grew louder and began to impinge on his self-pitying consciousness. He thought about the proxy fight — his hoped-for return to Wall Street had fallen flat. He thought about Mother’s Day — his mother had effectively deserted him thirty years before, and how would Lois understand his not returning to share the day with her?
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“God,” he thought, “I am going to get drunk;” and in that thought began the final founding moment of Alcoholics Anonymous. For at that instant, Wilson panicked. Never before had he panicked at the thought of a drink. One idea rose out of all his recent intensive experience: “I
need
another alcoholic,” and Bill Wilson turned on his heel, purposefully striding away from the bar and towards the church directory.

For an Oxford Group adherent and friend of Sam Shoemaker, the choice of a name from the directory proved simple: the listed Episcopalian minister was the Rev. Dr. Walter Tunks. Frantic, Bill called and poured out his tale, asking to be put in touch with any Oxford Groupers in Akron. Tunks furnished a list often names, and Wilson commenced calling. He had reached the last name on the list, that of Norman Sheppard, before he found someone who seemed to understand his concern and desperation. No, Sheppard told Bill, he himself was not an alcoholic, nor did he really know any alcoholics, but a friend of his, Mrs. Henrietta Seiberling, could perhaps prove more helpful. Desperately fearful, for from the phone booth Wilson could glimpse the bar and he had just caught himself thinking that perhaps a drink — just one — might make this last call easier, Bill tried her number. To the softly Southern voice which answered the phone, he gushed forth the beginning of his story: “I’m from the Oxford Group and I’m a rum hound from New York.”
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Henrietta Seiberling, a Vassar College graduate and the daughter-in-law of the founder and one-time president of the Goodyear Rubber Company, was not an alcoholic. A deeply committed Oxford Group adherent, she had devoted the past two years of her young life to one project: sobering up Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, a prominent Akron surgeon whose wife was her close friend. She had introduced the Smiths to the Oxford Group in Akron, a circle that had developed largely through the efforts of Harvey Firestone. Recently, in her private prayers, Mrs. Seiberling had received “guidance” concerning the alcoholic surgeon: “Bob must not touch one drop of alcohol.” She had shared this with the doctor, but it had not done much good. “Henrietta,” he had replied, “I don’t understand this thing [alcoholism].
Nobody
understands it.” So it was that when Henrietta Seiberling heard Bill Wilson’s frenzied voice and strange announcement over the phone, this cultured woman of faith was not put off. Her first thought ran, “This is manna from heaven,” and she invited Bill to come by her home on the Seiberling estate.
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+

Wilson went, told his story to Henrietta, and heard from her something about “Doctor Bob,” as he was called in the Oxford Group. Dr. Bob, Bill was told, had tried all the medical cures and all the religious approaches, including the Oxford Group, yet somehow he couldn’t stay sober. “Would you like to talk with him?” Henrietta asked. That, of course, was why Bill had come, and so the Smiths — Dr. Bob and his wife Anne — were invited to visit Henrietta Seiberling and her strange Oxford Group visitor from New York the next afternoon. “The next afternoon” because, although Henrietta called Anne with an immediate invitation upon hearing Bill’s story, Dr. Smith was at that moment passed out under his dining-room table, as “potted” as the Mother’s Day plant that he had just placed gingerly upon it.
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Promptly at five o’clock Sunday afternoon, the Smiths appeared at Henrietta Seiberling’s door. Bill Wilson had passed most of the day meditating on the advice Dr. Silkworth had given him: “You’ve got to deflate these people first. So give them the medical business, and give it to them hard.” Fine, Bill thought, but here he was, about to speak to a medical doctor. What could he, Bill Wilson, possibly tell him,
Doctor
Bob Smith?

One look at the twitching, trembling surgeon as they were introduced solved Bill’s problem about what to say first. “You must be awfully thirsty, Bob. Say, let’s talk a little while first — it won’t take long.” Moving off to a side room, Wilson began telling Smith the tale of his experiences with alcohol: the hopes, the promises, and the failure of both; the drinking camaraderie in hotel rooms and the painful dryings-out; the loving devotion of his wife and how she had had to take a clerk’s job to support his boozing. When he came to Dr. Silkworth’s diagnosis of obsession, compulsion, and physical allergy, Bill “really laid it on.” Then he told of Ebby’s visit and his simple message: “Show me your faith and by my works I will show you mine.”
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A tall, rigidly erect, stern-visaged man, Dr. Bob Smith studied Bill Wilson through his rimless glasses as he sat listening, fascinated. When the surgeon had agreed to visit Henrietta, he had extracted from his wife a promise that they would not stay longer than fifteen minutes. But now he wanted to hear more from this man. Yes, here was somebody who really knew how it was! This stranger from New York had “been there.” He had felt the obsession of craving, the terrors of withdrawal, the self-hatred over failure — all the things that he himself, Dr. Robert Smith, had experienced and was experiencing even as he listened.

Something happened within Bob. He was an only child, and not until age thirty-six, after he had moved far down the road of alcoholic drinking, had he married. Dr. Bob Smith had become convinced of and had lived his life on the principle that no one else could really understand. He had had childhood friends, college buddies, respectful colleagues, a devoted wife, a circle of Oxford Group associates. None had ever heard Dr. Bob talk about himself. To them, it was his innate Vermont taciturnity — some of them at times joked about it among themselves. To him, it was the lonely pain of the deep conviction that no one else would or could ever understand — and it wasn’t very funny, even — especially — when soaked in the treacherous balm of alcohol.
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But here was someone who did understand, or perhaps at least could. This stranger from New York didn’t ask questions and didn’t preach; he offered no “you must’s” or even “let us’s.” He had simply told the dreary but fascinating facts about himself, about his own drinking. And now, as Wilson moved to stand up to end the conversation, he was actually thanking Dr. Smith for listening. “I called Henrietta because I needed another alcoholic. I needed you, Bob, probably a lot more than you’ll ever need me. So, thanks a lot for hearing me out. I know now that I’m not going to take a drink, and I’m grateful to you.” While he had been listening to Bill’s story, Bob had occasionally nodded his head, muttering, “Yes, that’s like me, that’s just like me.” Now he could bear the strain no longer. He’d listened to Bill’s story, and now, by God, this “rum hound from New York” was going to listen to his. For the first time in his life, Dr. Bob Smith began to open his heart.
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Robert Holbrook Smith had been born on 8 August 1879, in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The only son of parents prominent in civic and church activities, Bob had been raised strictly, but he had also shown signs of revolt and rebellion from an early age. Perhaps for this reason, he had been especially popular with his peers. His first drink of alcohol, Smith recalled, had been at age nine, when he had found a jug hidden under some bushes. Even then, he had liked what it had done for him, “he liked the way it made him feel.”
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After high school at St. Johnsbury Academy, Bob began his college career at Dartmouth. Liberated for the first time from his parents’ supervision, young Smith put into practice a childhood vow. As a boy he had deeply resented enforced attendance at church, Sunday School, and Christian Endeavor. He had resolved that when finally free from parental domination, he would never again darken the doors of a church. It was a promise he had kept for forty years. Life at Dartmouth furnished other joys: he acquired campus fame as the school’s champion beer-drinker. After graduation, Smith passed three years exploring the world of business. Yet he wanted to be a doctor, so eventually, Bob enrolled in the pre-medical program at the University of Michigan, where he was promptly elected to star membership in the school’s drinking fraternity.

At Ann Arbor, something in him began to change. Certainly not his desire to drink: “that was stronger than ever.” But Smith, who had boasted so often of never having a hangover, began to suffer morning-after shakes. Life became one binge after another. Bob quit school to dry out, then decided to return only to learn that the faculty entertained other ideas. He transferred to Rush Medical College in Chicago, but the binges continued. Yet, somehow, he managed to stay dry for two probationary quarters and so obtained his M.D. degree and even an especially attractive internship at the City Hospital in Akron, Ohio. For perhaps two years, the young Dr. Smith was so busy that he stayed dry. Then he developed “stomach trouble,” and the drinking and the round of binges began again. At least a dozen times, he admitted himself to various sanitoria (Wilson noted the carefully proper plural), to no avail. Finally, his father sent another doctor to Akron, and a thoroughly frightened Dr. Bob Smith spent two months back in St. Johnsbury, silently crying himself to sleep in the bed in which he had been born.

Passage of the Eighteenth Amendment had brought hope. He couldn’t drink if he couldn’t get it. He soon learned the facts about the Great American Experiment, and some even less pleasant facts about himself. The government allowed doctors access to liquor for medical reasons. Dr. Bob, who had always held his profession a sacred trust, began to rummage through the telephone directory, picking out names at random and filling out the prescriptions that would get him a pint of whiskey. Smith developed two phobias, fear of not sleeping and fear of running out of liquor. His life became a squirrel cage: staying sober to earn enough money to get drunk, getting drunk to go to sleep, using sedatives to quiet the jitters, staying sober, earning money, getting drunk.…

For seventeen years this nightmarish existence had gone on, his wife Anne and their two children living in a shambles of broken promises. Unwilling to see their friends, they existed on bare necessities. Even in those bleak Depression years, fewer and fewer patients were willing to trust their bodies to a surgeon whose hands trembled. Bob was a proctologist, and he had seen the humor in but had not deeply appreciated a comment overheard one day at the hospital as the elevator door opened: “When you go to Doctor Smith, you really bet your ass!”
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Sometime in late 1932, Delphine Webber, a friend of the Smiths, called Henrietta Seiberling, one of the few members of Akron’s elite rubber families who had stayed with the Oxford Group beyond Harvey Firestone’s initial enthusiasm, to urge that “something has to be done about Dr. Smith — his drinking, you know.” Henrietta had not known, but after praying for guidance, she called her friend Anne Smith and urged her — without mentioning the drinking problem — to bring Bob around to the Oxford Group meetings. When the time was right, Henrietta felt assured within herself, further “guidance” would direct her to further activity.
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Dr. Bob, guilty over the friendless life his drinking had forced upon his wife, accepted the invitation eagerly. When he learned that this new group had something of a spiritual nature, however, his initial enthusiasm flagged. Yet the surgeon found attractive the poise, health, and happiness of these new acquaintances. He sensed that they possessed something in which he did not share, and he resolved to examine it — as an objective student of religious philosophies. For the next two and one-half years Bob attended their meetings, joined in their practices — and continued to get drunk regularly. In fact, the Group did fascinate him. Religious philosophy had long been his hobby, and he had read much in the Scriptures, spiritual and devotional books, and the lives of the saints. Unfortunately, his own best ideas seemed to come only when he was well lubricated with alcohol, and invariably he forgot them by the next day.

Now, as he finished his story with these wry attempts at humor, watching to see if Bill “understood,” something began to dawn on Dr. Bob Smith. Slowly, at first, then with sudden clarity,
he
understood. Bill Wilson had been able to control his drinking problem by the very means — the Oxford Group — that Bob himself had been trying to use … but there was a difference. “The spiritual approach was as useless as any other if you soaked it up like a sponge and kept it to yourself.” The purpose of life wasn’t to “get,” it was to “give”: for all his dabbling in religion and philosophy, Dr. Smith had never before realized that simple and now obvious fact.
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