The Accidental Cordelia

Tommie Bower

Word Count 1385

I was just sober enough to feel the things alcohol had killed. Anxiety called my name in shrill, bird-like bursts of alarm. The problem with spending ten years besotted by booze is that alcohol allows no solutions other than itself. Thirty-six on the outside, I was a stunted 13-year-old squirming in her ill-fitting self.

One night, while negotiating the passage through the murmuration of alcoholics at an A.A. meeting, I was stopped by legs splayed between two cafeteria tables. The legs were attached to a grandfather-gray, faded-tweed guy. He stuck his hand out. “Russ. Alcoholic. Sorry about the legs. Sometimes they like to dance, sometimes they lounge.”

I said something pithy, “Hi.” and shifted the large green canvas bag filled with three psychoanalytic tomes I hoped would explain me to me, before anyone else did, and ran.

Reaching safety, I realized he was the impossible guy whose sharing elicited groans from our group. Russ took time setting his words out like cufflinks and a tie before a party and was particularly fond of disassembling bumper-sticker thinking. He could make a knock-knock joke sound like sacred knowledge. Okay, he was pompous.

Any distraction from my own world was welcome, so I watched the old guy at the break, noticing he was surrounded by a group of highly educated women. From a distance, I listened to his generous, almost courtly banter. After the meeting, I discovered we were both on foot for the mile between the hospital and the subway. On that first night, I deliberately lagged behind in the spirit of shyness or perhaps in the spirit of my first vocational goal--girl detective.

I came to know him from the autobiographical bits dropped in the back-and-forth sharing that flowed through the meetings. He wrote for magazines in the heyday of wordsmiths in New York City. He flicked off the names of authors I recognized in the way smokers used to tap ashes. Somewhere over 65 and ten years sober, he put an X on July 4 for his anniversary because he could not remember when he fell into the fog of early abstinence. This entitled, shameless take-over of a national holiday was entirely out of my repertoire of protestant self-abnegation. It was one of the wannabe magnets that drew me to him.

Each week, we walked back to the Harvard Square T and swapped cross interests in art and archaeology as well as the dog-eared events that anchored our drinking stories. In the beginning, I talked about my surroundings and made jokes that floundered. I kept silent about my inland lake of desperation. I didn’t want to drink, but I fantasized about grabbing my fellow recovering alcoholics by the shoulders and screeching, “Will it ever be better?”

On Saturdays, I walked the river with Russ, testing him by throwing out pieces of shame. This was not to demean my emotional self. It was the gasping for the air of connection after being buried alive alone in drinking for such a long time. Without ceremony, he became my recovery sponsor, though I never asked him because he would have deferred to the protocol of staying in one’s own gender lane.

*

Parts of my life that alcohol kept at bay now intruded, without permission, into awareness. After receiving a letter from my father about his hope of reconciliation, I decided to end years of silence and call him. It was a crap shoot I decided to take. My father opened with an appeal to reinstate our relationship using the predictable “I always loved you,” adding, “You were more like me—never like your mother.” He lacked subtlety.

I had decided to confront him about hitting my younger sister. He denied it. When I snorted with incredulity, he backtracked.

“Well, I might have reached across the table to smack her when she mouthed off.” This was a man who scored 100 percent for all eight behaviors on the domestic violence wheel of abuse. But my anger was at his physical cruelty to someone who was small, the sister I loved. I ended the phone call.

Walking along the Charles, I talked to Russ about the meaning of that conversation. I felt him slow his pace, finally standing still, his attention holding me upright. “I cannot forgive my father,” I choked on grief as I understood there would be no redeemed father for me.

“You will not forgive yourself,” Russ answered.

He knew. My agony was the inability to keep my father from beating the child he despised. How could I reckon with the reality of being a six-year-old, helpless to protect her?

I searched the river for something to talk about, holding my breath, which then broke into heaves as it left me. I turned my back so he wouldn’t see.

Russ looked at me and started, “When I feel that way, I.....”

I didn’t let him finish but jumped in with the truth that shadowed me everywhere, “I don’t know why people stay alive. What is the point? I don’t want to drink, but I don’t want to be alive.”

He waited as the unedited words fell under the mottled trees, stalwarts along the river. It was a metaphor I noticed later. The sycamore’s bark peels and leaves pale patches on the trunk in order that the heart of the tree may grow. His words were a bridge between his suffering and mine.

*

Although I knew short sequences of his drinking and life history, I had never heard the whole story of his alcoholism and recovery until his sober anniversary week. He started with the descent details, his writing life, the ritzy style, his rage, the growing fury to drink. Martini rage, he called it and then laid out how his bitter contempt sharpened with each drink and targeted his co-workers, his ex-wife, and his two beloved daughters, how he walked out on all that was his to cherish.

Russ stood still in the brutality of addiction that cannot be forgiven. He described his attempt to reach out to his family after he stopped drinking, leaving an envelope of regrets and many words under the door to their apartment. I did not know that part of the story, nor that there was no answer to his hope of making amends for his behavior while drunk. And then he walked directly into the tragedy most of us, younger by half, had not considered. He might die before finding a way to heal his relationship with his daughters. The Friday night room was stilled as the common grief of lost loved ones exhaled.

On the week of my fourth anniversary, he handed me a card that was signed, ‘To the real Cordelia, Russ (Lear)’. We never talked about the card, but I understood that I mattered, something that was new for me to feel. By that time, I had a full-time job. I saw him less.

Russ asked me to visit him at his apartment. I had never been before. There were no clues about his former life in the small modular space. The one framed photo was turned out of sight. We sat at the linoleum table, and he told me he had cancer and would die soon. Grace left me. I stood by the side of the graying night when the earth is flattened, and there was no one to hold on to.

In the weeks that followed, I visited him in a large open ward at the V.A. but could not fathom that the short time of having someone who thought I was somebody, was ending. Russ was ending.

A group from the meeting joined his daughters at the cemetery and walked to the place where his ashes would be buried. We met for the only time there in the gray of a Massachusetts February. I have always wished I could have wrapped up the version of him I received and have it delivered to them.

We never hugged. But I wore black for a year, for my friend. Sometimes if we show up for the whole improbable show, destiny writes us an epilogue to the tragedy. I often remind myself that when Russ and I parted ways at the Harvard T station, he wished me goodbye by saying, “Have joy.” I mean, who says that?

Tommie returned to writing during the pandemic after decades designing and running programs for those suffering from Substance Use Disorder. Her work, including creative non-fiction and poetry, has appeared in Brevity Blog, VisualVerse, CounterMeasures, and Sojourner. This is her first CNF publication, a piece from her memoir about the long haul, conjoined challenges of trauma and addiction. She lives in New Hampshire where she keeps watch on the Squamscott River and its birds.