Carriage Trade (45 page)

Well, naturally that demand infuriated Si, and Mr. Kohlberg came back to us saying that there would be no trust fund at all unless Si was given custody. I was damned if I was going to give Si custody, because he'd begun saying that when he and Connie were married they planned to adopt Blazer, and I couldn't let that happen.

So the battle lines were drawn. For a year and a half I hardly ever left my apartment unless it was to go to a court hearing or a meeting with my lawyer. I was followed everywhere. I was sure my telephone was tapped, so my friends and I talked in code. For instance, when I'd invite my friend Bev for the weekend, I'd say, “Are you bringing your boyfriend?” That meant,
Are you bringing me some vodka?
She'd say, “No, he's going to be out of town.” That meant,
Yes, I've got you half a case
.

Finally, after what I gather was a particularly heartrending performance by my lawyer, the court-appointed referee granted custody of my son to me, and we all heaved a great sigh of relief. I'd won that round.

With that victory, I had a considerable bargaining chip on my side of the table. If Si wanted to see his son
at all
, he was told, he was going to have to come up with some sort of trust fund for him. Dickering over that took several more months.

I'd wanted the income from the fund to be available at age eighteen, which would have been in 1981, when Blazer would presumably be starting college. Si's side wanted the income to start three years later, when Blazer was twenty-one. In the end, Si agreed to pay all Blazer's college costs and to set up a trust that would start paying Blazer an income when he reached his twenty-first birthday. An elaborate schedule of yearly contributions to the fund was worked out, so much each year, until the fund reached a ceiling worth of half a million dollars. It was only half what we'd originally asked for, but my lawyer thought it was a good compromise. In return, I agreed to allow Blazer to spend two weekends a month with his father until he was eighteen, when he'd be on his own.

My divorce from Sol was final in September of 1965, and my lawyer and my friend Beverly Hollister and I all celebrated in my apartment that night, and I'm sorry to say that all three of us got very, very drunk.

Sam, my lawyer, gave us a souped-up rendition of the heartrending performance he'd given before the court referee that got me custody. “Your Honor,” he said, standing on a chair, “I ask you to consider the heartache and emotional torment my client has been put through. The young widow of a United States Air Force hero, she came to this cruel city to find employment that would put bread on her table. Here she was taken up by the suave, polished, sophisticated and ten-years-older millionaire Silas Tarkington, the possessor of a twenty-two-room duplex luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue, New York's most prestigious address. Seduced by this older man's blandishments and promises of riches, she agreed to be his wife. But no sooner had the couple entered into the bond of matrimony than the young wife discovered evidence of her faithless husband's philanderings—late nights in expensive nightclubs with ladies of the evening, other women's lipstick smeared on his pocket handkerchiefs, and, yes, Your Honor, in one instance on her husband's underclothing. And yet, despite the humiliation and the heartache caused by these discoveries, the young wife determined to keep up her end of the solemn marriage vows.”

His voice broke. He pretended to shed a tear.

“A year later, a child, a son, was born to this marital pair. Added to the travails inflicted upon her by her husband's blatant infidelities were now the duties of sweet young motherhood. Ignored by her faithless husband, she made her infant the center of her life. Today, Your Honor, that infant is barely a toddler. Surely you would not deprive a child of such tender years of its mother, nor a young mother of her only child. Since the outset of this divorce action, Your Honor, my client has devoted herself full-time to the care of her little one, forsaking all social life. In the meantime, she has been forced to hear herself vilified by opposing counsel as a woman of loose morals, an unfit mother, an uncaring parent, and a woman addicted to alcohol, to the demon rum, to the devil's brew.… By the way, Your Honor, I'm ready for another drink!”

He had Bev and me rolling on the floor with laughter.

Sam and Bev later got married, by the way. I've lost track of Bev, and it's too bad, because she was my best friend. But she was a friend from my drinking days. That often happens to us alcoholics. When we get sober, the friends from the drinking days just sort of disappear. Today, most of my friends are members of my support group.

Of course my victory over Blazer's trust fund turned out to be a Pyrrhic one, didn't it? By the time Blazer's twenty-first birthday rolled around, there wasn't any trust fund. Si told Blazer I must have raided it, but I swear to you I did not. I never touched any of that money. I never even saw it. Maybe I should have paid closer attention, but I was drinking during all those years, and I let other people handle details like that. In that sense I am to blame for the missing funds—me and my old friend alcohol. Remember, I've only been sober now for six years—six years, three months, and eighteen days, to be exact. And that's a very short time, compared to all those drinking years.

Around 1970, a young man named Thomas Bonham joined the store, and Si placed him in charge of the trust fund, of the annual contributions that Si was making to it. Once a year, Mr. Bonham would come to see me, to go over the trust figures with me and give me pieces of paper to sign. I assumed that everything was going well. Mr. Bonham is a charming man, very intelligent and well-spoken. I have a theory that Si brought him in to be the eventual replacement for Moses Minskoff as his financial detail man. Mr. Bonham was certainly a cut above Mr. Minskoff.

When Blazer found out that his trust fund had somehow evaporated, he was furious. His father had accused me of stealing it, and Blazer actually asked me if I had. “Did you, Mom?” he asked me.

“I swear to you I didn't!” I told him. “I had no access to it. How could I have done it? All I ever did was go over the figures with Mr. Bonham once a year.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure, Mom, that maybe sometimes when you were a little drunk you didn't write out some checks, or whatever you do to get at money like that, and then forgot about it?”

“Why
would I have done that?” I said to him. “I fought hard to get that trust fund for you, all during the divorce. I wouldn't have fought so hard to get that for you, and then have taken it away.”

The issue of the vanished trust fund very nearly drove a permanent wedge between my son and me.

There was no way I could get through to Si, so I called Mr. Bonham to find out what had happened. “I thought everything was in perfect order,” I said to him.

“It was,” he told me. “Everything was in perfect order until a couple of years ago, when Si made some bad investments in it. I warned him at the time, but he insisted. Then this last recession hit us hard, and there were debts to be paid, and calls for more collateral. I'm sorry, Alice.”

I told Blazer about this.

“Then the old man stole it,” he said. “He must have.”

Blazer and his father had had many disagreements and quarrels in the past, but the missing trust fund drove the final wedge between them. “I hate him,” Blazer said at the time. “I really hate him now. I'd like to kill him! I'd really like to
kill him
!”

Well, even though it was awful to hear Blazer talk like that, one good did come out of that trust fund episode—my sobriety.

When Blazer said that to me, about my maybe having done something when I was “a little drunk,” I realized that my son had never before used the word “drunk” about me. It woke me up.
My son thinks of me as a drunk!
I thought. It opened my eyes. And I took a good, hard look at myself for the first time.

I realized a number of things all at once. I realized how dependent I'd become on alcohol. I realized how it had come to control my life. My job, for instance. I'd begun editing a weekly fashion newsletter, to give me extra income, to supplement Erick's pension and his $200,000 life insurance policy. It permitted me to work out of my apartment. I didn't have to worry about how I looked or what I wore. I could sleep late on mornings when I had hangovers. In other words, it was a job designed to accommodate itself to my drinking hours.

Other than my job, every minute of my waking day was spent planning on when it would be sundown and time for the cocktail hour. “The sun is over the yard arm, Bev!” I'd say to my friend, and we'd bring out the bottle and the ice and glasses. During the day, I'd check my liquor supply, counting the bottles. Today is Saturday, I'd think. Do I have enough for Sunday, when every liquor store in town will be closed? If I went to a party, I'd stick a flask in my purse, in case the hostess's drinks weren't being poured fast enough. I'd even dream about drinking. I began to have dreams in which a certain seven-digit number kept appearing. I was certain that I was dreaming a winning lottery-ticket number, and one night I forced myself awake and wrote the number down. It was Sherry-Lehmann's telephone number.

I used to say I drank because it helped me get a good night's sleep. I realized it was taking more and more liquor to put me to sleep, and instead of sleeping I was becoming an insomniac. I felt suddenly that my whole life was being washed away in alcohol.

Worst of all, I realized that alcohol and I were cheating my son. There were events in Blazer's life when I was either missing or only half there. In school, he played basketball and, because he was taller than other boys his age, he played center. He'd remind me of the dates of his games, but I'd argue that I didn't care for basketball so I never saw him play. Those games interfered with my drinking time. He had the male lead in the school play,
Onions in the Stew
. I went to see it, but all through the performance I was thinking about getting home and having a drink. “How'd I do?” he asked me afterward. “Just fine,” I said, outside in the street, desperately trying to flag down a cab that would get me home to the bottle.

I realized—and this was the most horrible realization of all—that Si had been right: I
was
an unfit mother.

Blazer enjoyed his weekends in Old Westbury with Connie and his father, at the farm they'd bought. He'd try to tell me about the things he'd done there, but I didn't want to hear about any of it. One day—he was only five years old—he mentioned swimming. “You can't swim,” I told him. “Yes, I can,” he said. “Aunt Connie taught me in their pool.” She also taught him how to ride, on the horses they kept at the farm, and she began entering him in horse shows out on Long Island, and he started winning blue ribbons. But he never told me about the blue ribbons because he knew I didn't want to talk about anything that happened out there. I only found out about them when I happened to open one of his dresser drawers and saw them lying there. Neatly, in rows.

I realized that Connie was doing exactly as she promised and giving him a wonderful home—at least, while he was with them. And where was I? Drinking, thinking, Hell, I have no pool, I have no horses.

When Blazer was at Yale, Connie and Miranda often visited him there. Somehow, I never had the time. I realized Blazer had become genuinely fond of Connie, and he adored his little half sister. That only made me feel bitter, jealous, and resentful. I knew that Blazer and his father often quarreled, particularly when Blazer reached his teens, because Blazer had no interest in retailing or in following his father's footsteps into the store. At the time, Blazer talked about becoming a musician, but his father told him there was no money in it. When I heard about Blazer's quarrels with his father, it made me feel good. It made me feel justified as a mother. Can you imagine that? All because I was drinking.

If I hadn't been drinking, I might have kept a closer eye on what was happening to Blazer's trust fund and also what was happening to Blazer.

But mostly it was the shock of hearing my son say,
Are you sure, Mom, that maybe sometimes when you were a little drunk …?

All sorts of things came rushing back to me. One day when he was sixteen, he sat down at the piano, and I realized he was playing a Chopin étude. “When did you learn to play?” I asked him.

He looked at me a little guiltily. “Aunt Connie taught me,” he said. “She's been giving me lessons since I was six.”

All those years, I realized, I'd hardly been noticing him. But he'd been noticing me. Often in the mornings, before he'd go off to school, or in the evenings, when I'd have trouble getting to sleep, he'd come into my room and give me back rubs, and shoulder rubs, and neck rubs. “Are you feeling better, Mom?” he'd ask me. All that time, he knew intuitively that I was sick, with an illness I couldn't control. All those years, when I'd been doing so little for him, he'd been trying to do whatever he could for me.

Sometimes when you were a little drunk …

That was when I decided to do something to bring my life under control. I screwed up my courage and went to my first A.A. meeting. It was a very unpleasant experience, but I forced myself to go back. And I began to realize that there were other people in the same plight, who were taking everything out of the bottle and giving nothing back.

When Blazer learned he'd been left out of his father's will, I don't think he was really surprised. I think he expected it, after the trust fund debacle and the bad scene with his father afterward. But who knows? Maybe in the long run it will be good for him that he didn't get a lot of money from his father. Maybe it will force him to go out and do something on his own, the way his father did. He and a friend are trying to open a restaurant in the Village right now. Sometimes I think, looking back, that my insistence on a trust fund from Si was just another example of my own laziness at the time.