Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin

Author:Gail Godwin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345463630
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

Ralph the knife again

Chapter Six

Alcoholics Anonymous met at St. Aidan’s on Tuesdays and Saturdays at five. Christina had often eavesdropped on them while weeding the church’s perennial garden. If Rudy went along with her, he sat on a nearby bench, brooding fondly over her crouching form. Roars of applause erupted frequently from the open windows of the church hall. There was a certain exhibitionism about the proceedings, she and Rudy had agreed.

“The Pope will have left a message on the machine,” Rudy would rumble complacently as they were driving home, about the same time that the AA group was having its coffee break, crushing out their cigarette butts in the newly weeded garden and hugging one another and tossing their Styrofoam cups and candy bar wrappers into the sand-filled clay urn the gardening committee had provided for their cigarette butts. Recently some abstainer had been taking out his rage on the folding metal chairs, bending them the wrong way till they broke, until Father Paul warned the group that if it didn’t stop, they would have to meet elsewhere, as he was running out of chairs.

“I would rather die,” Christina told Gilbert Mallow, who had stopped by to offer support at her newly abstemious cocktail hour while Eve was at the chiropractor’s, “than stand up and give an accounting of myself to those people who stub their butts out in the church garden and abuse our poor chairs.”

“There are more congenial groups,” Gil told her, sipping his herbal tea. “Or you may have the strength to go it alone. The one thing you cannot do, Christina, is make an exception—just that one little drinky-poo to get you through a party, the polite toast on someone’s birthday. It’s all over. Forever. Poison. You have to tell yourself that.” In his eighteen years of sobriety, Gil had sampled many AA groups, from urbane Columbia professors to riverboat pilots (his favorite group), but now he walked. He walked in the country, but preferred the stimulation of populated streets. He and Eve kept a place in Manhattan, and sometimes he drove down to the city just to walk. “The rewards will be worth it, Christina. You’ll find yourself getting words back. Whole rooms in your memory will open up.” Gil had been, by his own admission, “a fall-down drunk,” starting at age sixteen in prep school. Then when he was forty-nine he woke up one morning and couldn’t tie his shoes. His first wife tied them for him and called a taxi, as he had also forgotten how to drive. When he got to his newspaper job, he couldn’t connect the necessary mental circuits for laying out the pages. His paper had good benefits and he went off for six weeks to a renowned drying-out establishment and hadn’t touched a drop since. Still, Christina resented being told she could never have another drop.

Gil brought photographs of his late mother’s sculptures; he was preparing a major retrospective at a Soho gallery. Christina was very interested

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