acquired by trading jewelry he’d made.
By the time he’d finished pointing things out, the coffee was ready, and it was as perfectly done as his apartment, even better than what Jan made on Lispenard Street. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he ground the beans himself.
He said, “Matt, I have an ethical dilemma. May I ask where you are on the steps?”
“I’m concentrating on the first one,” I said. “And thinking some about the second and third.”
“You haven’t done a formal Fourth Step.”
“My sponsor says I shouldn’t be in a rush. He says there’s a natural progression of a step a year, and I’m in my first year, so my focus should stay on that first step.”
“That’s one school of thought,” he said. “And there’s something to the step-a-year principle, in that it takes a year for a step to really sink in. But the people who started all this back in the thirties and forties, they’d haul prospects out of hospital beds and get them on their knees, proclaiming their powerlessness over alcohol and their faith in a Higher Power and all the rest of it. They didn’t even wait for the poor sons of bitches to stop shaking. They were the original Step Nazis, decades before anybody came up with the term.”
“So you’re not the first.”
“I’m afraid not. And, as I’ve said, I’m not the sponsor everybody’s looking for. But I wouldn’t have made it in this program if I didn’t have a sponsor who was every bit the hard-liner I’ve turned into. He made me write everything out, which I hated, and he made me pray on my knees, which I considered demeaning, and likely to interfere with the buddy relationship I’d been hoping to have with God. Two reasonable men, you know, working things out on an even footing. Lord, what an arrogant little prick I was!”
He shook his head at the memory.
“Up until the day he died,” he went on, “I’d have told you I was the right sponsor for Jack. We had next to nothing in common—he was almost twenty years older, he had a much rougher life, he was straight and even a little homophobic. But he wanted what I had and he liked the message I carried, and I could tell that the only way he was going to stay sober was if he was forced to do the program the way they laid it out. Prayer every morning, prayer every night, a minimum of a meeting a day, and you do the steps in order and in writing. Can you see my dilemma?”
“He wrote it all down.”
“Everything he told me, and everything he wrote out, was in strictest confidence. I’m not a priest and the seal of the confessional wouldn’t protect me in a courtroom, but that’s how I’d regard it, irrespective of the law. But now…”
“Now he’s dead.”
“Now he’s dead, and what he wrote might point the police in the right direction. So where does my responsibility lie? Does his death release me from the obligation to keep silent? I know it’s generally considered okay to identify a deceased person as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. To paraphrase a syrupy book and film, death means never having to maintain your anonymity. But this is a little different, wouldn’t you say?”
“In some ways.”
“And not in others?” He sighed. “You know what I miss about drinking? The many opportunities it gave you to just say, ‘Oh, what the hell.’ Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to think things through.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Jack has a lot of people on his Eighth Step list. He didn’t just write down the names of the people he’d harmed during his drinking years. He wrote a paragraph about each person, what he’d done and what effect it had had and what action he could possibly take to make things right. Some of the people on the list had died, and it bothered him that there was no way to make amends to a dead person.”
“He told me about his father.”
“How he hadn’t been there when the old man died. I suggested some things he could do. He could go someplace quiet—a church sanctuary, a park. The old neighborhood in the Bronx might have been a good choice if they hadn’t run an expressway through it. The venue’s not important. He could go there and think about his father and talk to him.”
“Talk to him?”
“And tell him all the things he wished he’d been able to tell him on his deathbed. And let the old man know he was sober now, and what that meant to him, and—well, you know, I wasn’t going to compose a speech for him. He’d think of plenty of things to say.”
“And who’s to say if the message would get through?”
“For all I know,” he said, “the old fellow’s off on a cloud somewhere, and he’s got ears that can hear a dog whistle.” He frowned. “I mean one of those whistles only dogs can hear.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“It could have meant, you know, a dog whistling. Not even the dead can hear that.”
“So far as we know.”
He gave me a look. “There’s more coffee,” he said. “Can I get you another cup?”
VIII
JACK WAS SITTING in your chair when he took the Fifth Step. He’d written out his Fourth Step, spent several weeks on it, making sure he got it all down. Then he sat there, and I sat where I am now, and he read it out loud. His voice broke a few times. It was hard going.”
I could imagine.
“I would stop him now and then, you know. For amplification. But mostly he read and I took it in, or tried to. It wasn’t easy.”
“Heavy going?”
