Susan Cheever on her father

 

----from The Fix 3 22 2011

My father had finally gotten sober in his sixties after years of medical emergencies and social embarrassments, “controlled” drinking that never lasted, appointments with psychiatrists, drugs to make him less anxious, and doctors’ warnings about the dire effects of too much whiskey and gin. In the decade before he went to rehab, my brothers and I got so used to visiting him in the intensive care unit of the local hospital that we made a point of stealing a “No Parking” sign from the hospital lot every time he was discharged. When he died, we joked, we would take the big “One Way” sign at the entrance.

But he surprised us, and perhaps himself. He spent 28 days in a rehab that he said he hated: Smithers, in the old Billy Rose mansion on East 93rd Street, in New York City. He threatened to walk out almost every day. Yet he emerged—it sounds dramatic, I know—a different man. He had always been a slob in the kitchen; now he asked me to show him how to work the dishwasher. He learned how to cook; he especially enjoyed the textures of the pastry and meat in Beef Wellington. He listened. He asked questions. He was kind. It was like having a wonderful father whom I barely remembered return from the dead miraculously restored. He went to a lot of AA meetings, and I often went with him for companionship.

In the years when he was sober, my father followed the teachings of AA to the letter—we should carry the message of sobriety through attraction rather than promotion, cofounder Bill Wilson wrote. Wilson was a salesman, but he knew that alcoholics can’t be told what to do. For an alcoholic, proselytizing often activates defiance. My father was very active in trying to help people he knew who had problems with alcohol. He sponsored some of my childhood friends. Yet he never mentioned to me that he thought I might have a drinking problem. Instead he showed me what the rewards of sobriety might be—largely thanks to the joy he seemed to finally find during his own storybook sobriety.

Within two years of leaving Smithers he had written his most powerful novel, Falconer, which reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek. In 1979 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collected short stories.