Everlastingly trying

Love, love, love

In April 1925 Bill and Lois gave up their jobs and their apartment and set off on their motorcycle with a sidecar, a tent and four huge Moody’s manuals. Bill wanted to study companies at first hand. Lois wanted to get him away from New York and its bars. The diary she kept went home to her mother every week, so she left the drinking out. The year did slow it down (everything she tried). Bill’s side of the trip is in Number One Man.

In 1926, driving home from Canada, Bill said he wanted some cigarettes just before the bridge to the United States. She knew better: liquor was cheaper in Canada. He had the car keys and the money. “So I could do nothing but wait and wait, hour after worried hour, parked on that bridge plaza.” At dark she found him in the very last saloon, “hardly able to navigate.” Pass It On tells it among the events of 1927.

Money came with the bull market, and the drinking kept pace. Night after night she waited until the small hours. One night, after walking the floor for hours, she wrote the words at the top of this page, and more. “I put faith in love, love, love—and patience.” Looking back, she saw what she had believed: “that I, because of my love for Bill, could change him.”

As the drinking grew, they kept to themselves. She stayed away even from her oldest friend, Elise. On the nights she waited, she set herself projects hard enough to keep her from thinking: making over one of her mother’s dresses, reupholstering a chair. Once she worked all night reweaving a hole in an old Oriental rug, fell asleep over it at dawn, and woke to the telephone. It was the police. Bill was in a Manhattan jail, and she could come and get him.

In the spring of 1929 she wrote it all down again, page after page. “Is my theory of the importance of love and faith nothing but bunk?” She ended by resolving to “keep on everlastingly trying,” and she did.

The crash cost them their apartment on Livingston Street. After less than a year in Montreal, Bill lost his job, and they came back with no money, by way of the family’s camp in Vermont, to her parents’ house, where her mother was ill. On Christmas Day, 1930, her mother died. Lois went to work at Macy’s. In 1933 and again in 1934 she took Bill to the country, and twice to Towns Hospital, where Dr. William D. Silkworth told them alcoholism was an illness. During the second stay, the doctor told her she might have to put Bill away. She believed it, for a minute.

That December, Bill was back at Towns. The minute she saw him there, she knew something had happened to him. “I never doubted that at last he was free. I walked home on air.”