About Alice Read Online Free PDF

for a house in Greenwich Village in the late sixties. She considered my membership in a Yale senior society terminally silly—she would have expected me to renounce it, or at least make fun of it—but when the subject came up I always had the feeling that she was struggling to be merely sarcastic rather than completely contemptuous. People we had come to know because a goddaughter of mine married into their family have some involvement in the cigarette business, and Alice, who could be frank enough on that subject to provoke a shouting match at a dinner party, never mentioned it in their presence. I realized that, because I thought of my goddaughter as family, they’d been granted a sort of family easement.
    Easements on the subject of cigarettes were not given casually. Alice hated cigarettes. Cigarette companies did not anger her as much as those who did the companies’ marketing for them by giving young people—particularly young women—the notion that smoking was a hip way to defy those square goody-goodies sometimes referred to as the smoking police. Given three overwhelming facts that she was always ready to quote—that lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer and ovarian cancer combined, that almost ninety percent of lung-cancer cases are caused by smoking and are therefore avoidable, and that the number of young women who take up cigarettes was rising each year—Alice thought that anybody who made smoking seem appealing was doing something that bordered on the criminal.
    In 1999, a piece in the
Times
Style section portrayed a Manhattan “cigarette lounge” as an attractive and sophisticated and even sweet-smelling sanctuary where smokers, safe from their hectoring families, could enjoy a quiet drink or hold a private party—including, one waitress was quoted as saying, a recent baby shower at which everybody smoked. Alice was enraged. In an article in
The Nation,
she wrote, “I have always been puzzled that anyone thinks women who smoke are cool, probably because my mother…was the least cool person I have ever known. I guess she thought she looked good when she started smoking as a teenager, but by the time I knew her she was pathetically addicted to cigarettes, always desperately trying to stop.” In the piece, Alice mentioned that she admired Julia Roberts for working as a volunteer counselor at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a camp in Connecticut for children with cancer and other serious illnesses—Alice was on the board, and we were volunteer counselors as well—but had to wonder “how many young women had started smoking because of how appealing Roberts made it look in
My Best Friend’s Wedding
.”
    Alice had never smoked, but her mother was a chain-smoker and her father smoked cigars constantly. She didn’t claim to know if the clouds of smoke she had grown up in were responsible for her lung cancer, but she was certain that her parents, who were exceedingly protective, would never have raised her in a house full of smoke if they had understood the danger it presented. She had testified to that effect in the late eighties, when the city held hearings on whether to ban smoking in restaurants—a ban that passed and was eventually extended to bars. By that time, she had allied herself with a loose band of anti-smoking crusaders led by the late William Cahan, a renowned thoracic surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, who was even more dangerous at a dinner party than Alice was, since he had access to X-rays of lungs devastated by cigarette smoking. In the version of her testimony that ran as an op-ed piece in the
Times,
under the heading FOR A SMOKING BAN IN NEW YORK CITY , she said, “I ask the city to ban smoking in public places because I want to do for my children what my parents would have certainly done for me, had they known what we know today.” Actually, she hadn’t left that completely up to the city. The