Gelzinis: Nanny should take advantage of wake-up call

If God is kind and redemption is possible, then accused drunk nanny Susan Conway-Lally will soon stand before a gathering of her fellow alcoholics at an A.A. meeting to talk about last Wednesday, the day she hit rock bottom.

And I hope she will quote from a report authored by Salem Police Officer Thomas Pelletier.

“This officer knocked on the back door … I requested that Conway-Lally open the door … I then heard her fumbling with the dead bolt. It appeared to this officer that she was not turning the dead bolt completely,” Pelletier wrote.

“After hearing Conway-Lally speak, I believed her speech was slurred and it sounded as though she had marbles in her mouth.”

The “marbles in her mouth” were from a bottle of Cossack 80-proof vodka that Susan Conway-Lally had just about drained, while a baby girl, all of 4 months old, cried as she lay in a diaper filled with her own urine.

The baby’s frantic mother stood on the other side of the door that Susan Conway-Lally was too drunk to unlock.

A crisis was averted, but only because the Salem Fire Department arrived to break down the door. The baby was hungry and wet, but thankfully appeared none the worse for wear.

As for her nanny, Susan Conway-Lally was unable to leave the apartment on her own. She was, as they say, legless.

After a court appearance in Salem on Thursday to answer to the charge of reckless endangerment of a child, Susan Conway-Lally admitted to the obvious: she said, “I have a very, very bad alcohol problem, that I thought was under control. I don’t.”

And, she said, this was “not an excuse for what I did. I’m sorry.”

That’s encouraging, but nowhere near enough. Conway-Lally is a 52-year-old grandmother who says she has battled booze for most of her adult life. She has managed to function in a variety of jobs and was able to pass a background check for her latest, disastrous attempt at being a nanny.

Amid the funky menagerie of junk that clutters the front porch of Susan Conway-Lally’s modest Saugus home is a sign that reads “Santa Stops Here.” There is a certain ironic sweetness in imagining St. Nick navigating his way over the chaos to get in.

No one inside wanted to talk to me yesterday when I knocked.

“Maybe this will be a wake-up call for me,” Conway-Lally said warily after her court appearance, “this will be a wake-up call for me.”

Maybe.

That wake-up call could start this way: Conway-Lally gets herself a copy of Officer Thomas Pelletier’s police report and reads it over and over and over.

Peter Gelzinis