Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Walt by contrast was built on Hallam lines, Mom’s family, big in the chest and across the shoulders, florid, shaggy, a barrel of a man, a locomotive, where I was a stork, a palm. Fred was a washout. A soak. “What are you drinking, Dad?” said Walt.

  It was a small, gloomy room with a padded bar, a few round tables with lamps, the lingering odor of cigar smoke. Some sort of Muzak was playing. We were the only ones in there besides the sad-faced man in a short white jacket who stood behind the bar. Walt half-turned in his chair to bring him over. Fred settled his elbows on the table and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and a certain ease was at once apparent. He was at home in a bar. “I think in the circumstances a dry martini, Walter.”

  “I don’t want anything,” I said.

  “Two dry martinis,” he said.

  “Olives or a twist?”

  “Twist.”

  The three of us sat in silence until the drinks arrived.

  “So Charlie, what’s the story?” Walt said at last.

  “A vascular accident. That’s a stroke. There could be another in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It’ll probably kill her.”

  “Oh god,” Fred said.

  “That troubles you?” I said.

  “Back off, Charlie,” said Walt.

  I knew why I was so angry, and that it wasn’t my father’s fault, but I saw no particular reason not to displace it onto him, and if I could make Walt mad at the same time then so much the better. Walt watched me over the rim of the glass as he took a sip of his martini. Fred left his untouched, as though to indicate his indifference to alcohol. I wished I didn’t see this; I wished the three of us could just have a drink without rancor, like regular guys.

  “So, Walter,” Fred said, “I read about you in the paper.”

  “Where do you live now, Dad?”

  “I travel a lot,” he said. “There’s an office in Jersey City that can usually find me.”

  The tone was distinctly evasive.

  “So what do you do, Fred?” I said. “What does all this traveling involve?”

  “It wouldn’t interest you, Charlie.”

  “Sure it would.”

  “Lay off,” said Walt.

  “You two boys going to have a fight?” said Fred, picking up his drink at last. He’d always encouraged our fights when we were boys. He liked to see us going at it.

  Again we sat in silence. Fred finished his martini and Walt signaled for another round. Fred stared at the table with his hands laid flat on either side of his glass, a cigarette between his fingers. He looked up. The gray skin of his jowls and cheeks had acquired a few purple spots of bloom.

  “You think it cost me nothing to leave your mother?” he said.

  “No,” Walt said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Fred leaned over and gripped my arm, shaking his head. He looked as though he was about to cry.

  “Christ, man, you’re a fucking shrink,” said Walt.

  “I hate that word,” I said.

  Fred sat with his elbows on the table, his mouth pressed to his clasped fingers, the cigarette smoke drifting across his troubled, sagging, blotchy face.

  “That’s what you really think, son?” he said.

  I sat regarding my father and nodded my head.

  “Shit, Charlie,” Walt said.

  I stood up and without looking at either one of them I walked out of the hotel and hailed a cab. I wanted to be at home listening to classical music with my eyes closed. I wanted my mother not to die.

  But die she did. It was as I said. The next stroke came within forty-eight hours. I’d spent many of those hours at her bedside. She reverted again to the subject of her family. She said she had misled me, that she’d given me to believe they came to America much earlier than they had. It seemed to matter that I understand this.

  “What sort of people were they, Mom?” I said.

  She was doped, bleary, weak. Her fingers trembled on my wrist. Her face grew light, almost humorous, like a child’s. Or like a young woman’s face, the young woman she once had been.

  “Actors, Charlie! They were actors!”

  It was our last conversation. The funeral took place at a Presbyterian church on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam that she’d never set foot in. There was a death notice in the Times, and perhaps fifty people showed up. They were invited back to the apartment afterward while Fred and Walt and I accompanied the coffin to a cemetery in the Bronx. The atmosphere in the car was strained. It was a Lincoln town car and my father elected to sit up front with the driver. He and I were wearing black suits but Walt sported a dark blue affair with broad lapels and one of those absurd ties, huge and floppy, deep purple in color. It was the fashion then. His sideburns made him look like a werewolf.

  I believe that of the three of us he was the least affected by our mother’s death. He was gazing out the window as we drove north, and I could tell his thoughts were elsewhere. I leaned forward and gripped my father’s shoulder.

  “Is that you, Charles?” he said, turning his head so I had his face in profile.

  “You all right, Dad?”

  “Sure. What about you?”

  I gave the shoulder a squeeze and withdrew my hand. It did not go unremarked by the psychiatrist inside my skull that by any standards this was pretty rudimentary communication; but it was all I was capable of, with him.

  When we returned to the apartment Agnes was there. Since the separation I’d seen her only when I went down to Fulton Street to pick up our daughter, Cassie. Agnes had barely spoken to me in years.

  “Hello, Charlie,” she said.

  “Hello, Agnes.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  We embraced. I held her close. Over her shoulder I could see Cassie, aged eight, gazing at me. Behind her, stony-faced, stood her stepfather, Leon. On the rare occasions over the years when the three of us, Agnes, Cassie and I, had been together, and by an act of willful erasure I succeeded in forgetting the fissure I had created and glimpsed instead a family, it aroused in me a strong gush of pleasure. It was the idea of the three of us under one roof, living unexceptional routines and bound to one another by ties of unthinking affection. Such ordinariness struck me as the very acme of human achievement.

  Then other people were crowding in, old family friends, my mother’s few intimates, women like herself if such a thing can be imagined, also the people she’d met in her late-blooming career as a novelist.

  Later, when they had all left, I sat alone with the empty glasses and dirty plates and ashtrays while the housekeeper cleaned up, and felt an alarming plummeting sensation in my body. It was accompanied by what I can only call a wave of the purest blackness. I recognized it as the sort of precipitate mental collapse that had characterized my mother’s depressions, and I felt, too, as I watched myself falling like a stone down a well, that I’d become infected with her illness. I saw it then, Mom’s depression, as a parasite deprived of its host and finding me instead. A perverse idea, but I understood why my mood had changed so dramatically. In a compressed few hours I had encountered every person with whom I’d ever known intimacy save one, that being my mother, and she was dead. I was estranged from all of them except one, that being my daughter, who lived not with me but with her mother. I was approaching forty and I no longer regarded my life as possessing unlimited potential, or any at all. I felt my own isolation strongly, and while I was still sexually active the possibility of proper human intimacy seemed every day to recede further from me.

  I sat by the window in my mother’s living room as the housekeeper ferried stacks of dishes and trays of glasses to the kitchen. Outside, the light faded as the long winter afternoon came to an end. I could hear the woman working in the kitchen and for a second imagined it was Mom in there. After a while she came back into the living room and turned the lights on. She cried out when she saw me, as though
she’d seen a ghost.

  “Are you still here, Doctor?”

  I got up out of my chair and left the apartment. Descending the staircase I remembered a story about a man in an asylum. This man believes that his psychiatrist, whom he has met only once, is busy working on his case, finding the solution to his problem. It keeps him going. Then, after some months, he sees him again. The psychiatrist pats him on the back and asks what his name is, and what seems to be the problem. This was my mood. I felt as though I’d been putting my faith in some absent being who was working on my problem. When my mother died I realized that nobody was working on my problem, in fact no one even knew what my problem was.

  Chapter Two

  The building on Eighty-seventh Street had a small foyer with a bronze pot for umbrellas, an old wing chair and a faded rug. It was always full of shadows, especially in the gloom of a dying day. As I came down the last flight of stairs a figure rose from the chair and moved toward me. She had waited for me. We stood there in our overcoats, facing each other, and then we embraced.

  “Look at the state of you,” she murmured.

  We took a cab in the rain to Twenty-third Street. Agnes had never been in the apartment before, and she moved around it as women do, as cats do, in new places, feeling for the spirit, I suppose. We had barely spoken in the cab. I was very deeply moved by this act of generosity, or affection, or whatever it sprang from; for some reason it made me think of the early days, when I was running the psych unit on the East Side and we stood shoulder to shoulder, Agnes and I, comrades as much as lovers. Now I felt that the bond had endured despite the years of anger, despite everything.

  “You’re going to miss her, Charlie.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Her being with me like this, keeping company with the bereaved—given that I had nobody else, this was a compassionate gesture, though what more it signified I couldn’t say. Agnes remained physically attractive to me, and perhaps as a function of death’s proximity I wanted very badly to hold her close to me then. But that was not for me to ask.

  “All right, Charlie, come here.”

  She was on the sofa. I switched off all the lights except for the lamp in the corner and sat down next to her. Turning toward me she took my face in her hands and, with some deliberation, kissed me. I became at once feverish and she permitted this, then she let herself be led into the bedroom where the fierceness of my desire surprised me but apparently not her, perhaps because she already understood sex as a kind of cathartic abreaction to the fact of death. I hadn’t had sex with an emotional intimate since she and I had last been together, that was before Danny, her brother, died. But I hadn’t been celibate in the meanwhile; there was a building at Thirty-third and Lex where in a large, fourth-floor apartment women sold sex every night of the week. One of the women I visited there resembled Agnes sufficiently—the same lanky, small-breasted body, hair the same shade of pale straw—that I was able to sustain an identification. We did nothing particularly kinky. I was happy just to have her wrap her legs around me as Agnes used to, and do that same thing with her pelvis. The woman apparently had no feelings either way as to what name I moaned into her stiffly lacquered hair.

  Later we lay comfortably in the darkness. Through the narrow space where the blind failed to reach the top of the window the lights of the city played across the ceiling.

  Agnes was mildly surprised to find herself in my bed, though not alarmed; there was no convulsion of panic or guilt. She hadn’t planned this, she told me, but when she’d seen the depth of my grief back on Eighty-seventh Street, it was inconceivable to her that I should be left alone in such pain. I had once left her alone in pain, and I knew, because she’d told me, that she would never forget it.

  We had met almost ten years earlier. I was running a psychiatric unit in an old city hospital then, and one of my responsibilities was to sit in with a group of vets. One night a young woman lingered in the doorway after the meeting ended. The vets had all dispersed, and I was writing up my notes. When I became aware of her I stood up and asked if I could help her, and she told me she was Danny Magill’s sister. She said he didn’t know she was there.

  She was leaning against the door frame with her arms folded. I could see the resemblance, physically at least. She was about twenty-two, and like her brother she possessed a watchful kind of reserve. Bony physique, pale skin, dishwater blond hair with thick bangs covering her forehead and falling over her eyes. She seemed to be inspecting me. She was grinning, I remember, as though I amused her.

  “You want to talk?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  But she pushed herself off the door frame and sat down. She was wearing a short denim skirt and cowboy boots, and a black T-shirt with a skull and crossbones on it. I remember a lot of women like that in those days, tall, self-reliant women, skeptical and independent. Back then I was less cautious than I became later. A woman like this I wanted to get close to. She was my type. The gray eyes were direct, aggressively so, and I liked that. It was a humid summer night. The traffic on First Avenue was heavy. An ambulance siren grew piercingly shrill, then suddenly fell silent.

  “You think he’s getting anything out of it?”

  “He keeps showing up.”

  I leaned against the table, watching her. She stood up and wandered around the room.

  “Does he talk to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me either.”

  All at once she contracted her facial muscles as though to rid herself of an unwelcome thought. What was it? Her brother, of course. Danny. What did she want from me? Reassurance, some platitude regarding his eventual recovery. Back like he was before.

  “We were close once. He won’t talk to me at all now. What’s your name?”

  I told her. We stared at each other for a few seconds. There was a clarity, a frankness between us, and I felt I’d known her for years. I also felt she didn’t want platitudes but something more substantial.

  “I just don’t get it,” she said.

  “You just have to wait till he’s ready.”

  “Why?”

  Why! Yes, she wanted to know. She wanted to hear me talk about him. I told her these men had been profoundly traumatized by what they’d been through.

  “What does that mean?”

  “A shock to the mind so intense you can’t get rid of it. You can force it out of your consciousness but you never forget it. And it comes back.”

  “How?”

  “Nightmares. Flashbacks.”

  She asked me more questions. I tried to answer them. I remember sitting forward on the edge of a chair, one hand on my knee and the other chopping at the air, giving emphasis, trying to make it all clear for her. Her posture mirrored mine. She too sat forward, listening intently, frowning, elbows on her knees. We were both tall and skinny, both long-haired, earnest, serious. From the start we were like a pair of twins.

  “So we wait.”

  “How long?”

  I shrugged. “Long as it takes.”

  “Have you done a lot of this stuff?”

  “We’re making it up as we go along.”

  Now she laughed, a short bark like a cork exploding from a bottle. She sat back, pushed her hand into her bag and pulled out rolling tobacco and papers. I was tired. I wanted to go home. I had to be on the ward first thing in the morning. But I didn’t want to let her out of my sight.

  “You know what they call you?” she said.

  “What do they call me?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She was fully alive to me now. We were fully alive to each other.

  “No.”

  “Captain Nightmare.”

  “I knew that.”

  She thought it was flattering. “And Christ,” she said, “those guys have nightmares. Don’t they?”

  “Oh, they have nightmares all right.”

  “So what do I do, Captain Nightmare?”

  “I think you just have to give him
room,” I said.

  She nodded, then lit her cigarette with a Zippo. It is an image I have always held on to, for some reason, how she sat with her fingers cupped around the cigarette, frowning, her hair falling forward, the flare of the Zippo and the tobacco catching. Outside, the low rumble of traffic, a muted car horn, a blast of music, the Doors. She snapped the lighter shut.

  “I feel better.” She blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I locked up. She walked down the corridor beside me, her boots clanking on the floor. The strip lighting cast a harsh glare on the green walls. A janitor slipped by and murmured good night. From somewhere high in the building we heard a man shouting.

  Out on the sidewalk she threw away the cigarette. “You want to go for a beer, Captain?”

  Second Avenue on a hot summer night. Cabs, cop cars, long-hooded Cadillacs with their windows rolled down, a woman screaming, horns honking, the sidewalk crowded. We went to Smithy’s, a seedy joint with its doors wide open to the street and rock music spilling out. We got our beers and found a corner and talked some more about her brother. They’d grown up in a town out on the island. Their father was a builder, also a drunk. She was a grad student at NYU in sociology. She’d won a scholarship. Later, after a couple of beers, on the steps of an apartment building, she stood with her back to the wall, hips canted forward and her hands behind her head, and let me kiss her. I covered her body as headlights raked the doorway. I kissed her again. Then she pushed herself off the wall and kissed me back, spreading her fingers across my cheeks. We stared at each other, very close now, in that clear-eyed, candid way we’d been looking at each other for the last hour. We were both panting slightly, and grinning like a pair of conspirators. We were in this together, whatever it was. Compadres. The mood suddenly broke.

  “Okay, I’m headed uptown,” she said.

  “I’m downtown.”

  “So, thanks.”

  She stuck out her arm and we shook hands. Hers was a thin, strong, bony hand. I crossed the street, then turned and watched her stride away, contained and imperturbable. Emphatically not one of my haunted women.