Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  She turned toward me in the bed and propped her head on her chin to gaze at me where I lay staring at the shifting patterns of light on the ceiling. Somewhere on Tenth Avenue a garbage truck rumbled to life and moved off with a hiss and a clatter. A distant siren was audible to the east, a wail within the indistinct constant restless murmur of the city late at night.

  “What will they say at home?”

  “Nobody’s at home. I’m a free woman tonight.”

  “You knew, did you, that this would be the worst night?”

  She nodded. She reached over to me, stroked my cheek and ran her finger along my lips. “Charlie,” she said.

  “Will you come here again?”

  “Maybe.”

  I reached for her. I believed that this “maybe” meant we might have some sort of private arrangement. But I feared that her tentative acquiescence could vanish as suddenly as it had materialized. For although Agnes was at that moment as open and tender toward me as she’d ever been, I doubted she would be the same woman in the morning. So I said nothing more. A little later we fell asleep, still tangled in each other’s limbs.

  • • •

  Her brother was one of the worst damaged of the vets in the group, although I didn’t tell her that the night we met. I’d just completed my residency at Johns Hopkins when I was offered the psych unit, and despite the squalid condition of the facilities and the evident demoralization of the staff, I’d accepted the job at once. I was young for such an appointment, but I was ambitious, I was qualified and I was deeply relieved to be back home after the years in Baltimore.

  But New York had deteriorated in my absence. I was horrified at the decay into which the city had sunk, and if the worst of it fell on the poor—garbage everywhere, streetlights broken, phone booths smashed up, crime out of control, people at each other’s throats, on and on—that was nothing compared to what was happening to the mentally ill. It was too late for most of the pathetic creatures who shuffled up and down the wards, who for years had been so completely dependent on the institution that there was no possibility of their ever getting out again, though many had got out, had been thrown out, in fact, and were wandering the city in rags, babbling to themselves and living in filth, truly the wretched of the earth. At the end of my first day I sat exhausted in my office and asked myself what possible point there was in carrying on.

  But I was young, and I refused to be disheartened: I would make a difference. With the support of my boss, a man named Sam Pike, I planned to turn the unit into a model of the sort of progressive mental-health treatment I’d been exposed to at Johns Hopkins. I suppose I was no different from tens of thousands of young Americans then, disgusted by not only the political establishment but all social institutions, orthodox psychiatry not least, and committed to the idea that without radical change our society was done for. Central to this movement, if that’s what it was, was our opposition to the war. For this reason I was determined to do what I could for the men returning from Southeast Asia with severe psychological damage, what was once called combat fatigue, and before that shell shock.

  I will not forget the stuffy, smoke-filled room where we met in the basement of the hospital; the room where I met Agnes. I remember a dozen or more vets sitting in a rough circle. I see them grinning as though for a group photo, each of those emotionally shattered but still defiant men in their T-shirts and blue jeans, their baseball caps, their tattoos, men in their twenties mostly who’d seen what no human being should ever have to see and the pain of it stamped on their faces like boot prints. They looked old beyond their years, sitting forward with elbows on knees, or with legs flung out, an arm over the back of the chair, eyes turned up to the ceiling and a cigarette always burning between their fingers. They startled easily and sought refuge in street drugs and alcohol, and their symptoms would later be tied to posttraumatic stress disorder—a term that didn’t exist then. They’d seen their buddies die and wanted to know why it wasn’t them. They felt defiled. They felt, many of them, that they were already dead.

  It was three weeks before she visited me again. I had not tried to contact her. I preferred to test my solitude to the limits of endurance, and those I had yet to reach. But the hours I’d spent with her the night of my mother’s funeral had awoken in me what I could only think of as a hunger:

  Agnes was the only woman I had ever properly loved. I had often thought about what I meant by the word love with regard to Agnes, and found it easier to discard other competing emotions and define it in the negative. For sure it had something to do with sex, but my desire for Agnes was also driven by a further wealth of feeling that wasn’t affinity, or not merely affinity, nor was it a twinning, although this idea did at least begin to approximate what I was after. There was a feeling of twinship, not least because we resembled each other physically, and could have passed for brother and sister. So what was I to make of the fact that it was the death of her real brother that destroyed our marriage? I remembered telling her, in the immediate aftermath of Danny’s death, that she would be better off without me, better able to get on with her life. The inadequacy of this as justification for leaving her was made very clear to me. I tried to explain how corrosive it would be, her conviction of my responsibility for Danny’s death.

  “Then change my conviction,” she said.

  I was silent. I opened my hands, a gesture of helplessness. I couldn’t do it, I told her. It was during that conversation, or one identical to it—they blur together in my memory now—that I remember her pummeling my chest with her fists, weeping with frustration, and me standing there with my arms by my sides in a posture of stoic mortification.

  That was all behind us now. The most potent charge of emotion weakens over time, unless it’s repressed. Then it can wreak havoc in the psyche for years to come, which was what had happened to Danny and his buddies. Their buried material was throwing up nightmares and other symptoms, and would continue to do so until the trauma could be translated into a narrative and assimilated into the self; this was our working assumption, Sam Pike’s and mine. But Agnes didn’t repress. She remembered in vivid detail the events surrounding Danny’s death and my own subsequent departure, for it had kept her effectively out of touch with me for seven years.

  But the day I buried my mother she had waited for me afterward and then come home with me.

  Chapter Three

  My apartment was on the eleventh floor of a building on West Twenty-third Street. After I moved out of Fulton Street I spent a couple of years in a cramped little studio in the Village before moving up to Chelsea. It was a big corner apartment, not as spacious as the apartment on West Eighty-seventh, which by then I knew was going to Walt, but a good-sized two-bedroom with a view of the river and, to the south, all the way down to the twin towers. My living room, the one with the views, had a broad arched opening halfway down and a kitchen at the far end with a counter and high stools. Two walls were given over to bookshelves, floor to ceiling, crammed full and spilling out. There was a good stereo system and some framed reproductions of works by the surrealists, holdovers from my Baltimore days that I’d never troubled to replace. The dining table was always heaped high with papers and journals, and there was no television, much to the frustration of Cassie, who claimed that weekends spent with me were deadly boring, involving as they did a good deal of reading.

  Cassie was a clever child with a flair for the dramatic gesture. At times she was distant and dreamy, apparently indifferent to the world around her. She was tall for her age and had a mass of tangled blond hair that would fall across her face like a curtain.

  “Daddy, everybody has TV! You are such a dinosaur.”

  “What sort of a dinosaur, honey?”

  She’d roll her eyes in despair. But she was just as happy with a book as she would have been with TV. She only pretended to be a modern child.

  Agnes, on her second visit to my apartment, wandered the bookshelves while I ordered food from the Chinese place on Eight
h Avenue. She pulled out a volume of Wallace Stevens and idly turned the pages. “Charlie,” she said, “you don’t imagine I’ve forgiven you?”

  I was still on the phone. I turned toward her. She was wearing a black skirt and a dark blouse of some silky loose material, and she had not yet removed her raincoat. She had changed in the years we’d been apart, somehow become more of a woman, her long, clever face sprinkled with freckles now and a sort of wryness apparent in her slightly snaggletoothed grin. Often she talked with a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, her eyes squinting against the smoke. Her hair still tumbled untidily to her shoulders, much as it had when I first met her. She stood by the bookshelves and took the cigarette from between her lips.

  “Because if you do, I have to tell you that it isn’t what this is about.”

  I was still ordering food, and it was a mark of some intellectual agility on my part that I could sustain both that activity and Agnes’s last sentence. I completed the order and put the phone down. I didn’t give a damn whether she thought that I thought that she’d forgiven me: she was here. I sat leaning forward on a high kitchen stool, my legs slightly bent and my palms on my thighs.

  “Come here at once,” I said.

  Agnes, smoking, continued to turn the pages, her face averted from me. I waited. She walked down the room, swaying a little, and tossed the book onto the sofa, where I found it the next morning. I opened my arms, and when she stepped between them I slid my hands in under the raincoat, clasping her slim frame to me with some force. She leaned into me and we kissed. Why was she doing this? Only once had I properly met Leon, her second husband, Cassie’s stepfather. Leon O’Connor. They came from the same town on Long Island; apparently they had dated in high school. He worked for the Fire Department.

  I remembered the defensiveness in Agnes’s tone when I’d asked what he did for a living. We were still enemies in those days but were forced to cooperate for Cassie’s sake.

  “Yes, you laugh,” she’d said, “that’s just like you.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  But a fireman? And her with a PhD in sociology? This had been my thought.

  “Better a decent fireman,” she’d said.

  “Better than what?”

  “Than a shit of a shrink.”

  By then I had mastered the ability to bite back my anger when she dispensed some particle of her own reservoir of resentment. I hoped the fireman would extinguish some at least of her unhappiness, and for a while it seemed he had. The one time we met, it was because there’d been some miscommunication about when I was supposed to pick up Cassie from Fulton Street. My daughter, then aged five, interposed her body. “Daddy,” she said, “this is Leon O’Connor. Leon, this is Daddy.”

  Done with grace. She was a precocious child. We shook hands. He was as tall as me and strongly built, a formidable man with cropped hair and a thick, tobacco-stained mustache. New York Irish. But he was not healthy. His skin was gray and he had a ragged cough.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  Then I thought, what does he see? Some shit of a shrink. The asshole who walked out on Agnes when she needed him most—see him climb the stairs of a blazing tenement with sixty pounds of gear on his back to save a kid! Cassie was watching us closely.

  “You two going swimming?” Leon O’Connor said.

  “Yes, we are, aren’t we, Daddy?”

  “Sure.”

  “You have a good time, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart. He calls my daughter sweetheart. I should have him arrested. I should give him a medal. I should get the fuck out of here. Instead I made conversation.

  “You work in the city, Leon?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “Why did you go into the Fire Department? You mind my asking?”

  “It’s what the men in my family do. You kind of take it on board when you’re a kid.”

  “Never wanted to buck the system?”

  “Daddy, can we go now?” She was hopping from foot to foot, suddenly uncomfortable having two daddies in the same room.

  “Nah. You?”

  “Me? Oh, I always wanted to buck the system.”

  “Yeah, so I heard.”

  In the cab on the way to the pool I pondered that remark. A humbling encounter, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. He would have heard Agnes’s account, and it wasn’t hard to guess how it would play in the moral theater of Leon’s mind. A familiar sensation occurred then, and I didn’t attempt to suppress it, the welling of anger and within it a flame of resistance: I did the right thing. Agnes will understand that one day. At the same time, streaming in like a tide was my acceptance of the inevitability of her version of events, with me at fault, me the shit. What else was this Leon to think of me?

  “Daddy, what are you doing?”

  I realized I was staring out the window of the cab and that my hands, clenched tight on my thighs, had begun furiously kneading the fabric of my trousers. “Sorry, honey,” I said, “I was thinking about something else.”

  With Agnes that second night I again held back from asking what it meant that she should come to me like this. I had to respect her discretion. But at the same time I wanted to know, and she knew it. Afterward, as she smoked, and again we watched the lights on the ceiling, she said, “So why don’t you ask me? I never knew you to be reticent before, not about things like this.”

  “So tell me.”

  “It’s not what you think.” Suddenly she pushed back the sheet and, swinging her long legs over the side of the bed, sat with her back to me, tapping her cigarette in the ashtray on the night table. Her head sank forward, one hand covering her face. In the gloom I saw her shoulders shaking, but there was no sound. “What’s going on?” I whispered.

  My hand was on her spine but she shook me off. She stubbed out the cigarette and left the room. She returned dry-eyed, wrapped in a bath towel that she shed as she got back into bed. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “You sure about that?”

  I loomed over her, peering into her face. Did it still work? Could I read her like I used to? But no, a new layer of emotion had silted and hardened upon what once had been a virgin bed of trust. She may have offered me her body but she wasn’t about to give me her heart, not now.

  Danny never missed a meeting. He was a raw-boned and taciturn man who gave off a strong feeling of separateness. Don’t touch me, he seemed to say. Come no closer. I understood from the others that he’d been a tough soldier who’d watched his buddy die. Something happened to him after that, and four months later they shipped him home.

  He seldom talked, and when he did his voice was so low we had to strain to hear him. I never heard that quality of silence in the group at any other time. One night, though, he described how his buddy died. He spoke as if there were a gun to his head, and in a way there was: he had an alien inside his brain, a foreign body he could neither assimilate nor expel. His squad was ambushed out on patrol. When fired on you throw yourself down. His buddy threw himself into the brush beside the path, where a primitive contrivance was waiting for him, a plank of wood with spikes driven up through it. Impaled, horribly injured, he quickly bled to death.

  The other men were disgusted. There were loud cries of anger. One remark stayed with me.

  “No safe place, man,” said Billy Sullivan, a heavy guy from Staten Island, twenty-five now, who’d served two tours and come back stammering, plagued by nightmares, hands shaking so bad he could barely, at times, so he told us, get the bottle to his lips.

  No safe place. Danny seemed to have gone on a sustained rampage after that. I think he went berserk. He was lucky to have survived. But it was the aftermath that mattered. In Danny’s nightmares, the Vietnamese he’d killed rose up from the earth and came after him. Night after night they came back, night after night he was pursued by the running corpses of his victims until he awoke in sweaty suffocation and could still smell their bodily corruption in
the room. Sometimes the smell lingered all day long. Later he talked more about the loss of his buddy. He said he didn’t try to replace him, instead he became cold and isolated, embittered to the point of numbness. This grieving man withdrew emotionally, as do all of us who grieve. Robbed of a friendship that had been the one tender sound, the single grace note in the cacophony of violence and insanity and death, he shut down his humanity. Better not to feel.

  It was also clear he was drinking heavily, alone, every night, so as to mentally climb down from the state of combat readiness in which he spent most of his waking hours. He couldn’t help it. In his mind he was still in the jungle. So his morose, apparently resentful presence was at least in part the function of a chronic hangover. Agnes later confirmed this to me.

  Again she came to the hospital, and again we went for a beer. It was a strange relationship we had at first, those stray hours snatched at the end of a long working day. We soon became lovers. I brought her downtown to Walt’s loft at the bottom of Chambers Street. I was still living there but it wasn’t satisfactory. The facilities were minimal, and with Walt’s irregular rhythms of existence I found it difficult to work the long hours demanded of me. They stayed up so late, they made so much noise! There were days when the psych unit seemed a haven of tranquillity by contrast, the company of the mentally ill preferable by far to that of Walt’s carousing painter friends.

  There had been tension between Walt and me for some months. At first he welcomed Agnes. In those days almost all the females who came through the loft were hippie girls he found it easy to seduce. Painterly mess for some reason never failed to turn them on: trestle tables heaped with squeezed tubes, tools and brushes everywhere, wine bottles, a paint-spattered floor. Three windows faced west toward the river; at the other end of the space the windows faced east to Broadway and south to the near-complete twin towers. We were close to the site of what once had been the Washington Street produce market. The area was cheap because the Port Authority had recently torn down what it called a commercial slum, actually a viable community of saloons and coffee shops and a few blocks of stores specializing in electronics and radio parts. But by the time I moved back to the city it was mostly artists you saw on the streets down there, painters and sculptors who like Walt had moved into the empty warehouses to take advantage of the light, the high ceilings, the low rent or even no rent at all. So north of Chambers an artist community was in formation, while south was a wasteland where the bulldozer and the wrecking ball had reduced all to rubble, the rubble then dumped into the Hudson for landfill.