Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “Oh sure, I’d be alarmed if she were anything but.”

  “I saw her in the corridor.”

  “She say anything?”

  “It wasn’t what she said.”

  This gave him pleasure.

  I stood outside the hospital and contemplated walking over to Fulton Street, and then I remembered: she wanted nothing more to do with me. It was all about my needs and not about hers. Despite my protestations to the contrary I hadn’t changed. I’m too old for experiments, Charlie.

  My patients were my distraction, my solace, my sanity, and to them I clung. I saw Stein again, and again, briefly, he lifted my mood. There had been a development, the only positive news in this bleak period. His doctors discovered that the lesion in his spinal cord was incomplete, which meant he would walk again. Already he was beginning to recover sensation. He could use a wheelchair once they took the body jacket off. He told me his psyche was in better shape than mine but I probably had superior bowel control. A snort of dark laughter from me. I asked him about his wife and he said he had no time for her. He was too busy with himself.

  “How so?”

  “Recovery takes work,” he said. “It’s a full-time job.”

  I wasn’t sure whether his wife would understand this. I encountered her in the hospital lobby as I left. She was wearing a sheepskin coat that made her look fiercer than usual, like some lost Hun who’d wandered down from Westchester in error. The weather had turned cool and windy, and her hair was tousled, her eyes streaming. She dabbed at her face with a tissue as she frowned into the mirror of her compact.

  “Mrs. Stein,” I said.

  The compact snapped shut. “Dr. Weir. Have you been to see Joe?”

  “Yes. The news is good.”

  “No thanks to you.”

  “What?”

  “You know I don’t have a very high opinion of psychiatry.”

  “Nor of psychiatrists, apparently.”

  She’d never declared her hostility so directly, and I was in no mood for it. She stood before me with her hands plunged deep in the fur-lined pockets of her sheepskin coat, this small, angry woman from the suburbs.

  “Shall we sit down?”

  “I don’t have much time. Look, Joe gave plenty of warning that he might try to kill himself, and what good were you?”

  “I know what it must look like to you—”

  “He was a danger to himself. Why didn’t you have him committed?”

  “I know how you must feel—”

  “Or doped him to the eyeballs so he couldn’t think—”

  “Will you listen to me?”

  The entire lobby fell silent. The nurses at reception gazed at me. The security men gazed at me. The scattering of people in the waiting area looked up from their magazines and newspapers and gazed at me. I saw then that not only had I shouted at her, I had lifted my fist.

  “Are you going to attack me?” Stein’s wife said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you seem to have an inflated idea of what I can and cannot do. Many of my patients threaten suicide—”

  That’s when it happened. It was the word suicide. I saw Danny sprawled on the floor of his apartment, with a gun on the floor beside him. There was an acrid smell. His blood and brains were splashed across the window. I saw the unspeakable mess he’d made of his skull, the bloody shards of bony matter, the impression of there being only part of a head. His face: his eyes were open and he looked startled. I was only dimly aware of the woman’s voice. I was deathly cold, shivering, and I couldn’t seem to get enough air, I had to get out of there. I walked toward the entrance and heard as though from a great distance my name being called. I emerged onto the street and felt a blast of wind off the East River. Still very badly shaken I limped blindly away from the hospital and found myself some minutes later at the fish market. It was not yet four in the afternoon.

  It had never been so vivid before. I’d never been so aware of what it looked like, what it smelled like. That strong, acrid tang in the air, was it cordite? The window was splattered with blood and brain matter that had created trailing globular lines down the glass. And he had looked startled, surprised, irritated, this dead man. I was at least relieved that I’d walked away from Stein’s wife without losing my temper. I remembered the moment when the fist had come up as though of its own accord, unaided by any human agency, that’s how it had felt. I’d had no intention of hitting the woman. I was responsible, yes, and it would be irrational to think otherwise, but I could remember no conscious desire even to threaten her.

  The last time I saw Stein was in Westchester. He’d been moved closer to his home for physical rehabilitation. He was in a wheelchair now and learning to walk again. He showed off his new prowess to me.

  “One small step for Stein,” he said.

  His mental health grew more robust each time I saw him, and mine decayed. I asked him what he thought about the death of the pedestrian now, and he said he didn’t think about it much at all.

  “No guilt?”

  He stared at the floor. We were in his room, him in his wheelchair and me leaning against the windowsill. His wife wasn’t around. He shook his head.

  “Not much. It comes back to me sometimes, late at night, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it. That sound callous to you?”

  “Does it to you?”

  “It’s how I feel.”

  I would never have predicted that the mind could work with such precision: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. I asked him if it had occurred to him too.

  “Oh sure,” he said. “I talk to the dead guy, you know. In my thoughts. I ask him what more I can do, but he says, nothing, you can’t do anything more. Get on with your life, he says.”

  “Joe, do you ever see him?”

  I knew at once that he did. Or had. His hands were gripping the arms of the wheelchair hard. I knew such hallucinations to be symptomatic, and that when he’d finished with his guilt he would no longer see the man whose death he had caused. The same was true of my relationship with Danny, or I hoped it was. Though perhaps I’d never be finished with my guilt, and he’d be with me forever. Perhaps it was him I was meant to grow old with, and not his sister.

  “Yeah, I saw him,” said Stein.

  “Often?”

  “It varied. There were days I’d see him two, three times. Then for weeks, nothing.”

  “And the day you tried to kill yourself ?”

  “He was everywhere.”

  I needed no clarification. He was everywhere. There had been times Danny was everywhere. I was better able to cope with this than Stein because I understood the pathology. But Stein hadn’t seen the dead man since his fall. It confirmed to me that he was recovering.

  I didn’t visit him again. There was no need to. But I missed him. He was an uncomplicated man to whom a complicated mischance had occurred. He wasn’t to blame for it, but the unconscious doesn’t care for such distinctions. The unconscious operates like fate in this regard. Stein’s story had an almost mythical shape to it, the offering of his own blood for the blood he had spilled, the subsequent purging of guilt, the atonement. It occurred to me that I might achieve a similar outcome by similar means, the downside being that unlike Stein I probably wouldn’t survive the fall.

  But I contemplated it. That night I stood out in the wind on my fire escape, my clothes flapping about me. It was eleven stories down to the street. Vehicles, people, all were very tiny from up here. To the south the twin towers, to the west, where the street opened out to the highway, the emptiness of the night sky over the river. I rattled the railing and heard the rusted rivets creak as they shifted about in their housings. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the whole thing coming loose, and me stepping into space.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Walt left for Europe with his family. I went up to see them the night before their departure. The children were excited. I’d been to the bank and brought each of them what seemed a huge amount of lira
but was actually a small sum of money. I was briefly very popular. Watching them as they finished their packing, hearing the unending stream of questions as to what Italy would be like, what they could bring with them, and Lucia overseeing this scene of mild chaos with placid authority, it was hard not to think of my own family. I knew what happened to children who lived with one parent, how in time they became indifferent to the absent father unless great care was taken. And though I could still see Cassie on the weekends, I had begun to hope for much more than that.

  Walt wanted to give me a set of keys so I could sleep in the apartment every so often, to give the appearance that the place was occupied. We were sitting at the kitchen table, beneath the metal ring with the copper-bottomed pots and pans hanging from hooks.

  He gazed at me, frowning. “You depressed?”

  He knew how our mother had suffered, and he knew my own history.

  “It comes and goes,” I said. “You know.”

  “You have to take care of yourself.”

  “Sure.”

  “Try again with Nora, will you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t break her heart,” he said.

  “Walter, what exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Take a look at this. One of the kids found it in back of a drawer.”

  It was a photograph. Thirty years old at least, a creased print in which I saw my mother, my brother and myself standing outside an old hotel somewhere in the mountains upstate. Our faces were just wedges of light and shadow but there was no mistaking the tension in those two stiffly smiling boys, me about six, Walter three years older. Mom was in dark glasses and a head scarf, and she wasn’t even trying to smile. My fingers trembled as I held it. I felt nauseous. What the hell was going on?

  “I guess Fred took it,” I said. “It’s the Catskills. Can I have it?”

  He was watching me intently.

  “Take it,” he said.

  I went up again late the following afternoon. My own apartment now seemed to reek of loneliness, the stark, rank, empty den of a lone wolf. What I wanted was the lingering echo of Walter’s children. I wanted the atmosphere I’d breathed the day before as they rushed from room to room, clamoring with insistence that this doll must come, this toy, this skirt, this baseball mitt. It was silent now. The housekeeper had not yet been in and the detritus of departure lay everywhere, damp towels, discarded garments, breakfast leftovers. It was as though I’d arrived late for an orgy and everyone had moved on without saying where they were going.

  I stood in the doorway of what had once been Mom’s bedroom. Walt had replaced her old bed with a low modern thing made of white maple, the duvet hopelessly tangled, the pillows all askew, a pair of abandoned jeans on the floor. I straightened the duvet, put the pillows back and hung up the jeans in the closet. I would sleep here, rather here than in my bleak cell on Twenty-third Street. It occurred to me that I might move Mom’s bed back up, restore at least that much of the apartment I grew up in.

  That night I wandered from room to room and felt I’d come home again. Traces of my mother were everywhere, for despite Walter’s redecoration there was no escaping her, and my image of her was the sad woman in the photo that had so oddly disturbed me. Standing in the bathroom off the master bedroom, which was now all aluminum towel racks and white tiles and mirrors, I was reminded of a morning around the time that photo was taken, when I had gone into her bathroom, thinking she was out, and discovered her naked. She was sitting on the toilet reading the New York Times. She wasn’t embarrassed, though I sure was. No surprise that a memory like this survives; any boy’s experience of the mother’s body will leave a footprint on his psyche. This was before Fred left her for another woman and everything went to hell in West Eighty-seventh Street.

  Some days later I went down to my own apartment to pick up some clothes. Just as I was leaving, the phone rang. I thought it might be Agnes.

  “Charlie, it’s Maureen Magill.”

  “Maureen.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “It’s bad news. Leon died this afternoon.”

  I suppose I should have known. I’d dreamed of his death a dozen times, back when I thought he was the only obstacle separating me from Agnes. Pulmonary fibrosis, poor guy. Scarring of the tissue between the sacs, it happens to firemen. He’d been a candidate for a lung transplant, but infection had taken him off that list. It explained his frequent absences from Fulton Street, and it explained Agnes’s reluctance to talk about him and, later, her openness to the possibility of taking me back: the role of husband would shortly become available. But she’d ditched that idea. She was too old for experiments.

  I thought at once of Cassie, who’d be greatly distressed and would need all the support we could give her. I called the apartment, and Agnes told me in a weary voice to come whenever I wanted. I arrived in the early afternoon and found them finishing lunch. Maureen was there too, and she certainly looked relieved when I showed up. Agnes and Cass were sitting at the table silently pushing food around their plates. I sat down with them.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Charlie, thanks for coming,” said Agnes.

  “You want some coffee?” said Maureen, who’d taken over from Agnes in the kitchen.

  “No thanks. What I’d like is to have a look at Cassie’s room. You want to show me your room, honey?”

  She stood up from the table and without a word left the kitchen. Agnes lifted her eyes to mine and offered a wan smile. I followed Cassie to her room.

  It was as I remembered it. She wasn’t a tidy girl; the floor was strewn with her clothes, the walls covered with posters of pop stars and movie actors. She had a little dressing table littered with cheap costume jewelry, and strips of glittery material hung from her mirror. She’d assembled on her bed the stuffed animals she’d had as a little girl, to remind herself of a time when she’d felt safe.

  “I remember this teddy bear,” I said, picking up a very chewed and battered stuffed animal and smoothing its mangy fur.

  “His name is Albert,” said Cass.

  “I know. He looks pretty sad today. You sad, Albert?”

  “Everybody’s sad, Daddy,” she said reproachfully, as though I thought Albert was the only one.

  “Are you sad, honey?”

  She sat on the side of the bed and nodded glumly. I was sitting on the carpet with Albert in my lap. “I think you loved Leon a lot,” I said.

  That did it. She was in my lap, Albert having been tossed aside, her arms around my neck, weeping her little heart out. She told me how kind he was to her, even though she wasn’t very nice to him.

  “Cassie, he didn’t mind,” I said softly. “He understood. It’s not easy, having two daddies. You handled it really well. I was proud of you.”

  “No, I didn’t, Daddy. I was so mean to him.” Another squall of tears, her head pressed against my shirt.

  “He understood. He was a wise man.”

  Then she was out of my lap and opening a drawer in her dresser, from which she produced a number of small treasures, all gifts from Leon. She knelt on the carpet and laid them out, one by one. There was the silver dollar given him by his own father. Beside it she placed the first badge he’d ever worn as a fireman. Then a ring with a huge green stone, and a book of fairy tales. Pride of place went to an autographed photo of Donny Osmond.

  “How on earth did he get this?” I asked, gazing with awe at the puppy features of the boy wonder.

  “He said he saved him when he was trapped in a burning building. But I think he sent away for it.”

  “He might have saved him,” I said.

  “Oh, Daddy,” said Cass, “don’t be naive.”

  Who taught her that word? I felt a familiar pang; it hadn’t been me.

  “Will you miss him?”

  She sat on the carpet, gazing at me. Then her face crumpled again, a
nd there were more tears. I wanted her to have a very good cry. She must talk about Leon and feel no reluctance to express her grief. After a few seconds she was back in my lap. I stroked her hair.

  “But why didn’t Mommy tell me he was so sick?”

  “She didn’t want to frighten you, I guess.”

  The question had occurred to me too. Agnes had given me no hint of the seriousness of Leon’s condition. “You mustn’t be cross with Mommy,” I said. “She’s missing him as much as you are.”

  “No, she’s not!”

  This came out with a wail. I murmured that it would be all right, and told her again that Agnes felt it as much as she did.

  “She doesn’t show it!”

  “Oh, she does,” I said. “I saw it as soon as I came into the kitchen.”

  She pulled back and frowned at me. “Did you?”

  I told her that of course I did, it was my job to know what people were feeling. “We all express our emotions differently,” I said. “Mommy doesn’t cry in front of you because she doesn’t want to upset you more than you already are.”

  Agnes almost never showed her feelings, and Cassie would understand this one day. But for now it was enough just to defuse her anger. Her mother hadn’t prepared her for Leon’s death, this was the problem.

  We went back to the kitchen. Cassie went straight to Agnes and hugged her. I asked Maureen if I could have some coffee now.

  Agnes showed me out a few minutes later. She came into the corridor with me and closed the door behind her. “Thanks for doing that,” she said. “I’m not being much use to her right now. I’m in shock, I guess. Thank god for Maureen.”

  “She was upset you didn’t tell her how sick he was,” I said. “It took her by surprise. Me too.”

  “That was his decision. He didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Brave man.”

  “I guess so. He’s not as complicated as you, or he wasn’t, I mean. It was good of you to come.”

  She put her arms around me. I heard a muffled sob against my chest, already damp with Cassie’s tears. When Maureen first told me that Leon was dead I’d experienced a distinct surge of hope. She pulled back and gazed at me. “You okay?” she said.