Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “I still want you back, Agnes.”

  I saw her anger blaze briefly. Then it died away, replaced by the tenderness I’d seen a little earlier.

  “Nothing’s changed, Charlie. I’m sorry.”

  “But won’t you give us a chance, at least?”

  “I don’t think it’ll work.”

  “But you can’t be sure of that!”

  She turned away. She leaned against the wall. “I can’t deal with you now,” she said.

  “Later?”

  She shook her head, then went back in and closed the door behind her.

  I returned to Eighty-seventh Street. I stood in the doorway of my mother’s old bedroom. That morning two men had moved Walt’s bed down to the basement and assembled the old bed in its place, an operation I had supervised with close attention. Not a single metal screw, all wooden pegs and dowels: that bed was over a hundred years old. Then came the headboard, and after that the footboard, both carved from black teak and inlaid with panels of walnut. Last, an old chest constructed of lacquered wood that went at the foot of the bed, where it had always stood in my childhood. Walt had spent serious money on this apartment, and there was a sleek, clean, minimalist aesthetic in all the rooms—but one. The master bedroom was now a monument to the past, a shrine to the presence that still imbued it.

  I slept in my mother’s bed that night and was badly disturbed. I grappled through the hours of darkness with intensely frustrating problems of logic, or so it felt, but had a waking memory only of repetitive circular movements of the mind that allowed no resolution or escape, like being trapped inside the mechanism of a clock. Of the specific content of these dreams I had no recall, but I woke in a state of dread. I knew what that meant. Dread signals not the imminence of a catastrophic event, but the presence of repressed memory—the memory of a catastrophic event, one that has already happened. But where? In that bedroom? In that bed?

  That night I medicated myself but it didn’t work and I knew why: it was because the mind was overriding the drug. I once treated a man for a sleep disorder and was impressed by the level of disruption it created, how it bled into every aspect of his life, threatening his job, his marriage, his health. It was one of the few occasions in my professional career when I employed hypnosis. I attempted self-hypnosis now, though I had little confidence that it would be effective, and it wasn’t, probably because I expected it not to be.

  The next morning I left the apartment early and walked across the park to my office. I’d been a fool to think Agnes might have changed her mind, and had succeeded only in reopening the wound. I liked to spend all day at the office, even if there was less than a full day’s roster of appointments. Once I’d had to turn patients away; that was not the case now. There had been very few referrals in the last several months, not since my mother died, perhaps for good reason. One of the last of the few was Elly, for whom there was little more I could do. She’d told me about the latter stages of her relationship with her father, the period before he shifted his attentions to her sister. The family had an estate in Southampton, and in the yard, whose lawns and trees swept down to the water, her father had built a studio where he kept his fishing rods and his paint box. He was an avid watercolorist. Seascapes, mostly.

  Elly invariably spoke in a flat, deadpan tone. The numbing of her psyche in childhood had over the years become a fixed feature of her personality, and it was hard now to imagine her expressing strong emotion, or behaving with spontaneity, or even laughing out loud, though I had no doubt she’d been a normal kid before her father started coming to her bedroom at night. I listened as she talked about becoming invisible so as to escape him. On long, hot summer afternoons he liked to take her down through the yard to his studio.

  Later, when she’d gone, I left the office to walk for a while. It was a dank, gray day and there was an uneasy energy in the streets, which seemed busier than usual. People were more hostile, more clumsy, more impatient, more desperate. Was I hoping to avert or undo the terrible event that was trying to break through into consciousness, and whose existence was signaled by this dread? Was it about my mother? All the attention I’d given her, had it stemmed from guilt, then? Had it been not her love but her forgiveness I was seeking all those years? Guilt for what?

  I felt crowded, claustrophobic, trapped—as though the city was a labyrinth from which I couldn’t escape. I became short of breath and began to panic. On a sidewalk somewhere in the East Sixties, just a few steps from Fifth Avenue, I stood leaning on my hands against the wall of a building. Looking down, I saw stashed in a doorway a few sheets of cardboard and newspaper, also a badly soiled quilt and several bulging trash bags. I stood there panting as the crowds jostled me, and contemplated this tragic spectacle. Someone lived in that doorway. Someone would return here and burrow into that stinking heap of cardboard and foul quilt. This was someone’s home.

  • • •

  Leon O’Connor’s funeral was held in a Roman Catholic church in Queens, a steep-gabled Gothic Revival building of red sandstone with copious stained glass in its narrow lancet windows. It was raining hard that morning, and I’d left the apartment in some haste and without a coat, but there was an umbrella by the front door and I took it. I was lucky enough to find a cab right away. We got lost twice in Queens and when I arrived the service had already begun.

  I took a seat in the back of the church. There were at least seventy people in there, many of the men wearing the dress uniform of the Fire Department. They were all on their feet singing a hymn and their voices boomed and echoed in that gloomy place. The floor was of stone, the pews of dark wood. There was incense burning, and in front of the high altar, close to the rail, the coffin stood on trestles. Agnes was in the front pew, dressed in black and wearing a veil. I couldn’t see Cassie because there were too many people in the way. Finally the congregation sat down, and the priest said a few words of greeting. Then there was a prayer. It felt damp in there, with coats steaming and a good deal of coughing and wheezing.

  I barely took in what the priest said next. I had eyes only for Agnes, although from where I sat at the back of the church we were separated by those uniformed men, who collectively formed what seemed to me a tribe, one to which I did not belong. I had dreamed of Leon’s funeral before, of course, though in my dreams it took place not in a church but at an indoor swimming pool. The unconscious likes to confound death and water.

  We rose again to our feet to sing, and I was able to participate this time, for a woman in the pew in front of mine was kind enough to give me an order of service and a hymn book. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” I sang, or bellowed, rather. The last lines were apt: “And I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.” Then we sat down again for the Gospel according to Saint John. As I shivered in the chill of that wet November afternoon I asked myself where my dwelling place should be, for I sure as hell couldn’t stay at Eighty-seventh Street. I wasn’t able to sleep properly in my mother’s bed, and my waking hours were consumed with dread. The idea of returning to Twenty-third Street was just as unthinkable, for it too felt haunted, and most poignant of its ghostly echoes were those associated with the night I’d first gone back there with Agnes. It was hard to forget the brief period of her unpredictable visits, and with them the awakening of a heart grown hard and cynical on the false warmth of prostitutes.

  There was a homily and an address. Leon was spoken of in warm terms by his superior officer in his last firehouse. I didn’t know he’d served honorably in Vietnam, nor that as a fireman on several occasions he’d performed feats of conspicuous bravery. The point was then made that he’d shown the same courage when facing his last illness, and in this regard Agnes was mentioned, specifically the happiness and peace of mind she had brought him, she and Cassie both. Then members of the congregation went up to the rail for communion, my ex-wife and daughter among them.

  At last I had a chance to see them, though from my pew there was little enough to see. Heads bowe
d, hands clasped in prayer, they returned from the rail without so much as a glance toward the back of the church. Cassie was in a long black dress with a large ornate brooch pinned to it that my mother had given her, and also Leon’s badge. She saw me, but it wasn’t until later, when they followed behind the coffin, which was carried on the shoulders of six firemen, that Agnes did. She nodded her head, no more than that, and I nodded back. Cassie gazed at me, clinging to her mother’s arm, the tears streaming down her face, and it was hard not to step into the aisle and comfort her, or at least walk beside her, but I couldn’t. It was not my place; not my tribe.

  Outside the church, in the rain, among the umbrellas, I did speak to Agnes, but she had time only to thank me for coming before she and Cassie were hurried away to the car they were to share with the O’Connors for the trip to the cemetery. There was no special signal, no squeeze of the fingers, no warmth at all. The congregation began to disperse. I felt a hand on my arm and it was Maureen. She asked how I was and she sounded concerned, as if she’d heard I was gravely ill. We were joined by the kindly lady who’d given me an order of service, who now asked if I’d like to join them for a cup of tea, or perhaps something stronger, but I said no. I would have said yes, had I thought I could wait for Agnes as she had once waited for me after a funeral, and history would repeat itself. Instead I went back into the church.

  I sat alone in the gloom with the smell of lingering incense as the daylight faded. I had reached some sort of crisis in my life, or a crossroads, at least; anyway, I had to make some decision about my immediate future. For several minutes I contemplated this, then I left. I returned to West Eighty-seventh Street.

  That night I was in the living room, sitting in the window seat in the dark, as I so often had as a boy, when the phone rang. It was after ten. Again I thought it might be Agnes, and I ran into the hall to pick up.

  “Hello?”

  “Walt, it’s Audrey. You have to get down here.”

  Audrey from Sulfur, assuming I was Walter. My brief excitement abated. I could hear the din and clatter of a busy restaurant in the background.

  “Why?”

  “She’s really upset.”

  “You mean Nora.”

  “She thinks you’ve already gone.”

  She hung up. I stood in the dark hallway. Nora gets upset in Sulfur and it’s not me they call but Walter. They call Walter. There was a wineglass on the table under the mirror and I picked it up. I wanted to dash it to the floor and see it shatter into a thousand pieces, and why? Because I had nothing and Walt had everything, more than everything, he even took what was mine.

  I put the glass back down on the table. I leaned on my hands and stared at my reflection. So it was true. Poor Nora. Had she really believed she could control this exotic triangle, mistress to two brothers, one a shrink and the other an artist? I left the apartment and took a cab downtown. It was a nice conceit, it had flattered her vanity but she couldn’t sustain it, not after I’d brought her back to the apartment and persuaded her to tell me the truth. She was not sober, and she’d only just realized that Walter had already left for Italy, and without telling her that his departure was imminent; this was why she was so upset. But it shocked her now to think that he would visit her in my apartment on Twenty-third Street not, as he claimed, because he happened to be in the neighborhood, but because it pleased him to possess his brother’s lover in his brother’s bed.

  He was not the Walter she’d thought he was, I made sure of that. He was not the shaggy pirate of the art world, some latter-day Bacchus with a paintbrush, he was a far more sinister figure altogether, this pathological narcissist who had used her to cause pain to the brother he hated.

  After the remorse, the pleas, the tears, the surrender, we went to bed. Mom’s bed. We had sex in Mom’s bed. Generations had slept in that bed, died in that bed, conceived and given birth in that bed. All that history in a bed. It was Mom’s room again, I told her. All it lacked were half a dozen overflowing ashtrays, a few empty liquor glasses smeared with lipstick, a quantity of discarded reading matter and an air of terminal melancholy.

  “I can fix that,” she said.

  She would have fixed it too, had I let her. There she lay, a pale tiny figure in that vast old bed, with her mascara smudged from crying and her eyes soft and damp. The next morning, as we said goodbye, I remembered thinking that she was again adrift, this woman who survived on a diet of kindness from old friends and lovers and never knew where the next meal was coming from. She was still beautiful, and the damage she’d suffered over the last month or so had only refined that beauty in my eyes. I no longer saw her as neurotic, nor did I believe that her nightmares were the symptoms of trauma; they stemmed, I realized, from the stress of living such a complicated lie, and that was Walter’s fault. In fact, I had no need to regard her in terms of pathology at all anymore, but could see her instead as I’d seen her in Sulfur that first evening. I glimpsed it again in my mother’s bed, the hint of desolation, the lingering echo of some harrowing hour late in the night when her existence had seemed to offer only dead ends; and if all social life is performance, then Nora’s lay in concealing just how bad things must have looked to her at times. She was a brave, doomed soul, and I wanted only to keep her alive in my imagination, as the spirit, perhaps, of some soaring violin cantata—

  As I closed the door on her, the decision for which I had been groping in the church suddenly took shape in my mind. I had been looking at the employment ads in one of my professional journals, and a coincidence had occurred, if that’s what it was. I was far from intact, but I was not so blind as to miss signs, in whatever form they appeared. It had become clear to me that this obsession I had with the idea of home—the pursuit of Agnes, a woman who didn’t want me, and this bizarre compulsion to recreate my mother’s bedroom, as though trying to return to the womb—it was nothing more than an urge to repeat the past. This is what we mean by home, the place where we repeat the past: Freud tells us this, and he also tells us that most of what we call love is our resistance to the prospect of leaving home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dr. Weir, let us be frank.”

  I liked this woman. I opened my hands, the very soul of frankness. We were sitting in my new office. On my desk there was a framed photograph of my mother, and another of Agnes and Cassie. They were my only ties to the past.

  “You feel strongly about this,” I said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  She gazed at me with some displeasure. Tall, big-boned, plainspoken, she wore a dark brown wool suit and her hair was gathered in an untidy bun at the back of her head. Her name was Joan Bachinski. I sat forward in my desk chair and regarded her as though pondering the matter with some gravity. I think she knew there was no gravity. I think she had my measure.

  “I had no idea the treatment of this patient would be a source of such contention,” I said. “I thought I would be easing your burden.”

  I was far from home. In a remote valley in the Catskills, a three-hour drive northwest of New York City, near the head of a lake that lies in almost constant shadow, stands a state hospital for the insane known locally as Old Main. It is a Victorian building of granite and timber with rounded turrets and arched windows. To the north and east, heavily wooded mountains march one behind the other as far as the eye can see, and beyond the lake the land rises steeply with no sign of human presence other than a logging road. Old Main can no longer adequately meet the needs of its patients, but there’s a haunting splendor to this decaying asylum that I have come to love.

  “I encounter a great deal of darkness in my day’s work,” said Joan Bachinski, “as do you, I know. Francis Mead sheds a little light, and I should miss that badly if you were to take him from me.”

  “Then he’s yours. But you won’t begrudge me the veterans, I hope.”

  “Have them, and welcome. I’m not much good with battlefield trauma.”

  I rose to my feet. We shook hands. The eyes in that weather
ed face, with its distinct suggestion of underbite in the jaw, were shrewd; it occurred to me that she was probably a very good psychiatrist.

  She paused at the door. “May I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you here, Doctor?”

  Why indeed? I deflected the question. I told her I was about to ask her the same thing.

  “I must look after my father,” she said. “There is nobody else to do it. But I imagine you are nursing a broken heart. I hope you won’t leave us as soon as you feel better.”

  An astute woman, and I was reassured by her presence here. I thought we might become friends.

  • • •

  I’d seen the Old Main job advertised in the American Journal of Psychiatry. They wanted a clinician with my sort of institutional experience, and the interview was little more than a formality. I could have conducted a more rigorous job search and probably done better in terms of status and salary, but I wasn’t interested. This was the town where the photo had been taken of Mom with Walt and me in front of that old hotel. The coincidence was uncanny, and I felt that somehow I’d been intended for Old Main. This was superstitious thinking, of course, and perhaps the first marker of my breakdown; but it was no less real for that.

  Joan Bachinski had shown me around the facility. Together we’d walked the wards, and much of what I saw and heard and even smelled was familiar from my days on the psych unit with Sam Pike. Distant shouts, the rattle of keys, clanging metal doors, footsteps echoing in stairwells and always, in the middle distance, halfway down some long, deserted corridor, a man in loose institutional pants and shirt mopping the floor in slow, sweeping motions; and everywhere that distinctive asylum odor, a pungent compound of disinfectant, tobacco and urine. I was introduced to the ward supervisors, who told me that almost all the patients came from scattered communities in this part of the state, many of them suffering from chronic psychotic illnesses exacerbated by alcoholism. So I wouldn’t be challenged, or not professionally, at least.