Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Agnes did not at once regard Walt as some kind of bohemian art god, and was not prepared to worship. I’d told her about my disillusionment with his work. There was no politics, and what was worse, he didn’t see any problem with that, being more passionate about a few square feet of painted canvas than he ever was about the escalation of the war in Vietnam. I remember how impatient I used to get when they started talking art theory, Walt and his friends, I think because I couldn’t imagine such talk being treated with anything but contempt by the veterans I knew. The arguments about formalism they pursued deep into the night seemed to me so far beside the point as to be immoral.

  Agnes felt as I did, but when she confronted Walt on the apolitical issue he always eluded her. Only once do I remember her cornering him, or at least angering him sufficiently that he exploded, saying he had no time for art that tried to change his mind about the world.

  “Who needs it?” he shouted. “I have a show!”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  Agnes in those days was tenacious, also blunt. Her style was confrontational, and she was impatient with evasion.

  “I have to sell the work! Why else would I do it?”

  I don’t remember her answer exactly. It was along the lines, I think, of a work of art being about more than its commercial viability. Walt stamped around the loft mocking us as sentimental fools. Philistines. Romantics, worst of all.

  “You probably think art is about beauty!” he shouted.

  “No, I don’t,” said Agnes.

  It was late at night. None of the windows had drapes, so life was lived after dark against huge rectangles of blackness. I remember once discovering on Walt’s shelves a book of plates by Goya. It was titled Los Caprichos. It contained the drawing beloved by psychiatrists the world over: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Nothing could better express what was happening to America in those years, but I was more interested in another drawing, “Here comes the bogeyman,” which showed two terrified children clutching their mother’s skirt while she gazes up at a cowled and hooded figure standing before her in shadow. Goya’s caption says in effect that it is wrong to teach a boy to fear the bogeyman more than he does his father, and thus make him afraid of something that does not exist—y obligarle a temer lo que no existe.

  The problem in those years was the refusal to recognize a bogeyman that did exist, and that ravaged the minds of the men who’d had the misfortune to encounter it, and whose suffering was then compounded by the willful blindness of those who denied its existence. Walter eventually came around to our side, as my mother did. She was as vehement as any of us once she had, but when she first met Agnes she still believed that Nixon was going to end the war.

  She’d let things slide after Fred left her. The apartment was always awash in newspapers and discarded clothing and empty glasses. She was a full-time writer by then; she’d come to it late, but her two novels had been respectfully received. One afternoon I took Agnes up there and we found her sitting by the empty fireplace with a book in her lap staring into space. She was a little drunk. She rose with a small cry of pleasure. Agnes knew to expect eccentric behavior. I remember how she gazed at my mother with a curiosity in which I detected no trace of intimidation. Agnes wasn’t a woman who could be pushed around, of this I was well aware, but at the same time I’d been accustomed to think of Mom as the force indomitable. I went to the kitchen for drinks, and when I came back the two of them were already arguing about the war. Did we talk of nothing else? Mom was a heavy smoker, and it was wrecking her throat. Her voice was hoarse and scratchy. She was telling Agnes we had to be in Vietnam or all Southeast Asia would be lost.

  “Lost to what?” said Agnes.

  “To Communist China. That’s why your brother went over there.”

  “Danny was drafted.”

  “At least he didn’t burn his draft card.”

  “He believed what they told him.”

  “And he doesn’t now. What a pity.”

  “A pity?” said Agnes.

  My mother was a humped, bent little woman even then, bowed in the shoulders, her spine distinctly curved. She wore a denim shirt and corduroy trousers and a string of large wooden beads. The black hair with its silver streaks was swept back off her forehead.

  “Yes, my dear, a pity. Such a waste. To make that sacrifice, and then turn against his country.”

  “Danny hasn’t turned against his country.”

  “So what would you call it?” She turned to face Agnes full on, her dark eyes bright and her lip trembling a little.

  Agnes gave out one of her small barks of laughter.

  “Danny thinks his country’s turned against him.”

  It was as though she had invoked some sexual practice known only to the most grievously depraved.

  Late that night, back at the loft, I sat out on the fire escape by myself watching the lights of the traffic on West Street. I could see Agnes as she sat there staring at Mom, the force indomitable, with no trace of fear. I was much affected by this. I needed a strong woman. Like many in this profession, I had experienced my own need for love as a destructive force. It’s what attracts us to the damaged birds, but in Agnes I could see no damage at all.

  I came to the conclusion that what had angered me that evening was my mother’s attitude to what she’d called Danny’s sacrifice, her assumption that he was motivated by a kind of pure, uncomplicated patriotism. There were times when I regarded the pathology of the damaged men I worked with as emblematic of a far greater malaise, and I was apt then to be seduced by my own grand diabolical vision in which America played the part of a mad god eager to devour its young, the willing slave of its own death instinct. Danny wasn’t alone in his mute recognition of his damage, and his anger was exacerbated by the recognition that it had occurred in the service of no noble cause. It was meaningless and it was unnecessary, and I saw, every day, that a great part of the difficulty faced by men like him came from having to balance expectations like my mother’s with memories of insane slaughter. The irony was that fighting for your country rendered you unfit to be its citizen.

  Later, when Agnes and I were living together in the apartment on Fulton Street, a few blocks up from the fish market, Danny would show up when he felt the need of human company, or of people, at least, with whom he had more connection than he did with the stranger on the next bar stool. He was no more talkative than when we’d first met. I would like to say that he was getting better. Agnes said she’d seen signs of improvement, but it wasn’t the case. The drinking was starting to take a toll. He was usually unshaven, and beneath the stubble his face was coarsely inflamed. He was growing a hard, swollen belly and he had the unmistakably bloated look of an alcoholic. The heavy intake of unfiltered cigarettes had brought on a harsh cough he was unable to shake.

  He had keys to the apartment but never once showed up at bad times or stayed too long; the reverse, in fact. He’d shake my hand when he came in and then look around for Cassie, whom he adored. He would lift her high in the air and she’d shriek with laughter when he threatened to drop her, and at times like this I’d watch his face and he seemed a child himself. Agnes saw it too, and we had an odd sense, sometimes, that he was our child, ours to protect, for his pain and vulnerability were heartbreaking. I could tell when he was flashing back to the war. He would sit very still. His mouth fell open and his eyes became glazed and empty, his face masklike. After several seconds, sometimes longer, he came back to the here and now with a shake of the head.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Nah,” he’d say. “Same old bullshit.”

  He was a stoic. I had some idea what this same old bullshit looked like. Other times I would see him violently startled by the telephone, or a knock on the door, by one of us coming into the room or Cassie starting to cry. He immediately grew tense, his back stiff, hands gripping the arms of the chair. His eyes darted about the room, calculating where he could find cover, where his b
ack would be protected.

  “It’s okay, Dan, just a delivery.”

  It upset him that this happened. Feeling he’d abused our hospitality, he would leave soon afterward. It was no use trying to stop him. He would suddenly head for the door, and though we offered him the sofa he never took it, he needed to be in the bars for hours yet before sleep would come. At times Agnes went into the bedroom after he’d gone and closed the door behind her, and I could hear her crying in there. It reminded me of my mother, of course, and as with her I would go to Agnes and give what comfort I could. So for the first months of Cassie’s life her uncle Danny was a frequent, moody presence in the apartment, but not for a single moment did either of us resent his presence.

  This in part was because of his courtesy toward us, and also the dignity that never failed him, at least not in my presence, and which I think derived from a personal code that enabled him to hold on to what few small scraps of self-respect had survived the war. At times I glimpsed what I thought of as the real Danny, like a ghost within the shattered personality. Then he was visible, if only faintly so, and this was what lent such pathos to the man, that you could see what he would’ve been had the war not traumatized him.

  “I’m fucked, Charlie. Don’t worry about it.”

  But he would never tell me his story, not of what had happened to him those last four months. He was too ashamed, I think, too ashamed of what he’d done. I saw how the men in the group formed a defensive circle around him, emotionally as well as spatially. Danny liked to sit at the back, on the outer edge of the loose, open circle of chairs, close to both the wall and the door. Even when he showed up late nobody took his chair, although for several of those men a seat close to the door was preferable to any other in the room. He paid close attention to what was said, and at times, when some part of another man’s experience conformed to his own, he would nod emphatically. This was always remarked on. “Right, Dan?” the guy would say, and he would lift his head and give consent to what was being said.

  Agnes liked it when I talked about Danny, though I rarely had anything to tell her other than that he had showed up. When the meeting ended it was usually late, for we often ran over our two hours into three or even four if we were getting real work done, and it’s a mark of how strong their need was that we could talk for so long, and at such a harrowing emotional pitch. Danny always lingered a few minutes at the end, long enough for me to get across the room to him. “Good meeting,” he’d say, then ask if it was okay for him to stop by on Saturday, and of course I said yes. But he liked to be sure he was expected.

  I’d begun to guess what happened those last months in Vietnam, that he’d gone through a worse ordeal than the others and that they knew it too. Later I spent many hours thinking about this, and trying to see what I’d obviously failed to see then. It took me a long time to discover what the missing element was; this is in no way an excuse, but I remember how busy my life was then, those long hours in the psych unit. Agnes did try to persuade me to cut back. She was doing her academic work in the apartment and looking after Cassie at the same time, and it was lonely for her if I didn’t get home till eight or nine or later.

  By then I was exhausted. I took for granted that she understood all this. My memory is of coming home in the evening and the pair of us then talking at the kitchen table for an hour or so before going to bed. I don’t remember any sustained friction, or her voicing any serious objection to being left alone with Cassie. But later she produced a different account, and it’s hard to know exactly where the truth lies. There must have been nights we argued, quietly, so as not to wake Cassie, but for me they weren’t the dominant feature of those days. Agnes for her part has no strong recollection of a shared sense that we were living useful lives, or that a time would come when we’d have more money, and more time together, and that it would all have been worth it, and so on: the sentiments any couple feels at this stage.

  She said later that the deal was unfair, that she’d felt imprisoned in the apartment, that I was selfish and moody. Again, this is not how I remember it, and to me it doesn’t sound like Agnes, who was never a passive or put-upon woman. It is my conviction that she revised her memories after the fact so as to bring them into line with her anger.

  This falsification of memory—the adjustment, abbreviation, invention, even omission of experience—is common to us all, it is the business of psychic life, and I was never seriously upset about it. I know how very fickle the human mind is, and how malleable, when it has to accommodate belief, or deny the intolerable.

  But it all came back to Danny. He was so important to us, and I have no doubt I allowed Agnes’s feelings about him to influence my own attitude. I have often tried to imagine how I might have seen him had he been just one of the guys in the group and not her brother. Certainly he was haunted by repressed memories he hadn’t yet found a means of articulating, and he was never able to use the group to find the strength to confront his nightmares sober.

  But would I have glamorized him, seen something tough, laconic, even heroic, in a particularly American sort of a way, in his posture of lonely suffering? I believe Agnes’s romanticizing her brother influenced me, and that perhaps I failed to appreciate how weak he was. Perhaps I tended to view his isolation as a mark not of fragility but of resilience. Had the question been put to me directly I’m sure I would have said he had no resilience at all, but it never was put to me like that, and I accepted too easily Agnes’s picture of the protective elder brother who never let her down, whose courage and recklessness were famous in her hometown, whose readiness to take a beating, when the old man came home drunk, rather than allow him to beat up any of the women in the house, made her cry to think about even years later.

  Then, too, the quiet deference of the other guys in the group—it all came together to create a certain image, but I should have seen how much of his core had been blasted, and how unstable what little remained of him actually was. The outward form of the man was still apparent to Agnes, but she didn’t suspect how thin a shell it was, that it was as brittle as a wafer. I saw more than she did yet I too failed to recognize the extent of his frailty.

  Chapter Four

  In the weeks following my mother’s death I grew increasingly preoccupied with my newly revived relationship with Agnes. Her reserve excited me. Her implicit statement that regions of her being once mine were now closed to me, this aroused in me a strong urge to penetrate them. I didn’t question it, I didn’t subject this urge of mine to any imperative of deference, or even of common civility. I wanted to know what went on in her mind. What had happened to her while we were apart? I wanted to be in possession of the facts. Agnes clearly had ideas of her own with regard to the scope and depth of this resurgent liaison, but my intention was to disregard those limits and break down her resistance by whatever means necessary.

  “Leon doesn’t suspect you’re having an affair?” I said one night.

  “Charlie, you’re not to ask me questions like that.”

  It was the third or fourth time she’d come to the apartment. Again, it was the happy hour in the bed after sex when tenderness and languor and lingering physical pleasure encourage lovers to reveal all.

  “What would happen if he found out?”

  “If you don’t stop, I won’t come here again.”

  “It’s not so odd that I should ask, is it?”

  “I know what you’re doing, so just quit it.”

  “What I’m doing is very simple. I just want to know what this is all about.”

  “You don’t like it? Relax, Charlie. Stop thinking.”

  The idea of stopping thinking struck me as amusing. I knew Agnes knew she was being unreasonable by refusing to disclose any motive or explanation, but I also knew she knew my curiosity would not be bound by the normal parameters, that in this regard I was not a normal man: I was a psychiatrist. She knew my need to excavate far beyond what was comfortable, beyond what was even reasonable, logical or comprehensi
ble. But she wouldn’t allow the door to open so much as a crack, and while this frustrated me it also became a source of keen intrigue.

  “I wonder if what you want is that I uncover what you’re hiding by means of your body.”

  I wasn’t altogether clear what I meant by this. I had been reading about a theory of memory that rejected the idea of storage and instead posited memory as dynamic somatic imprinting.

  “Charlie!”

  “Your resistance is almost pathological.”

  At this she walked out of the bedroom. A few minutes later I was standing in the hallway in my bathrobe, where I at least made an attempt at amends.

  “Okay, I was being psychiatric. I’m sorry.”

  But she came back. It wasn’t as though we had nothing else to talk about. There was Cassie, who according to Agnes became more precocious and more eccentric every day; more difficult, she meant. She was worried, and I tried to tell her that our daughter was simply growing up, becoming an individual. I didn’t ask her about our daughter’s relationship with Leon, which I strongly suspected was turbulent, Cassie being of an age now to fall in love with her real daddy—me—and treat my rival with breezy disdain. We talked about Agnes’s sister, Maureen, the onetime hippie earth mother who now ran a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue; and of course about her brother. About Danny’s suicide, and Agnes’s gradual change of heart in this regard—her acceptance of the idea that I couldn’t have prevented it, that it would have happened anyway. Probably. I was surprised by this, and heartened.