Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Agnes didn’t speak to me for two years after Danny’s death. When I visited Fulton Street she was never there, still too angry to be in the same room with me. Cassie was happy to see me regardless. Often we went swimming. There was a pool at NYU to which I had access. It was one of the very few pleasures I can remember from this period, splashing around with my daughter as I taught her how to swim. She was a leggy, slender child even then, and she was physically graceful. She loved being in the water and loved showing off. I remember one weekend when she was staying at my apartment, and our plan was to go to the pool early on Saturday morning and swim before breakfast. I think she was four. She was very excited, and we went to bed early. But during the night I was awoken. She was standing beside my bed, shaking me.

  “Daddy, wake up! It’s time!”

  “It’s the middle of the night, Cass.”

  I struggled up and turned on the lamp on the night table. She had tried to put on her swimsuit, a little thing in shocking pink with shoulder straps, but she hadn’t succeeded. It was somehow both upside down and backward and hopelessly twisted, her head sticking out through an armhole and her arms where her legs should be. There she stood in her little pink straitjacket, clapping her hands and telling me to get up or we’d be late.

  “Come here, honey, what have you done?”

  “We have to hurry, Daddy!”

  Being with her at times made me feel wretched when I thought of what I had lost; what it was to have a family, what it was to be alone. Sometimes she burst into tears when I took her back to Fulton Street and told her I had to leave her now, and it broke my heart too. But Maureen was good. She would sweep the child up and comfort her, and while she was distracted I slipped away. At other times she was asleep when I came to the apartment, and I’d sit in the kitchen with Maureen. I was curious that she didn’t hold me responsible for her brother’s death, as Agnes did. Her reply surprised me. She said it was obvious Danny would die young.

  “Agnes never told me that,” I said.

  “Well, she wouldn’t, would she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She worshipped him. She couldn’t contemplate it.”

  Maureen was heavier and softer than Agnes, a statuesque woman with thick coppery hair who for some weeks had dated Billy Sullivan. The men in the group gave Billy plenty of grief for claiming that because of Maureen Magill he was “mellow.” She let him go when he started to get weird on her, as she put it, but she let him down lightly and they stayed friendly. I admired the tact with which she did it. So when she told me she’d always known Danny would die young, I paid close attention.

  “He had demons,” she said, “even when he was a little kid. What a moody kid! It would come on him so suddenly, and we just had to get out of the way. He was the same as Daddy like that.”

  We were drinking coffee and waiting for Cassie to wake up from her nap. Maureen dressed like a hippie, all flowing skirts and scarves and beads. She was as impressive a personality as her sister but she inclined to the role of earth mother, which Agnes emphatically did not. Like Agnes she rolled her own cigarettes, though with weed mixed in.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Oh, he’d do all this crazy stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like one time he jumped into an old quarry. Nobody knew how deep the water was, but he didn’t care. I’ll never forget it. It was a long way down and we watched him, a bunch of us kids, and we didn’t know and he didn’t know if the water was two feet deep or what. Agnes was a mess.”

  I could picture it, the young Danny sauntering to the edge of the quarry, bare-chested, barefoot, freckles on his shoulders, gazing down at the still, brown water, drowsy with insects and sparkling where sunlight came dappling through the foliage above. Small boys gathered around their leader, proud but secretly horrified; it was for the boys that he was doing it. Then shouting “Geronimo”—jumping—and coming up spluttering in the sunshine, his arms up over his head, and the children at the top of the cliff dancing around and yelling, all but one of them ecstatic at his bold feat, and the one not yelling was Agnes, for whom it was too much, he could have been killed—

  And all at once I saw her crying for him in our bed at night, and me not there to comfort her. Me not there.

  • • •

  Another time I asked Maureen if Danny was really the hero who stood up for his mother and sisters when their father came home drunk and wanted to hit someone. She shook her head.

  “It was you?” I said.

  “It was Agnes.”

  He would come home and want to hit his son, and it was Agnes who prevented him, Agnes who took the slaps herself. But she’d turned the story upside down. She’d told it as she’d wanted it to happen, that Danny defended her, and I think by then she believed it.

  “It wasn’t your fault he killed himself,” Maureen said, blowing smoke at the ceiling.

  “Agnes thinks it was.”

  “She thinks that now.”

  At first I thought my clinical career was over. I’d made up my mind to quit the unit. And in the bleak, selfish spirit with which I’d abandoned my marriage I considered this a good thing. I spoke to Sam Pike about it. He confirmed what Maureen had said, that Danny was always a suicide risk.

  He became dogmatic, prodding the table with his finger. “It was not your fault. You did not drive him to it. It had very little to do with that botched intervention of yours. Anything might have triggered it. Try not to play the martyr here, Charlie.”

  We were having lunch in the oyster bar in Grand Central. Sam had a train to catch. He was speaking at an antiwar rally someplace upstate. He was constantly on the move in those years.

  “No reason it shouldn’t make you a better therapist.”

  “Better?”

  “If you can learn from it. You shouldn’t have left Agnes but I guess that’s not my business.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not.”

  He busied himself with his lobster, cracking a claw and clumsily extracting the meat. Sam loved to eat but he wasn’t elegant about it. He encouraged me not to give up, and in the further course of the conversation—it was, in retrospect, one of the more important conversations of my life—he not only succeeded in convincing me to stay on at the unit, but fired my imagination with his vision of an emerging discipline. He meant the treatment of trauma. He was already using the term posttraumatic syndrome.

  “Charlie, I want you with me. What’s the time? I must go.”

  “You want me?” I said, rising from the table.

  “You’re young,” he said. “I’m not.”

  He threw down some bills and went shouldering out, flinging an arm up in farewell. I sat back down at the table. It was now clear that I could, after all, be useful—that I too could serve. Otherwise I did not know what the point of me was. And after Danny’s death, to have a point was a matter of some considerable importance.

  But Sam was right, I now realize; I shouldn’t have left Agnes. In my blindness and selfishness I had looked to my own pain and not to hers. I was wretched after I moved out; the memory of those days still makes me ashamed. There was all the nuisance of physical upheaval—getting my books out of Fulton Street was a nightmare, in the heat—but worse, of course, far worse was the wrench of separation. Agnes was at times so very vulnerable, so pathetic and childlike in her desperation, that it took an inhuman level of detachment for me to go through with it. But I did it. Somehow I managed to raise the cold determination to see it through, and I functioned like a machine, impervious to her misery. Within a month I was able to glimpse the extent of my cruelty but by then it was too late, or so I thought. With a kind of grim relish I settled to my suffering, and my awareness of Agnes’s suffering only served to twist the knife already deep in my guts.

  It later occurred to me that by failing Agnes I had again failed my mother. I’d behaved exactly as Fred had. But did I want to fail my mother? Did I have to? Because I hated her? We s
ee nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

  Agnes asked me over for dinner again. I’d been to see Joe Stein in the afternoon. They still didn’t know if he would walk again. When I asked how he felt he said he felt sore, how the hell did I think he felt? But I detected a change in him. I didn’t see, as I have in others who have failed in a suicide attempt, the steely conviction that next time will be different, next time they’ll do it right. There was a new attitude in Joe Stein, I thought, as though he had paid, or at least was paying, and perhaps this was all—having taken a life—that he’d wanted to do. As though he had offered his own life in good faith, and the offer had been declined. It wasn’t the time to speak of such things, but all the same I had the sense that we’d both just glimpsed the possibility of an end to our suffering, for I was then raising the question with Agnes of whether we might try again, she and I. Before I left I asked Stein how his wife was.

  “Guardedly pessimistic,” he said.

  Guardedly pessimistic—was that me? No. I allowed myself to soar higher than that. I had hope. I thought I could undo the error that had robbed me of seven years with Agnes. I thought I could go home, and in fact I saw no reason why I shouldn’t. I had been much buoyed by what had happened at Sam’s memorial, and while I was aware of the unreliability of one’s peers’ approbation, the salutary effect on my parched ego of being reminded of my professional status was nonetheless profound. I stood at the window in my apartment and told myself that my life was about to change. I put on the glorious Schubert E-flat PianoTrio, sank into an armchair and closed my eyes. That night I slept well and awoke with the mood intact.

  I heard nothing from Nora. I felt sorry about how it had worked out, sorry that she’d failed to find what she was after. She would never find it, of course, not without psychotherapy, for what she wanted was a man to whom she could submit while he treated her, and whom she could at the same time punish for what he, or rather that absent other of whom he was the ghost, had done to her in the past.

  Chapter Thirteen

  August, and the weather continued hot and humid, unrelenting days of gas fumes, fraying tempers, sirens, fire trucks and garbage in the streets. Human wreckage everywhere you looked. In City Hall Park, just yards from the mayor’s office, I watched a kid on a bench shoot up with heroin and then doze off. I was still seeing Cassie on the weekends. I’d pick her up at Fulton Street in the morning and over an early lunch we’d discuss what she wanted to do. I didn’t tell her of my recent efforts to displace Leon and resume being her daddy full-time, and I was certain Agnes wouldn’t speak to her about it either. But I forgot what a very perceptive child she was.

  “Are you coming to live with us again?”

  We were having lunch in her favorite place, a diner on Tenth Avenue. There was a long counter with fixed stools, and tables and banquettes by the window. From the grill came the sizzle of frying bacon. Food orders were being shouted back and forth, all was briskness and gruff conviviality. She’d ordered a burger and fries. I was having a coffee.

  “I’m not, honey.”

  She gazed at me through half-closed eyes, an expression meant to communicate shrewd penetration. “Mommy told Leon you weren’t moving back in so he should just stop worrying.”

  I said I couldn’t move back in if Leon was living there. Two daddies in the same apartment? My tone was one of elaborate reasonableness.

  Cass frowned. “I wish you would.”

  I’d always made it a point never to talk to Cassie about Leon. I’d told Agnes years before that if we used our daughter to spy on each other, it would be hard on her for all kinds of reasons.

  “But you want to, don’t you?” she said.

  “There’s no point talking about what can’t happen.”

  “Why can’t it happen?”

  It was torture, having to pretend like this. I refused to cut off the conversation by telling her a lie, by saying that no, I didn’t want to move back in. At the same time I couldn’t tell her that I did, though this, naturally, was what she needed to know. She needed to know where I stood.

  Cass was very like her mother in some respects, she had Agnes’s directness and obstinacy.

  She shrugged. “I’ll find out anyway,” she said.

  Another time we were in a cab going north on the FDR and I was staring out the window at the river. I was a thousand miles away.

  “Are you sad today, Daddy?”

  “Sorry, Cass, I’m preoccupied.”

  “You look sad. Is it because of Leon?”

  “No.”

  “Mommy is.”

  This was the sort of statement we had agreed we would not follow up on. It was none of my business if Agnes was sad about Leon. I couldn’t care less how she felt about her fireman.

  “He’s sick, that’s why Mommy’s sad.”

  “Honey, I never talk to you about Leon. You should know that by now.”

  Then I saw there was something else going on. She was frightened. I couldn’t have the conversation with her, but I could attend to her feelings. There in the back of the cab I opened my arms, and gratefully she let herself be folded into a hug. I stroked her hair. Whatever was going on at home was disturbing her and so I comforted her, telling her she was a strong girl and that she would be able to handle it, whatever happened. When we reached the park she’d recovered, and we set off to find a hot dog stand. She was a skinny kid but she ate like a horse.

  A few days later I returned to Fulton Street. Cassie was staying over at Maureen’s and Leon was out somewhere, so it was just Agnes and me. Leon so often seemed to be out, and this I took to be a sign of the breakdown of the marriage, though Agnes would never talk about it.

  “Charlie, I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  We were seated at the kitchen table. There was a salmon in the oven. She was looking very attractive, I thought, in her casual, lanky fashion. I said so. She asked if I wanted music and I told her I didn’t care, and she said that with the others out she was happy to have silence.

  I’d been thinking too. I’d allowed myself to indulge a domesticity fantasy. The idea of membership in a family again, this aroused me strongly, and while with one part of my brain I watched my emotions with cautious detachment, at the same time I periodically surrendered to giddy speculation. So I was at times a fevered youth, and at other times the watchful parent of that youth.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about what you said about wanting to come back. Were you serious?”

  “I was. I am.”

  She gazed at me, then laid her head against the back of the chair and pushed her hands through her hair and sighed. Agnes had lovely slim hands with long, tapering fingers. I had always loved her hands.

  “You said you didn’t know me anymore.”

  “What I meant was I’ve missed so much that’s happened to you.”

  “People don’t change, Charlie.”

  “Not without help we don’t.”

  She frowned. She was scrutinizing me.

  “I think you do know me. But I don’t know you anymore, that’s the point. When Danny died, when you left me, I didn’t understand why you were doing it. I didn’t recognize what made you do it. I thought you’d go away for a few days, even a week or two, and then you’d come back. And I was bewildered, this on top of everything else in my life just then, and it turned to anger. And I was angry with you for a long time.”

  “I know.”

  “But you didn’t do anything about it.”

  “I know.”

  “But why?”

  She was sitting forward now, her hands laid flat on the table. She stared at me and I saw that she was genuinely unable to understand why I’d hurt her so badly. I saw too that my response to this mattered very much.

  “Many reasons. Shame. Despair. Sense of spiritual fragmentation. Alienation. I didn’t start to come out of it
till the night of Mom’s funeral.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “And when I saw that instead of sparing you I’d betrayed you by not being there when you needed me, I felt even worse. I felt I wasn’t fit to be with you.”

  “Or anybody else, apparently. Until this Nora.”

  I didn’t challenge this.

  “And you haven’t been in therapy, you of all people!”

  “No.”

  “And now you come back as though nothing happened.”

  “I don’t pretend that nothing happened.”

  “But what if you get depressed again? And decide you’re not fit to live with? Will you walk out on us like you did before?”

  “No.”

  A silence here. She didn’t ask how I could be sure of it, though the question hung in the air anyway.

  “I know what I want now,” I said.

  She frowned. “I’m too old for experiments, Charlie.”

  I said nothing to this. I waited.

  “I need to know you’re with me for good before I let you back in.”

  The fevered youth in my head had crawled into some dark place and was not to be heard from. I reviewed whatever occurred to me to say and none of it seemed adequate. “I don’t know what I can tell you other than this,” I said, “that I’ll never hurt you again. I don’t know how to make you believe that.”

  “You believe it?”

  “I do.”

  She sipped her wine and gazed at me. There was a ping! from the oven but she ignored it. All at once I saw that she wanted to believe me, that there lived in her, if not a fevered youth, then a woman who could still love poor Charlie Weir but was taking counsel from a parent urging caution, reminding her of what had happened the last time she’d allowed herself to love him.