Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Every institution like Old Main has among its patients at least one distinctive character, and here it was an elderly man named Francis Mead. Many years ago, before any of his doctors were even born, and while in a state of florid psychosis, Francis had committed murder. I was introduced to him, a thin, white-haired gent of seventy. He washed and mended his own clothes, and in the summer filled his room with wildflowers, he told me. He reminded me of my father; he had the same air of seediness, for it invariably clings to those incarcerated too long. I watched him move among the shuffling schizophrenics and sad-eyed depressives with the sprightly grace of an aging philanthropist visiting a slum, and when he spoke it was in perfect sentences. He was treated by the staff as something of a pet. For several years he’d been in the care of Joan Bachinski, but when I told her, back in my office, that I wanted to add him to my own caseload, she’d objected. I yielded with good grace; I had no wish to antagonize Dr. Bachinski.

  Staff accommodation was available in Old Main but I preferred to rent a house in town. I intended to stay awhile, my life in Manhattan having effectively ended the day of Leon O’Connor’s funeral. It was an old, narrow, wooden house. The corners were square, the ceilings dry, the floorboards firm and silent after eighty years, and from the front hall the staircase ascended steeply to the bedrooms above, then up a further flight to an attic with a small window from which on moonlit nights I had a clear view of Old Main brooding on its ridge five miles away. It wasn’t comfortable, but comfort was no longer what I wanted. Comfort I had abjured.

  As for the town, it had seen better days. Once a place of some distinction, its handsome wooden stores and homes were now in a state of disrepair. Paintwork was peeling, rooflines sagging, windows boarded up and everywhere a sense of neglect and decrepitude. I soon found the place in Walt’s photo. It was the Western Hotel on Main Street, a large yellow clapboard structure with a broad porch in front and wooden pillars supporting a railed verandah on the second floor. It too was a ruin now, and apparently there were plans to pull it down. I stood on the sidewalk and stared at it, and it stared back at me, sagging, unsafe, condemned, and the blocked windows were like dead eyes, blank and opaque but pregnant, somehow, with secrets, like a trauma built of wood. It aroused a strong sense of dread in me that I couldn’t explain.

  Several weeks went by. As I’d predicted, the work offered little stimulation, just backward psychiatry for lost souls; I was far more preoccupied with my own state of mind. The dread did not let up, it grew worse, if anything, and I began to sink into depression. The first snow fell. The plows were out and the roads were kept passable. I shoveled a path to my front door, not a task I’d ever had to perform in the city. The house was cold at night despite the best efforts of my housekeeper, Magda. She was a weary soul, older than her years, and a good worker, but she couldn’t keep the house warm after dark. The kitchen was the most comfortable room. From the back door I looked out onto a field of snow a hundred yards across and several feet deep, a tract of silent whiteness that I found profoundly disquieting. The trees beyond were heavy with snow that fell in loads, crashing through the branches, shattering the eerie quiet of the forest. At night I listened to Rachmaninoff and Elgar, read the life of Nietzsche and the novels of Jane Austen. I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.

  To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness. There came a period toward the end of the year when I’d find myself in front of the Western Hotel every day, and given how cold it was, and that nobody spent any more time out of doors than they had to, I know it aroused comment that I stood in my overcoat gazing at a ruin as the snow settled on my bare head. Often the feeling of dread was so strong I’d have to walk away, and I’d go to a bar at the end of Main Street where the road turned up into the mountains. I’d sit at the counter and try to sedate myself. I felt then as I imagined Danny had in those last months in New York.

  Then came the crisis. I was the doctor on call that night, and driving up the valley I saw through the falling snow that Old Main was ablaze with lights. It was also alive with noise and confusion, for the patients were awake and at their doors, banging and shouting, the staff unable to control them. Francis Mead had for some weeks been suffering a depressive episode that had sufficiently worried Joan Bachinski that she’d moved him to a secure ward. That night he’d torn up his shirt and used it to make a rope. He’d hanged himself from the bars on his window.

  I went down to his room with the ward supervisor. Strips of material still hung from the bars. Francis was lying on the bed covered by a sheet. I lifted the edge of the sheet for a second; sick at heart, I turned away. I told the supervisor to get the patients calmed down and move the body off the ward, but even as I did so I heard wheels rattling on the tiles and turned to see an attendant pushing a metal gurney down the corridor toward us.

  “Can you look after it?” I said.

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  I went downstairs and sat at my desk, panting. The effort I’d made on the ward had almost undone me; and then that damn gurney! I became aware of someone knocking on the door. “Who is it?”

  It was Joan Bachinski. She stared at me for a few seconds, then came in and closed the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  She pulled a chair close to mine and took my hands in her own strong fingers. They were still shaking. She told me to watch my breath, and after a few minutes I sat back and wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief. I straightened my spine. She asked if I’d ever been through something like this before; a suicide, she meant.

  “Oh yes.”

  An hour later she drove me home. I was exhausted. It was still dark but there was a faint gleam off the snow. I decided to take a shower and sleep for an hour, then return and face the day. She’d asked me about Danny, and I’d told her how I’d been the one who found him, how I’d assumed responsibility for his death and how it had destroyed my marriage; and also how my mother once told me that Danny died because I always interfered where I wasn’t wanted. Then the nightmares, the flashbacks, the panic attacks, the rage—

  “I thought it would be easier up here,” I said.

  “How isolated you must feel.”

  Her empathy was like balm. For far too long I’d been carrying this burden of ghosts and horror alone. I wanted to weep but I held back the tears; instead I reached across the desk, and once more she took my hands.

  “What did you actually think when you found him?”

  “I thought, I did this.”

  “ ‘I did this.’ Not, ‘I may be indirectly responsible for this.’ Not, ‘this man was suicidal to begin with, this was always going to happen, anything might have provoked it’?”

  “No.”

  “And it ended your marriage.”

  I nodded. Silence again. I remembered Sam Pike once telling me not to play the martyr, and I remembered too that even Agnes came around in the end to the idea that Danny would have killed himself anyway.

  “I think there’s more to it,” she said at last.

  “What do you mean?”

  She was taking some care to formulate her thoughts. “This shouldn’t be as destructive as it seems to be. It’s very possible,” she said slowly, “that the real trauma lies elsewhere. It might be very deep. And I think Danny’s just a screen.”

  Three weeks passed, a month, I don’t know. More markers of madness became apparent. I saw Joan Bachinski watching me, and her concern for my welfare was palpable. I continued to be obsessed with the Western Hotel. Often I went onto the property at night and kicked around in the snow, looking for I don’t know what, I guess my own past, the memory of whatever it was that Joan had glimpsed beneath the nightmare of Danny’s death. She was the only one who knew what was happening to me, but at every approach I rebuffed her. Resi
stance is of course a feature of trauma.

  “Charlie,” she said, “come talk to me, for heaven’s sake. You’re unraveling before my eyes.”

  But I never did. Somehow I got through Christmas, and although Cassie and I talked on the phone she didn’t come to see me, which was probably just as well. At times at night I was given to wild elation and at other times there was only a bleak, formless despair. The dissociative states became more frequent, and with them a lingering numbness, a sense of being only barely present in the world. One night I punched out a window in my house and cut up my knuckles. Joan, seeing that I kept my hand concealed, came to my office and got the truth out of me. I realized she was losing patience, and that if I didn’t do something to arrest this downward spiral then she would. She’d do what psychiatrists always do: she’d interfere. This thought alone was enough to remind me of my mother’s conviction that without my interference Danny wouldn’t have died. “He’d have done it anyway!” I’d shouted, and Mom had replied: “No, he wouldn’t.”

  Then one afternoon I came home from Old Main and saw an unfamiliar car parked outside the house. As I walked up the path Magda opened the front door. It was a cold day with more snow forecast and a few flakes were already drifting down. Pulling a shawl over her shoulders, she ran to intercept me. “Doctor, there’s two men in the house.”

  I knew then it was time. It was what I’d been waiting for, what I’d been afraid of. “Who are they?” I said.

  “They’re in the front room. They made a fire.”

  I gripped her sleeve. “Who are they, Magda?”

  “One of them says he’s your father.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fred Weir sat in a wing chair pulled up close to the fireplace, holding his hands to the flames. He looked pale and gaunt, cadaverous even, with his face and hands aglow as he leaned into the fire, and when I entered he glanced at me without warmth or recognition. He was wearing a shiny black jacket and faded blue jeans, and there was a black fedora on the floorboards beside him.

  On the far side of the fireplace, standing at the window, was Walter. He was all in black: overcoat, jeans, boots. On the low table between them stood an open bottle of Wild Turkey. In my last encounter with Nora Chiara I’d made her see my brother in a very dark light indeed; I’d turned him into a monster, told her that he hated me, that he’d used her so as to hurt me. But to see him in the flesh—to lay eyes, I mean, on the living, breathing man himself—made the paranoia falter. It was Walter, after all. An imperfect man, a flawed man, but no more flawed or imperfect than me. He opened his arms.

  I shook my head. I was in no condition for hearty reconciliations. “Why didn’t you call?” I said.

  “Ah, Charlie. You’d have told us not to come.”

  “That’s right, I would. What do you want, Walter?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Why is he here?”

  Fred seemed not to hear this. He continued trying to coax warmth into his trembling hands and gave the impression he had no part to play in whatever transpired between his sons. It was like having a dog in the room. I went to the sideboard for a glass, pulled up a chair and poured myself a shot of the bourbon. Walter sat down beside me, yawning. He’d flown into JFK only the day before. I’d had little enough sleep myself.

  “Heard from Nora?” he said at last.

  “Not since I left the city.”

  “I saw her last night. She told me where you were. She didn’t look too good, Charlie.”

  “How so?”

  “She was acting a little crazy.”

  “That was your fault. You made her crazy.”

  He seemed not to hear me. He said there’d been a lot of wild talk and that she’d got drunk fast, a thing she never used to do. He said he knew there’d be tears so he took her home. She’d had a little breakdown in the cab.

  “What sort of a little breakdown?”

  Now he turned and faced me straight. His tone was funereal. “You broke her heart, Charlie.”

  That Walter should tell me I’d broken Nora’s heart struck me as faintly ridiculous. It occurred to me to ask him how, after all his duplicity, all his treachery, he had the nerve to say such a thing. “You didn’t give a damn about her,” I said wearily. “She was one of your things, Walter, and all you needed was someone to look after her. I was your concierge. Your sex concierge.”

  “All right, Charlie, calm down.”

  Fred was interested now. He’d always enjoyed seeing us fight, and there was a gleam in his old, loser’s eyes as I sank back in my chair. Walter had no need to tell me to calm down, I was calm already, calm unto death.

  “You remember being up here as a kid?” he said. “I remember the town.”

  “I couldn’t imagine why you’d come here otherwise. So how is it?”

  I stood up and walked to the window. It was growing dark outside. Something was howling in the forest. All I wanted was to sleep. “She was in a lot of pain because of you,” I said. “You never heard her screaming in the night.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Charlie.”

  I remember smiling when he said this. I returned to the table and refilled my glass. “What are you doing here, Walter—come to make me crazy too?”

  He said nothing. To carry on talking about Nora would only create more conflict, and what was the point?

  “Actually,” he said, “I came because I thought you might kill yourself.”

  The answer was so unexpected that I shouted with laughter. Seeing me as a suicide risk, Walter had come to this little town in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York to save me. I stood up and turned on the lamp in the corner.

  “You’ve figured it out, right?” he said.

  “Figured what out?”

  There was a furtive movement by the fire, Fred flicking me a glance; the dog’s ears had pricked up at this turn in the conversation. I saw he was agitated now. He lifted the poker and jabbed at the fire, and a shower of sparks went rushing up the chimney.

  “Figured out what the hell happened here. There’s a reason you had to come back. You’re a shrink, man, it shouldn’t be that hard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Oh, but I did. The building in the photo, that dilapidated hotel. Walter gazed at me, frowning. He got a cigar out of his pocket and toyed with it. Finally he said, “Remember that dream you used to have?”

  “It wasn’t a dream,” I said. He meant the dream in which Fred put a gun to my head.

  “No.”

  He came to the window. We were both drawn there, as if offered some means of escape, some portal through which we could flee the past. The sensation this last exchange aroused in me was hard to describe. I stood beside him and together we stared into the white world outside. It was snowing heavily now. I made a movement of my head to indicate Fred, who was sitting over the fire with his back to us. Walter shook his head.

  “Where did it happen?” I said.

  “Here.”

  “What, this house?”

  “This town. On Main Street, that big yellow hotel, the Western.”

  A sort of click in my head, as of a ball in a socket. The whiskey was biting now. Hardly surprising, since we’d almost emptied the bottle. But I’d at least grasped Walter’s confirmation of what I’d already figured out, that my childhood nightmare in fact was true. It had happened. Fred turned around in his chair and glanced from Walter to me, and I think he realized what was going on for he became distinctly shifty.

  “So tell me about it,” I said.

  “They were fighting. It was a bad one, Charlie. They were making a lot of noise. You went into their room.”

  “Ah, shit,” said Fred. He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He sat there motionless, groaning.

  “Where were you?” I said.

  “I was in the corridor.”

  “Why weren’t you with me?”

  He stared out the window. Now neither of them could look at me.
Later it occurred to me that my brother’s cowardice on that long-ago night, in leaving me to do what he should have done, must have been a source of secret shame for years. It was why he hated me. Shame creates hatred. It had done so in my mother too, she hated me out of shame.

  “Dad,” I said.

  Fred got up out of the chair and now he was like a cornered animal as he moved toward the door.

  “Did it happen?”

  He gave a sort of sneer.

  “For god’s sake,” I said, “be honest for once in your sorry life. Did you put a gun to my head in the Western Hotel?”

  “No, I fucking did not!”

  I looked at Walter. He was pouring the last of the whiskey into our glasses. “That’s the end of it,” he said. “You got any more?”

  “There’s nothing else to drink,” I said. “So what happened, Walter? Did he or didn’t he?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “So it didn’t happen.”

  “Oh, it happened,” said Walter, “only it wasn’t Fred.”

  “What?”

  “It was Mom.”

  • • •

  Ten minutes later Walter and I were out in the snow, trudging up Main Street to get another bottle. The town was silent. No traffic, no pedestrians, only the falling snow casting a white veil over the buildings on either side of the empty street. The mountains were obliterated by the snowfall; even Old Main was invisible tonight. We felt like the only people left alive in the world. A semi had passed through not long before and left tracks for us to follow. The Western Hotel, a pale hulking ruin in the snowstorm, was as vague as a mirage in a dream. It looked almost benign. We turned at the top of Main Street, by the church, and began climbing the hill. The windows of the trailer homes glowed dimly through the snow. Several were still decorated with Christmas lights. Where the road turned, there was the bar, an old brick building with a neon Budweiser sign in the window. It seemed to promise warmth and good cheer, and we pushed the door open.