The place was almost empty. The pool tables in back were deserted. Four or five men sat on barstools, leaning on the counter, smoking, each one sunk deep in his own wintry thoughts. They turned as we entered, then returned to their silent meditations.
The bartender approached. “Gentlemen?”
Walt told him what we wanted, and the man put a bottle on the bar. “What else?”
“Give us a couple of shots,” said Walt.
We’d barely said a word to each other on our way here, but he did tell me he’d had to bribe Fred to come.
“So why did you bring him?” I said.
“I needed backup.”
We sat at a table in that shabby bar and listened to Hank Williams on the jukebox. “All right, Walter,” I said, “I’ll tell you what I remember, then you tell me where it’s wrong.”
“Go on then.”
What a big man he was. I remember thinking this as he put his elbows on the table and leaned in, the bulk of his overcoat black in the bar’s gloom, the little tumbler of bourbon gleaming amber between his thick fingers. So I told him what I’d always believed to be a dream. We’d been standing in a dark corridor outside a closed door in a strange, frightening building. Mom and Fred were shouting at each other. Their voices were muffled but we recognized the rage. Then there was the sound of a body falling. All went quiet, then Walt put his hand on the doorknob, grinning at me in the darkness. I felt a sense of rising panic. I knew he mustn’t do it but he did, he turned the knob, and pushed the door open. Then he ran away. I was left there by myself. The room in all its horror yawned before me.
“That true so far?”
He flung a glance at me, then lit a cigarette. I watched him as he threw back his whiskey and shuddered. He was staring at the counter where the old men sat. I told him that the next thing I remembered was Fred coming toward me, and the effect was of a giant about to devour me. He had a gun in his hand.
“Walter, I was six years old, and I didn’t run away.”
“It wasn’t Fred. He was sitting on a chair on the other side of the room. It was Mom.”
“How can you know that? You weren’t there!”
“I came back. I watched the whole thing through a crack in the door.”
She was very drunk. Her eyes were crazy. Her clothes were loose, falling open; he could see her brassiere, and her hair was wild. She had a cigarette between her teeth. Grinning, she pointed the gun at the boy’s head and told him to turn around. He pleaded with her but she just shouted at him to turn around and then pushed his face against the wall.
“Give me a cigarette, Walter.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“Just give me one. Then what?”
With one hand still squashing the boy’s face into the wall she put the gun between the fingers splayed on the back of his head and pushed the barrel against his skull, so hard that he screamed with pain.
“You know what she said then?” said Walter.
I crushed out the cigarette. “What?”
“She said, This is what you get for going into other people’s bedrooms, Charlie.”
When she pulled the trigger, nothing happened, just a click. The boy slid down the wall into the mess he’d made in his shorts. It was Fred who stopped it. He told her to leave me alone.
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. You came out of that room on your hands and knees. I took you back to our room and put you in the tub. Nobody talked about it the next day. Mom told me later that if you ever mentioned it, I was supposed to say it was just a bad dream. That’s what we did. After a while you believed it.”
“So why did I think it was Fred?”
“I don’t know, man. You’re the fucking shrink.”
Displacement. Unthinkable, that my mother could do that to me. The unconscious wouldn’t sanction it for a moment. So it got displaced onto Fred.
• • •
When we left the bar, the snow was still coming down and we were far from steady. The plow had been through, but even so the walk back up Main Street must have taken us an hour. We encountered nobody. Back at the house, Fred was watching for us. He opened the front door as we staggered up the path.
“Where have you two pissheads been?” he shouted.
The next thing I remember we were sitting in the kitchen and Walt was attempting to cook some eggs. I’d drunk myself into sobriety, or so I imagined, but I had no motor coordination and had already dropped a glass that shattered on the floor. I think it was Walter who pushed the fragments into the corner with his boot. An argument erupted at some point, and I remember Walter shouting at Fred to tell me what happened.
“How the fuck do I know?” shouted Fred. He wanted nothing more to do with this excavation of the past. It was just one of the many squalid incidents in his life that he preferred to forget.
“Tell Charlie what you told me earlier.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tell him about that night in the Western Hotel.”
Fred tried to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking so violently he couldn’t strike the match. Walter stood up and loomed, swaying, over him. I felt a sudden surge of disgust for the old man. He was in an impossible situation but it was entirely of his own making.
“Tell him!”
Something flared to life in old Fred Weir then, as he sat with his whiskey at my kitchen table, a last, flickering impulse of outrage that Walt should be barking orders at him like this. He stood up too. “Fuck you, Walter!” he shouted, then he was heading for the door, and Walt went after him, but somehow I got myself between them and blocked Walter from hitting the old man, then I was pushing Walter through the back door, my hands on his chest, shouting at him to get the fuck outside.
Then we were out in the yard, our breath cloudy in the cold night air. He swung at me and I took a glancing blow to the nose, which at once started bleeding. With some surprise I watched my blood dripping into the snow. I wiped my face. Walter was panting and snorting like a bull. Then a kind of red flood swept through me and I went for him, and somehow got his coat up over his shoulders, but he rushed me and we floundered around for a while, falling over as we tried to punch each other. A little later the two of us stood coughing, grunting, glaring at each other, neither of us with the strength to go on.
Then we heard laughter. Fred was standing in the back door, framed against the house by the light from the kitchen. He was wearing his black fedora, I remember. He tossed something into the snow between us. It was the black automatic he’d had on Eighty-seventh Street.
“Here it is, boys, you figure it out!”
The childhood nightmare came back to me then, my mother in a dark room at the mercy of this man. The force indomitable, begging him to stop, and me the witness to the sordid travesty their marriage had become. At that moment I hated him more than I’d ever done before. I don’t recall picking the gun up out of the snow, but Walter must have guessed my intention because he threw himself on me. As we went down it fired, and it was Walter that got shot, not my father.
Then I was on all fours being sick. I remember gazing down at the mess I was making. Blood, snot, tears and vomit were pooling in the trampled snow, and Walter was staggering toward the house, and I remember screaming at them to leave me alone, to get the fuck out of my house, to just get away from me—
Fred was in a panic, shouting that we had to drive Walter to a hospital, and later I found blood tracked right through the house.
They were gone. I was sitting under the window on the kitchen floor. I was thinking about Danny, how he’d been sitting on a floor under a window when I kicked his door down that Sunday morning in the summer of 1972. There’d been spilt whiskey in that room too. Our situations were identical, the booze, the awakened trauma, the gun. I still had the gun. I shifted around until I was in the exact position Danny had been when I found him. I put it between my teeth, then pushed it hard against the roof of my mouth so it h
urt, because I wanted to do it right, like Danny.
I sat like that for several minutes. Then I thought of Cassie. I struggled to my feet and from the back door I threw the gun out into the snow. When my mother pulled the trigger that night, how did she know it wasn’t loaded? Did she know? Did she care?
I sat through the hours of darkness, shivering in my overcoat in the kitchen. The back door was still open, snow was drifting in, and the room so cold I was chilled to the bone. But how quiet it was up here in the mountains. I thought for a long time about Francis Mead. I felt a strong sense of kinship with the old man. The ward report showed that he’d been asleep twenty minutes before they found him hanging from the window bars. Whether that was true or not nobody would ever know, of course, but I doubted it. That was no impulsive suicide.
The snow stopped falling before dawn as the sky turned dark blue. Hour of the wolf. Only then did it occur to me to phone Joan Bachinski. I woke her up. She listened with close attention as I described what had happened.
“Charlie,” she said, “stay where you are. I’m coming to get you. I’m taking you in.”
I opened the front door and leaned against the frame. I was all used up. Ghosts were clamoring in my head, I could hear them, I could even feel them, they were ripping me apart from the inside. I began to rock back and forth, my face in my hands—and then it changed.
It changed. I lifted my head. I turned to the east. The first light was touching the turrets of Old Main; and when a few minutes later I heard Joan’s car in the distance I sank to my knees in the snow and wept. I was going home.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book was set in Janson, a typeface long thought to have been made by the Dutchman Anton Janson, who was a practicing typefounder in Leipzig during the years 1668–1687. However, it has been conclusively demonstrated that these types are actually the work of Nicholas Kis (1650–1702), a Hungarian, who most probably learned his trade from the master Dutch typefounder Dirk Voskens. The type is an excellent example of the influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon (1692–1766) developed his own incomparable designs from them.
Composed by Creative Graphics, Allentown, Pennsylvania Printed and bound by R. R. Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia Book design by Robert C. Olsson
ALSO BY PATRICK McGRATH
Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now
Port Mungo
Martha Peake
Asylum
Dr. Haggard’s Disease
Spider
The Grotesque
Blood and Water and Other Tales
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Patrick McGrath
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGrath, Patrick, [date]
Trauma / Patrick McGrath.—1st ed.
p. cm
1. Psychiatrists—Fiction 2. Adult children of dysfunctional families—
Fiction. 3. Death—Psychological aspects—Fiction.
4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
ps3563.c3663t73 2007
813'. 54—dc22 2007031071
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26870-9
v3.0_r1
Trauma Page 18
