Trauma (15 page)

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 bowed, 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

D
r. 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 weathered 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.

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. Resistance 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.”