Trauma (4 page)

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 back 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

I
n 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 comprehensible. 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.

“But then to leave me!”

For once I didn’t challenge her, although I still believed I’d been right to leave. Instead, tentatively, I asked whether her changed attitude regarding my responsibility for Danny’s death was what had made her wait for me after my mother’s funeral, and kept bringing her back to my apartment. I didn’t know if this would anger her.

“Of course it did. You think I’d come here if I hated you?”

“So do you love me?”

“Don’t get carried away, Charlie. All I said was, I didn’t hate you. I
did
hate you, but I don’t now. It’s such hard work hating someone.”

“I’ve never hated anyone. Except my father. And Walt, of course, but that’s complicated. That’s not true hatred.”

“What is it then?”

“You want me to tell you a story about Walt?”

I was watching her closely. Did she want me to tell her a story about Walt? I took a strong interest in what others felt about my brother, and it was a source of astonishment to me that people didn’t see right through him. When Agnes first met him, Walt was a hairy, hard-drinking painter-man whose abstract aesthetics were tempered by a ferocious ambition he did little to conceal. This wasn’t something I could talk to him about. Walt derided me for supposedly upholding some outdated myth of the artist in the garret, and I told him that his cynicism made a mockery of any aspiration to integrity he might claim. On one occasion, and this was the story I told Agnes, I had accused him of being indifferent to the war—this at a time when the streets of American cities were loud with protest. Walt’s response was extraordinary. He claimed he was himself at war.

“At war with what?” I’d said.

“With the history of art.”

I had never forgotten it. I told Agnes about it as though it had happened not years ago but yesterday.

“You do know, don’t you, that you’ve told me that story before?” she said.

I was aware that I’d told her the story before, but what mattered was that she share my horrified amusement. So deep an impression had it made on me, so strong was the charge that still attached to the memory, that it overrode any embarrassment I may have felt about repeating myself.

“Oh, Charlie, you’re so odd about Walter. I’m afraid your mother’s responsible for that.”

“You think it’s unhealthy.”

“Sure I think it’s unhealthy. I never figured out why she treated you so badly, and so adored Walter.”

This, too, we’d discussed before. The sad fact was, I didn’t know either.

“But you’re the shrink!”

I spread my hands wide.
I didn’t know.

One night, when she was about to return to Fulton Street, I asked why she couldn’t stay the night.

“Don’t, Charlie. Try to imagine my situation. It’s not easy.”

I said nothing. She put her arms on my shoulders. She was almost as tall as me in her heels.

“You’re a nice guy,” she said. “Say something, Charlie.
Be nice.”

“I’m running on empty here,” I said.

She angled her head slightly and kissed me.

“Is it very unfair?” she said.

“I think it is.” She gazed at me then with what looked like sadness tinged with affection, but said nothing.

A little later I sat in the dark apartment feeling like a man suffering from a peculiar sort of thirst. Lacking the power to control the course of the relationship, starved of information about what was happening in Fulton Street and forced to accommodate Agnes’s erratic schedule, I was in the position of a kept man. Concubinage was still a criminal offense in some countries. Sophia Loren had been prosecuted for it. Of course I wasn’t
paid
to hold myself in readiness for my lover’s occasional appearances, unless the sex was itself payment; and there were the women I visited on Lexington Avenue and elsewhere, though they offered little of what I required, the sort of intimacy that Agnes promised but never quite delivered. She never stayed the night and gave me only partial glimpses of the life she led apart from me. But despite my dissatisfaction I knew it wouldn’t be me who broke off the arrangement. I still entertained fantasies of the three of us living under one roof, a family. And god knows I needed a family—my own had been a disaster.

After she’d left, my mind drifted back to the story I’d told her about Walter. The bond between brothers is often intense, but it isn’t necessarily affection that unites them.

Affection was rarely evident in our relationship, yet we depended on each other in a number of ways. I often questioned him closely about our childhood. Being three years older than me, he remembered more than I could, and despite the patent unreliability of such memories I was always eager to hear his stories. I remember one particular conversation in some detail. We were sitting up late drinking in my apartment.

“Did he ever have a job?” I said.

We were talking about Fred, of course.

“He brought in a little cash now and then, but it was never clear where he got it. Gambling, I guess, the horses. I think he fenced stolen property, but very small-time. You remember that time the bedroom was full of cardboard boxes?”

“No.”

“I had a look in one of them. Kitchen equipment. Egg beaters, knives and forks, pots and pans. Mom told him if he didn’t get that shit out of the apartment she’d call the cops.”

I think I would’ve looked more kindly on my father’s shortcomings, or with less scorn, at least, if he’d been even slightly affable or affectionate toward me. But he wasn’t.

“You remember how he’d just
blow
?” said Walt.

Oh, I remembered. I remembered him shouting, I remembered doors being slammed, plates and glasses being smashed. I remembered how once I climbed onto the table and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” with my hand on my heart, just to distract him. It worked: the astonishment was enough to disrupt his anger and turn it into laughter. Walter nodded when I told him this story. He’d been there, of course; in fact he’d probably shaped the story for me in later years.

“Why did he get so mad?” I said.

Adult anger is terrifying to a child. The loss of control threatens the stability of his world and puts him in fear of his life. The child has no confidence in his ability to withstand rage, and believes it will break him into fragments.

“Because Mom told him he was a loser.”

“You heard her say that?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Christ, Charlie, I just remember how she’d go for his jugular, and it drove him crazy.”

Fred Weir in fact
was
a loser, and this must have been apparent to others long before I realized it myself. My mother, on the other hand, was a sharp-tongued woman who saw no reason not to speak her mind, which made her ill-suited for life with a lazy, shiftless, short-tempered man like him. Small wonder that as a child I used to dream of him putting a gun to my head and threatening to kill me.

“She provoked him, didn’t she?” I said.

“He couldn’t take criticism. She didn’t care. She wasn’t going to keep quiet just because he lost his temper.”

Walter fished a cigar out of his pocket and took a moment to get it going. I waited.

“It got pretty bad at times,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“He used to hit her.”

He leaned across the table and refilled my glass. I didn’t remember it, but at the same time I knew it had happened.
Nobody had ever told me it happened, but I was sure that when he described it I would recognize it. In fact, I could dimly visualize it already. I said as much.

“I guess you’ve wiped it. I wish I could.”

“Why?”

“I saw it happen one time. He knocked her down, but she got right back up like one of those dolls and called him a cocksucker and then
boom!
Down she went again.”

“Where did it happen?”

“In some hotel in the Catskills. I saw it through a crack in the door. I never told her I saw him hit her. Then he’d walk out and we’d hear her crying in there. You hated that.
You’d go in and try to comfort her.”

“I do remember that.”

“But this one time it was really bad.”

“Go on.”

“You remember his gun?”

His gun. Fred and his firearms.

“No.”

But I did, and even as I denied it I felt the memory begin to stir, the dream of the gun rising in my mind as though from under a lifting mist—it was what I’d felt a moment before, the certainty that when he said it I would know it.
Fred’s gun, which he kept in a locked drawer of his desk in the living room. But Walter knew where he put the key: on the top shelf of a cupboard in the kitchen. One time, when Fred was out, and Mom was in her room, we unlocked the drawer and looked at the gun. It lay there among the bills and checkbooks, a heavy black automatic. His service weapon from World War II. Neither of us dared even touch it. Fred always had firearms. He went to jail for firearms.

“So what about the gun?”

“Oh, I forget now. All so long ago.”