Trauma Read Free

came to, and so was Walt. I remember how her hand lifted off the covers. It was like a little bird trying to take flight, and failing, but it was an ugly little bird, clawed and liver-spotted.
    “Mom?”
    The eyes were bleary. She was confused. Her voice was weak. She wanted to talk about her family.
    “No, Mom, just rest, you can tell us later.”
    The light all at once flared in those watery eyes and she seized my wrist. She tried to sit up but couldn’t. Nor could she talk anymore. A little later she fell asleep and we left her. When we were out in the corridor the elevator opened and my father emerged. I told him she needed to rest. Walt suggested we go somewhere for a drink.
    We sat at a quiet table in a hotel bar a couple of blocks from the hospital. The years had not been kind to Fred Weir and his decay was marked. He’d failed to shave properly, leaving patches of stubble on his throat and jaw. His suit was cheap, the cuffs frayed, and the collar of the shirt was yellowed. More telling was the faint air of apology that clung to him now and, too, the dampness, the lifelessness in the eyes, all of which suggested heavy drinking, loss of vitality, collapse of self-esteem. Also, he’d done jail time in Florida for a firearms offense. He looked like what he was, I thought: a loser. As a boy I always tried to please this man, to keep him from hurting my mother, and what a waste. He wasn’t worth it, and I believed at one time that this was why she gave all her love to Walter, and none to me. Physically, and to an extent temperamentally, I resembled Fred Weir, and the older I got the clearer it became. With his long, pallid face, his shambling gait, the lick of gray, greasy hair falling over his forehead, the ingratiating grin that would once have opened doors, opened hearts—he was the template, I was the issue.
    Walt by contrast was built on Hallam lines, Mom’s family, big in the chest and across the shoulders, florid, shaggy, a barrel of a man, a locomotive, where I was a stork, a palm.
Fred was a washout. A soak. “What are you drinking, Dad?” said Walt.
    It was a small, gloomy room with a padded bar, a few round tables with lamps, the lingering odor of cigar smoke.
Some sort of Muzak was playing. We were the only ones in there besides the sad-faced man in a short white jacket who stood behind the bar. Walt half-turned in his chair to bring him over. Fred settled his elbows on the table and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and a certain ease was at once apparent. He was at home in a bar. “I think in the circumstances a dry martini, Walter.”
    “I don’t want anything,” I said.
    “Two dry martinis,” he said.
    “Olives or a twist?”
    “Twist.”
    The three of us sat in silence until the drinks arrived.
    “So Charlie, what’s the story?” Walt said at last.
    “A vascular accident. That’s a stroke. There could be another in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
    “Which means what?”
    “It’ll probably kill her.”
    “Oh god,” Fred said.
    “That troubles you?” I said.
    “Back off, Charlie,” said Walt.
    I knew why I was so angry, and that it wasn’t my father’s fault, but I saw no particular reason not to displace it onto him, and if I could make Walt mad at the same time then so much the better. Walt watched me over the rim of the glass as he took a sip of his martini. Fred left his untouched, as though to indicate his indifference to alcohol. I wished I didn’t see this; I wished the three of us could just have a drink without rancor, like regular guys.
    “So, Walter,” Fred said, “I read about you in the paper.”
    “Where do you live now, Dad?”
    “I travel a lot,” he said. “There’s an office in Jersey City that can usually find me.”
    The tone was distinctly evasive.
    “So what do you do, Fred?” I said. “What does all this traveling involve?”
    “It wouldn’t interest you, Charlie.”
    “Sure it would.”
    “Lay off,” said Walt.
    “You