Trauma

Trauma Read Free Page A

Book: Trauma Read Free
Author: Patrick McGrath
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two boys going to have a fight?” said Fred, picking up his drink at last. He’d always encouraged our fights when we were boys. He liked to see us going at it.
    Again we sat in silence. Fred finished his martini and Walt signaled for another round. Fred stared at the table with his hands laid flat on either side of his glass, a cigarette between his fingers. He looked up. The gray skin of his jowls and cheeks had acquired a few purple spots of bloom.
    “You think it cost me nothing to leave your mother?” he said.
    “No,” Walt said.
    “Yes,” I said.
    Fred leaned over and gripped my arm, shaking his head.
He looked as though he was about to cry.
    “Christ, man, you’re a fucking
shrink
,” said Walt.
    “I hate that word,” I said.
    Fred sat with his elbows on the table, his mouth pressed to his clasped fingers, the cigarette smoke drifting across his troubled, sagging, blotchy face.
    “That’s what you really think, son?” he said.
    I sat regarding my father and nodded my head.
    “Shit, Charlie,” Walt said.
    I stood up and without looking at either one of them I walked out of the hotel and hailed a cab. I wanted to be at home listening to classical music with my eyes closed. I wanted my mother not to die.

    But die she did. It was as I said. The next stroke came within forty-eight hours. I’d spent many of those hours at her bedside. She reverted again to the subject of her family.
She said she had misled me, that she’d given me to believe they came to America much earlier than they had. It seemed to matter that I understand this.
    “What sort of people were they, Mom?” I said.
    She was doped, bleary, weak. Her fingers trembled on my wrist. Her face grew light, almost humorous, like a child’s. Or like a young woman’s face, the young woman she once had been.
    “Actors, Charlie! They were actors!”
    It was our last conversation. The funeral took place at a Presbyterian church on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam that she’d never set foot in. There was a death notice in the
Times,
and perhaps fifty people showed up.
They were invited back to the apartment afterward while Fred and Walt and I accompanied the coffin to a cemetery in the Bronx. The atmosphere in the car was strained. It was a Lincoln town car and my father elected to sit up front with the driver. He and I were wearing black suits but Walt sported a dark blue affair with broad lapels and one of those absurd ties, huge and floppy, deep purple in color. It was the fashion then. His sideburns made him look like a werewolf.

    I believe that of the three of us he was the least affected by our mother’s death. He was gazing out the window as we drove north, and I could tell his thoughts were elsewhere. I leaned forward and gripped my father’s shoulder.
    “Is that you, Charles?” he said, turning his head so I had his face in profile.
    “You all right, Dad?”
    “Sure. What about you?”
    I gave the shoulder a squeeze and withdrew my hand. It did not go unremarked by the psychiatrist inside my skull that by any standards this was pretty rudimentary communication; but it was all I was capable of, with him.
    When we returned to the apartment Agnes was there.
Since the separation I’d seen her only when I went down to Fulton Street to pick up our daughter, Cassie. Agnes had barely spoken to me in years.
    “Hello, Charlie,” she said.
    “Hello, Agnes.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “I know. Thanks.”
    We embraced. I held her close. Over her shoulder I could see Cassie, aged eight, gazing at me. Behind her, stony-faced, stood her stepfather, Leon. On the rare occasions over the years when the three of us, Agnes, Cassie and I, had been together, and by an act of willful erasure I succeeded in forgetting the fissure I had created and glimpsed instead a family, it aroused in me a strong gush of pleasure.
It was the idea of the three of us under one roof, living unexceptional routines and bound to one another by ties of

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