Trauma (16 page)

Chapter Eighteen

F
red Weir sat in a wing chair pulled up close to the fireplace, holding his hands to the flames. He looked pale and gaunt, cadaverous even, with his face and hands aglow as he leaned into the fire, and when I entered he glanced at me without warmth or recognition. He was wearing a shiny black jacket and faded blue jeans, and there was a black fedora on the floorboards beside him.

On the far side of the fireplace, standing at the window, was Walter. He was all in black: overcoat, jeans, boots. On the low table between them stood an open bottle of Wild Turkey. In my last encounter with Nora Chiara I’d made her see my brother in a very dark light indeed; I’d turned him into a monster, told her that he hated me, that he’d used her so as to hurt me. But to see him in the flesh—to lay eyes, I mean, on the living, breathing man himself—made the paranoia falter. It was Walter, after all. An imperfect man, a flawed man, but no more flawed or imperfect than me. He opened his arms.

I shook my head. I was in no condition for hearty reconciliations. “Why didn’t you call?” I said.

“Ah, Charlie. You’d have told us not to come.”

“That’s right, I would. What do you want, Walter?”

“We have to talk.”

“Why is
he
here?”

Fred seemed not to hear this. He continued trying to coax warmth into his trembling hands and gave the impression he had no part to play in whatever transpired between his sons. It was like having a dog in the room. I went to the sideboard for a glass, pulled up a chair and poured myself a shot of the bourbon. Walter sat down beside me, yawning. He’d flown into JFK only the day before. I’d had little enough sleep myself.

“Heard from Nora?” he said at last.

“Not since I left the city.”

“I saw her last night. She told me where you were. She didn’t look too good, Charlie.”

“How so?”

“She was acting a little crazy.”

“That was your fault. You made her crazy.”

He seemed not to hear me. He said there’d been a lot of wild talk and that she’d got drunk fast, a thing she never used to do. He said he knew there’d be tears so he took her home. She’d had a little breakdown in the cab.

“What sort of a little breakdown?”

Now he turned and faced me straight. His tone was funereal. “You broke her heart, Charlie.”

That Walter should tell me I’d broken Nora’s heart struck me as faintly ridiculous. It occurred to me to ask him how, after all his duplicity, all his treachery, he had the nerve to say such a thing. “You didn’t give a damn about her,” I said wearily. “She was one of your
things,
Walter, and all you needed was someone to look after her. I was your concierge. Your sex concierge.”

“All right, Charlie, calm down.”

Fred was interested now. He’d always enjoyed seeing us fight, and there was a gleam in his old, loser’s eyes as I sank back in my chair. Walter had no need to tell me to calm down, I was calm already, calm unto death.

“You remember being up here as a kid?” he said. “I remember the town.”

“I couldn’t imagine why you’d come here otherwise. So how is it?”

I stood up and walked to the window. It was growing dark outside. Something was howling in the forest. All I wanted was to sleep. “She was in a lot of pain because of you,” I said. “You never heard her screaming in the night.”

“Oh, fuck off, Charlie.”

I remember smiling when he said this. I returned to the table and refilled my glass. “What are you doing here, Walter—come to make me crazy too?”

He said nothing. To carry on talking about Nora would only create more conflict, and what was the point?

“Actually,” he said, “I came because I thought you might kill yourself.”

The answer was so unexpected that I shouted with laughter. Seeing me as a suicide risk, Walter had come to this little town in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York to save me. I stood up and turned on the lamp in the corner.

“You’ve figured it out, right?” he said.

“Figured what out?”

There was a furtive movement by the fire, Fred flicking me a glance; the dog’s ears had pricked up at this turn in the conversation. I saw he was agitated now. He lifted the poker and jabbed at the fire, and a shower of sparks went rushing up the chimney.

“Figured out what the hell happened here. There’s a reason you had to come back. You’re a shrink, man, it shouldn’t be that hard
.
”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Oh, but I did. The building in the photo, that dilapidated hotel. Walter gazed at me, frowning. He got a cigar out of his pocket and toyed with it. Finally he said, “Remember that dream you used to have?”

“It wasn’t a dream,” I said. He meant the dream in which Fred put a gun to my head.

“No.”

He came to the window. We were both drawn there, as if offered some means of escape, some portal through which we could flee the past. The sensation this last exchange aroused in me was hard to describe. I stood beside him and together we stared into the white world outside. It was snowing heavily now. I made a movement of my head to indicate Fred, who was sitting over the fire with his back to us. Walter shook his head.

“Where did it happen?” I said.

“Here.”

“What, this house?”

“This town. On Main Street, that big yellow hotel, the Western.”

A sort of
click
in my head, as of a ball in a socket. The whiskey was biting now. Hardly surprising, since we’d almost emptied the bottle. But I’d at least grasped Walter’s confirmation of what I’d already figured out, that my childhood nightmare in fact was true. It had
happened.
Fred turned around in his chair and glanced from Walter to me, and I think he realized what was going on for he became distinctly shifty.

“So tell me about it,” I said.

“They were fighting. It was a bad one, Charlie. They were making a lot of noise. You went into their room.”

“Ah, shit,” said Fred. He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He sat there motionless, groaning.

“Where were you?” I said.

“I was in the corridor.”

“Why weren’t you with me?”

He stared out the window. Now neither of them could look at me. Later it occurred to me that my brother’s cowardice on that long-ago night, in leaving me to do what he should have done, must have been a source of secret shame for years. It was why he hated me. Shame creates hatred. It had done so in my mother too, she hated me out of shame.

“Dad,” I said.

Fred got up out of the chair and now he was like a cornered animal as he moved toward the door.

“Did it happen?”

He gave a sort of sneer.

“For god’s sake,” I said, “be honest for once in your sorry life. Did you put a gun to my head in the Western Hotel?”

“No, I fucking did not!”

I looked at Walter. He was pouring the last of the whiskey into our glasses. “That’s the end of it,” he said. “You got any more?”

“There’s nothing else to drink,” I said. “So what happened, Walter? Did he or didn’t he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“So it
didn’t
happen.”

“Oh, it happened,” said Walter, “only it wasn’t Fred.”

“What?”

“It was Mom.”

•                  •                  •

Ten minutes later Walter and I were out in the snow, trudging up Main Street to get another bottle. The town was silent. No traffic, no pedestrians, only the falling snow casting a white veil over the buildings on either side of the empty street. The mountains were obliterated by the snowfall; even Old Main was invisible tonight. We felt like the only people left alive in the world. A semi had passed through not long before and left tracks for us to follow. The Western Hotel, a pale hulking ruin in the snowstorm, was as vague as a mirage in a dream. It looked almost benign. We turned at the top of Main Street, by the church, and began climbing the hill. The windows of the trailer homes glowed dimly through the snow. Several were still decorated with Christmas lights. Where the road turned, there was the bar, an old brick building with a neon Budweiser sign in the window. It seemed to promise warmth and good cheer, and we pushed the door open.

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.