Trauma (17 page)

Then we heard laughter. Fred was standing in the back door, framed against the house by the light from the kitchen. He was wearing his black fedora, I remember. He tossed something into the snow between us. It was the black automatic he’d had on Eighty-seventh Street.

“Here it is, boys, you figure it out!”

The childhood nightmare came back to me then, my mother in a dark room at the mercy of this man. The force indomitable, begging him to stop, and me the witness to the sordid travesty their marriage had become. At that moment I hated him more than I’d ever done before. I don’t recall picking the gun up out of the snow, but Walter must have guessed my intention because he threw himself on me. As we went down it fired, and it was Walter that got shot, not my father.

Then I was on all fours being sick. I remember gazing down at the mess I was making. Blood, snot, tears and vomit were pooling in the trampled snow, and Walter was staggering toward the house, and I remember screaming at them to leave me alone, to get the fuck out of my house, to just get away from me—

Fred was in a panic, shouting that we had to drive Walter to a hospital, and later I found blood tracked right through the house.

They were gone. I was sitting under the window on the kitchen floor. I was thinking about Danny, how he’d been sitting on a floor under a window when I kicked his door down that Sunday morning in the summer of 1972. There’d been spilt whiskey in that room too. Our situations were identical, the booze, the awakened trauma, the gun. I still had the gun. I shifted around until I was in the exact position Danny had been when I found him. I put it between my teeth, then pushed it hard against the roof of my mouth so it hurt, because I wanted to do it right, like Danny.

I sat like that for several minutes. Then I thought of Cassie. I struggled to my feet and from the back door I threw the gun out into the snow. When my mother pulled the trigger that night, how did she know it wasn’t loaded? Did she know? Did she care?

I sat through the hours of darkness, shivering in my overcoat in the kitchen. The back door was still open, snow was drifting in, and the room so cold I was chilled to the bone. But how quiet it was up here in the mountains. I thought for a long time about Francis Mead. I felt a strong sense of kinship with the old man. The ward report showed that he’d been asleep twenty minutes before they found him hanging from the window bars. Whether that was true or not nobody would ever know, of course, but I doubted it. That was no impulsive suicide.

The snow stopped falling before dawn as the sky turned dark blue. Hour of the wolf. Only then did it occur to me to phone Joan Bachinski. I woke her up. She listened with close attention as I described what had happened.

“Charlie,” she said, “stay where you are. I’m coming to get you. I’m taking you in.”

I opened the front door and leaned against the frame. I was all used up. Ghosts were clamoring in my head, I could hear them, I could even
feel
them, they were ripping me apart from the inside. I began to rock back and forth, my face in my hands—and then it changed.

It changed. I lifted my head. I turned to the east. The first light was touching the turrets of Old Main; and when a few minutes later I heard Joan’s car in the distance I sank to my knees in the snow and wept. I was going home.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

This book was set in Janson, a typeface long thought to have been made by the Dutchman Anton Janson, who was a practicing typefounder in Leipzig during the years 1668–1687. However, it has been conclusively demonstrated that these types are actually the work of Nicholas Kis (1650–1702), a Hungarian, who most probably learned his trade from the master Dutch typefounder Dirk Voskens. The type is an excellent example of the influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon (1692–1766) developed his own incomparable designs from them.

Composed by Creative Graphics, Allentown, Pennsylvania Printed and bound by R. R. Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia Book design by Robert C. Olsson

ALSO BY PATRICK McGRATH

Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now

Port Mungo

Martha Peake

Asylum

Dr. Haggard’s Disease

Spider

The Grotesque

Blood
and Water and Other Tales

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Patrick McGrath
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGrath, Patrick, [date]
Trauma / Patrick McGrath.—1st ed.
p. cm
1. Psychiatrists—Fiction                    2. Adult children of dysfunctional families—
Fiction.                    3. Death—Psychological aspects—Fiction.
                  
4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.                    5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
ps3563.c3663t73 2007
813'.
54—dc22 2007031071

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26870-9

v3.0_r1