Chapter One
My mother’s first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I
felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it. This was about a year
before my father left us. His name was Fred Weir. In those days he could be
generous, amusing, an expansive man-my brother, Walt, plays the role at
times-but there were signs, perceptible to me if not to others, when an
explosion was imminent. Then the sudden loss of temper, the storming from the
room, the slamming door at the end of the hall and the appalled silence
afterward. But I could deflect all this. I would play the fool, or be the baby,
distract him from the mounting wave of boredom and frustration he must have felt
at being trapped within the suffocating domestic atmosphere my mother liked to
foster. Later, when she began writing books, she fostered no atmosphere at all
other than genteel squalor and heavy drinking and gloom. But by then my father
was long gone.
In those days we lived in shabby discomfort in a large apartment on West
Eighty-seventh Street, where my brother lives with his family today. I never
contested Walt’s right to have it after Mom died, and have come to terms with
the fact that to me she left nothing. Indeed, it amuses me that she would throw
this one last insult in my face from beyond the grave. It was more appropriate
that Walt should have the apartment, given the size of his family, and me living
alone, although Walt didn’t actually need the apartment. Walt was a wealthy
man-Walter Weir, the painter? But I don’t resent this, although having said
that, or rather, had I heard one of my patients say it, I would at once detect
the anger behind the words. With consummate skill I would then extricate the
truth, bring it up to the surface where we both could face it square: You hated
your mother! You hate her still!
I am, as will be apparent by now, a psychiatrist. I do professionally that which
you do naturally for those you care for, those whose welfare has been entrusted
to you. My office was for many years on Park Avenue, which is less impressive
than it sounds. The rent was low, and so were my fees. I worked mostly with
victims of trauma, who of all the mentally disturbed people in the city of New
York feel it most acutely, that they are owed for what they’ve suffered. It
makes them slow to pay their bills. I chose this line of work because of my
mother, and I am not alone in this. It is the mothers who propel most of us into
psychiatry, usually because we have failed them.
Often a patient will be referred to me, and after the preliminaries have been
completed and he, or more usually she, is settled comfortably, this will be her
question: Where would you like me to begin?
“Just tell me what you’ve been thinking about.”
“Nothing.”
“What were you thinking about on your way to this appointment?”
And so it begins. I listen. Mine is a profession that might on the surface
appear to suit the passive personality. But don’t be too quick to assume that we
are uninterested in power. I sit there pondering while you tell me your
thoughts, and with my grunts and sighs, my occasional interruptions, I guide you
toward what I believe to be the true core and substance of your problem. It is
not a scientific endeavor. No, I feel my way into your experience with an
intuition based on little more than a few years of practice, and reading, and
focused introspection; in other words, there is much of art in what I do.
My mother did eventually recover, but there is a strong correlation between
depression and anger and at some level she stayed angry. It was largely directed
at my father, of course. I have a clear memory of the day I first became aware
of my parents’ dynamic of abandonment and rage. Fred had taken Walter and me to
lunch, a thing he did occasionally when he was in town and remembered that he
had two sons living on West Eighty-seventh Street. For me these were stressful
events, starting with the cab ride to an East Side steakhouse, though in fact
any time spent with my father was stressful. One summer he took us on a road
trip upstate to a hotel in the Catskills, a journey of pure unmitigated hell,
the endless hours sitting beside Walter in the back of the Buick as we drove
through the endless mountains, and the atmosphere never less than explosive-
Fred Weir was still handsome then, his dark hair swept back from a sharp peak in
a high-templed forehead, a tall, athletic fellow with a charming grin. He wasn’t
a successful man but he gave the impression of being one, and when he took us
out to lunch I marveled at the peremptory tone with which he addressed the
waiters, brisk unsmiling men in starched white aprons who, in that adult room of
wood paneling and cigar smoke, thoroughly intimidated the lanky, nervous
adolescent I then was. My anxiety was not eased by the presence of steak knives
with heavy wooden handles and sharp serrated blades, and a sort of diabolical
trolley that was wheeled, steaming, to the table by a stout man with a pencil
mustache who with the flourish of a gleaming knife indicated the meat and
demanded to know where I wanted it carved.
When Fred grew bored with us and showed signs of calling for the check, Walt
would ask him for investment advice, claiming to have considerable funds stashed
away. Walt was always more curious about our father than I was. As a boy he was
intrigued as to what went on in our parents’ bedroom, when they shared a
bedroom, that is. He wanted to get in there and find out what they did.
Mom was distressed when we returned from these outings, having in our absence
awoken to the possibility that Fred might exert a stronger influence over her
boys than she did and that we too would then be lost to her. It fell to me to
assure her of our love and loyalty. Then she lavished her affection on me for a
while, until she grew distracted and drifted off down the hall to her study.
Hearing the door close and the tap-tap-tap of the typewriter, I knew she would
not come out before it was time for a cocktail. I was comforted by the sound of
the typewriter. If she was typing then she wasn’t crying, although later she was
able to do both at once.
But I remember one day when we returned to the apartment and she wasn’t waiting
in the hallway as we came up the stairs. This was unusual. We let ourselves in
and at once heard her crying in her bedroom. It was pitiful. Walter said he was
going out again, I could do what I wanted. I see myself with great clarity at
that moment. The choice was simple. I could walk out of the apartment with him
and spend an hour or two in Central Park, or I could go and knock on my mother’s
bedroom door and ask her what was wrong. I remember sitting down on the chair in
the hallway, beside the low desk with the telephone on it, where she always left
her keys on the tray and fixed her hair in the mirror on the wall above it.
“I’m not waiting,” Walt said from the front door.
A sudden fresh gust of misery from the bedroom.
“I think I’ll stay.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and the front door closed behind him.
For another minute I sat on the chair in the hallway, then stood up and walked
slowly toward her room. This is how psychiatrists are made.
Much of my later childhood and adolescence followed this pattern. I did not make
friends easily, and I was more content by far with a book than with the company
of my contemporaries. Walter by contrast was a gregarious boy and often brought
his friends back to the apartment. This was a source of pleasure to my mother,
although if she was depressed she would withdraw to her bedroom. At times like
this it was a cause of concern to me that Walter’s friends made so much noise. I
remember I stood in the doorway of the living room once and asked them to be
quiet, as Mom was resting. They were dancing to Bill Haley. Walter would have
been about seventeen; I was three years younger. I remember he turned the record
player off and they all stared at me, six or seven of them, older kids I’d seen
in the corridors of the high school we attended on the Upper West Side.
“What did you say?” said Walter.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that Mom was trying to sleep I would have fled.
“I said, I think you should turn it down.”
They all stared at me in silence. It was a form of mockery. “What did you say?”
said Walter again.
“Turn it down! She’s trying to get some sleep!”
He looked at the others and solemnly repeated my words. They started laughing.
They slapped their thighs, they yelped like hyenas; they lifted their heads and
howled, all to humiliate me. Then Mom’s bedroom door opened down the hall. She
shuffled toward the living room, yawning. She was in her robe, barefoot, and she
hadn’t brushed her hair. It was the middle of the afternoon and I felt
embarrassed for her in front of Walter’s friends, who had fallen silent. She
stood in the doorway and asked what was going on, and Walter told her. She was
still half asleep. She turned to me.
“Don’t be silly, Charlie, I was only reading. You people have fun, I don’t
care.”
She went back to her room with a wave of her hand and I left the apartment
feeling angry and ashamed.
When I returned to New York after my residency at Johns Hopkins, I didn’t move
back to Eighty-seventh Street. Mom told me she didn’t want me in the apartment.
She said she needed silence in order to write. I understood what she was telling
me. It was not a rejection, though it was framed in those terms, because she
also gave me a new set of keys. Don’t abandon me, she was saying. She was
stabilized on antidepressants but there were still times when she would
suddenly, precipitately go down, and then it was me she needed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Trauma
by Patrick McGrath
Copyright © 2008 by Patrick McGrath.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
Patrick McGrath
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4166-4
