Free Trauma by Patrick McGrath Page B

Perhaps there was no sense to make.
    “Walt looks out for everybody,” Nora said.
    “Mostly himself,” said Lucia, without turning.
    Walt shouted with laughter and slapped the counter. His taking himself no more seriously than he did anybody else could be disarming. He had a beard then, and with his broad face and his tangle of dark hair, he had an aura about him, at least when he was drinking and at ease, that to me suggested some shaggy wine-god figure of dissolute antiquity—cunning as he was genial, entirely lacking in moral scruple, and not for a moment to be trusted, particularly by the brother for whom he sustained this intermittent, inexplicable animosity. Jake, his long-haired and painfully shy son, came in to bum a cookie, and Walter reached into the cupboard for a tin of biscotti. Lucia protested, saying he should wait for dinner. So it went, and we sat sipping Walter’s wine and I felt as though I was wrapped in a wool blanket. But just before the food was taken into the dining room Lucia stood before me and took my hands.
    “Charlie,” she said gravely, “we have something to tell you.”
    I was alarmed. “What is it? Tell me at once.”
    “Walter has accepted a residency in Venice.”
    “For how long?”
    “A year.”
    “A
year
! You’re all going?”
    “Yes, Charlie,” she said. “It’s what I want. I want to see my children in Italy. I want to hear them speak my language.”
    “I see.”
    “But this is exciting,” said Nora.
    A few minutes later we were at the table, where I tried to digest this new development while the children peppered their mother with questions about Italy. Walter turned to me and asked what was wrong. He knew me well.
    “This Venice thing,” I said. “I feel very ambivalent about it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    I shook my head. I didn’t want to say it.
    “I’ll be back now and then,” he said. “I won’t just disappear.”

    Later we took the train back down to Twenty-third. My mood was troubled. I became preoccupied with what I perceived as Walt’s cavalier attitude to our mother’s possessions, this careless consignment of her furniture to the basement. I couldn’t see it as anything other than hostile, or worse, he must hate her, I thought, to behave with such disregard, and he must be aware too of the effect on
me
. Thinking this, I became angry. Nora asked me what was going on, and when I told her she was incredulous.
    “Oh,
Charlie
!” she cried.
    She wheeled around to face me, and other passengers in the subway car threw shifty glances in our direction before staring back down at the floor.
    “Charlie, that’s absurd,” she said quietly.
    “Is it?”
    “Of course it is! Walt just doesn’t like old stuff. He has an aesthetic. He has his own taste.”
    “And I don’t?”
    “That’s not what I said.”
    I stretched my legs out and crossed them at the ankles. I folded my arms and sank my chin onto my chest and I too then gazed unseeing at the floor of the subway car.
    Nora thrust her arm through mine. “You’re being ridiculous,” she whispered. “Everybody gets rid of their mother’s furniture. It’s not a mark of disrespect. It’s just
furniture.”
    She shook her head in disbelief and looked away. I said nothing. There are times when the psychiatric perspective is a liability. You see so much more clearly than those around you the sources and motives of the behavior of others. Nora saw Walt as an artist, as a man with an aesthetic. I saw him as an older brother, threatened, attacking me where he knew me to be most vulnerable: on the maternal front. But I didn’t know how to say this to Nora without sounding paranoid. Probably better to say nothing.
    “He’s persecuting me,” I said.
    Her arm was swiftly withdrawn, and again she stared at me aghast. “Are you
serious
?”
    Yes, better to say nothing at all.
    “I said, are you serious?”
    “It’s difficult,” I said, “for an only child like you to understand what goes