The Last Warner Woman (22 page)

M
ILTON ADMITS HE HAD TO LOOK UP THE WORD
“conjugal” when they assured him he would have conjugal rights. For the life of him, he couldn’t work out what they were suggesting he do on any evening between the hours of seven and nine p.m. if he was in the mood. He tells me he laughed when he found out, and yet (he leans forward seriously) it was curious—when Adamine left he suddenly found his nature. That’s how he puts it. He found his nature.

“Yes, my boy, I find it again. Strong, strong.”

He says no more but I have an unfortunate image of this old man with a raging erection, masturbating furiously, his free hand holding any garment that had once belonged to Adamine. I imagine that he would cum magnificently, gritting his teeth and whispering, “Oh Lord, oh Lord!” and then wipe up the mess with one of her red-and-white headwraps.

But what Milton tells me is that he did not think of my mother again, this woman who had lived with him for three years. He was determined to erase her from his life.

Now that I am sitting in front of him, in this flat that has slipped back into a chaos it will never escape from again, he tells me, “Young man, is only sake of the fact that you come here this morning and bring up her name that I even remembering these stories. It was a long time ago, three years in my life that never should have happened. And you know what? Whenever I have a form to fill out these days, I write down that I is single. Or else I write that I is a widower. And I don’t do it to be badmind. Is just that I truly forget about Ada. You ask if I even know where she is, but how I would know such a thing? She probably still in some madhouse or other. She probably even dead. I really couldn’t care less.”

I
NOW HAVE A THEORY AS TO WHY THERE ARE NO
clear pictures of Bruce Young. It has something to do with the reason a microphone, for instance, will hum or squeak in the presence of a radio or a telephone. Something to do with waves, interference, the invisible, cosmic clashing of alike things. Maybe whenever a camera’s lens was trained on Bruce Young, he would stare right back at it and the thing would short-circuit.

He was a man who stared, who could stare comfortably for hours. And even if the person he was staring at was discomforted by the intensity of his gaze, he wouldn’t stop. He freaked people out. Even dogs that came up to him growling would whimper and walk away, frightened by the scorch of his eyes.

On the day that my mother sat to eat her first meal at St. Osmund’s, his gaze was trained on her. Adamine looked up and then diverted her eyes. She concentrated instead on the green peas on her plate, and on the plate itself, and on her fork. But Bruce’s gaze had already done its damage. She was aware of him. She started shivering and then began to pat her shoulders. She did it softly at first, but her movements soon began to grow. They became larger and larger and then it spread. A wave of nervousness was now going around the dining room, people suddenly mumbling to themselves and twitching, and at the center of it all was Adamine. She was in her own storm, her hands no longer patting, but hitting her shoulders violently. It seemed as though she were shooing an invisible swarm of flies.

Bruce Young kept studying her.

A nurse ran over and insisted that Adamine calm down at once. Attendants went over with straps and held her, but Adamine wriggled out of their grasps. She lifted her head and now she too stared across the room, matching Bruce Young eye for eye, gaze for gaze. She pointed at him and bellowed, “See him there and know his name, my people. Him is the one who name Abaddon. Him name is Rutibel. Some call him the Wicked One. Know his name, my people. Is him that name Satan.”

Bruce Young’s mouth cracked into a gap-toothed smile as the attendants finally managed to restrain Adamine.

S
YLVIA LIGHTBOURNE TELLS ME THAT THERE WERE DAYS
when she felt that if retirement came the following morning, it wouldn’t have come too soon. she was tired of it all. if she wasn’t being accused by the protestors who had now started to picket outside the gates, she was sorting through complaints from her own staff.

There was this one nurse, she tells me conspiratorially, Julie Astwood who was a particular pain.

“Oh,” she sighs, shaking her head. “Oh,” she sighs again, “that young woman was dead set against one of the male attendants. Every week it was a new complaint. Now it wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, but let me tell you, thirty years I’d worked in hospitals. Thirty years. And I knew a thing or two about how the damn place worked. And let me tell you, one doesn’t get very far by investigating every indiscretion … Sometimes you have to let things slide.”

I try not to look surprised.

“Look, remember those were not good days. The protestors were right outside and they wanted a story, they wanted blood. I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them something they could use to shut us down for good.”

But even with all that said, Sylvia was truly perplexed by one of Nurse Astwood’s gripes.

“She complained that the man had been giving some of the patients flowers. Flowers? I asked her. Yes, she tells me. Flowers. Well bloody hell,” and now Sylvia is smiling, “if news like that had leaked out we might actually have had a chance of staying open a while longer. But no, this nurse tells me. It wasn’t just that he gave them flowers, but that he gave particular flowers to particular patients. You understand? So maybe he would give ivy blossoms to one, and daises to another, and marigolds to another and so on and so forth. Never mixed it up. This is what the nurse tells me. Always the same flowers to the same people. Even I can admit it seemed a little psychotic.”

I have already heard the story about the flowers, so I try to keep the anger from creeping into my voice when I ask, “But it wasn’t just flowers, was it? Nurse Astwood was right to be suspicious. When you think of how it all ended, shouldn’t you have listened to her?”

Sylvia bites her lips and her body begins to shake an old woman’s shake. She purses her lips and her voice snaps out like a whip.

“What the hell was I to do? Let me tell you something about mental hospitals, young man. They mostly hire two kinds of people mostly—either those who would have been better suited as prison wardens, or those who would be better off as patients. Madness attracts madness. Simple as that. So fine, fine, the fellow and his flowers may not have been altogether here …”

“But he was abusing patients!” I interject, but Sylvia continues speaking over me.

“… but if his only fault was that he gave flowers, blinking flowers, to a few of the patients then … then I could certainly live with that.”

I wait for her body to stop shaking before I say, “But that wasn’t his only fault, was it? Are you able to live with that?”

“You’re damned right I can.”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME JULIE’S FACE IS NOT OPEN. HER EYES
have become distant, as if she is looking at something far off, and cold, as if she is steeling herself. Without looking at me, she says, “I believe he was … I believe he was hurting them. Those patients he gave flowers to; those were the ones he hurt.”

“And Adamine?” I can’t help but ask.

She nods. “Yes. He always gave her flowers.”

I
HAVE BEEN BACK TO ST. OSMUND’S. IT IS, AFTER ALL,
the place where I first died. I have always felt this was an odd way to have entered the world, to have died first, and then to have revived. But then neither of these facts—that I was born, or that I died there, makes me unique.

I found this out because I have been through the records. There were other patients who delivered babies at the asylum. Magical babies. Immaculately conceived. There is never the mention of a father. I may not be able to prove that Bruce Young, behind his strange trail of daisies and petunias, impregnated each of these women; but I have listened to stories, and stories, and stories, and I am certain. I feel related to each child who was born at St. Osmund’s; I consider them my siblings. And in the same way, I feel related to everyone who died there. This is why I have been back, because it was as if I were returning to a family home.

The hospital remained empty for years after it was closed, as if it too had to take a moment to consider itself. Later it reopened as a hostel, so on the day that I returned and walked through the grounds, I was aware that things would have changed. This St. Osmund’s did not resemble the place I had read or heard about. There was too much light, too many open doors. And there was no garden.

It is the garden that I had wanted especially to see, the arrangement of flowers. But these too have slipped into the past and I am only able to imagine what it must have been like. I wonder whether Bruce Young gave his victims their flowers before, or after; was it a promise of something to come, or an apology for what he had done? And which specific flower did he give to my mother?

J
ULIE KNEW THAT HER COMPLAINTS WERE NOT GOING
to go anywhere. There were too many other things to worry about. The hospital was understaffed; they were short of medication; fights were always erupting; and she had noticed this business of the flowers and complained about it at the worst time of the year—the beginning of Suicide Season.

Whenever winter reached its end and outside began to defrost, and the bees and the daffodils and the birds came, it signaled the beginning of the hardest season for a mental hospital. In the spring patients would suddenly climb up to the roof and jump, or hang themselves by their pajamas, or steal matches and set themselves on fire, or else break glasses and plunge the jagged ends into their wrists, or try to escape the grounds and step in front of cars. Some came up with the most ingenious attempts, and if it weren’t all so tragic one would want to congratulate them for their focus and creativity.

A good week was any one that ran its course without a hearse pulling up, an undertaker being called in, a body bag being dragged out. Julie understood that no one was going to listen to a complaint about an attendant who gave out flowers.

Even she herself hadn’t thought it was
rape
at first. But then she noticed the way the patients acted around him. There was a subtle change in their bodies whenever Bruce Young handed them flowers. Julie noticed that they would flinch.

But if she had said this to Matron Lightbourne, the woman would have balked.

“Flinched? Nurse Astwood, may I remind you that this
is
a mental hospital.”

It was true. Patients were not known for their fluid or graceful movements. They walked slowly. They looked around furtively. Their eyes blinked rapidly. And every so often a wave of nervousness passed through their bodies and they would flinch. To work in a mental hospital was to get used to occasional jerks and shivers, to people who for no apparent reason lost control of their muscles at random moments.

Julie pauses, and then as if to change the subject, she tells me how she became aware of my existence. She had helped Adamine to the toilet one morning, and then the morning after that, and the morning after that. It was on the third morning that Julie placed her hand on the hollow of Adamine’s back as she retched into the toilet, and asked quietly, “Who did this to you, Ada?”

Adamine began to shake, weeping into the bowl.

“Who?” Julie asked again, her question as soft as her hand.

Adamine was gasping for air.

“Tell me who, Ada.”

“Satan,” Adamine, the Warner Woman, my mother, said at last. “Is Satan who do it!”

PART FOUR

in which the story invents parables, and speaks a benediction, and then ends

an installment of a testimony spoken to the wind

Shhhhhhhhh

M
AYBE SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO TELL A STORY CROSSWAYS
, because to tell it straight would ongly mean that it go straight by the person’s ears who it intend for. For consider the words of Jesus: when the blessed Savior go up on the mountain him did decide to speak in parables. He never just tell them that all of them was heathens, and that not a one of them could reach Heaven without him. Instead he talk bout hard ground and soft ground and ground that was full of macka and thorns, and how the seeds would grow according to what ground them did fall on; he talk bout the old woman who lose her coin and then find it again; him talk bout camels that cannot fit through the eye of needles; him talk bout a lost sheep who finally make him way home. And maybe it is afterwards, when you gather all of these crossway stories, and you put them together, that you finally see a line had been running through all of them. Sometimes you have to tell a story the way you dream a dream, and everyone know that dreams don’t walk straight.