The Last Warner Woman (19 page)

Milton tells me unabashedly that while he had suspected it before, he knew it for sure once Doris was gone that he was the kind of man who simply needed to have a wife. The small apartment he and Doris had lived in, the selfsame one in which I am now interviewing him, descended into chaos. It was as if he began to misplace bits of the structure, losing whole sections of its architecture. He lost the kitchen first. It was buried beneath pots and pans and a suffocating mountain of carrier bags and boxes of Chinese takeout he had begun to eat night after night. Then, judging by the squeaks, it was invaded by a family of mice. He lost the bedroom next. It was somewhere beneath a pile of clothes belonging to him and Doris. He had to sleep in the one remaining room, squashing his fat body into the bathtub each night. But soon enough he began to lose this room as well. Mildew and great tufts of mold began to colonize the space. After Milton was put on antibiotics for the second time, it was with resignation that he began to look for a new wife.

He fancied at first that he would trade up from Doris and marry an Englishwoman. Indeed, he dated one for five weeks. Linda was many years his junior, fresh out of college, and would always say to him, “You know, I have no problem being with a darkie. In fact, I think it’s kind of thrilling.”

He didn’t mind that she said this to him, but was uncomfortable when she insisted on saying it to just about everyone. She would tell waiters in restaurants, people out walking their dogs, and random commuters on the train. Her fingers defiantly intertwined with his, she would shout it to just about anyone who would listen, as if to advertise how utterly transgressive she was.

She was apparently the kind of girl who had learned too late the joy of rebellion, who now got a high from sticking it to the world, and who broke rules to feel more alive only because in her heart she was so repressed. So she said she had no problem being with a darkie, no problem at all, and she said it so often that soon Milton realized that she meant the opposite.

One night she took him to meet her parents. At the end of the meal she helped her mother to clear the plates. The two women disappeared into the kitchen. Linda’s father looked at Milton and Milton looked at the father. They smiled politely and nodded at each other but found nothing to say. They could hear the sound of dishes being scraped, and then the voices.

“You know, Mom, I don’t care what you and Father think. I have no problem being with a darkie. In fact, I think it’s kind of thrilling.”

“Yes, dear, but he is awfully old. He’s almost our age.”

Linda made a sound. It seemed she was surprised and almost disappointed that their objection was not to Milton’s color. She tried to remind her mother.

“He is black, and I don’t care.”

She needed her rebellion to matter.

“We don’t have any problem with you being with a darkie but gosh, Linda, there are so many of them about, you might have chosen a better-looking one.”

When they came back out Linda looked at Milton as if for the first time, a new emotion narrowing her eyes and curling her lips. She didn’t walk him to the door that evening, and that was that.

So Milton decided he was better off sending for a wife. Others had done it, requested a wife from back home—an Esme, or a Geraldine, or a Puncie—in much the same way as they asked for sugar or cigarettes or hard-dough bread to be sent. Milton wrote to Lucas Gilles, the Captain of a Revival band he had once been a part of, and Lucas wrote back promptly to say it was good to hear from a long-lost sheep, and that he in fact knew just the right helpmeet for Milton, and also that the church badly needed money for a new building, and he would be grateful if he, Milton, could donate a little something, living so prosperously as he no doubt did in England. So Milton scrimped and saved and sent money toward the Church Building Fund, and more money for a plane ticket for his wife-to-be. And this is how he ended up at the airport that morning, waiting for a fiancée he had never met.

One by one, the shiny smiling faces found their loved ones and left. Milton stood alone, feeling even more miserable, but then he felt a sensation in his back as though someone was staring at him. He turned around and saw her again, my mother. She was sitting on one of the airport benches observing him. Milton’s misery transformed itself into pure anger. He stomped over.

“Woman, I really hope you don’t name Adamine Bustamante, because if you name Adamine Bustamante then we starting off on the wrong, wrong foot. You never see me wave at you earlier? You is blind or something?”

Adamine did not flinch. Instead she ran her eyes up and down this man she would be married to in less than twenty-four hours. Milton, I imagine, would have tried to suck in his gut and lift his head as high as possible. But my mother’s eyes were all disapproval. She seemed as displeased with him as he was with her. Her first words to him:

“Them tell me you was supposed to be a mighty man of God. You don’t look like that to me.”

“But excuse you!” Milton snapped. “For somebody that coming straight from the dungle heap, you is quite facety! Try don’t start with me, woman. Awoah!”

“Excuse me nothing.” Adamine spat.

(“Right there on the airport floor!” Milton says to me incredulously. “She spit!”)

Adamine sucked her teeth and shook her head.

Milton hated her. He uses this word.
Hate.
For what the hell had she been expecting? What did a mighty man of God even look like? And how was it that she could make him feel so small, so quickly?

He does not tell me that he was clenching his fists that morning, but he is clenching them as he tells me this story, so I imagine that his body is also remembering the experience, and recreating it. I wonder then whether Adamine saw this, his fists, and whether she knew, as he did, that as bad as they both thought things were going to get, they would in fact work out a whole lot worse.

I
MEET SYLVIA LIGHTBOURNE IN A HOME FOR THE
elderly. She is happy to see me because she doesn’t often get visitors. I look on her and think she has become that kind of old that has finally erased all traces of its youth. But when she begins talking, there is, beneath the gravel of her voice, a kind of steel, and it is in this sound that she carries her past. So if I close my eyes and just listen, I can imagine her as someone else—as the matron she once was.

It was the 1970s, she tells me, and whenever she sat at the little brown desk in her little blue office at St. Osmund’s, she did so with a sigh. From that desk she had a front-row seat to one of the strangest and greatest wars of the twentieth century. Strange, because both sides in this altercation—the conservatives and the liberals—wanted the same bloody thing. Both were fighting to achieve similar ends, so it was like a tug-of-war with both teams pulling on the same end of the rope. The only people who were going to suffer were those caught, as the hospital was, slap bang in the middle.

Sylvia pulls her shawl a little closer around her and shivers. It occurs to me how much old people like to reminisce about wars.

There had been a time, she continues, when she had potted plants in her office, framed pictures of her two daughters, and a print of a Bellini Madonna on the wall. But when she had settled into the job, and saw the war that was being waged, she decided to bunker up. She took down the Bellini Madonna, took the potted plants and the framed pictures back to her house, and emptied the little office of its soul. Instead it became a sterile but functional place and, she admits, that suited her just fine. Even after she had been matron for seven years and counting, Sylvia Lightbourne still had in mind that it would all end soon.

The war was a simple one. Everyone wanted the mental hospital to close. Not just St. Osmund’s, but all of them. The Conservative Party felt that the hospitals had become too much of a strain on the budget. Hospitals were all well and good if patients got better and were discharged to live productive, tax-paying lives; but such was hardly ever the case with the mentally ill. For those who suffered the most chronic cases of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, multiple personality disorders, manic depression; for those who heard voices in the walls and saw
UFO
s frisbeeing themselves across the sky each night; for those who became loud and aggressive if you simply looked at them too closely—treatment in a hospital added up to many, many thousands of pounds per month, a staggering figure when multiplied by the many months of a patient’s life. The conservatives began to mutter that even the most generous of governments would rather spend its cash elsewhere.

And if the hospitals thought they were going to get support from the other side, they were wrong. A collection of pamphlets had begun circulating and a few Hollywood films had been made. Together they painted a grim picture—mental asylums that resembled little more than dungeons, places so gray and lifeless they could have featured in a Charles Dickens novel. Sylvia Lightbourne had read the pamphlets, had watched the films, and though she, more than anyone else, knew that these stories were exaggerated, a bending of the truth, she felt helpless. Her own two daughters would come over for Sunday dinner and eye her suspiciously.

“I just can’t believe you subject people to shock therapy,” one had said weightily, as if she had just discovered her mother was working for the Nazis.

Sylvia had sighed, not knowing how to explain that in her experience electrotherapy wasn’t a bad thing, that it wasn’t the random plugging of people into a wall socket. She had seen it help some of her worst patients—severely depressed psychopaths who had been fully intent on killing themselves and had shown no response to any other kind of therapy. Sylvia had seen them calm down dramatically and go on to live healthier, happier lives. But she knew that a great wave was building against the institution for which she worked.

There were petitions. And then a mob marched to Downing Street, a loud rabble of the sane and the not-so-sane, a large, riotous group mumbling, muttering, chanting and waving placards,
PSYCHIATRY KILLS, LOVE IS BETTER THAN SHOCK
! It made for good
TV
and sensational headlines.

Sylvia recognized the sentiment that was growing. It was a passion that was essential to every crusade—the passion of a people who had finally found something to believe in, to fight for, and in doing so invest their lives with worth. Their worthiness was directly proportional to the worthlessness of what they were fighting against.

There was no way of winning this war. And so this is why, whenever she went to her soulless office at St. Osmund’s and sat at her desk, she did so with a sigh, knowing the end would be coming soon.

M
RS. EVELYN YOUNG HAD LOVED HER SON WITH THAT
special, blinding kind of love that women lavish on boys who are the only mementos they have left of a man swallowed and lost in the belly of war. It was a dangerous kind of love—one that tied up a young boy in its apron strings, covered him with an emotion so fierce and complex it was as good as locking him in an oven, turning it on high, and expecting the child to come out undamaged. Evelyn Young’s son was, in a word, fucked. Bruce Young resented the strength of his mother’s affection, a thing so huge he would never be able to reciprocate. He gave up trying soon enough and decided instead that he would dislike the woman. But whereas his mother’s love was sharp and penetrating, his dislike was blunt and wide and ever-expanding.

He wasn’t close to anyone in the village either, so his dislike grew to include them all. He crinkled his nose whenever Mr. Williams, the pig farmer, was nearby; he did the same around Mrs. Devonish, who didn’t need to raise pigs to smell funny; he shielded his eyes against the glare of Mrs. Jones’s badly dyed hair; and he kept his distance from Mr. Jones, who it was said used to bugger his sheep on occasion. And because such things—foul-smelling people, bad hair dye, and the occasional rape of sheep—were usual enough occurrences in every village, the people began to wonder about the boy. The villagers became wary when no matter how kindly they said
hallo there,
or how they stooped down on their knees and smiled at him, or how they pinched his cheek or ruffled his hair, he would only ever stare back at them contemptuously. One could say, however, that his relationship with the community was, in the end, healthier than his relationship with his mother, for at least with the community, emotions were exchanged measure for measure, and any wariness toward him was a direct reflection of his aloofness toward them.

Then his mother died. The boy was fifteen at the time. She had put her nose right up to a bluebell, took a deep inhale as if she were trying to drink in the pollen, and a disturbed bee had flown straight up into her nose. There is no account of this actual moment, but it is widely imagined that Evelyn Young would have yelped. Bruce, it is imagined, would have looked up in surprise, and then, something unexpected. He would have giggled. Mrs. Young’s face turned red. Hives came up all over her body. She looked at her son with astonished eyes and tried to make a sound. She began fanning her face desperately as it turned from red to blue. She shook her head from side to side as if that would open the airways and allow her to breathe again. Her whole face swelled to an extraordinary size. She collapsed into the mud and all the while, Bruce just watched.

The next morning it was as if a wet carpet had been spread over the village. Everyone wrinkled their nose, but no one bothered to ask what the smell was. The following day it was more obvious, the smell more alive, and people now recognized it as the sweet choking smell of something rotting. On the third day the smell was so rank that many couldn’t swallow their breakfasts, and they could now tell it was coming from the Youngs’ house. They went over and knocked on the door, wanting to know whether a dog or sheep had died.

There was no answer. Only then did someone say, “Has anyone seen Evelyn these past three days? Anyone?”

There was a moment of silence, and then they banged on the door even harder, more desperately, as if time were suddenly of the essence, as if they could break in and save her life. They had to call the police.