Asylum Read Free

unique pressures that a life in art imposes. About a year before his admission he became obsessed with the idea that his wife, Ruth, was having an affair with another man. By all accounts Ruth Stark was a quiet, sensible woman; she modeled for Edgar and supportedhim financially much of the time. But as a result of his wild and violent accusations the marriage became severely strained and she threatened to leave him.
    One night after they’d been drinking there was a terrible quarrel and he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. What he did to her after that indicated to us how very disturbed he was. No one came to help Ruth Stark though her screams were heard the length of the street. Edgar was in a profound state of shock when he reached us. I tidied him up and then prepared to see him through the inevitable reaction of grief and guilt. But to my concern there was no grief or guilt; he regained his equilibrium after a few weeks and was soon involved in a variety of hospital activities.
    We were worried about him. Although he functioned at a high level of intelligence he never showed any insight into why he had killed his wife. What troubled me was not just the persistence of his delusions, it was their intrinsic absurdity. He claimed to have a wealth of evidence of Ruth’s infidelity, but when asked for it he produced only trivial everyday occurrences, into which he read bizarre, extravagant meanings. A flushing toilet, a stain on the floor, the placement of a box of washing powder on a windowsill, these were the sorts of things that signified. He had otherwise fully recovered his sanity and was ready to be released, but he remained on this one point unshakable, that the murder was justified. Oh, he agreed it shouldn’t have happened, and he regretted drinking so much, but he insisted that he’d been driven to it by her taunts and insults. I didn’t feel we should let him out yet, and nor did anyone else. He’d been with us for five years, and it looked to me as though he’d be with us another five at least. This was how things stood when he was given the job of restoring Max Raphael’s conservatory.
    Every morning that summer several parties of parole patients, each under the supervision of an attendant, and all dressed in baggy yellow corduroy trousers and blue shirts, with white canvas jackets slung over their shoulders, emerged from the Main Gate to maintain the grounds of the estate. Edgar wasone of the group assigned to the deputy superintendent’s garden. Stella often saw him when she went out to pick vegetables or flowers, and if there was no sign of the attendant, a senior man called John Archer, she would sit for a few minutes and they would talk. She admitted she was attracted to him almost from the start. For obvious reasons she tried to ignore the feeling, but his presence out there every day made it easy for her to invent pretexts for seeing him. Though what harm was there in befriending a patient? This is what she said to herself, in justification of her behavior.
    How had it happened?
    On this point she couldn’t at first give me any sort of satisfactory answer. She avoided my eyes, she became vague. Perhaps it was just a case of household lust, easily enough aroused, just as easily crushed out, but when I suggested this the dreamy abstraction vanished and for a moment I felt a flare of spirited hostility from her. Then it faded. She was already deeply depressed; she could not sustain affect. She mentioned something he’d done one day that expressed, oh, strength, tenderness …
    Perhaps. I let it pass.
    Then in a later conversation she described it more fully, what it was he’d done that had so charmed and attracted her at the beginning. She’d gone into the vegetable garden one warm afternoon to pick some lettuce, and saw Charlie down at the far end with a patient, the big black-haired man she had been aware of simply as the one working on Max’s conservatory, she didn’t even know his name;