I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  She sat down with the folder, opened it, and read it through:

  BLAU, DEBORAH F. 16 yrs. Prev. Hosp: None

  INITIAL DIAG: SCHIZOPHRENIA.

  Testing: Tests show high (140-150) intelligence, but patterns disturbed by illness. Many questions misinterpreted and overpersonalized. Entire subjective reaction to interview and testing. Personality tests show typically schizophrenic pattern with compulsive and masochistic component.

  Interview (Initial): On admission patient appeared well oriented and logical in her thinking, but as the interview went on, bits of the logic began to fall away and at anything which could be construed as correction or criticism, she showed extreme anxiety. She did everything she could to impress her examiner with her wit, using it as a formidable defense. On three occasions she laughed inappropriately: once when she claimed that the hospitalization had been brought about by a suicide attempt, twice with reference to questions about the date of the month. As the interview proceeded her attitude changed and she began to speak loudly, giving random happenings in her life which she thought to be the cause of her illness. She mentioned an operation at the age of five, the effects of which were traumatic, a cruel babysitter, etc. The incidents were unrelated, and no pattern appeared in them. Suddenly, in the middle of recounting an incident, the patient started forward and said accusingly, “I told you the truth about these things—now are you going to help me?” It was considered advisable to terminate the interview.

  Family History: Born Chicago, Ill. October, 1932. Breast-fed 8 mos. One sibling, Susan, born 1937. Father, Jacob Blau, an accountant whose family had emigrated from Poland 1913. Birth normal. At age 5 patient had two operations for removal of tumor in urethra. Difficult financial situation made family move in with grandparents in suburb of Chicago. Situation improved, but father became ill with ulcer and hypertension. In 1942 war caused move to city. Patient made poor adjustment and was taunted by schoolmates. Puberty normal physically, but at age 16 patient attempted suicide. There is a long history of hypochondria, but outside of tumor the physical health has been good.

  She turned the page and glanced at the various statistical measurements of personality factors and test scores. Sixteen was younger than any patient she had ever had. Leaving aside consideration of the person herself, it might be good to find out if someone with so little life experience could benefit from therapy and if she would be easier or harder to work with.

  In the end it was the girl’s age that decided her, and made the report weigh more heavily than the commitment of doctors’ meetings to be attended and articles to be written.

  “Aber wenn wir … If we succeed …” she murmured, forcing herself away from her native tongue, “the good years yet to live …”

  Again she looked at the facts and the numbers. A report like this had once made her remark to the hospital psychologist, “We must someday make a test to show us where the health is as well as the illness.”

  The psychologist had answered that with hypnotism and the ametyls and pentothals such information could be obtained more easily.

  “I do not think so,” Dr. Fried had answered. “The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end … in the end it is our only ally.”

  chapter three

  For a time—how long by Earth’s reckoning Deborah did not know—it was peaceful. The world made few demands so that it seemed once more as if it had been the world’s pressures that had caused so much of the agony in Yr. Sometimes she was able to see “reality” from Yr as if the partition between them were only gauze. On such occasions her name became Januce, because she felt like two-faced Janus—with a face on each world. It had been her letting slip this name which had caused the first trouble in school. She had been living by the Secret Calendar (Yr did not measure time as the world did) and had returned to the Heavy Calendar in the middle of the day, and having then that wonderful and omniscient feeling of changing, she had headed a class paper: NOW JANUCE. The teacher had said, “Deborah, what is this mark on your paper? What is this word, Januce?”

  And, as the teacher stood by her desk, some nightmare terror coming to life had risen in the day-sane schoolroom. Deborah had looked about and found that she could not see except in outlines, gray against gray, and with no depth, but flatly, like a picture. The mark on the paper was the emblem of coming from Yr’s time to Earth’s, but, being caught while still in transition, she had to answer for both of them. Such an answer would have been the unveiling of a horror—a horror from which she would not have awakened rationally; and so she had lied and dissembled, with her heart choking her. Such a danger must no more be allowed, and so that night the whole Great Collect had come crowding into the Midworld: gods and demons from Yr and shades from Earth, and they had set up over their kingdoms a Censor to stand between Deborah’s speech and actions and to guard the secret of Yr’s existence.

  Over the years the power of the Censor had grown greater and greater, and it was he who had lately thrust himself into both worlds, so that sometimes no speech and no action escaped him. One whisper of a secret name, one sign written, one slip of light could break into the hidden place and destroy her and both the worlds forever.

  On Earth the life of the hospital moved on. Deborah worked in the craft shop, grateful that the world also offered its hiding places. She learned to do basketwork, accepting the instruction in her acerbic and impatient way. She knew that none of the workers liked her. People never had. On the ward a large girl had asked her to play tennis and the shock had sounded down to the last level of Yr. She saw the pencil-doctor a few more times and learned that he was “ward administrator” and the one who gave permission for “privileges”—steps in similitude to the normal world—to get up and go out on the ward, to go to dinner, on the grounds, then out of the hospital itself to the movie or store. Each was a privilege and had a certain connotation of approval that seemed to be expressed in distances. To Deborah he gave permission to walk unrestricted on the grounds, but not outside. Deborah said to the large girl, whose name was Carla, “Well, I’m a hundred square yards sane.” If there were such things as man-hours and light-years, surely there was foot-sanity.

  Carla said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get more privileges soon. If you work hard with your doctor, they ease up a little. I just wonder how long I’ll have to stay here. It’s been three months already.” They both thought of the women at the far end of the ward. All of them had been in the hospital for over two years.

  “Does anyone ever leave?” Deborah asked. “I mean be well and leave?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carla.

  They asked a nurse.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t been here that long.”

  There was a groan from Lactamaeon, the black god, and a derisive laugh from the Collect, which were the massed images of all of the teachers and relatives and schoolmates standing eternally in secret judgment and giving their endless curses.

  Forever, crazy girl! Forever, lazy girl!

  Later one of the little student nurses came to where Deborah was lying, looking at the ceiling.

  “It’s time to get up now,” she said in the wavering and frightened voice of her inexperience. There was a new group of these students working out their psychiatric training in this place. Deborah sighed and got up dutifully, thinking: She is astounded at the haze of craziness with which I fill a room.

  “Come on now,” the student said. “The doctor is going to see you. She’s one of the heads here and a very famous doctor, too, so we must hurry, Miss Blau.”

  “If she’s that good, I’ll wear my shoes,” Deborah replied, watching the young woman’s expression widen with surprise and her face fight with its look of disapproval. She must have been told not to show anything so strong as anger or fear or amusement.

  “You really should be grateful,” the student said. “You’re very lucky to get to see her at all.”

  “Known and loved by madmen the world over,” Deborah sai
d. “Let’s go.”

  The nurse unlocked the ward door and then the stairway door, and they went down to the lower floor, which was open, and out of the back of the building. The nurse pointed to a green-shuttered white house—a small-town, oak-lined-streets type of white house—standing incongruously just inside the hospital grounds. They went to the front door and rang. After a while a tiny, gray-haired, plump little woman answered the door. “We’re from Admissions. Here she is,” the nurse said.

  “Can you come back for her in an hour?” the little woman said to the student.

  “I’m supposed to wait.”

  “Very well.”

  As Deborah stepped through the door, the Censor began to thrum his warnings: Where is the doctor? Is she watching from behind a door somewhere? The little housekeeper motioned toward a room.

  “Where is the doctor?” Deborah said, trying to stop the rapid juxtaposition of walls and doors.

  “I am the doctor,” the woman said. “I thought you knew. I am Dr. Fried.”

  Anterrabae laughed, falling and falling in his darkness. What a disguise! And the Censor growled, Take care … take care.

  They went into a sunny room and the Housekeeper-Famous-Doctor turned, saying, “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” There came a great exhaustion and when the doctor said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” a great gust of anger, so that Deborah stood up quickly and said to her and to Yr and to the Collect and to the Censor, “All right—you’ll ask me questions and I’ll answer them—you’ll clear up my …symptoms’ and send me home … and what will I have then?”

  The doctor said quietly, “If you did not really want to give them up, you wouldn’t tell me.” A rope of fear pulled its noose about Deborah. “Come, sit down. You will not have to give up anything until you are ready, and then there will be something to take its place.”

  Deborah sat down, while the Censor said in Yri: Listen, Bird-one; there are too many little tables in here. The tables have no defense against your clumsiness.

  “Do you know why you are here?” the doctor said.

  “Clumsiness. Clumsiness is first and then we have a list: lazy, wayward, headstrong, self-centered, fat, ugly, mean, tactless, and cruel. Also a liar. That category includes subheads: (a) False blindness, imaginary pains causing real doubling-up, untrue lapses of hearing, lying leg injuries, fake dizziness, and unproved and malicious malingerings; (b) Being a bad sport. Did I leave out unfriendliness? … Also unfriendliness.”

  In the silence where the dust motes fell through the sun shaft, Deborah thought that she had perhaps spoken her true feelings for the first time. If these things were so, so be it, and she would leave this office at least having stated her tiredness and disgust at the whole dark and anguish-running world.

  The doctor said simply, “Well, that seems to be quite a list. Some of these, I think, are not so, but we have a job cut out for us.”

  “To make me friendly and sweet and agreeable and happy in the lies I tell.”

  “To help you to get well.”

  “To shut up the complaints.”

  “To end them, where they are the products of an upheaval in your feelings.”

  The rope tightened. Fear was flowing wildly in Deborah’s head, turning her vision gray. “You’re saying what they all say—phony complaints about nonexistent sicknesses.”

  “It seems to me that I said that you are very sick, indeed.”

  “Like the rest of them here?” It was as near as she dared go, already much too near the black places of terror.

  “Do you mean to ask me if I think you belong here, if yours is what is called a mental illness? Then the answer is yes. I think you are sick in this way, but with your very hard work here and with a doctor’s working hard with you, I think you can get better.”

  As bald as that. Yet with the terror connected with the hedged-about, circled-around word “crazy,” the unspoken word that Deborah was thinking about now, there was a light coming from the doctor’s spoken words, a kind of light that shone back on many rooms of the past. The home and the school and all of the doctors’ offices ringing with the joyful accusation: There Is Nothing The Matter With You. Deborah had known for years and years that there was more than a little the matter—something deeply and gravely the matter, more even than the times of blindness, intense pain, lameness, terror, and the inability to remember anything at all might indicate. They had always said, “There is nothing the matter with you, if you would only …” Here at last was a vindication of all the angers in those offices.

  The doctor said, “What are you thinking about? I see your face relax a little.”

  “I am thinking about the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.”

  “How so?”

  “The prisoner pleads guilty to the charge of not having acute something-itis and accepts the verdict of guilty of being nuts in the first degree.”

  “Perhaps in the second degree,” the doctor said, smiling a little. “Not entirely voluntary nor entirely with forethought.”

  Deborah suddenly recalled the picture of her parents standing very single and yet together on the other side of the shatter-proof locked door. Not aforethought, this thing, but more than a little with malice.

  Deborah became aware of the nurse moving about in the other room as if to let them know that the time was up.

  The doctor said, “If it’s all right with you, we will make another appointment and begin our talks, because I believe that you and I, if we work like the devil together, can beat this thing. First, I want to tell you again that I will not pull away symptoms or sickness from you against your will.”

  Deborah shied away from the commitment, but she allowed her face a very guarded “yes,” and the doctor saw it. They walked from the office with Deborah striving assiduously to act as if she were somewhere else, elaborately unconcerned with this present place and person.

  “Tomorrow at the same time,” the doctor told the nurse and the patient.

  “She can’t understand you,” Deborah said. “Charon spoke in Greek.”

  Dr. Fried laughed a little and then her face turned grave. “Someday I hope to help you see this world as other than a Stygian Hell.”

  They turned and left, and Charon, in white cap and striped uniform, guided the removed spirit toward the locked ward. Dr. Fried watched them walking back to the large building and thought: Somewhere in that precocity and bitterness and somewhere in the illness, whose limits she could not yet define, lay a hidden strength. It was there and working; it had sounded in the glimmer of relief when the fact of the sickness was made plain, and most of all in the “suicide attempt,” the cry of a mute for help, and the statement, bold and dramatic as adolescents and the still-fighting sick must always make it, that the game was over and the disguising ended. The fact of this mental illness was in the open now, but the disease itself had roots still as deeply hidden as the white core of a volcano whose slopes are camouflaged in wooded green. Somewhere, even under the volcano itself, was the buried seed of will and strength. Dr. Fried sighed and went back to her work.

  “This time … this time can I only call it forth!” she sighed, lapsing into the grammar of her native tongue.

  chapter four

  Suzy Blau took the story of the convalescent school quite well, and when Esther told her own parents she tried to shade the hospital into a rest home. But they were undeceived and furious.

  “There’s nothing the matter with her brains! That girl has a good wit,” Pop said. (It was his highest compliment.) “It’s just that the brains in this family skipped a generation and fell on her. She is me, my own flesh. The hell with all of you!” He walked out of the room.

  In the following days Esther pleaded for their support in her decision, but only when Claude, her elder brother, and Natalie, her sister—the favorites of the family—admitted to Mom and Pop that there could be a need, did the old man relent a little, for Deborah was his favorite grandchild.

&n
bsp; At home Jacob was silent but not at peace with what he and Esther had done. They went to see Dr. Lister twice, and Jacob listened, trying to be comforted by the belief that they had done the right thing. Confronted with direct questions, he had to agree, and all the facts were trying to make him say “yes,” but he had only to submit to his feelings for the smallest moment and his whole world rang with misgivings. When he and Esther quarreled, the crucial thing remained unspoken, leaving an atmosphere of wordless rancor and accusation.

  At the end of the first month a letter arrived from the hospital relating Deborah’s activities in very general terms. She had made “a good adjustment” to the routine and staff, had begun therapy, and was able to walk about the grounds. From this noncommittal letter Esther extracted every particle of hope, going over and over the words, magnifying each positive sign, turning the remarks this way and that for the facets of brightest reflection.

  She also struggled to sway the feelings of Jacob and Pop, practicing her arguments with her image in the mirror. Pop knew in himself somewhere, she believed, that the decision was not wrong, that his anger at Deborah’s hospitalization was only an expression of his injured pride. Esther saw that her dominating, quick, restless, and brilliant immigrant father now showed certain signs of mellowing; only his language was as brusque as ever. Sometimes it even seemed to her that with Deborah’s illness coming to a head, the whole thrust and purpose of their lives was forced under scrutiny. One night she asked Jacob abruptly, “How did we share in the thing? What awful wrongs did we do?”

  “Do I know?” he answered. “If I knew would I have done them? It seemed like a good life—a very good life she had. Now they say it wasn’t. We gave love and we gave comfort. She was never threatened with cold or hunger …”