Esther had forced herself to stay cheerful and strong, to go to Debby’s room always with a smile. She was pregnant again and worried because of the earlier stillbirth of twin sons, but to the hospital staff, the family, and Deborah, her surface never varied, and she took pride in the strength she showed. At last they learned that the operations had been successful. They were jubilant and grateful, and at Deborah’s homecoming the whole house was festive and decorated, and all the relatives were present for a party. Two days later Jacob got the Sulzburger account. Esther found old names coming to mind from nowhere.
At the time the Sulzburger account had seemed to be the most important thing in their lives. It was a series of very lucrative smaller accounts and they had gone a little crazy with it. At last Jacob could be free, more than a consort in his own house. He bought a new one in a quiet and modest neighborhood not too far from the city. It was small, with a little garden and trees and lots of children close by with lots of different last names. Deborah was cautious at first, but before long she began to open, to go out and make friends. Esther had friends, too, and flowers that she could take care of herself, and sunlight, and open windows, and no need for servants, and the beginnings of her own decisions. One year—one beautiful year. Then one evening Jacob came home and told her that the Sulzburger account was a vast chain of fraud. He had been three full months discovering how and where the money was going. He said to Esther on the evening before he went to resign it, “A fraud that’s as diverse and clever as this one is has a kind of beauty in it. It’s going to cost us—everything. You know that, don’t you? … But I can’t help admiring that mind….”
They had to give up the house and a month later they were back in the family home once again. There was very little money, but Esther’s parents decided to give the house to them; there was too much room without the whole family and the parents had rented an apartment in Chicago. But the big house had to stay in the family, of course. And so the hated place became the Blau house.
Deborah went to the best schools in the winter and the best camps in the summer. Friendships came hard to her, but they do to many people, Esther thought. The family had not known until years later that the first summer camp (three silent years of it), was cruelly anti-Semitic. Deborah had never told them. What Esther and Jacob saw were the laughing teams of girls at play and singing over toasted marshmallows the old camp songs about Marching on to Victory.
“Was there nothing to show you that she was ill or suffering—just reticence?” Dr. Fried asked.
“Well, yes…. I mentioned school—it was small and friendly and they all thought well of her. She was always very bright, but one day the psychologist called us and showed us a test that all the children had been given. Deborah’s answers seemed to show him that she was …disturbed.’”
“How old was she then?”
“Ten,” Esther said slowly. “I looked at my miracle, trying to see her mind, if it were true. I saw that she didn’t play with other children. She was always at home, hiding herself away. She ate a lot and got fat. It had all been so gradual that I had never really seen it until then. And—and she never slept.”
“A person must sleep. You mean she slept little?”
“I knew that she must sleep, but I never saw her asleep. Whenever we came into her room at night, she would be wide awake, saying that she heard us coming up the stairs. The steps were heavily carpeted. We used to joke about our light sleeper, but it was no joke. The school recommended that we take her to a child psychiatrist, and we did, but she only seemed to get more and more disturbed and angry, and after the third session she said, …Am I not what you wanted? Do you have to correct my brain, too?’ She had that way of speaking even at ten, a kind of bitterness that was too old for her. We stopped the visits because we never wanted her to feel that way. Somehow, even without realizing it, we got into the habit of listening, even in our sleep, for—”
“For what?”
“I don’t know …” And she shook her head to ward off a forbidden word.
When the Second World War began it was no longer possible to maintain a fifteen-room house. Esther struggled on while they tried to get rid of it, feeling overwhelmed by its huge, musty rooms and the awful compulsion to “keep things up” in the critical eyes of Mom and Pop and the rest of the family. At last they found a buyer, dropped the weight of the past gratefully, and moved into an apartment in the city. It seemed a good thing, especially for Deborah; her little oddities, her fears, and her loneliness would seem less strange in the anonymity of a large city. She was still not really happy, but her teachers thought highly of her in the new school and the studies went well without any great effort on her part. She took music lessons and did all the ordinary things that young girls do.
Esther tried to think of something that would make Deborah’s present condition believable. Well … she was intense. Esther remembered speaking to her about it now and then, telling her not to take things so very, very seriously, but it was part of both of them, and not something to be stopped just by a decision or request. In the city Deborah discovered art. The opening of her interest was like a torrent; she spent every spare moment drawing and sketching. In those first years, when she was eleven and twelve, she must have done thousands of pictures, not to mention the little sketches and bits of drawing on scrap paper at school.
They had taken some of the drawings to art teachers and critics and were told that the girl was, indeed, talented and should be encouraged. It was a bright and easy answer to Esther’s gray, vague suspicions, and she tried to pull it up over her eyes. To the whole family it suddenly seemed to explain all the sickness and sensitivity, the sleeplessness, the intensity, and the sudden looks of misery, covered quickly by a blank hardness of the face or the bitter wit’s backthrust. Of course … she was special, a rare and gifted spirit. Allowances were made for her complaints of illness, for her vagueness. It was adolescence, the adolescence of an exceptional girl. Esther kept saying it and saying it, but she never could quite believe it. There was always this or that nagging sign that seemed to taunt her perceptions. One evening Deborah had gone to the doctor for another one of her mysterious pains. She had come home strangely blank and fearful. The next day Deborah had left early on some errand and not come home until late. At about four in the morning, Esther had awakened for some unknown and instinctive reason and she had gone to Deborah’s room with a certainty that now, in the telling, brought her a strange feeling of guilt. The room was empty. When she looked in the bathroom, she had found Deborah sitting quietly on the floor, watching the blood from her wrist flow into a basin.
“I asked her why she didn’t just let it go into the sink,” the doctor said, “and she answered interestingly, I thought. She said that she had not wanted to let it get too far away. You see, she knew, in her own way, that she was not attempting suicide, but making the call for help, the call of a mute and confused person. You live in an apartment house; you have from your windows a death much quicker and surer at every hand and yet this—and she knew you to be light sleepers because she was.”
“But did she decide to do this? Could she have planned it?”
“Not consciously, of course, but her mind chose the best way. She is, after all, here. Her call for help was successful. Let us go back a way now, to the camps and the school. Was there always trouble between Deborah and the campers and schoolmates? Did she work her own troubles out or did she call on you for help?”
“I tried to help, certainly. I remember quite a few times when she needed me and I was there. There was the time when she had just started school and was having trouble with a little clique there. I took them all out for a big day at the zoo and that broke the ice. In the summer camp sometimes people didn’t understand her. I was always friendly with the counselors and that would ease the way a little. She had great trouble with one of the teachers at the public school in the city. I had the teacher in to tea and just talking a bit, explaining Deborah’s fears
of people and how sometimes they were misinterpreted. I helped her to understand Deborah. They were friends through the rest of school, and at the end the teacher told me that having known Deborah had been a real privilege, that she was such a fine girl.”
“How did Deborah take this help?”
“Well, she was relieved, of course. These troubles loom so large at that age and I was glad to be a real mother to her, helping in things like that. My own mother never could.”
“Looking back at those times—what was the feeling of them? How did you feel during them?”
“Happy, as I said. The people Deborah had trouble with were relieved and I was happy to be helping her. I worked hard to overcome my own shyness, to make it fun always to be where I was. We sang and told jokes. I had to learn how to bring people out of themselves. I was proud of her and often told her so. I told her often how much I loved her. She never felt unprotected or alone.”
“I see,” the doctor said.
It seemed to Esther that the doctor did not see. Somehow the wrong picture was there before them, and Esther said, “I fought for Deborah all her life. Maybe it was the tumor that started it all. It was not us—not the love that Jacob and I had for each other or for our children. It was in spite of all our love and care, this awful thing.”
“You knew for a long time, didn’t you, that things were not right with your daughter? It was not only the psychologist at the school. When did it seem to you that the trouble started?”
“Well, there was the summer at camp—no—it was before that. How does one sense just when the atmosphere changes? Suddenly it just seems to be, that’s all.”
“What about the camp?”
“Oh, it was the third year she had been going. She was nine then. We had come up to see her toward the end of the season and she seemed unhappy. I told her how I had gotten over bad spots of growing up by going in for sports. It’s a good way to get recognition and friends when you are young. When we left, she seemed all right, but somehow, after that year … something … went out of her…. It was as if she had her head down from then on, waiting for the blows.”
“Waiting for the blows …” the doctor said musingly. “And then there came a time, later—a time when she began to arrange for blows to fall.”
Esther turned toward the doctor, her eyes full of recognition. “Is that what the sickness is?”
“Maybe it is a symptom. I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, …Why, before the world does them.’ I asked him then, …Why not wait and see what the world will do?’ and he said, …Don’t you see? It always comes at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.’”
“That patient … did he get well?”
“Yes, he got well. Then the Nazis came and they put him into Dachau and he died there. I tell you this because I am trying to tell you, Mrs. Blau, that you can never make the world over to protect the ones you love so much. But you do not have to defend your having tried.”
“I had to try to make things better,” Esther said, and then sat back, thinking. “Somehow, as I see it now, there were mistakes—great mistakes—but they are more toward Jacob than Deborah.” She paused, looking at the doctor incredulously. “How could I have done such things to him? All these long years … since that over-priced apartment, the years of Pop’s charity, the years and years I let him come second, even today—if …Pop thinks so’ or …Pop wants it.’ Why—when he was my husband and his wishes were so simple and modest?” She looked again. “It’s not enough, then, just to love. My love for Jacob didn’t stop me from hurting him and lowering him in his own eyes as well as my father’s. And our love for Deborah didn’t stop us from … well, from causing … this … sickness.”
Dr. Fried looked at Esther and listened to the words of love and pain coming from the carefully composed mother of a girl sick to death with deception. The love was real enough and the pain also, so that she said very gently, “Let us, Deborah and I, study for the causes. Do not agonize and blame yourself or your husband or anyone else. She will need your support, not your self-recrimination.”
Brought back to the present, Esther realized that she would now have to face the Deborah of the present. “How—how can I know the right thing to say while I am talking to her? You know, don’t you, that she won’t let Jacob see her, and she had such a strange, sleepwalker’s look when I last saw her?”
“There is only one thing that is really dangerous, especially now because she is so sensitive to it.”
“And what is that, Doctor?”
“Why, lying, of course.”
They rose because the time was over. Too short, Esther thought, to say a fraction of what needed to be said. Dr. Fried saw her to the door with a last small gesture of comfort. She was thinking that the patient’s versions would be radically different from the ones her mother ascribed to both of them. The helpful parent, the grateful child. But if it were not so, the child would not be a patient. The quality of and the difference between these versions of reality would help to give depth to each of their interpretations of it.
As she left the doctor’s office, it seemed to Esther that she had not put her case correctly. Perhaps her attempt to help had been, after all, interference. The hospital had given her permission to take Deborah out by herself. The two of them would go to a movie and dinner in town, and they would talk. “I swear to you,” Esther said to the Deborah in her mind, “I swear to you that I will not use you. I will not ask you what we did or didn’t do.”
She went to the small hotel room to tell Jacob that Deborah still refused to see him. The doctor had said that they must not force her, that perhaps what she had done was not so much a slighting of Jacob as an attempt, poor and misdirected, to make her own decisions. Esther had thought that this was only placating, but she had said nothing. Poor Jacob—and I am in the middle again—the deliverer of the blow.
And after a while Jacob stopped insisting, but Esther saw him in the back of the theater, watching Deborah instead of the film. And as they came out she saw him standing in the shadows alone, watching her, and on the corner as they went into the restaurant, he was standing in the cold path of early winter.
chapter six
“Tell me about your life before this hospital,” the doctor said.
“My mother told you all about it,” Deborah answered bitterly from the high, cold regions of her kingdom.
“Your mother told me what she gave, not what you took; what she saw, not what you saw. She told me what she knew of that tumor of yours.”
“She doesn’t know much about it,” Deborah said.
“Then tell me what you know.”
She had been five, old enough to be ashamed when the doctors shook their heads about the wrongness inside her, in the feminine, secret part. They had gone in with their probes and needles as if the entire reality of her body were concentrated in the secret evil inside that forbidden place. On the evening that her father made the plans for her to appear at the hospital the next day, she had felt the hard anger of the willful when they are dealt with and moved about like objects. That night she had had a dream—a nightmare—about being broken into like a looted room, torn apart, scrubbed clean with scouring powder, and reassembled, dead but now acceptable. After it had come another about a broken flowerpot whose blossom seemed to be her own ruined strength. After the dreams she had lapsed into a mute, stunned silence. But the nightmares had not taken into account the awful pain.
“Now just be quiet. This won’t hurt a bit,” they had said, and then had come the searing stroke of the instrument. “See, we are going to put your doll to sleep,” and the mask had moved down, forcing the sick-sweet chemical of sleep.
“What is this place?” she had asked.
“Dreamland,” had come the answer, and then the hardest, longest burning of that secret place she could imagine.
She had asked one of them onc
e, an intern who had seemed to be discomfited at her suffering, “Why do you all tell such terrible lies?” He had said, “Oh, so you will not be frightened.” On another afternoon, tied to that table yet again, they had said, “We are going to fix you fine now.” In the language of the game-playing liars she had understood that they were going to murder her. Again the transparent lie about the doll.
What terrible scorn they had had to give that lie so often! Was it to have been worse than murder? What could they have had in their demented minds, those killers with their false “fine”? And afterward, through the brutal ache: “How is your doll?”
As she told it, she looked at Dr. Fried, wondering if the dead past could ever wake anything but boredom in the uncaring world, but the doctor’s face was heavy with anger and her voice full of indignation for the five-year-old who stood before them both. “Those damn fools! When will they learn not to lie to children! Pah!” And she began to jab out her cigarette with hard impatience.
“Then you’re not going to be indifferent …” Deborah said, walking very gingerly on the new ground.
“You’re damn right I’m not!” the doctor answered.
“Then I will tell you what no one knows,” Deborah said. “They never said they were sorry, not one of them. Not for going in so callously, not that they made me take all that pain and be ashamed of feeling it, not that they lied so long and so stupidly that their lies were like a laughing at me. They never asked my pardon for these things and I never gave it to them.”
“How so?”
“I never lost that tumor. It’s still there, still eating on the inside of me. Only it is invisible.”
“That punishes you, not them.”
“Upuru punishes us both.”
“Upu—what?”
Yr had opened suddenly, in horror that one of its guarded secrets had slipped into the earthworld, the sunny office with the booby-trap furniture. The language of Yr was a deep secret, kept always more rigidly away from people as it crept toward greater control of the inner voice. Upuru was Yr’s word for the whole memory and emotion of that last hospital day—that day after which all things had seemed to gray to dimness.
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Page 4
