The whole ward erupted into laughter and relaxed, although the mind-scent of tension still hung in the air like the ozone smell after a lightning bolt. Something had been narrowly averted.
After Deborah had been given her sedative, she got into her bed, waiting the familiar wait, the gods and the Collect reduced to a somnolent undertone. McPherson came into the dormitory and stopped by her bed.
“Deb,” he said gently, “lay off on Mr. Ellis, will you?”
“Why me?” she said.
“I want all of you to let him alone. No more jokes. No more references to Hobbs.”
“Are you going to tell everybody?” (The guarded vying-for-favor and the guarded suspicion of all the world’s motives and representatives overcame prudence and forced the question.)
“Yup,” he said. “Everybody on the ward.”
“Even Marie and Lena?” (They were acknowledged to be the sickest on the ward, even by the patients.)
“Deb … just lay off.”
For a moment she felt that he was using her. He was the only one who could get away with calling the patients by nicknames without sounding strained, but it sounded strained now.
“Why me? I thought you normal ones had agreed that we were out of it—your conventions and routines. I’m not nice and I’m not polite and I know more about Hobbs than you do. He was one of us! The only thing that separated him from us was three inches of metal key he used to fondle for assurance. Ellis is another one. I know about him and his hate.”
McPherson’s voice was low, but his anger was real, and Deborah felt it coming from a place in him that he had never shown before.
“Do you think the sick people are all in hospitals? Do you girls think you have a corner on suffering? I don’t want to bring up the money business—it’s been over-done—but I want to tell you right now that lots of people on the outside would like to get help and can’t. You ought to know mental trouble when you see it. You don’t bait other patients. I’ve never heard you say anything against one of them.” (She remembered what she had said to Carla and the stroke of guilt fell again for it.) “Lay off Ellis, Deb—you’ll be glad for it later.”
“I’ll try.”
He looked down hard at her. She could not see his face in the shadow, but she sensed that it was in repose. Then he turned and walked out of the dormitory. Deborah fought the sedative for a while, thinking about what he had said and how. It was tough but true, and under the anger of it ran the tone—the tone rare anywhere, but in a mental ward like a priceless jewel—the tone of a simple respect between equals. The terror she felt at the responsibility it bore was mingled with a new feeling. It was joy.
chapter twelve
“Something in a session not long ago keeps coming back to me,” Dr. Fried said. “You were discussing being sick as if it were a volcano and you said of your sister that she would have to decorate her slopes herself. Do you know what you tell us now? Can you really not see that the gods and the devils and the whole Yr of yours is your own creation?”
“I didn’t mean that at all!” Deborah said, backing away, and still hearing the Collect chanting years of people: Snap out of it; it’s all in your mind. “Yr is real!”
“I have no doubt that it is real to you, but there is also something else that you seem to be saying—that the sickness stands apart from the symptoms which are often mistaken for it. Are you not saying that, although the symptoms bear on the sickness and are related to it, the two are not the same?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I want you to take me back into that past of yours again, before the slopes were decorated, and share with me a look at the volcano itself.” She saw the look of terror, and added, “Not all at once; a little at a time.”
They had gone over the Great Deceits, and also the many little ones that are inevitable in life, but which, because of Deborah’s feelings and beliefs, seemed to be pointing the way to doom as meaningfully as if they had been arranged as part of a plan, a secret joke that everyone knew, but no one admitted knowing. After months of therapy, Deborah began to learn that there were many reasons why the world was horrifying to her. The shadow of the grandfather dynast was still dark over all the houses of the family. She went back often again, hearing grandfather’s familiar voice saying, “Second in the class is not enough; you must be the first.” “If you are hurt, never cry, but laugh. You must never let them know that they are hurting you.” It was all directed against the smiling sharers of the secret joke. Pride must be the ability to die in agony as if you did it every day, gracefully. Even his pride in her was anger. “You’re smart—you’ll show them all!” He had sharpened her word-wit on his own, cheered the cutting edge of it, called women cows and brood-bitches, and slapped her half-roughly because she would grow up wasted, a woman. She would have to take on the whole world of fools and ingrates, and, even though she was a woman, win his battle: the ancient, mystical battle between a crippled immigrant and a long-dead Latvian Count.
In the place and time where Deborah was growing up, American Jews still fought the old battles that they had fled from in Europe only a few years earlier. And then there were the newer battles, pitched as the Nazis walked through Europe and screamed hatred in America. There were Bund marches in the larger cities, and flare-ups against synagogues and neighborhood Jews who had ventured out of the ghettos. Deborah remembered having seen the Blau house splashed with paint and the dead rats stinking beside the morning paper that told of Czech Jews running for the Polish border only to be shot by the “freedom-loving” Poles. She knew much of the hate and had been attacked once or twice by the neighborhood bullies, but the grandfather would say triumphantly, as if he saw in this an obscure kind of proof, “It’s envy! The best and the smartest are always envied. Walk straight and don’t let them know if they touch you.” And then, as if the hate were peering through the joke, he would say, “You’ll show them! You’re like me. They’re all fools, the rest of them—you’ll show them someday!”
What she had to “show them” was a harbinger, a deceiver, a seducer: her own precocity. The hint that she would someday be “someone” seemed to make the old man right. For a long time she used her bitter wit as a weapon to startle and amaze the adults in her armed truce with the world, but it never fooled the people of her own age for a single moment. The young knew her, and wise in their own fear, set out to destroy her.
“It was a willing soil then, to which this seed of Yr came,” the doctor said. “The deceits of the grown-up world, the great gap between Grandfather’s pretensions and the world you saw more clearly, the lies told by your own precocity, that you were special, and the hard fact that you couldn’t get to first base with your own contemporaries no matter how impressive your specialness was.”
“The gap between the carefully brought up little rich girl with maids and imported dresses and the—and the—”
“And the what? Where are you now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but she was speaking from a place in which she had been before. “There are no colors, only shades of gray. She is big and white. I am small and there are bars between. She gives food. Gray. I don’t eat. Where is my … my …”
“Your what?”
“Salvation!” Deborah blurted.
“Go on,” the doctor said.
“My … self, my love.”
Dr. Fried peered at her intently for a while and then said, “I have a hunch—do you want to try it with me?”
“Do you trust me with it?”
“Certainly, or there wouldn’t be this science at all, where the two of us work together. Your own basic knowledge of yourself and truth is sound. Believe in it.”
“Go ahead then, or psychiatry will disappear.” (Laughter.)
“Your mother had trouble with a pregnancy when you were very small, did she not?”
“Yes, she miscarried. Twins.”
“And afterward went away to rest for a while?”
The light str
uck the past and there was a seeming sound of good, strong truth, like the pop of a hard-thrown ball into a catcher’s glove. Connect. Deborah listened to the sound and then began to tumble over her words, filling in the missing features of the ancient nightmare that was no more otherworldly than the simple experience of being left alone.
“The white thing must have been a nurse. I felt that everything warm had left. The feeling comes often, but I thought it could never have been true that I ever really was in such a place. The bars were crib bars. They must have been on my own crib…. The nurse was distant and cold…. Hey! Hey!” The now-friendly light struck something else and its suddenness made the small, prosaic connection seem like a revelation full of greatness and wonder. “The bars … the bars of the crib and the cold and losing the ability to see colors … it’s what happens now! It’s part of the Pit—it’s what happens now, now! When I am waiting to fall, those bands of dark across my eyes are the old crib bars and the cold is that old one—I always wondered why it meant more than just something you could end by putting on a coat.”
The rush of words ended and Dr. Fried smiled. “It is as big, then, as abandonment and the going away of all love.”
“I thought I was going to die, but at last they came back.” She paused in the flight and another sudden question took her, as if it had been there forever. “Why doesn’t everybody have black bands? Surely everyone is left alone sometimes, maybe for a week or two. Parents die, even, but the children don’t go nuts and have mourning bands going up and down their retinas.” It had come to her as another deeper proof that she was mismade somehow, that the fault was as elemental as her genes, a bad seed. She expected the doctor’s sympathetic demur, a familiar and comforting lie with which she could light her own way back to Yr. Instead the words were strong.
“The memory may not change in form, but years of underlining give it a weight that can become tremendous. Each of the many, many times you are called to remember the cold of abandonment, the bars, and the loneliness, this experience says deep inside you, …You see? That’s the way life is, after all.’”
The doctor rose to mark the session’s end. “We have done very well this time, seeing where some of the ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present.”
Deborah murmured, “I wonder what the price will be.”
The doctor touched her arm, “You set the price yourself. Tell all of Yr that it dare not compromise you in this search of ours.”
Deborah pulled her arm away from the doctor’s hand because of some obscure fear of touching. She was right, for the place where the hand had paused on her arm began to smoke and the flesh under the sweater sleeve seared and bubbled with the burning.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, seeing Deborah’s face go pale. “I didn’t mean to touch you before you were ready.”
“Lightning rods,” Deborah answered, looking through the sweater arm to the charred flesh, and seeing how terrible it must be when one was the grounding path for such power.
The doctor, lost under the leap of the logic, could only look past the shaking body of the patient before her to where the hunted spirit had flashed for a moment in gladness and now was gone. “We will work hard, together, and we will understand.”
“As long as we can stand at all,” Deborah said.
chapter thirteen
Time ground on. Deborah was flung and rebounded like a tennis ball in play from stage to stage in Yr, from Earth to nowhere, from sunlight to black window, over the divisions that demarcate the time of the sane, trying, in passage, not to be cruel to Mr. Ellis. She freed him from Hobbs’s name, she was obedient if not cheerful, and she bore his martyrdom—her own existence—as well as she could. A new group of nursing students had come and gone, some comforted that the mentally ill could no longer strike fear in them, some running in terror from the whip of subtle similarity between the madwomen’s uttered thoughts and their own unuttered ones. Another group had come and was being broken in on Constantia’s spontaneous nudity, Helene’s graceful and bone-breaking violence, and Deborah’s locked eyes. A young nurse had said too loudly, “That kid looks through me as if I’m not here at all.” Trying to give comfort, Deborah had later whispered to the nurse, “Wrong not.” She was saying that it was not the pretty nurse who was not there but the ugly patient, and still the wrong-coming words only made the frightened student more alarmed, and Deborah saw again the uncrossable expanse between herself and the species called “human being.”
Deborah was standing in the small seclusion room forward of the hall. Her lunch tray had been brought by a nurse, who fumbled with the keys (her difference), and was pale, remembering perhaps the secret bedlam horror-nightmares of her own keeping. Those, at least, Deborah shared, believed, understood. She whispered her comfort and saw the nurse get hard in the face with fear, and turn, stumbling over her own feet to hang on the fraction of the edge of her balance.
Deborah put out a hand almost instinctively, since clumsiness had made them kin, and the hand got to the nurse’s arm and held her for a second. Balance caught the young woman and swung her toward vertical again and she pulled her arm away, strong in her fear, and tottered out of the room.
Suffer, Deborah said to all the assembled ones in Yr, the Yri metaphor for greeting. I am a conductor of lightnings and burnings. Passes through me from doctor, flows to nurse. Here I have been copper wire all the time and people had been mistaking me for brazen!
Anterrabae laughed. Be witty, he said, shedding hairsparks in his unending, unconsuming, fiery fall. Outside this room, ward, hospital, such as that and that even, when her shift is through, laugh, walk, breathe, in an element that you will never understand or know. Their breath in and out, blood, bones, night and day are not of the same substance as yours. Your substance is fatal to them. If they are ever infected with your element they will die of it or go insane.
“Like the Pit?”
Exactly so.
Deborah cried out in horror at her power to destroy. She fell on the floor, moaning softly, “Too much power, too much hurt. Don’t let anyone hurt like that—not like that! Not like that … like that …”
Then she was standing above herself, dressed in her Yri rank and name, kicking the herself that was on the floor, kicking her low in the stomach and in the tumorous place that gave like a rotten melon. When the ceremonial creak of leave-taking sounded, the sky was burdening itself with darkness outside the barred window. She looked out, finding herself erect and in front of the window and saying quietly, “Let me die, all of you.” If they would all come together against her, she knew that she could not live. There was no joy or happiness or peace or freedom worth this suffering. “End me, Anterrabae, Collect, all you others. Once and for all, crush me against the world!”
The light was put on from the outside and the key grated in the lock. “Just checking,” the change-of-shift nurse said gaily, but when she saw Deborah’s face, she turned back to the one behind her. “Finish the ward check and get a pack set up.”
Deborah did not know what look she was carrying in front of what self, but she was greatly relieved. Help was coming by virtue of some of the misery which was apparently leaking through the mask. “Out at the eyeholes, maybe …” she murmured to the people who came after a while.
When she rose again, it was in the darkness. She came like a great whale from the benthic depths—another element with other rules and climates. The earth came back to a night outside another window than the one which had measured the early dusk, and there were now two beds, and full, starred darkness beyond—the glass barred, bars screened, screens tightened. It was a beautiful night, with the stars piercing clear, even behind the triple-masked window. There was a low sound from the other bed. “Who’s that?” Deborah asked.
“Our Lady of the nose-itch,” Helene answered. “Venus de Milo with nose-itch.”
“Were you ever in a pack and had a hair get in your eye?” Deborah asked, remembering the struggles she had had som
etimes with hairs or fluff or itches, little devilish mites of annoyance that seemed to be the whole world when you could not reach up and push them aside.
“I am a hair in my eye,” Helene said coolly, “and so are you.”
So Deborah lay quietly, resting from the eternal apocalypse. She could see clearly through her mind, and for a while she thought about Helene, lying like a twin in the other bed. Although Helene was bitter and usually angry, Deborah respected her intellect and also that she, too, in her thorny and unconceding way, had ceased her persecution of the martyred Mr. Ellis. Most of the time Helene was out of contact and not to be reached; sometimes a bitter sentence or two broke like glass, sudden and brittle, and sometimes an attack as hard as it was surprising, but Deborah knew in the quiet, unspectacular way of her clear moments that Helene, as desperately ill as she was, had the unknown quantity of strength or will or something that it took to get well. Helene, she knew, could make it. Because of this, her feelings toward Helene were a texture of envy, respect, and fear.
Once, she had been cruel to Helene; she had told her that she thought she could get well and had seen the terror build in the muscular body. Deborah had not realized fully her own tormenting then. Helene had told her in a fine and reasonable voice that if she, Deborah, didn’t move away and fast, she, Helene, would break every bone in that dung-stinking head. Deborah had complied.
The light went on and both of them groaned softly at the revelation of the lurid spectacle of themselves and each other after the beauty of the star-darkness. Ellis came in alone, and walked swiftly to Helene’s bed to take her pulse.
Normally the nurses and attendants spoke as they entered, in order to introduce slowly the presence of the world, of which they were representatives, to those who might be midhung and confused, and usually they waited for their presence to be acknowledged even by an eyeblink. The suddenness of Ellis’s coming was too much in so vulnerable a place; when he went for Helene’s head to capture her temple-pulse and force from it a number for his report, she pulled hard away from his hand. Movement of the head was a person’s whole repertoire in pack; Ellis grabbed Helene’s face and held it with one hand while he tried to catch the bird-pulse with the other. Again she fought away. Then he straightened a little, riot angry, only deliberate, and began to hit her in the face. The blows landed sure and hard. She spat up at him, a diffused and angry spray, and Deborah, watching, saw what would be to her forever after the symbol of the impotence of all mental patients: the blow again, calm and accurate and merciless, and the spitting back again and again. Helene did not even reach him, but after every attempt he met her at the end of his arm with full force. There was no sound except the pursing sputter of the now dry lips, her labored breathing, and the blows falling. They were both so intent that they seemed to have forgotten everything else. When he had slapped her into submission, he took her pulse and Deborah’s and left. When he went out, Helene was coughing a little on her blood.
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Page 10
