I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  The next day Deborah became her own Yri enemy—a voluntary sharer, an eyeless-and-utterly-naked, which Yri called nelaq tankutuku. She went to the nurse and asked to see the ward doctor when he came to sign the orders for the week.

  “Why do you want to see him?” the nurse asked.

  “I have something to tell him.”

  “What is it?”

  “That a pacifist is one who uses his open hand.”

  Nurse gave way to ward nurse. The theme again. Ward nurse to head day nurse; the theme again. The cloud was beginning to darken under the ceiling, lowering toward Punishment, but Deborah had to tell the doctor somehow and get it off her own conscience that she had been a witness and thus, in some obscure way, a sharer in the experience of both victor and victim. The nurse was skeptical and Deborah had to plead, with the cloud pressing closer and the wind coming up. At last she got permission to see the ward doctor. She told, sparely and dryly, what she had seen, trying for the world’s semblance of sanity so that he would believe her. She did not use the expense of the telling to show him how important it was, nor did she speak of Ellis’s propensities, which she knew were secret simply because he had the keys and the patients didn’t. When she got finished, the doctor sat looking at her, watching her hair grow. She knew from long experience that he did not see the cloud, feel the dark wind, or sense the Punishment. He sat in another season—springtime, maybe—beneath a separate sun whose rays ended at the periphery of her eyesight, her reality, and her kingdom.

  At last he said, “Why doesn’t Helene tell me this?”

  “Helene left right after it happened.” She was about to add that it was like Helene to blank out and leave her holding the bag, her way of getting even for the time when she had told Helene that she saw the possibility of wellness in her. She saw that this was unwise, but the realization stopped her mind on it, like cloth caught on a nail, and she could say no more.

  “We are interested in stopping any brutality going on around here, but we can’t take something without proof. You were in pack because you were upset, you know. Something perhaps you believe you saw …”

  “Ask Ellis at least. With his Soul … he’s going to have trouble with it anyway if he has to lie.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” the doctor said, making no move toward his ubiquitous notebook. He was clearly giving her what Lee Miller called Treatment Number Three: a variety of the old “fine-fine,” which went, “Yes, yes, of course,” and was meant to placate without changing, silence without comprehending, and end friction by doing nothing. As she looked at him, Deborah thought about her sedative order. She had wanted an increase in her sedation and she knew that if she asked now he would give it to her. But she didn’t want to buy sleep with Helene’s swallowed blood, and she let him go, murmuring, “Chloral hydrate generosity, and charity in cc’s.” She watched the worms that were dropping out of the cloud. The doctor left. Never mind; she would tell Dr. Fried, The Fire-Touch, about it.

  Furii, or Fire-Touch, was the new Yri name for Dr. Fried; it recalled the fearsome power that had seared Deborah’s arm with an invisible burning.

  “Did you tell the ward doctor this?” Furii asked.

  “Yes, and he gave me the Number Three With Smile: …yes-yes.’” She felt ridiculous in her honorable abstinence from the heavier sedation that she had wanted. She wished that she had at least got something from what was bound to be so costly.

  “You know,” Furii said, “I am not connected with the running of your ward. I cannot break into ward policy.”

  “I’m not saying that policy should be changed,” Deborah said, “unless the policy is beating up patients in pack.”

  “I have no say in discipline of ward personnel either,” Furii said.

  “Is Pilate everybody’s last name around here?”

  At last Furii agreed to mention it in the staff meeting, but Deborah was not convinced. “Maybe you doubt that I saw it at all.”

  “That is the one thing that I do not doubt,” the doctor said. “But you see, I have no part in what is to be done on the wards; I am not an administrative doctor.”

  Deborah saw the match lighting dry fuel. “What good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer. Helene kept her bargain about Ellis and so did I. What good is your reality then?”

  “Look here,” Furii said. “I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice …” (She remembered Tilda suddenly, breaking out of the hospital in Nuremburg, disappearing into the swastika-city, and coming back laughing that hard, rasping parody of laughter. “Sholom Aleichem, Doctor, they are crazier than I am!”) … and I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is so that you can be free to fight for all of these things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie … and a bore, too!”

  “Will you bring it up at the meeting—about Helene?”

  “I said I would and I will, but I promise nothing.”

  Because Helene had left her standing alone with the burden of witnessing, Deborah found herself going, without a conscious choice, to Lee Miller, the one who went tankutuku for the forgotten words of Sylvia. Lee could not allow anyone to be behind her, and she didn’t like to stand against the wall the way the others did, so she had to keep circling relentlessly to “keep everyone properly placed.” Without allegiance or loyalty, but because of a mysterious sense of fitness, Deborah began to follow Lee, the ptolemaic sun circling her planets.

  “Get away, Blau!”

  That, too, was fitting; by her speaking to Deborah she was admitting, Deborah thought, that they were actors in the same event and related to one another.

  “Get away, Blau!”

  Deborah came on after, bearing the chains of the relationship.

  “Nurse! Get this bitch out of here!”

  The nurse came. “Get off the hall, Deborah, or stop following.” The nurse was a third actor, but not tankutuku. The gravity bond dissolved; Deborah moved away again.

  By the light of my fire, Bird-one, Anterrabae said, see how carefully, how carefully they separate you from small dangers: pins and matches and belts and shoelaces and dirty looks. Will Ellis beat the naked witness in a locked seclusion room?

  Deborah slid down the wall to an accustomed place on the floor among the other statues, watching the pictures in her mind—simple pictures, explicit and terrifying.

  In the evening, Lucia, a new patient with a certain prestige for her violence and the nine years she had spent in one of the roughest hospitals in the country, suddenly said to the small group of perpetually cold ones who were huddled around the radiator enclosure, “It’s different here. I been lotsa joints, lotsa wards. My brother, too; lotsa wards. What’s here … there’s more scared, more mad; pissin’ on the floor and yellin’—but it’s because of the maybe. It’s because of the little, little maybe.”

  She went off again, leaping in her long ostrich run down the hall, laughing in order to negate the immense, fearful power of her words, but they had been given and they were hanging in the air like the zoo smell of the ward itself. Everyone was afraid of the hope, the little, little Maybe, but for Deborah, coming at that moment, the words had a special ring, so that she looked out into both worlds and saw the imminent things, the lowering cloud and the worms that were dropping from it, and the law, blowing like a shred in the black wind.

  “Never mind the Maybe; it’s an administrative problem.”

  chapter fourteen

  Esther and Jacob sat together in the office, waiting, Dr. Fried saw, for reassurance and for peace. She wanted to tell them bluntly that she was not God. There were no sure promises and she could not be a judge of what they had done or not done to their daughter to bring her to this battlefield.

  “Is it wrong to want a child like anyone else’s?” Jacob asked. “I �
� I mean is there a cure, really, or will she stay here and have to be placated and comforted … always?” He heard how cold his words sounded. “It isn’t a question of love—sick or well—it’s only that we have to expect something, even to hope for something. Can you tell us what we may hope for?”

  “If you want to hope for a college diploma and a box of dance invitations and pressed roses and a nice clean-cut young man from a fine family—I don’t know. This is what most parents hope for. I don’t know if Deborah will have these things someday or if she will even want them. Part of our work together is to find out and come to terms with what she really does want.”

  “May we see her?”

  Dr. Fried had known that the question would come, and here it was. It was the one she didn’t want to answer. “Of course, if you decide to see her you may, but I would not advise it this time.” She tried to make the answer very, very calm.

  “Why not!” Jacob said, moving loudly against his fear.

  “Because her feeling of reality is quite shaky now. The way she looks might alarm you a little, and she knows this and is afraid of you … and for herself also.”

  Jacob sat back dazedly, wondering why they had ever done this thing. The old Deborah as she was might have been sick as they all said. She had been unsure and wretched, but she had been theirs—unsure, to be guarded and planned for; wretched, to be cheered and mothered. At least she had been familiar. Now, the picture that this doctor made was of someone unrecognizable.

  “Let me say that the symptoms are not the sickness,” the doctor was saying. “These symptoms are defenses and shields. Believe it or not, her sickness is the only solid ground she has. She and I are hacking away at that ground, on which she stands. That there will be another, firmer ground for her after this is destroyed she can only take on faith. Imagine it for yourself for a moment and you can see why she doesn’t pay attention to her grooming; why she gets so frightened and the symptoms proliferate.”

  Dr. Fried tried to describe the feelings of someone who had never known real mental health in her life. “We who have never experienced this sickness firsthand can only guess what horror and loneliness there must be. You know, she is now being called upon to suspend all the years of what she has known as reality, and to take another version of the world on faith. Deborah’s sickness is now a desperate fight for health.”

  “The world we gave her wasn’t so horrible,” Jacob said.

  “But she never took your world at all, don’t you see? She created a robot that went through the motions of reality, and behind it the true person drew further and further away.” Knowing that people feared the unknown person behind the familiar robot, she let the matter rest.

  Jacob said quietly, “I still want to see her.”

  “No, Jacob—it’s better—!”

  “Es—I want to see her! It’s my right.”

  “Very well,” the doctor said affably. “I’ll call and have her brought down from the ward and you may see her in the visitors’ room.” She went to her phone. “If you should want to see me again afterward, please have the attendant on duty call me. I will be here until four.”

  She watched them leave and walk rigidly toward the hospital building. The Families. “Make him well,” they say. “Make her well,” they say, “with good table manners and a future according to our agreed-on dream!” She sighed. Even the intelligent, the honest, the good, find it too easy to sell their children. Deceits and vanities and arrogances that they would never stoop to for themselves they perpetrate on their children. Ach! Another sigh escaped from her, because she had never given birth or nursed a child, and because she wondered suddenly if she, too, would not connive or be ambitious, buy dreams and wish them impossibly on a Deborah if the Deborah were her own. She thought a moment longer, then turned and went to the phone, and got through at last to D ward.

  “She was just taken down to visitors, Doctor,” the attendant said.

  “Oh, well, then, never mind. I just hoped …”

  “Doctor?”

  “Just that there was time for her to comb her hair.”

  In the car driving home Esther and Jacob were silent. They were waiting for the truth to become plain to them, but because everything they had seen contradicted everything they felt to be true, they were mute in their confusion. They trusted Dr. Fried. She had not been hypocritically calming, but she had given them hope, and it was hope for which they were most desperate. But their daughter had been almost unrecognizable. She had not frightened them with mumbling or violence, but with a subtle and terrifying kind of withdrawal. She had not inhabited her body.

  As they left the visitors’ room Jacob had said only, “She’s very pale—”

  And Esther, striving to catch what she was feeling, murmured, “Someone … someone beaten to death from the inside.”

  Jacob’s anger had risen against her and he had turned away. “You always talk too much! Can’t you just let it be?”

  On the way back to Chicago, all they knew was that it was past time for Suzy to be told the truth.

  Dr. Fried continued to chase, corner, and urge her recalcitrant patient through the circles of loving and hating. Deborah kept fleeing away to Yr’s darknesses, dissembling and throwing up dust to hide in. She longed for blindness and ignorance, for she now realized that if she herself saw or recognized anything, it would have to be exposed for discussion, however shameful, fearful, or ugly it might be; although to Deborah the reason for this necessity was as mysterious as the lower places of Yr itself.

  “I have let you get away from your father long enough,” Furii announced during one session. “When you speak of him, it is with fear and hatred—and with something else.”

  The deeper secret, toward which Furii reached with her world hooks, lay beneath common injustices: the beating over a trivial thing, the simple misunderstanding at a crucial time. Part of the secret was that Deborah was like her father. They shared a sudden, violent temper, long smolderings that erupted in incongruous rages. And because she recognized the similarity, she feared him and herself also, and she felt his love for her was blind, that he never knew or understood her for a single moment. And there was something else beyond his understanding.

  “I was scornful of him sometimes,” she said.

  “I know you are remembering something.”

  “He was always frightened of the men—the men lurking to grab me from dark streets: sex maniacs and fiends, one to a tree, waiting for me. So many times he shook warnings into me. Men are brutes, lusting without limit. Men are animals … and I agreed in myself. One time he was scolding me for having seen an exhibitionist on the street. Because I had attracted the man’s attention my father somehow connected me with having done something. He was full of rage and fear and he went on and on as if all such men were bound by laws like gravity to me alone. I said to him, …What do they want with me, broken into and spoiled already? I’m not good enough for anyone else.’ Then he hit me very hard because it was true.”

  “Was he afraid, perhaps, of the commands of his own passions?”

  “What? He was a father—” Deborah said, beginning to know the answer before she refuted it.

  “He was a man first. He knows his own thoughts. Do all others have such thoughts? He knows they have. Do all others have so good control as he has? Surely they cannot.”

  Deborah pondered the almost-lust that was almost apparent so many times. It was full of guilt and love intermingled; it had badgered and confused her, making of her a secret accomplice in all of the heinous crimes of the maniacs which he was forever describing. In his fear he saw her as having the same hunger and guilt as they did—as he did. He had spoken of the diseased parts of these men and Deborah knew that her shame-parts too had been diseased. Always in her dreams what she fled from and then turned to face at last was the eternally horrifying familiar faces of her father and herself.

  “Is it so fearful now?”

  “No …” And then thinking how great t
he shadow had grown in the Fear-bog, and that it was only him and a few unspoken, briefly hinted thoughts of her own that had been so cloaked in guilt that their true shapes had disappeared, she said, “No, not fearful—good. I was not only … only to him a daughter who was making him embarrassed all the time. Part of the yearning was the human … human …” Deborah began to cry.

  She was well into it when the terror caught. Furii saw it coming, strangling out the sobs.

  “Quickly!” she said. “It may try to make you pay, that sickness of yours, for our having outdistanced it. Quickly I tell you that you have touched insight, which is truth and love and forgiveness; that these are part of the reality of which you have been so afraid. Are they not wonderful and thrilling, these things?” She saw the light drawing away. The voice that came next was coming from Yr.