I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

When she was this great soaring creature it seemed as if it was the Earth ones who were damned and wrong, not she, who was so complete in beauty and anger. It seemed to her that they slept and were blind.

  When the Second World War had come, making of the names of Pacific Islands another language of hell and magic to Americans, the Collect had said to her, “They hate these Japanese as they have always hated you,” and Anterrabae, in the urbane falling-smile, Bird-one, you are not of them.

  She had remembered hearing the fragment of some speech on the radio. “Those who aren’t with us are against us!” And the Collect had cried out, Then you must be this enemy they fight!

  On a certain night before falling asleep, Deborah had been reborn as a captured Japanese soldier. From behind the mask of an American-Jewish girl with a past of an American suburb and city, the elliptical eyes of the Enemy looked for the day of his unmasking. The tumor’s impossible, insistent anguish was his war wound, and his mind, versed in a strange language, rang with dreams of escape. He did not hate his captors—he never wished that they would lose the war, but the world now offered meaning to the irreconcilable oppositions in Deborah, the ruination of her secret and female parts, the bitter secrecy of her wound, and the hidden language. Captivity and secrecy and the glory and misery of Yr’s declaration You are not of them were somehow justified.

  On the day that the war in the Pacific was over, Anterrabae caused Deborah to break a glass and step on the pieces with her bare foot. There was no pain, and the doctor, wincing himself as he picked the slivers out, was awed and a little puzzled at her “soldierly” stoicism.

  At last I am brave enough for the damn doctors! Deborah said in Yri to Lactamaeon.

  You are captive and victim, Lactamaeon said. We did not want you to escape.

  “You hid this presence from everyone around you,” Furii said. “Did you hide it also from Yr?”

  “It had no place in Yr; it was part of the Earth dimension.”

  “And so the Censor had the care of keeping it secret. Is that not so? I have trouble to understand the place of this Censor in your kingdom.”

  “The Censor is supposed to protect me. In the beginning he was put at the Midworld barrier to keep Yri secrets from coming out in Earth’s conversations. He censored all my acts to keep Yr’s voices and rites from reaching the Earth’s people. Somehow he became a tyrant. He began to order everything I did or said, even when I was not in Yr.”

  “But this Censor, and Yr itself, was still only an attempt to understand and explain reality, to build a sort of truth where you could live. Well,” the doctor concluded, “I am sure there is much to see here and to study. You are not a victim now; you are a fighter with me, for the cause of your good, strong life.”

  When her patient left, Dr. Fried looked at her desk clock. It had been a long, exhausting session, though the clock showed the time had been no longer than usual. The intensity of her listening, of her sharing, had been so great that she wondered if she could face an afternoon of the cries and agonies of the other patients and the studies and bitter questions of the psychiatric students. What was it today, again? She looked in the appointment book on her desk. Oh, yes, the seminar. But there was, miraculously, an hour before she had to leave. For three weeks her Schumann records had lain on the record cabinet unopened. Beethoven was calling from her memory. Why was there always so little time? She stretched and walked into the living room, teasing herself by humming little bits. Schumann or Beethoven? How does the doctor feel today?

  She took the package down and opened it, and as she did so, she began to think about a patient whose doctor had come for her advice on a seemingly insoluble problem. No. No more patients now. She got the machine ready and put the first record on the spindle. Schumann’s sweet, gentle music filled the room. She listened and her mind shifted to German and the poetry of her youth. She sat back in the soft living room chair, closed her eyes, and rested. And then for the twelfth time that day, the phone rang.

  On Deborah’s way back to the ward the dreaded cloud lowered, and the rumble of the Collect and Censor and Yr began. Terror at what was coming made her try to break through her silence when she was back on the ward. Seeing the head nurse leaving, she went after her, but she could not speak; the door closed and the day shift was gone. The evening shift came on and the menacing moved closer, hovering to engulf her. Just before the wave broke, Deborah went to the ward nurse who was overseeing the evening spoon-count.

  “Miss Olson …”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s going to hit—please—it’s going to hit harder than I can stand up under. I should be in a pack when it hits.”

  The nurse looked up; it was a keen and penetrating look. Then she said, “Okay, Miss Blau. Now go and lie down.”

  The wave broke as hard as she had foreseen, with a tremendous gust of ridiculing laughter, but the fleeing of her senses was not complete. The Censor’s voice, like a cinder which Deborah’s teeth were grinding, was loud in her inner ear: Captive and victim! Don’t you know why we have done this? The third mirror—the ultimate deception is still to be given! You came to this hospital—it was in the plan. We let you trust that doctor. You opened your secrets more and more. This is the final one. Now you have given enough of your secrets, and you will see what she will do—she and the world! And the cinder-laugh crazed Deborah’s teeth to splinters in her mouth.

  Her face was wooden as she walked to the pack and lay down on the cold sheets, but when the full punishment came, she was already under heavy restraints, fighting and thrashing in the bed that would not give an inch….

  When she came clear it was a long time later. She looked around, seeing. The newly cleared vision was like a blessing. The other bed had its white hump, but she did not know who was making it.

  “Helene?”

  Silence. It had been a long time. The circulation in her feet had nearly stopped altogether, and her heels, where they had made the long hours of contact with the wet sheets, were beginning to burn. She lay back and pulled hard with her whole body, trying to get the weight off the tightly bound ankles. When she had to let go, she rested, trying to save the clarity that was permitting her to see down into her mind. It had been longer than four hours; the attendants would come soon and take her from the now painful “fighting clothes.” But they did not come. The pain became intense. She could feel her ankles and knees swelling against the sheets and the downward pull of the restraints, but even their heavy ache did not neutralize the sharper, burning pain of the blood-starved feet. Pulling to relieve the weight of the bones inside the legs, Deborah succeeded only in striking hard cramps into both calves. When she found she could not ease the knotted muscles, she waited on, gritting her teeth. And still they did not come. She began to whimper.

  “Miss Blau … Deborah … what’s the matter?”

  The voice came from the other bed, but she could not recognize the voice.

  “Who is that?” she asked, frightened of another kind of deception.

  “It’s Sylvia. Deborah, what is it?”

  Deborah turned her head and her wonder penetrated through the pain. “I didn’t know you saw me or knew my name,” she said. She had always thought of Sylvia as everyone else did, as a useless piece of ward furniture. She now felt ashamed of having taken her at her own silence.

  “Sick, but not dead,” Sylvia said. “Are you all right?”

  “God … it hurts. How long have we been in?”

  “Five hours—maybe six. We were packed together. Try yelling and maybe someone will come.”

  “I can’t … I never could,” Deborah said.

  Time went on, and the intensity of the pain unlocked Deborah’s voice. For a while she called loudly, hoping that Yr would not hear it as a scream of cowardice and punish her with it forever. And still no one came, and finally she stopped. Sylvia laughed a little, low in her throat.

  “I forgot that the yelling of lunatics is lunatics’ yelling.”

  “How
can you stand it?” Deborah said.

  “I probably have better circulation than you. I don’t hurt at all, usually, but if your feet are tied just a little too tightly, or if you have trouble with your blood—Ah—the night-kitchen light has gone out. Three o’clock, then.”

  Deborah had never reckoned time by the routine of the hospital, or the day-and-night changes and personal idiosyncrasies of the staff, and she was amazed at the perception of one who had always, but for one moment months and months ago, seemed far closer to the dead than to the living. “How long have we been in, then?”

  “Seven hours.”

  And still they did not come. Deborah’s face was full of tears that she could not wipe away. Burning in the pain-flaming darkness, Anterrabae fell, crying, Deception! Deception! The time is now!

  And still they did not come. She realized that the fragile trust had opened her wide again for the cold wind and the cold knife. She groaned against the white-hot stabbing that was moving into her legs. “God, they build their tortures cunningly!”

  “You mean the restraints?” Sylvia asked.

  “I mean the hope!” As she spoke, the mirror of the final deception, the Awaited Death Oncoming moved toward her. “I see you, Imorh,” Deborah said, speaking for the first time aloud in the presence of a stranger the language of Yr.

  When they came at last she was very quiet and they were cheered.

  “Now you’re all calmed down.”

  She could not walk, but the late-night shift was not too busy and they let her sit for a while until the swelling went away, the color returned to her legs, and her feet could carry her. Before leaving Sylvia in the hard light and her unrolling, Deborah turned, wanting to repay her for the mercy that had wrenched her from silence. She walked toward Sylvia’s bed, watching the eyes of the others grow wary.

  “Sylvia …”

  But Sylvia was furniture again—a statue or a mannequin, familiar only in form and alive only to the seeking finger at the pulse-place.

  Sure doom was not as difficult to bear as the little Maybe had been. Deborah had expected the last deception for so long that its coming was almost a relief. Before she went to the doctor’s office, the Collect and gods and all of Yr massed together on its horizon. “I will not go easily,” she said to them, “not this time. I will not be brave and obliging. No more games. No more being a good sport. I will not play the Game, and go to this death as if I didn’t know what it was.”

  When she saw Furii with her familiar smile of greeting, a current of doubt moved in and away. Maybe she doesn’t know, Deborah thought. But the thought was foolish and a dream. The last Change was death or worse; it had been said years ago, and last night, the first help she had asked for in English had been given easily, easily, and was only in scorn. She had surrendered her separateness, trusting, on the cold bed. They make a good score of it. Her ankles and feet still ached from their joke. Dark against the fireworks of the pain was that shadow: the always known Oncoming. By what other hand could the end be so sure and so complete, if not by this fire-touch woman who was now sitting before her?

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well?” Furii answered.

  A sudden rage came. “I know that this has to be played in a certain way, and there is a game that the victim is not supposed to break through. But I know about the game and the end of the game. Why make me foolish as well as dead! All right! I am foolish. The deception and the last change is here, so throw it and be done!”

  “Where are we now?” Furii said, shaking her head a little, very carefully unexcited. “You tell me about the Japanese soldier and about having been set apart and special. I try to make you secure that in giving such valuable secrets to our view you do not risk my faith in you for a moment. Then you come the next day and make our work part of the great deception and change.”

  “They knew when I was ready,” Deborah said. “When I could ask for help, they knew that I trusted and they were ready with the stone to break the flowerpot.”

  “Somehow the old hospital of the past and this present hospital have joined their natures in your mind. I will not open your trust and then betray you.”

  “Haven’t you got any mercy?” Deborah shouted. “Everyone is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. …I can’t stand to see suffering,’ they say, …so die outside!’ It has started already and you still say trust and everything is fine!”

  “When I look at you now in this bad shape I can hardly say …fine-fine.’ What happened between yesterday and now? If you say that the last Change has started, just tell me … tell both of us how.”

  Slowly, the doctor let Deborah come closer and closer to speaking the truth. Slowly, bit by bit, Deborah told her about asking for the pack. “It has a kind of humor in it, too,” she said bitterly. “It was like what sane people do when they see a rattlesnake. They scream for help, run for safety, lock the doors, crawl under the bed, and then, when the snake is caught, they faint. I got all ready for the onslaught, but I forgot that I was standing on their ground and all they had to do was to dissolve it under me.” She told about the long time calling out, and the pain and laughter from Yr, and she took a righteous pride that was almost gleeful in answering Furii’s questions.

  “Are you sure it was that long?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Now, you did call for help …”

  “You were never a mental patient, were you?”

  There was no smile at all, and Furii, as grave as Deborah had ever seen her, said, “No…. I am sorry, too, because I can only guess at what it must be like. But it will not stop me from being able to help you. Only it makes it your responsibility to explain everything fully to me and to be a little patient with me if sometimes my perceptions are a bit slow.”

  She went on and the quizzical look returned. “I think now, though, that you are a little too happy with yourself for this trouble you have. I think you are giving up too easily, so let me say again that I will not betray you.”

  At last Deborah had her tinder.

  “Prove it!” she shouted, remembering with what good cheer the teachers and doctors and counselors and family had dispensed deceit and misery over the years.

  “A hard proof, but a valid one,” Furii said. “Time.”

  chapter seventeen

  In the same kind of restraints as those in which Miss Coral had arrived, and with the same thrashing and profanity, the safari brought its new tigress to captivity, and, as before, the ward was laced with tension. Such arrivals always mirrored this patient’s anguish, threatened that one’s violence, and blew like a shifting wind over those to whom any change was a symbol of death. Outwardly there was little acknowledgment of the presence of new patients; many came to “D” and many went from it, but the fighting ones always bound the ward with a special kind of panic. Now Lee Miller, proud of her veteran’s status on the ward, watched with faintly amused tolerance until she looked into the face of the tigress proceeding down the hall. Then, recognizing it in the swarm of attendants, she turned, went to her bed, and lay down.

  Later, when Deborah went to Lee Miller and asked her who it was (knowing that certain patients usually learned by grapevine days in advance who was coming, Name, Age, Occupation, Religion, whether Married or Single, Previous Hospitals, Shock Treatments—what kind and how many—Other Treatment, and Remarks), Lee replied, “Why ask me?” and pulled her blanket over her face.

  Deborah was reduced to seeking out an attendant. “It’s a readmission,” the attendant said lightly. “Isn’t much written. Her name’s Doris Rivera.”

  With a sick feeling Deborah moved back against the wall and the attendant went by her. Fear and anger, fear and vindictive joy, fear and jealousy rose in her. She began to gag with the surfeit. The great Doris Rivera had broken her back on the wheel of the world. It was proof of something. Suddenly, the envy burst out of her mouth in a great gust of bitter laughter.

  “So much for Rivera, the North Star! Who did s
he think she was anyway!”

  “Napoleon!” Lena shouted, and grabbed the heavy ashtray she was using and threw it, missing Deborah and hitting the wall beside her.

  The attendant said, “Come on, now, Lena,” but there was no force in it.

  Later, Deborah heard her in the nursing station saying, “Damn that Blau bitch! Mommy and Daddy are shelling out plenty on that bitch who isn’t fit for saving.” Someone else demurred, but it was only for form’s sake. Deborah turned slowly and walked past the doors of the seclusion section to the front of the closed box where Doris had been taken.

  “That’s where you are, Presumptuous!” she said to the person behind the door. Who was she to have tried, challenging them all? And how dared she have failed under the grinding of the world! But there also came a long surge of pity, which was also pity for herself, and an answering terror, which was also terror for herself. So they come back; the ones who are too stubborn to accept that their nganons are poisonous and who are beaten to ruins. They come back, and slowly, they get up off the ward’s floors, shaking like the loser in a prizefight, and after a while stagger back toward the world again and again, and come back, not on the canvas, but in it. How many times will it take before they die at last?

  And you, Bird-one, Lactamaeon said, smiling a little. Darkness and pains and hard fear and mindlessness, and yet your heart is still going and your pulse still makes you a part of the census.

  Why? she shouted at him in Yri.

  Because your keepers are sadists!

  Throughout the day, everyone was busy seeing Doris. Doctors and nurses rang the keys of their authority in her locked door. Packs and sedations, consultations and counselings kept the ward excited and angry. A multitude of little sisters was consumed with envy for the attention given to a sibling who had come home to violate their sovereignty. Dowben’s Mary stood outside the door groaning wordlessly as the members of the parade emerged, and Lee Miller sat in her place on the hall muttering angrily, “So you’ve botched the job, Doc. Pick up the marbles and go home…. She’s lost. Doctors never know when they’re beaten.”