I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “Well, there are lots of mental hospitals, and they build more every day.”

  “And if I fight, then for what?”

  “For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity—a good strong self with which to begin to live.”

  “You certainly don’t go in for hyperbole.”

  “Look here, my dear girl,” Furii said, and thumped the ash of her cigarette on the tray. “I am your doctor and I see these years how allergic you are to lying, so I try not to tell lies.” She looked at Deborah with the familiar half-smile. “Besides, I like an anger that is not fearful and guilty and can come out in good and vigorous English.”

  They were quiet for a while and then Furii said, “I think it is time and that you are ready to answer for yourself the question that you raised before. Are you getting sicker? Don’t be afraid—you will not have to hang for your answer, whatever it is.”

  Deborah saw herself as Noah, sending out a dove to scout the fearful country. After a time the dove came back, quaking with exhaustion. No green branch, but at least it was a return. “Not sicker,” she said. “Not sicker at all.”

  “Not sicker …” Dr. Fried said at the meeting of the D-ward staff. “… Not sicker at all.”

  The ward personnel listened politely and attentively, but it seemed unbelievable to them that the bursting stream of gibberish and the uncontrolled and useless violence was not a great change for the worse. Before, Deborah Blau had been morbid and silent or morbid and witty; she had had an immobile face and a sarcastic and superior manner. There were real signs of serious mental illness, but now she fit the familiar form of D ward’s patients. She was “crazy,” a word felt and used by most of them except in the presence of the doctors or when they thought they might be overheard. It was the penetrating but unspoken word in the air now.

  “Well … the burning business is slowing up a little …” one of the attendants said, without much conviction.

  “That would be her …new morality,’” Dr. Fried answered with her little smile. “She said that she does not wish to involve other patients in her sickness, so she must get her fires elsewhere. She has made some restrictions on the stealing.”

  “Do they … do they have considerations like that? I mean … morals?” It was a new man asking. They all knew what the answer was supposed to be, but few of them really believed it. Only a few of the doctors really believed it and only some of the time.

  “Of course,” Dr. Fried said. “As you work here, you will often see evidences of it. There are many examples of such ethics or morals, which have moved …healthy’ ones to awe over the years—the little nicety, the sudden and unexpected generosity of great cost to the patient, but present nevertheless to remind us and to kick the crutch from our complacency. I remember when I left my hospital in Germany, a patient gave me a knife to protect myself. This knife he had made in secret by grinding down a piece of metal for months and months. He had made it to save against the day that his illness would become too painful for him to bear.”

  “And did you accept it?” someone asked.

  “Of course, since his ability to give was an indication of health and strength. But because I was coming to this country,” she said with a gentle little smile, “I gave the knife to one who had to stay behind.”

  “She’s a good speaker, don’t you think?” Dr. Royson said as they left. He had come to the conference as Dr. Halle’s guest and because he had worked for a while with some of the patients.

  “Blau is one of her cases,” Dr. Halle said. “Oh yes, I forgot. Of course, you knew that.”

  “Yes, I took over while she was away,” Dr. Royson said.

  “How was it?”

  “At first I thought it was her resentment that made the working so difficult—you know, having the regular therapist leave her—a rejection, you might say. But you know, that wasn’t the case. It was something we don’t like to face because we are doing medicine, and that’s a science which doesn’t admit of likes or dislikes. We just didn’t get on. We didn’t like each other. I think perhaps we were too much alike….”

  “Then it’s no wonder you struck sparks.”

  “Do you think there’s any real progress in that Blau case? She seems to think so.” He turned a little and made a gesture toward Dr. Fried. “But …”

  “I don’t see any, but she would know.”

  “She is a fine doctor—I wish I had her brains,” Royson said.

  “She is brainy”—and Halle looked back at the chubby little woman who was still answering questions in the conference room—“but after you know her a while, you’ll find out that with little Clara Fried, brains are only the beginning.”

  chapter twenty-two

  Through the distortion of heat-watering air over the volcano, through the gray lava-flow desolation between eruptions, Deborah noticed the onset of a certain kindness toward her from the ward staff—a kindness that seemed to be more than form. A new attendant by the name of Quentin Dobshansky, one of the Good Ones like McPherson, came to replace tired old Tichert; Mrs. Forbes came back to work on Male Disturbed, in the other building, and another autumn yielded to another winter.

  Winter was a hard season. The ancient and erratic heating system wheezed and clanged, overheating everyone to dullness when it was on and letting them all freeze when it wasn’t.

  “By what methods do they heat this place?” Lee asked, echoing eternal questions about eternal subjects. She was huddled with her coffee cup, trying to warm her hands.

  “It’s a system that Lucy’s Abdicated First Husband the VIIIth thought up,” Helene said.

  “The heating is taken care of by all the characters in the dreams we tell our doctors.”

  “They don’t hate us, though,” Mary chirped gaily, “at least not me. They despise me intensely, but they don’t hate me—because the Bible says not to!”

  Deborah got up and went in search of warmth. Since the eruption of the volcano, the need to keep alert for backfire material had lessened, though the anguish had not. The volcano’s fear-rage would still come and throw her against a wall with the force of its eruption, or send her running down the hall until she was stopped by a closed door or a wall. She was in a pack every day, sometimes twice, and once tightened in, she would let the fight explode and overcome her as violently as it would. Yet … yet they were all kinder, all the nurses and attendants, joking even, and giving little gifts of themselves.

  “Don’t you know why?” Furii said.

  “No. I am exploding and they take time with me. Lots of times I feel the thing coming and I ask to get packed and they do it, although it takes time and energy, and afterward, we sometimes even talk.”

  “You see,” Furii said gently, “when this volcano of yours broke, something else broke, too: your stoniness of expression. One sees you now reacting and living by looking at your face.”

  Deborah went ice cold with the special fear that was many years old and from which she had protected herself at such great cost.

  “Nacoi … nacoi …”

  “What is it?” Furii asked.

  “It was always … unmatching … what the face showed: …Why are you angry?’ when I was not, and …Why are you scornful?’ when I was not. It was part of the reason for a Censor and the set rules and Yri laws.”

  “You are free of them now,” Furii said. “Your face does not make enemies for you; it only shows a person reacting to what she feels. Anger and fear show also because you suffer them. But do not be frightened—no need anymore to lie about anger and fear, and, best of all, enjoyment shows too, and fun, and hope also, and these expressions are not unmatching, as you call it, but are appropriate and will become more and more subject to your own conscious wish and choice.”

  But Deborah was still frightened. Her facial expressions we
re a mystery to her, one that had never been solved. In memories whose meaning was still dark to her, she counted years and years of enemies made in ways which she could never explain. Part of it had been the look—must have been the look—some expression not hers which she had been wearing, a voice and a doer not herself and capable of turning allies into persecutors. Now that the volcano had melted her stone face it might all start over again: the nacoi-life of laws to which she had no key and realities to which she could lay no claim.

  The afternoon was cold and lowering, and coming back from the doctor’s office she laughed at herself and at the attendant with her, shivering in the cold (real cold), while she alone, although close to the attendant’s side, was also in cold (intraregional fear) and cold (Yr-cold).

  “Like to freeze you to death!” the attendant said. It was nice being spoken to in that way, so Deborah repaid the sense of equality with truth.

  “You’ve only got one kind of cold, the kind coats can fix.”

  The attendant sniffed. “Don’t you believe it,” she said, and Deborah remembered back, through a thousand falls and punishments, to McPherson saying, “What makes you think you have a corner on suffering?”

  “I’m sorry,” Deborah said. “I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

  But the attendant was bitter and angry, and began to tell Deborah about how hard it was to raise children and work for long hours and low pay. Deborah seemed to hear into the attendant’s mind, where the woman was saying also that the work was ugly: cleaning up messes from adult bodies and sitting in the midst of childish noises made by adult lungs and ingenuity. The woman was angry at Deborah, who was at that moment a symbol of “the job,” but Deborah felt that she was giving a confidence also. The dislike was impersonal and honest and therefore not hard to bear. At the door, whose lock and key were also symbols, the whole relationship ended; the attendant erased it as if it had never been, and her face was impassive as she walked away from her charge.

  Deborah walked idly around the ward for a while. When the change of shift came on, she asked to be let into the bathtub room to be by herself for a little while. Inside, the heat was turned off, but by force of habit she went to the old radiator and sat down on its covered top. A window above it looked out over the lawn part of the hospital grounds, where there were trees and a thick hedge that concealed the wall—Deborah had named it the Preserve. The sun, ready to set, glittered beyond the hedge like a cold star, and the trees seemed bare and gray in the diffusing light. It was quiet. Yr was quiet and the Collect, for once, was silent also. All the voices in all the worlds seemed stilled.

  Slowly and steadily, Deborah began to see the colors in the world. She saw the form and the colors of the trees and the walkway and the hedge and over the hedge to the winter sky. If the sun went down and the tones began to vibrate in the twilight, giving still more dimension to the Preserve. And in a slow, oncoming way, widening from a beginning, it appeared to Deborah that she would not die. It came upon her with a steady, mounting clarity that she was going to be more than undead, that she was going to be alive. It had a sense of wonder and awe, great joy and trepidation. “When will it begin?” she said to the gradual night. It came to her that it was already beginning.

  The night had fully arrived when she opened the door of the bathtub room and went out on the ward again. The Third Dimension, the meaning, persevered in the bare lines of walls and doors and the planes of people’s faces and bodies. There was a great temptation to watch—to keep seeing and hearing, sensing and reveling in the meaning and the light—the senses and planes of reality, but Deborah was the veteran of many deceits and she was cautious. She would subject this new thing to Furii’s time-hunter and let it shoot its arrows.

  She ate supper and found herself capable of suffering that she had to do it messily, with fingers and a wooden spoon. The food tasted. It was substantial under her teeth and afterward she remembered having eaten it.

  “Whatever this thing is …” she muttered, “… I wonder when they will pull it out from under.” She spent the evening listening to the attendants talking to one another like lonely outpost sentinels in a strange and barren land. They wouldn’t know what this thing was, but it was beginning to frighten Deborah because she didn’t know what it was going to turn into. Maybe it was another part of the Game, that always recurring last laugh of the world.

  When she gulped down her sedative and walked to bed she said to Yr, Suffer, gods.

  Suffer, Bird-one, we are waiting….

  I have a question: Two natives are in a comic strip, but they don’t know it, and think themselves alive. They are building a campfire on an island, which is really the back of a hippo who is standing in a river. They begin to cook their dinner. When the heat reaches through the hippo’s hide, he gets up and walks away, carrying the natives with astonished faces. Then the reader of this comic strip laughs and turns the page on which are natives, astonishment, jungle, river, hippo, and fire. The question is: What can their faces show now? What can they do now?

  One would have to wait in order to find out, Anterrabae said. Who knows, this happening may be gone by tomorrow.

  You may not even have to do anything about it, Lactamaeon said. You may not even have to think about it.

  Maybe it was just a symptom, Deborah said.

  In the morning she lay in bed awake, but wondering if it would be wise for her to open her eyes. Someone was screaming in the hall, and she could hear a student close by—rustling apron and apprehension—trying to wake Dowben’s Mary. Through her closed eyes the light from the morning sun was red. The lucky ones by the windows got all the benefit of the sun, but every morning the day reached out for all of them for a little while at least, and this morning it made Deborah search in her mind for something that had changed in her.

  “Something happened to me …” she whispered to herself, “… something yesterday. What was it? What was it?”

  “Come on, Miss Blau, rise and shine,” the student said.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Deborah asked, not wishing to give any of her questions away.

  “Typical regional cooking,” Fiorentini’s Mary chirped. “They never say what region, but I have some ideas!”

  “What kind of regional cooking do they have for people who are out of this world?” someone asked.

  Then it came to Deborah what had happened last night, with the color and the form and the meaning infusing it and the sense of life. Was it still there, waiting beyond the eyelids? She opened her eyes wide and at once. The world was still there. She got up, wrapped herself in her blanket, and went out on the hall and to the nursing station.

  “Excuse me, do I see my doctor today?” She had been a thousand times a mendicant before that door, but this time it seemed to be different, although no one acted as if it were.

  “Just a minute. Yes, you’re down for off the ward today. Two o’clock.”

  “Can I go by myself?”

  The suspicion came up like a surgical mask over the nurse’s face. “I’ll have to get a written order from the ward administrator. You know that by now.”

  “Can I see him when he comes?”

  “He’s not going to be on the ward today.”

  “Will you write my name down, please?”

  “All right.” And the nurse turned away.

  It sounded more like a maybe, but Deborah knew by now that it was not good form to seem too insistent, even though the world might be gone by the time the permission came through.

  At her hour she was shy and frightened that speaking of it might end it, but after a time of groping she told Furii about the seeing and, more importantly, about the meaning and the thing that had come attached to the meaning: the slow, opening hope.

  “It was not like what usually happens in Yr,” she said. “It reminded me of you because it was just a simple statement in my mind that I was going to live, to come up alive.”

  Furii gave her the familiar testing look. “Do you believe
that this is a true prognosis?”

  “I don’t want to say because I may have to hang by my thumbs from it.”

  “No, you won’t. Nothing will change for us.”

  “Well … I think … I think that it may be true.”

  “We prove it then,” Furii said. “We get to work.”

  They spent the time cutting ways to the old secrets and seeing facets of them that needed the new hunger for life to come real. Deborah saw that she had taken the part of the enemy Japanese as an answer to the hate of the ones at the summer camp, his foreignness and violence being an embodiment of anger. A part of the same insight opened on to the subject of martyrdom—that being martyred had something to do with Christ, the pride and terror of every Jew.

  “Anger and martyrdom,” she said, “that’s what being a Japanese soldier was, and I gave the doctors the …good soldier’ that they wanted. Anger and martyrdom … It sounds like something more … like the description of something I know….”

  “What more?” Furii asked. “It must have had many walls to have supported itself for all these years.”

  “It’s a description of … why … why, it’s grandfather!” Deborah cried, having unearthed the familiar tyrannical Latvian to whom she had given such an unrecognizable mask. It was a description of him and it fitted him better than height or weight or number of teeth. “The secret soldier that I was is a mulu—what Yr calls a kind of hiding image of my kinship with him.”

  “Coming to see this … does it hurt so much?”

  “A good hurt,” Deborah said.

  “The symptoms and the sickness and the secrets have many reasons for being. The parts and facets sustain one another, locking in and strengthening one another. If it were not so, we could give you a nice shot of this or that drug or a quick hypnosis and say, …Craziness, begone!’ and it would be an easy job. But these symptoms are built of many needs and serve many purposes, and that is why getting them away makes so much suffering.”