I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  Part of it was of the same fear that had made the others back off from her definition of a “good, healthy sickness.” She smiled at it ruefully.

  “It should be strong enough, this therapy,” Carla said, “to go a lousy mile into town. I’m going to start looking for jobs where I won’t be sealed up in a little room somewhere. Maybe that was the main trouble before.” She sounded frightened and tired.

  “I’ll miss you,” Deborah said bleakly.

  “Maybe soon you can come, too.”

  Deborah tried to say “sure,” but she knew that her fear might translate the words into some other language, so she lay on her bed and felt the fear settle over her like fog.

  The girl who took Carla’s place in her room was a gentle, generous veteran of mechanical psychiatry in a dozen other hospitals. Her memory had been ravaged, but her sickness was still intact. She gave herself dozens of sets of wildly divergent parents. “It was always a musical family …” she would say vaguely. “My father—he’s Paderewski, and my mother is Sophie Tucker. It’s why I’m high-strung.”

  Deborah liked her and after a while they did not speak of families at all, or the marital frictions of her parents, Greta Garbo and Will Rogers.

  The hunger for the new world which had awakened in Deborah forced her to seek more and more of it. She would sit near the student nurses on the hall and in the craft shop to hear them talk. She would question them about their lives and families and where they lived and what they wanted to do after they finished their training. She would walk into town and back often, learning all the ways there were to go and come, looking, smelling, watching the seasons change.

  The hunger made her go even where she was not wanted, into the social life of the town. She joined two church choirs and talked to the Methodist minister about the young people’s group. They both knew that belonging was a hopeless quest; the hospital and its inmates had been feared and ridiculed far too long in the small, insular community. But the tired, quiet ladies of the church choir could not measure or reckon the passionate hunger of a newborn worldling for her birthright. Although they ignored her, she came anyway. They made her invisible, yet she still came.

  And finally, in fear and excitement, restlessness and stubborn will, she set into motion the request for her own way out of the hospital. When the machinery had whirred and the response had come, she saw in her roommate’s face the look which she, in turn, must have shown to Carla and before Carla to Doris Rivera—an awe, a fear, an anger, an envy—above all, a reality-shattering loneliness.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, your going,” the roommate said. “I’m not really a patient here, you know. I’m just doing research for my degree and as soon as I’m finished I’ll just pick up and go.”

  When Deborah said good-by, the woman looked at her as if she had never seen her before.

  The social worker had a list of rooms in town that could be let to outpatients. Most of them, Deborah knew from the grapevine or from her walks, were poor and dark, and partook of the shame of the lepers who lived in them.

  “There are one or two places which are new and have no patients living in them. They are a little far, though—way over on the other side of town.”

  Deborah closed her eyes and put her finger on the list of names.

  “The law requires us to state—”

  “Yes, I know,” Deborah said, and suddenly remembering her sprained ankle and St. Agnes’s (“Are they violent?”) she winced a little.

  “I’ll have to come along,” said the social worker. “It’s a requirement—”

  They stood together at the door of the old house, and when the landlady opened it, Deborah looked hard at her, waiting for the guarding of the eyes and the closing of the face as the social worker explained what she was. The landlady was elderly and there was little subtlety in her. Deborah began to wonder if she understood what was being said.

  When the worker was finished she motioned to them. “Well, I hope you like the room.”

  “It’s a mental hospital,” the social worker said desperately.

  “Oh? … Now, this room has more light, but the other is closer to the bathroom, you see.”

  When the worker left, the landlady only said, “Now, please don’t clog up this toilet—it’s old and a little cantankerous.”

  “Not if my life depended on it,” Deborah said.

  As it turned out, the landlady, Mrs. King, was a stranger in the town and had not been raised on the bogeymen of “That Place.” Too many incidents and frightening tales had bred fear and contempt in most of the town’s people. Deborah had often seen mothers call their children out of the range of “The Captain,” who had been in the Navy and talked to himself as he walked. To Deborah, who looked somewhat more normal, the town showed no such fear. It showed nothing. Although Deborah had gone to the choir practice at the church and sewing classes at the high school, and even a teenage outing club (Come One Come All), she went and returned, sharing a sewing machine, a hymnbook, a map, and “good evening” and “good night” and no more. Everyone was most polite and so was she, but their lives had been walled against her.

  “Is it the town or is it my face?”

  “Maybe both …” said Furii, “although your face looks all right to me—perhaps there is a certain anxiety in it when you meet people.”

  Deborah and Dr. Fried worked without inspiration—a kind of mental day labor, finding in the new freedoms new confrontations with the past.

  “I wanted to ask you,” Furii said, “to look back again to the past and tell me if you see any light breaking through that grayness of which we have spoken.”

  Deborah sank back into the memories. The reign of ruin and calamity, which had seemed so total, now, magically, admitted of some patches of sunlight all but lost under the conquering powers of Yr. “Yes … yes … I do!” She smiled. “I seem to remember whole days of it some-times—and there was that year in the house where we were before we moved back to Chicago—and there was my friend—how could I have forgotten!”

  “You had a friend?”

  “Until I came here—and she was not one of the ruined either, at least not after she got used to the newness of the city. She started like all the others to whom nganon cries—she was lonely and a foreigner—but she learned our ways quickly and she was good—I mean she was not ruined!”

  “You heard from her in the last years?”

  “Oh, yes! She’s in college—why didn’t I remember?”

  “When you were so very ill, remembering a friend or a partial sunlight would have meant changing a view of the world that could not allow change. One relinquishes claim to the world for a reason. You have to have all the reasons to make so big a renunciation. Now, when you have come again to the world, you are able to remember what was also there with the darkness. Much of it was darkness only because it was balanced against the light of loving and experiencing truth.”

  “But Yr is beautiful and true also, and there is love there, too.”

  “It is not the language, and not the gods in themselves,” Furii said, “but their force of keeping you from the world, which is the sickness.”

  “It’s nice to walk with Lactamaeon when he is in a good mood. After the sewing class, where I don’t belong, or the church choir where I am a stranger, it’s good to walk home with someone who can laugh and be silly or turn beautiful and make you cry, looking at the stars while he recites.”

  “You know, don’t you, now, that you made him up out of yourself—that you created him out of your own humor and your own beauty?” Furii said gently.

  “Yes—I know now.” It was an admission that gave much pain.

  “When were you at last able to see this?”

  “You mean with all my eyes?”

  Furii nodded.

  “Well, maybe I always saw it, partly far in the place where it was safe, but I guess it’s been getting nearer and nearer to me for a long time. Last week I was laughing secretly with Idat and Anter
rabae. They had written a choral setting of a poem by Horace, and when they sang it, I said, That was one of the few texts I know by heart all the way through. And Anterrabae said, Of course! And then we started the kind of banter—the kind you have when you are kidding and hurting someone at the same time. I said, Teach me mathematics, and they laughed, but they admitted at last that they could not go beyond my knowledge. Then we were insulting each other and laughing, but giving pain, too. I said to Anterrabae, Is that my fire you are burning in? and he said, Was it not worth the fuel? I said, Does it do for light or heat? and he said, For years of your life. I said, For all the years? Forever? A disputed land, your land.

  “Do you see the Collect now as the criticism of parts of your own mind?” Furii said.

  “I’m afraid, still afraid that they are real somehow. It would be wonderful if I could dismiss them when I wanted to.”

  Furii reminded her how merciless the Collect had been, and how lacking in real beauty for a long, long time the gods had been. Only now when she fought them did they come with their allurements of wit and poetry, because it is harder to fight an amiable spirit.

  While the memory of light was still in Deborah’s mind, Furii said, “What about your new friend, Carla? Do you still see her sometimes?” And Deborah began to tell Furii about the strange thing that had happened.

  She had not seen Carla much lately, but when they were together there was a special closeness between them. They might have been friends anywhere, but because they had been sick together and had fought out of it at the same time, their comradeship was tinged with the aura of emergent life and struggle. Carla was busy during the day at a lab technician’s job, and at night she had to spend time studying the new techniques which had passed by the barred windows of her five years and three hospitals.

  They had shared much of their pasts, most of their fears, and all of their tenuous and fragile hopes, but Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art, or something on which she was working, a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness. Because it was a subtle emotion in a world of erratic oscillations of feeling, of violence, and of lies told by every sense and perception, Deborah had not noticed it in their sick times. But one day the world had cleared enough so that she realized that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back. In their new eagerness for experience and reality, the strange aloofness stood out clearly. She did not remember Carla ever having seen her work, but there must have been scraps of it about during their days of paper-collecting on D ward. It must have been that Carla hadn’t liked what she had seen and was guilty, being a friend, and angry because of it. So Deborah had decided to spare Carla the ups and downs of her art. There was so much to share in the new world that they never missed the view from that one window.

  The Saturday before, Deborah had gone to sleep looking forward to telling Carla about a new boarder and the landlady’s son-in-law. She had a dream.

  In the dream it was winter and night. The sky was thick blue-black and the stars were frozen in it, so that they glimmered. Over the clean white and windswept hills the shadows of snowdrifts drew long. She was walking on the crust of snow, watching the star-glimmer and the snow-glimmer and the cold tear-glimmer in her own eyes. A deep voice said to her, “You know, don’t you, that the stars are sound as well as light?”

  She listened and heard a lullaby made by the voices of the stars, sounding so beautiful together that she began to cry with it.

  The voice said, “Look out there.”

  She looked toward the horizon. “See, it is a sweep, a curve.” Then the voice said, “This night is a curve of darkness and the space beyond it is a curve of human history, with every single life an arch from birth to death. The apex of all of these single curves determines the curve of history and, at last, of man.”

  “Can I know about my curve?” she said, begging the voice. “Will I hold part of the sweep of the age?”

  “I cannot show you yours,” the voice said, “but I can show you Carla’s. Dig here, deep in the snow. It is buried and frozen—Dig deep.”

  Deborah pushed the snow aside with her hands. It was very cold, but she worked with a great intensity as if there were salvation in it. At last her hand struck something and she tore it up from burial. It was a piece of bone, thick and very strong and curved in a long, high, steady curve.

  “Is this Carla’s life?” she asked. “Her creativity?”

  “It is bone-deep with her, though buried and frozen.” The voice paused a moment and then said, “It’s a fine one—a fine solid one!”

  Deborah wanted to plead again for the shape that her art would draw in time, but the dream faded and the voices of the stars became dim and died out entirely at last.

  In the morning the vividness was still with her, so that when Carla came and they sat idly and talked, Deborah was distracted and her mind was still hung with heavy stars and her hands were still gripping the smooth curve of bone.

  “Please don’t be angry,” she said, and then told Carla the dream. When she got to the part about digging in the snow for the curve, Carla was with her; when she pulled up what was buried, Carla said, “Do you see it? What is it like!” moving a little whenever Deborah moved as if to brush the snow away from it. When she described it to Carla and told what the voice said, Carla began to cry.

  “Do you think it’s true—do you really think it’s true?”

  “I told you as it happened.”

  “You didn’t make it up—I mean you really dreamed it that way—”

  “Yes, I did.”

  She wiped her eyes. “It was only a dream, your dream….”

  “It’s true anyway,” Deborah said.

  “The one place I could never go …” Carla said musing, “… the one hunger I could never admit.”

  When Deborah finished, Furii said, “You always took your art for granted, didn’t you? I used to read in the ward reports all the time how you managed to do your drawing in spite of every sort of inconvenience and restriction. You were rich in your gift, even at your sickest, and now you see how it can be with others who are not so lucky to have a creative calling into which they can grow and grow. The healthy friendship you had to bury in forgetfulness, and the times of sunlight you banished from your memory. I think this dream was to remind you of another joy as well; it was the understanding of Carla. There may be many who envy you a little—yes, yes, I know it sounds like the old …lucky girl’ business, but it isn’t. You have been taking for granted this rich and prolific gift of yours that so many others would give so much to have themselves. By this dream you were perhaps awakening to it a little. It is part of the call of the world.”

  As Deborah listened to Furii’s description of her, it did not sound like a cursed and ruined life. Together they recalled the old Yri cry: Immutably, in sleep, in silence, nganon cries from itself. It had been the secret cry to the damned and had made Deborah an engine and accomplice in their destruction. It would seem now that this horror had been lifted. Was it possible that she could touch things without causing them to become diseased? Was it possible that she could love without poisoning, witness without blighting? Could she give testimony from the elemental bone in a friend’s good need?

  chapter twenty-eight

  Deborah spent the next months simply, working on a series of pen-and-ink drawings and cleaving the past in heavy hours with Dr. Fried. As the world began to gain form, dimension, and color, she started to find the sessions of choir practice and sewing class too fragile a scaffold on which to build hope. No matter how pleasant, sane, or cooperative she was, invisible and inaudible was all she would ever be. She would know the Methodist liturgical year and some of the gossip of the Ladies’ Altar Club, but she would never penetrate an inch under the politely closed faces whose motions she duplicated in those places. Over the text of John Stainer’s “Seven-Fold Amen,” she looked out into the congregation on
Sunday and wondered if they ever thanked God for the light in their minds, for friends, for cold and pain responsive to the laws of nature, for enough depth of sight into these laws to have expectations, for friends, for the days and nights that follow one another in stately rhythm, for the sparks that fly upward, for friends…. Did they know how beautiful and enviable their lives were? She realized more and more that her few spare-hour pastimes provided too little in which to test or exercise her fragile “yes” to a newborn reality.

  Although she read Latin and some Greek, she had never graduated from high school and her memory of it was now almost four years old—the memories of an occasional visitor from a foreign place. She looked in the town papers and was surprised at her feeble knowledge of the world and its requirements. No job, even the simplest, was open to her. The town was small and slow; a waitress or 5 & 10 girl would not be under the pressure of hurrying crowds; these jobs required little intellect; but she did not have enough education to qualify for them.

  For a while there was no help from the hospital. The psychiatrists were all themselves strangers to the town and had been long years away from considerations of skilled and unskilled labor. Dr. Fried implied subtly that it might be Deborah’s problem to solve, and the outpatient administrator, after saying somewhat the same thing, mentioned offhandedly that he would look into the problem. When he called her back to his office two weeks later, he seemed a little surprised.

  “I’ve talked to several people,” he said, “and apparently you’ll have to get through high school, before you can get any job.” To her terror-stricken look he said, “Well … think about it for a while. …”

  He did not know that Deborah had gone during the day to look at the town high school. It was a great and sudden stand of buildings all the way over on the other side of town. The stone heaps brooded like a great moa, too big to fly. She might have to be one of the students at that school. She had been broken in a school like that, years ago. Certainly the sickness had been building up inside her for years, but the final terrors of it—the missing days, the sudden falls into dark Yr—were all walked through in halls like the ones inside that building, among faces like the ones that would be there. She remembered the struggle before she had given up the pretense of consubstantiality. She thought again of the secret Japanese, bearing untreated the wounds which had led to his capture, secretly dead and bearing unnoticed the pressure-crazing Semblance, secretly a citizen and captive of Anterrabae, the Censor, the Collect, and the Pit.