Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Deborah was weak when she got up, and had difficulty walking, but her world-self had risen. When she was dressed, she went back to her bed to lie down. The unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England was full of solicitude. “You poor little whore,” she said, “I saw what they did to you for not sleeping with that doctor! They tied you so that you couldn’t move and then he went in and violated you.”

“What a prize!” Deborah answered acidly.

“Don’t lie to me! I am the unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England!” the Wife shouted. Her phantoms flowed to her, and she began to chat with them in a parody of all of gentility’s gossip and rattling teacups. Politeness made her introduce Deborah, from whom the streaky marks of sheet creases were just beginning to fade: “And this is the little tart I was telling you about.”

“Disturbed … what does disturbed mean ?” Esther Blau said, looking at the report again. She was hoping that the word would change or that some other word would appear to modify it so that it could be transmuted into the pleasant fact she wanted. In its briefly impersonal way, the monthly report counseled patience, but the facts it contained were unambiguous, and the signature at the bottom was that of another doctor, the administrator of the Disturbed Ward. Esther wrote immediately to the hospital and shortly received a reply saying that a visit would not be wise.

With a fear verging on panic, Esther wrote to Dr. Fried. Perhaps she might go down again, not to see Deborah, since the hospital thought it unwise, but to confer with Deborah’s doctors about this change. The answer was the attempt of an honest person to reassure. It, too, counseled patience. Of course, if she and her husband felt it necessary to come, they would be given appointments, but this seeming setback was in itself no reason for anxiety.

Esther remembered the screams from that high, double-barred place, and she shivered. Reading the letter over again and again, she located the subtle strain of its meaning, like a hidden message. She must not let her fear, or Jacob’s, interfere with what was happening to their daughter. She must wait and endure. Quietly, she put the letter and the report away with the others. She did not look at it again.

“I wonder if there is a pattern …” Dr. Fried said. “You give up a secret to our view and then you get so scared that you run for cover into your panic or into your secret world. To Yr or there.”

“Stop making my puns,” Deborah said, and they laughed a little.

“Well then, tell me what the rhythm is, of these upsets of yours.” She was looking at her patient intently, interested in that world which had been a refuge once, had suddenly gone gray, and was now a tyranny whose rulers Deborah had to spend long days of her life propitiating.

“One day …” Deborah started. “One day I was walking home from school and Lactamaeon came to me and said, Three Changes and Their Mirrors, and then Death. He spoke Yri and in Yri the word that means death also means sleep, insanity, and the Pit. I didn’t know which he meant. The first change, I knew, was riding home from the hospital after the tumor was supposed to be out. Its mirror was the broken flower that I saw years later. The second change was being shamed in the camp, and its mirror was an episode with a car when I was about fourteen. The third was moving to the city, and its mirror, foretold, was what made the prophecy come true. Whether it was cutting my wrist or coming home I don’t know, but it was the death that Lactamaeon spoke of.”

“Two of the changes happened before the god, or whatever, announced them, didn’t they?”

“But the third didn’t and the mirrors didn’t.” And she began to tell of the weaving together of prologue and destiny, that was the fabric of her secret world.

When the tumor was removed, everyone had been jubilant. They had driven her home from the hospital through a light rain and they had been laughing. Deborah had stood up in the back of the car and looked out at the gray skies and the wet streets where people were pulling their coats close. Reality was not inside this car with her singing mother and cheerful father, but toward the murky sky finishing with its rain, exhausted and dark. It occurred to her that this darkness was now, and was forever going to be, the color of her life. Years later, after other realities had been argued for between her soul and the world, Lactamaeon reminded her of that day of knowledge.

Even before she had gone to that hospital there had been a dream: a white room—the hospital room as she imagined it—and an open window through which she saw a brilliant blue sky where a swiftly changing white cloud rode. In the window a flowerpot stood and a red geranium was growing in it. “You see—” the dream voice said, “there are flowers in a hospital and strength, too. You will live and be strong.” But suddenly in the dream the air went dark and the sky through the window blackened, and a stone thrown from somewhere smashed the pot and broke the plant. There was the sound of screaming and the foreknowledge of something horrible. Many years later a bitter-voiced art student—another Deborah entirely—passed by a broken flowerpot that had fallen into the street. The dirt had spilled out and a red flower hung tangled in its own roots and stem. Lactamaeon, beside her, whispered, See — see. The change has come and the mirror of the change is here. It is completed. Two more changes and two more mirrors of those changes and then Imorh (that word like death or sleep or insanity; a word made like a sigh of hopelessness).

The second change came when she was nine and it came with her shaming. It was the first day of her third year at the camp, and still fighting against what she felt was the injustice of having been born as herself, she reported the two girls who had ridiculed her and refused to let her walk with them. The camp director gave her a hard look. “Who actually said those words to you: …We don’t walk with stinking Jews—’ Was it Claire or Joan?”

Because it was the first day, Deborah was confused over names and faces in the swarm of girls. “It was Claire,” Deborah answered. Only when Claire was called and hotly denied saying the words did Deborah realize that Claire had only listened and nodded agreement and that the speaker had been Joan.

“Claire denies this. What do you say now?”

“Nothing.” The train of ruin was keeping its track. She stopped struggling and said no more. That night there was one of the comradely campfires that campers remember years later with wistful sadness at the innocence of their youth. The director gave an impassioned speech about “a liar in our midst who uses her religion to get pity and involve innocent girls in trouble—one among us who would stoop to any evil, any dishonor.” He would not mention names, he said, but they all knew who it was.

Some days later when she managed to get away for a while by herself, she heard a voice from somewhere saying in a sweet, dark sound, You are not of them. You are of us. She looked for the voice but it was part of the mosaic of leaves and sunlight. Fight their lies no longer. You are not of them. After a while, hoping to hear the voice, becoming sadder with the loss of it, she found it again in the night of stars, inaudible to the others walking with her, the same rich voice saying like a poem, You can be our bird, free in wind. You can be our wild horse who shakes his head and is not ashamed.

The shaming was the second change, but the rising of the gods, the first intimations of what would become Yr, made the shaming secondary. The hatred of the people in the world was, rather than a wound, suddenly a proof of the truth of Yr and it was reflected in its mirror, suddenly, when Anterrabae called her from a crowd in a car and she had to make them stop and let her go. In the camp the world had held her hour after hour, but henceforth she could no longer be kept, for she belonged otherly, as Yr said.