Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

The third change was the move to the city. Mother had thought it would be such a happy change. They could have their own place at last, even if it were an apartment, and Deborah would find friends of her own age. She had laughed as they left the old house, for she knew they were taking the ruin with them. In the city the fatal taint would stand out with even more clarity and the issues themselves would be clearer. At last, the old hate and loneliness could no longer be attributed to their being Jewish. But the hate of the old place had grown familiar. In the city the new scorn and the new loneliness cut their channels deep in the parts of her feeling that had not yet been toughened.

This time the mirror came as another embarrassment: a gym teacher singling her out for some scornful comment on her clumsiness. She had fallen headlong into the Pit. She spent three days of walking nightmare, invisible to her own soul and inaudible to her own ears.

Then, one evening shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was returning from a doctor’s office, heavy with the nonexistent pain of her nonexistent tumor. Anterrabae and Lactamaeon were with her and so were the Censor and the Collect. Amid the noise of their conflicting demands and curses, she suddenly realized that she had lost another day somehow. In an inexplicable way time pleated up again, and it was another time and she was being chased by a policeman. When he caught up to her, he asked her what was wrong; she had been running in great terror from something. She assured him that nothing was the matter, even ducking into a building to get away. When she came out again, she was walking to the slow, deep rhythm of a drumbeat. It has come. The Imorh at last is here. There came a long, calm sounding of the rhythm and a great peace because there was no more need to struggle or resist.

The three changes and the three mirrors, all as Lactamaeon had said.

“But I could not be sure. I am good at getting deceived, you know. It’s even one of my names in Yr, The Always Deceived.”

“Since two of your three changes happened before the gods were even presences to you, I wonder if they did not seem wise by hindsight. I wonder if they do not deceive you only to conform to your own picture of the world.” The doctor leaned forward in the chair, feeling Deborah’s exhaustion at revealing the things which seemed to Deborah to most truly motivate her. A secret language concealing a still more secret one; a world veiling a hidden world; and symptoms guarding still deeper symptoms to which it was not yet time to go, and those in turn concealing a still, still deeper burning wish to live. She wanted to tell the stunned-looking girl in front of her that this sickness, which everyone shied from and was frightened of, was also an adjustment; these hidden worlds—all of them—and tongues and codes and propitiations were for her the means to stay alive in a world of anarchy and terror.

“You know … the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.”

“At least being nuts is being somewhere.”

“Exactly so, but it is still in a group, with other people.”

“No! No!”

“At a terrible price, you belong.”

“Not to anyone here! Not to you or the world! Anterrabae told me that a long time ago. I belong to Yr!” But Deborah knew that the doctor was, perhaps, in a small way right. She had opened her mind to the words the way an eye used to darkness, veiled with its lashes, opens cautiously to the light, and, finding it even a little blinding, closes itself too late. The light had come, and come invincibly, even after the eye had renounced it. It was too late to unsee. She was, after all, at home on D ward, more than she had ever been anywhere, and for the first time as a recognizable and defined thing—one of the nuts. She would have a banner under which to stand.

After the session Dr. Fried went to her kitchen and began to brew some coffee. Mirrors and changes! Aren’t all human eyes distorting mirrors? Here again, as a hundred times before, she was standing between one person’s truth and another’s, marveling at how different they were even when there was love and the shared experiences of many years. After the tumor business and the anti-Semitism of the camp there must have begun the malignant and pernicious loneliness that is the ground of mental illness; all of the love that Esther gave had been reinterpreted by Deborah. If the daughter was damned surely, she must feel that her mother knew it and was offering pity instead of love and feeling martyrdom instead of pride.

When the coffee began to perk, she looked at it suddenly feeling a little old and baffled. The mother was formidable. “Charming … needing very much to be charming and a great success at everything …” she murmured to the empty cup in front of her. “She is competitive, I think…. She dominates, but there is honest love too…. Ach!” And she leaped up with a word in the true and familiar language of her own childhood and youth because the coffee had boiled over and was spilling from under the lid.

Deborah walked back to the ward, yearning for somewhere she could go to be completely alone. In this place aloneness was an ambiguous state, for though the hospital was full, the floors were full, and the wards were full, all the occupants were separated. In all the hospitals she had heard about there were atomized armies of persons who had severed their claims to membership in all the world’s other groups and orders. Some of the patients on her ward had been stopped motionless. Some, like the prostituted Wife of the Assassinated Ex-President, had set up their own kingdoms and never even seemed to approach, as Deborah did, the edges of terrestrial reality.

Many of the patients had the preternatural ability to tell, almost at a glance, it seemed, where another person’s weaknesses lay and how great and compelling those weaknesses were. But coupled with this power, as if the forces of self-ruin were afraid of it, was the utter inability to use the knowledge consciously. They had all been taught to be “civilized,” never to laugh at cripples or stone the deformed or stare at old men in the road. They obeyed these commandments, but when it came to unseen lamenesses, they perceived secrets with accustomed eyes, and they heard the hidden pleas of the so-called sane with well-attuned ears, and they were merciless. But their cruelty was beyond their own grasp or control.

Deborah saw one attendant attacked by the patients night after night. The attackers were always the sickest ones on the ward—out of contact, far from “reality.” Yet they always chose to go against the same man. On the day after a fight that had been more violent than usual, there was an inquiry. The battle had become a free-for-all; patients and staff were bruised and bleeding and the ward administrator had to ask everyone questions. Deborah had watched the fight from the floor, hoping that an attendant would trip over her foot, so that she might play a little parody of St. Augustine and say later, “Well, the foot was there, but I didn’t make him use it. Free will, after all—free will.”

The ward administrator spoke to everyone about the fight. The patients were proud of their lack of involvement; even the mutest and most wild-eyed managed a fine disdain and they purposely thwarted all of the questions.

“How did it start?” the doctor asked Deborah, alone and very important for her moment in the empty day-room.

“Well … Hobbs came down the hall and then there was the fight. It was a good fight, too, not too loud and not too soft. Lucy Martenson’s fist intruded into Mr. Hobbs’s thought processes, and his foot found some of Lee Miller. I had a foot out, too, but nobody used it.”