Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Now, Deborah,” he said earnestly—and she could see the hope in his eyes, something to do with his own success as a doctor if he could get the answer when another might fail—“I want you to tell me … Why is it always Hobbs and why never McPherson or Kendon? Is Hobbs rough on the patients without our knowing about it?”

Oh, that hope!—not for her but for her answer; not for the patients, but for a moment in his private dream when he would say matter-of-factly, “Oh, yes, I handled it.”

Deborah knew why it was Hobbs and not McPherson, but she could no more say it than she could be sympathetic to that raw, ambitious hope she saw in the doctor’s face. Hobbs was a little brutal sometimes, but it was more than that. He was frightened of the craziness he saw around him because it was an extension of something inside himself. He wanted people to be crazier and more bizarre than they really were so that he could see the line which separated him, his inclinations and random thoughts, and his half-wishes, from the full-bloomed, exploded madness of the patients. McPherson, on the other hand, was a strong man, even a happy one. He wanted the patients to be like him, and the closer they got to being like him the better he felt. He kept calling to the similarity between them, never demanding, but subtly, secretly calling, and when a scrap of it came forth, he welcomed it. The patients had merely continued to give each man what he really wanted. There was no injustice done, and Deborah had realized earlier in the day that Hobbs’s broken wrist was only keeping him a while longer from winding up on some mental ward as a patient.

She did not wish to say this, so she said, “There is no injustice being done.” It seemed to the doctor a cryptic statement—with a patient in bed, another with a broken rib, Hobbs’s wrist, another with a broken finger, and two nurses having black eyes and bruised faces. He rose to go. He had not helped her to say any more than she wished to say, and she saw that he was angry and disgusted with her for having helped to frustrate his daydream. Then the door opened quickly, and he turned. It was Helene, another patient, carrying her lunch tray into the day-room. Apparently they had given out lunch while Deborah was in with the doctor.

For a moment Deborah thought that Helene simply wanted to eat in the dayroom, where it was sunny, but seeing her face—no, it was not for the sun. The doctor looked up sharply and said, “Go back to your place, Helene.” With a single, graceful step back and a pivot of the arm, smooth on its fluid bearings, Helene sent the tray crashing down on Deborah’s head. Deborah had seen the beautiful balletlike motion and she was yearning after the beauty of it when the world suddenly exploded in an avalanche of warm, wet food—stew, shreds of things, and the glancing edge of the tray. She turned toward the ward doctor and saw him cowering against the wall, saying in a voice very different from his professional drawl: “Don’t hit me, Helene—don’t hit me! I know how hard you can hit!” Right behind his cry the attendants came rushing in to overwhelm the ballet with their heavy arms and hard, frightened faces. There seemed to Deborah to be quite a few of them for one small woman, even though she was like a thresher and they, wheat. She murmured beneath the mess dripping from her face and hair, “Good-by, Helene, go in sixes.”

“What did you say?” the doctor asked, straightening his clothes and struggling to do the same with his expression.

“I said, …Relevez, soufflé, dragged away. ’”

She heard the bed being moved for the cold pack. The doctor left hurriedly to cope with some screaming that had started in one of the back rooms. Deborah stood alone in the mess wondering if she were bleeding.

Because of the excitement, it was half an hour before she could get an attendant to unlock the bathroom so that she could clean up a little. Here as elsewhere, the attackers were favored above the attacked. They were not so far from the world after all. Deborah thought a curse against the whole business. They might have quelled Helene roughly, but they were caring about her; they were concerned. When she had freed herself of Helene’s lunch, she went to her bed, where her own cold food was waiting, having been half eaten by a patient who slept near the window.

“Eat, dear,” said the Wife of the Abdicated, sitting on her bed, “they’ll get it out of you later.”

“No …” said Deborah, looking at the stew. “I’ve done this already.”

The Wife of the Assassinated looked at her sharply. “My dear, you’ll never get a man, looking like that!”

She turned from Deborah to attend her conference, and, suddenly, Deborah knew why Helene had come in and tried to hurt her. About an hour earlier, before the doctor had called her, Helene had come to Deborah and, speaking quite clearly, had shown her some pictures which had come in a letter. Helene was kept in a seclusion room, for she was universally feared for her angers and violence, which could break bones when she wished. The door had been open today, though, and no one had noticed her going to see Deborah or had heard them sharing the small confidences of the pictures. She had gone on for a while telling Deborah who this one was and that, and had come to a picture and said, “She was with me in college.” A nice girl, standing in the real world, that nightmare no man’s land. Helene had taken the picture back from her and lain down on Deborah’s bed, saying, “Go away—I’m tired.” Because she was Helene, Deborah had left the room and gone into the hall and soon the attendant had found Helene and told her to go back to her room. Deborah understood now that Helene had attacked her because she had to discredit her as a witness to the shame and misery that the picture evoked. The mirror had to be dirtied so that it would no longer reflect the sudden secret vulnerability beneath the surface of hard fists and eyes and obscenity.

“Philosopher!” Deborah muttered to herself and picked a piece of food from behind her ear.

“We have the changes and we have the secret world,” Dr. Fried said, “but what was going on in your life in the meantime?”

“It’s hard to get close to; it all looks like hate—the world and camp and school….”

“Was the school also anti-Semitic?”

“Oh, no, it was truer there. The hate was all for myself, the good, hard in-spite-of-lessons-on-manners dislike. But every time mere dislike turned to active anger or hate, I never knew why. People would come to me and say, … … after what you did, …’ or … … after what you said, … even I won’t defend you anymore… .’ I never knew what it was that I had done or said. The maids in our house left one after another, until it was like a continuous procession, and I kept having to …apologize,’ but I never knew for what or why. Once I greeted my best friend and she turned from me. When I asked why, she said, …After what you did?’ She never spoke to me again, and I never found out what had happened.”

“Are you sure that you are not hiding some truth here—something you needed to do that angered these friends?”

“I’ve tried and tried to imagine, to think, to remember. I have no idea at all. None.”

“How did you feel about this happening?”

“After a while it was just a grayness and the surprise of the inevitable.”

“Surprise of the inevitable?”

“Where there is no law but this awful destruction, coming and always coming closer—the Imorh—the shadow of it is always inevitable. Yet—and why I don’t know—I keep suffering from its oncoming and from being hit and hit over and over from directions which I don’t expect.”