Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Perhaps it is only that you are looking to be shocked and frightened in this world.”

“You mean arranging deceits?” Deborah felt the ground beginning to go dangerous.

“But you had to make the deceits yourself, did you not? Or understand nothing.”

A picture came to Deborah from the years when she was only waiting for the end. She had been removed from the anti-Semitic camp, but the color of life had been set and only the despair could deepen. She was always off by herself sketching, they had said, but she never let anyone see the pictures. She had begun to carry that sketchbook around everywhere, clutching it like a kind of shield, and once, among a laughing, idle group of boys and girls, a picture had dropped out of the book without her knowing it. One of the boys had picked up the paper. “Hey—what’s this? Who dropped it?”

It was an intricate picture with many figures. One by one the members of the group disclaimed it: no, not mine, not mine, no, no … down the line, and finally he looked again at Deborah.

“Is this yours?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on—admit it.”

“No.”

As Deborah looked at the boy more closely, she saw that he was trying to help her—that if she would admit the work and take her “punishment” in the laughter of the others, he would defend her. He wanted to be a benefactor, but she did not know at what cost to her.

“Is it yours?”

“It is not mine.”

“You see—” she told the doctor bitterly, “they made me repudiate my art.”

“But don’t you see that the boy was begging you not to repudiate it, and none of the others laughed, really. You were only afraid that they might laugh. You alone made yourself lie.”

She looked at the doctor, angry and fearful. “How many times does one tell the truth and die for it!”

She got up angrily, went to the doctor’s desk, and took a sheet of paper and began to draw an answer to the seeming accusations of all of them: the doctor, who seemed to be blaming her; the Collect and its endless disapproval; the words of so many. She drew furiously for a while, and when she was finished, she handed the picture to the doctor.

“I see clearly the anger, but there are symbols here which you should explain. Crowns … scepters … birds …”

“Those are nightingales. So lovely. See, the girl has all the advantages, all that money can buy, only the birds use her hair for nests and to polish those crowns, and they burnish the scepter with her bones. She has the finest of crowns and the heaviest of scepters and everyone says, …Lucky girl, with all that!’”

Dr. Fried saw her patient turning and running, turning and running in her fear. Soon there would be no place to go and she would have to meet herself as she planned her own destruction. She looked at Deborah. At least the battle was being fought in earnest now. The old apathy was gone. She began to feel in herself a rising hope and with it an excitement that was like no other—the echo coming out of so deep a place still bore the sound of this girl’s potential health. She withheld the excitement from her face so that Deborah would not see it and damn herself forever by defiantly trying to prove that this Yr of hers was a fact.

“Crown and nightingales!” Deborah was saying caustically. “Keep the thing and you can show it to the learned doctors you lecture to. Tell them that you don’t have to be sane to understand linear perspective.”

“It does depend on the kind of perspective,” the doctor said. “But I think I’ll keep this for myself—to remind me that the creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.”

Deborah was sitting on the floor of the ward, idly waiting for a meeting with Anterrabae, when she saw Carla coming toward her down the hall. “Hey, Deb …”

“Carla? I didn’t know you were up here.”

Carla looked very tired. “Deb—I had enough of hate all boxed in. I decided to come up here where I can yell and yell until I get hoarse.” They looked at each other and smiled, knowing that “D” was not the “worst” ward at all, only the most honest. The other wards had “status” to keep up and a semblance of form to maintain.

The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular. So Wards A and B whispered their little symptoms and took their sedatives and were terrified of loud noises or overt agony or towering despair. Women’s Disturbed rocked like a boat sometimes, but its inmates felt free of the subtle, treacherous currents of secret madness.

Sometimes the patients talked to one another about their lives before, or shared information from the grapevine. Such was the instinct of the idle and displaced for some union with the world, however they wished to deny it. Now their world was peopled with psychotics and bounded by walls and wards.

“Where were you before?”

“Crown State.”

“Jessie was there. I knew her in Concord.”

“What ward in Concord?”

“Five and Eighteen.”

“I had a friend on Seven. She said it was a real bug-house.”

“Hell, it was! Hesketh was head of the place. He was nuttier than the patients.”

“Hesketh …?” Helene, passing by them, started from her trancelike procession down the hall. “Short and kind of thin? Blue eyes—a slurring of his r’s? Did he turn his head up like this?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“The bastard! I got beaten up by him at Mount Saint Mary’s.” And she continued on, moving away from them and back into her trance. Lee Miller rubbed her ear reflectively. “Mount Saint Mary’s … I remember … Doris was there, Doris Rivera.”

“Who the hell is she?”

“Oh, kid, she was before your time, a veteran of every treatment I ever heard of and she was as crazy as a bedbug. She was up here for three years.”

“Where did they send her then?”

“Nowhere. She’s living outside now and working.”

They were incredulous. Did someone really know? Could someone really name the name of a success—one for whom this place had been means and not end? They deluged Lee with questions until she said, “Listen, I knew Doris when she was up here on …D,’ but I don’t know her formula for success and I haven’t seen her since she left! All I know is that she’s out and has a job. Now damn it, leave me alone!”

The patients turned and began to scatter to the day-room, the bathroom, the far end of the hall, and their beds. The evening went into night. The Wife of the Assassinated made one of her monthly breaks for freedom—a headlong, blind dash to the closing ward door as the dinner trays left.

Deborah stood listening to the endless recitals of her wrongs in the chant of the Collect, and into the middle of their noise Anterrabae cried, See if you can ever go out and live. See if you can ever go out and work and be a person! The threat made her dizzy with fear. The outside world and its beings were as foreign to her as if she had never eaten at the same tables with them or been caught in the up-current of their death-dealing and unfathomable lives. All the simple-looking actions that she could not counterfeit, she saw again, flatly, like a series of still pictures. Young girls saying hello, walking together, going unafraid to school, the pretty girls, courting and marrying. She remembered Helene and the anguish which had made her wish to obliterate the face that had seen and understood the picture of a pretty college friend.

You are not of them! Lactamaeon screamed out of Yr, trying to protect her.

All the other mothers are proud of their young girls! the Collect was saying in the acid, mocking tone it took when things were worse than usual.