Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

At the table, they tried to forget the report for Suzy’s sake, but they both returned to it to worry it again and again this way and that, speaking in a kind of code over and around the head of the happy daughter, who sat chattering at her meal, knowing and not knowing why the heaviness was all around them like a fog, seeming to hide them from one another. It was Debby. It was always Debby. For a moment she wondered if, were she far away and sick, she could ever make them suffer so palpably. She realized suddenly that she would be afraid to try; she would lose—almost certainly. Fear of wanting to prove that failure once and for all, guilt at foreseeing such a failure, and anger at Debby, who had all the love, made Suzy turn from one parent to the other and say, “All right! She’s not lying in a ditch somewhere. She has doctors and stuff! Why is everybody always crying over poor, poor Debby!” She left the table angrily, but not before she had seen the pain in her parents’ faces.

Carla sat next to Deborah in the dayroom, elaborately smoking her cigarette. In conformity with the revised regulations of a hard-starch new head nurse, patients wishing to smoke were required to do so in the hall or dayroom, individually “specialed” by a nurse or attendant. For two weeks, cries of “Cigarette! Cigarette!” had echoed and reechoed from the hall and rooms, and the staff was beginning to look haggard.

Carla had come from the end dormitory, saying, “Cigarette, please,” up to the barred ward door, and then turning to Deborah with a wink, “If you can’t join ’em, fight ’em.” They had sat down, waiting for time to pass.

In the first days on D ward, Deborah had been able to dramatize herself in her own mind simply by thinking: the insane asylum—the violent ward. It conjured huge and flaming pictures in her mind. The reality had offered a promise of more physical safety, but to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself. The number of cracks on the cold corridor floor was nineteen, the wide way, and twenty-three the long way (counting the seam). When Deborah was in the world of the ward, she walked with the moving frieze up and down the corridor, around where it widened and was called “the hall,” into and around the dayroom, out to the nursing station, past the front bathroom, past the banks of seclusion rooms, past the dormitories (where wandering was not allowed), past the back bathroom, and around the other side of the corridor to start again. When she was not real enough to walk, she lay on her bed. The ceiling was nineteen holes by nineteen holes in its soundproofing squares. Sometimes she stood with the stone women near the nursing station, waiting for something to happen, or not to happen. The boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone’s violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief simple moments of companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone. Deborah and Carla were enjoying such a rain as Carla nursed her cigarette.

“When I get around to it, I’m going to do your portrait,” Deborah said, watching the smoke of Carla’s cigarette. From Deborah’s statement Carla understood that she had managed to steal both pencil and paper and hide them. They were behind the cold-water pipe in the front bathroom. The back section, where the tubs were, was always kept locked unless it was being used and it could be used only in the presence of the attendant. Deborah began to explain this and Carla caught the suggestion in it.

“It takes paper to do portraits,” Carla said.

“True.”

“What kind of picture would it be?”

“Watercolor. I would use lots and lots of water.”

Carla understood and smiled. “If you get to do it, you’ll need something to lean on.” By this Carla meant that she had a book and that it was hidden in an accessible place.

At the times when they were capable of it, the patients took great pleasure in the codes and secrecies of prisoners or nuns or mental patients or members of remote and tiny clans who knew every moment of each other’s day. Speaking past the alien faces of the attendants, they were beginning, now and then, fragments of an allegiance. Helene would move with Deborah or Carla sometimes, and then, frightened, withdraw into violence. Lee, the veteran of the ward, spoke the most. Although there was no cohesiveness or loyalty or generosity, at least they had secrets.

“I wish I could do that portrait now,” Deborah said, wishing aloud that she had the forbidden things. Paper was allowed, but pencils and pens were considered weapons and were not allowed on the ward unless used in the presence of a watching attendant.

“Do I need a hairwash?” Carla asked vaguely. In the code, she was suggesting that they both ask to be allowed to wash their hair. Carla would ask first and get the back bathroom with the nice big sink. Since policy was that unless there were three on duty in the bathroom, no more than one patient could use the sinks at one time, Deborah would have to go to the front bathroom, where she might be able to get the attendant to unlock the tub-room door and be distracted long enough for Deborah to get to her treasure.

“My hair feels dirty,” Deborah said. “If you don’t like it, you can lump it.” She was saying “thank you.”

The plan went well and by lunchtime the forbidden pencil was resting in a sling made of discarded rubber bands hooked to the underside of the fourth bedspring of Deborah’s bed. Then there was to wait for the lunch trays. Then there was to wait for the end of lunch. Then there was to wait for change of shift. Then there was to wait for supper. Then there was to wait for the sedative line. Then there was to wait for bed.

Dr. Fried was off at a convention of some kind, so there were not even the therapeutic hours to break the days. Deborah could have put in for the craft shop and gone there when the people from “D” went in the morning, but she didn’t. She had given up “doing things.” Sometimes she sketched a little, sitting on the floor and shielded by the bed of the Wife of the Abdicated. She attended the denunciations of the Collect, the tyranny of the Censor, and the witty calumny of the gods and the blandishments of Yr, but after the hours of punishment or propitiation there was time to wait through, endless time, marked off by meals and sleep, a word or two brushing by, an anger, a story, or the raging delusion of another patient—all experienced disinterestedly and remembered only as part of the frieze of the sick around the walls of the ward. Sometimes there were frightening dreams; or great volcanos of waking terror; or fears congealed with hallucinations of sound, odor, and touch; but mostly there was only looking at the clock that was masked like the face of a fencer standing forever en garde over the door of the nursing station.

Esther had written another letter to the hospital, asking if she might visit Deborah on her new ward, and if she might see the ward doctors and Deborah’s doctor also. The reply she got was the usual mystifying, placating one about the patient doing as well as could be expected. If she wished, she might have some time with Deborah’s doctor. The ward administrator did not deal directly with patients’ families, and visits to Ward D were not permitted. If there were any matters to be discussed, there would be time made available with the social worker, Mrs. Rollinder….

Esther took the long train ride for the single appointment with Dr. Fried. She was glad that Jacob’s work kept him from insisting that he drive her. At the hospital she found that her presence gave her no easier way around the doctors, whose written rules she had hoped somehow to circumvent. Dr. Fried was gentle but noncommittal. She tried to ease Esther’s fear about the D ward; she seemed hopeful still that this was a “phase of the sickness.” Esther talked to the social worker and got the same answers, but more impersonally and coldly. The no-visiting rule stood.