Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Pity,” Deborah said, “pity. Somewhere there is a thief who has heard that people bury and hide their gold and jewels. Can you see the expression on his face when he comes on what I have buried!” For a moment they both laughed.

When the evening shift came on, Helene placed herself in front of the nursing station and began stamping her feet heavily. The noise soon brought an attendant out.

“What’s that matter now, Helene?”

“Case closed,” Helene said. “I’m stamping Mr. Hobbs’s case closed.”

She was smiling archly, so that the attendant’s face tightened. It was supposed to be a big secret that the night before Mr. Hobbs had gone home after his shift, closed his doors and windows, turned on the gas, and died. In the nun-prisoner-pigmy confinement of Ward D everyone knew, even the unknowing.

As lunatics, crazies, screwballs, nuts, the patients felt no responsibility to be decent and desist from speaking ill of the dead. Where deformity of the body was regarded with certain mercy, death and its conventions were heaped with scorn. Helene had once said, “A nut is someone whose noose broke,” for they had all wanted to kill themselves, they had all tried suicide more or less diligently, and they all envied the dead. Part of their illness was that they saw the whole world revolving around themselves, and so what Hobbs had done was to stick out his tongue at them from a place where they could not get at him to slap his face for it.

The evening shift was here, and the patients were all waiting to see who would be taking Hobbs’s place. When those at the head of the hall saw, they carried the news back.

“It’s a Nose—a new one—a new Nose,” and there was an almost palpable groan. Noses were Conscientious Objectors who had selected to work in mental hospitals as an alternative to prison. Lee Miller had originated the name “Nose” a long time ago by saying, “Oh, those conchies, I hate them. They won’t fight, so the government says …We’ll rub your noses in it for you! It’s either prison or the nuthouse!’ ” Helene had laughed and someone else had said, “Well, they’re the noses’ and we’re it. ”

Now Carla only murmured, “I like being somebody’s punishment; it makes me feel needed,” and she laughed, but with a bitterness that was rare for her.

The Noses usually came in pairs. “I suppose we should call one of them a Nostril,” precise Mary said, rubbing the blood from invisible stigmata. The patients laughed.

“Maybe he’ll be all right,” Carla said. “Anything’s better than Hobbs.”

They watched the new staff member go his first long and hard walk down the hall. He was terrified. They saw his terror with feelings caught between amusement and anger. Constantia, in the seclusion section, began to scream when she saw him, and Mary, hearing it, said, “Oh, my God, he’s going to faint!” laughing and then hurt: “She’s only a person, you know.”

“He’s afraid he’ll catch what we have,” Deborah said, and they all laughed, because Hobbs had caught it, and died from it too.

The expedition neared them.

“Get up off the floor, will you please?” the head ward nurse said to the group of patients sitting against the walls of the hall and corridor.

Deborah looked at the Nose. “Obstacle,” she said.

She meant that she and the other patients with feet stuck out before the terrified man were like the contrivances in the obstacle courses that men must run through in their military training, that she and they understood their substitution as “the horrors of war,” and that they would try to fulfill the Army’s desire that this man’s training be rigorous. But the nurses neither laughed nor understood, and passed by with another admonition about getting off the floor. The patients all knew that it was merely form. Everybody always sat on the floor and it was only when guests came that the nurses, like suburban wives, clucked at the dust and wished that “things were neater.”

Constantia was beginning to work herself up into an all-night howl, when the ward door opened and McPherson let himself in. Deborah looked hard at him, saw everyone suddenly go easier, and said meaningfully, “They should have changed the lock.”

She was thinking that McPherson’s key-turn and incoming was of a completely different order from the one which had preceded it—as different as if there had been different doors and different locks. She felt obscurely that the words had somehow done her injury, and so she went over them, seeking the culprit.

“They … should … have … changed … the … lock.”

McPherson said, “I don’t like this key business anyway.” Carla looked around, as Deborah had just before, knowing that no one understood, but with McPherson, not understanding carried no penalty of scorn or hatred. She sat back quietly.

They were all glad that McPherson was there, and because feeling this meant that they were vulnerable, they had to try to hide it. “Without those keys you wouldn’t know yourself from us!”

But McPherson only laughed—a laughter at himself, not at them. “We’re not so different,” he said, and went into the nursing station.

“Who is he kidding!” Helene said. There was no malice in her statement; she was merely hurrying to rebuild the wall that he had breached. She turned and disappeared into her limbo, and because McPherson’s afterimage still hung in the air there were no catty remarks about her fadeout. But when the procession of magi passed by once more, bearing with them the Nose, rigid and clamp-jawed with fear, no one could withhold the cruelty which seemed to each her true and natural self. Helene shuddered as he passed; Carla looked blank; Mary, always inappropriately gay, trilled laughter, saying, “Well, Hobbs’s bodkins, here comes another gas customer!”

“Let’s call him Hobbs’s Leviathan, because he may be a whale of a lot worse!”

“Their religion doesn’t permit them to commit suicide,” Sylvia said from her place against the wall.

The ward was suddenly silent. Sylvia had not said anything at all for over a year and her voice was so toneless that the sound almost seemed to come from the wall itself. The silence hung in the ward as everyone sought to make sure that there had really been words and that they had come from the frozen and mute piece of ward furniture that was Sylvia. They could all see each other checking for symptoms—did she say it or did I only hear it? Then Lee Miller broke from inaction and went to the closed door of the nursing station. She pounded on it until the nurse opened the door and looked out in annoyance, as if confronted by an unfamiliar salesman.

“Call the doctor,” Lee said tersely.

“Sylvia talked.” “The ward report is not finished,” the nurse said, and closed the door. Lee pounded again. After a while the door opened. “Well …?”

“You’d better get that doctor, because if you don’t, it will be your fault and not mine. Adams will come—she always does. She came last time at three in the morning when Sylvia talked!”

“What are you all excited about, Miller?” the nurse said. “What did she say?”

“It doesn’t matter and it wouldn’t make sense to you because it was part of the conversation.”

“About what?”

“Oh, Christ. Please! ”

Standing between Sylvia and the excited Lee Miller, Deborah saw how stupid any fragment of the conversation would sound. Sylvia had extinguished her brief, faint light. Lee had an aura of dark light around her, the Yri sign for one who was tankutuku —Yri for unhidden—open to the elements and far from shelter. Lee had put herself in this horrible state for someone else, who would never praise her for it or feel gratitude. Yri had a word for this, too; used rarely, it was nelaq: eyeless. Deborah now wanted to thank Lee for being eyeless and unhidden. Yr praised Lee, but Deborah could not speak the necessary words.