Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

The whole ward erupted into laughter and relaxed, although the mind-scent of tension still hung in the air like the ozone smell after a lightning bolt. Something had been narrowly averted.

After Deborah had been given her sedative, she got into her bed, waiting the familiar wait, the gods and the Collect reduced to a somnolent undertone. McPherson came into the dormitory and stopped by her bed.

“Deb,” he said gently, “lay off on Mr. Ellis, will you?”

“Why me?” she said.

“I want all of you to let him alone. No more jokes. No more references to Hobbs.”

“Are you going to tell everybody?” (The guarded vying-for-favor and the guarded suspicion of all the world’s motives and representatives overcame prudence and forced the question.)

“Yup,” he said. “Everybody on the ward.”

“Even Marie and Lena?” (They were acknowledged to be the sickest on the ward, even by the patients.)

“Deb … just lay off.”

For a moment she felt that he was using her. He was the only one who could get away with calling the patients by nicknames without sounding strained, but it sounded strained now.

“Why me? I thought you normal ones had agreed that we were out of it—your conventions and routines. I’m not nice and I’m not polite and I know more about Hobbs than you do. He was one of us! The only thing that separated him from us was three inches of metal key he used to fondle for assurance. Ellis is another one. I know about him and his hate.”

McPherson’s voice was low, but his anger was real, and Deborah felt it coming from a place in him that he had never shown before.

“Do you think the sick people are all in hospitals? Do you girls think you have a corner on suffering? I don’t want to bring up the money business—it’s been over-done—but I want to tell you right now that lots of people on the outside would like to get help and can’t. You ought to know mental trouble when you see it. You don’t bait other patients. I’ve never heard you say anything against one of them.” (She remembered what she had said to Carla and the stroke of guilt fell again for it.) “Lay off Ellis, Deb—you’ll be glad for it later.”

“I’ll try.”

He looked down hard at her. She could not see his face in the shadow, but she sensed that it was in repose. Then he turned and walked out of the dormitory. Deborah fought the sedative for a while, thinking about what he had said and how. It was tough but true, and under the anger of it ran the tone—the tone rare anywhere, but in a mental ward like a priceless jewel—the tone of a simple respect between equals. The terror she felt at the responsibility it bore was mingled with a new feeling. It was joy.

“Something in a session not long ago keeps coming back to me,” Dr. Fried said. “You were discussing being sick as if it were a volcano and you said of your sister that she would have to decorate her slopes herself. Do you know what you tell us now? Can you really not see that the gods and the devils and the whole Yr of yours is your own creation?”

“I didn’t mean that at all!” Deborah said, backing away, and still hearing the Collect chanting years of people: Snap out of it; it’s all in your mind. “Yr is real!”

“I have no doubt that it is real to you, but there is also something else that you seem to be saying—that the sickness stands apart from the symptoms which are often mistaken for it. Are you not saying that, although the symptoms bear on the sickness and are related to it, the two are not the same?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I want you to take me back into that past of yours again, before the slopes were decorated, and share with me a look at the volcano itself.” She saw the look of terror, and added, “Not all at once; a little at a time.”

They had gone over the Great Deceits, and also the many little ones that are inevitable in life, but which, because of Deborah’s feelings and beliefs, seemed to be pointing the way to doom as meaningfully as if they had been arranged as part of a plan, a secret joke that everyone knew, but no one admitted knowing. After months of therapy, Deborah began to learn that there were many reasons why the world was horrifying to her. The shadow of the grandfather dynast was still dark over all the houses of the family. She went back often again, hearing grandfather’s familiar voice saying, “Second in the class is not enough; you must be the first.” “If you are hurt, never cry, but laugh. You must never let them know that they are hurting you.” It was all directed against the smiling sharers of the secret joke. Pride must be the ability to die in agony as if you did it every day, gracefully. Even his pride in her was anger. “You’re smart—you’ll show them all!” He had sharpened her word-wit on his own, cheered the cutting edge of it, called women cows and brood-bitches, and slapped her half-roughly because she would grow up wasted, a woman. She would have to take on the whole world of fools and ingrates, and, even though she was a woman, win his battle: the ancient, mystical battle between a crippled immigrant and a long-dead Latvian Count.

In the place and time where Deborah was growing up, American Jews still fought the old battles that they had fled from in Europe only a few years earlier. And then there were the newer battles, pitched as the Nazis walked through Europe and screamed hatred in America. There were Bund marches in the larger cities, and flare-ups against synagogues and neighborhood Jews who had ventured out of the ghettos. Deborah remembered having seen the Blau house splashed with paint and the dead rats stinking beside the morning paper that told of Czech Jews running for the Polish border only to be shot by the “freedom-loving” Poles. She knew much of the hate and had been attacked once or twice by the neighborhood bullies, but the grandfather would say triumphantly, as if he saw in this an obscure kind of proof, “It’s envy! The best and the smartest are always envied. Walk straight and don’t let them know if they touch you.” And then, as if the hate were peering through the joke, he would say, “You’ll show them! You’re like me. They’re all fools, the rest of them—you’ll show them someday!”

What she had to “show them” was a harbinger, a deceiver, a seducer: her own precocity. The hint that she would someday be “someone” seemed to make the old man right. For a long time she used her bitter wit as a weapon to startle and amaze the adults in her armed truce with the world, but it never fooled the people of her own age for a single moment. The young knew her, and wise in their own fear, set out to destroy her.

“It was a willing soil then, to which this seed of Yr came,” the doctor said. “The deceits of the grown-up world, the great gap between Grandfather’s pretensions and the world you saw more clearly, the lies told by your own precocity, that you were special, and the hard fact that you couldn’t get to first base with your own contemporaries no matter how impressive your specialness was.”

“The gap between the carefully brought up little rich girl with maids and imported dresses and the—and the—”

“And the what? Where are you now?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but she was speaking from a place in which she had been before. “There are no colors, only shades of gray. She is big and white. I am small and there are bars between. She gives food. Gray. I don’t eat. Where is my … my …”

“Your what?”

“Salvation!” Deborah blurted.

“Go on,” the doctor said.

“My … self, my love.”

Dr. Fried peered at her intently for a while and then said, “I have a hunch—do you want to try it with me?”