Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“You know,” Furii said, “I am not connected with the running of your ward. I cannot break into ward policy.”

“I’m not saying that policy should be changed,” Deborah said, “unless the policy is beating up patients in pack.”

“I have no say in discipline of ward personnel either,” Furii said.

“Is Pilate everybody’s last name around here?”

At last Furii agreed to mention it in the staff meeting, but Deborah was not convinced. “Maybe you doubt that I saw it at all.”

“That is the one thing that I do not doubt,” the doctor said. “But you see, I have no part in what is to be done on the wards; I am not an administrative doctor.”

Deborah saw the match lighting dry fuel. “What good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer. Helene kept her bargain about Ellis and so did I. What good is your reality then?”

“Look here,” Furii said. “I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice …” (She remembered Tilda suddenly, breaking out of the hospital in Nuremburg, disappearing into the swastika-city, and coming back laughing that hard, rasping parody of laughter. “Sholom Aleichem, Doctor, they are crazier than I am!”) … and I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is so that you can be free to fight for all of these things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie … and a bore, too!”

“Will you bring it up at the meeting—about Helene?”

“I said I would and I will, but I promise nothing.”

Because Helene had left her standing alone with the burden of witnessing, Deborah found herself going, without a conscious choice, to Lee Miller, the one who went tankutuku for the forgotten words of Sylvia. Lee could not allow anyone to be behind her, and she didn’t like to stand against the wall the way the others did, so she had to keep circling relentlessly to “keep everyone properly placed.” Without allegiance or loyalty, but because of a mysterious sense of fitness, Deborah began to follow Lee, the ptolemaic sun circling her planets.

“Get away, Blau!”

That, too, was fitting; by her speaking to Deborah she was admitting, Deborah thought, that they were actors in the same event and related to one another.

“Get away, Blau!”

Deborah came on after, bearing the chains of the relationship.

“Nurse! Get this bitch out of here!”

The nurse came. “Get off the hall, Deborah, or stop following.” The nurse was a third actor, but not tankutuku. The gravity bond dissolved; Deborah moved away again.

By the light of my fire, Bird-one, Anterrabae said, see how carefully, how carefully they separate you from small dangers: pins and matches and belts and shoelaces and dirty looks. Will Ellis beat the naked witness in a locked seclusion room?

Deborah slid down the wall to an accustomed place on the floor among the other statues, watching the pictures in her mind—simple pictures, explicit and terrifying.

In the evening, Lucia, a new patient with a certain prestige for her violence and the nine years she had spent in one of the roughest hospitals in the country, suddenly said to the small group of perpetually cold ones who were huddled around the radiator enclosure, “It’s different here. I been lotsa joints, lotsa wards. My brother, too; lotsa wards. What’s here … there’s more scared, more mad; pissin’ on the floor and yellin’—but it’s because of the maybe. It’s because of the little, little maybe.”

She went off again, leaping in her long ostrich run down the hall, laughing in order to negate the immense, fearful power of her words, but they had been given and they were hanging in the air like the zoo smell of the ward itself. Everyone was afraid of the hope, the little, little Maybe, but for Deborah, coming at that moment, the words had a special ring, so that she looked out into both worlds and saw the imminent things, the lowering cloud and the worms that were dropping from it, and the law, blowing like a shred in the black wind.

“Never mind the Maybe; it’s an administrative problem.”

Esther and Jacob sat together in the office, waiting, Dr. Fried saw, for reassurance and for peace. She wanted to tell them bluntly that she was not God. There were no sure promises and she could not be a judge of what they had done or not done to their daughter to bring her to this battlefield.

“Is it wrong to want a child like anyone else’s?” Jacob asked. “I … I mean is there a cure, really, or will she stay here and have to be placated and comforted … always?” He heard how cold his words sounded. “It isn’t a question of love—sick or well—it’s only that we have to expect something, even to hope for something. Can you tell us what we may hope for?”

“If you want to hope for a college diploma and a box of dance invitations and pressed roses and a nice clean-cut young man from a fine family—I don’t know. This is what most parents hope for. I don’t know if Deborah will have these things someday or if she will even want them. Part of our work together is to find out and come to terms with what she really does want.”

“May we see her?”

Dr. Fried had known that the question would come, and here it was. It was the one she didn’t want to answer. “Of course, if you decide to see her you may, but I would not advise it this time.” She tried to make the answer very, very calm.

“Why not!” Jacob said, moving loudly against his fear.

“Because her feeling of reality is quite shaky now. The way she looks might alarm you a little, and she knows this and is afraid of you … and for herself also.”

Jacob sat back dazedly, wondering why they had ever done this thing. The old Deborah as she was might have been sick as they all said. She had been unsure and wretched, but she had been theirs—unsure, to be guarded and planned for; wretched, to be cheered and mothered. At least she had been familiar. Now, the picture that this doctor made was of someone unrecognizable.

“Let me say that the symptoms are not the sickness,” the doctor was saying. “These symptoms are defenses and shields. Believe it or not, her sickness is the only solid ground she has. She and I are hacking away at that ground, on which she stands. That there will be another, firmer ground for her after this is destroyed she can only take on faith. Imagine it for yourself for a moment and you can see why she doesn’t pay attention to her grooming; why she gets so frightened and the symptoms proliferate.”

Dr. Fried tried to describe the feelings of someone who had never known real mental health in her life. “We who have never experienced this sickness firsthand can only guess what horror and loneliness there must be. You know, she is now being called upon to suspend all the years of what she has known as reality, and to take another version of the world on faith. Deborah’s sickness is now a desperate fight for health.”

“The world we gave her wasn’t so horrible,” Jacob said.

“But she never took your world at all, don’t you see? She created a robot that went through the motions of reality, and behind it the true person drew further and further away.” Knowing that people feared the unknown person behind the familiar robot, she let the matter rest.

Jacob said quietly, “I still want to see her.”

“No, Jacob—it’s better—!”

“Es— I want to see her! It’s my right.”

“Very well,” the doctor said affably. “I’ll call and have her brought down from the ward and you may see her in the visitors’ room.” She went to her phone. “If you should want to see me again afterward, please have the attendant on duty call me. I will be here until four.”