Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

She watched them leave and walk rigidly toward the hospital building. The Families. “Make him well,” they say. “Make her well,” they say, “with good table manners and a future according to our agreed-on dream!” She sighed. Even the intelligent, the honest, the good, find it too easy to sell their children. Deceits and vanities and arrogances that they would never stoop to for themselves they perpetrate on their children. Ach! Another sigh escaped from her, because she had never given birth or nursed a child, and because she wondered suddenly if she, too, would not connive or be ambitious, buy dreams and wish them impossibly on a Deborah if the Deborah were her own. She thought a moment longer, then turned and went to the phone, and got through at last to D ward.

“She was just taken down to visitors, Doctor,” the attendant said.

“Oh, well, then, never mind. I just hoped …”

“Doctor?”

“Just that there was time for her to comb her hair.”

In the car driving home Esther and Jacob were silent. They were waiting for the truth to become plain to them, but because everything they had seen contradicted everything they felt to be true, they were mute in their confusion. They trusted Dr. Fried. She had not been hypocritically calming, but she had given them hope, and it was hope for which they were most desperate. But their daughter had been almost unrecognizable. She had not frightened them with mumbling or violence, but with a subtle and terrifying kind of withdrawal. She had not inhabited her body.

As they left the visitors’ room Jacob had said only, “She’s very pale—”

And Esther, striving to catch what she was feeling, murmured, “Someone … someone beaten to death from the inside.”

Jacob’s anger had risen against her and he had turned away. “You always talk too much! Can’t you just let it be?”

On the way back to Chicago, all they knew was that it was past time for Suzy to be told the truth.

Dr. Fried continued to chase, corner, and urge her recalcitrant patient through the circles of loving and hating. Deborah kept fleeing away to Yr’s darknesses, dissembling and throwing up dust to hide in. She longed for blindness and ignorance, for she now realized that if she herself saw or recognized anything, it would have to be exposed for discussion, however shameful, fearful, or ugly it might be; although to Deborah the reason for this necessity was as mysterious as the lower places of Yr itself.

“I have let you get away from your father long enough,” Furii announced during one session. “When you speak of him, it is with fear and hatred—and with something else.”

The deeper secret, toward which Furii reached with her world hooks, lay beneath common injustices: the beating over a trivial thing, the simple misunderstanding at a crucial time. Part of the secret was that Deborah was like her father. They shared a sudden, violent temper, long smolderings that erupted in incongruous rages. And because she recognized the similarity, she feared him and herself also, and she felt his love for her was blind, that he never knew or understood her for a single moment. And there was something else beyond his understanding.

“I was scornful of him sometimes,” she said.

“I know you are remembering something.”

“He was always frightened of the men—the men lurking to grab me from dark streets: sex maniacs and fiends, one to a tree, waiting for me. So many times he shook warnings into me. Men are brutes, lusting without limit. Men are animals … and I agreed in myself. One time he was scolding me for having seen an exhibitionist on the street. Because I had attracted the man’s attention my father somehow connected me with having done something. He was full of rage and fear and he went on and on as if all such men were bound by laws like gravity to me alone. I said to him, …What do they want with me, broken into and spoiled already? I’m not good enough for anyone else.’ Then he hit me very hard because it was true.”

“Was he afraid, perhaps, of the commands of his own passions?”

“What? He was a father—” Deborah said, beginning to know the answer before she refuted it.

“He was a man first. He knows his own thoughts. Do all others have such thoughts? He knows they have. Do all others have so good control as he has? Surely they cannot.”

Deborah pondered the almost-lust that was almost apparent so many times. It was full of guilt and love intermingled; it had badgered and confused her, making of her a secret accomplice in all of the heinous crimes of the maniacs which he was forever describing. In his fear he saw her as having the same hunger and guilt as they did—as he did. He had spoken of the diseased parts of these men and Deborah knew that her shame-parts too had been diseased. Always in her dreams what she fled from and then turned to face at last was the eternally horrifying familiar faces of her father and herself.

“Is it so fearful now?”

“No …” And then thinking how great the shadow had grown in the Fear-bog, and that it was only him and a few unspoken, briefly hinted thoughts of her own that had been so cloaked in guilt that their true shapes had disappeared, she said, “No, not fearful—good. I was not only … only to him a daughter who was making him embarrassed all the time. Part of the yearning was the human … human …” Deborah began to cry.

She was well into it when the terror caught. Furii saw it coming, strangling out the sobs.

“Quickly!” she said. “It may try to make you pay, that sickness of yours, for our having outdistanced it. Quickly I tell you that you have touched insight, which is truth and love and forgiveness; that these are part of the reality of which you have been so afraid. Are they not wonderful and thrilling, these things?” She saw the light drawing away. The voice that came next was coming from Yr.

“Well”—from far across the barrier—“you did it. I cried. I forgave my mother and father really. Now I guess I go home.”

“You are not so stupid and neither am I,” Furii said earnestly, trying to speak across the widening space. “There are many secrets to come and you know it. You are now parting with food that sustained you—all the secrets and the secret powers—and no other nourishment has yet appeared to replace it. This is the hardest time of all, harder than even your sickness was before you came here. At least that had a meaning for you, as awful as the meaning was sometimes. You will have to trust me enough to take on faith that the new food, when it comes, will be richer.”

They spoke more, Furii eliciting from her the many small scraps of supporting evidence from years of living. Deborah was exhausted, but the stubbornness was still in her, helping her to yield and cast with Furii and her world while she awaited the last collision which would leave her insane forever.

“There is more—much more,” Furii said. “We will go until we see it all. When it is over, you can still choose Yr if you really wish it. It is only the choice which I wish to give you, your own true and conscious choice.”

“I could still be crazy if I wanted to?”

“Crazy as a fruitcake … if you wanted to.”

“Nutty as a fruitcake.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. I hear also someone say …bats.’ What is …bats’?”

“It means bats-in-the-belfry. It means that up in your head, where the bells ring, it’s night and the bats are flying around, black and flapping and random and without direction.”

“Oh, I will have to remember that one! The Americans capture the feeling of mental illness quite accurately sometimes.”

“And if I should want it—if I should need it … afterward …”

“You have no experience to know what mental health is, but I don’t think that you will need or want to have bats in the steeple. Still, the answer is yes. If you need it or want it afterward, all your choices will still be there.”