Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

On the ward there was a barely covered excitement. Two packs had been set up in the small seclusion room and were waiting to be occupied; the hall seemed to be all white and khaki, with nurses and attendants walking fast from here to there, yet still waiting.

“What’s up?” Deborah whispered to Lee, the one most likely to know and to tell it.

“Miss Coral’s coming back again,” Lee said. “She was here before your time. Thank God. It’s been dull as beans up here.”

Just before lunch was due to be brought up, the heavy elevator went rattling down and everybody in hearing gave a little jump. After a while they heard it coming back up and stopping outside the double doors of ward D. A group of white uniforms filled the translucent screen of frosted glass, and then the key turned and the ward administrator appeared in his magnificence. He was followed by two attendants (for feet) and two attendants (for head) carrying, under heavy restraint, a tiny, white-haired old lady. Behind them flowed assorted secondary personages of procession: receiving-ward day nurses, acolytes, the regular clergy, novices, postulants, and others.

“ That is Miss Coral?”

“All ninety pounds of her,” Lee said. There was a ringing string of beautifully balanced, varied, and intricate profanity as the bundle moved down the hall, past the setup packs (surprisingly), and into the Number Four seclusion room beyond.

For a while there was silence and then the bearers began to drift back down the hall. Deborah was about to turn again to her post at the dormitory window when she saw the last of the attendants joining the others. His coming was absurd, frightening, interesting, funny, non-Newtonian; he was flying. He was prone on the air, his expression utterly blank, as if he felt obliged to live out his life as a trajectory.

But he did not come to rest; he fell and it was the heavy, clumsy sound of his falling that stopped his companions and spun them around. Deborah breathed heavily with disappointment. It was only a man after all.

He was not hurt in the flight nor in the fall, but he was nearly run over in the stampede of staff that rushed back to subdue the source of his propulsion. The patients followed to watch and heckle. Miss Coral stood at the open door. Her tiny being was like electricity. That hair has been burned white, Deborah said quietly in Yri. The three men who went to move Miss Coral were pitiful against the sharp motions of her fighting body; she literally shook them off, her blank and expressionless face staring straight ahead. When more attendants leaped into the melee there was less for her to do, and she stood still because they were working against one another. Helene, sensing a challenge to her reign as at least the most feared on the ward, ran into the deserted upper hall, removed the hasps from the hinges of the nursing-station door, tore the door off with its own weight and hers, flung it into the hall, and followed it with everything that came to hand. Sylvia, planted like a poorly made statue against the wall, found that she could not bear the tension of Helene’s violence and suddenly exploded, diving at Helene in the broken ruins of the door, trays, medicine, cutlery, and towels. Someone rang the emergency bell, and it took twelve extra people to still the riot and put Helene and Sylvia in pack. Apparently the orders for Miss Coral had been forgotten by the ward administrator, because the door was simply closed after her and that was that.

“Well,” Lee said as Deborah passed her in the hall, “it beats anything we’ve had up here for a while, you must admit that.”

“I sure wish I could have made it to that narcotics cabinet,” Deborah mused. “I never knew a little old lady was strong enough to sail a grown man.”

“She was here two years ago. I saw her throw a bed once. Not push it, throw it. She’s also the best-educated one of all of us.”

“Better than Helene?” “Hell, yes! She speaks four or five languages and is some sort of mathematician on the outside. She tried to explain it to me once, but as you know, I stopped in the eighth grade.” Looking around, she began to circle again, impatiently trying to get the world properly placed.

Four days later, Miss Coral’s door was left open, giving her access to the ward. When, after a few hours, she came hesitantly to the threshold, she found Deborah sitting on the other side.

“Hello,” Deborah said.

“Hello…. Aren’t you rather young to be up here?” The voice was old, but not harsh, and the vowels were spread wide in diphthongs the way the Deep South spoke them.

“I’m sorry I’m young,” Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half pose. “We have the right to be as crazy as anyone else.”

The second part was more like a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, “Yes … I suppose that’s true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.”

The crude hunger that had made Deborah sit at the door for upward of four hours would not allow her to be civil or patient.

“Lee Miller says you know languages and mathematics. Is that true?”

“Oh, is she still here? Too bad,” and Miss Coral clucked.

“Can you really speak them?”

“Heavens, no! They only taught us to read and write a language in those days and it was only to read the classics.”

“Do you remember the languages?” She looked to Deborah like an Anterrabae who had stopped falling, with the lightning-blue eyes and the static-stiff white hair that only needed rekindling to ignite the whole firebrand. She looked at Deborah for a while. “What is it that you wish?” she said.

“Teach me.”

The rigid lines seemed to melt, the body slackened, and water rose in the hard eyes and overwhelmed them for a moment. “I’m ill,” Miss Coral said. “I’ve been very ill, and I forget. I could be inaccurate sometimes because of the years”—Deborah was watching her sustain an invisible brutal beating, trying to stand up—“and the sickness …”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m tired now,” Miss Coral said, backing away again into the bare room. “I will make a decision and inform you of it later.” She slammed the knobless heavy door behind her.

Sitting on the floor in the door-draft, Deborah could hear the muffled sounds of the battle: curses and cries, falling and blows. An attendant passed her. “I thought I opened that door—what’s going on in there?”

“Coral versus Coral—divorce action. Fighting over custody of the child.”

“Blau, you saw her come out. Did she close that door herself?”

“Maybe she should talk to somebody,” Deborah said.

The attendant turned away and went slowly to start the chain of permissions. Deborah sat down in front of the door again and emptied her pocket of all of its treasures. She found two cigarettes which she had picked up after a forgetful student nurse. They were only half smoked. She went to Lee Miller’s bed and put them under her pillow as an offering of thanks. Sylvia’s debt had been repaid.

It was quite a while before the ward nurse arrived. Sitting by Miss Coral’s door, Deborah was sensing the inexorable guilt of relatedness; her substance had spread through the ward reflecting anguish on everyone. For every such battle as raged behind this door she was symbolically responsible. Yet she also remembered Carla saying that her sickness was like an overflowing glass, and Deborah’s drop or two could hardly matter. Was she responsible or not?

Being unable to decide, she let the question go. After a while the sounds from inside the room stopped and Miss Coral’s voice, dead-level with exhaustion, called through the door.

“Young woman—young woman—are you still there?”