Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Are you calling me? Is it me you want?” Deborah called back when she could speak.

“Yes.” Then Miss Coral said:

“Inter vitae scelerisque purus

Non eget Mauris jaculis neque arcu

Nec venanatis gravida sagittis,

Fusce, pharetra.”

“What is that?”

“Tomorrow,” Miss Coral said. “And the spelling, too.”

Deborah and Miss Coral met in loose moments between the closings of their separate worlds. Deborah had entered upon a dry and barren era. The smell of her burnt-up self was always in her nostrils—charred flesh and hair, clothing, and the rubber and leather of shoes. She lost her ability to see color and the black bars limited the scope of her vision to a small, vertical strip of gray. Nevertheless she learned. Her pockets and secret hiding places became crammed with scraps of paper carrying the words, sentences, and poems of Miss Coral’s remembered classics in Latin; Greek alphabet and vocabulary; and bits of the stolen honey of the licentious Middle Ages.

“It was too sinful in our day,” Miss Coral told Deborah shyly. “The medievals were beasts, supposedly, and their Latin, degenerate; but the books went around the school dormitory at night and not all of it was lascivious. Strangely, it is they, the singing madmen, that I most remember …” and she recited Abelard and Scottus. “Perhaps in …folly and darkness’ I resembled them…. We are here, after all….” And she was caught in a paroxysm of weeping and rage.

A conventional teacher could never have made a moment’s headway against the defensive anger of Miss Coral’s pupil, but Deborah felt no threat in the small bits of gentle teaching, for her tutor’s manner was limned with her own pain and despair, and precluded the sour superiority that Deborah sensed in most teachers. Miss Coral was a fellow inmate, and Deborah’s genuine hunger, at last divorced from her deceptive precocity, forced her to reach out and take all that Miss Coral had to give.

In line, waiting for sedatives: “That De Ramis Cadunt Folia…. I did okay until I got to the part about Nam Signa Coeli Ultima. ”

“Well, you know those words…. I remember you had them in other poems.”

“I know what they mean, but …”

“Oh, yes, that Signa is …sign,’ but here it is astrological, and would mean more like …house’ or …ascendancy.’ ”

Waiting before trays:

“Morpheus in mentem

trahit impellentem

ventum lenem,

segetes maturas,

… I don’t remember the rest.”

From poems they went to bits of poems, to sentences, to phrases, building Deborah’s knowledge on familiar words in their changing grammatical forms. Miss Coral worked with her memory, and Deborah with her hunger and the forbidden pencil.

At last Miss Coral said, “You have all the Latin and Greek I know. I’m sorry about the grammar—I’ve lost so much, but at least you will come across familiar landmarks when you read the classics; you have quite a number of bits and pieces all copied down on those papers of yours.”

Indeed, the scraps of paper were becoming an embarrassment, cramming her pockets and stuffed under the bedsprings. She realized that it was time to ask for the special privilege of a notebook. It took a week or so to get up the nerve, but finally she took her place among the “petitioners” who waited for the ward doctor to come on his rounds. There seemed to be quite a few this time, even without counting those who were there habitually:

Lee: “Hey, I want double sedatives tonight.”

The Wife of the Assassinated: “Let me go home! I want to go home!”

Mary (who has Dr. Fiorentini): “I’ve contracted a social disease from the socialists!”

Mary (who has Dr. Dowben): “Murder and fire! There’s a fire!”

Carla, who was going to go to the movie in town, needed special permission, being a “D” patient, and money. Miss Coral, starting at the bottom of the via dolorosa, was there to ask for some basic ward privilege.

The doctor arrived on the ward, and the requests and answers flew back and forth. When Deborah asked for the notebook, he looked at her quickly, measuring her.

“We’ll see,” he shot back over his departing shoulder, and went his way.

That afternoon Dr. Adams came on the ward to see Sylvia. When she left, she was missing a copy of Look Homeward Angel that she had been carrying with her. Later in the day one of the student nurses looked in vain for her lecture notebook. The written pages turned up two days later in the elevator outside the Disturbed Ward, but the half of the book which was blank had disappeared.

Deborah began to bother Helene for remembered poetry, and Helene obliged by giving her some of Hamlet and Richard III, dredged up, to her own amazement, from some distant but still-living source. Greek words were dutifully copied and then Latin; Look Homeward Angel became an agony under Deborah’s mattress, but she read and reread it until Dowben’s Mary got ahold of it and ate it, leaving only the binding. Carla had read the novel once and for a while they talked about it.

“If I can learn these things …” Deborah said, “… can read and learn, why is it still so dark?”

Carla looked at her and smiled a little. “Deb,” she said, “who ever told you that learning facts or theories or languages had anything to do with understanding yourself? You, of all people …” And Deborah understood suddenly how the precocious wit, though it had supported her sickness and was part of it, acted for her independently of the troubles that clouded her reality.

“Then one may learn, and learn, and be a schizo.”

“At least it may be so in Deborah,” Helene said caustically.

Deborah put her notebook behind the dormitory radiator and lay down on her bed. She stayed there for the next three months, getting up only to be let into the bathroom or to be taken off the ward to see Dr. Fried. The darkness seemed complete. Phases of Yr came and went, the Collect met and dispersed, but outside the sessions with Dr. Fried she did not fight any of it. Carla sometimes came in and talked to her, telling the ward gossip or the little happenings of the day. Deborah was incapable of saying how much these visits meant. They were sometimes the only human contacts she had for days at a stretch, for her lying mask gave forth looks that hurried the attendants away; they would give the tray or put out the clothes and leave without a word or a nod. Because she began to have bad dreams and loud, hard awakenings, she was moved out of the noisy and populous front dormitory and placed in a small room in the darker back hall with two more of the living dead. The coming of daylight shut their mouths and cut off their vision a foot or two beyond their eyes, but their dreams burst from them in screaming shards that shattered the brittle crust of drugged sleep for which the other patients fought. It was considered better to have the three of them waking one another than to have the whole ward upset, so they were immured together and left to themselves. Some of the nights seemed like imitations of the dramatic-fantasy Insane Asylum that Deborah still carried somewhere from her childhood store of nurses’ threats. Often she would wake with one of the roommates standing over her, arms upraised, or the other hitting her in a sleep-blind anger. One night she thought suddenly of her father and that other facet of his love, which was human need, and to the fat one, whose pounding had awakened her, she broke the mold of silent terror. “Oh, Delia, for God’s sake go back to bed and let me get some sleep.”