Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Just a moment! the Censor intervened with his raspvoice. Deborah never actually saw the Censor because he was not of either world, but had a part in both.

Yes … wait. Idat, the Dissembler, unmale, unfemale, joined him. While they discussed the matter elaborately, parodying the now familiar psychiatric manners and terms, Lactamaeon found a chasm, dove into it with a high eagle-scream of triumph, and was gone.

Somehow, in the interim, it had come to be evening. Miss Coral came up to Deborah, saying, “I guess that the secret of enjoying hospital food is to be too ill to notice it.”

“Mary still has some of those candy bars, doesn’t she? Ask her and maybe she’ll give you one.”

“Oh, but I can’t ask. I never could ask for anything. I thought you knew that. When I have to ask, something happens to me and I … well, I start to fight.”

“I didn’t notice,” Deborah said, wondering if she ever looked at anyone or noticed anything about the world.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Miss Coral said almost shyly. “I’ve found a tutor for you—someone who reads classical Greek fluently—a real Greek student, and if you ask him I know that he’ll be glad to help you.”

“Who is it? Someone here—a patient?”

“No, it’s Mr. Ellis, and he’s here now, on the evening shift.”

“Ellis!” Deborah realized that the episode with Helene and the bitter cost of witnessing and going Unhidden had been before Miss Coral’s time—that since McPherson had spoken to her she had not talked to Mr. Ellis at all and that somehow his sneering and scorn, while still as plain as Anterrabae’s fire, had faded into a part of the undertone of the ward. He spoke little now, and had little to defend. He was no longer new on the job, no longer being tested by the patients, and he was now looked upon by them and himself as merely a custodian of things, some of which were still alive. Perhaps he had been spoken to about beating patients; perhaps not. There might be or might not be those who rose from packs during his hours less convinced of the world than they had been when they went in.

“If you want to learn,” Miss Coral continued gently, “it’s he who holds the key—” She laughed a little at the allusion. “You have all the Greek I can give you.”

Down the hall Deborah could see Ellis unlocking the bathroom for The Wife of the Abdicated. He did not look at his charge or speak as he stood back and let her by him. Without expression he moved back on the corridor, not looking at anything or anyone. As he passed Deborah, the tumor wrenched inside her, doubling her over hard so that she found herself on her hands and knees. The dark sweat took a while to pass, but it was Castle, the new aide, and not Ellis whom she found watching her shaking the dizziness away.

“What’s the matter, Blau?”

“Your spatial laws are okay,” she said from the sweat, “but God—watch out for the choices you give us!”

For weeks Esther Blau had worried and fretted over having to tell Suzy about her sister’s illness. Who had not heard all the old-style high melodrama of insanity; of the madwoman in Jane Eyre, of bedlam, of the hundreds of dark houses with high walls and little hope; of lesser dramas in lesser memories, and of maniacs who murdered and passed on the taints of their blood to menace the future? “Modern Science” had given the official lie to much of this, but beneath the surface of facts, the older fears remained in the minds of the well no less than of the sick. People paid lip service to new theories and new proofs, but often their belief was no more than the merest veneer, yielding at a scratch to the bare and honest terror, the accretion of ten thousand generations of fear and magic.

Esther could not bear the thought of Suzy replacing the familiar image of her sister with the wild-eyed face of the straitjacketed stereotype chained in an attic. She realized now that it was this stereotype that she and Jacob had begun to imagine the first time they heard the grating of the locks, when they saw the barred windows, and when they shuddered to the screaming of a woman from some high gable. Still, Suzy had to know; it was past time. The little sister was growing up and they could no longer talk around her; it wasn’t fair to keep shutting her out from the source of their deepest concern. But the telling would have to be done in some sure way, safely and expertly. They wondered if Dr. Lister could tell Suzy. But Dr. Lister refused it; it was Esther’s job and Jacob’s, he said.

“Wait a little longer,” Jacob said. Esther knew that “wait-a-little-longer” was only one of the doors he used to slip quietly into inaction. Close your eyes and it won’t exist; everything will be fine-fine-fine. It was a lie. So they fenced back and forth with it and at last Esther won her way. That evening, when they were finished with dinner and Suzy had gotten up to do her practice on the piano, Esther called her back.

“This is serious….” To her own ears her voice had an odd mixture of gravity and embarrassment. Sitting stiffly, she began to tell her younger daughter that Deborah’s “convalescent school” was a hospital; her doctors, psychiatrists; her illness not physical but mental. After they had eased into the icy subject, Jacob began to add, modify, explain this part and that, presenting as fact much of what he himself had been uncertain about.

Suzy listened with the complete impassivity of a twelve-year-old, her face giving no sign or flicker by which the parents could detect how she was hearing the words they were wringing out of themselves. When they had finished, she waited a while and then spoke slowly.

“I always wondered why those reports seemed to be more about Debby’s thoughts than about her body, like pulse or temperature.”

“You read the reports?”

“No. I hear you quoting things to Grandma sometimes, and once you read to Uncle Claude part of it, and it sounded kind of funny to be about the usual kind of sickness.” She smiled a little, no doubt remembering something else that had puzzled her. “It all fits now. It makes sense.”

She went into the next room to practice her piano lesson. A few minutes later, she came back to where Esther and Jacob were still sitting at the table, stunned, over their coffee. “It’s not like she’s Napoleon or something … is it?”

“Of course not!” Then they spoke a little stiltedly and painfully about the optimism of the doctors, the advantage of early treatment, and the strong force of their patience and love all weighing in Deborah’s favor.

Suzy said, “I hope she comes home soon—sometimes I miss her a lot.” And then she went back to the duty of Schubert.

They sat for a long time shocked at the difference between the expectation and the happening. Esther felt weak with the sudden easing of the tension.

Jacob said slowly, “Is this all? … I mean is this all there is or didn’t she really hear us? Will she be back, when the shock wears off, with the look on her face that I have been afraid of for all these months?”

“I don’t know, but maybe the cannon blast we were fearing was only what we heard.”

Jacob took a long draw on his cigarette and let his anguish leave his body with the exhaled breath.

“English is a wonderful language,” Furii said, “to have such expressions. You look like what they call …down in the dumps.’”

“English is no better than Yri.”

“To praise one thing is not to damn another.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t being wrong courting death?” (The sharp sword of precocity had been comfortable in her hand; she had honed its edge herself. To be queen of Yr [and its slave and captive] was to be right and only right.)