Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Well?” she said.

“Well?” Furii answered.

A sudden rage came. “I know that this has to be played in a certain way, and there is a game that the victim is not supposed to break through. But I know about the game and the end of the game. Why make me foolish as well as dead! All right! I am foolish. The deception and the last change is here, so throw it and be done!”

“Where are we now?” Furii said, shaking her head a little, very carefully unexcited. “You tell me about the Japanese soldier and about having been set apart and special. I try to make you secure that in giving such valuable secrets to our view you do not risk my faith in you for a moment. Then you come the next day and make our work part of the great deception and change.”

“They knew when I was ready,” Deborah said. “When I could ask for help, they knew that I trusted and they were ready with the stone to break the flowerpot.”

“Somehow the old hospital of the past and this present hospital have joined their natures in your mind. I will not open your trust and then betray you.”

“Haven’t you got any mercy?” Deborah shouted. “Everyone is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. …I can’t stand to see suffering,’ they say, …so die outside!’ It has started already and you still say trust and everything is fine!”

“When I look at you now in this bad shape I can hardly say …fine-fine.’ What happened between yesterday and now? If you say that the last Change has started, just tell me … tell both of us how.”

Slowly, the doctor let Deborah come closer and closer to speaking the truth. Slowly, bit by bit, Deborah told her about asking for the pack. “It has a kind of humor in it, too,” she said bitterly. “It was like what sane people do when they see a rattlesnake. They scream for help, run for safety, lock the doors, crawl under the bed, and then, when the snake is caught, they faint. I got all ready for the onslaught, but I forgot that I was standing on their ground and all they had to do was to dissolve it under me.” She told about the long time calling out, and the pain and laughter from Yr, and she took a righteous pride that was almost gleeful in answering Furii’s questions.

“Are you sure it was that long?”

“Absolutely.”

“Now, you did call for help …”

“You were never a mental patient, were you?”

There was no smile at all, and Furii, as grave as Deborah had ever seen her, said, “No…. I am sorry, too, because I can only guess at what it must be like. But it will not stop me from being able to help you. Only it makes it your responsibility to explain everything fully to me and to be a little patient with me if sometimes my perceptions are a bit slow.”

She went on and the quizzical look returned. “I think now, though, that you are a little too happy with yourself for this trouble you have. I think you are giving up too easily, so let me say again that I will not betray you.”

At last Deborah had her tinder.

“Prove it!” she shouted, remembering with what good cheer the teachers and doctors and counselors and family had dispensed deceit and misery over the years.

“A hard proof, but a valid one,” Furii said. “Time.”

In the same kind of restraints as those in which Miss Coral had arrived, and with the same thrashing and profanity, the safari brought its new tigress to captivity, and, as before, the ward was laced with tension. Such arrivals always mirrored this patient’s anguish, threatened that one’s violence, and blew like a shifting wind over those to whom any change was a symbol of death. Outwardly there was little acknowledgment of the presence of new patients; many came to “D” and many went from it, but the fighting ones always bound the ward with a special kind of panic. Now Lee Miller, proud of her veteran’s status on the ward, watched with faintly amused tolerance until she looked into the face of the tigress proceeding down the hall. Then, recognizing it in the swarm of attendants, she turned, went to her bed, and lay down.

Later, when Deborah went to Lee Miller and asked her who it was (knowing that certain patients usually learned by grapevine days in advance who was coming, Name, Age, Occupation, Religion, whether Married or Single, Previous Hospitals, Shock Treatments—what kind and how many—Other Treatment, and Remarks), Lee replied, “Why ask me?” and pulled her blanket over her face.

Deborah was reduced to seeking out an attendant. “It’s a readmission,” the attendant said lightly. “Isn’t much written. Her name’s Doris Rivera.”

With a sick feeling Deborah moved back against the wall and the attendant went by her. Fear and anger, fear and vindictive joy, fear and jealousy rose in her. She began to gag with the surfeit. The great Doris Rivera had broken her back on the wheel of the world. It was proof of something. Suddenly, the envy burst out of her mouth in a great gust of bitter laughter.

“So much for Rivera, the North Star! Who did she think she was anyway!”

“Napoleon!” Lena shouted, and grabbed the heavy ashtray she was using and threw it, missing Deborah and hitting the wall beside her.

The attendant said, “Come on, now, Lena,” but there was no force in it.

Later, Deborah heard her in the nursing station saying, “Damn that Blau bitch! Mommy and Daddy are shelling out plenty on that bitch who isn’t fit for saving.” Someone else demurred, but it was only for form’s sake. Deborah turned slowly and walked past the doors of the seclusion section to the front of the closed box where Doris had been taken.

“That’s where you are, Presumptuous!” she said to the person behind the door. Who was she to have tried, challenging them all? And how dared she have failed under the grinding of the world! But there also came a long surge of pity, which was also pity for herself, and an answering terror, which was also terror for herself. So they come back; the ones who are too stubborn to accept that their nganons are poisonous and who are beaten to ruins. They come back, and slowly, they get up off the ward’s floors, shaking like the loser in a prizefight, and after a while stagger back toward the world again and again, and come back, not on the canvas, but in it. How many times will it take before they die at last?

And you, Bird-one, Lactamaeon said, smiling a little. Darkness and pains and hard fear and mindlessness, and yet your heart is still going and your pulse still makes you a part of the census.

Why? she shouted at him in Yri.

Because your keepers are sadists!

Throughout the day, everyone was busy seeing Doris. Doctors and nurses rang the keys of their authority in her locked door. Packs and sedations, consultations and counselings kept the ward excited and angry. A multitude of little sisters was consumed with envy for the attention given to a sibling who had come home to violate their sovereignty. Dowben’s Mary stood outside the door groaning wordlessly as the members of the parade emerged, and Lee Miller sat in her place on the hall muttering angrily, “So you’ve botched the job, Doc. Pick up the marbles and go home…. She’s lost. Doctors never know when they’re beaten.”

By the time Doris herself appeared, very pale and haggard, a few days later, she had a whole hall of secret enemies. Deborah appraised her in the light of the myth which she and Carla had made. Doris was very thin and she had graying hair, but even exhausted and dizzy with sedatives, there was an abundant sense of life thrumming through her. In whatever manner she had taken the world for this long, it had not been on her knees.

She saw Deborah looking at her with the merciless eye of the whole ward.