Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

It was the second spring that she was gone, and how much closer was she to the modest, obedient, womanly being that his heart cried out to have as a daughter? No closer. There had been no improvement at all. The young girls began to file out of the auditorium, all innocence and white dresses. Jacob turned to Esther, who, for Suzy’s sake, was dressed stunningly in what the family called her “coronation clothes.”

“Why can’t she come home for a while? We’d go to the lakes,” he whispered.

“Not now!” Esther hissed.

“She’s not committed there by law!” he whispered back.

“It may not be good for her.”

“It may be good for me—me, once in a while!”

In the evening they took Suzy out to a fancy restaurant. She had wanted to go to the class party, but Jacob, feeling that time and beauty and all his days of them were slipping away, had wanted this one evening at least. Because he wanted it so badly, it was a failure from the start. Suzy was subdued, Esther, saddened because the present daughter was being stinted again for the absent one. Jacob knew that the symbol breaks when it is too heavily weighted, but he could not help himself. The whole evening had a forlorn quality to it.

Esther, trying to sound natural by naming the name, said, “Debby wanted to come to your graduation—and if she could, she would have sent something.”

Suzy looked at her quietly and said, “She was here. I saw you talking about her when we were getting our diplomas and again when we were getting ready to march out.”

“Nonsense!” Jacob said. “We didn’t talk about anyone.”

“It’s okay, really, even if you didn’t really talk out loud; it was that look you get….” She thought of describing it, in case they didn’t know how it showed on their faces, but the words that came were so painfully embarrassing that she could not say them.

“Nonsense!” Jacob said again, waving it away. “A certain look—nonsense!”

Suzy and Esther caught each other’s glance. He was hiding again. Be merciful to him, Esther said with her mind. Suzy looked down at her white graduation dress. She fussed with a button for a moment. “You know the girl who stood in front of me when we got the diplomas? Well, her brother is a real dream—”

Although those in the hospital wondered how springtime could come in spite of their particular pain, it came and was triumphant. It made the patients on D ward angry that the world which had murdered them did not suffer for its sins, but, on the contrary, seemed to be thriving. And when Doris Rivera tied up her hair, put on a suit and a shallow smile, and left again for the world, it seemed to many as if she were in league with the springtime against them. The Wife of the Abdicated had a theory:

“She’s a spy. I knew her years ago. She takes it all down and the opposition gives her money for it and later when it’s published it becomes indigenous.”

“We must be charitable,” Dowben’s Mary said because she was Saint Teresa. “We must be charitable even though she has every social disease it is possible to have. Not to mention infections in private places put there by men of no social standing. Not to mention schizophrenia of a dirty, filthy nature.” She had gotten very loud and her tone had the hard, familiar edge of terror.

“You mentally ill are so amusing,” Fiorentini’s Mary said.

There was a fight.

The whole ward, it seemed, had fallen into a whirlpool of anger and fear and fights broke out with wild and pointless spontaneity.

“There are so many patients in seclusion,” a new student mused.

“When they get a few more, they will start to double them up,” Deborah answered.

“Yes … yes …” the student agreed (Number Three with Smile, fleeting). Deborah turned away and had another try for the clock with her shoe.

“I’d like to stop that smile.”

“Your face alone should be sufficient,” Helene said.

“At least you can be superior to me !”

And there was another fight.

“You get these times on the ward,” the old attendants assured the new ones. “It’s not usually this wild.” But the new ones didn’t believe them. In all of the new groups of student nurses there was the usual fear, but for the latest group there was a particularly poignant one. Two nurses from the previous group had “cracked up” shortly after having left their psychiatric affiliation and were now themselves patients in mental hospitals. “What you see,” it was rumored, “can drive you crazy.”

And so the four new students assigned to D ward stood in a tight, scared little clutch, the only beauty, youth, and health present, and in the spring of the year. Never did the bearers of poisonous nganons feel their separation so much as on this day. Helene and Constantia would fight the new enemies until their strangeness wore off, and Deborah would obliterate them in her own way until they faded into the ward’s daily anonymous pattern. She would not see them except as blurs of white. She would seldom hear them unless they spoke of her or gave specific orders. This protection against their newness and beauty was more successful than fighting. Although it was not a conscious act, she was grateful for it. It was not only the beauty and sprightliness of the students that hurt, but their strangeness, which made Deborah feel self-conscious in her craziness.

One afternoon, sitting on the floor near the nursing station and measuring the stare of the enemy clock, Deborah heard two of the students talking.

“A new one from B? Where’ll they put her?”

“I don’t know, but she really must have blown if she’s coming up here.”

“Remember what Marcia told us—they do better and then they do worse. I hope she’s toilet trained at least and knows where to put her food!” And they giggled.

The giggle was a reflex of anxiety and Deborah knew it, but when they brought Carla up later, all sprung inside and with the beaten look that Doris Rivera had had, Deborah was bitterly angry at the white unseens for having laughed. They had not been talking about some nut, but about Carla, a Carla who was good all the way to the bone, good enough even to be kind when Deborah had struck her at the core of her pain.

No one, seeing Deborah and Carla, would have known that they were friends. It would be an imposition, incomprehensible to the sane, for Deborah to greet Carla, who was in distress and who would be sorry later if a greeting drove her to violence or even rudeness. Deborah did not look at Carla; she only waited behind her stone mask until she would see the secret sign from Carla that meant recognition.

When the sign was given, they moved toward each other appearing as elaborately unconcerned as they could. Deborah smiled very slightly, but then a strange thing happened. Into the flat, gray, blurred, and two-dimensional waste of her vision, Carla came three-dimensionally and in color, as whole and real as a mouthful of hot coffee or coming-to in a pack.

“Hi,” Deborah said, on a barely rising tone.

“Hi.”

“Can you smoke?”

“No privileges.”

“Uh.”

Later Deborah passed Carla outside the bathroom, waiting to be let in by an attendant.

“Supper on my bed, if you want.”

Carla didn’t answer, but when supper came, she brought her tray to the back dormitory, where Deborah was now staying.

“Okay?”

Deborah moved aside so that Carla had the choice place, on the foot of the bed where it was level. (“Hello, hello, my three-dimensional and multicolored friend. I am so glad to see you.”) Aloud she said, “Doris Rivera was back, but she left again.”

“I heard.” Carla looked up at Deborah and by another miracle, perhaps like the one which had made her clear to Deborah’s eyes, she seemed to see through the mask. “Oh, Deb—it’s not so bad. I had to come back because I tried too much at once, and because part of what I did was against my father … and for lots of other reasons. I’m not giving up; I’m just tired, that’s all.” Her eyes filled with tears, and Deborah, frozen with confusion and terror in the presence of her friend’s grief, could only wonder what there was in that awful chaos-ocean of the world that made the drowning ones go back to it, still pale and choking, for another try and another and another.