Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Maybe when I leave,” Furii said, “you can learn to cry. For now, let me say this: measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion. Also, I will see you tomorrow.”

She left.

That evening Miss Coral came to Deborah holding a book. “Look,” she said timidly, “my doctor has left this with me. It is a book of plays and I wondered if perhaps you might not wish to read them with me.”

Deborah looked over at Helene, who was sitting against the wall. Had Helene been offering the book, she would have kicked it across the floor to Deborah, perhaps with a taunt. Did any two people, even in the World, speak the same language?

As she answered, Deborah could hear herself mirroring some of Miss Coral’s elaborate form of speech and also her shyness. “Which one would you prefer?” Miss Coral asked. They began to read The Importance of Being Earnest, with Deborah doing most of the men and Miss Coral doing most of the women. Soon Lee and Helene and Fiorentini’s Mary were reading, too. With the actors parodying themselves, the play was uproarious. Mary, laugh and all, was Ernest as a wellborn bedlamite, while Miss Coral as Gwendolyn reeked with magnolias and spiderwebs. Oscar Wilde’s urbane and elegant comedy was being presented on the nightmare canvas of Hieronymus Bosch. They read the whole play through, and then another, aware that the attendants were laughing with them as well as at them, and thinking, for all the fear it caused, that it was a good night, one which, magically, was not included in their damnation.

Esther Blau faced Dr. Fried unable to speak. Then she cleared her throat.

“Did I understand you correctly?”

“I think so, but first—”

“Why! Why?”

“We are attempting to find out why.”

“Can’t you find out before she’s burned up!”

Esther had read the carefully general report, but something in its tone had alerted her and she had come down again, full of foreboding, to see Deborah. She had been told that it would be unwise; she had demanded to see Dr. Halle, and once in his office, she had heard the facts no words could modify or ease. Now she sat before Dr. Fried, angry and frightened and despairing.

“And what can I tell her father—what lie can I tell him now so that we can keep her here where she gets sicker and more violent all the time!”

Through her fear the doctor’s words sounded long and slow. “I think perhaps that we are all letting ourselves go overboard with this burning business. It is, after all, a symptom of the sickness which we all know is there, and which is still responding to treatment.”

“But it’s so … so ugly !”

“You mean the wounds?”

“I haven’t seen the wounds—I mean the idea, the thought. How could anyone do that to themselves! A person would be in—” Esther gasped and put her hand before her mouth, and tears spilled over the rims of her eyes and rolled down her face.

“No, no,” the doctor said, “it’s the word that is making you so frightened. It is the old evil word …insane,’ which once meant …hopeless and forever,’ that is making you suffer so.”

“I never let myself think that word for Debby!”

The façade is broken and what is behind the façade is not so bad, Dr. Fried thought. She wondered if she could let the mother know it in some way. It might be a small comfort. The telephone rang and Dr. Fried answered it in her affable voice, and when she turned again to face Esther, she found her composed.

“You do think, then, that there is still a chance for her to be … normal?”

“I think that there is certainly a chance for her to be mentally healthy and strong. I will say something to you now, Mrs. Blau, but it is not for your daughter and I will appreciate it if you never mention it to her. I am approached at least four times every week to do therapy with a patient. I have doctors’ analyses also to supervise for the university School of Psychiatry, and at every session I must turn many away. I would be worse than wasteful to give a moment’s time to a hopeless case. I do not keep her one moment longer than I think I can help her. Tell them this at home. You need not keep telling lies—the truth is not unbearable at all.”

The doctor saw Deborah’s mother out of her office, hoping that she had helped. Easy comfort might do for some other branch of medicine (placebo was a prescription more common than doctors themselves liked to admit), but the whole weight of her life and training was against it. And after her experiences, anything that sounded even faintly like placating would frighten Esther Blau; if she had been strengthened by this talk, the whole family would be strengthened in turn.

Dr. Fried understood that Esther had outgrown her subjection to her father. She was now a strong, dominant, even dominating person. The same force in her that had tried to conquer all of Deborah’s enemies, to her detriment, might be the saving force as well. If she believed in this therapy for her daughter, she would stand against the whole family to see that it was carried out. Deborah’s illness had done more than shake the portraits in the family album. Some of the family had had to question why, and had grown a little themselves because of asking. If this were true, it was a source of hope seldom mentioned in the psychiatric journals, maybe because it was beyond “science” and beyond planning for. Outside the doors of study, Dr. Fried’s father had once told her, an angel waits.

Coming out of the doctor’s house into the brisk autumn day, Esther looked toward the high, heavily screened porch behind which she knew was D ward. What was it like there? What was it like inside the minds of people who had to stay there? She looked away from it quickly, finding that it was blurred by a sudden overwhelming of tears.

Deborah sat on the floor of the ward having her burns dressed. She had begun to be of medical interest; the wounds refused to heal. The student nurses, delighted by so tangible a condition, worked faithfully and busily with their unguents, potions, bandages, and tape. The smokers were still angry at Deborah, holding her responsible for the new rules, and even Lee, who needed to talk, was sending scornful looks at her. While the nurses worked, Deborah watched what she had come to call the Breathing Frieze of other patients, sitting and standing, expressionless except for a look of great awe that their blood could move its ways so steadily, their hearts could beat beyond will or passion. When the nurses finished dressing the recalcitrant burns, they left the hall for a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, Deborah became aware that Helene was looking hard at Sylvia, who was standing next to her, immobile as ever. The next moment, Helene came close and struck Sylvia heavily once, and once again. Sylvia stood beneath the blows and gave no sign of being conscious of them. Challenged, Helene exploded into a whirlwind of rage. A wild creature seemed to be hurling itself against rock. Helene beat and screamed and scratched and flapped, spitting and red-faced, her hair flying. Sylvia reacted only by closing her eyes slowly. Her hands were still limp at her sides; her body, it seemed, was totally commended to the forces of gravity and inertia; she appeared to take no interest in the beating. The sudden, swift happening was interrupted by the standard six attendants required to get Helene away. Soon she was borne off drowning in a wave of khaki and white.

Deborah remained standing ten feet from Sylvia. Both of them seemed alone on the planet. Deborah remembered the time two years earlier when Helene had rushed at her to destroy the face that had witnessed, and be safe from its knowledge. Everything had been Helene—doctors, nurses, attendants, the ward’s quickened rhythm, the wet sheets, and seclusion—all, all Helene, and Deborah had stood alone and shamed, because she had been too degraded to defend herself. She had stood as Sylvia was standing now, like a statue. Only her breathing betrayed her, wrenching in and out, almost as if she were snorting. Deborah was the only one who could know why Sylvia, who had failed to defend herself, needed as much attention as Helene was now getting.