Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Mistake,” Deborah said, like talking wood. “By mistake.” She remembered others: a patient who had aimed at one person and hit another, the student nurse who always seemed to be walking where fists and chairs were landing. If this one could somehow be made to fit in with the others …

“Maybe the dear patient was temporarily insane!” Fiorentini’s Mary chimed in gaily. “Temporary Insanity—that’s a legal term. It means before and during and a while after, but they never say how long which way. Very exact, the law … a science, you know.” And she skipped down the hall like a seven-year-old, erupting in a new giggle and leaving the old one to grate against their senses.

“Is Mrs. Forbes coming back?” Deborah asked, feeling sick to her stomach. She understood that Lee was taking out her anger at her because Miss Coral was in seclusion and not to be approached, while Deborah was standing before her, available. Deborah had not thought of herself as being anyone’s friend, but it occurred to her that Lee thought otherwise.

She turned very slowly to Lee, and with overdrawn dignity, because dignity was new to her and strange and worn uncomfortably, she said, “Okay, Lee, Carla, too.” (She was still afraid to say the word “friend,” because of its transcendent danger.)

Lee walked to the door of the nursing station and beat on it. When it opened, she asked for a cigarette, and when it was lit for her, she growled, “What am I doing here with all these crazy people!” Deborah walked into the dorm, lay down on her bed.

The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to know why Miss Coral had hit Mrs. Forbes; why one of the Good Ones? After the lineup for sedation that evening, she moved unobtrusively to the corner beyond the nursing-station door, and stood completely still with her head against the water pipes that were placed there. The hot pipe was jacketed with insulation, but the cold, though uncomfortable, was sometimes used by the patients as a listening device. If a person put the whole side of her head against this pipe and held her breath, she could hear the conversations going on inside the nursing station, even with the door closed. Deborah had assumed that the sounds were transmitted by the faucets, because the reception was better when the speakers were near the steel sink. She was not noticed where she stood; the whole ward had been darkened for the evening, and the attendants who were out on the halls were busy getting the reluctant patients to bed. Inside the nursing station the reports were being written.

“Over there,” a voice was saying. It sounded like Miss Cleary.

“No, there—by the coffeepot.”

The idea of having coffee anytime, now or whenever, set off a water of desire in Deborah’s mouth, and she pushed her head harder against the pipe to get her mind off it. They began to talk about allotment of days off. The hall was clearing fast. If they didn’t get down to it soon, she would have to move.

“Jesus, I’m tired.” (That would be Hanson.)

“You ain’t the only one.” (Bernardi.) “I don’t know, but seems to me they’re all getting sicker.”

“You mean crazier.”

“Tch, tch, tch. Watch your language!” They laughed.

“No, honest—the damn ward is never a day without fights, a couple more in seclusion, half of ’em in packs. Now that old Coral Allan everyone calls Miss Coral, as if she was some Southern belle—I’ve heard people talk about her, but I never seen it myself ’til this afternoon.”

“God! You ever think an old lady like that could lift a bed, no less chuck it?”

Deborah wanted them to talk about Mrs. Forbes, and when they started to, she smiled against the cold pipe.

“You seen Lou Ann?” (Mrs. Forbes’s first name was Lou Ann.)

“Hudson and Carelle went down with her. Sophie’s going down to see her tomorrow, and I will too, if I get off.”

Deborah ground her teeth with impatience. They were beginning to get ready to close the night on their charges. If the evidence was not given now …

“Hey, you seen Blau last night?”

“No—I missed that one; I was back with Whitman.”

“Oh”—laugh—“ brother. ”

Deborah didn’t want to hear about Blau. She had come to find out what circumstances there might be to mitigate the pain she was feeling about Coral vs. Forbes; some reason to hold against all of her knowledge that always deceived her and ended blind and mad.

“Lord! In the bathroom and yelling all kinds of nonsense. Filled the wall with some kind of crazy writing and come out fighting like a tiger. All the time we was packing her she was swearing in that kind of babble-talk—not anything you could understand, but you looked at her face and there was that hate. Brrrr.”

“She didn’t talk at all today.”

“Well, put it in the records.”

Deborah sank down along the cold track of the pipe to the floor. She covered her face with her hands. It was hot with shame. She crawled a little away from the pipe so that she would be on neutral ground, and disassociated from the source of her knowledge. She began to cry with the incredible sounds she had made before, murmuring to all the worlds and to the collision, the one unchanging thing, “You are not of them.” She was still heaving and holding her face when Martenson, the student nurse, came and stood over her.

“Come on now, Miss Blau,” she said, “let’s get to bed.”

“Okay,” and she stood up, still hiding in the dark behind her hands, and stumbled into the dorm and to bed. She continued to sob.

“What are those obscene noises?” Fiorentini’s Mary chirped. “Some new sort of homosexual perversion, I am sure. … Oh, you insane are all so inventive—it’s because you have time to think things through .” She began to murmur and laugh.

The Wife of the Abdicated became disturbed by Mary’s laughter and the choked-out noises of Deborah’s crying and began to protest. “Have you no respect, you filthy whores! I am the secret first Wife of Edward, the Abdicated King of England!”

“Well, Hail Columbia!” said Jenny, rarely heard, but one who liked her sleep.

“Hail Mary, Full of Grace …” called Dowben’s Mary, who always brought out the atheist in everyone with her endless prayers.

“Oh, Christ! Now you’ve started that bitch up again!”

The tumult mounted and Deborah heard it as a counterpoint to the ugly sounds that were still working inside her. The attendant came and shut them all up, and there was silence, with each soul sealed away in a seclusion to the limits of which no eye could seem to reach.

Deborah lay in bed, and her thoughts returned to the puzzle. Dust motes blown and floating all the patients were, but even so there were some things that were not done. Deborah knew very well that she could never ask Miss Coral why she had thrown the bed or how it was that Mrs. Forbes’s arm had been intruded upon by that bed. Beating, stealing, swearing, blaspheming, and sexual eccentricity were not sins on D ward. Spitting on the floor, urinating, defecating, or masturbating incontinently in public aroused only passing annoyance rather than horror, but to ask how or why was not forgivable and to oppose another patient’s act was a sign of crudity at best and at worst a kind of assault—an attempted mayhem at the barriers which were the all-costly protectors of life. Lee Miller had cursed Deborah for the burnings which had resulted in the whole ward’s restriction, but she had never asked why they had been done or expressed a wish that they be stopped. There was ridicule and anger, but never intrusion. Miss Coral could never be confronted with throwing the bed, and her friends, such as they could be, would henceforth delicately expunge the name of Mrs. Forbes from their conversation in the presence of the one who had caused her to be hurt. Where then could Deborah get the answer to her question?