Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Heads shot up from work. Deborah saw in her mind a sudden vision of the occupational-therapy worker in the clothes of a hunter shooting over a wind-bent wheatfield and causing the scared and sudden rising of a flock of birds. Carla understood what was happening and turned away for a moment. Then she turned back, and said, “She’s on B ward now, and she’s my roommate.”

A few of the faces relaxed and a few of the hands moved to work again.

They stayed for a while and Deborah was introduced to some of the male patients, wondering as she heard their names what could possibly make men sick. When the two girls left, they walked toward A ward, which was open and where there was a coffeepot for both patients and staff.

“It’s mostly for them,” Carla said, “but it shows you what you can hope for, and maybe if no one wants any coffee, they will let us have what’s left.” Deborah did not want to go in. One shot over the wheatfield was enough for the day.

“Carla … you’ve been out—I mean really out. Is that the way it is outside when one of us comes into a room?”

“Sometimes,” Carla said. “Getting a job, you have papers you have to show, and sometimes there’s a social worker checking on you. It can be very, very tough, but people are sometimes better than you think they will be. In lots of jobs you have to show your …sanity papers’ and they make a big thing of it, but the best people on the outside make you feel honored to share the name …person’ with them. The part that’s hardest is the feeling you get when everyone is polite and says …good morning’ and …good night’ while the distance between you and them is getting wider and wider. The doctors say that it’s the fault of the sick one—my fault. If I were less anxious, they say, it would be easier for friendships to come, but that’s easy to say. I don’t think any of the doctors ever tried to break into a new group with a heavy stigma on their heads and having their first acceptance in that group hinge on pity or morbid fascination.”

Deborah laughed. “Doctors! Spend a glorious year in Foreign Travel. Visit your nuthouse as a patient!”

Carla laughed. “Tour without your prestige, your civil rights, or your self-respect! Thrill to the false fine-fine when you are on the receiving end!”

For a while they indulged themselves in the game of getting even with all the doctors who used their prestige and a certain sense of private ownership of reality to separate themselves from their patients. It occurred to Deborah that Dr. Halle and Furii and New Doctor would not need Foreign Travel because they had never completely shut the gate between themselves and their patients.

“I forgot to tell you,” Deborah said when they were walking back to the ward. “It’s about Helene. You know, we’ve been laughing at her jokes, but until lately, they were awfully cold. Somehow lately, there’s been something like a caring in her.” Deborah told Carla how Helene had been at the door when she was leaving the D ward. Helene had waited until they were alone for a moment and then had said, “Why couldn’t I be the one going?” Deborah had said, “Well, why not?” and she had answered abstractedly, “Maybe … maybe …” as if she were thinking of it for the first time. Helene had never been so unguarded, even in her sleep. Of course, when the nurse came to take Deborah down, she had covered it up, putting out her fist and calling Deborah “a stupid bitch” and yelling after her, “Don’t you forget it!” But Deborah had smiled, knowing that Helene had been cursing the Maybe and not her at all.

They went through the keyless south door and met New Doctor coming out. When he saw Deborah, his face brightened. “Hey”—with the eye-deep smile—“I heard about your change of address. Congratulations!” His tone had respect. She had not taken into account that there might be some heady wine in the first tasting of the new world. But he may not really know enough to judge, Deborah whispered to the gods of Yr in propitiation.

“Something strange—something I never thought about before—” Deborah said to Dr. Fried, “—that Jews have their own form of intolerance. I never knew anyone well who was not Jewish, and I never gave my last particle of trust to someone who wasn’t Jewish. Dr. Hill, the new doctor, and Carla are Protestants, and Helene is Catholic, and Miss Coral has kind of a frantic-Baptist background …”

“Well?”

“Well, I’ve been doing something funny in my mind. I’ve been making them Jewish so that they could be close to me.”

“How do you do this?”

“Well, it’s one step more than forgetting that they’re gentiles—the ones we were always told betray you in the end. I also have to forget that they’re not Jewish, too. Yesterday, Carla asked me what I thought of someone. I said, …You know that type—he wants to be an individualist, so he cries through Purim.’ It took her look, that sudden stop of surprise, and a long, long time to remind me that she didn’t know what I was talking about because she isn’t Jewish. ”

“Can you let them be what they are and be what you are, and still love them?”

“The hospital gave me that,” Deborah said slowly. “When you’re nuts, it hardly matters that you’re a nutty Jew or a nutty Holy Roller….”

Dr. Fried’s thoughts drifted for a moment to an article she had written once discussing the question of how a doctor tells a recovering patient that her own newborn health must grapple with symptoms of madness in the world. The health in this girl might weigh someday toward larger reason and freedom. Then discipline caught her up and she said, “How glad I am that you have discovered this! But beside the point. You know, I have listened to that memory you told me—the one about your almost having thrown your sister out of the window when she was a baby—and something has been bothering me about it; something is not right about it. Tell me the thing again.”

Deborah told the memory again: how she had reached into the bassinet for the little darling whose ugliness was so apparent to her and so invisible to everyone else; about the window out of which she had held the little creature, the arrival of Mother, and the shame of hating and being caught at it; how when love came, she had shivered at thinking that she might have ended Suzy’s life that day. Over the whole happening brooded the spirits of the knowing, shamed, and sorrowful parents, silent in their charity.

“Was the window open?” Furii asked.

“Yes, but I remember opening it wider.”

“Did you open it all the way?”

“Enough to lean far out with the baby.”

“I see. Then, after you opened the window and tested it by leaning out, you went and got the baby?”

“No—I picked her up first and then decided to kill her.”

“I see.” Furii leaned back like Mr. Pickwick after a good dinner. “Now I turn detective,” she said, “and I tell you that your story stinks to heaven! A five-year-old lifts up a heavy baby, carries it to the window, holds it on the sill with her own body while she opens the window and practices leaning out, lifts the baby out over the sill, and holds it at arm’s length out the window ready to drop it. Mother comes in and in a flash of speed this five-year-old whips the child inside where it starts to cry so that the mother takes it—”

“No—by that time it was back in the bassinet.”

“Most interesting,” Furii said. “Now, am I crazy or did you make that story up when you were five years old and walked in and saw that baby lying there and hated it enough to want to kill it?”

“But I remember …”

“You may remember hating, but the facts are against you! What did your mother say when she came in? Was it: …Put that baby down!’ or …Don’t hurt the baby!’?”