Джоанн Гринберг: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

They turned and left, and Charon, in white cap and striped uniform, guided the removed spirit toward the locked ward. Dr. Fried watched them walking back to the large building and thought: Somewhere in that precocity and bitterness and somewhere in the illness, whose limits she could not yet define, lay a hidden strength. It was there and working; it had sounded in the glimmer of relief when the fact of the sickness was made plain, and most of all in the “suicide attempt,” the cry of a mute for help, and the statement, bold and dramatic as adolescents and the still-fighting sick must always make it, that the game was over and the disguising ended. The fact of this mental illness was in the open now, but the disease itself had roots still as deeply hidden as the white core of a volcano whose slopes are camouflaged in wooded green. Somewhere, even under the volcano itself, was the buried seed of will and strength. Dr. Fried sighed and went back to her work.

“This time … this time can I only call it forth!” she sighed, lapsing into the grammar of her native tongue.

Suzy Blau took the story of the convalescent school quite well, and when Esther told her own parents she tried to shade the hospital into a rest home. But they were undeceived and furious.

“There’s nothing the matter with her brains! That girl has a good wit,” Pop said. (It was his highest compliment.) “It’s just that the brains in this family skipped a generation and fell on her. She is me, my own flesh. The hell with all of you!” He walked out of the room.

In the following days Esther pleaded for their support in her decision, but only when Claude, her elder brother, and Natalie, her sister—the favorites of the family—admitted to Mom and Pop that there could be a need, did the old man relent a little, for Deborah was his favorite grandchild.

At home Jacob was silent but not at peace with what he and Esther had done. They went to see Dr. Lister twice, and Jacob listened, trying to be comforted by the belief that they had done the right thing. Confronted with direct questions, he had to agree, and all the facts were trying to make him say “yes,” but he had only to submit to his feelings for the smallest moment and his whole world rang with misgivings. When he and Esther quarreled, the crucial thing remained unspoken, leaving an atmosphere of wordless rancor and accusation.

At the end of the first month a letter arrived from the hospital relating Deborah’s activities in very general terms. She had made “a good adjustment” to the routine and staff, had begun therapy, and was able to walk about the grounds. From this noncommittal letter Esther extracted every particle of hope, going over and over the words, magnifying each positive sign, turning the remarks this way and that for the facets of brightest reflection.

She also struggled to sway the feelings of Jacob and Pop, practicing her arguments with her image in the mirror. Pop knew in himself somewhere, she believed, that the decision was not wrong, that his anger at Deborah’s hospitalization was only an expression of his injured pride. Esther saw that her dominating, quick, restless, and brilliant immigrant father now showed certain signs of mellowing; only his language was as brusque as ever. Sometimes it even seemed to her that with Deborah’s illness coming to a head, the whole thrust and purpose of their lives was forced under scrutiny. One night she asked Jacob abruptly, “How did we share in the thing? What awful wrongs did we do?”

“Do I know?” he answered. “If I knew would I have done them? It seemed like a good life—a very good life she had. Now they say it wasn’t. We gave love and we gave comfort. She was never threatened with cold or hunger …”

And Esther remembered then that Jacob, too, had an immigrant past; had been cold, wet, hungry, and foreign. How he must have sworn to keep those wolves from his children! Her hand went up to his arm, protectively, but at the gesture he turned a bit.

“Is there more, Esther? Is there more?”

She could not answer, but the next day she wrote a letter to the hospital asking when they might visit and see the doctor. Jacob was glad for the letter and waited, going over the mail every day for the answer, but Pop only snorted, “What are they going to do—tell you it’s a mistake? The world is full of jackasses. Why should that place be immune?”

“Nonsense!” Jacob said, more angrily than he had ever spoken to his father-in-law. “Doctors have ethics to live up to. If they find out it’s a mistake, they’ll let us take her home right away.”

Esther realized that he was still waiting for the diagnosis to be reversed, the miracle to happen, the locked doors to swing wide, the film of the last year of living to be run backward, and everyone to be able to laugh at the ludicrous way life worked—backward, backward until it was all unlived and erased. She pitied Jacob suddenly, but she could not let him go on thinking that she wanted to visit the hospital for that reason. “I wanted to tell the doctors—to ask them—well, our lives have changed … and there are things that Deborah may not even know that made us do what we did. There are reasons for so much of it that all our goodwill could not change.”

“We lived simple lives. We lived good lives. We lived in dignity.” He said it believing it utterly, and Esther saw that some of what she had said reflected on him and on her relationship with him, both before she was married and after, when she should have changed allegiances and hadn’t. She couldn’t bear to hurt him now. It was pointless anyway; so much of the struggle was past. For everyone but Deborah it was a dead issue, and who could know what it was to her?

And sometimes, in the first months, there were periods of calmness, even of happiness. Suzy, alone in the house, began to come into her own, and Jacob realized even as he denied it, that before Deborah had gone he had been tiptoeing, deferring, frightened of something nameless for a long time.

One day a group of Suzy’s school friends trooped in, laughing and joking, and Esther asked them all to dinner on the spur of the moment. Suzy shone, and when they had gone, Jacob said good-naturedly, “Those stupid kids. Were we ever that stupid? The little one with that cap!” He laughed, and catching himself in the real enjoyment, said, “My God—I laughed so much tonight. When before did I have so much fun!” And then: “Has it really been that long? Years?”

“Yes,” she said, “it has been that long.”

“Then maybe it’s true that she was … unhappy,” he said, thinking of Deborah.

“Sick,” Esther said.

“Unhappy!” Jacob shouted and left the room. He came back a few minutes later. “Just unhappy!” he said.

“Your parents write that they wish to make a visit,” Dr. Fried said. She sat on the other side of the heavy twelfth-century iron portcullis that Deborah occasionally found separating them. The portcullis had been raised this time, invisible, but when the doctor had mentioned parents and a visit, Deborah heard the sudden heavy rasp, and down it clanged between them.

“What is it?” the doctor said, not hearing the clang of lowering, but perceiving its effect.

“I can’t really see you and I can’t really hear you,” Deborah said. “You are behind the gate.”

“Your medieval gate again. You know, those things have doors on them. Why don’t you open a door?”

“The door is locked, too.”

The doctor looked at her ashtray. “Well, those gatemakers of yours must not be too smart or they would never build their barriers with side doors and then not be able to open them.”

Deborah was annoyed when the doctor took her private facts and moved them and used them to her own ends. The bars were thickening against the doctor. The soft, accented voice was closing and closing to silence behind the metal wall. The last words were: “Do you want them to come?”