Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“No, I remember clearly. She said, …What are you doing here?’ and I remember that the baby was crying then.”

“What astonishes me about this whole business is that I was so busy listening to the emotional content—the hatred and the pain—that I lost the facts and they had to shout at me again and again before I could hear them. The hatred was real, Deborah, and the pain also, but you were just not big enough to do any of the things you remember doing, and the shame you say your parents felt all these years was only your guilt at wishing your sister dead. With the false idea of your own power (an idea, by the way, that your sickness has kept you from ever growing out of), you translated those thoughts into a memory.”

“It might as well have been real; I lived with it for all those years as if it were real.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Furii said smiling, “but no longer will you be able to flagellate yourself with that particular stick. Our would-be murderess is no more than a jealous five-year-old looking into the cradle of the interloper.”

“Bassinet,” Deborah said.

“Those ones on legs? My God, you couldn’t even reach into it then. I turn in my detective badge tomorrow!”

Deborah was back in the room being five again and standing with her father for a view of the new baby. Her eyes were on the level of the knuckles of his hand, and because of the ruffles on the bassinet she had to stand on her toes to peep over the edge. “I didn’t even touch her …” she said absently. “I didn’t even touch her… .”

“As long as you are back in those days, we might as well see them together,” Furii said.

Deborah began to talk about the year of brightness before gloom had settled in for good. She explored the brief and magical time when looking forward had been with expectation. Now it came to her that for that one year, even with the false weight of the murder and her dethronement as princess, she had not yet been under the sentence of destruction. There had been that season—it came again now with a powerful surge of meaning—when she had still been committed to life and had lived a joyful hunger because of a present and a future.

She came from the sunshine of that fifth year with tears running down her face. Furii saw the tears and nodded. “I approve.”

Deborah understood now that the very early happiness was proof that she was not damned genetically—damned bone and fiber. There had been a time when she suffered, yet shone with life. She began to cry in full earnest. It was still a novice’s cry, harsh, random, and bitter, and when it subsided, Furii had to ask if it had been a “good one,” with healing in it.

“What’s the date?” Deborah asked.

“December fifteenth. Why do you ask?”

“I was just thinking out loud. Yri time is internal. You know about the two calendars and how days are measured between meetings for trial by the Collect.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I just remembered that today is Fourth Englift toward Annot. It means that we are on a rising-calendar.” She was still too frightened to say that, by some miracle, it seemed to have raised her from Hell to Purgatory.

When she left the doctor’s office to return to the ward, an icy rain was falling. Cold of the causal world made her shiver, and she was grateful because it was a cold responsible to the laws and seasons of the earth. In the Preserve the tree limbs were wet and black. She saw Idat high above her, walking on a great branch. Her veils were all shimmering like the air above a fire.

Suffer, victim, Idat greeted her.

Oh, Idat! Deborah answered in Yri. The earth is so good now — why is it walking in ruin to have both Yr and Elsewhere?

Am I not beautiful in this tree? the goddess asked. Questions had a particularly poignant quality in Yri because they used a familiar form and because they gave hint of the quick and ephemeral quality of asking anything. Idat was the Dissembler and her answers were always difficult. I think I shall be a woman always, she said now. You can have something on which to model yourself.

Deborah knew that she could never use Idat for a model. They were different in every way, mainly in that Idat was a goddess and impossibly beautiful, not bound to the world at all. When Idat cried, her tears crystallized into diamonds splashed on her face. Her laws were not those of Earth.

Stay with me, Deborah begged to Yr, using the word which meant forever. There was no answer.

At dinner Carla seemed particularly nervous. Her hands were shaking and she had a pale, sick look. Deborah tried to warm her by looking at her with “pure” Earth eyes, but it was no use. When coffee came, Carla tried to pick up her cup, but it leaped from her shock-wired hands and fell, breaking like the brittle crust of reality on which they all walked. While the sound of the breaking crockery still echoed, the others at the table made quick reference to their own places on that crust, while the fright ran all along the familiar pathway traces inside of them.

Then Deborah took Carla’s hands and held them. The hands rested. Carla rested. The act was a sudden thing, more sudden than the recollection that Yri time and season were measured by the internal climate and that Fourth Englift toward Annot was a strong position to venture from—more sudden than the recollection that a debt to Sylvia still had to be paid and that she still wanted to give a kiss to McPherson, long away. She looked at Carla. The face was still pale and slapped-looking, but it was better than it had been. The hands relaxed. No one said anything and soon the nurse whose particular job it was to signal the end of the meal raised her discreet white arm, just enough to be seen, and everyone, more or less, got up and went. It was then, at the signal, that Deb realized that she had unhidden herself for Carla. On the way up the stairs it came to her that perhaps—no, perhaps was too strong—that three short of maybe, she might be more than only an ex-almost-murderess. She might be something more nearly—the word hit like a fist, but it was there and she could not cancel it or keep it out of her mind—more nearly good.

Her dream began with winter darkness. Out of this darkness came a great hand, fisted. It was a man’s hand, powerful and hollowed by shadows in the wells between bones and tendons. The fist opened and in the long plain of the palm lay three small pieces of coal. Slowly the hand closed, causing within the fist a tremendous pressure. The pressure began to generate a white heat and still it increased. There was a sense of weighing, crushing time. She seemed to feel the suffering of the coal with her own body, almost beyond the point of being borne. At last she cried out to the hand, “Stop it! Will you never end it! Even a stone cannot bear to this limit … even a stone …!”

After what seemed like too long a time for anything molecular to endure, the torments in the fist relaxed. The fist turned slowly and very slowly opened.

Diamonds, three of them.

Three clear and brilliant diamonds, shot with light, lay in the good palm. A deep voice called to her, “Deborah!” and then, gently, “Deborah, this will be you.”

On the first of January, with eagerness outrunning terror, Deborah went home for a five-day visit. Although she knew that she wore a strange look, that besides the scars of scrapings and burnings, a subtler mark was on her—an aura of withdrawal and loneliness—hunger for the new world propelled her into it.

She was received at home as if she had won the world. Suzy had been warned, Jacob had been warned. Grandmother and Grandfather had been warned, and all the old aunts and uncles, warned, so that they held their love up, quivering with pity and fear, to show her that it was still whole. All her favorite foods were served and all her favorite people came to bear witness to the fact that “nevertheless” and “no matter what …”