Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Dead pale, cold-handed, in a lilac-flowered dress that ill suited the lithe tiger wearing it, Helene came to B ward. Her “normal” smile seemed wired, like a booby trap. When Deborah and Carla told her they were glad to see her, she told them they were hypocrites and liars, and her true smile crept behind the display one, so that they saw she was inhabiting her body and they were happy for her.

They took her over to the craft shop when she was given her privileges. Deborah went, too, because she remembered that it was a wheatfield and that the hunter there had a very sudden gun. With Helene’s violent past, legends of which were still current, the gun would be a cannon.

Carla left early for her doctor’s hour and they didn’t see her again until just before supper. She came quietly out on the hall where Deborah and Helene were sitting with sketch pad and curlers, and walked over to them.

“Deb—it’s about Carmen.” She handed her the newspaper clipping. Newspapers were not allowed on B ward, but there was a brisk bootleg trade going on. Deborah looked at it quickly and slipped it in her sketch pad. The headline said, MAGNATE’S DAUGHTER SUICIDE. She held the pad so no one could see the clipping and read it through. Under the headline there was an article with details about the mess that can be made when a human being fires a gun into her ear.

“Do you know her? I mean did you know her?” Helene asked. “How long was she here?”

“Just long enough to learn to disagree,” Carla said.

“She could have made it,” Deborah said flatly, as she stood up.

“Oh, Deb, how can you be sure?”

“You’re not just rubbing it in good to get a little free suffering out of it?” Helene asked in her bitter voice.

“I didn’t say that she would have made it, but that she could have.”

Their voices brought others out of their rooms. Everyone knew what the talk was about and there was a rippling tension on the ward. The nurses stood by, not knowing whether to speak or be silent, and Deborah began to feel the mood was less about Carmen’s suicide than an argument between the cynicism that was in each of them and the blind, small longing to fight.

To her surprise, Deborah found herself on the side of the little Maybe. She knew what she was thinking, but wondered if she could speak to these women who were both so much saner and so much more terrified than the D-ward patients were.

“Oh, Deb, you said yourself that Carmen was going to blow sky-high any minute,” Carla said.

Deborah looked at Carla, wondering if Carla were trying to keep her from saying something that would make trouble and need recanting, or spoil something between them that had weathered all the suffering.

“Carmen could have made it, that’s all. She had a good, healthy sickness.”

“That’s a contradiction in terms!”

“That’s impossible!”

“No, it isn’t—think about it for a minute—a sickness with a good, hard hurt that’s direct and doesn’t cover with an appealing surface or exercises in normal-faking the doctors.”

There was an embarrassed silence and without meaning to, Deborah found herself looking at Linda, the “psychological authority,” who had read everything and gave jargon like currency, recklessly improvident because she hoped never to be touched by the pain that was wrapped in the words. Linda, frightened of the look and the definition, came back angrily. “Ridiculous—you’re just rationalizing your own defensive system!”

Deborah tried to say it better, and make it more real. “Look at the bunch from the Men’s Admitting—they’re all very rational and …sane’ and witty. The staff likes them, even as people, but they’re here and they’ve been here for years and they aren’t helped by anything or anybody. They don’t seem to suffer much because they don’t feel anything much. That’s sick-sickness. Miss Coral up on D may be sick but she’s feeling and fighting and alive …” Her voice petered out in the face of their anger and disbelief, but suddenly she felt again the quiet power of the opening of the world which she had felt that evening on the D ward. Only now it came more urgently and passionately. “Alive is fighting,” Deborah said. “It’s the same thing. I still think that Carmen could have made it.”

The nurse stopped them then, and Deborah looked around at the faces suffused with anger against her. She had hit a particularly sensitive nerve. It was B ward’s nerve, a desperate hope that the false “fine-fine” might see them through if only they acted long enough and tried to make it be the truth. Was it as frightened a clutching at convention on the outside?

“You sure like to rattle the cages around here,” Carla said later as they got ready for bed.

“You’re wondering how I ever made it to this old age, as thorny as I am?”

“I’m going to miss you, Deb.”

In Yr’s distances a cannon went off. “Why should you?”

“Because I’m going out to try again.”

The fear, like a backhand slap, caught her unprepared, but her lessons with Furii had been well learned, and while she shook, she questioned: Fear for me or for Carla? If for me, why? Lose a friend? Lose a friend to the world? Fear because soon I will have to go?

Part of it was of the same fear that had made the others back off from her definition of a “good, healthy sickness.” She smiled at it ruefully.

“It should be strong enough, this therapy,” Carla said, “to go a lousy mile into town. I’m going to start looking for jobs where I won’t be sealed up in a little room somewhere. Maybe that was the main trouble before.” She sounded frightened and tired.

“I’ll miss you,” Deborah said bleakly.

“Maybe soon you can come, too.”

Deborah tried to say “sure,” but she knew that her fear might translate the words into some other language, so she lay on her bed and felt the fear settle over her like fog.

The girl who took Carla’s place in her room was a gentle, generous veteran of mechanical psychiatry in a dozen other hospitals. Her memory had been ravaged, but her sickness was still intact. She gave herself dozens of sets of wildly divergent parents. “It was always a musical family …” she would say vaguely. “My father—he’s Paderewski, and my mother is Sophie Tucker. It’s why I’m high-strung.”

Deborah liked her and after a while they did not speak of families at all, or the marital frictions of her parents, Greta Garbo and Will Rogers.

The hunger for the new world which had awakened in Deborah forced her to seek more and more of it. She would sit near the student nurses on the hall and in the craft shop to hear them talk. She would question them about their lives and families and where they lived and what they wanted to do after they finished their training. She would walk into town and back often, learning all the ways there were to go and come, looking, smelling, watching the seasons change.

The hunger made her go even where she was not wanted, into the social life of the town. She joined two church choirs and talked to the Methodist minister about the young people’s group. They both knew that belonging was a hopeless quest; the hospital and its inmates had been feared and ridiculed far too long in the small, insular community. But the tired, quiet ladies of the church choir could not measure or reckon the passionate hunger of a newborn worldling for her birthright. Although they ignored her, she came anyway. They made her invisible, yet she still came.

And finally, in fear and excitement, restlessness and stubborn will, she set into motion the request for her own way out of the hospital. When the machinery had whirred and the response had come, she saw in her roommate’s face the look which she, in turn, must have shown to Carla and before Carla to Doris Rivera—an awe, a fear, an anger, an envy—above all, a reality-shattering loneliness.