Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“It doesn’t matter to me, your going,” the roommate said. “I’m not really a patient here, you know. I’m just doing research for my degree and as soon as I’m finished I’ll just pick up and go.”

When Deborah said good-by, the woman looked at her as if she had never seen her before.

The social worker had a list of rooms in town that could be let to outpatients. Most of them, Deborah knew from the grapevine or from her walks, were poor and dark, and partook of the shame of the lepers who lived in them.

“There are one or two places which are new and have no patients living in them. They are a little far, though—way over on the other side of town.”

Deborah closed her eyes and put her finger on the list of names.

“The law requires us to state—”

“Yes, I know,” Deborah said, and suddenly remembering her sprained ankle and St. Agnes’s (“Are they violent ?”) she winced a little.

“I’ll have to come along,” said the social worker. “It’s a requirement—”

They stood together at the door of the old house, and when the landlady opened it, Deborah looked hard at her, waiting for the guarding of the eyes and the closing of the face as the social worker explained what she was. The landlady was elderly and there was little subtlety in her. Deborah began to wonder if she understood what was being said.

When the worker was finished she motioned to them. “Well, I hope you like the room.”

“It’s a mental hospital,” the social worker said desperately.

“Oh? … Now, this room has more light, but the other is closer to the bathroom, you see.”

When the worker left, the landlady only said, “Now, please don’t clog up this toilet—it’s old and a little cantankerous.”

“Not if my life depended on it,” Deborah said.

As it turned out, the landlady, Mrs. King, was a stranger in the town and had not been raised on the bogeymen of “That Place.” Too many incidents and frightening tales had bred fear and contempt in most of the town’s people. Deborah had often seen mothers call their children out of the range of “The Captain,” who had been in the Navy and talked to himself as he walked. To Deborah, who looked somewhat more normal, the town showed no such fear. It showed nothing. Although Deborah had gone to the choir practice at the church and sewing classes at the high school, and even a teenage outing club (Come One Come All), she went and returned, sharing a sewing machine, a hymnbook, a map, and “good evening” and “good night” and no more. Everyone was most polite and so was she, but their lives had been walled against her.

“Is it the town or is it my face?”

“Maybe both …” said Furii, “although your face looks all right to me—perhaps there is a certain anxiety in it when you meet people.”

Deborah and Dr. Fried worked without inspiration—a kind of mental day labor, finding in the new freedoms new confrontations with the past.

“I wanted to ask you,” Furii said, “to look back again to the past and tell me if you see any light breaking through that grayness of which we have spoken.”

Deborah sank back into the memories. The reign of ruin and calamity, which had seemed so total, now, magically, admitted of some patches of sunlight all but lost under the conquering powers of Yr. “Yes … yes … I do!” She smiled. “I seem to remember whole days of it some-times—and there was that year in the house where we were before we moved back to Chicago—and there was my friend—how could I have forgotten!”

“You had a friend?”

“Until I came here—and she was not one of the ruined either, at least not after she got used to the newness of the city. She started like all the others to whom nganon cries—she was lonely and a foreigner—but she learned our ways quickly and she was good—I mean she was not ruined!”

“You heard from her in the last years?”

“Oh, yes! She’s in college—why didn’t I remember?”

“When you were so very ill, remembering a friend or a partial sunlight would have meant changing a view of the world that could not allow change. One relinquishes claim to the world for a reason. You have to have all the reasons to make so big a renunciation. Now, when you have come again to the world, you are able to remember what was also there with the darkness. Much of it was darkness only because it was balanced against the light of loving and experiencing truth.”

“But Yr is beautiful and true also, and there is love there, too.”

“It is not the language, and not the gods in themselves,” Furii said, “but their force of keeping you from the world, which is the sickness.”

“It’s nice to walk with Lactamaeon when he is in a good mood. After the sewing class, where I don’t belong, or the church choir where I am a stranger, it’s good to walk home with someone who can laugh and be silly or turn beautiful and make you cry, looking at the stars while he recites.”

“You know, don’t you, now, that you made him up out of yourself—that you created him out of your own humor and your own beauty?” Furii said gently.

“Yes—I know now.” It was an admission that gave much pain.

“When were you at last able to see this?”

“You mean with all my eyes?”

Furii nodded.

“Well, maybe I always saw it, partly far in the place where it was safe, but I guess it’s been getting nearer and nearer to me for a long time. Last week I was laughing secretly with Idat and Anterrabae. They had written a choral setting of a poem by Horace, and when they sang it, I said, That was one of the few texts I know by heart all the way through. And Anterrabae said, Of course! And then we started the kind of banter—the kind you have when you are kidding and hurting someone at the same time. I said, Teach me mathematics, and they laughed, but they admitted at last that they could not go beyond my knowledge. Then we were insulting each other and laughing, but giving pain, too. I said to Anterrabae, Is that my fire you are burning in? and he said, Was it not worth the fuel? I said, Does it do for light or heat? and he said, For years of your life. I said, For all the years? Forever? A disputed land, your land.

“Do you see the Collect now as the criticism of parts of your own mind?” Furii said.

“I’m afraid, still afraid that they are real somehow. It would be wonderful if I could dismiss them when I wanted to.”

Furii reminded her how merciless the Collect had been, and how lacking in real beauty for a long, long time the gods had been. Only now when she fought them did they come with their allurements of wit and poetry, because it is harder to fight an amiable spirit.

While the memory of light was still in Deborah’s mind, Furii said, “What about your new friend, Carla? Do you still see her sometimes?” And Deborah began to tell Furii about the strange thing that had happened.

She had not seen Carla much lately, but when they were together there was a special closeness between them. They might have been friends anywhere, but because they had been sick together and had fought out of it at the same time, their comradeship was tinged with the aura of emergent life and struggle. Carla was busy during the day at a lab technician’s job, and at night she had to spend time studying the new techniques which had passed by the barred windows of her five years and three hospitals.

They had shared much of their pasts, most of their fears, and all of their tenuous and fragile hopes, but Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art, or something on which she was working, a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness. Because it was a subtle emotion in a world of erratic oscillations of feeling, of violence, and of lies told by every sense and perception, Deborah had not noticed it in their sick times. But one day the world had cleared enough so that she realized that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back. In their new eagerness for experience and reality, the strange aloofness stood out clearly. She did not remember Carla ever having seen her work, but there must have been scraps of it about during their days of paper-collecting on D ward. It must have been that Carla hadn’t liked what she had seen and was guilty, being a friend, and angry because of it. So Deborah had decided to spare Carla the ups and downs of her art. There was so much to share in the new world that they never missed the view from that one window.