Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

They had to give up the house and a month later they were back in the family home once again. There was very little money, but Esther’s parents decided to give the house to them; there was too much room without the whole family and the parents had rented an apartment in Chicago. But the big house had to stay in the family, of course. And so the hated place became the Blau house.

Deborah went to the best schools in the winter and the best camps in the summer. Friendships came hard to her, but they do to many people, Esther thought. The family had not known until years later that the first summer camp (three silent years of it), was cruelly anti-Semitic. Deborah had never told them. What Esther and Jacob saw were the laughing teams of girls at play and singing over toasted marshmallows the old camp songs about Marching on to Victory.

“Was there nothing to show you that she was ill or suffering—just reticence?” Dr. Fried asked.

“Well, yes…. I mentioned school—it was small and friendly and they all thought well of her. She was always very bright, but one day the psychologist called us and showed us a test that all the children had been given. Deborah’s answers seemed to show him that she was …disturbed.’”

“How old was she then?”

“Ten,” Esther said slowly. “I looked at my miracle, trying to see her mind, if it were true. I saw that she didn’t play with other children. She was always at home, hiding herself away. She ate a lot and got fat. It had all been so gradual that I had never really seen it until then. And—and she never slept.”

“A person must sleep. You mean she slept little?”

“I knew that she must sleep, but I never saw her asleep. Whenever we came into her room at night, she would be wide awake, saying that she heard us coming up the stairs. The steps were heavily carpeted. We used to joke about our light sleeper, but it was no joke. The school recommended that we take her to a child psychiatrist, and we did, but she only seemed to get more and more disturbed and angry, and after the third session she said, …Am I not what you wanted? Do you have to correct my brain, too?’ She had that way of speaking even at ten, a kind of bitterness that was too old for her. We stopped the visits because we never wanted her to feel that way. Somehow, even without realizing it, we got into the habit of listening, even in our sleep, for—”

“For what?”

“I don’t know …” And she shook her head to ward off a forbidden word.

When the Second World War began it was no longer possible to maintain a fifteen-room house. Esther struggled on while they tried to get rid of it, feeling overwhelmed by its huge, musty rooms and the awful compulsion to “keep things up” in the critical eyes of Mom and Pop and the rest of the family. At last they found a buyer, dropped the weight of the past gratefully, and moved into an apartment in the city. It seemed a good thing, especially for Deborah; her little oddities, her fears, and her loneliness would seem less strange in the anonymity of a large city. She was still not really happy, but her teachers thought highly of her in the new school and the studies went well without any great effort on her part. She took music lessons and did all the ordinary things that young girls do.

Esther tried to think of something that would make Deborah’s present condition believable. Well … she was intense. Esther remembered speaking to her about it now and then, telling her not to take things so very, very seriously, but it was part of both of them, and not something to be stopped just by a decision or request. In the city Deborah discovered art. The opening of her interest was like a torrent; she spent every spare moment drawing and sketching. In those first years, when she was eleven and twelve, she must have done thousands of pictures, not to mention the little sketches and bits of drawing on scrap paper at school.

They had taken some of the drawings to art teachers and critics and were told that the girl was, indeed, talented and should be encouraged. It was a bright and easy answer to Esther’s gray, vague suspicions, and she tried to pull it up over her eyes. To the whole family it suddenly seemed to explain all the sickness and sensitivity, the sleeplessness, the intensity, and the sudden looks of misery, covered quickly by a blank hardness of the face or the bitter wit’s backthrust. Of course … she was special, a rare and gifted spirit. Allowances were made for her complaints of illness, for her vagueness. It was adolescence, the adolescence of an exceptional girl. Esther kept saying it and saying it, but she never could quite believe it. There was always this or that nagging sign that seemed to taunt her perceptions. One evening Deborah had gone to the doctor for another one of her mysterious pains. She had come home strangely blank and fearful. The next day Deborah had left early on some errand and not come home until late. At about four in the morning, Esther had awakened for some unknown and instinctive reason and she had gone to Deborah’s room with a certainty that now, in the telling, brought her a strange feeling of guilt. The room was empty. When she looked in the bathroom, she had found Deborah sitting quietly on the floor, watching the blood from her wrist flow into a basin.

“I asked her why she didn’t just let it go into the sink,” the doctor said, “and she answered interestingly, I thought. She said that she had not wanted to let it get too far away. You see, she knew, in her own way, that she was not attempting suicide, but making the call for help, the call of a mute and confused person. You live in an apartment house; you have from your windows a death much quicker and surer at every hand and yet this—and she knew you to be light sleepers because she was.”

“But did she decide to do this? Could she have planned it?”

“Not consciously, of course, but her mind chose the best way. She is, after all, here. Her call for help was successful. Let us go back a way now, to the camps and the school. Was there always trouble between Deborah and the campers and schoolmates? Did she work her own troubles out or did she call on you for help?”

“I tried to help, certainly. I remember quite a few times when she needed me and I was there. There was the time when she had just started school and was having trouble with a little clique there. I took them all out for a big day at the zoo and that broke the ice. In the summer camp sometimes people didn’t understand her. I was always friendly with the counselors and that would ease the way a little. She had great trouble with one of the teachers at the public school in the city. I had the teacher in to tea and just talking a bit, explaining Deborah’s fears of people and how sometimes they were misinterpreted. I helped her to understand Deborah. They were friends through the rest of school, and at the end the teacher told me that having known Deborah had been a real privilege, that she was such a fine girl.”

“How did Deborah take this help?”

“Well, she was relieved, of course. These troubles loom so large at that age and I was glad to be a real mother to her, helping in things like that. My own mother never could.”

“Looking back at those times—what was the feeling of them? How did you feel during them?”

“Happy, as I said. The people Deborah had trouble with were relieved and I was happy to be helping her. I worked hard to overcome my own shyness, to make it fun always to be where I was. We sang and told jokes. I had to learn how to bring people out of themselves. I was proud of her and often told her so. I told her often how much I loved her. She never felt unprotected or alone.”

“I see,” the doctor said.

It seemed to Esther that the doctor did not see. Somehow the wrong picture was there before them, and Esther said, “I fought for Deborah all her life. Maybe it was the tumor that started it all. It was not us—not the love that Jacob and I had for each other or for our children. It was in spite of all our love and care, this awful thing.”