Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“You knew for a long time, didn’t you, that things were not right with your daughter? It was not only the psychologist at the school. When did it seem to you that the trouble started?”

“Well, there was the summer at camp—no—it was before that. How does one sense just when the atmosphere changes? Suddenly it just seems to be, that’s all.”

“What about the camp?”

“Oh, it was the third year she had been going. She was nine then. We had come up to see her toward the end of the season and she seemed unhappy. I told her how I had gotten over bad spots of growing up by going in for sports. It’s a good way to get recognition and friends when you are young. When we left, she seemed all right, but somehow, after that year … something … went out of her…. It was as if she had her head down from then on, waiting for the blows.”

“Waiting for the blows …” the doctor said musingly. “And then there came a time, later—a time when she began to arrange for blows to fall.”

Esther turned toward the doctor, her eyes full of recognition. “Is that what the sickness is?”

“Maybe it is a symptom. I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, …Why, before the world does them.’ I asked him then, …Why not wait and see what the world will do?’ and he said, …Don’t you see? It always comes at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.’”

“That patient … did he get well?”

“Yes, he got well. Then the Nazis came and they put him into Dachau and he died there. I tell you this because I am trying to tell you, Mrs. Blau, that you can never make the world over to protect the ones you love so much. But you do not have to defend your having tried.”

“I had to try to make things better,” Esther said, and then sat back, thinking. “Somehow, as I see it now, there were mistakes—great mistakes—but they are more toward Jacob than Deborah.” She paused, looking at the doctor incredulously. “How could I have done such things to him? All these long years … since that over-priced apartment, the years of Pop’s charity, the years and years I let him come second, even today—if …Pop thinks so’ or …Pop wants it.’ Why—when he was my husband and his wishes were so simple and modest?” She looked again. “It’s not enough, then, just to love. My love for Jacob didn’t stop me from hurting him and lowering him in his own eyes as well as my father’s. And our love for Deborah didn’t stop us from … well, from causing … this … sickness.”

Dr. Fried looked at Esther and listened to the words of love and pain coming from the carefully composed mother of a girl sick to death with deception. The love was real enough and the pain also, so that she said very gently, “Let us, Deborah and I, study for the causes. Do not agonize and blame yourself or your husband or anyone else. She will need your support, not your self-recrimination.”

Brought back to the present, Esther realized that she would now have to face the Deborah of the present. “How—how can I know the right thing to say while I am talking to her? You know, don’t you, that she won’t let Jacob see her, and she had such a strange, sleepwalker’s look when I last saw her?”

“There is only one thing that is really dangerous, especially now because she is so sensitive to it.”

“And what is that, Doctor?”

“Why, lying, of course.”

They rose because the time was over. Too short, Esther thought, to say a fraction of what needed to be said. Dr. Fried saw her to the door with a last small gesture of comfort. She was thinking that the patient’s versions would be radically different from the ones her mother ascribed to both of them. The helpful parent, the grateful child. But if it were not so, the child would not be a patient. The quality of and the difference between these versions of reality would help to give depth to each of their interpretations of it.

As she left the doctor’s office, it seemed to Esther that she had not put her case correctly. Perhaps her attempt to help had been, after all, interference. The hospital had given her permission to take Deborah out by herself. The two of them would go to a movie and dinner in town, and they would talk. “I swear to you,” Esther said to the Deborah in her mind, “I swear to you that I will not use you. I will not ask you what we did or didn’t do.”

She went to the small hotel room to tell Jacob that Deborah still refused to see him. The doctor had said that they must not force her, that perhaps what she had done was not so much a slighting of Jacob as an attempt, poor and misdirected, to make her own decisions. Esther had thought that this was only placating, but she had said nothing. Poor Jacob—and I am in the middle again—the deliverer of the blow.

And after a while Jacob stopped insisting, but Esther saw him in the back of the theater, watching Deborah instead of the film. And as they came out she saw him standing in the shadows alone, watching her, and on the corner as they went into the restaurant, he was standing in the cold path of early winter.

“Tell me about your life before this hospital,” the doctor said.

“My mother told you all about it,” Deborah answered bitterly from the high, cold regions of her kingdom.

“Your mother told me what she gave, not what you took; what she saw, not what you saw. She told me what she knew of that tumor of yours.”

“She doesn’t know much about it,” Deborah said.

“Then tell me what you know.”

She had been five, old enough to be ashamed when the doctors shook their heads about the wrongness inside her, in the feminine, secret part. They had gone in with their probes and needles as if the entire reality of her body were concentrated in the secret evil inside that forbidden place. On the evening that her father made the plans for her to appear at the hospital the next day, she had felt the hard anger of the willful when they are dealt with and moved about like objects. That night she had had a dream—a nightmare—about being broken into like a looted room, torn apart, scrubbed clean with scouring powder, and reassembled, dead but now acceptable. After it had come another about a broken flowerpot whose blossom seemed to be her own ruined strength. After the dreams she had lapsed into a mute, stunned silence. But the nightmares had not taken into account the awful pain.

“Now just be quiet. This won’t hurt a bit,” they had said, and then had come the searing stroke of the instrument. “See, we are going to put your doll to sleep,” and the mask had moved down, forcing the sick-sweet chemical of sleep.

“What is this place?” she had asked.

“Dreamland,” had come the answer, and then the hardest, longest burning of that secret place she could imagine.

She had asked one of them once, an intern who had seemed to be discomfited at her suffering, “Why do you all tell such terrible lies?” He had said, “Oh, so you will not be frightened.” On another afternoon, tied to that table yet again, they had said, “We are going to fix you fine now.” In the language of the game-playing liars she had understood that they were going to murder her. Again the transparent lie about the doll.

What terrible scorn they had had to give that lie so often! Was it to have been worse than murder? What could they have had in their demented minds, those killers with their false “fine”? And afterward, through the brutal ache: “How is your doll?”

As she told it, she looked at Dr. Fried, wondering if the dead past could ever wake anything but boredom in the uncaring world, but the doctor’s face was heavy with anger and her voice full of indignation for the five-year-old who stood before them both. “Those damn fools! When will they learn not to lie to children! Pah!” And she began to jab out her cigarette with hard impatience.