I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (11 page)

After her visit, she rode home to lie to Jacob and the family. She would tell them that she had seen Deborah and the ward and the doctors and that it was all, all fine. They would want to hear this and they would want desperately to believe it, and so they would let her lie to them, at least for a while. She had carried an armful of magazines with her for Deborah. They had not even let her give them, and she noticed absentmindedly as she sat looking out of the train window that she still had them. She began to thumb through them idly; the lie she had to tell to Jacob and the pain she had to keep to herself seemed to be reflected in everything she saw. She tried to escape to the pictures in the magazine, but there was no refuge there either. As she looked, tears closed over her eyes and blurred the grimly gay models in the advertisements:

COLLEGE IN THE FALL
CLASSIC STYLE FOR THE CAMPUS

And on the next page:

OUR NEW YOUNG DEBUTANTES
WHITE, WHITE, WHITE FOR HER FIRST
PROM

There were forget-me-nots scattered all over that page, and Esther set her jaw hard against those flowers, waiting for the tears to stop filling in her eyes. Deborah’s classmates would be looking at these pages, substituting their own faces in place of the models, as they looked forward to graduation and college. Friends of Esther’s with daughters were already giving and taking the names of colleges like calling cards. They were getting the lovely outfits ready to be worn, and the diaries to be filled. She
still met these mothers, her friends, and spoke to them, and their children’s problems seemed only a little smaller in scope than Deborah’s. “Marjorie is so shy; she just doesn’t seem comfortable with her friends!”
“Helen takes everything as if it were life and death—she’s so intense.” Esther listened to these descriptions with her cold lie in front of her, and recognizing a little breath of Deborah in this sigh or that. Her little idiosyncrasies were like theirs. She, too, was shy; she, too, covered her fear with precocity and cynical wit; she, too, was intense, but would she ever come back to a world like theirs? That hospital—could it—could it have been a mistake all along?

When she got home, she saw Jacob and then the family, smiling and poised, and she parried and equivocated with fluency and conviction. She thought herself greatly successful, until Jacob said, “Wonderful—I’m glad they think she’s made so much progress, because next time you go, I’m going with you.”

“How did you destroy your sister?” Dr. Fried asked Deborah, who was huddled on the couch, shivering in Yr’s cold through the heat of Earth’s August.

“I didn’t meant to—she was exposed to my essence. It’s called by an Yri name—it is my selfness and it is poisonous. It is mind-poisonous.”

“Something you say that destroys? Something you do, or wish?”

“No, it’s a quality of myself, a secretion, like sweat. It is the emanation of my Deborah-ness and it is poisonous.”

Suddenly Deborah felt an explosion of self-pity for the miasma-creature she was, and she began to elucidate, drawing larger and larger the shape of herself and the virulence of her substance.

“Wait a moment—” The doctor put up a hand, but the joy of self-loathing had taken Deborah as fully as if it had been love, and she went on and on, decorating and embellishing the foulness, throwing the words higher
and higher. When she was finished, her shadow was immense. The doctor waited until Deborah could hear her and then said flatly,
“So, you are still trying to throw dust in my eyes?”

Deborah parried, defending and nursing the unrecognizable image she had made, but the doctor said, “No, my dear—it just doesn’t work. It’s an old invention, this camouflage, and it was not invented by your Eeries, either.”

“Yeeries.”

“I wonder. No. To hide one can forget, or pretend to another happening, or distort. They are all just good methods of getting away from the truth that might be bitter.”

“Why not hide then, and be safe?”

“And be crazy.”

“Okay, and be crazy. Why not, after what they did to me!”

“Oh, yes. You remind me cleverly of what I had left out. Another camouflage is to blame it all on someone else. It keeps you from having to face what they really did to you, and what you did to yourself and are still doing.”

Part of what Deborah had said about the evil emanation was actual and true to her, but the glorifying of it had put its reality far away for a while, and the monster-girl she now saw was a stranger to her. The doctor pressed her to continue about the destruction of Suzy, and she did, telling of the early jealousy and the later love that had been so racked and guilty. Deborah’s illness had been oncoming for a long time. She described how she felt about it: that everyone she knew was tainted by it through her—Suzy more than anyone because Suzy was loving and impressionable.

“Do you make her have hallucinations or smell things that are not there? Do you make her doubt her own sanity or reality?”

“No,” Deborah said. “The illness is not seeing or hearing things—the illness is underneath those. I never
gave her symptoms. The illness is the volcano; she will have to decorate the slopes herself.”

“Are you still cold?” the doctor asked.

“Yes, ever since these rains began to fall and the icy fogs settled. On the ward they never turn the heat on.”

“Well, in the outside—the world—it is August. The sky is clear and the sun is very hot. I am afraid that the cold and the fog are inside you.”

The tumor woke, angered that there were other powers contending for her allegiance, and it sent a sharp bolt through its kingdoms to remind them that it was still supreme. Deborah doubled up, gasped with pain, and began to tremble.
I warned you,
the Censor said. The heavy smell of ether and chloroform came to her and she heard her heart pounding. “I tried to kill my sister when she was born,” she said. She was surprised that the information did not come out any louder than her own voice. No cannon boomed.

“How did you do this?”

“I tried to throw her out the window. I was almost ready to throw her when mother came in and stopped me.”

“Did your parents punish you?”

“No. No one ever mentioned it again.”

She felt a slow, fearful gratitude to her family, who had lived with a monster and treated it like a person.

“After the operation …” the doctor mused.

“We were in the sunny house where we had moved for that one year. No matter what they gave me, you see, no matter what they did for me—” She was near tears for a moment, until the sickness remembered that tears were human.
You are not of them,
Yr said, and the tears drew away as suddenly as if they had never approached.

“Did you just think about killing her?”

“No! I had her in front of the window all ready to go.”

“And your parents never spoke of it or asked you about it?”

“No.” Deborah knew that they must have taken the naked fact and buried it hurriedly somewhere, like carrion.
But she knew well how the stench of a buried lie pursues the guilty, hanging in the air they breathe until everything smells of it, rancid and corrupting. Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.

She had said,
What is that awful stench?

Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy,
he had answered.

Deborah began to laugh, so that the doctor leaned toward her. “What is it? Take me along with you.”

“Pity,” Deborah said, “pity. Somewhere there is a thief who has heard that people bury and hide their gold and jewels. Can you see the expression on his face when he comes on what I have buried!” For a moment they both laughed.

When the evening shift came on, Helene placed herself in front of the nursing station and began stamping her feet heavily. The noise soon brought an attendant out.

“What’s that matter now, Helene?”

“Case closed,” Helene said. “I’m stamping Mr. Hobbs’s case closed.”

She was smiling archly, so that the attendant’s face tightened. It was supposed to be a big secret that the night before Mr. Hobbs had gone home after his shift, closed his doors and windows, turned on the gas, and died. In the nun-prisoner-pigmy confinement of Ward D everyone knew, even the unknowing.

As lunatics, crazies, screwballs, nuts, the patients felt no responsibility to be decent and desist from speaking ill of the dead. Where deformity of the body was regarded with certain mercy, death and its conventions were heaped with scorn. Helene had once said, “A nut is someone whose noose broke,” for they had all wanted to kill themselves, they had all tried suicide more or less diligently, and they all envied the dead. Part of their illness was that they saw the whole world revolving around themselves,
and so what Hobbs had done was to stick out his tongue at them from a place where they could not get at him to slap his face for it.

The evening shift was here, and the patients were all waiting to see who would be taking Hobbs’s place. When those at the head of the hall saw, they carried the news back.

“It’s a Nose—a new one—a new Nose,” and there was an almost palpable groan. Noses were Conscientious Objectors who had selected to work in mental hospitals as an alternative to prison. Lee Miller had originated the name “Nose” a long time ago by saying, “Oh, those conchies, I hate them. They won’t fight, so the government says …We’ll rub your noses in it for you! It’s either prison or the nuthouse!’
” Helene had laughed and someone else had said, “Well, they’re the noses’ and we’re
it.
”

Now Carla only murmured, “I like being somebody’s punishment; it makes me feel needed,” and she laughed, but with a bitterness that was rare for her.

The Noses usually came in pairs. “I suppose we should call one of them a Nostril,” precise Mary said, rubbing the blood from invisible stigmata. The patients laughed.

“Maybe he’ll be all right,” Carla said. “Anything’s better than Hobbs.”

They watched the new staff member go his first long and hard walk down the hall. He was terrified. They saw his terror with feelings caught between amusement and anger. Constantia, in the seclusion section, began to scream when she saw him, and Mary, hearing it, said, “Oh, my God, he’s going to faint!” laughing and then hurt: “She’s only a
person,
you know.”

“He’s afraid he’ll catch what we have,” Deborah said, and they all laughed, because Hobbs had caught it, and died from it too.

The expedition neared them.

“Get up off the floor, will you please?” the head ward nurse said to the group of patients sitting against the walls of the hall and corridor.

Deborah looked at the Nose. “Obstacle,” she said.

She meant that she and the other patients with feet stuck out before the terrified man were like the contrivances in the obstacle courses that men must run through in their military training, that she and they understood their substitution as “the horrors of war,” and that they would try to fulfill the Army’s desire that this man’s training be rigorous. But the nurses neither laughed nor understood, and passed by with another admonition about getting off the floor. The patients all knew that it was merely form. Everybody always sat on the floor and it was only when guests came that the nurses, like suburban wives, clucked at the dust and wished that “things were neater.”

Constantia was beginning to work herself up into an all-night howl, when the ward door opened and McPherson let himself in. Deborah looked hard at him, saw everyone suddenly go easier, and said meaningfully, “They should have changed the lock.”

She was thinking that McPherson’s key-turn and incoming was of a completely different order from the one which had preceded it—as different as if there had been different doors and different locks. She felt obscurely that the words had somehow done her injury, and so she went over them, seeking the culprit.

“They … should … have … changed … the … lock.”

McPherson said, “I don’t like this key business anyway.” Carla looked around, as Deborah had just before, knowing that no one understood, but with McPherson, not understanding carried no penalty of scorn or hatred. She sat back quietly.

They were all glad that McPherson was there, and because feeling this meant that they were vulnerable, they had to try to hide it. “Without those keys you wouldn’t know yourself from us!”

But McPherson only laughed—a laughter at himself, not at them. “We’re not so different,” he said, and went into the nursing station.

“Who is he kidding!” Helene said. There was no malice in her statement; she was merely hurrying to rebuild the wall that he had breached. She turned and disappeared into her limbo, and because McPherson’s afterimage still hung in the air there were no catty remarks about her fadeout. But when the procession of magi passed by once more, bearing with them the Nose, rigid and clamp-jawed with fear, no one could withhold the cruelty which seemed to each her true and natural self. Helene shuddered as he passed; Carla looked blank; Mary, always inappropriately gay, trilled laughter, saying, “Well, Hobbs’s bodkins, here comes another gas customer!”

“Let’s call him Hobbs’s Leviathan, because he may be a whale of a lot worse!”

“Their religion doesn’t permit them to commit suicide,” Sylvia said from her place against the wall.

The ward was suddenly silent. Sylvia had not said anything at all for over a year and her voice was so toneless that the sound almost seemed to come from the wall itself. The silence hung in the ward as everyone sought to make sure that there had really been words and that they had come from the frozen and mute piece of ward furniture that was Sylvia. They could all see each other checking for symptoms—did she say it or did I only hear it? Then Lee Miller broke from inaction and went to the closed door of the nursing station. She pounded on it until the nurse opened the door and looked out in annoyance, as if confronted by an unfamiliar salesman.

“Call the doctor,” Lee said tersely.