I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (12 page)

“Sylvia talked.” “The ward report is not finished,” the nurse said, and closed the door. Lee pounded again. After a while the door opened. “Well …?”

“You’d better get that doctor, because if you don’t, it will be your fault and not mine. Adams will come—she always does. She came last time at three in the morning when Sylvia talked!”

“What are you all excited about, Miller?” the nurse said. “What did she say?”

“It doesn’t matter and it wouldn’t make sense to you because it was part of the conversation.”

“About what?”

“Oh, Christ.
Please!
”

Standing between Sylvia and the excited Lee Miller, Deborah saw how stupid any fragment of the conversation would sound. Sylvia had extinguished her brief, faint light. Lee had an aura of dark light around her, the Yri sign for one who was
tankutuku
—Yri for unhidden—open to the elements and far from shelter. Lee had put herself in this horrible state for someone else, who would never praise her for it or feel gratitude. Yri had a word for this, too; used rarely, it was
nelaq:
eyeless. Deborah now wanted to thank Lee for being eyeless and unhidden. Yr praised Lee, but Deborah could not speak the necessary words.

She had to do something. Lee was all alone in that hideous place called “Involvement” or “Reality” and no one could help her. Locked in a motionless body—as motionless now as Sylvia’s—mute in English, Deborah began to tremble. In fear she made another headlong dash for Yr; the deeper the better, but the flaming Anterrabae laughed.
How dare you cast with the world! You will be punished, you traitoress!
The way to Yr closed before her.

No! No! If you do that I will go insane!
she cried to them.

You admire the
nelaq tankutuku,
do you? Well then, there is the world. Take it!

A black wind came up. The walls dissolved and the world became a combination of shadows. Seeking for the shadow of firm ground on which to stand, she was only deceived again when it warped away like a heat mirage; she looked toward a landfall and the wind blew it away. All direction became a lie. The laws of physics and solid matter were repealed and the experience of a lifetime of tactile sensation, motion, form, gravity, and light were invalidated. She did not know whether she was standing or sitting down, which way was upright, and from where the
light, which was a stab as it touched her, was coming. She lost track of the parts of her body; where her arms were and how to move them. As sight went spinning erratically away and back, she tried to clutch at thoughts only to find that she had lost all memory of the English language and that even Yri was only gibberish. Memory went entirely, and then mind, and then there was only the faster and faster succession of sensations, unidentifiable without words or thoughts by which to hold them. These suggested something secret and horrible, but she could not catch what it was because there was at last no longer a responding self. The terror, now, could have no boundary.

When she came from the Punishment she was looking at her fingernails. They were blue with cold. It was the summer of a certain time and there was sunlight outside, and greenness, but she dared not use her mind to fix the time lest the Punishment return and take it away again. She got up from somebody’s bed, where she found herself lying, pulled a blanket from it, and, still chattering with the cold, walked into the hall. She didn’t recognize anyone, but at least she knew to a reasonable extent that she existed and that she was looking at three-dimensional solids, called people, who moved in an element called time. She went up to one of them and asked an irrelevant question: “What day is it?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh, then, what day was it?” The person didn’t understand, and since she was too confused to pursue the point, she walked away. Behind her the three-dimensional solids were complaining about the heat. They fanned the air of their time in front of their faces.

She felt nauseated by the freezing cold, so she went back and lay down on a bed, desperately grateful that she recognized it as hers.

You see what it is …
Anterrabae said genially.
We can really do it. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we can do it up, down, and sideways. You thought all those descriptions were
metaphors: lost one’s mind, cracked-up, crazed, demented, lunatic? Alas, you see, they are all quite, quite true. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we are protecting you. When you admire the world again, wait for our darkness.

Later, Dr. Fried asked her what she had found out since their last session.

“I found out about being insane,” Deborah said, and remembering with awe the immensity and power and horror of it, she shook her head. “It really is something. Yes, it sure is something.”

The struggle between the Nose, Hobbs’s Leviathan, and the patients went on. His rigid fundamentalist beliefs made him see insanity as a just desert for its victims, as God’s vengeance, or as the devil’s work, and sometimes as all three at once. As the days passed, his fear waned and the time of his righteous wrath was at hand. He saw that he was suffering persecution for his faith.

Against his loathing, the sick fought in their sick way. The literate rewrote the Bible or ridiculed its passages to make him horrified. Constantia made flagrant sexual advances to him. Helene took the towel he brought her with a little curtsy, saying, “From Paraclete to Paranoid. Amen, amen.” And Deborah made a few pointed observations about the similarity between psychotics and religious fanatics. McPherson sensed the anger and violence blowing like a wind over the ward and wondered what he could do about it. There was not enough staff anyway. The two other new conscientious objectors were doing well on different wards, and one of them was showing signs of ability at working with mental patients. He didn’t like the new man on ward D, Ellis, much himself, but he was sympathetic toward him. Ellis was not suited for the work at all; he feared and hated the patients, and looked upon the government which had punished him as the early Christian martyrs must have looked upon the Roman procurators. Because of this, Ellis had to drag the dead Hobbs after him in the nickname the patients had given
him. The worst of it was that Ellis’s religion could not see suicide as anything but a sinful horror, monstrous in nature.

So, Ellis dragged a dead and stinking whale, and McPherson mused that there was no hunter in the world as clever or merciless in placing barbs in a weak place as these sick people. Sometimes he wondered why Hobbs had been attacked and never he; why Ellis, now, and not he. Never was Helene’s tremendous store of knowledge used to damn him; never did the hard-faced Deborah Blau set her knife-edged tongue against him. He felt somehow that it might just be more than luck, but he did not truly know how or why he escaped the bitterness and unhappiness that vented itself all around him.

Now he watched the patients as they stood, waiting for dinner, waiting for darkness, waiting for sedatives, waiting for sleep. Blau was standing near the barred and screened radiator, staring out at something beyond the wall. He had once asked her what she was looking at and she had answered him from her otherness, “I’m the dead, reckoning.”

Constantia was out of her seclusion room, but in seclusion still, muttering quietly in a corner. Lee Miller was clenching and unclenching her teeth; Miss Cabot from the dormitory insisting, “I’m the Wife of an Assassinated Ex-President of the United States!” Linda, Marion, and Sue Jepson, and all the rest were doing what they usually did. Yet there was a lingering sense of dangerous unrest—more than the sum of the parts of unrest. Ellis came out of the nursing station where he had been writing up the medication reports. The badgering began.

“Thar he blows—it’s Hobbs’s Leviathan!”

“Get thee behind me, Satan!”

“Hobbs committed suicide and the army committed him!”

“He got a commission, but not the kind that gives you eagles on the shoulder.”

“With his commission they give bats in the belfry!”

“What’s the latest from Hell today, Preacher?”

“Don’t ask him now. Let him look over his holdings first.”

There was a radio built in behind a heavy mesh screen in the wall. It was supposed to be on only during certain hours of the day and tuned only to certain innocuous semi-light music, but now McPherson went to the screen, unlocked it, and turned the radio on good and loud. Into the ward poured the tinny sounds of romantic-love dance music, pathetically, even hilariously, incongruous in the heavy urine-and-disinfectant atmosphere that permeated the ward. When the announcer’s moist voice bade them “Good night from the Starlight Roof,” Carla replied in a parody of romantic wistfulness, “A farewell flutter of my restraints, delicately, good night … good night …”

The whole ward erupted into laughter and relaxed, although the mind-scent of tension still hung in the air like the ozone smell after a lightning bolt. Something had been narrowly averted.

After Deborah had been given her sedative, she got into her bed, waiting the familiar wait, the gods and the Collect reduced to a somnolent undertone. McPherson came into the dormitory and stopped by her bed.

“Deb,” he said gently, “lay off on Mr. Ellis, will you?”

“Why me?” she said.

“I want all of you to let him alone. No more jokes. No more references to Hobbs.”

“Are you going to tell everybody?” (The guarded vying-for-favor and the guarded suspicion of all the world’s motives and representatives overcame prudence and forced the question.)

“Yup,” he said. “Everybody on the ward.”

“Even Marie and Lena?” (They were acknowledged to be the sickest on the ward, even by the patients.)

“Deb … just lay off.”

For a moment she felt that he was using her. He was the only one who could get away with calling the patients by nicknames without sounding strained, but it sounded strained now.

“Why me? I thought you normal ones had agreed that we were out of it—your conventions and routines. I’m not nice and I’m not polite and I know more about Hobbs than you do. He was one of
us!
The only thing that separated him from us was three inches of metal key he used to fondle for assurance. Ellis is another one. I know about him and his hate.”

McPherson’s voice was low, but his anger was real, and Deborah felt it coming from a place in him that he had never shown before.

“Do you think the sick people are all in hospitals? Do you girls think you have a corner on suffering? I don’t want to bring up the money business—it’s been over-done—but I want to tell you right now that lots of people on the outside would
like
to get help and can’t. You ought to know mental trouble when you see it. You don’t bait other patients. I’ve never heard you say anything against one of them.” (She remembered what she had said to Carla and the stroke of guilt fell again for it.) “Lay off Ellis, Deb—you’ll be glad for it later.”

“I’ll try.”

He looked down hard at her. She could not see his face in the shadow, but she sensed that it was in repose. Then he turned and walked out of the dormitory. Deborah fought the sedative for a while, thinking about what he had said and how. It was tough but true, and under the anger of it ran the tone—the tone rare anywhere, but in a mental ward like a priceless jewel—the tone of a simple respect between equals. The terror she felt at the responsibility it bore was mingled with a new feeling. It was joy.

“Something in a session not long ago keeps coming back to me,” Dr. Fried said. “You were discussing being sick as if it were a volcano and you said of your sister that she would have to decorate her slopes herself. Do you know what you tell us now? Can you really not see that the gods and the devils and the whole Yr of yours is your own creation?”

“I didn’t mean that at all!” Deborah said, backing away, and still hearing the Collect chanting years of people:
Snap out of it; it’s all in your mind.
“Yr is real!”

“I have no doubt that it is real to you, but there is also something else that you seem to be saying—that the sickness stands apart from the symptoms which are often mistaken for it. Are you not saying that, although the symptoms bear on the sickness and are related to it, the two are not the same?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I want you to take me back into that past of yours again, before the slopes were decorated, and share with me a look at the volcano itself.” She saw the look of terror, and added, “Not all at once; a little at a time.”

They had gone over the Great Deceits, and also the
many little ones that are inevitable in life, but which, because of Deborah’s feelings and beliefs, seemed to be pointing the way to doom as meaningfully as if they had been arranged as part of a plan, a secret joke that everyone knew, but no one admitted knowing. After months of therapy, Deborah began to learn that there were many reasons why the world was horrifying to her. The shadow of the grandfather dynast was still dark over all the houses of the family. She went back often again, hearing grandfather’s familiar voice saying, “Second in the class is not enough; you must be the first.”
“If you are hurt, never cry, but laugh. You must never let them know that they are hurting you.” It was all directed against the smiling sharers of the secret joke. Pride must be the ability to die in agony as if you did it every day, gracefully. Even his pride in her was anger. “You’re smart—you’ll show them all!” He had sharpened her word-wit on his own, cheered the cutting edge of it, called women cows and brood-bitches, and slapped her half-roughly because she would grow up wasted, a woman. She would have to take on the whole world of fools and ingrates, and, even though she was a woman, win his battle: the ancient, mystical battle between a crippled immigrant and a long-dead Latvian Count.

In the place and time where Deborah was growing up, American Jews still fought the old battles that they had fled from in Europe only a few years earlier. And then there were the newer battles, pitched as the Nazis walked through Europe and screamed hatred in America. There were Bund marches in the larger cities, and flare-ups against synagogues and neighborhood Jews who had ventured out of the ghettos. Deborah remembered having seen the Blau house splashed with paint and the dead rats stinking beside the morning paper that told of Czech Jews running for the Polish border only to be shot by the “freedom-loving” Poles. She knew much of the hate and had been attacked once or twice by the neighborhood bullies, but the grandfather would say triumphantly, as if
he saw in this an obscure kind of proof, “It’s envy! The best and the smartest are always envied. Walk straight and don’t let them know if they touch you.” And then, as if the hate were peering through the joke, he would say, “You’ll show them! You’re like me. They’re all fools, the rest of them—you’ll show them someday!”