I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (20 page)

“Can you read my thoughts?” she asked them.

“Are you talking to me?” Lee said.

“To all of you. Can you read my thoughts?”

“What are you trying to do—get me sent to seclusion?”

“Go to hell,” Helene said pleasantly.

“Don’t look at me,” Miss Coral said, with the genteel horror of a countess visiting an abattoir. “I can’t even read my own.”

Deborah looked around at the figures decorating the walls of the hall. They were always waiting, always seeming never to have moved or changed.

“If you’re seeking objective reality,” she muttered to herself, “this is one hell of a place to start.”

It was spring, the season of passion and impatience. The terrible vacuum caused by the rushing by of time made Jacob feel empty inside. He sat at the grammar-school graduation exercises of his younger daughter, heard the singing and the speeches, the prayers and the promises, and felt the emptiness deepen as if it would never end. He had told himself that this was Suzy’s day and that Deborah was to be no part of it. But against his conscience, his wishes, his promises to Esther and himself, he could not get the thought of Deborah out of his mind. Why wasn’t she here with them?

It was the second spring that she was gone, and how much closer was she to the modest, obedient, womanly being that his heart cried out to have as a daughter? No closer. There had been no improvement at all. The young girls began to file out of the auditorium, all innocence and white dresses. Jacob turned to Esther, who, for Suzy’s sake, was dressed stunningly in what the family called her “coronation clothes.”

“Why can’t she come home for a while? We’d go to the lakes,” he whispered.

“Not now!” Esther hissed.

“She’s not committed there by law!” he whispered back.

“It may not be good for her.”

“It may be good for
me—me,
once in a while!”

In the evening they took Suzy out to a fancy restaurant. She had wanted to go to the class party, but Jacob, feeling that time and beauty and all his days of them were slipping away, had wanted this one evening at least. Because he wanted it so badly, it was a failure from the start. Suzy was subdued, Esther, saddened because the present daughter was being stinted again for the absent one. Jacob knew that the symbol breaks when it is too heavily weighted, but he could not help himself. The whole evening had a forlorn quality to it.

Esther, trying to sound natural by naming the name, said, “Debby wanted to come to your graduation—and if she could, she would have sent something.”

Suzy looked at her quietly and said, “She was here. I saw you talking about her when we were getting our diplomas and again when we were getting ready to march out.”

“Nonsense!” Jacob said. “We didn’t talk about anyone.”

“It’s okay, really, even if you didn’t really talk out loud; it was that look you get….” She thought of describing it, in case they didn’t know how it showed on their faces, but the words that came were so painfully embarrassing that she could not say them.

“Nonsense!” Jacob said again, waving it away. “A certain look—nonsense!”

Suzy and Esther caught each other’s glance. He was hiding again. Be merciful to him, Esther said with her mind. Suzy looked down at her white graduation dress. She fussed with a button for a moment. “You know the girl who stood in front of me when we got the diplomas? Well, her brother is a real dream—”

Although those in the hospital wondered how springtime could come in spite of their particular pain, it came and was triumphant. It made the patients on D
ward angry that the world which had murdered them did not suffer for its sins, but, on the contrary, seemed to be thriving. And when Doris Rivera tied up her hair, put on a suit and a shallow smile, and left again for the world, it seemed to many as if she were in league with the springtime against them. The Wife of the Abdicated had a theory:

“She’s a spy. I knew her years ago. She takes it all down and the opposition gives her money for it and later when it’s published it becomes indigenous.”

“We must be charitable,” Dowben’s Mary said because she was Saint Teresa. “We must be charitable even though she has every social disease it is possible to have. Not to mention infections in private places put there by men of no social standing. Not to mention schizophrenia of a dirty, filthy nature.” She had gotten very loud and her tone had the hard, familiar edge of terror.

“You mentally ill are so amusing,” Fiorentini’s Mary said.

There was a fight.

The whole ward, it seemed, had fallen into a whirlpool of anger and fear and fights broke out with wild and pointless spontaneity.

“There are so many patients in seclusion,” a new student mused.

“When they get a few more, they will start to double them up,” Deborah answered.

“Yes … yes …” the student agreed (Number Three with Smile, fleeting). Deborah turned away and had another try for the clock with her shoe.

“I’d like to stop
that
smile.”

“Your face alone should be sufficient,” Helene said.

“At least you can be superior to
me
!”

And there was another fight.

“You get these times on the ward,” the old attendants assured the new ones. “It’s not usually this wild.” But the new ones didn’t believe them. In all of the new groups of student nurses there was the usual fear, but for the latest group there was a particularly poignant one. Two nurses
from the previous group had “cracked up” shortly after having left their psychiatric affiliation and were now themselves patients in mental hospitals. “What you see,” it was rumored, “can drive you crazy.”

And so the four new students assigned to D ward stood in a tight, scared little clutch, the only beauty, youth, and health present, and in the spring of the year. Never did the bearers of poisonous
nganons
feel their separation so much as on this day. Helene and Constantia would fight the new enemies until their strangeness wore off, and Deborah would obliterate them in her own way until they faded into the ward’s daily anonymous pattern. She would not see them except as blurs of white. She would seldom hear them unless they spoke of her or gave specific orders. This protection against their newness and beauty was more successful than fighting. Although it was not a conscious act, she was grateful for it. It was not only the beauty and sprightliness of the students that hurt, but their strangeness, which made Deborah feel self-conscious in her craziness.

One afternoon, sitting on the floor near the nursing station and measuring the stare of the enemy clock, Deborah heard two of the students talking.

“A new one from B? Where’ll they put her?”

“I don’t know, but she really must have blown if she’s coming up here.”

“Remember what Marcia told us—they do better and then they do worse. I hope she’s toilet trained at least and knows where to put her food!” And they giggled.

The giggle was a reflex of anxiety and Deborah knew it, but when they brought Carla up later, all sprung inside and with the beaten look that Doris Rivera had had, Deborah was bitterly angry at the white unseens for having laughed. They had not been talking about some nut, but about Carla, a Carla who was good all the way to the bone, good enough even to be kind when Deborah had struck her at the core of her pain.

No one, seeing Deborah and Carla, would have known
that they were friends. It would be an imposition, incomprehensible to the sane, for Deborah to greet Carla, who was in distress and who would be sorry later if a greeting drove her to violence or even rudeness. Deborah did not look at Carla; she only waited behind her stone mask until she would see the secret sign from Carla that meant recognition.

When the sign was given, they moved toward each other appearing as elaborately unconcerned as they could. Deborah smiled very slightly, but then a strange thing happened. Into the flat, gray, blurred, and two-dimensional waste of her vision, Carla came three-dimensionally and in color, as whole and real as a mouthful of hot coffee or coming-to in a pack.

“Hi,” Deborah said, on a barely rising tone.

“Hi.”

“Can you smoke?”

“No privileges.”

“Uh.”

Later Deborah passed Carla outside the bathroom, waiting to be let in by an attendant.

“Supper on my bed, if you want.”

Carla didn’t answer, but when supper came, she brought her tray to the back dormitory, where Deborah was now staying.

“Okay?”

Deborah moved aside so that Carla had the choice place, on the foot of the bed where it was level. (“Hello, hello, my three-dimensional and multicolored friend. I am so glad to see you.”) Aloud she said, “Doris Rivera was back, but she left again.”

“I heard.” Carla looked up at Deborah and by another miracle, perhaps like the one which had made her clear to Deborah’s eyes, she seemed to see through the mask. “Oh, Deb—it’s not so bad. I had to come back because I tried too much at once, and because part of what I did was against my father … and for lots of other reasons. I’m not giving up; I’m just tired, that’s all.” Her eyes filled with tears, and Deborah, frozen with confusion and terror in the presence
of her friend’s grief, could only wonder what there was in that awful chaos-ocean of the world that made the drowning ones go back to it, still pale and choking, for another try and another and another.

Why do they think they can float like others when the surface tension of their
nganons
was broken by the first drowning?
Deborah cried to Lactamaeon.

Idat only knows,
he said.
For some, nothing is impossible.
Deborah’s inner muscles tightened with fear.
Then you think that her
nganon
is not intrinsically evil, but is … is circumstantial?

Yes.

But I am a friend of hers. If she is not of my substance, I will poison her!

Exactly so.

Can a thing go so against the Laws? Even the Law says, “
nganon
calls forth itself.” Did I call forth a different essence, and if so, why?

Perhaps as a punishment,
Lactamaeon said.
Occasionally others are damned by you to punish you.

Deborah looked from the god and saw Carla still crying. It was part of the Deceit, it seemed, to believe that one knew the code, that after years of suffering to find a way to outguess it, the final step gave way and there was the old chaos, anarchy, and laughter.

She was my friend!
she cried to the departing gods.
She seemed not to be hurt….

You are not of the same substance; the
nganons
are not the same. You will be her murderer,
they said.

When Carla finished crying, Deborah’s body was still at the other side of the bed, but her self was not with her body.

For some unfathomable reason, one of the students attached herself to Deborah. Busily and with the gratuitous, meddling cheeriness of her dedication, the student followed her, a white blur and a blurred voice in the gray background, whenever Deborah poked her face out on the “public” part of the ward.

You must be sicker than you think,
Deborah said to herself in Yri.
These people usually take the worst ones to throw to God. God is their dog and Deborahs are so many bones. Therefore shall my name be Bone.

It seemed very funny indeed in Yri, and she laughed aloud and then she made the symbolic Yri gesture with her hands and the mimicry of laughter, mutely, as it was in Yr.

Who laughs there?
Anterrabae joked with her.

It is I, the God-Bone-Thing!
she answered, and they laughed until she felt the torment of the Earth easing inside her.
What will happen to that one’s dear glory when God smells what her offering is!
and they laughed again.

And the surprise on the face of the sweat-borne student storming Heaven?
And there was more laughter, but it ended in sorrow because Deborah knew that she was not strong enough to ask the student not to track her and bother her with solicitous noises.

The spring went on and although Deborah gave and gave to Furii the secrets and fears and passwords of the passages between her worlds, she was surrendering them only to hasten her own capitulation to a total deceit that was as sure as the Juggernaut or the falling of Anterrabae. She did not lose the chill feeling of detachment before the doom and for a while she even posed a little in drama of that doom, making a high art of dying beautifully.

Furii threw up her hands. “Not only sick, God help us, but adolescent, too!”

“Well?”

“Well, there is no help for it—you must do what you have to, parodies and all. Only please help me to see which is the sickness against which we pit our whole strength, and which is the adolescence that is only another sure sign that you are one hundred percent Earth-one and woman-to-be.” She looked at Deborah keenly for a while and then smiled. “Sometimes the work gets so intense—all the secrets and the symptoms and the ghosts of the past to be met—one
forgets how arid and meaningless this therapy can all seem before the world comes to be real to the patient.”

Deborah looked at the doctor’s littered desk. Looking away to it had often been a relief; on it lay a paperweight, whose odd shape resisted definition and eased the eyes and the mind from the tension of those hours. She was going to it now because, though it was familiar, it could not hurt. Furii saw her looking at it.

“Do you know what that is?”

“Agate?”

“No, not agate. It is a rare kind of petrified wood,” Furii said. “My father took me on a trip to Carlsbad when I graduated from what you call the high school. There the strangest sorts of rocks and formations are made, and he bought this for me as a souvenir of the trip.”

Furii had never once said a personal thing about her own past or self. Early in their time together, when the first trust was coming and Deborah had wrestled with her understanding and had forced herself to stay
tankutu
(unhidden) while Furii’s questions probed, Furii had risen at the end of the hour and had broken off a large and beautiful blossom from a cluster of cyclamen in her flowerpot. She had said, “I don’t ordinarily break flowers, but this you have earned. I don’t often give presents either, so take it.”