I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (27 page)

Then Deborah said, “Grapevine never told me you were back.” She looked straight at Carla while she said it, and with that look she meant everything that would have been an intrusion had it come in words.

“It gets awfully lonely out there, that’s all,” Carla answered. She had given Deborah the privilege of a question; Deborah tried to make it a simple one.

“Was it hard to come back?”

“Well … it’s being defeated,” Carla said, and she nodded the question away with her head and went off, gently, on a tangent. “I was all alone in my job … the long ride in the morning to work gets you kind of hypnotized and there was no one except the technicians and …good morning’ and …good night.’ In the evenings I went to the movie show or stayed in my room and read technical books to catch up. Soon the streets began to remind me of the other streets back in St. Louis and the way the days were back there—the feeling of it all seemed the same—”

The look of the familiar pain was stamped on Carla’s face as she talked, but suddenly she pulled herself away from her thought. “I’m not saying that no one succeeds,” she said hurriedly, “or even that
I
won’t make it again—it’s just that I go out sometimes in defiance, when I’m not ready—” The ringing of a bell interrupted her. “The O.T. shop is open,” she said. “Come on—I’ll show you around.”

Outside, the winter air was sharp with cold. Deborah found the world incomparably beautiful. Somewhere beyond the hedge of the Preserve there was smoke rising and she caught the smell of it occasionally. Next to her was a friend and in the craft shop a drawing pad waiting to be filled. She tried to stop the gratitude and hunger that were overflowing inside her, but her eyes filled with the colors and dimensions of the world and the laws of the consubstantial human race—motion and gravity, cause and effect, friendship and a sense of a human self. She heard a sound high up and behind her, and turning, saw Miss Coral waving from a window on D ward.

“She must be in seclusion again,” Carla said, counting the windows. They waved back and for a few moments drew signals in the air to talk to one another.

(I was in a fight) Miss Coral said, spreading her gestures in the space of the fenced window.

(I am free!) Deborah answered, breaking chains and doing a caper.

(How far?) Miss Coral asked, making the sign of looking out to sea.

Deborah made a wall with her arm and stopped before it, with her hand.

(Nurse is coming!) Miss Coral shouted, hands to head for the two wings of the white cap and then the flip of a key.

(Good-by!) A quick wave and gone.

An attendant had come out the back door and seen gesticulating in the walkway.

“What are you girls doing?” she asked.

“Just practicing,” Carla said, “just practicing.” They walked on to the craft shop that was in one of the out-buildings.

The shop had a warm, normal look of work being done until one looked close and saw that it was only imitation. Patients were sewing or modeling in clay, reading or making collages with paste and bits of fabric. Most of their activity was make-work of the most obvious kind, and Deborah felt quietly embarrassed. Outcasts from the laws of the world seemed to be warming their hands before the illusion of satisfying labor. They were vainly seeking its textures, papers, and materials, and raveling out old woolen scarves to extract reality from them. In a land where usefulness was extolled above all, the “therapeutic” make-work seemed to Deborah an unconscious slap at the pride which the patients were supposed to be developing. An occupational therapy worker in her blue-and-white-striped uniform came toward them.

“Well, hello, Carla,” she said, a little too cheerily; then, looking at Deborah, “Have you brought us a visitor?”

“Yes,” Carla said. “We just wanted to look in. This is Deborah.”

“Why, of course!” the worker said enthusiastically. “I’ve seen you before—it was up on D ward!”

Heads shot up from work. Deborah saw in her mind a sudden vision of the occupational-therapy worker in the
clothes of a hunter shooting over a wind-bent wheatfield and causing the scared and sudden rising of a flock of birds. Carla understood what was happening and turned away for a moment. Then she turned back, and said, “She’s on B ward now, and she’s my roommate.”

A few of the faces relaxed and a few of the hands moved to work again.

They stayed for a while and Deborah was introduced to some of the male patients, wondering as she heard their names what could possibly make
men
sick. When the two girls left, they walked toward A ward, which was open and where there was a coffeepot for both patients and staff.

“It’s mostly for them,” Carla said, “but it shows you what you can hope for, and maybe if no one wants any coffee, they will let us have what’s left.” Deborah did not want to go in. One shot over the wheatfield was enough for the day.

“Carla … you’ve been out—I mean really out. Is that the way it is outside when one of us comes into a room?”

“Sometimes,” Carla said. “Getting a job, you have papers you have to show, and sometimes there’s a social worker checking on you. It can be very, very tough, but people are sometimes better than you think they will be. In lots of jobs you have to show your …sanity papers’ and they make a big thing of it, but the best people on the outside make you feel honored to share the name …person’ with them. The part that’s hardest is the feeling you get when everyone is polite and says …good morning’ and …good night’ while the distance between you and them is getting wider and wider. The doctors say that it’s the fault of the sick one—my fault. If I were less anxious, they say, it would be easier for friendships to come, but that’s easy to say. I don’t think any of the doctors ever tried to break into a new group with a heavy stigma on their heads and having their first acceptance in that group hinge on pity or morbid fascination.”

Deborah laughed. “Doctors! Spend a glorious year in Foreign Travel. Visit your nuthouse as a patient!”

Carla laughed. “Tour without your prestige, your civil rights, or your self-respect! Thrill to the false fine-fine when you are on the receiving end!”

For a while they indulged themselves in the game of getting even with all the doctors who used their prestige and a certain sense of private ownership of reality to separate themselves from their patients. It occurred to Deborah that Dr. Halle and Furii and New Doctor would not need Foreign Travel because they had never completely shut the gate between themselves and their patients.

“I forgot to tell you,” Deborah said when they were walking back to the ward. “It’s about Helene. You know, we’ve been laughing at her jokes, but until lately, they were awfully cold. Somehow lately, there’s been something like a caring in her.” Deborah told Carla how Helene had been at the door when she was leaving the D ward. Helene had waited until they were alone for a moment and then had said, “Why couldn’t I be the one going?” Deborah had said, “Well, why not?” and she had answered abstractedly, “Maybe … maybe …” as if she were thinking of it for the first time. Helene had never been so unguarded, even in her sleep. Of course, when the nurse came to take Deborah down, she had covered it up, putting out her fist and calling Deborah “a stupid bitch” and yelling after her, “Don’t you forget it!” But Deborah had smiled, knowing that Helene had been cursing the Maybe and not her at all.

They went through the keyless south door and met New Doctor coming out. When he saw Deborah, his face brightened. “Hey”—with the eye-deep smile—“I heard about your change of address. Congratulations!” His tone had respect. She had not taken into account that there might be some heady wine in the first tasting of the new world.
But he may not really know enough to judge,
Deborah whispered to the gods of Yr in propitiation.

“Something strange—something I never thought about before—” Deborah said to Dr. Fried, “—that Jews
have their own form of intolerance. I never knew anyone well who was not Jewish, and I never gave my last particle of trust to someone who wasn’t Jewish. Dr. Hill, the new doctor, and Carla are Protestants, and Helene is Catholic, and Miss Coral has kind of a frantic-Baptist background …”

“Well?”

“Well, I’ve been doing something funny in my mind. I’ve been
making
them Jewish so that they could be close to me.”

“How do you do this?”

“Well, it’s one step more than forgetting that they’re gentiles—the ones we were always told betray you in the end. I also have to forget that they’re not Jewish, too. Yesterday, Carla asked me what I thought of someone. I said, …You know that type—he wants to be an individualist, so he cries through Purim.’ It took her look, that sudden stop of surprise, and a long, long time to remind me that she didn’t know what I was talking about
because she isn’t Jewish.
”

“Can you let them be what they are and be what you are, and still love them?”

“The hospital gave me that,” Deborah said slowly. “When you’re nuts, it hardly matters that you’re a nutty Jew or a nutty Holy Roller….”

Dr. Fried’s thoughts drifted for a moment to an article she had written once discussing the question of how a doctor tells a recovering patient that her own newborn health must grapple with symptoms of madness in the world. The health in this girl might weigh someday toward larger reason and freedom. Then discipline caught her up and she said, “How glad I am that you have discovered this! But beside the point. You know, I have listened to that memory you told me—the one about your almost having thrown your sister out of the window when she was a baby—and something has been bothering me about it; something is not right about it. Tell me the thing again.”

Deborah told the memory again: how she had reached into the bassinet for the little darling whose ugliness was so apparent to her and so invisible to everyone else; about the window out of which she had held the little creature, the arrival of Mother, and the shame of hating and being caught at it; how when love came, she had shivered at thinking that she might have ended Suzy’s life that day. Over the whole happening brooded the spirits of the knowing, shamed, and sorrowful parents, silent in their charity.

“Was the window open?” Furii asked.

“Yes, but I remember opening it wider.”

“Did you open it all the way?”

“Enough to lean far out with the baby.”

“I see. Then, after you opened the window and tested it by leaning out, you went and got the baby?”

“No—I picked her up first and then decided to kill her.”

“I see.” Furii leaned back like Mr. Pickwick after a good dinner. “Now I turn detective,” she said, “and I tell you that your story stinks to heaven! A five-year-old lifts up a heavy baby, carries it to the window, holds it on the sill with her own body while she opens the window and practices leaning out, lifts the baby out over the sill, and holds it at arm’s length out the window ready to drop it. Mother comes in and in a flash of speed this five-year-old whips the child inside where it starts to cry so that the mother takes it—”

“No—by that time it was back in the bassinet.”

“Most interesting,” Furii said. “Now, am I crazy or did you make that story up when you were five years old and walked in and saw that baby lying there and hated it enough to want to kill it?”

“But I remember …”

“You may remember hating, but the facts are against you! What did your mother say when she came in? Was it: …Put that baby down!’ or …Don’t hurt the baby!’?”

“No, I remember clearly. She said, …What are you
doing here?’ and I remember that the baby was crying then.”

“What astonishes me about this whole business is that I was so busy listening to the emotional content—the hatred and the pain—that I lost the facts and they had to shout at me again and again before I could hear them. The hatred was real, Deborah, and the pain also, but you were just not big enough to do any of the things you remember doing, and the shame you say your parents felt all these years was only your guilt at wishing your sister dead. With the false idea of your own power (an idea, by the way, that your sickness has kept you from ever growing out of), you translated those thoughts into a memory.”

“It might as well have been real; I lived with it for all those years as if it were real.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Furii said smiling, “but no longer will you be able to flagellate yourself with that particular stick. Our would-be murderess is no more than a jealous five-year-old looking into the cradle of the interloper.”

“Bassinet,” Deborah said.

“Those ones on legs? My God, you couldn’t even reach into it then. I turn in my detective badge tomorrow!”

Deborah was back in the room being five again and standing with her father for a view of the new baby. Her eyes were on the level of the knuckles of his hand, and because of the ruffles on the bassinet she had to stand on her toes to peep over the edge. “I didn’t even touch her …” she said absently. “I didn’t even touch her…
.”

“As long as you are back in those days, we might as well see them together,” Furii said.

Deborah began to talk about the year of brightness before gloom had settled in for good. She explored the brief and magical time when looking forward had been with expectation. Now it came to her that for that one year, even with the false weight of the murder and her dethronement as princess, she had not yet been under the sentence of destruction.
There had been that season—it came again now with a powerful surge of meaning—when she had still been committed to life and had lived a joyful hunger because of a present and a future.

She came from the sunshine of that fifth year with tears running down her face. Furii saw the tears and nodded. “I approve.”

Deborah understood now that the very early happiness was proof that she was not damned genetically—damned bone and fiber. There had been a time when she suffered, yet shone with life. She began to cry in full earnest. It was still a novice’s cry, harsh, random, and bitter, and when it subsided, Furii had to ask if it had been a “good one,” with healing in it.

“What’s the date?” Deborah asked.

“December fifteenth. Why do you ask?”