I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (3 page)

“You really should be grateful,” the student said. “You’re very lucky to get to see her at all.”

“Known and loved by madmen the world over,” Deborah said. “Let’s go.”

The nurse unlocked the ward door and then the stairway door, and they went down to the lower floor, which was open, and out of the back of the building. The nurse pointed to a green-shuttered white house—a small-town, oak-lined-streets type of white house—standing incongruously just inside the hospital grounds. They went to the front door and rang. After a while a tiny, gray-haired, plump little woman answered the door. “We’re from Admissions. Here she is,” the nurse said.

“Can you come back for her in an hour?” the little woman said to the student.

“I’m supposed to wait.”

“Very well.”

As Deborah stepped through the door, the Censor began to thrum his warnings:
Where is the doctor? Is she watching from behind a door somewhere?
The little housekeeper motioned toward a room.

“Where is the doctor?” Deborah said, trying to stop the rapid juxtaposition of walls and doors.

“I am the doctor,” the woman said. “I thought you knew. I am Dr. Fried.”

Anterrabae laughed, falling and falling in his darkness.
What a disguise!
And the Censor growled,
Take care … take care.

They went into a sunny room and the Housekeeper-Famous-Doctor turned, saying, “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” There came a great exhaustion and when the doctor said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” a great gust of anger, so that Deborah stood up quickly and said to her and to Yr and to the Collect and to the Censor, “All right—you’ll ask me questions and I’ll answer them—you’ll clear up my …symptoms’ and send me home …
and what will I have then?”

The doctor said quietly, “If you did not really want to give them up, you wouldn’t tell me.” A rope of fear pulled its noose about Deborah. “Come, sit down. You will not have to give up anything until you are ready, and then there will be something to take its place.”

Deborah sat down, while the Censor said in Yri:
Listen, Bird-one; there are too many little tables in here. The tables have no defense against your clumsiness.

“Do you know why you are here?” the doctor said.

“Clumsiness. Clumsiness is first and then we have a list: lazy, wayward, headstrong, self-centered, fat, ugly, mean, tactless, and cruel. Also a liar. That category includes subheads: (a) False blindness, imaginary pains causing real doubling-up, untrue lapses of hearing, lying leg injuries, fake dizziness, and unproved and malicious malingerings; (b) Being a bad sport. Did I leave out unfriendliness? … Also unfriendliness.”

In the silence where the dust motes fell through the sun shaft, Deborah thought that she had perhaps spoken her true feelings for the first time. If these things were so, so be it, and she would leave this office at least having stated her tiredness and disgust at the whole dark and anguish-running world.

The doctor said simply, “Well, that seems to be quite a list. Some of these, I think, are not so, but we have a job cut out for us.”

“To make me friendly and sweet and agreeable and happy in the lies I tell.”

“To help you to get well.”

“To shut up the complaints.”

“To end them, where they are the products of an upheaval in your feelings.”

The rope tightened. Fear was flowing wildly in Deborah’s head, turning her vision gray. “You’re saying what they all say—phony complaints about nonexistent sicknesses.”

“It seems to me that I said that you are very sick, indeed.”

“Like the rest of them here?” It was as near as she dared go, already much too near the black places of terror.

“Do you mean to ask me if I think you belong here, if yours is what is called a mental illness? Then the answer
is yes. I think you are sick in this way, but with your very hard work here and with a doctor’s working hard with you, I think you can get better.”

As bald as that. Yet with the terror connected with the hedged-about, circled-around word “crazy,” the unspoken word that Deborah was thinking about now, there was a light coming from the doctor’s spoken words, a kind of light that shone back on many rooms of the past. The home and the school and all of the doctors’ offices ringing with the joyful accusation: There Is Nothing The Matter With You. Deborah had known for years and years that there was more than a little the matter—something deeply and gravely the matter, more even than the times of blindness, intense pain, lameness, terror, and the inability to remember anything at all might indicate. They had always said, “There is nothing the matter with you, if you would only …” Here at last was a vindication of all the angers in those offices.

The doctor said, “What are you thinking about? I see your face relax a little.”

“I am thinking about the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.”

“How so?”

“The prisoner pleads guilty to the charge of not having acute something-itis and accepts the verdict of guilty of being nuts in the first degree.”

“Perhaps in the second degree,” the doctor said, smiling a little. “Not entirely voluntary nor entirely with forethought.”

Deborah suddenly recalled the picture of her parents standing very single and yet together on the other side of the shatter-proof locked door. Not aforethought, this thing, but more than a little with malice.

Deborah became aware of the nurse moving about in the other room as if to let them know that the time was up.

The doctor said, “If it’s all right with you, we will make another appointment and begin our talks, because I believe that you and I, if we work like the devil
together, can beat this thing. First, I want to tell you again that I will not pull away symptoms or sickness from you against your will.”

Deborah shied away from the commitment, but she allowed her face a very guarded “yes,” and the doctor saw it. They walked from the office with Deborah striving assiduously to act as if she were somewhere else, elaborately unconcerned with this present place and person.

“Tomorrow at the same time,” the doctor told the nurse and the patient.

“She can’t understand you,” Deborah said. “Charon spoke in Greek.”

Dr. Fried laughed a little and then her face turned grave. “Someday I hope to help you see this world as other than a Stygian Hell.”

They turned and left, and Charon, in white cap and striped uniform, guided the removed spirit toward the locked ward. Dr. Fried watched them walking back to the large building and thought: Somewhere in that precocity and bitterness and somewhere in the illness, whose limits she could not yet define, lay a hidden strength. It was there and working; it had sounded in the glimmer of relief when the fact of the sickness was made plain, and most of all in the “suicide attempt,” the cry of a mute for help, and the statement, bold and dramatic as adolescents and the still-fighting sick must always make it, that the game was over and the disguising ended. The fact of this mental illness was in the open now, but the disease itself had roots still as deeply hidden as the white core of a volcano whose slopes are camouflaged in wooded green. Somewhere, even under the volcano itself, was the buried seed of will and strength. Dr. Fried sighed and went back to her work.

“This time … this time can I only call it forth!” she sighed, lapsing into the grammar of her native tongue.

Suzy Blau took the story of the convalescent school quite well, and when Esther told her own parents she tried to shade the hospital into a rest home. But they were undeceived and furious.

“There’s nothing the matter with her brains! That girl has a good wit,” Pop said. (It was his highest compliment.) “It’s just that the brains in this family skipped a generation and fell on her. She is me, my own flesh. The hell with all of you!” He walked out of the room.

In the following days Esther pleaded for their support in her decision, but only when Claude, her elder brother, and Natalie, her sister—the favorites of the family—admitted to Mom and Pop that there could be a need, did the old man relent a little, for Deborah was his favorite grandchild.

At home Jacob was silent but not at peace with what he and Esther had done. They went to see Dr. Lister twice, and Jacob listened, trying to be comforted by the belief that they had done the right thing. Confronted with direct questions, he had to agree, and all the facts were trying to make him say “yes,” but he had only to submit to his feelings for the smallest moment and his
whole world rang with misgivings. When he and Esther quarreled, the crucial thing remained unspoken, leaving an atmosphere of wordless rancor and accusation.

At the end of the first month a letter arrived from the hospital relating Deborah’s activities in very general terms. She had made “a good adjustment” to the routine and staff, had begun therapy, and was able to walk about the grounds. From this noncommittal letter Esther extracted every particle of hope, going over and over the words, magnifying each positive sign, turning the remarks this way and that for the facets of brightest reflection.

She also struggled to sway the feelings of Jacob and Pop, practicing her arguments with her image in the mirror. Pop knew in himself somewhere, she believed, that the decision was not wrong, that his anger at Deborah’s hospitalization was only an expression of his injured pride. Esther saw that her dominating, quick, restless, and brilliant immigrant father now showed certain signs of mellowing; only his language was as brusque as ever. Sometimes it even seemed to her that with Deborah’s illness coming to a head, the whole thrust and purpose of their lives was forced under scrutiny. One night she asked Jacob abruptly, “How did we share in the thing? What awful wrongs did we do?”

“Do I know?” he answered. “If I knew would I have done them? It seemed like a good life—a very good life she had. Now they say it wasn’t. We gave love and we gave comfort. She was never threatened with cold or hunger …”

And Esther remembered then that Jacob, too, had an immigrant past; had been cold, wet, hungry, and foreign. How he must have sworn to keep those wolves from his children! Her hand went up to his arm, protectively, but at the gesture he turned a bit.

“Is there more, Esther? Is there more?”

She could not answer, but the next day she wrote a letter to the hospital asking when they might visit and see
the doctor. Jacob was glad for the letter and waited, going over the mail every day for the answer, but Pop only snorted,
“What are they going to do—tell you it’s a mistake? The world is full of jackasses. Why should that place be immune?”

“Nonsense!” Jacob said, more angrily than he had ever spoken to his father-in-law. “Doctors have ethics to live up to. If they find out it’s a mistake, they’ll let us take her home right away.”

Esther realized that he was still waiting for the diagnosis to be reversed, the miracle to happen, the locked doors to swing wide, the film of the last year of living to be run backward, and everyone to be able to laugh at the ludicrous way life worked—backward, backward until it was all unlived and erased. She pitied Jacob suddenly, but she could not let him go on thinking that she wanted to visit the hospital for that reason. “I wanted to tell the doctors—to ask them—well, our lives have changed … and there are things that Deborah may not even know that made us do what we did. There are reasons for so much of it that all our goodwill could not change.”

“We lived simple lives. We lived good lives. We lived in dignity.” He said it believing it utterly, and Esther saw that some of what she had said reflected on him and on her relationship with him, both before she was married and after, when she should have changed allegiances and hadn’t. She couldn’t bear to hurt him now. It was pointless anyway; so much of the struggle was past. For everyone but Deborah it was a dead issue, and who could know what it was to her?

And sometimes, in the first months, there were periods of calmness, even of happiness. Suzy, alone in the house, began to come into her own, and Jacob realized even as he denied it, that before Deborah had gone he had been tiptoeing, deferring, frightened of something nameless for a long time.

One day a group of Suzy’s school friends trooped in, laughing and joking, and Esther asked them all to dinner
on the spur of the moment. Suzy shone, and when they had gone, Jacob said good-naturedly, “Those stupid kids. Were we ever that stupid? The little one with that cap!” He laughed, and catching himself in the real enjoyment, said, “My God—I laughed so much tonight. When before did I have so much fun!” And then: “Has it really been
that
long? Years?”

“Yes,” she said, “it has been that long.”

“Then maybe it’s true that she was … unhappy,” he said, thinking of Deborah.

“Sick,” Esther said.

“Unhappy!” Jacob shouted and left the room. He came back a few minutes later. “Just unhappy!” he said.

“Your parents write that they wish to make a visit,” Dr. Fried said. She sat on the other side of the heavy twelfth-century iron portcullis that Deborah occasionally found separating them. The portcullis had been raised this time, invisible, but when the doctor had mentioned parents and a visit, Deborah heard the sudden heavy rasp, and down it clanged between them.

“What is it?” the doctor said, not hearing the clang of lowering, but perceiving its effect.

“I can’t really see you and I can’t really hear you,” Deborah said. “You are behind the gate.”

“Your medieval gate again. You know, those things have doors on them. Why don’t you open a door?”

“The door is locked, too.”

The doctor looked at her ashtray. “Well, those gatemakers of yours must not be too smart or they would never build their barriers with side doors and then not be able to open them.”

Deborah was annoyed when the doctor took her private facts and moved them and used them to her own ends. The bars were thickening against the doctor. The soft, accented voice was closing and closing to silence behind the metal wall. The last words were:
“Do you want them to come?”

“I want Mother,” Deborah said, “but not him. I don’t want him to visit me.”