I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Read online

  “You can’t use the real one all the time?”

  Deborah laughed because it was an absurd question. “It would be like powering a firefly with lightning bolts.”

  “Yet you sound quite competent in English.”

  “English is for the world—for getting disappointed by and getting hated in. Yri is for saying what is to be said.”

  “You do your drawing with which language—I mean when you think of it, is it in English or Eerie?”

  “Yri.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the doctor said. “I am perhaps a little jealous since you use your language to communicate with yourself and not with us of the world.”

  “I do my art in both languages,” Deborah said, but she did not miss the threat of the doctor, and the claim she was putting on the communication.

  “Our time is over,” the doctor said gently. “You have done well to tell me about the secret world. I want you to go back and tell those gods and Collect and Censor that I will not be cowed by them and that neither of us is going to stop working because of their power.”

  The first secret had been given, but the day was still there when Deborah and the attendant went back through it to the hospital. No lightning or growl from Yr. The last ward door was locked behind her, and they were beginning to serve lunch. There had been a change of head nurses on the ward, and the new one was giving metal spoons instead of wooden ones. There were two missing in the count. As the search grew more earnest, Doris, a new girl, began to laugh. “Keep calm, everybody! Keep calm!” For Deborah, those were the last clear Earth-words for a while; there was a pleat in time.

  Ward D’s administrator was saying, “What are you feeling like?” Deborah couldn’t speak without great difficulty, so she drew with her hands—a surging. She had trouble seeing.

  “You look pretty frightened,” he said.

  The surge began to make noise also. After a while the voice came through again. “Do you know what a cold-sheet pack is? I’m going to have one set up for you. It’s kind of uncomfortable at first, but when you’re in it a while, it may calm you down. It doesn’t hurt—don’t worry.”

  Watch out for those words … they are the same words. What comes after those words is deceit, and … The stroke from the tumor made her writhe on the floor. A bursting vein of terror released itself and then there was the darkness, even beyond the power of Yr.

  The consciousness that came after a time was blunt. She became aware that she was lying on a bed with an icy wet sheet stretched under her bare body. Another was thrown over her and it was also pulled tight. Then she found herself being rolled back and forth between the sheets while others were wound about her body. Then came restraints, tightening, forcing her breath out, and pushing her deep into the bed. She did not stay for the completion of whatever was being done….

  Sometime later Deborah came free of the Pit with perceptions as clear as morning. She was still wrapped and bound tightly in the pack, but her own heat had warmed the sheets until they seemed the temperature of her own exertions. All the anguish and fighting only served to heat the cocoon; the heat, to wear her out. She moved her head a little, tiring from the effort. It was all she could move.

  After a while someone came in. “How are you feeling?”

  “Yes …” Her voice sounded surprised. “How long have I been here?”

  “About three and a half hours. Four hours is standard and if you’re okay we’ll let you up in half an hour.” He left. Her joints were beginning to ache from the pressure of the restraints, but reality was still there. She was amazed that she had been able to come from the deepest place without the anguish of rising.

  After what seemed like a long time, they came to let her up. As they were freeing her, she studied the construction of the cocoon. There was an ice pack under her neck and a hot-water bottle at her feet. Sheets were spread over and under the complex of wrappings which made up the mummy case. Over the sheets were three canvas strips, wide and long, which were pulled tightly across her body at the chest, stomach, and knees, and tied to the bed on the other side. A fourth strip was knotted around her feet and pulled down to be tied around bars at the foot of the bed. The wrappings were large sheets that fitted around the body; three of them interlapped like white wet leaves, and one, on the inside, held the arms to the sides.

  Deborah was weak when she got up, and had difficulty walking, but her world-self had risen. When she was dressed, she went back to her bed to lie down. The unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England was full of solicitude. “You poor little whore,” she said, “I saw what they did to you for not sleeping with that doctor! They tied you so that you couldn’t move and then he went in and violated you.”

  “What a prize!” Deborah answered acidly.

  “Don’t lie to me! I am the unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England!” the Wife shouted. Her phantoms flowed to her, and she began to chat with them in a parody of all of gentility’s gossip and rattling teacups. Politeness made her introduce Deborah, from whom the streaky marks of sheet creases were just beginning to fade: “And this is the little tart I was telling you about.”

  chapter eight

  “Disturbed … what does disturbed mean?” Esther Blau said, looking at the report again. She was hoping that the word would change or that some other word would appear to modify it so that it could be transmuted into the pleasant fact she wanted. In its briefly impersonal way, the monthly report counseled patience, but the facts it contained were unambiguous, and the signature at the bottom was that of another doctor, the administrator of the Disturbed Ward. Esther wrote immediately to the hospital and shortly received a reply saying that a visit would not be wise.

  With a fear verging on panic, Esther wrote to Dr. Fried. Perhaps she might go down again, not to see Deborah, since the hospital thought it unwise, but to confer with Deborah’s doctors about this change. The answer was the attempt of an honest person to reassure. It, too, counseled patience. Of course, if she and her husband felt it necessary to come, they would be given appointments, but this seeming setback was in itself no reason for anxiety.

  Esther remembered the screams from that high, double-barred place, and she shivered. Reading the letter over again and again, she located the subtle strain of its meaning, like a hidden message. She must not let her fear, or Jacob’s, interfere with what was happening to their daughter. She must wait and endure. Quietly, she put the letter and the report away with the others. She did not look at it again.

  “I wonder if there is a pattern …” Dr. Fried said. “You give up a secret to our view and then you get so scared that you run for cover into your panic or into your secret world. To Yr or there.”

  “Stop making my puns,” Deborah said, and they laughed a little.

  “Well then, tell me what the rhythm is, of these upsets of yours.” She was looking at her patient intently, interested in that world which had been a refuge once, had suddenly gone gray, and was now a tyranny whose rulers Deborah had to spend long days of her life propitiating.

  “One day …” Deborah started. “One day I was walking home from school and Lactamaeon came to me and said, Three Changes and Their Mirrors, and then Death. He spoke Yri and in Yri the word that means death also means sleep, insanity, and the Pit. I didn’t know which he meant. The first change, I knew, was riding home from the hospital after the tumor was supposed to be out. Its mirror was the broken flower that I saw years later. The second change was being shamed in the camp, and its mirror was an episode with a car when I was about fourteen. The third was moving to the city, and its mirror, foretold, was what made the prophecy come true. Whether it was cutting my wrist or coming home I don’t know, but it was the death that Lactamaeon spoke of.”

  “Two of the changes happened before the god, or whatever, announced them, didn’t they?”

  “But the third didn’t and the mirrors didn’t.” And she began to tell of the weaving together of prologue and destiny, that was the fabric of her
secret world.

  When the tumor was removed, everyone had been jubilant. They had driven her home from the hospital through a light rain and they had been laughing. Deborah had stood up in the back of the car and looked out at the gray skies and the wet streets where people were pulling their coats close. Reality was not inside this car with her singing mother and cheerful father, but toward the murky sky finishing with its rain, exhausted and dark. It occurred to her that this darkness was now, and was forever going to be, the color of her life. Years later, after other realities had been argued for between her soul and the world, Lactamaeon reminded her of that day of knowledge.

  Even before she had gone to that hospital there had been a dream: a white room—the hospital room as she imagined it—and an open window through which she saw a brilliant blue sky where a swiftly changing white cloud rode. In the window a flowerpot stood and a red geranium was growing in it. “You see—” the dream voice said, “there are flowers in a hospital and strength, too. You will live and be strong.” But suddenly in the dream the air went dark and the sky through the window blackened, and a stone thrown from somewhere smashed the pot and broke the plant. There was the sound of screaming and the foreknowledge of something horrible. Many years later a bitter-voiced art student—another Deborah entirely—passed by a broken flowerpot that had fallen into the street. The dirt had spilled out and a red flower hung tangled in its own roots and stem. Lactamaeon, beside her, whispered, See—see. The change has come and the mirror of the change is here. It is completed. Two more changes and two more mirrors of those changes and then Imorh (that word like death or sleep or insanity; a word made like a sigh of hopelessness).

  The second change came when she was nine and it came with her shaming. It was the first day of her third year at the camp, and still fighting against what she felt was the injustice of having been born as herself, she reported the two girls who had ridiculed her and refused to let her walk with them. The camp director gave her a hard look. “Who actually said those words to you: …We don’t walk with stinking Jews—’ Was it Claire or Joan?”

  Because it was the first day, Deborah was confused over names and faces in the swarm of girls. “It was Claire,” Deborah answered. Only when Claire was called and hotly denied saying the words did Deborah realize that Claire had only listened and nodded agreement and that the speaker had been Joan.

  “Claire denies this. What do you say now?”

  “Nothing.” The train of ruin was keeping its track. She stopped struggling and said no more. That night there was one of the comradely campfires that campers remember years later with wistful sadness at the innocence of their youth. The director gave an impassioned speech about “a liar in our midst who uses her religion to get pity and involve innocent girls in trouble—one among us who would stoop to any evil, any dishonor.” He would not mention names, he said, but they all knew who it was.

  Some days later when she managed to get away for a while by herself, she heard a voice from somewhere saying in a sweet, dark sound, You are not of them. You are of us. She looked for the voice but it was part of the mosaic of leaves and sunlight. Fight their lies no longer. You are not of them. After a while, hoping to hear the voice, becoming sadder with the loss of it, she found it again in the night of stars, inaudible to the others walking with her, the same rich voice saying like a poem, You can be our bird, free in wind. You can be our wild horse who shakes his head and is not ashamed.

  The shaming was the second change, but the rising of the gods, the first intimations of what would become Yr, made the shaming secondary. The hatred of the people in the world was, rather than a wound, suddenly a proof of the truth of Yr and it was reflected in its mirror, suddenly, when Anterrabae called her from a crowd in a car and she had to make them stop and let her go. In the camp the world had held her hour after hour, but henceforth she could no longer be kept, for she belonged otherly, as Yr said.

  The third change was the move to the city. Mother had thought it would be such a happy change. They could have their own place at last, even if it were an apartment, and Deborah would find friends of her own age. She had laughed as they left the old house, for she knew they were taking the ruin with them. In the city the fatal taint would stand out with even more clarity and the issues themselves would be clearer. At last, the old hate and loneliness could no longer be attributed to their being Jewish. But the hate of the old place had grown familiar. In the city the new scorn and the new loneliness cut their channels deep in the parts of her feeling that had not yet been toughened.

  This time the mirror came as another embarrassment: a gym teacher singling her out for some scornful comment on her clumsiness. She had fallen headlong into the Pit. She spent three days of walking nightmare, invisible to her own soul and inaudible to her own ears.

  Then, one evening shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was returning from a doctor’s office, heavy with the nonexistent pain of her nonexistent tumor. Anterrabae and Lactamaeon were with her and so were the Censor and the Collect. Amid the noise of their conflicting demands and curses, she suddenly realized that she had lost another day somehow. In an inexplicable way time pleated up again, and it was another time and she was being chased by a policeman. When he caught up to her, he asked her what was wrong; she had been running in great terror from something. She assured him that nothing was the matter, even ducking into a building to get away. When she came out again, she was walking to the slow, deep rhythm of a drumbeat. It has come. The Imorh at last is here. There came a long, calm sounding of the rhythm and a great peace because there was no more need to struggle or resist.

  The three changes and the three mirrors, all as Lactamaeon had said.

  “But I could not be sure. I am good at getting deceived, you know. It’s even one of my names in Yr, The Always Deceived.”

  “Since two of your three changes happened before the gods were even presences to you, I wonder if they did not seem wise by hindsight. I wonder if they do not deceive you only to conform to your own picture of the world.” The doctor leaned forward in the chair, feeling Deborah’s exhaustion at revealing the things which seemed to Deborah to most truly motivate her. A secret language concealing a still more secret one; a world veiling a hidden world; and symptoms guarding still deeper symptoms to which it was not yet time to go, and those in turn concealing a still, still deeper burning wish to live. She wanted to tell the stunned-looking girl in front of her that this sickness, which everyone shied from and was frightened of, was also an adjustment; these hidden worlds—all of them—and tongues and codes and propitiations were for her the means to stay alive in a world of anarchy and terror.

  “You know … the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.”

  “At least being nuts is being somewhere.”

  “Exactly so, but it is still in a group, with other people.”

  “No! No!”

  “At a terrible price, you belong.”

  “Not to anyone here! Not to you or the world! Anterrabae told me that a long time ago. I belong to Yr!” But Deborah knew that the doctor was, perhaps, in a small way right. She had opened her mind to the words the way an eye used to darkness, veiled with its lashes, opens cautiously to the light, and, finding it even a little blinding, closes itself too late. The light had come, and come invincibly, even after the eye had renounced it. It was too late to unsee. She was, after all, at home on D ward, more than she had ever been anywhere, and for the first time as a recognizable and defined thing—one of the nuts. She would have a banner under which to stand.

  After the session Dr. Fried went to her kitchen and began to brew some coffee. Mirrors and changes! Aren’t all human eyes distorting mirrors? Here again, as a hundred times before, she was standing between one person’s truth and another’s, marveling at how different they were even when there was love and the shared experiences of many years. After the tumor business and the anti-Semitism of the camp there
must have begun the malignant and pernicious loneliness that is the ground of mental illness; all of the love that Esther gave had been reinterpreted by Deborah. If the daughter was damned surely, she must feel that her mother knew it and was offering pity instead of love and feeling martyrdom instead of pride.

  When the coffee began to perk, she looked at it suddenly feeling a little old and baffled. The mother was formidable. “Charming … needing very much to be charming and a great success at everything …” she murmured to the empty cup in front of her. “She is competitive, I think…. She dominates, but there is honest love too…. Ach!” And she leaped up with a word in the true and familiar language of her own childhood and youth because the coffee had boiled over and was spilling from under the lid.

  Deborah walked back to the ward, yearning for somewhere she could go to be completely alone. In this place aloneness was an ambiguous state, for though the hospital was full, the floors were full, and the wards were full, all the occupants were separated. In all the hospitals she had heard about there were atomized armies of persons who had severed their claims to membership in all the world’s other groups and orders. Some of the patients on her ward had been stopped motionless. Some, like the prostituted Wife of the Assassinated Ex-President, had set up their own kingdoms and never even seemed to approach, as Deborah did, the edges of terrestrial reality.

  Many of the patients had the preternatural ability to tell, almost at a glance, it seemed, where another person’s weaknesses lay and how great and compelling those weaknesses were. But coupled with this power, as if the forces of self-ruin were afraid of it, was the utter inability to use the knowledge consciously. They had all been taught to be “civilized,” never to laugh at cripples or stone the deformed or stare at old men in the road. They obeyed these commandments, but when it came to unseen lamenesses, they perceived secrets with accustomed eyes, and they heard the hidden pleas of the so-called sane with well-attuned ears, and they were merciless. But their cruelty was beyond their own grasp or control.