I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  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.”

  Her words surprised her. She knew that she meant them, that they were somehow important, but she didn’t know why. For many years words had come out of her mouth for which her mind could not remember giving the order. Sometimes only a feeling would sweep over her. The feeling would be given voice, but the logic behind it, by which the world might have been convinced, remained mute, and so she lost faith in her own desires. It made her defend them all the more blindly. Part of her present feeling, she knew, was delight in her power to reward and punish. Her father’s love for her was her weapon against him, but she had a knowledge, however hard to express, that his pity and love were dangerous to her now. She knew that this hospital was good for her. She knew also that she could not defend her knowledge, that she could not express why this was really where she belonged. Considering her own muteness and the eloquence of the locks and bars, Jacob might be overcome by the horror and sadness she had seen in him when they had first brought her there. He might decide to end this “imprisonment.” The women on Disturbed were always howling and shrieking. One of them might tip the balance the wrong way. Deborah knew all this, but she could not utter it. Also, there was her sense of power.

  She saw the doctor’s mouth moving, and imagined that it was spewing questions and accusations. She began to fall, going with Anterrabae through his fire-fragmented darkness into Yr. This time the fall was far. There was utter darkness for a long time and then a grayness, seen only in bands across the eye. The place was familiar; it was the Pit. In this place gods and Collect moaned and shouted, but even they were unintelligible. Human sounds came, too, but they came without meaning. The world intruded, but it was a shattered world and unrecognizable.

  Once in the past, while in the Pit, she had been scalded, because although she had seen the stove and boiling water, its purpose and form had had no meaning. Meaning itself became irrelevant. And, of course, there was no fear in the Pit because fear had no meaning either. Sometimes she even forgot the English language.

  The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself. There had been one day (also in school) when she had risen from the Pit while a teacher pointed to a word in her book, saying, “What is it … this word?” She had tried desperately to make intelligibility of white ground and black lines and curves. Nothing. It had taken every bit of strength to remember sufficient English to say, “What?” The teacher had been angry. Was she trying to be a smart aleck? “What is the word?” Nothing. She had been unable to extract a single bit of reality from the lines and spots on the white ground. Someone tittered in the background and the teacher, apparently fearing compromise of her authority, left the mute Deborah and disappeared into the grayness. Present became nothing; world, nothing.

  Again in Dr. Fried’s office, the terror of emergence had not yet begun. Deborah was still deep in the Pit and it was yet unimportant whether there was language or meaning or even light.

  Esther Blau tore open the letter eagerly and, as she read, was first puzzled and then angry. “It says that she wants me to come, but she has told the doctor that she wants me alone this time.” She was trying to make it easier for Jacob by not using the words that were in the letter: “… will not see Mr. Blau.”

  Jacob said, “Well, we’ll drive down and see her for a while, and then you two can have a nice visit if you want.”

  She edged the fact a little closer. “Well, Jacob, they think that both of us would be too much just now. I can drive down myself or take the train.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “It’s nonsense. I will go.”

  “It isn’t nonsense,” she said. “Please, Jacob—”

  He took the letter from the table and read it, and the anger that came first was m
ore for his wife, who had had to try to cover up for him and spare him, than for the words themselves. “Who does she think she is!”

  “She’s sick, Jacob—I told you—Dr. Lister told you.”

  “All right!” he said. “All right.”

  The hurt had now come to overwhelm the anger. “You can’t go alone. I’ll drive you down and stay in the background. If she changes her mind, she can see me.”

  “Of course.” It was giving in again, Esther knew. She would be pulled from both sides all the way, but she had to let Jacob do this for her. Maybe he could see the doctor there and be reassured. She got up and took the letter from him, hoping that the trip would dull the pain of the unequivocal words of denial.

  When she went into their bedroom to put the letter away, she heard Suzy talking with a friend on the phone. She was saying, “But I don’t know … it’s not just something you can plan for…. I told you. My sister, Debbie, is very sick. No…. They get these reports every month. No … it’s not that. It’s that if the next one is bad, they won’t feel like having anything here…. Sure. Well, I’ll let you know if it’s all right.”

  A sudden, helpless anger leaped into Esther’s head, and her eyes burned with it for a moment. Deborah! Deborah—what has she done to us all!

  chapter five

  Dr. Fried saw Esther Blau in the doctor’s bright, cluttered office. It was important to Dr. Fried to know whether Deborah’s mother would be an ally in this treatment or an adversary. Many parents said—even thought—that they wanted help for their children, only to show, subtly or directly, that their children were part of a secret scheme for their own ruin. A child’s independence is too big a risk for the shaky balance of some parents. On Esther’s impeccable surface Dr. Fried saw intelligence, sophistication, and straightforwardness. There was also an intensity that made her smile a little hard. How those two blunt wills must have struggled over the years!

  They sat down in the comfortable chairs, the doctor breathing a little heavily and feeling somewhat dowdy as she faced Esther’s formidable jewelry. She examined her again. The woman was sane: she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also. Her daughter did not. Where was the difference to be found?

  The mother was looking about the room. “Is this—is this where Deborah comes?”

  “Yes.”

  Relief showed on the carefully composed surface. “It’s pleasant. No—bars.” She got the word out, straining so hard for relaxed matter-of-factness that the doctor almost winced.

  “Right now it hardly matters. I don’t know if she trusts me enough to see the room as it really is.”

  “Can she get well? I love her so very much!”

  If it is so, Dr. Fried thought, the love will meet a strong test in what they are all about to undergo. She said, “If she is going to get well, we are all going to have to be patient and to work like anything.” The colloquialism sounded strange in her accent. “She will need a tremendous amount of energy to give to this, to fight her own impulses for safety … and so you may find her tired and not keeping herself groomed as she should. Is there something that worries you particularly about her now?”

  Esther tried to frame her thoughts. It was too soon to think about Deborah’s progress really; the worry was something else. “You see—all these days … all these days we’ve been thinking and thinking how and why this could have happened. She was so much loved! They tell me that these illnesses are caused by a person’s past and childhood. So all these days we’ve been thinking about the past. I’ve looked, and Jacob has looked, and the whole family has thought and wondered, and after all of it we just can’t see any reason for it. It’s without a cause, you see, and that’s what is so frightening.”

  She had spoken louder than she wished, trying to convince the chairs and the tables and the doctor and the whole institution with its bars and screaming people whose reasons for being there must be different … must be.

  “Causes are too big to see all at once, or even as they really are, but we can tell our own truths and have our own causes. Tell me what you know about Deborah and yourself in your own way and as you knew it.”

  “I suppose I should start with my own father.”

  Pop had come from Latvia. He had a clubfoot. Some how these two things represented him more fully than his name or occupation. He had come to America a young man, poor and foreign and lame, and he had borne down on his new life as if it were an enemy. In anger he had educated himself; in anger he had gone into business, failed, succeeded, and made a fortune. With his fortune and his anger he had bought a great home in an old neighborhood of the inbred and anciently rich. His neighbors had every manner he admired, and in turn they despised his religion, his accent, and his style. They made the lives of his wife and children miserable, but he cursed them all, the neighbors and wife and children, in the crude, blunt words of his abhorrent past. The true conquest, he saw, would not be for him, but for his seed, educated and accentless and gently conditioned. The Latvian and Yiddish curses that they had learned at his knee he tried to temper with tutoring in genteel French.

  “In 1878,” Esther said, “the daughters of noblemen took harp lessons. I know because I had to take harp lessons, even though playing the instrument had gone out of fashion, even though I hated it and had no talent for it. It was one of the flags to capture, you see, and he had to try to win it, even through me. Sometimes when I played, Pop would pace the floor and mutter to his nobleman, …Look, damn you—it’s me, the little cripple!’”

  Pop’s “American” children had grown up knowing that all their worth and gentility and culture and success was only a surface. For a glimpse of their true value they had only to look into their neighbors’ eyes or to hear Pop’s remarks if the soup was cold or the suitor came late. As for the suitors, they were to be flags also; the proud banners of great families; the emblems of conquests in alliance, as it had been among the great in the old country. But willful Esther had chosen beneath her family’s hopes. The boy was smart enough, well-spoken, and presentable; still he had put himself through accountancy school and his family was “a bunch of poor greenhorns,” beneath Esther, beneath the dream in every way. They had argued and fought and at last, on the strength of Jacob’s prospects for the future, Pop had given in. Natalie had married well enough for the family to afford a gamble. Soon both of the young wives were pregnant. Pop began to think of himself as the founder of a dynasty.

  And Esther’s daughter was blond! A singular, thrilling, impossible fair-skinned blonde. She was Esther’s redemption from secret isolation, and for Pop she was the final retort to a long-dead village nobleman and his fair-skinned daughters. This one would go in gold.

  Esther recalled then the time of the depression and the cast of fear that had surrounded everything. It was fear and—Esther groped for the word that would evoke those years—unreality. Jacob had entered his working life at the very nadir of opportunity. The accounts that he had sworn to take in order to deserve Esther as a wife—the boring and routine, the scraps that others threw away—were simply not there. For every column of figures there were a hundred minds waiting, as hungry and well-educated as his. Yet they lived in one of the best new sections of town. The daughters of the dynasty had to live well and Pop paid all their bills. When Deborah was born it was into the handmade lace—the heirloom of some great European house felled by the revolution. Capturing an old flag was better than weaving a new one, and the princely carriage caps that Deborah wore for her outings had once been fitted to the head of a prince. Though the peasant’s mud-village past was already a generation removed, there was still in that peasant a peasant’s dream: not simply to be free, but to be free to be titled. The New World was required to do more than obliterate the bitterness of the Old. Like the atheist saying to God, “You don’t exist and I hate You!” Pop kept sounding his loud shouts of denial into the deaf ear of the past. When Jacob was earning fifteen and then twenty dollars a week, Deborah had twelve ha
nd-embroidered silk dresses and a German nurse.

  Jacob could not pay for her food. After a while they moved back into the family home, surrounded by a new generation of neighborhood scorn. Even as a prisoner of her own past, Esther saw that Jacob was unhappy, that he was taking charity from a man who despised him, but her own fear made her subtly and consistently side with her father against her husband. It seemed then as if having Deborah had made her allegiance right. Jacob was consort of the dynasty, but Deborah—golden, gift-showered Deborah—always smiling and contented, was a central pin on which the dream could turn.

  And then they found that their golden toy was flawed. In the perfumed and carefully tended little girl a tumor was growing. The first symptom was an embarrassing incontinence, and how righteously wrathful the rigid governess was! But the “laziness” could not be cured by shaming or whipping or threats.

  “We didn’t know!” Esther burst out, and the doctor looked at her and saw how passionate and intense she was under the careful, smooth façade. “In those days the schedules and the governesses and the rules were god! It was the …scientific’ approach then, with everything sterile and such a horror of germs and variation.”

  “And the nursery like a hospital! I remember,” said the doctor laughing, and trying to comfort Esther with her laughter because it was too late for anything but remorse for the mistaken slaps and the overzealous reading of misguided experts.

  At last there were examinations and a diagnosis and trips from doctor to doctor in search of proof. Deborah would have nothing but the best of course. The specialist who finally did the operation was the top man in the Midwest, and far too busy to explain anything to the little girl or stay with her after the miracles of modern surgery were over and the ancient and barbaric pain took their place. Two operations, and after the first, a merciless pain.