I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  Deborah saw one attendant attacked by the patients night after night. The attackers were always the sickest ones on the ward—out of contact, far from “reality.” Yet they always chose to go against the same man. On the day after a fight that had been more violent than usual, there was an inquiry. The battle had become a free-for-all; patients and staff were bruised and bleeding and the ward administrator had to ask everyone questions. Deborah had watched the fight from the floor, hoping that an attendant would trip over her foot, so that she might play a little parody of St. Augustine and say later, “Well, the foot was there, but I didn’t make him use it. Free will, after all—free will.”

  The ward administrator spoke to everyone about the fight. The patients were proud of their lack of involvement; even the mutest and most wild-eyed managed a fine disdain and they purposely thwarted all of the questions.

  “How did it start?” the doctor asked Deborah, alone and very important for her moment in the empty day-room.

  “Well … Hobbs came down the hall and then there was the fight. It was a good fight, too, not too loud and not too soft. Lucy Martenson’s fist intruded into Mr. Hobbs’s thought processes, and his foot found some of Lee Miller. I had a foot out, too, but nobody used it.”

  “Now, Deborah,” he said earnestly—and she could see the hope in his eyes, something to do with his own success as a doctor if he could get the answer when another might fail—“I want you to tell me … Why is it always Hobbs and why never McPherson or Kendon? Is Hobbs rough on the patients without our knowing about it?”

  Oh, that hope!—not for her but for her answer; not for the patients, but for a moment in his private dream when he would say matter-of-factly, “Oh, yes, I handled it.”

  Deborah knew why it was Hobbs and not McPherson, but she could no more say it than she could be sympathetic to that raw, ambitious hope she saw in the doctor’s face. Hobbs was a little brutal sometimes, but it was more than that. He was frightened of the craziness he saw around him because it was an extension of something inside himself. He wanted people to be crazier and more bizarre than they really were so that he could see the line which separated him, his inclinations and random thoughts, and his half-wishes, from the full-bloomed, exploded madness of the patients. McPherson, on the other hand, was a strong man, even a happy one. He wanted the patients to be like him, and the closer they got to being like him the better he felt. He kept calling to the similarity between them, never demanding, but subtly, secretly calling, and when a scrap of it came forth, he welcomed it. The patients had merely continued to give each man what he really wanted. There was no injustice done, and Deborah had realized earlier in the day that Hobbs’s broken wrist was only keeping him a while longer from winding up on some mental ward as a patient.

  She did not wish to say this, so she said, “There is no injustice being done.” It seemed to the doctor a cryptic statement—with a patient in bed, another with a broken rib, Hobbs’s wrist, another with a broken finger, and two nurses having black eyes and bruised faces. He rose to go. He had not helped her to say any more than she wished to say, and she saw that he was angry and disgusted with her for having helped to frustrate his daydream. Then the door opened quickly, and he turned. It was Helene, another patient, carrying her lunch tray into the day-room. Apparently they had given out lunch while Deborah was in with the doctor.

  For a moment Deborah thought that Helene simply wanted to eat in the dayroom, where it was sunny, but seeing her face—no, it was not for the sun. The doctor looked up sharply and said, “Go back to your place, Helene.” With a single, graceful step back and a pivot of the arm, smooth on its fluid bearings, Helene sent the tray crashing down on Deborah’s head. Deborah had seen the beautiful balletlike motion and she was yearning after the beauty of it when the world suddenly exploded in an avalanche of warm, wet food—stew, shreds of things, and the glancing edge of the tray. She turned toward the ward doctor and saw him cowering against the wall, saying in a voice very different from his professional drawl: “Don’t hit me, Helene—don’t hit me! I know how hard you can hit!” Right behind his cry the attendants came rushing in to overwhelm the ballet with their heavy arms and hard, frightened faces. There seemed to Deborah to be quite a few of them for one small woman, even though she was like a thresher and they, wheat. She murmured beneath the mess dripping from her face and hair, “Good-by, Helene, go in sixes.”

  “What did you say?” the doctor asked, straightening his clothes and struggling to do the same with his expression.

  “I said, …Relevez, soufflé, dragged away.’”

  She heard the bed being moved for the cold pack. The doctor left hurriedly to cope with some screaming that had started in one of the back rooms. Deborah stood alone in the mess wondering if she were bleeding.

  Because of the excitement, it was half an hour before she could get an attendant to unlock the bathroom so that she could clean up a little. Here as elsewhere, the attackers were favored above the attacked. They were not so far from the world after all. Deborah thought a curse against the whole business. They might have quelled Helene roughly, but they were caring about her; they were concerned. When she had freed herself of Helene’s lunch, she went to her bed, where her own cold food was waiting, having been half eaten by a patient who slept near the window.

  “Eat, dear,” said the Wife of the Abdicated, sitting on her bed, “they’ll get it out of you later.”

  “No …” said Deborah, looking at the stew. “I’ve done this already.”

  The Wife of the Assassinated looked at her sharply. “My dear, you’ll never get a man, looking like that!”

  She turned from Deborah to attend her conference, and, suddenly, Deborah knew why Helene had come in and tried to hurt her. About an hour earlier, before the doctor had called her, Helene had come to Deborah and, speaking quite clearly, had shown her some pictures which had come in a letter. Helene was kept in a seclusion room, for she was universally feared for her angers and violence, which could break bones when she wished. The door had been open today, though, and no one had noticed her going to see Deborah or had heard them sharing the small confidences of the pictures. She had gone on for a while telling Deborah who this one was and that, and had come to a picture and said, “She was with me in college.” A nice girl, standing in the real world, that nightmare no man’s land. Helene had taken the picture back from her and lain down on Deborah’s bed, saying, “Go away—I’m tired.” Because she was Helene, Deborah had left the room and gone into the hall and soon the attendant had found Helene and told her to go back to her room. Deborah understood now that Helene had attacked her because she had to discredit her as a witness to the shame and misery that the picture evoked. The mirror had to be dirtied so that it would no longer reflect the sudden secret vulnerability beneath the surface of hard fists and eyes and obscenity.

  “Philosopher!” Deborah muttered to herself and picked a piece of food from behind her ear.

  chapter nine

  “We have the changes and we have the secret world,” Dr. Fried said, “but what was going on in your life in the meantime?”

  “It’s hard to get close to; it all looks like hate—the world and camp and school….”

  “Was the school also anti-Semitic?”

  “Oh, no, it was truer there. The hate was all for myself, the good, hard in-spite-of-lessons-on-manners dislike. But every time mere dislike turned to active anger or hate, I never knew why. People would come to me and say, … … after what you did, …’ or … … after what you said, … even I won’t defend you anymore… .’ I never knew what it was that I had done or said. The maids in our house left one after another, until it was like a continuous procession, and I kept having to …apologize,’ but I never knew for what or why. Once I greeted my best friend and she turned from me. When I asked why, she said, …After what you did?’ She never spoke to me again, and I never found out what had happened.”

  “Are you sure that you are not hiding some tr
uth here—something you needed to do that angered these friends?”

  “I’ve tried and tried to imagine, to think, to remember. I have no idea at all. None.”

  “How did you feel about this happening?”

  “After a while it was just a grayness and the surprise of the inevitable.”

  “Surprise of the inevitable?”

  “Where there is no law but this awful destruction, coming and always coming closer—the Imorh—the shadow of it is always inevitable. Yet—and why I don’t know—I keep suffering from its oncoming and from being hit and hit over and over from directions which I don’t expect.”

  “Perhaps it is only that you are looking to be shocked and frightened in this world.”

  “You mean arranging deceits?” Deborah felt the ground beginning to go dangerous.

  “But you had to make the deceits yourself, did you not? Or understand nothing.”

  A picture came to Deborah from the years when she was only waiting for the end. She had been removed from the anti-Semitic camp, but the color of life had been set and only the despair could deepen. She was always off by herself sketching, they had said, but she never let anyone see the pictures. She had begun to carry that sketchbook around everywhere, clutching it like a kind of shield, and once, among a laughing, idle group of boys and girls, a picture had dropped out of the book without her knowing it. One of the boys had picked up the paper. “Hey—what’s this? Who dropped it?”

  It was an intricate picture with many figures. One by one the members of the group disclaimed it: no, not mine, not mine, no, no … down the line, and finally he looked again at Deborah.

  “Is this yours?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on—admit it.”

  “No.”

  As Deborah looked at the boy more closely, she saw that he was trying to help her—that if she would admit the work and take her “punishment” in the laughter of the others, he would defend her. He wanted to be a benefactor, but she did not know at what cost to her.

  “Is it yours?”

  “It is not mine.”

  “You see—” she told the doctor bitterly, “they made me repudiate my art.”

  “But don’t you see that the boy was begging you not to repudiate it, and none of the others laughed, really. You were only afraid that they might laugh. You alone made yourself lie.”

  She looked at the doctor, angry and fearful. “How many times does one tell the truth and die for it!”

  She got up angrily, went to the doctor’s desk, and took a sheet of paper and began to draw an answer to the seeming accusations of all of them: the doctor, who seemed to be blaming her; the Collect and its endless disapproval; the words of so many. She drew furiously for a while, and when she was finished, she handed the picture to the doctor.

  “I see clearly the anger, but there are symbols here which you should explain. Crowns … scepters … birds …”

  “Those are nightingales. So lovely. See, the girl has all the advantages, all that money can buy, only the birds use her hair for nests and to polish those crowns, and they burnish the scepter with her bones. She has the finest of crowns and the heaviest of scepters and everyone says, …Lucky girl, with all that!’”

  Dr. Fried saw her patient turning and running, turning and running in her fear. Soon there would be no place to go and she would have to meet herself as she planned her own destruction. She looked at Deborah. At least the battle was being fought in earnest now. The old apathy was gone. She began to feel in herself a rising hope and with it an excitement that was like no other—the echo coming out of so deep a place still bore the sound of this girl’s potential health. She withheld the excitement from her face so that Deborah would not see it and damn herself forever by defiantly trying to prove that this Yr of hers was a fact.

  “Crown and nightingales!” Deborah was saying caustically. “Keep the thing and you can show it to the learned doctors you lecture to. Tell them that you don’t have to be sane to understand linear perspective.”

  “It does depend on the kind of perspective,” the doctor said. “But I think I’ll keep this for myself—to remind me that the creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.”

  Deborah was sitting on the floor of the ward, idly waiting for a meeting with Anterrabae, when she saw Carla coming toward her down the hall. “Hey, Deb …”

  “Carla? I didn’t know you were up here.”

  Carla looked very tired. “Deb—I had enough of hate all boxed in. I decided to come up here where I can yell and yell until I get hoarse.” They looked at each other and smiled, knowing that “D” was not the “worst” ward at all, only the most honest. The other wards had “status” to keep up and a semblance of form to maintain.

  The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular. So Wards A and B whispered their little symptoms and took their sedatives and were terrified of loud noises or overt agony or towering despair. Women’s Disturbed rocked like a boat sometimes, but its inmates felt free of the subtle, treacherous currents of secret madness.

  Sometimes the patients talked to one another about their lives before, or shared information from the grapevine. Such was the instinct of the idle and displaced for some union with the world, however they wished to deny it. Now their world was peopled with psychotics and bounded by walls and wards.

  “Where were you before?”

  “Crown State.”

  “Jessie was there. I knew her in Concord.”

  “What ward in Concord?”

  “Five and Eighteen.”

  “I had a friend on Seven. She said it was a real bug-house.”

  “Hell, it was! Hesketh was head of the place. He was nuttier than the patients.”

  “Hesketh …?” Helene, passing by them, started from her trancelike procession down the hall. “Short and kind of thin? Blue eyes—a slurring of his r’s? Did he turn his head up like this?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “The bastard! I got beaten up by him at Mount Saint Mary’s.” And she continued on, moving away from them and back into her trance. Lee Miller rubbed her ear reflectively. “Mount Saint Mary’s … I remember … Doris was there, Doris Rivera.”

  “Who the hell is she?”

  “Oh, kid, she was before your time, a veteran of every treatment I ever heard of and she was as crazy as a bedbug. She was up here for three years.”

  “Where did they send her then?”

  “Nowhere. She’s living outside now and working.”

  They were incredulous. Did someone really know? Could someone really name the name of a success—one for whom this place had been means and not end? They deluged Lee with questions until she said, “Listen, I knew Doris when she was up here on …D,’ but I don’t know her formula for success and I haven’t seen her since she left! All I know is that she’s out and has a job. Now damn it, leave me alone!”

  The patients turned and began to scatter to the day-room, the bathroom, the far end of the hall, and their beds. The evening went into night. The Wife of the Assassinated made one of her monthly breaks for freedom—a headlong, blind dash to the closing ward door as the dinner trays left.

  Deborah stood listening to the endless recitals of her wrongs in the chant of the Collect, and into the middle of their noise Anterrabae cried, See if you can ever go out and live. See if you can ever go out and work and be a person! The threat made her dizzy with fear. The outside world and its beings were as foreign to her as if she had never eaten at the same tables with them or been caught in the up-current of their death-dealing and unfathomable lives. All the simple-looking actions that she could not counterfeit, she saw again, flatly, like a series of still pictures. Young girls saying hello, walking together, going unafraid to school, the pretty girls, courting and marrying. She remembered Helene and the anguish which had made her wish t
o obliterate the face that had seen and understood the picture of a pretty college friend.

  You are not of them! Lactamaeon screamed out of Yr, trying to protect her.

  All the other mothers are proud of their young girls! the Collect was saying in the acid, mocking tone it took when things were worse than usual.

  Walk out of this with that famous doctor of yours! the Censor roared. Do you think you can go telling secrets and be safe forever? There are other deaths than death—worse ones.

  Now it is time to hide and be hidden … whispered Idat, rarely seen god who was called the Dissembler.

  From the endless-sounding embroilment, the flashing-by of gods and faces of the Collect, Deborah saw, like a cartoon, flat and unforeshortened, the figure of McPherson walking down the hall of the ward. I’m going to call him—to get help, she said to all of it. Go ahead. Anterrabae laughed. Try. And he passed by with a whiff of the smell of his burning. Fool!

  McPherson was passing by. Soon he would be gone. Deborah got closer to him but couldn’t speak. Gesturing a little with a hand, she tried to get his attention, and he saw her out of the corner of his eyes, arrested by the intensity of her look and the strange, almost spastic motions of her hand, twisted by tension into an odd position. He turned.

  “Deb? … What’s the matter?”

  She could not tell him. She could do no more than gesture feebly with her body and hand, but he saw the panic she was in. “Hold on, Deborah,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She waited and the fear mounted as her other senses closed to her. She could only see in gray now and she could barely hear. Her sense of touch was also leaving, so that the reality of contact with her own flesh and clothing was faint. The mumbling out of Yr went on, and after a while the smell of people in the heavy ether-and-chloroform stench of the Pit made her think that she should try to see them. Everything was white—it must be nurses or the winter snow.