I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  “Well”—from far across the barrier—“you did it. I cried. I forgave my mother and father really. Now I guess I go home.”

  “You are not so stupid and neither am I,” Furii said earnestly, trying to speak across the widening space. “There are many secrets to come and you know it. You are now parting with food that sustained you—all the secrets and the secret powers—and no other nourishment has yet appeared to replace it. This is the hardest time of all, harder than even your sickness was before you came here. At least that had a meaning for you, as awful as the meaning was sometimes. You will have to trust me enough to take on faith that the new food, when it comes, will be richer.”

  They spoke more, Furii eliciting from her the many small scraps of supporting evidence from years of living. Deborah was exhausted, but the stubbornness was still in her, helping her to yield and cast with Furii and her world while she awaited the last collision which would leave her insane forever.

  “There is more—much more,” Furii said. “We will go until we see it all. When it is over, you can still choose Yr if you really wish it. It is only the choice which I wish to give you, your own true and conscious choice.”

  “I could still be crazy if I wanted to?”

  “Crazy as a fruitcake … if you wanted to.”

  “Nutty as a fruitcake.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember. I hear also someone say …bats.’ What is …bats’?”

  “It means bats-in-the-belfry. It means that up in your head, where the bells ring, it’s night and the bats are flying around, black and flapping and random and without direction.”

  “Oh, I will have to remember that one! The Americans capture the feeling of mental illness quite accurately sometimes.”

  “And if I should want it—if I should need it … afterward …”

  “You have no experience to know what mental health is, but I don’t think that you will need or want to have bats in the steeple. Still, the answer is yes. If you need it or want it afterward, all your choices will still be there.”

  On the ward there was a barely covered excitement. Two packs had been set up in the small seclusion room and were waiting to be occupied; the hall seemed to be all white and khaki, with nurses and attendants walking fast from here to there, yet still waiting.

  “What’s up?” Deborah whispered to Lee, the one most likely to know and to tell it.

  “Miss Coral’s coming back again,” Lee said. “She was here before your time. Thank God. It’s been dull as beans up here.”

  Just before lunch was due to be brought up, the heavy elevator went rattling down and everybody in hearing gave a little jump. After a while they heard it coming back up and stopping outside the double doors of ward D. A group of white uniforms filled the translucent screen of frosted glass, and then the key turned and the ward administrator appeared in his magnificence. He was followed by two attendants (for feet) and two attendants (for head) carrying, under heavy restraint, a tiny, white-haired old lady. Behind them flowed assorted secondary personages of procession: receiving-ward day nurses, acolytes, the regular clergy, novices, postulants, and others.

  “That is Miss Coral?”

  “All ninety pounds of her,” Lee said. There was a ringing string of beautifully balanced, varied, and intricate profanity as the bundle moved down the hall, past the setup packs (surprisingly), and into the Number Four seclusion room beyond.

  For a while there was silence and then the bearers began to drift back down the hall. Deborah was about to turn again to her post at the dormitory window when she saw the last of the attendants joining the others. His coming was absurd, frightening, interesting, funny, non-Newtonian; he was flying. He was prone on the air, his expression utterly blank, as if he felt obliged to live out his life as a trajectory.

  But he did not come to rest; he fell and it was the heavy, clumsy sound of his falling that stopped his companions and spun them around. Deborah breathed heavily with disappointment. It was only a man after all.

  He was not hurt in the flight nor in the fall, but he was nearly run over in the stampede of staff that rushed back to subdue the source of his propulsion. The patients followed to watch and heckle. Miss Coral stood at the open door. Her tiny being was like electricity. That hair has been burned white, Deborah said quietly in Yri. The three men who went to move Miss Coral were pitiful against the sharp motions of her fighting body; she literally shook them off, her blank and expressionless face staring straight ahead. When more attendants leaped into the melee there was less for her to do, and she stood still because they were working against one another. Helene, sensing a challenge to her reign as at least the most feared on the ward, ran into the deserted upper hall, removed the hasps from the hinges of the nursing-station door, tore the door off with its own weight and hers, flung it into the hall, and followed it with everything that came to hand. Sylvia, planted like a poorly made statue against the wall, found that she could not bear the tension of Helene’s violence and suddenly exploded, diving at Helene in the broken ruins of the door, trays, medicine, cutlery, and towels. Someone rang the emergency bell, and it took twelve extra people to still the riot and put Helene and Sylvia in pack. Apparently the orders for Miss Coral had been forgotten by the ward administrator, because the door was simply closed after her and that was that.

  “Well,” Lee said as Deborah passed her in the hall, “it beats anything we’ve had up here for a while, you must admit that.”

  “I sure wish I could have made it to that narcotics cabinet,” Deborah mused. “I never knew a little old lady was strong enough to sail a grown man.”

  “She was here two years ago. I saw her throw a bed once. Not push it, throw it. She’s also the best-educated one of all of us.”

  “Better than Helene?” “Hell, yes! She speaks four or five languages and is some sort of mathematician on the outside. She tried to explain it to me once, but as you know, I stopped in the eighth grade.” Looking around, she began to circle again, impatiently trying to get the world properly placed.

  Four days later, Miss Coral’s door was left open, giving her access to the ward. When, after a few hours, she came hesitantly to the threshold, she found Deborah sitting on the other side.

  “Hello,” Deborah said.

  “Hello…. Aren’t you rather young to be up here?” The voice was old, but not harsh, and the vowels were spread wide in diphthongs the way the Deep South spoke them.

  “I’m sorry I’m young,” Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half pose. “We have the right to be as crazy as anyone else.”

  The second part was more like a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, “Yes … I suppose that’s true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.”

  The crude hunger that had made Deborah sit at the door for upward of four hours would not allow her to be civil or patient.

  “Lee Miller says you know languages and mathematics. Is that true?”

  “Oh, is she still here? Too bad,” and Miss Coral clucked.

  “Can you really speak them?”

  “Heavens, no! They only taught us to read and write a language in those days and it was only to read the classics.”

  “Do you remember the languages?” She looked to Deborah like an Anterrabae who had stopped falling, with the lightning-blue eyes and the static-stiff white hair that only needed rekindling to ignite the whole firebrand. She looked at Deborah for a while. “What is it that you wish?” she said.

  “Teach me.”

  The rigid lines seemed to melt, the body slackened, and water rose in the hard eyes and overwhelmed them for a moment. “I’m ill,” Miss Coral said. “I’ve been very ill, and I forget. I could be inaccurate sometimes because of the years”—Deborah was watching her sustain an invisible brutal beating, trying to stand up—“and the sickness …”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m tired now,” Miss Coral said, backing away again into the bare room. �
��I will make a decision and inform you of it later.” She slammed the knobless heavy door behind her.

  Sitting on the floor in the door-draft, Deborah could hear the muffled sounds of the battle: curses and cries, falling and blows. An attendant passed her. “I thought I opened that door—what’s going on in there?”

  “Coral versus Coral—divorce action. Fighting over custody of the child.”

  “Blau, you saw her come out. Did she close that door herself?”

  “Maybe she should talk to somebody,” Deborah said.

  The attendant turned away and went slowly to start the chain of permissions. Deborah sat down in front of the door again and emptied her pocket of all of its treasures. She found two cigarettes which she had picked up after a forgetful student nurse. They were only half smoked. She went to Lee Miller’s bed and put them under her pillow as an offering of thanks. Sylvia’s debt had been repaid.

  It was quite a while before the ward nurse arrived. Sitting by Miss Coral’s door, Deborah was sensing the inexorable guilt of relatedness; her substance had spread through the ward reflecting anguish on everyone. For every such battle as raged behind this door she was symbolically responsible. Yet she also remembered Carla saying that her sickness was like an overflowing glass, and Deborah’s drop or two could hardly matter. Was she responsible or not?

  Being unable to decide, she let the question go. After a while the sounds from inside the room stopped and Miss Coral’s voice, dead-level with exhaustion, called through the door.

  “Young woman—young woman—are you still there?”

  “Are you calling me? Is it me you want?” Deborah called back when she could speak.

  “Yes.” Then Miss Coral said:

  “Inter vitae scelerisque purus

  Non eget Mauris jaculis neque arcu

  Nec venanatis gravida sagittis,

  Fusce, pharetra.”

  “What is that?”

  “Tomorrow,” Miss Coral said. “And the spelling, too.”

  chapter fifteen

  Deborah and Miss Coral met in loose moments between the closings of their separate worlds. Deborah had entered upon a dry and barren era. The smell of her burnt-up self was always in her nostrils—charred flesh and hair, clothing, and the rubber and leather of shoes. She lost her ability to see color and the black bars limited the scope of her vision to a small, vertical strip of gray. Nevertheless she learned. Her pockets and secret hiding places became crammed with scraps of paper carrying the words, sentences, and poems of Miss Coral’s remembered classics in Latin; Greek alphabet and vocabulary; and bits of the stolen honey of the licentious Middle Ages.

  “It was too sinful in our day,” Miss Coral told Deborah shyly. “The medievals were beasts, supposedly, and their Latin, degenerate; but the books went around the school dormitory at night and not all of it was lascivious. Strangely, it is they, the singing madmen, that I most remember …” and she recited Abelard and Scottus. “Perhaps in …folly and darkness’ I resembled them…. We are here, after all….” And she was caught in a paroxysm of weeping and rage.

  A conventional teacher could never have made a moment’s headway against the defensive anger of Miss Coral’s pupil, but Deborah felt no threat in the small bits of gentle teaching, for her tutor’s manner was limned with her own pain and despair, and precluded the sour superiority that Deborah sensed in most teachers. Miss Coral was a fellow inmate, and Deborah’s genuine hunger, at last divorced from her deceptive precocity, forced her to reach out and take all that Miss Coral had to give.

  In line, waiting for sedatives: “That De Ramis Cadunt Folia…. I did okay until I got to the part about Nam Signa Coeli Ultima.”

  “Well, you know those words…. I remember you had them in other poems.”

  “I know what they mean, but …”

  “Oh, yes, that Signa is …sign,’ but here it is astrological, and would mean more like …house’ or …ascendancy.’ ”

  Waiting before trays:

  “Morpheus in mentem

  trahit impellentem

  ventum lenem,

  segetes maturas,

  … I don’t remember the rest.”

  From poems they went to bits of poems, to sentences, to phrases, building Deborah’s knowledge on familiar words in their changing grammatical forms. Miss Coral worked with her memory, and Deborah with her hunger and the forbidden pencil.

  At last Miss Coral said, “You have all the Latin and Greek I know. I’m sorry about the grammar—I’ve lost so much, but at least you will come across familiar landmarks when you read the classics; you have quite a number of bits and pieces all copied down on those papers of yours.”

  Indeed, the scraps of paper were becoming an embarrassment, cramming her pockets and stuffed under the bedsprings. She realized that it was time to ask for the special privilege of a notebook. It took a week or so to get up the nerve, but finally she took her place among the “petitioners” who waited for the ward doctor to come on his rounds. There seemed to be quite a few this time, even without counting those who were there habitually:

  Lee: “Hey, I want double sedatives tonight.”

  The Wife of the Assassinated: “Let me go home! I want to go home!”

  Mary (who has Dr. Fiorentini): “I’ve contracted a social disease from the socialists!”

  Mary (who has Dr. Dowben): “Murder and fire! There’s a fire!”

  Carla, who was going to go to the movie in town, needed special permission, being a “D” patient, and money. Miss Coral, starting at the bottom of the via dolorosa, was there to ask for some basic ward privilege.

  The doctor arrived on the ward, and the requests and answers flew back and forth. When Deborah asked for the notebook, he looked at her quickly, measuring her.

  “We’ll see,” he shot back over his departing shoulder, and went his way.

  That afternoon Dr. Adams came on the ward to see Sylvia. When she left, she was missing a copy of Look Homeward Angel that she had been carrying with her. Later in the day one of the student nurses looked in vain for her lecture notebook. The written pages turned up two days later in the elevator outside the Disturbed Ward, but the half of the book which was blank had disappeared.

  Deborah began to bother Helene for remembered poetry, and Helene obliged by giving her some of Hamlet and Richard III, dredged up, to her own amazement, from some distant but still-living source. Greek words were dutifully copied and then Latin; Look Homeward Angel became an agony under Deborah’s mattress, but she read and reread it until Dowben’s Mary got ahold of it and ate it, leaving only the binding. Carla had read the novel once and for a while they talked about it.

  “If I can learn these things …” Deborah said, “… can read and learn, why is it still so dark?”

  Carla looked at her and smiled a little. “Deb,” she said, “who ever told you that learning facts or theories or languages had anything to do with understanding yourself? You, of all people …” And Deborah understood suddenly how the precocious wit, though it had supported her sickness and was part of it, acted for her independently of the troubles that clouded her reality.

  “Then one may learn, and learn, and be a schizo.”

  “At least it may be so in Deborah,” Helene said caustically.

  Deborah put her notebook behind the dormitory radiator and lay down on her bed. She stayed there for the next three months, getting up only to be let into the bathroom or to be taken off the ward to see Dr. Fried. The darkness seemed complete. Phases of Yr came and went, the Collect met and dispersed, but outside the sessions with Dr. Fried she did not fight any of it. Carla sometimes came in and talked to her, telling the ward gossip or the little happenings of the day. Deborah was incapable of saying how much these visits meant. They were sometimes the only human contacts she had for days at a stretch, for her lying mask gave forth looks that hurried the attendants away; they would give the tray or put out the clothes and leave without a word or a nod. Because she began to have bad dreams a
nd loud, hard awakenings, she was moved out of the noisy and populous front dormitory and placed in a small room in the darker back hall with two more of the living dead. The coming of daylight shut their mouths and cut off their vision a foot or two beyond their eyes, but their dreams burst from them in screaming shards that shattered the brittle crust of drugged sleep for which the other patients fought. It was considered better to have the three of them waking one another than to have the whole ward upset, so they were immured together and left to themselves. Some of the nights seemed like imitations of the dramatic-fantasy Insane Asylum that Deborah still carried somewhere from her childhood store of nurses’ threats. Often she would wake with one of the roommates standing over her, arms upraised, or the other hitting her in a sleep-blind anger. One night she thought suddenly of her father and that other facet of his love, which was human need, and to the fat one, whose pounding had awakened her, she broke the mold of silent terror. “Oh, Delia, for God’s sake go back to bed and let me get some sleep.”

  Delia turned away and Deborah found herself happier than the mere success of her command would warrant. One night Helene herself—an angry, brutal Helene—played the apparition. Thinking that it was only one of the roommates Deborah snorted in what by that time had become standard form.

  “Get away, damn you. Beat it!”

  “I’m insane,” Helene said, menacing closer in the darkness. “I’m insane….”

  Deborah recognized the voice and knew the tremendous strength of violence in Helene, but now laughter came welling up as naturally as if she had always had it as a friend.

  “Do you think you could compete with my smallest nightmare on its dullest day?”

  “I could be capable of anything …” Helene said, but Deborah thought she heard more hurt pride in the tone than savagery.

  “Listen, Helene. You are bound to the same laws that I am, and there is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn’t do to me smarter and faster and better and good night, Helene, go back to bed.”