If only I could tell her … , Furii thought. How do you tell someone born and raised in the desert what rich and fertile lands there are, just out of sight? Instead she said, “How is it going for you on the ward?”
“Well, of course the patients are mad at me, and the staff is kind of disappointed. I’m down to see Dr. Halle today.”
“Oh, something special?”
“No … I have to tell him to let the social worker know that it’s still on with me, and that if it’s okay with the people down at that place she mentioned, I’ll be ready whenever they are.”
* * *
REQUISITION
Date: Sept. 3
Ward: D
Patient: Blau, Deborah
Ward Administrator: Dr. Halle, H.L.
Date: Sept. 5
Time: 8:30 A.M.
ITEMS:
1 dress, suitable for city wear
1 pr. hose
1 pr. shoes
27 “clip-type” curlers
1 coat
1 tube lipstick
$.80 suburban bus fare (for social worker and self)
4 city bus tokens (for social worker and self)
The above to be requisitioned from patient’s rooming house.
Signed:
H. L. Halle
chapter twenty-nine
Miraculously, her need had been seen by Earth ones. Deborah found that her exceptional problem was common enough to be covered by a statute. If she could prove to the Board of Regents her conquest of high-school subjects, she could get a certificate of equivalency without having to undergo three years in the big stone school. If she could ride the two hours to and two hours back between the hospital and the city’s Remedial and Tutorial School, there might be a quicker and less perilous bridge between Never and Maybe. She fell into her work dizzily and full of doubt, found her balance, took the books, and dove into them. Buried in pages, she sounded to the bottom like a whale, rose, took breath, and plunged again. Despite the dangerously hypnotic effect of the double two-hour ride each day, pride in the stubborn battle gave her the strength she needed. She struggled to stay up to the demands of the study and travel. In time the teachers were able to open a tiny crack in the wall of her separation. During the month that she went to school from B ward the nurse woke her before full light. Each morning before she was ready to leave for school, she was allowed by doctor’s order (medicinal) one cup of coffee, and after a week of fidelity to the early hour, the night nurse added toast and a glass of juice on her own responsibility. Deborah was proud of the respect that the little extras showed. Except for the extraordinary ones, the hospital workers tended to give the flat requirement and no more, but lately, at the moment when she stood at the door with her morning schoolbooks—symbols of responsible sanity—and waited for it to be unlocked with the large “madhouse” key, the attendant would say, “Good-by, now,” or even, “Have a good day.”
With such extras, Deborah achieved a certain pride and status on the ward. When she moved back to the rooming house, and went to the hospital just for supper and therapy, the shadow that she cast along the walkways was lengthened by more than the coming of evening. She began to understand why Doris Rivera, who had been well enough to work and live with her own keys in her pocket, had spoken so sparingly to the hungry and terror-stricken audience of D ward. She, too, had seen her shadow lengthened by hard-won hairbreadths, and though she was still dwarfed on the flat-faced walls of the world, to the hope-stunted sick from among whom she had gone, she had had an outline larger than life. How it had swayed and faltered with her return.
One day, coming from an exhausting session with Furii, Deborah saw a knot of people in the hall, and coming closer she saw that they were writhing, slow motion, like creatures under water. At the center of the knot, all but hidden by it, was Miss Coral. Because Deborah’s loyalty had not shifted with her commitment to the world, she had to choke back a guffaw. The bed-flinging genius of fulcrum, weight, and thrust was at it again! Deborah wondered how she had gotten off the ward. She was standing almost still in the middle of the melee, taking on five attendants by drawing them into battle with each other. Her rant was a low mutter, like an engine, full of long sibilances and obscenity. Deborah passed by and tossed a “Hello, Miss Coral,” more for the attendants than for the lady herself. Miss Coral removed her concentration from her war and smiled to Deborah.
“Hello, Deborah. You’re not back, are you?”
“Oh, no; just a doctor’s hour.”
“I heard you were home for the Christmas holidays.”
“Yes…. It was easier this time—almost like real fun.”
Miss Coral’s lightning eyes softened; her rigid stance and the whole five-man writhe about her relaxed into a half-comic, yet strangely moving, truce, while Deborah and Miss Coral faced each other, socializing.
“How is Carla? Do you still see her?”
“Oh, yes, she got that job she wanted…. Hey, is it true that Dobshansky got married to a nurse on one of the male wards?”
“Yes, a student. It’s a secret marriage, though, because of her training. No one knows about it,” and they smiled at each other for all the cold-water pipes and all the ears on all the wards.
“How is everybody?” Deborah asked.
“Oh, the same, more or less. Lee Miller is leaving for another hospital. Sylvia looks rather better, but she still doesn’t talk. Helene’s back with us on …D,’ you know.”
“No—I didn’t. Say …Hello’ for me. Throw something at her and be rude so she’ll know it’s me.” Deborah looked hard at Miss Coral. It was difficult to confront the pain she saw so nakedly in the face of her modest and gentle teacher, the bed-thrower and bearer of Catullus. “Are you okay?” she asked, knowing that anything more would be an imposition.
Miss Coral looked apologetically at her retinue as if they were all one great, embarrassing social blunder with which she was not connected.
“Well …” she said, “it comes and goes.”
“Can I bring you anything?”
She knew that Miss Coral could not ask, but she was hoping for something in code. They had shared a thing rare for their sort of illness—a touching of minds, a touching of feelings. Horace, shouted through the two-inch-thick doors of a seclusion room and into the dark wastes of a private world, had been more than Latin, more than beauty.
“Oh, no … no.”
Deborah realized that the bus would be leaving. “I have to go—”
“Well, then, good-by, Deborah.”
“Good-by.” She moved past. The hardness came back into Miss Coral’s eyes; the muscles tensed. The writhing began again; the machine hum started. The truce was ended.
When Deborah sat in the bus, she thought of Miss Coral and trembled a little. How many of the dead could be raised? Of all the D-ward women, how many would be free someday? In her three years there many faces had come and gone, and many had stayed. Of those who had gone, maybe three-quarters had left for other hospitals. Some had improved enough to live a kind of half-life as outpatients. How many were really out, alive, and free? You could count them on your fingers! She shivered. She would have to force herself to her books tonight.
The months went on and the high-school subjects began to fill in the notebooks. If sanity was measured in feet and hours, learning was weighed in pounds of books carried to school and back again. The heavy textbooks gave her a kind of pride, as if she might someday weigh in the world what her schoolbooks weighed in her arms. The city remedial school was mainly for young children with reading problems or speech impediments, but apart from sitting at tiny deal tables, Deborah liked it. She liked not having to be uncomfortable with her teachers, working alone and hard and with no precocity, and not unbelonging in the middle of the Varsity Drag. After a while her teachers began to praise her for her tenacity. Steady and steadfast, they said, and she was greatly pleased. It was only when she was returning to her room in the afternoon that the world hurt. Young a
nd rustling, loud with charm-bracelets and giggling, the high-school and young college girls would overwhelm the buses, and she would once again find herself peering into the world of the elaborately vain, mirror-mad, fearing and predatory young girls—a world where she had failed, a world that she knew looked much better than it really was, but to the eyes of its outcasts, a world that glowed with mysterious brilliance. She looked down at her own school skirt and sweater. She looked the way they did, but she was still a stranger, the imitation of a young schoolgirl.
And am I not as that world is? Idat asked from Yr. I am veiled and mysterious; I am rewarding and full of splendor. If you leave me and Lactamaeon, who loves you, and Anterrabae, who is your friend, with whom you laugh and are easy, will you ever have such light?
Then, strangely, the images of her tutors at the remedial school appeared in Yr to speak to Idat.
Are you joining the Collect? You too? Deborah called to them.
Certainly not! the English tutor said. We are against those creatures of yours!
Listen, you, the math tutor said to Idat, that girl works hard. She is here every day with sharp pencils and conventional dress. She is prompt and obedient and never insane in the classroom. She’s not overbright in math, but she works hard for what she gets and that’s the good, solid truth!
Hardly a shower of stars, Idat said dryly. Hardly a silver raven. (It was an Yri metaphor for flattery—because of the high polish.)
Suddenly, one by one, members of the Collect began to appear in the Midworld. One carried a trumpet, one a fiddle, one a drum, and one a tambourine. We are going to the Dance, they said to Deborah.
What dance?
The Grand Dance.
Who will be there?
You also.
Where will it be?
The Five Continents.
Sick or well, the English tutor said, sick or well you are one of the dancers—don’t you see that? Teachers and Collect began to trace the Yri words of separation on a piece of paper. In Yri and English they copied the old, old words, “You Are Not Of Them.” There it stands, the math teacher said. All your old reality.
Then they tore the paper into shreds and gave it away to the wind.
That evening at the church, Deborah invited her hymnbook mate out for a soda. The girl blanched and stammered so badly that Deborah became frightened that those who had seen might think she had said something indecent. She saw a momentary picture of the ancient fear, as Onward Christian Soldiers marched onward against the little girl of the past. Slipping back to invisibility she sang on through choir practice about Compassion.
“Adolescence again?” Furii said. “That at least you can grow out of, but do you really think you are poisoned still?”
“No, it’s just hard to get rid of the old things all at once. I was always so careful of my nganon, and so jealous of the clean things that other people had. It’s hard to think differently about everything all at once.”
“But you have friends—” Furii said, more as a question.
“In this town, though I sing beside them and take classes at night—they don’t see me. They will never see me.”
“Are you sure it isn’t your attitude?”
“Trust me,” Deborah said quietly. “It’s true. There are brightnesses, but they are small except for one or two friends from the hospital.”
“And the small brightness?”
“Well, my landlady was babysitting for her daughter. The little granddaughter is just two months old and the landlady had to go out. She came to my room and just said, …Deborah, will you mind the baby ’til I get back?’ Then she went out and that was all. I sat with that little baby for an hour and a half, hoping against hope that it would keep imitating itself—breathe in, breathe out, and not die while I was there.”
“Why should the baby die?”
“If I really was just a Semblance after all—only alive one-eighth-inch inward; alive to fire perhaps, but no deeper—”
“Tell me, do you love your parents?”
“Of course I love them.”
“And your sister, whom you never murdered?”
“I love her—I always did.”
“And your friend Carla?”
“I love her, too.” She started to cry. “I love you, too, but I haven’t forgotten your power, you old mental garbage-collector!”
“How does it feel to go about without all that old, stinking garbage?”
Deborah felt Anterrabae begin to rumble. Were he, Lactamaeon, Idat, and all the beauties of her many places in Yr to be lumped together with the Pit, the Punishment, the Collect, the Censor, and all the plagues of past reality?
“Does it all have to go? Do we pile it up and throw it all out?”
“It cannot be a decent bargain now—don’t you see?” Furii said. “You have to take the world first, to take it on faith as a complete commitment … on my word, if no one else’s. Then, on what you yourself build of this commitment you can decide whether it’s a decent bargain or not.”
“How about the shining things? Must I never think about Lactamaeon, so black on his black horse, or Anterrabae, or Idat, now that she keeps her form and is so beautiful? Am I never to think of them again or of the words in Yr that are better than English for certain things?”
“The world is big and has much room for wisdom. Why have you never drawn pictures of Anterrabae or the other ones?”
“Well, they were secret—you know the laws against mingling the worlds.”
“Perhaps the time has come to share the good parts, the lovely and wise parts of Yr, with the world. Contributing is building the commitment.”
Deborah saw Anterrabae falling faster in his own spark-lightened darkness, and while Idat’s tears had been diamonds, his were flame-bits; Lactamaeon was weeping blood like Oedipus. The blood made her remember something and she spoke absently.
“I once went to a lady’s house and saw blood coming out of her kitchen faucets. There used to be blood clotted in the streets and people were bug-swarms. At least I don’t have that anymore.”
“Oh, Deborah! Health is not simply the absence of sickness. We never worked this hard just so that you might be unsick!”
Again Dr. Fried yearned silently as if before a blind patient to whom she was trying to prove the color of light. If only Deborah could know what a life of reality and experience means!
“If I gave you a picture of Lactamaeon in his hawk aspect or as a rider, would you look at it as my old nuttiness, or as a …contribution’?”
“I would have to see it first,” Furii said. “All right then,” Deborah said, “perhaps I might begin to open Yr.”
* * *
STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
High-School Equivalency Examination
The high-school equivalency examinations will be given on May 10th at the County Courthouse.
As a registrant for these examinations you will be required to fill out and send in the appended forms and be present at the County Courthouse on Tuesday, May 10th at 9:00 A.M. Failure to comply with both of these requirements will disqualify you for certification.
Deborah put the notice on one side of the table and on the other, the sketches for a picture of Anterrabae. She had taken the notice from its envelope quickly, surprised that the time for it had come so soon. She had filled out the enclosure immediately, had looked twice to see that the address was right, and had gone out to mail it right away, lest it be forgotten or misplaced. When the letter was in the gullet of the mailbox, she had felt the first fear.
Now she sat before the table and tried to laugh it back, knowing with what eagerness and excitement part of her mind was functioning. The real feeling was hope, not fear. It was too late to pretend that she might not cast with the world this time.
Expectation bore her along for the two weeks until the test, and then she went forth in the clothes of reason on the specified day, to the musty, wainscoted room in the old courthouse building. There she found oth
ers taking their high-school educations at one gulp—a group of hard-handed day laborers who sweated and grunted over their papers as if they were blocks of granite. She was surprised and then humbled that they, too, though not prisoners or insane, had somehow missed beats in the rhythm of the world, and now were sharers with her in this necessary thing. McPherson’s wisdom was at her elbow: you have no corner on suffering. When the time was up and the papers had to be given in, Deborah put hers with the others and left, unable to measure what she had done.
An arrangement had been made at the school for her to go on with the tutoring until the results came in, as much to keep her from worry and idleness as out of fear that she might fail and have to apply again. It was a time of innocence before decision. She pursued her studies, but not breathlessly; followed the season of budding fruit trees in front of the Methodist Church; looked at the changes of the sky; fell in love with poplar trees; went to the movies every time the picture changed, which meant that she knew Tarzan at least as well as Hamlet; and had a month of singular, idle happiness. She called it “childhood.”
At the end of the month the Regents of the State called her out of the springtime to open their letter. She had passed well—well enough to be certified by the state as having an education equivalent to that of students who had attended high school—and there were enough points over to make her an acceptable applicant to any college. She phoned home especially proud to give her parents that second bit of news, and glad that their time of pride, while hedged-about and deferred, was still possible.
“Wonderful! It’s wonderful! Oh, wait until I call all the family! They are all going to be so proud!” Esther said.
Jacob, by comparison, was almost still. “… Very proud,” he said. “It’s fine, just fine.” His voice seemed on the verge of breaking.
The high-school graduate hung up the phone, ashamed of her father’s pitiful pride. The sunlight still pulsed through the room, the air still bore the odors of spring—sap and greenness, flowering bushes, and moist, warmed earth. She walked slowly outside and down the road and around the old Catholic graveyard and past the auto wreckers’, intending to go to the high school and stare its windows down. It was a ritual she has promised herself if she passed the exam. There was no joy in going now; she was going simply to keep an old promise. She walked onto the school grounds and skirted the huge ball field, on which four boys were still practicing. Suddenly she felt very tired, and sat down against the fence that bounded the back of the field.
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Page 26