I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (17 page)

“What’s the matter, Blau?”

“Your spatial laws are okay,” she said from the sweat, “but God—watch out for the choices you give us!”

For weeks Esther Blau had worried and fretted over having to tell Suzy about her sister’s illness. Who had not heard all the old-style high melodrama of insanity; of the madwoman in
Jane Eyre,
of bedlam, of the hundreds of dark houses with high walls and little hope; of lesser dramas in lesser memories, and of maniacs who murdered and passed on the taints of their blood to menace the future? “Modern Science” had given the official lie to much of this, but beneath the surface of facts, the older fears remained in the minds of the well no less than of the sick. People paid lip service to new theories and new proofs, but often their belief was no more than the merest veneer, yielding at a scratch to the bare and honest terror, the accretion of ten thousand generations of fear and magic.

Esther could not bear the thought of Suzy replacing the familiar image of her sister with the wild-eyed face of the straitjacketed stereotype chained in an attic. She realized now that it was this stereotype that she and Jacob had begun to imagine the first time they heard the grating of the locks, when they saw the barred windows, and when they shuddered to the screaming of a woman from
some high gable. Still, Suzy had to know; it was past time. The little sister was growing up and they could no longer talk around her; it wasn’t fair to keep shutting her out from the source of their deepest concern. But the telling would have to be done in some sure way, safely and expertly. They wondered if Dr. Lister could tell Suzy. But Dr. Lister refused it; it was Esther’s job and Jacob’s, he said.

“Wait a little longer,” Jacob said. Esther knew that “wait-a-little-longer” was only one of the doors he used to slip quietly into inaction. Close your eyes and it won’t exist; everything will be fine-fine-fine. It was a lie. So they fenced back and forth with it and at last Esther won her way. That evening, when they were finished with dinner and Suzy had gotten up to do her practice on the piano, Esther called her back.

“This is serious….” To her own ears her voice had an odd mixture of gravity and embarrassment. Sitting stiffly, she began to tell her younger daughter that Deborah’s “convalescent school” was a hospital; her doctors, psychiatrists; her illness not physical but mental. After they had eased into the icy subject, Jacob began to add, modify, explain this part and that, presenting as fact much of what he himself had been uncertain about.

Suzy listened with the complete impassivity of a twelve-year-old, her face giving no sign or flicker by which the parents could detect how she was hearing the words they were wringing out of themselves. When they had finished, she waited a while and then spoke slowly.

“I always wondered why those reports seemed to be more about Debby’s thoughts than about her body, like pulse or temperature.”

“You read the reports?”

“No. I hear you quoting things to Grandma sometimes, and once you read to Uncle Claude part of it, and it sounded kind of funny to be about the usual kind of sickness.” She smiled a little, no doubt remembering something else that had puzzled her. “It all fits now. It makes sense.”

She went into the next room to practice her piano lesson. A few minutes later, she came back to where Esther and Jacob were still sitting at the table, stunned, over their coffee. “It’s not like she’s Napoleon or something … is it?”

“Of course not!” Then they spoke a little stiltedly and painfully about the optimism of the doctors, the advantage of early treatment, and the strong force of their patience and love all weighing in Deborah’s favor.

Suzy said, “I hope she comes home soon—sometimes I miss her a lot.” And then she went back to the duty of Schubert.

They sat for a long time shocked at the difference between the expectation and the happening. Esther felt weak with the sudden easing of the tension.

Jacob said slowly, “Is this all? … I mean is this all there is or didn’t she really hear us? Will she be back, when the shock wears off, with the look on her face that I have been afraid of for all these months?”

“I don’t know, but maybe the cannon blast we were fearing was only what we heard.”

Jacob took a long draw on his cigarette and let his anguish leave his body with the exhaled breath.

“English is a wonderful language,” Furii said, “to have such expressions. You look like what they call
…down in the dumps.’”

“English is no better than Yri.”

“To praise one thing is not to damn another.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t being wrong courting death?” (The sharp sword of precocity had been comfortable in her hand; she had honed its edge herself. To be queen of Yr [and its slave and captive] was to be right and only right.)

“But you made costly mistakes, didn’t you?” Furii asked gently. “You identified the wrong girl at the camp.”

“I was wrong a hundred times. But as long as I was ugly and ruined and beyond hope, and of a substance that was poisoned and poisoning, I could still appear to
be right. If I was wrong—even a little—then what was left?”

She saw the weak and wound-licking ghost of old vanity in what she was saying and laughed. “Even in Pernai—nothing—I had to have a little something.”

“And so do we all,” Furii said. “Are you ashamed of it? To me it is one sign that you are a member of Earth at least as much as of Yr. Do you believe that your substance, as you call it, is really poisonous?”

Deborah began to tell her about the Yri laws governing the ultimate substance of each person. People were differentiated by this substance, which was called
nganon. Nganon
was a concentrate which was defined in each person by nurture and circumstance. She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same
nganon
as the rest of Earth’s people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from humankind, but others of the undead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous
nganon.
She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen
nganon
wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions.

“But you told me that you used to bribe the children at camp with the candy that your mother sent you,” Furii said.

“Well, yes. The candy was in a box, all cellophaned and impersonal. Being unopened it had no essence, and it takes about a day or so before the Deborah-rot sets in. I gave it right away almost as soon as I got it.”

“And so you bought a little popularity for a few hours.”

“I knew I was a liar and a coward. But by that time the Collect had begun to come stronger and stronger, and …liar and coward’ were standard comments.”

“And this feeling was threaded through with the precocity that you had to maintain, and with your grandfather’s saying always how special you were.”

Deborah had pulled away her mind and the doctor looked up with a kind of sharpness in her eyes, catching Deborah at the edge of something.

“Anterrabae …”
Deborah called in Yr.

“Where are you now?” Dr. Fried interjected.

“Anterrabae!”
Deborah said aloud and in Yri.
“Can she bear the great weight?”

“What is it now, Deborah?” the doctor asked.

She moaned to the god, then turned to the mortal in desperation. “Anterrabae knows what I saw—what I have to speak of…. If only I had not seen it; if it had been hidden, that special thing … that thing.”

When she began to shiver with the cold of an ancient parting, Furii gave her a blanket, and she lay on the couch rolled up in it and shaking.

“During the war …” she said, “I was a Japanese.”

“An actual Japanese?”

“I was disguised as an American, but I was really not an American.”

“Why?”

“Because I was the Enemy.”

It seemed to Deborah an ultimate secret, and Dr. Fried was forced to ask her to speak louder time and time again. She began to explain that because she could go into Yr or rise out of its incredible distances without visibly changing, Yr had given her, as a gift for her ninth birthday, the power to transmute herself in form. For a year or so she had been a wild horse or a great bronze-feathered bird. She quoted to Dr. Fried the Yri incantation which had once freed the bird-self from the illusion of the ugly and hated girl:

“e, quio quio quaru ar Yr aedat

temoluqu’ braown elepr’ kyryr …”

(Brushwinged, I soar above the canyons

of your sleep singing …)

When she was this great soaring creature it seemed as if it was the Earth ones who were damned and wrong, not she, who was so complete in beauty and anger. It seemed to her that they slept and were blind.

When the Second World War had come, making of the names of Pacific Islands another language of hell and magic to Americans, the Collect had said to her, “They hate these Japanese as they have always hated you,” and Anterrabae, in the urbane falling-smile,
Bird-one, you are not of them.

She had remembered hearing the fragment of some speech on the radio. “Those who aren’t with us are against us!” And the Collect had cried out,
Then you must be this enemy they fight!

On a certain night before falling asleep, Deborah had been reborn as a captured Japanese soldier. From behind the mask of an American-Jewish girl with a past of an American suburb and city, the elliptical eyes of the Enemy looked for the day of his unmasking. The tumor’s impossible, insistent anguish was his war wound, and his mind, versed in a strange language, rang with dreams of escape. He did not hate his captors—he never wished that they would lose the war, but the world now offered meaning to the irreconcilable oppositions in Deborah, the ruination of her secret and female parts, the bitter secrecy of her wound, and the hidden language. Captivity and secrecy and the glory and misery of Yr’s declaration
You are not of them
were somehow justified.

On the day that the war in the Pacific was over, Anterrabae caused Deborah to break a glass and step on the pieces with her bare foot. There was no pain, and the doctor, wincing himself as he picked the slivers out, was awed and a little puzzled at her “soldierly” stoicism.

At last I am brave enough for the damn doctors!
Deborah said in Yri to Lactamaeon.

You are captive and victim,
Lactamaeon said.
We did not want you to escape.

“You hid this presence from everyone around you,” Furii said. “Did you hide it also from Yr?”

“It had no place in Yr; it was part of the Earth dimension.”

“And so the Censor had the care of keeping it secret. Is that not so? I have trouble to understand the place of this Censor in your kingdom.”

“The Censor is supposed to protect me. In the beginning he was put at the Midworld barrier to keep Yri secrets from coming out in Earth’s conversations. He censored all my acts to keep Yr’s voices and rites from reaching the Earth’s people. Somehow he became a tyrant. He began to order everything I did or said, even when I was not in Yr.”

“But this Censor, and Yr itself, was still only an attempt to understand and explain reality, to build a sort of truth where you could live. Well,” the doctor concluded, “I am sure there is much to see here and to study. You are not a victim now; you are a fighter with me, for the cause of your good, strong life.”

When her patient left, Dr. Fried looked at her desk clock. It had been a long, exhausting session, though the clock showed the time had been no longer than usual. The intensity of her listening, of her sharing, had been so great that she wondered if she could face an afternoon of the cries and agonies of the other patients and the studies and bitter questions of the psychiatric students. What was it today, again? She looked in the appointment book on her desk. Oh, yes, the seminar. But there was, miraculously, an hour before she had to leave. For three weeks her Schumann records had lain on the record cabinet unopened. Beethoven was calling from her memory. Why was there always so little time? She stretched and walked into the living room, teasing herself by humming little bits. Schumann or Beethoven? How does the
doctor
feel today?

She took the package down and opened it, and as she did so, she began to think about a patient whose doctor
had come for her advice on a seemingly insoluble problem. No. No more patients now. She got the machine ready and put the first record on the spindle. Schumann’s sweet, gentle music filled the room. She listened and her mind shifted to German and the poetry of her youth. She sat back in the soft living room chair, closed her eyes, and rested. And then for the twelfth time that day, the phone rang.

On Deborah’s way back to the ward the dreaded cloud lowered, and the rumble of the Collect and Censor and Yr began. Terror at what was coming made her try to break through her silence when she was back on the ward. Seeing the head nurse leaving, she went after her, but she could not speak; the door closed and the day shift was gone. The evening shift came on and the menacing moved closer, hovering to engulf her. Just before the wave broke, Deborah went to the ward nurse who was overseeing the evening spoon-count.

“Miss Olson …”

“Yes?”

“It’s going to hit—please—it’s going to hit harder than I can stand up under. I should be in a pack when it hits.”

The nurse looked up; it was a keen and penetrating look. Then she said, “Okay, Miss Blau. Now go and lie down.”

The wave broke as hard as she had foreseen, with a tremendous gust of ridiculing laughter, but the fleeing of her senses was not complete. The Censor’s voice, like a cinder which Deborah’s teeth were grinding, was loud in her inner ear:
Captive and victim! Don’t you know why we have done this? The third mirror
—
the ultimate deception is still to be given! You came to this hospital
—
it was in the plan. We let you trust that doctor. You opened your secrets more and more. This is the final one. Now you have given enough of your secrets, and you will see what she will do
—
she and the world!
And the cinder-laugh crazed Deborah’s teeth to splinters in her mouth.