I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (21 page)

It had been worth the cost of the two terrible punishments from Yr that Deborah had received for accepting flowers from the Earth, although when she had come clear from the second, it was days later and the beautiful flower had long since wilted and dried. Now Furii was giving a second gift, a little piece of herself. Its delicacy meant more than a small respite from the probing or an unsaid message to “take heart”; it said, “I will trust you with one of my memories as you have trusted me with yours.” Once again, adolescence or no, it made of Deborah an equal.

“Did you like the trip?” she said.

“Oh, it was not exciting or …fun’ such as young people have now, but I felt so grown-up, and it was an honor to
be with my father, just the two of us in the adult world.” Her face had the memory-shine of the old happiness. “Well!” She put her hands on her knees with finality. “Back into the salt mines. All right?”

“All right,” Deborah said, getting ready to bear inward again.

“Oh, no, wait. There is something else. I want to tell you now so that you can get used to the idea. I am leaving for my vacation early this summer because of a conference in Zurich. Then comes my vacation and then I go to join in a symposium for some writing which has been long put off.”

“How long will it be?”

“I plan to leave on June twenty-sixth and be back on September eighteenth. I have arranged for you to have someone to talk to while I am gone.”

In the sessions that followed Furii talked about the colleague’s qualifications, the possibility of resentment at what might seem a rejection, and the fact that this new doctor was not going to go deeply into the work, but would be there to stand for the world in the battles between Deborah and her censors, collects, and the forces of Yr. It was all deft and sure, but Deborah sensed the fait accompli, the oiling of the ancient wheels on which one was broken.

“I know lots of doctors here,” Deborah said wistfully. “Craig; and Sylvia’s doctor, Adams—I’ve seen her at work and I like her. I talked to Fiorentini once when he was on call at night, and then, the best one is Halle. He says he was the one who saw my parents when I was admitted. I’ve talked to him and I trust him….”

“Their schedules are all full,” Furii said. “Dr. Royson will see you.” The gears were oiled, the wheel ready; her acceptance would merely be form.

“My third rail,” Deborah said.

“What is that?”

“A free translation of an Yri word. It means: I will comply.”

Deborah worked against time, wishing to resolve everything before Furii left. She asked for and got a transfer to B ward—still locked, but not “disturbed.” Paper and pencil and books and privacy were possible there, but it was like a tomb compared to the rampant craziness of “D.” Because she had been a “D” patient, the others on “B” were afraid of her, but she knew a few of them and there were some good nurses who reminded her of McPherson by mentioning him. The therapeutic hours were infused with the desperate urgency created by Furii’s leaving, and if the insights were not brilliantly lit, they were at least hard-worked and honest.

“I leave you in good hands,” Furii said on the last day. “You know the B-ward administrator well and there is Dr. Royson to talk to. I hope you have a very good and profitable summer.”

Because Yri law wove into the world’s laws, Deborah knew that Furii was gone forever. As she had excised the love and memory of Carla from her feelings when her friend had left “D” for the first time, now Deborah forgot Furii as if she had never been and never would be
again. From the silent self-conscious hall of B ward, she went to see the New One.

She found Dr. Royson sitting stiffly in his chair in one of the offices on the main floor. “Come in,” he said.
“Sit down.”

She sat down.

“Your doctor has told me a lot about you,” he said. Deborah turned her mind for something to reply, thinking only: How stiffly he sits; I told her I would be fair … I told her I would try as hard with this one….

“Yes,” she said. He was not a friendly person. She understood and set out to try the first directions. “You’re from England, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I like the accent,” she said.

“I see.”

This is one-by-one from the jawbone!
Anterrabae groaned a little scornfully.

After a short silence the doctor said, “Tell me what you are thinking.” It seemed to come like a demand.

“About dentistry,” Deborah said.

“And what thoughts do you have about dentistry?” he said in his unchanging tone.

“That it can be more expensive than we think it will be,” Deborah said. She caught herself and tried again.
“I’m out of Novocain because Furii took it away with her.”

“Who is that? Who took it away?” He jumped on it as if it were some prize.

“The doctor—Dr. Fried.”

“You called her something else—what else did you call her?” The same demand, like a pickax.

“Just another name.”

“Oh, the Secret Language,” and he leaned back. Comfortably on safe ground, it looked to her. It was in the book on page ninety-seven. It was All Right. “Dr. Fried told me that you had a secret language.”

Withdraw!
Anterrabae said. He used the poetic Yri
form and in her heartsickness it seemed newly beautiful—
Te quaru:
be as the sea and ebb and leave only a moment of the sandshine.
But I promised her,
Deborah insisted to the firelit falling god in the black place.

She is dead,
Lactamaeon said on the other side of her.

“Tell me one of your words in that language,” the outside voice insisted.

“
Quaru,
” she said absently.

“What does it mean?”

“What?” She came to look at him suddenly and at the brutally hard lines of his disapproving face. He even sat austerely.

“What does it mean, that word you spoke? What was it?”

“
Quaru …
” she repeated. She was flustered with the confrontation, and she heard her own voice tell the gods,
But I promised …
“It means … well, it means wavelike, and it can imply something more of the sea, sometimes the coolness, or that soft, swishing sound, too. It means acting the way a wave acts.”

“Why don’t you merely say wavelike then?” he said.

“Well …” She was beginning the black sweat that was prelude to the Punishment. “You use it for anything that is wavelike, but it gives the sea connotation with it and sometimes that can be very beautiful.”

“I see,” he said. She knew that he didn’t.

“You can use it for the way the wind is blowing sometimes, or beautiful long dresses, or hair that is rippling, or
… or leaving.”

“It also means leaving?”

“No …” Deborah said, “… there is another word that means leaving.”

“What word?” He demanded. “… It depends on whether one has the intention of coming back …” she said miserably.

“Very interesting,” he said.

“There is also a saying—” (She had made it up that minute to try to save herself and them.) “It is: Don’t cut bangs with a hatchet.”

“Cut
bangs
?” he said.

An Americanism, perhaps, so she tried again. “Don’t do brain surgery with a pickax.”

“And what does that signify to you?” he said, perhaps forgetting that if she could speak truly to the world, she would not be a mental patient.

“It suffered and died in translation,” she said.

There followed a long silence between them, and though she tried at the next hour and the next and the next, his humorless and automatic responses brought down the muteness like a night. He worked hard to convince her that Yri was a language formulated by herself and not sent with the gods as a gift. He had taken the first words she gave him and shown her the roots of them from scraps of Latin, French, and German that a nine- or ten-year-old could pick up if she tried. He analyzed the structure of the sentences and demanded that she see that they were, with very few exceptions, patterned on the English structure by which she, herself, was bound. His work was clever and detailed and sometimes almost brilliant, and she had many times to agree with him, but the more profound he was the more profound was the silence which enveloped her. She could never get beyond the austerity of his manner or the icy logic of what he had proven, to tell him that his scalpels were intrusions into her mind just as long-ago doctors had intruded into her body, and that furthermore, his proofs were utterly and singularly irrelevant. At the end she marshaled all of her strength, and with as good a clarity as she could give him, she said, “Please, Doctor, my difference is not my sickness.” It was a last cry and it went unheard.

Now, with Furii dead and the warmth of Earth’s summer contradicting Deborah’s own season, whose sun was a gray spot in an empty universe, there could be nothing else but muteness. She stopped reacting at all and her surface became as dead as the moon. As time went on, her motion ceased also and she sat like a fixed display on her bed. Occasionally, inside, Yr would present her with
its alternatives and she would ride with Anterrabae in the hot wind of his fall or soar for a second with Lactamaeon on the rising columns of air over the Canyons of the Sorrow in Yr, but these times were all too rare and took incessant ceremonial tolls. Now even Yr seemed far and not to be apprehended.

She named the new doctor Snake-tooth, drawing the implication of the name from the hot summer-dry shaking of rattles, a senseless but evil sound, and she would think of it as she sat rigid and mute before him hour after hour. Slowly a volcano began to form beneath her still and masklike face, and as more days dragged by, voices and countervoices, hates, hungers, and long terrors began to seethe within its stony depths. The heat of them grew and mounted.

At a certain time Idat, the Dissembler, came to her in the shape of a woman. Idat was always veiled when she came so, but she was beautiful and never came without reminding her queen and victim of her beauty and saying also that she, Deborah, might someday aspire to being simply ugly. On this visit, the veil was lowered slightly, and Idat all in white.

Suffer, Idat. Why do you flow white?

Shroud and wedding gown,
Idat said.
Two gowns that are the same gown. Behold! Should you not dying, live; and living, die; surrender, fighting; and fighting, surrender? My road will give all opposites at the same time, and the same means for the opposite ends.

I know you from the veil outward, Idat,
Deborah answered.

I mean that men set backfires, one to kindle yet quench the other.

Is it applicable also to stone?

With my help,
Idat said.

Deborah perceived that by burning she could set a backfire that would assuage the burning kiln of the volcano, all the doors and vents of which were closed and barricaded. And by this same burning she could prove to herself finally whether or not she was truly made of
human substance. Her senses offered no proof; vision was a gray blur; hearing merely muffled roars and groans, meaningless half the time; feeling was blunted, too. No one counted matches on B ward and what Yr wished her to obtain was always clear to her vision, freed from the blur. She soon had the matches and a supply of cigarettes picked up here and there. With five of them glowing, she began to burn her surface away. But the volcano only burned hotter behind the stone face and body. She lit the cigarettes again and put them out slowly and deliberately against the inner bend of her elbow. There was a faint sensation and the smell of burning but still no abatement of the volcano. Would it take a conflagration then, to create a backfire?

Sometime later a nurse came in to tell her something. Perhaps she smelled the burned flesh, for she forgot what her message was and left, and soon a doctor was there. Deborah saw through her mask, with relief, the picture of the face of Dr. Halle. That it was summertime somewhere else and that the picture was in fact a living being, she accepted on faith, like facts too remote to be worth debating—the number of miles in the earth’s circumference, or the statistical variations of waves of light.

“What do you mean by a backfire?” he was saying.

“It seems necessary,” answered a representative of the volcano.

“Where?”

“On the surface.”

“Show me.” The words were careful but not critical or hypocritical.

The sleeve was now stuck to the burned place, but she pulled it off before he could cry the civilized “Don’t!”, instinctively wincing a little and thrusting his hand out as if she were made of real flesh.

After he looked, he said, a little sadly she thought, “I think I’d better take you up to …D.’
”

“Whatever.”

“Well”—and with a hint of a gentling—“you’ll be one
of my patients there. I’ve just taken over the administration of that ward.”

She gave the Yri hand-gesture of compliance with the slightly upward tilt, meaning that whether or not there was darkness, at least she felt safer because Halle could be spoken to and never gave the Number Three with Smile. He took her, with his usual decent lack of fuss, back to the D ward. When they stood inside the double-locked doors, someone from Yr said,
Look at him. See? He feels safer now.

Poor man,
she answered.

“You’ve made pretty much of a mess there,” Dr. Halle said, studying the burned place. “It’ll have to be cleaned up and it’s going to hurt.”

A student, delighted to be “medical” again, was standing by with an impressive tray full of medical metal. Dr. Halle began to scrub and clean the burn. A faint sensation followed his instruments, but there was no pain. For his concern and the time he was taking, Deborah wanted to give him a present. She remembered Furii and the gift of the cyclamen.

She is dead, though,
Anterrabae said.

But you can give him a flower,
Lactamaeon whispered.

I have nothing tangible.

Furii gave you a memory of hers,
Lactamaeon said. She thanked Lactamaeon with the Yri thanks:
Go warm-shod and well lighted in the mind.