I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (23 page)

Esther Blau faced Dr. Fried unable to speak. Then she cleared her throat.

“Did I understand you correctly?”

“I think so, but first—”

“Why! Why?”

“We are attempting to find out why.”

“Can’t you find out
before
she’s burned up!”

Esther had read the carefully general report, but something in its tone had alerted her and she had come down again, full of foreboding, to see Deborah. She had been told that it would be unwise; she had demanded to see Dr. Halle, and once in his office, she had heard the facts no words could modify or ease. Now she sat before Dr. Fried, angry and frightened and despairing.

“And what can I tell her father—what lie can I tell him now so that we can keep her here where she gets sicker and more violent all the time!”

Through her fear the doctor’s words sounded long and slow. “I think perhaps that we are all letting ourselves go overboard with this burning business. It is, after all, a symptom of the sickness which we all know is there, and which is
still
responding to treatment.”

“But it’s so …
so ugly
!”

“You mean the wounds?”

“I haven’t seen the wounds—I mean the idea, the thought. How could anyone do that to themselves! A person would be in—” Esther gasped and put her hand
before her mouth, and tears spilled over the rims of her eyes and rolled down her face.

“No, no,” the doctor said, “it’s the
word
that is making you so frightened. It is the old evil word …insane,’ which once meant …hopeless and forever,’ that is making you suffer so.”

“I never let myself think that word for Debby!”

The façade is broken and what is behind the façade is not so bad, Dr. Fried thought. She wondered if she could let the mother know it in some way. It might be a small comfort. The telephone rang and Dr. Fried answered it in her affable voice, and when she turned again to face Esther, she found her composed.

“You do think, then, that there is still a chance for her to be … normal?”

“I think that there is certainly a chance for her to be mentally healthy and strong. I will say something to you now, Mrs. Blau, but it is not for your daughter and I will appreciate it if you never mention it to her. I am approached at least four times every week to do therapy with a patient. I have doctors’ analyses also to supervise for the university School of Psychiatry, and at every session I must turn many away. I would be worse than wasteful to give a moment’s time to a hopeless case. I do not keep her one moment longer than I think I can help her. Tell them this at home. You need not keep telling lies—the truth is not unbearable at all.”

The doctor saw Deborah’s mother out of her office, hoping that she had helped. Easy comfort might do for some other branch of medicine (placebo was a prescription more common than doctors themselves liked to admit), but the whole weight of her life and training was against it. And after her experiences, anything that sounded even faintly like placating would frighten Esther Blau; if she had been strengthened by this talk, the whole family would be strengthened in turn.

Dr. Fried understood that Esther had outgrown her subjection to her father. She was now a strong, dominant,
even dominating person. The same force in her that had tried to conquer all of Deborah’s enemies, to her detriment, might be the saving force as well. If she believed in this therapy for her daughter, she would stand against the whole family to see that it was carried out. Deborah’s illness had done more than shake the portraits in the family album. Some of the family had had to question why, and had grown a little themselves because of asking. If this were true, it was a source of hope seldom mentioned in the psychiatric journals, maybe because it was beyond “science” and beyond planning for. Outside the doors of study, Dr. Fried’s father had once told her, an angel waits.

Coming out of the doctor’s house into the brisk autumn day, Esther looked toward the high, heavily screened porch behind which she knew was D ward. What was it like there? What was it like inside the minds of people who had to stay there? She looked away from it quickly, finding that it was blurred by a sudden overwhelming of tears.

Deborah sat on the floor of the ward having her burns dressed. She had begun to be of medical interest; the wounds refused to heal. The student nurses, delighted by so tangible a condition, worked faithfully and busily with their unguents, potions, bandages, and tape. The smokers were still angry at Deborah, holding her responsible for the new rules, and even Lee, who needed to talk, was sending scornful looks at her. While the nurses worked, Deborah watched what she had come to call the Breathing Frieze of other patients, sitting and standing, expressionless except for a look of great awe that their blood could move its ways so steadily, their hearts could beat beyond will or passion. When the nurses finished dressing the recalcitrant burns, they left the hall for a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, Deborah became aware that Helene was looking hard at Sylvia, who was standing next to her, immobile as ever. The next moment, Helene came close and struck Sylvia heavily once, and once again.
Sylvia stood beneath the blows and gave no sign of being conscious of them. Challenged, Helene exploded into a whirlwind of rage. A wild creature seemed to be hurling itself against rock. Helene beat and screamed and scratched and flapped, spitting and red-faced, her hair flying. Sylvia reacted only by closing her eyes slowly. Her hands were still limp at her sides; her body, it seemed, was totally commended to the forces of gravity and inertia; she appeared to take no interest in the beating. The sudden, swift happening was interrupted by the standard six attendants required to get Helene away. Soon she was borne off drowning in a wave of khaki and white.

Deborah remained standing ten feet from Sylvia. Both of them seemed alone on the planet. Deborah remembered the time two years earlier when Helene had rushed at her to destroy the face that had witnessed, and be safe from its knowledge. Everything had been Helene—doctors, nurses, attendants, the ward’s quickened rhythm, the wet sheets, and seclusion—all, all Helene, and Deborah had stood alone and shamed, because she had been too degraded to defend herself. She had stood as Sylvia was standing now, like a statue. Only her breathing betrayed her, wrenching in and out, almost as if she were snorting. Deborah was the only one who could know why Sylvia, who had failed to defend herself, needed as much attention as Helene was now getting.

I should go to her and touch her on the shoulder and say something, Deborah thought. But she stood still. I should go because it happened to me and no one knows as I do, how it is…. But her feet were in her shoes and her shoes were not moving toward Sylvia, and her hands stayed at her sides and were not moving. In the name of the dark night together when she broke her silence for me, I should go…. And she tried to wrench free of her granite garments and stone shoes. She looked at Sylvia, the ugliest of all of the patients, with her drooling and her pale, waxy face in its frozen grimace, and she knew that if she went to give what she of all people knew was
needed, Sylvia might destroy her with silence alone. A fear came up to consume the wish to act. In another moment the subduers of Helene began to come back from the battle and the chance was lost. From the subsiding fear, shame rose. It grew up over her face so that she stood for a long time stone blind and wishing for death.

Later, she stood before Furii in the office and told her what she had seen and had not done.

“I never told you a lie!” Deborah said. “I never told you that I was human. Now you can throw me out because I have a guilt with no apology.”

“I am not here to excuse you,” Furii said, looking up at Deborah from the chair, and lighting a cigarette. “You will find no shortage of moral issues and hard decisions in the real world, and, as I have said before, it’s no rose garden. Let us bless the strength that let you see, and work toward the time when you will be able also to
do
what you see to do. We have now to work hard on the roots of this burning which you do in your anger at me and at the hospital.”

Almost at once Deborah knew that Furii was wrong about the reason for the burning and the need for it, and most wrong about its seriousness. While it had the semblance of terrible aberration, Deborah felt that this was as deceptive as the quiet slopes of her volcano.

“Do you think the burning is very serious?” she asked Furii.

“Most serious, indeed,” Furii answered.

“You are wrong,” Deborah said simply, hoping that the doctor really believed what she had so often said about the patient trusting her own deep beliefs. There were over forty burns, inflicted over and over again on flesh scraped raw to receive them, and yet they didn’t seem worth the fuss that was being made about them. “I don’t know why, but you are wrong.”

Deborah looked around the cluttered office. For
members of the world, sunlight was streaming through the windows, but its goldenness and warmth were only there for her to perceive from a distance. The air around her was still cold and dark. It was this eternal estrangement, not fire against her flesh, that was the agony.

“Restricted or not,” she murmured, “I will do penance.”

“Louder, please, I cannot hear you.”

“Selective inattention,” Deborah said, laughing at the words of psychiatry, whose private language and secret jargon had not the beauty or poetry of Yri. Furii saw, too, and laughed.

“Sometimes I think that our professional vocabulary goes too far, but we speak to one another after all, and not only to ourselves and the falling gods. Was it to them that you spoke just now?”

“No,” Deborah said, “to you. I have decided not to be immoral, because of what happened to Sylvia. If I couldn’t do what I should have done after Helene attacked her, at least I won’t implicate her in my burnings, since you say that they are serious.”

“How do you mean this?”

“She smokes sometimes, but she is forgetful. She has put cigarettes down when I was there to pick them up quickly and be gone. Both Marys smoke like wild women and all I have to do is make sure that no one spots me. They are contributing to my delinquency, aren’t they?”

“I suppose, in a way they are. Actually you are taking advantage of their symptoms.”

“That must not be allowed to happen,” Deborah said quietly. She wondered why Furii had left matches in her waiting room, and cigarettes, too. The nurse who had accompanied her was easily distracted; Deborah wondered if Furii knew how trying those minutes of waiting had been.

When the time was over, Deborah got up to leave, saying, “I am cutting my throat now myself. I won’t steal burning butts from the patients unless they’re left in the
ashtrays or are forgotten, and I won’t let you contribute either because you wouldn’t want to.”

Then she reached into her sleeve and drew out the two packs of matches she had taken from Furii’s table and threw them angrily on the paper-littered desk.

When the volcano erupted at last, there was no backfire in the matchbooks that was big enough to stave it off. Deborah had not anticipated anything more unusual than dark-mindedness and howling from the Collect when she began to feel the familiar whip of fear and hear the one-tone whine of accusation from the invisible hating ones. She had been in the tubroom behind the front bathroom by herself because all the seclusion rooms were full. (Often the nurses would unlock the door for her and let her be alone in there until someone needed the toilets up front; for half an hour after the evening wash-up, solitude was almost a certainty.) It had been evening and soon it would be bedtime. She hadn’t wanted to carry her hell to bed with her, kicking the effects of dose after dose of chloral hydrate that kept growing deeper in the glasses and went down like burning celluloid.

She lay down on the cold floor and began beating her head slowly and methodically against the tiles. The black in her mind went red, swelling and growing out of her so far that before she knew it she was engulfed in the furious anger of eruption.

When her vision cleared, it was only enough to see and hear as if through a keyhole. She was aware that she was shouting and that attendants were in the room and that the walls of the room were covered with Yri words and sentences. Ranged around her were all the outpourings of hatred and anger and bitterness in a language whose metaphors used “broken” to mean
“consenting” and “third rail” to mean “complying.” All the words were extreme.
Uguru,
which was “dog-howling” and meant loneliness, was written in its superlative form in letters a foot high the length of one wall: U G U R U S U. The words were written in pencil and in blood, and in some places scratched with a broken button.

There was a look of horror and surprise even on the faces of a hardened D-ward staff, and it was that look which brought the full fire from her. The world’s fear and hatred were like the sun, common and pervading, daily and accepted—a law of nature. Now its rays were focused in their look, waking fire. The words Deborah spoke were not loud, but they were full of hatred and they were Yri.

“Where is what you used to scratch this, Miss Blau?”

“
Recreat,”
Deborah said. “
Recreat xangoran, temr e xangoranan. Naza e fango xangoranan. Inai dum. Ageai dum
.” (“Remember me. Remember me in anger, fear me in bitter anger. Heat-craze my teeth in bitterest anger. The signal glance drops. The Game”—
Ageai
meant the tearing of flesh with teeth as torture—“is over.”)

Mrs. Forbes came then. Deborah had liked Mrs. Forbes—she remembered having liked her. The anger was rising steadily and too much of what Deborah said could not wait even for the Yri logic and frame of words, and went sailing off into gibberish with only an Yri word here and there to let Deborah know what she was saying. Mrs. Forbes asked Deborah if she could send the others away, and Deborah, grateful for her courage in offering this, showed the two open hands and tried for form in her speech that was only going further and further into meaningless sounds.