I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (29 page)

“Don’t you see, you stupid girl,” Esther said almost savagely, “I don’t have to! Praising you is bragging. Praising Deborah is—excusing—”

Their voices were so loud that Jacob came in from the bedroom angrily and growled, “Enough! You’ll wake the dead!”

They all caught the slip, the unconscious but accurate allusion to the drugged and sleeping cause of all these years of heartache and argument. They went to bed guiltily and angrily, loving and despairing.

When the visit was over, Deborah went back to the hospital with a suitcase full of new clothes.

Spring moved in again and winter drew off the Preserve and off the streets that led to the town. Deborah, still in the first urgency of hunger and love for the world’s forms and colors, had radiated her artistic gift into a dozen mediums and styles. The materials in the craft shop were scanty, but she worked with whatever there was: silk-screen and block-printing, watercolor and
gouache.
She yearned to play with all the toys of the earth, while Yr and the world’s darker parts fought it out inside her. To Earth’s usages and people she felt she could never come, but to the material things there was new access and freedom and great reward. A new patient asked her what she was, meaning her religion, and she found herself answering, “A Newtonian.”

The new patient was very like Helene. Deborah felt that, underneath her vagueness and sudden crying out as if she had been shot, there was a trueness and a strength. Her name was Carmen, her father was a multimillionaire, and Deborah knew that she was destined for a long stay on D ward. The three-month “honeymoon” that most people spent clutching the last rags of sanity to cover an
awful nakedness was almost over for her. Sometimes, when Carmen passed, Carla and Deborah looked at each other and said with a look: When she blows, she’s going to cover the ceiling.

“Hey, Carmen—let’s go over to A ward and play Ping-Pong.”

“I can’t. My father’s coming to visit this afternoon.”

“Do you want us around or not?” Carla said, and Deborah knew that she was volunteering their aid. Though they were no beauties, she and Carla would wash up, get combed and rigged, to help their ward-mate by running interference between Carmen’s father and the more bizarre-looking of ward B’s cuckoos.

“No,” Carmen said in her listless way, “he wouldn’t understand. I just hope I can do it … just right.”

“Which is how?” Deborah asked.

“Agreement … always. Just absolute … agreement.”

It was Sunday and the craft shop was closed. There was a weekend desertedness about everything. Even in the safety of the hospital, Sundays were hard to take. Carla described how agonizing they had been when she was “outside” working, and Deborah herself remembered how treacherous the world made its Sundays. On regular days the Semblance could be pulled up like a screen over body and mind, but Sunday called itself Rest and Freedom, and threw one off guard. Sunday promised leisure, peace, holiness, and love. It was a restatement of the wish for human perfection. But it was on Sunday that the Semblance never fully covered, and Sunday afternoon was a frantic struggle to hide the other worlds before Monday arrived with its demand that the lies be repeated and the surface be perfect.

Deborah and Carla ambled idly in the half-warm mists of the early spring, looking at the cracks that winter had left in the walkway and playing their dreamers’ game, which they had made up to pass the time. In it they would shatter the world a dozen times and rebuild it, half as a punishment, half in a secret, fragile hope.

“In my university, we won’t allow any special groups or cliques.”

“In my factory, the bosses will work on the most routine jobs just so they can see how murderous they are.”

But it was hospitals that they knew best and they built and staffed hospitals endlessly, equipping and administering them as the main part of the game. As they talked, they found themselves walking far beyond the doctors’ buildings and student nurses’ residence.

“I could do away with all the bars on the windows,” Carla said.

Deborah wasn’t sure. “The patients would have to be strong enough to stand it, first,” she said. “Sometimes you have to fight what won’t yield and put yourself where it’s safe to be crazy.”

“Let’s make our doctors-on-call really on call.”

“All my attendants will spend a week as patients.”

They found themselves in the meadow far beyond the last hospital building.

“Look where we are.”

“I’m not allowed out here,” Deborah said.

“Neither am I.”

They felt good. The afternoon was settling into evening and a light rain was beginning to fall, but neither of them could bear to part with this small and special mutiny against Sunday, supervision, and the world. They sat in the field, stupid with pleasure and let the Sunday God’s rain fall on them. The day went to twilight. The rain got cold. They stood up in their sopping clothes and began wistfully to walk back toward the hospital.

As they neared the last building, they were seen by Henson and little Cleary, who had come out of Annex 3 and were going toward the main building.

“Hey, you girls—do you have night privileges?”

“No,” Carla said. “We were just going in now.”

“All right then.” The two attendants waited for them, flanking them when they came. It was not the way to go back; they could not go back that way, not after the freedom,
the laughing, and the good rain. They looked at each other. Their eyes said, “No.” When they came close to the door, the attendants closed in automatically; and so, defeated, they went in. On the other side of the door the moment came. Carla and Deborah saw it together, and, as if they had been trained for it all their lives, they took it together. Henson and Cleary had relaxed unconsciously. Beyond the door was a set of swinging doors, and when they had all passed through them, Carla and Deborah simply turned on the same footfall, back through the doors, which swung back on the surprised attendants, and out the front door without a break in stride. As they ran, they heard the buzzer that signaled to the hospital a patient’s escape.

They ran, laughing until they were breathless, for a long, long time, down the dark back roads. The rain beat hard on them and there was a fast rack riding the sky. Anterrabae was singing gloriously out of Yr, songs of the beauties of the world which he had not given for many, many years. Deborah and Carla ran on until the breath sobbed out of them and their sides ached, and then slowed down, shivering with cold and freedom. From a distance a light came on. It was a car.

“They sent searchers out!” Carla said breathlessly, and they dived together into a side ditch until the car passed. After the light had disappeared in the rain, the fugitives came out of the ditch and walked on, laughing because they were quick and able. After a while they saw another car.

“More searchers?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, nut. It’s still a public road.”

“Might as well play it safe, though …” and they dived again for the ditch.

Huddled cold and alert in their hiding, Deborah wondered for the first time what they intended to do. They had no dry clothes and no money. They had no plan and no desire to do any more than they were doing. She tried to remember what Furii had taught her about doing what
she really wanted, and sat back against the embankment wondering what it was. Beside her, Carla was shaking a stone from her shoe. When the car passed they clambered up, looking like twins for the mud, and went on walking.

“We have to turn back sometime,” Deborah said aloud.

“Sure,” Carla answered. “I see my doctor tomorrow. I just had to be alone, that’s all, not led or taken.”

Deborah smiled in the darkness. “Of course. That’s what I wanted.”

It was a long walk back. They sang through some of it and laughed at the way they slid in their sopping shoes. They were not
“caught” until they were through the front gate and inside the front door of the B-C-D ward building. In retaliation, it seemed, for having gone and come with such sweet ease, they were phalanxed and separated. Two attendants guarded Deborah while she took a bath. They were Second Night Staff, which meant that it must be after midnight.

“You’ll be in for it now,” one of them said self-righteously.

“Do I have to go … up?”

“You behave here and take your sedative and go to bed and you’ll be here tonight,” the attendant said.
“You girls will have to be in seclusion.”

After the bath Deborah and her guard passed Carla and her guard on the way to the end of the hall, where a small group of rooms were kept for seclusion. Their glances, still free, caught over the heads of the nurses and they winked at each other. Later, when Deborah began drifting toward sleep, she thought: It may be a hell of a price. But she remembered the smell of the rain.

A new doctor, a Dr. Ogden, was administrator for B ward. Deborah did not know him yet and couldn’t tell what he was like. She hadn’t seen Carla since they had exchanged the wink of complicity. All she could do was to try to remember all the grapevine talk about escapes in the past, and think of something that would make their
reasons sound good enough. At 11:00 that morning, she was sent down to the administration offices under guard. The attendant knocked at Dr. Ogden’s door.

“Come in.” Deborah went in and there, sitting at the desk, was Dr. Halle. The surprise and delight she felt must have been spread all over her face, since he smiled slightly and said, “Dr. Ogden is down with the flu, so I am taking over the B-ward work for a while. Being here for B-ward duties keeps things straight.” Then he leaned back, rubbing his thumbs together. “What’s it all about?”

She told him where they had been. He stopped her twice for details and when she was finished asked, “Whose idea was this in the first place?”

She groped for an explanation. There was an Yri word that described how they had felt and its presence in her mind made it difficult to concentrate on speaking English. She decided at least to translate the single word and hope that he could understand. After her false start he looked at her and said, “Just tell me.”

“Okay …” She hesitated because of the awful need to sound sane. “Well … if you’re clumsy and bungling the way I am, you venerate people who aren’t. Where … I … Where I came from we called such people
atumai.
For such people that extra step is not there to trip them, and the string that they tie packages with is never two inches too short. The traffic lights are always with them. Pain comes when they are lying down and ready for it and the joke when it is fitting to them to laugh. Yesterday, I got to have that
atumai,
just for a while. Carla had it, too. We both had it together. You don’t decide to sneeze, you just do it. No one had the idea or was the leader; we just did it and were.” She thought of the way they had swung back together through that second door and the smile came back and broke away from her.

“Was it fun?” he asked.

“It sure was!”

“All right,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Carla for a while and I want you to wait outside.”

She left the office and saw Carla, right outside, waiting her turn likewise guarded and looking very frightened. Her eyes questioned. Deborah shrugged the imperceptible shrug of the experienced patient, prisoner, spy, or nun. Carla’s eyes took the gesture like a blow. She went in. After what seemed a long while, she stuck her head out and motioned to Deborah.
“Come in—he wants to see us together.”

This time it was the guards who exchanged glances.

Deborah went in, scenting the air. Dr. Halle looked very grim, but Deborah breathed out with relief when she saw that he was fighting a smile.

“You broke hospital rules—eight of them, I believe,” he said. “Very reprehensible. Your descriptions of your actions tally with each other’s. It was fun, wasn’t it? It was shared fun. That’s rare here. I’m kind of proud of you….” He rearranged his look toward discipline. “I see no reason to change the status of your privileges. That’s all.”

They left, closing the door behind them. Dr. Halle swiveled around in his chair to look out the window. Outside, the trees were in small leaf, the springtime filling out along the branches. The hedge was raining green. He thought of the two girls in the stormy night, walking and singing and of a trip he had once taken, running away. “Kids!” he exclaimed. In his voice there was impatience, admiration, and a little kernel of envy.

“Where’s Carmen?” Carla asked Deborah. “I want to tell her that it’s all okay. She saw us go in the afternoon and she must have heard what happened.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

They asked the nurse.

“Carmen’s gone home. She left last night.”

“But didn’t her father come just to visit?”

“Yes,” the nurse said, “but I guess he changed his plans. All I know is that she left with him about seven last night.” The nurse’s tone told them to ask no more, so they questioned each other. “What could it have been?”

“Terry, did you see Carmen yesterday?”

“Yeah—I saw her.”

“What happened?”

“She disagreed.”

Deborah and Carla looked at each other, shivering, with the world’s perversity and Dr. Halle’s praise circling each other in their ears.

“My parents—” Deborah said. She knew that they had seen more of her hatred than her love, but they had let her stay. They had let her stay without a sign of improvement for a long, long time. They had never demanded of her a recovery to heal their prestige. She looked down and found her hands working in Yri again, passionately, framing words to speak to her own mind. Carla, sealed in her own cell and shut off at the eyes from all else, filled in her special words.

“It was freedom they gave me after all. Carmen’s didn’t give her a chance, but mine …”

It came to Deborah that it was her parents who had bought this fight for her. They could have cut her off from it the minute that she failed to make their progress. They had kept faith with a future which might never sing their praises.

“Carla … if I weren’t scared to death of it, I would be so grateful!”