I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (6 page)

“Your mother told me what she gave, not what you took; what she saw, not what you saw. She told me what she knew of that tumor of yours.”

“She doesn’t know much about it,” Deborah said.

“Then tell me what you know.”

She had been five, old enough to be ashamed when the doctors shook their heads about the wrongness inside her, in the feminine, secret part. They had gone in with their probes and needles as if the entire reality of her body were concentrated in the secret evil inside that forbidden place. On the evening that her father made the plans for her to appear at the hospital the next day, she had felt the hard anger of the willful when they are dealt with and moved about like objects. That night she had had a dream—a nightmare—about being broken into like a looted room, torn apart, scrubbed clean with scouring powder, and reassembled, dead but now acceptable. After
it had come another about a broken flowerpot whose blossom seemed to be her own ruined strength. After the dreams she had lapsed into a mute, stunned silence. But the nightmares had not taken into account the awful pain.

“Now just be quiet. This won’t hurt a bit,” they had said, and then had come the searing stroke of the instrument. “See, we are going to put your doll to sleep,” and the mask had moved down, forcing the sick-sweet chemical of sleep.

“What is this place?” she had asked.

“Dreamland,” had come the answer, and then the hardest, longest burning of that secret place she could imagine.

She had asked one of them once, an intern who had seemed to be discomfited at her suffering, “Why do you all tell such terrible lies?” He had said, “Oh, so you will not be frightened.” On another afternoon, tied to that table yet again, they had said, “We are going to fix you fine now.” In the language of the game-playing liars she had understood that they were going to murder her. Again the transparent lie about the doll.

What terrible scorn they had had to give that lie so often! Was it to have been worse than murder? What could they have had in their demented minds, those killers with their false “fine”? And afterward, through the brutal ache: “How is your doll?”

As she told it, she looked at Dr. Fried, wondering if the dead past could ever wake anything but boredom in the uncaring world, but the doctor’s face was heavy with anger and her voice full of indignation for the five-year-old who stood before them both. “Those damn fools! When will they learn not to lie to children! Pah!” And she began to jab out her cigarette with hard impatience.

“Then you’re not going to be indifferent …” Deborah said, walking very gingerly on the new ground.

“You’re damn right I’m not!” the doctor answered.

“Then I will tell you what no one knows,” Deborah
said. “They never said they were sorry, not one of them. Not for going in so callously, not that they made me take all that pain and be ashamed of feeling it, not that they lied so long and so stupidly that their lies were like a laughing at me. They never asked my pardon for these things and I never gave it to them.”

“How so?”

“I never lost that tumor. It’s still there, still eating on the inside of me. Only it is invisible.”

“That punishes you, not them.”

“
Upuru
punishes us both.”

“
Upu
—what?”

Yr had opened suddenly, in horror that one of its guarded secrets had slipped into the earthworld, the sunny office with the booby-trap furniture. The language of Yr was a deep secret, kept always more rigidly away from people as it crept toward greater control of the inner voice.
Upuru
was Yr’s word for the whole memory and emotion of that last hospital day—that day after which all things had seemed to gray to dimness.

“What did you say?” the doctor was asking, but Deborah had fled, terrified, into Yr, so that it closed over her head like water and left no mark of where she had entered. The surface was smooth and she was gone.

Looking at her, drawn away from words or reasons or comforts, Dr. Fried thought: The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power! Somehow they cannot believe that they are only people, holding only a humansized anger!

A few days later, Deborah returned to the Midworld looking out on Earth. She was sitting with Carla and some others on the corridor of the ward.

“Do you have town privileges?” Carla asked her.

“No, but they let me go out when my mother was here.”

“Was it a good visit?”

“I guess so. She couldn’t help trying to get me to figure
out what made me sick. We were no sooner sitting down when it came out in a big rush. I knew she had to ask it, but I couldn’t tell her—even if I knew.”

“Sometimes I hate the people who made me sick,” Carla said. “They say that you stop hating them after you’ve had enough therapy, but I wouldn’t know about that. Besides, my enemy is beyond hating or forgiving.”

“Who is it?” Deborah asked, wondering if it could only have been one.

“My mother,” Carla answered matter-of-factly. “She shot me and my brother and herself. They died; I lived. My father married again, and I went crazy.”

They were hard words, and stark, with no euphemisms such as one always heard outside. Starkness and crudity were two important privileges of the hospital, and everyone used them to the fullest. To those who had never dared to think of themselves, except in secret, as eccentric and strange, freedom was freedom to be crazy, bats, nuts, loony, and, more seriously, mad, insane, demented, out of one’s mind. And there was a hierarchy of privilege to enjoy these freedoms. The screaming, staring ones on Ward D were called “sick” by others and “crazy” by themselves. Only they were allowed to refer to themselves by the ultimate words, like “insane” and “mad,” without contradiction. The quieter wards, A and B, were lower on the upside-down scale of things and were permitted only lighter forms: nuts, cuckoo, and cracked. It was the patients’ own unspoken rule, and one learned without benefit of being told. B-ward patients who called themselves crazy were putting on airs. Knowing this, Deborah now understood the scorn of the rigid, dull-eyed Kathryn when a nurse had said, “Come on now, you are getting upset,” and the woman had laughed. “I’m not upset; I’m cuckoo!”

Deborah had been two months in the hospital. Other patients had come and some had gone up to “D” among the “insane,” and some to other hospitals.

“We’re getting to be veterans,” Carla said, “old hands
at the funny farm.” And perhaps it was true. Except for “D,” Deborah was no longer frightened of the place. She did what she was told and apart from that wielder of horrors, Dr. Fried, in her innocent-looking white house, there was no mark of excessive caution put on anything by the Censor.

“How long is the time until we know if we’re going to make it or not?” Deborah asked.

“You kids are just in the honeymoon phase,” said a girl sitting near them. “That takes about three months. I know, too. I’ve been in six hospitals. I’ve been analyzed, paralyzed, shocked, jolted, revolted, given metrazol, amatyl, and whatever else they make. All I need now is a brain operation and I’ll have had the whole works. Nothing does any good, not this crap or anything else.” She got up in the very doomed, dramatic way she had and left them, and Lactamaeon, second in command of Yr, whispered,
If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy. And therefore, Unbeautiful….

Kill me, my lord, in the form of an eagle,
Deborah said to him in the language of Yr. “How long has she been here?” she asked Carla in the language of Earth.

“More than a year, I think,” Carla said.

“Is this … forever?”

“I don’t know,” Carla answered.

The winter hung around them. It was December, and outside the windows the tree limbs were black and stark. A group in the dayroom was decorating a tree for Christmas. Five staff and two patients—God, they tried so hard to make the madhouse look like home. It was all lies; their laughter hung very false among the ornaments (no sharp edges and no glass), and Deborah thought that at least they had the decency to be embarrassed. At the doctor’s house the dragging forth of her history, and the retreats, camouflaging, and hiding, went on. Except for her contact with Carla and Marion on the ward, she was drawing away from the world even the undervoice that
answered questions and stood in place of herself when she wished to be in Yr. “I can’t describe the feeling,” she said, thinking of the Yri metaphors which she had used to tell herself and the Yri ones what she wished. In recent years thoughts often came, and happenings also, for which there seemed no sharer on the hard earth, and so the plains, pits, and peaks of Yr began to echo a growing vocabulary to frame its strange agonies and grandeurs.

“There must be some words,” the doctor said. “Try to find them, and let us share them together.”

“It’s a metaphor—you wouldn’t understand it.”

“Perhaps you could explain it then.”

“There is a word—it means Locked Eyes, but it implies more.”

“What more?”

“It’s the word for sarcophagus.” It meant that at certain times her vision reached only as far as the cover of her sarcophagus, that to herself, as to the dead, the world was the size of her own coffin.

“With the Locked Eyes—can you see me?”

“Like a picture only, a picture of something that is real.”

The exchange was making her terribly frightened. Because of it the walls began to thrum a little, vibrating like a great, blood-pumping heart. Anterrabae was reciting an incantation in Yri, but she couldn’t understand his words.

“I hope you are happy with your prying,” she said to the fading doctor in her chair.

“I am not trying to frighten you,” the doctor said, not seeing the walls writhe, “but there is still much to do. I wanted to ask you, since we had spoken about the tumor operations, how the world went gray suddenly after that, what the rest was like, the rest of those early years.”

It was difficult speaking to a half-present shape in the grayness outside of Yr, but there was an aching sense of loss and misery about the past and if this doctor could give a form to it, the memory might be easier to endure. Deborah began to pick through the happenings, and wherever
she looked there was failure and confusion. Even at the hospital where the tumor had been so successfully removed those years ago, she had somehow not been equal to the game they were playing. Its rules had been lies and tricks and she had seen through them but had not known how to respond to the play—to fall in with it and believe. The convalescence had also been hypocritical, since the illness itself had not passed.

When her sister, Suzy, had been born, Deborah’s senses had told her that the intruder was a red-faced puckered bundle of squall and stink, but the relatives had all come crowding into the nursery, crowding her out in their wonderment at the beauty and delicacy of the newborn child. They had been shocked and angered at the truth she felt so naturally: that she thought the thing ugly, did not love it, and could not conceive of it as ever being beautiful or a companion.

“But she is your sister,” they had said.

“That was not my doing. I wasn’t even in on the consultation.”

With that remark the family’s discomfort about her had begun. A clever and precocious comment for a five-year-old, they had said, but cold, almost cruel. An honesty, they had said, but one which rose from anger and selfishness and not from love. As the years went by the aunts and uncles had stood off from Deborah, proud but not loving; and Suzy had come behind with a careless, bright sweetness, all woman-child, and had been loved without reservation.

Like a dybbuk or the voice of a possession, the curse proclaimed itself from Deborah’s body and her mouth. It never left her. Because of the operation she was late starting school and stood apart from the first friendships and groups that the little schoolmates had formed in her absence. A kind and sorrowing mother, recognizing the fatal taint, took hold and played hostess to the girls of the most popular group. Deborah had been too heartsick to dissuade her. Perhaps through a lovely mother, taint or
no, Deborah would be tolerated. And it was somewhat so. But in the neighborhood the codes of long-established wealth still prevailed and the little-girl “dirty Jew,” who already accepted that she was dirty, made a good target for the bullies of the block. One of them lived next door. When he met her, he would curse her with the deep-rooted, hierarchical curse he loved: “Jew, Jew, dirty Jew; my grandmother hated your grandmother, my mother hates your mother
and I hate you!”
Three generations. It had a ring to it; even she could feel that. And in the summer there was camp.

They said it was nonsectarian, and it might have been so for the niceties which differentiated various sorts of middle-class Protestants, but she was the only Jew. They scrawled the hate-words on walls and in the privy (that place where the evil girl with the tumor had screamed once at the release of burning urine).

The instincts of these hating children were shared, for Deborah heard sometimes that a man named Hitler was in Germany and was killing Jews with the same kind of evil joy. One spring day before she left for camp she had seen her father put his head on the kitchen table and cry terrible, wrenching men’s tears about the “checks-andthe-poles.” In the camp a riding instructor mentioned acidly that Hitler was doing one good thing at least, and that was getting rid of the “garbage people.” She wondered idly if they all had tumors.

Deborah’s world revolved around an inborn curse and a special, bittersweet belief in God and the Czechs and the Poles; it was full of mysteries and lies and changes. The understanding of the mysteries was tears; the reality behind the lies was death; and the changes were a secret combat in which the Jews, or Deborah, always lost.

It was at the camp that Yr had first come to her, but she did not tell the doctor of it, or of the gods or the Collect with their great realms. From her absorption in the telling of events she looked out again and saw the doctor’s expressive face indignant for her. She wanted to thank this
Earth person who was capable of being moved to anger. “I did not know that they endowed Earth-ones with insides,” she said musingly, and then she was very tired.