I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Read Online Free Page A

the glimmer of relief when the fact of the sickness was made plain, and most of all in the “suicide attempt,” the cry of a mute for help, and the statement, bold and dramatic as adolescents and the still-fighting sick must always make it, that the game was over and the disguising ended. The fact of this mental illness was in the open now, but the disease itself had roots still as deeply hidden as the white core of a volcano whose slopes are camouflaged in wooded green. Somewhere, even under the volcano itself, was the buried seed of will and strength. Dr. Fried sighed and went back to her work.
    “This time … this time can I only call it forth!” she sighed, lapsing into the grammar of her native tongue.

chapter four
    Suzy Blau took the story of the convalescent school quite well, and when Esther told her own parents she tried to shade the hospital into a rest home. But they were undeceived and furious.
    “There’s nothing the matter with her brains! That girl has a good wit,” Pop said. (It was his highest compliment.) “It’s just that the brains in this family skipped a generation and fell on her. She is me, my own flesh. The hell with all of you!” He walked out of the room.
    In the following days Esther pleaded for their support in her decision, but only when Claude, her elder brother, and Natalie, her sister—the favorites of the family—admitted to Mom and Pop that there could be a need, did the old man relent a little, for Deborah was his favorite grandchild.
    At home Jacob was silent but not at peace with what he and Esther had done. They went to see Dr. Lister twice, and Jacob listened, trying to be comforted by the belief that they had done the right thing. Confronted with direct questions, he had to agree, and all the facts were trying to make him say “yes,” but he had only to submit to his feelings for the smallest moment and hiswhole world rang with misgivings. When he and Esther quarreled, the crucial thing remained unspoken, leaving an atmosphere of wordless rancor and accusation.
    At the end of the first month a letter arrived from the hospital relating Deborah’s activities in very general terms. She had made “a good adjustment” to the routine and staff, had begun therapy, and was able to walk about the grounds. From this noncommittal letter Esther extracted every particle of hope, going over and over the words, magnifying each positive sign, turning the remarks this way and that for the facets of brightest reflection.
    She also struggled to sway the feelings of Jacob and Pop, practicing her arguments with her image in the mirror. Pop knew in himself somewhere, she believed, that the decision was not wrong, that his anger at Deborah’s hospitalization was only an expression of his injured pride. Esther saw that her dominating, quick, restless, and brilliant immigrant father now showed certain signs of mellowing; only his language was as brusque as ever. Sometimes it even seemed to her that with Deborah’s illness coming to a head, the whole thrust and purpose of their lives was forced under scrutiny. One night she asked Jacob abruptly, “How did we share in the thing? What awful wrongs did we do?”
    “Do I know?” he answered. “If I knew would I have done them? It seemed like a good life—a very good life she had. Now they say it wasn’t. We gave love and we gave comfort. She was never threatened with cold or hunger …”
    And Esther remembered then that Jacob, too, had an immigrant past; had been cold, wet, hungry, and foreign. How he must have sworn to keep those wolves from his children! Her hand went up to his arm, protectively, but at the gesture he turned a bit.
    “Is there more, Esther? Is there more?”
    She could not answer, but the next day she wrote a letter to the hospital asking when they might visit and seethe doctor. Jacob was glad for the letter and waited, going over the mail every day for the answer, but Pop only snorted,
“What are they going to