I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg

same man. On the day after a fight that had been more violent than usual, there was an inquiry. The battle had become a free-for-all; patients and staff were bruised and bleeding and the ward administrator had to ask everyone questions. Deborah had watched the fight from the floor, hoping that an attendant would trip over her foot, so that she might play a little parody of St. Augustine and say later, “Well, the foot was there, but I didn’t make him use it. Free will, after all—free will.”
    The ward administrator spoke to everyone about the fight. The patients were proud of their lack of involvement; even the mutest and most wild-eyed managed a fine disdain and they purposely thwarted all of the questions.
    “How did it start?” the doctor asked Deborah, alone and very important for her moment in the empty day-room.
    “Well … Hobbs came down the hall and then there was the fight. It was a good fight, too, not too loud and not too soft. Lucy Martenson’s fist intruded into Mr. Hobbs’s thought processes, and his foot found some of Lee Miller. I had a foot out, too, but nobody used it.”
    “Now, Deborah,” he said earnestly—and she could see the hope in his eyes, something to do with his own success as a doctor if he could get the answer when anothermight fail—“I want you to tell me … Why is it always Hobbs and why never McPherson or Kendon? Is Hobbs rough on the patients without our knowing about it?”
    Oh, that hope!—not for her but for her answer; not for the patients, but for a moment in his private dream when he would say matter-of-factly, “Oh, yes, I handled it.”
    Deborah knew why it was Hobbs and not McPherson, but she could no more say it than she could be sympathetic to that raw, ambitious hope she saw in the doctor’s face. Hobbs
was
a little brutal sometimes, but it was more than that. He was frightened of the craziness he saw around him because it was an extension of something inside himself. He wanted people to be crazier and more bizarre than they really were so that he could see the line which separated him, his inclinations and random thoughts, and his half-wishes, from the full-bloomed, exploded madness of the patients. McPherson, on the other hand, was a strong man, even a happy one. He wanted the patients to be like him, and the closer they got to being like him the better he felt. He kept calling to the similarity between them, never demanding, but subtly, secretly calling, and when a scrap of it came forth, he welcomed it. The patients had merely continued to give each man what he really wanted. There was no injustice done, and Deborah had realized earlier in the day that Hobbs’s broken wrist was only keeping him a while longer from winding up on some mental ward as a patient.
    She did not wish to say this, so she said, “There is no injustice being done.” It seemed to the doctor a cryptic statement—with a patient in bed, another with a broken rib, Hobbs’s wrist, another with a broken finger, and two nurses having black eyes and bruised faces. He rose to go. He had not helped her to say any more than she wished to say, and she saw that he was angry and disgusted with her for having helped to frustrate his daydream. Then the door opened quickly, and he turned. It was Helene, another patient, carrying her lunch tray into the day-room.Apparently they had given out lunch while Deborah was in with the doctor.
    For a moment Deborah thought that Helene simply wanted to eat in the dayroom, where it was sunny, but seeing her face—no, it was not for the sun. The doctor looked up sharply and said, “Go back to your place, Helene.” With a single, graceful step back and a pivot of the arm, smooth on its fluid bearings, Helene sent the tray crashing down on Deborah’s head. Deborah had seen the beautiful balletlike motion and she was yearning after the beauty of it when the world suddenly exploded in an avalanche of warm, wet food—stew, shreds of things, and the glancing