by Andrew Potok
“It was surprising,” Charlotte said. “A quaint little shop full of careless hippie stuff. I know that English pottery is better than that.”
I said nothing.
“You should have come,” she continued. “Gorgeous narrow streets. And those tiles aren’t bad, are they?”
“How should I know?” I said, my voice cracking.
“Oh, come on,” she said, peeking her head in, “You’re good at that, you still have a feel for form. . . .”
“Shit!” I yelled at her disappearing face, “Shit, shit, shit! ‘Feeling for form,’ ” I mimicked. “What a terrific blind man. He feels form, hears trees grow, thinks lofty thoughts. . . .”
“Some mood,” Charlotte said, coming out with two cups of coffee. She touched my hand, then saw Helga’s books on the table. “Good God! What are these? I don’t believe it!” she said examining them both. “The Helga Barnes Press, with an HB logo no less.” She opened Storming the Distant Tower at random. “Jesus, listen to this.”
Fifty-four hazardous river crossings, hair-raising captures, escapades galore, and the backing of my staunch and wonderful band of helpers, to whom I shall ever be grateful, had finally triumphed. Thanks to their unfailing, alert and skillful watchfulness, their tender care and honesty, not a single treasure was lost, stolen or damaged, and I wriggled from the clutches of swooping bureaucracy by their “sang froid” or my own infernal cheek. They and good luck were with me to the end . . .
The book was a picaresque account of Helga’s efforts to smuggle furniture, art objects, and other family treasures out of postwar Austria and Hungary. Her massive belongings were safely collected in Czechoslovakia and sold with the intention of financing a medicated-bee-venom clinic in England. A picture of a quick, clever, and resourceful woman emerges from Storming the Distant Tower, a woman who delighted in trickery, stealth, and masquerade, single-mindedly driven, no matter what the odds, by her final purpose.
The second book, Disgrace in the Clinic, contains twenty-six anecdotes of Helga’s encounters with doctors, mostly rheumatologists, who appear incognito in search of treatment for themselves or their arthritic families, trying to steal her secrets, and generally go about their devious, dishonest ways, confounding and robbing humanity.
His stony heart was not aching for the suffering sick but that bottomless pit, his pocket, was gaping wide for all the cash he could grasp from them. . . .
Helga was everywhere, turning up rot and treachery wherever medicine was practiced, wherever arthritis raged. Doctors and patients alike sucked up her funds and slowly, surely tarnished her generous heart.
I couldn’t bear to listen to more, and I asked Charlotte to stop. We, her patients, would all be twisted into some tale, as an example and a warning. And if the treatment left us as diseased as when we first appeared on her doorstep, the failure would be blamed on some flaw or weakness in us.
Charlotte continued reading to herself and after a few minutes of silence, I begged for more.
Once upon a winter’s day, I gazed out at the summer’s faded remnants on the rock garden before the window of my consulting room, and beheld two old women, nearing eighty, fumbling at the gate. One was a peroxide blonde, the other raven dyed, and, both attired in ragged coats, hiding tattered costumes and torn jumpers . . . The tale they told was lamentable. Having heard of my cure with medicated bee venom, they had spent their last few shillings to crawl to me and they implored my pity plus my treatment to relieve them of their suffering.
Helga paid the women’s taxi, visited them daily, brought them food. They lived in a friend’s sumptuous house. One day, Helga arrived without warning and saw them as they really were: wealthy women, splendidly dressed, “awaiting their stock broker.”
“Though I’m rarely at a loss for words to deal with any situation,” Helga wrote, “on this occasion I was rendered limp and dumb.”
“The Rake,” the story Helga had mentioned earlier that day when she had first asked me if I remembered it from the books, turned out to be “an eighty-year-old Adonis,” who lied to her about his improvement. Tipped off by the friendly nurses in a private nursing home, Helga discovered him in bed, mocking an arthritic relapse. He had, of course, been playing around with the nurses.
“Mrs. Barnes, I haven’t been able to move out of bed for three days! I’m so bad there’s no hope for me!” . . . I strode boldly over to the bedside, and gripping the bedclothes beneath the writhing man’s chin, I tore them down in one go. There the agonized wretch lay fully dressed with his boots on. . . . He writhed and shivered, while I nearly had a rigor too. . . . “You double-crossing old rat,” I shouted. . . .
Charlotte read on, and when her voice gave out, she continued reading to herself. I went into the bedroom to lie down. I wondered if this was a genre, the healer’s complaints, published by vanity presses the world over since the beginnings of medicine and quackery. I could picture Helga dictating these tales to some patient enlisted gratis as secretary, sitting through endless evenings, collecting these weird bits of Victoriana, these penny dreadfuls, these turgid battles of good and evil. They were cautionary tales, sets of rules for proper patient behavior. The books were as devastating a blow to me as the ophthalmoscope and the disappearance of my improvement.
“Charlotte,” I yelled into the living room, “tell me it’s okay. It doesn’t matter, right?”
I heard the book hit the floor. “It’s horrible, disgusting stuff,” she said.
I went to sit beside her. “I want to continue in spite of the books,” I said. “I mean . . . the books have nothing to do with the cure. I should go on, don’t you think?”
“Go on if you want to,” she said. “Do what you like. But I think you’re mad.”
“Well, okay, I’m mad,” I said. “Nobody knows that better than you do. But say a few nice words of support. You know, humor me. Like in ancient tales of husbands and wives. Come on. A little lie. Tell me I’m wonderful. . . .”
“I tell you you’re wonderful when you’re wonderful,” Charlotte said without humor.
“Oh, come on,” I begged. “Because the next thing I’m going to ask you to say, just say, is that I must stay in London, that I’d be a fool to leave now. . . .”
Charlotte was not amused. “I love you,” she said sternly, touching my shoulder and rubbing it back and forth absentmindedly. It was, I knew, married love, the “preceptual” love from Judaic decree. “I understand your coming here and even admired your energy. But now I think you should leave. . . .”
“Charlotte, just say it,” I teased. “God won’t strike you dead. Say: ‘Andy, you should stay.’ That’s all. You could leave a note saying you didn’t mean it.”
“It’s not funny,” Charlotte said.
“I suppose not. If we have to be serious, I’ll pull my hair or cry.”
“Don’t pull me into your craziness,” Charlotte said. “Admit you’re wrong and come home.”
Suddenly I thought of my father again. I thought of him sitting and groaning in his chair, and as my mother walked in from work, seeing him like that, she would ask: “What’s the matter, Leon?” He would say nothing, as if too weak to answer, too pained, too slighted and ignored. “Call the doctor,” my mother would advise. And he would disappear into the bathroom, shuffling past her in his slippers, to peer into his bloodshot eyes and pour out another headache powder.
My uncle Max, on the other hand, didn’t even have to complain. My mother helped furnish his apartments, find him women, make him rich. All of it quietly, secretly, with total devotion. When he shouted at her as if she were at fault for some setback with women or partners or customers, she stayed up nights, planning and scheming to make things better. She connived, persuaded, and sacrificed for him.
But he was glamorous. He played cards for high stakes, and often all night; he drove fancy cars and entertained beautiful women at El Morocco. He was a dashing, elegant figure at Maximilian Furs. He was bigger than life.
My two
father figures were outrageous extremes. But, I thought, I would have to stop bitching and act like Max if I wanted to be treated like Max.
“What about Sarah?” Charlotte asked. “Surely you’re no longer thinking of bringing her here.”
“Why not? Of course I am.”
“Andy,” Charlotte said, “there’s a limit. Don’t interrupt her now. . . .”
“I’ll wait till the school year is over.”
“Andy,” Charlotte threatened.
“How can I not?” I asked. “How can I feel even a day’s worth of improvement and not send for Sarah? If there’s anything at all to the bees . . .”
“There isn’t,” Charlotte said.
“If there’s anything at all to the bees,” I repeated angrily, “it’ll work even better and faster on Sarah. She’s just starting.”
I had witnessed Sarah stumbling around at night ever since she was a little girl. I didn’t see her really, but I heard her, and I couldn’t bear this perfect little girl hatching her way into a spoiled life like mine. I would turn away. So would Joan, who thought Sarah was faking. “She just wants to be like her daddy,” Joan would say.
“But I can’t see,” Sarah would whine.
“We’re leaving,” Joan would say from the car. She had to do all the night driving. “Hurry up there, pumpkin.” And I would hear Sarah’s little body bump into the back of the car, her hand trailing the fender to find the handle of the back door.
When Sarah was sixteen, two years before London, Dr. Berson said there was no question about it anymore. Sarah had RP. He then told her, somewhat prematurely, that she should no longer drive, breaking her heart in the process.
“I’m not even going to wait for the end of the school year,” I told Charlotte now. “I’m going to send for her right away.”
Charlotte flipped through one of her Margaret Drabble paperbacks and started to read. I turned on the BBC louder than I needed to. They were playing a Smetana string quartet I hated. It was soupy and autobiographical.
“Oh, Jesus,” Charlotte muttered and took her book into the bedroom.
“Hey,” I yelled, struggling to keep us talking, “let’s try the Indian restaurant Edith told us about.”
We avoided touching each other as we got ready to go. We walked twenty minutes in silence to the Taj Mahal.
The restaurant was very dark. The odors were exotic, spread about by a large fan hanging from the ceiling. Except for the loud scraping of chairs from a far corner, there seemed to be no one there.
“All the waiters are getting up and putting on their jackets,” Charlotte said as I dragged behind her between tables and chairs.
A large waiter panted as he led us to a table. Then he stood, occupying, I sensed, a great deal of space. We ordered drinks, and he moved away in the dark like the Queen Elizabeth slipping from her berth in the middle of the night. I myself felt like some prehistoric reptile on whose primitive retina a hint of movement had just barely registered. My eyes felt heavy. It was hard to keep them open.
The waiter came back with our drinks. I felt the breeze of a menu being handed to Charlotte, and I shot my hand out to intercept mine. I knocked over my Scotch. “Another Scotch, sir?” he asked. His tone seemed disdainful.
The menu was extensive, and as Charlotte read it aloud, each item forced the preceding one from my mind, as if I had room for just one at a time. I felt terribly old.
Lights pointing upward from behind some potted palms caught the edges of the four-bladed fan rotating languorously in the center of the room. Like a moth I was drawn to the moving cross of light. As Charlotte read, I stared at the fan.
“Come on, honey, let’s order,” she said.
She seemed delicate now, sharp and decisive, like a cat among mastodons.
“Let’s try some stuffed somosas and an order of onion bhajees, whatever they are,” she suggested.
They came together with other little saucers filled with delicacies. My fork, with all the odds clearly in its favor for spearing something delectable, entered my mouth over and over again with a slice of a lemon or a hunk of burning ginger or a goddamn decorative herb. Charlotte began removing the inedible debris from my plates and offered me forkfuls of tasty morsels across the table. “Mmmm. Taste this,” she said pleasantly, dousing me now with cool yogurt and cucumber, now with a pungent mango chutney.
A buzzing, cheery English party came in and took a large table not far from us. They knew just what they wanted, making the waiters scurry from all the corners of the room. They brought drinks, then breads, stuffed and spiced and buttered.
“It takes sight to be in control,” I said bitterly.
Charlotte said nothing.
“My mother brought me up to take charge in restaurants,” I said, “to snatch the bill from Madame Harper’s Bazaar, to signal the waiter with a manly nod, to direct, to host. Well, look at me now.” I had no idea if she were looking or not. “You can do anything,” I said, “whatever you want. . . .”
“Bullshit,” she finally said. “My limitations are as real to me as blindness is to you. I’m getting old, not as desirable or promising as I once was. I’m afraid of dying. . . .”
My mouth burned, my bowels steamed; I felt immensely sad. “Maybe I should go back with you. Maybe I should stop being ashamed of the way I am, but I don’t know how to do it. I hate myself the way I am.”
Charlotte touched my hand, then stroked my fingers lying somewhere among the saucers.
“I’ll try to help more,” she said. “I know I haven’t been all that great.”
“I’m such a pushover. Everyone is a threat to me. I’m losing my grip. . . .”
“I’ll help more. I promise I will.”
“What can you do? I’ve got to help myself, and the only way I know how right now is with Helga. I don’t want to stay. I’m scared, but I’ve got to stay.”
Charlotte’s fingers stopped caressing mine. “I can’t help, I can’t even participate in any way if you’re here and I’m at home.”
“I know.”
“You should try to examine your reasons for staying though. More than you have,” Charlotte the teacher advised. “We don’t know a single person who would have survived those books. You know,” she added, “you always did have a soft spot for magical cures. Like the encounter sessions . . .”
“But just that. Nothing else,” I protested.
“Oh, but you were tempted by everything that promised to make life better.”
“I resisted them all,” I said.
“All that self-actualization crap,” Charlotte said with great disdain, as if she were addressing an incorrigible, unrepentant offender, an addict. “Along came some cockamamie new shrink, some drooling guru, and you listened. You daydreamed about having your life put in order. . . .”
“Who doesn’t?” I asked.
“I don’t,” she replied without hesitation. “You though, you’d like to think the answer lies in better breathing, deeper massage, grunting and wailing.”
I may have daydreamed of perfection brought about by lovely maidens rubbing me with fragrant oils on the cliffs of California, but in fact, my two noteworthy excursions looking for help were to St. Paul’s Rehabilitation Center and to a month-long colloquium of my graduate school in Florida.
When I arrived in Sarasota, I hadn’t been painting for over a year and I was desperate to find an occupation, anything to keep me from the madness of inactivity. Late the first night, as I lay in shorts on my bed, listening to a tape of Friedell’s Cultural History of the Modern Age, big Zeke, my roommate for the month, loped in through the door. His movements were clumsy and loud. He was a passionate bioenergeticist.
“It’s nice to leave Vermont in January for this weather,” I said.
“It’s a drag to leave California,” he answered.
We sat facing each other, and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his cupped hands, looking me over shamelessly.
“Stand up
,” he said and looked some more. “You have rotten posture,” Zeke informed me, breaking through formalities.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I’ve been told that I stand strangely, with my knees locked. . . .”
“It’s not strange,” Zeke said, “it’s sickening! We’ll work on it though.”
When I told Zeke about my eyes, he wasn’t surprised. “No wonder,” he snapped. “Just look at the way you block up here”—he poked my knees—“and here”—a chop to the neck. “It’s a wonder your juices are flowing at all. We’ll improve your eyes,” Zeke promised, “as well as every other goddamn thing.”
I thought Zeke himself was as loose and relaxed as a human being could possibly be. He had spent many weekends at Esalen, he had been stroked by thousands of busy, humanistic fingers. He was well-grounded in the here and now. Zeke’s belly hung comfortably over his belt, and his walk was as loose-jointed and unselfconscious as an ape’s. Every morning he sprang out of bed, darted into the bathroom, and stuffed his fingers down his throat to clear his system for the new day. Nauseating noises erupted from our room into the sunny stillness of a Florida morning.
During the month we spent together, Zeke poked at me, made me slouch and grunt, bellow and shriek, but nothing seemed to happen. And he wasn’t the only one there with a formula for self-improvement. I was urged by fellow students to walk with the armies of Krishna, to dive into the caverns of my unconscious, accompanied by music, exercise, or massage, to bow to the sun, to bury the old and rejoice in the new. At the end of the month I went home still not knowing what to do with my life, as uptight as ever, and slightly blinder than when I’d left.
Charlotte and I had worn out the Taj Mahal. No place seemed big enough to contain our dilemma. “Let’s get out of here,” I said; “let’s walk this off.”
It was a lovely, late Sunday afternoon. We walked for a long time, then found ourselves, happily, in Pond Square in Highgate. The asphalt island in the middle of the square was teeming with soccer games and weaving bicycles. Gay, chattering clusters of people sat on a low wall across a narrow street. Others congregated on the sidewalk in front of them, like a wedding party outside a church. There were brownstone houses on all sides. Everyone looked as though they belonged, as though they owned the place. We felt particularly foreign and conspicuous.