by Andrew Potok
I wondered how she behaved with friends. Or if she had a friend other than the glamorous stars she claimed as friends. “How I loved Rita Hayworth and the Aga Khan,” she’d say. “Charming people.” Or: “As Sir Arthur Fleming used to say to me, ‘Helga,’ he would say, ‘Helga, darling, don’t make the same mistake I did. They will try to pry your secret from you, but don’t ever give your wonderful secret away.’ ”
I tried to imagine her at her hairdresser’s, where she had a weekly setting that even I would notice, as her hair would be divided into a sea of curls, then plastered against her head, like a ram. I wondered if she lorded it over the young beauticians or if they giggled as she tried to look imperious under the huge hair drying helmet, mumbling stories to herself, her spectacles flashing.
“I fell going up the ramp to the jet,” she said. “I really hurt myself, damn it.” I hadn’t noticed anything wrong, but as she got out of her chair, I could see her limp. It seemed a reassuring sign. “This morning I put thirty bees right back here on my hip,” she said, “and you will see how quickly I will heal.”
That night I dreamed profusely. I stood in a dark sanctuary before a pair of awesome statues, aglow with fluorescent greens and reds. Two pairs of eyes were buried deep within the faces, black like coals. They had extraordinary power with retinitis pigmentosa. I knew that as soon as the vibration stopped, I would see again. I shot up out of bed to test my eyes and crashed into the open door in front of the light switch. In the bathroom mirror, I saw my face with a certain clarity.
I went back to bed and dreamed again. This time the dream was full of sound and fury. I stood on a small platform at the end of a boom, like the kind used by telephone linemen. I held the rails as the whole contraption began to jerk up and down, whiplashing me violently. It moved faster and faster, and I didn’t mind. Watching me from below, taking my measure within a rectangular frame, was a sculptor who, at the proper time, would transform me into a work of art.
The next day, as I walked to mail some letters home, a car nearly hit me crossing England’s Lane. It swerved, the brakes screeched, the rubber left black marks on the cement. The car stopped, and a voice yelled at me. “Watch where you’re going, you clumsy bloke!” I stood dazed and trembling. I wished it had hit me.
By the time Sarah and I got to Helga’s, there was hardly room for us in the house. Some dozen patients waited for Dr. Ryder to take blood. Helga was sweating and flushed with pride at all the people gathered at one time. Ryder did his job, taking 10 cc’s from one and all. He was most diplomatic, greeting me as if for the first time. Then Helga got on to each of us with our bees. I didn’t know the purpose of this one-time bloodletting ceremony. It felt like a cocktail party.
Outside, on a little square of grass between the rose-bushes, Dr. Ryder told me that it was all a sham.
“I’ve done this for her before,” he whispered. “I don’t know why she periodically insists on it, because she doesn’t even look at the results.”
“Have you any results yet from my blood cortisol?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I meant to tell you. We found nothing, no changes at all. It’s very curious.”
A few days later, Sarah was pronounced cured. It came as a shock, for aside from changes that seemed to come and go, Sarah thought that nothing much had happened.
“There, gorgeous,” Helga said, “it is all done, and you can be thankful. I can assure you that had you not come to me, you would be blind by your twenty-first birthday.”
In front of Helga, Sarah acted properly thrilled, but when we got outside, she didn’t know what to think.
“God, I’m happy to be out of her clutches, never to see that hag again. But, Papa, I don’t think I’m cured.”
“Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” I said stupidly.
“You know, sometimes I think there’ve been little changes, like my eyes getting less tired when I read, maybe also seeing better with my side vision. Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “The side vision was always okay. I think it was. But never another bee sting!”
We called Sta and Edith, who took Helga at her word. “If Mrs. Barnes says Sarah is cured, then she probably is,” Sta said.
We went to celebrate at the health-food restaurant Sta had become attached to, and the two of them watched Sarah’s every move, inside the place and outside in the dark street. “She sees everything, Andy, darling,” Edith said happily. “I’m sure there’s a difference.”
I called Ben at the Foundation. We made arrangements for Sarah’s tests at Eliot Berson’s ERG clinic. “Let’s hope,” we told each other rather weakly.
Sarah and I agreed that our six weeks together hadn’t been easy, but we felt that we had progressed on an upward-moving spiral. As good Hegelians would say, we were synthesizing our contradictions on ever higher planes.
“I’m going to miss you, Sarah,” I said, at Heathrow again.
“Me too,” Sarah answered. We were both too choked up to continue.
When I was miserably alone again, Helga’s patients began to cross the street to avoid greeting me. The day after Sarah’s departure, as I waited for the bus back to East Croydon, Mrs. Dorset ran out of the grocery store and, looking left and right, slipped a small piece of paper into my hand.
“This is my address and telephone number,” she whispered. “If you would like to talk about anything, call me. I can’t talk here for she might see us. She is furious with you and has warned us all not to keep company with you.” And then she was gone.
TWELVE
I HAD HAD OVER FIVE HUNDRED BEE STINGS, all in a small area on the back of my neck, an area some five inches square and usually not the object of so much attention. Over a period of two and a half months, this slice of epidermis with all its subcutaneous tissue, its sweat glands and sense organs, was a locus where each day the body mounted its defensive forces against the invasion of poison. I rubbed my neck wildly, as close to the stings as I could without touching the wounds themselves. The pain and itching never diminished. As a matter of fact, they seemed to get ever more intense.
I called Mrs. Dorset, who said that she didn’t know why Helga was so angry with me. “I’ve never seen her this furious, not with the Manchester ladies or my poor Toby.”
“How are your sons?” I asked.
“I think there’s some change, but it’s difficult to say for certain.”
I felt as annoyed with her as with myself for hanging on in spite of so little progress. I called Jorge Salomon, the Lima chappie, hoping that he, closer to Helga than any of us, would have a clue. I wanted to know why I had become the object of so much rage and what I could do about it.
“Could I see you?” I asked.
His hand cupped the receiver, and I heard the basso grumble of a private consultation. Then he spoke. “Why don’t you stop over tomorrow after your bees? I live a few blocks from Mrs. Barnes.”
I walked over the next day, taking a circuitous route from Helga’s, half expecting that she would follow me. Jorge Salomon and his wife had rented a house and car for the duration of his cure. His parents were financing everything, as Jorge himself was still a graduate student in business administration in a Florida university.
The blackness of his unruly curly hair made his eyes disappear, so that when he talked, I saw only the slight twitch of his moustache and an occasional flash of teeth.
“She used to like you, you know. She talked constantly of her ‘American chappie,’ what a gentleman he was, how charming and educated. For two months I heard about nothing but you. It changed quite suddenly. Now she rages about you because she thinks you’re no longer trustworthy, not about drugs or doctors or reporting improvements.”
“Do you really believe that? Don’t you think it might have something to do with, say, money? You know, I haven’t paid her a penny yet. . . .”
“Neither have I,” he said.
“Hasn’t she mentioned money?”
“She knows my family has it. We keep off
ering to pay, but she insists on waiting till I’m cured.”
“Do you expect to be cured?” I asked.
“By the way, that’s another reason she doesn’t want to continue with you. She thinks you don’t believe in her, that, in fact, you’re spying for the RP Foundation. As for me, I think I’m seeing a little better.”
“You told her you were sure. . . .”
“Of course I did,” he said. “I understand the importance of exaggerating. She needs reassurance.”
“Do you see better at all?”
“A little,” he said, fidgeting with his horn-rimmed glasses. He wanted me out of there as quickly as possible. I heard his wife puttering in the kitchen. She chose not to join us and obviously disapproved of this clandestine meeting. These people had been told that I was a failure and that through association with me, they would be too. I wondered whether I would have acted the same way.
“I think I can read my watch a little better,” Jorge Salomon said.
“What about the business in the tunnel and in the garage?” I asked.
“That was more or less true, but it’s so hard to judge. I have no reference points. If I were in Florida now I’d know, because I always park in the same garage.”
“What’s your vision like?” I asked.
“I can see pretty well. It’s like seeing through a cashew-shaped opening. I think the cashew is expanding.” He paused. “Look, I’m desperate. I don’t want to be blind. I won’t be blind.” He pounded a fist into his open hand. “And there is nothing but Mrs. Barnes.”
“I think she can cure me too. That’s why I’m so frantic about being kicked out. I came to you for advice. I came to appeal to you. You see, my days with her are numbered.”
“Yes, they are. . . .”
“Did she say that?”
“Yesterday she said that today would be your last.”
“What would you do in my place?” I asked.
He looked out the window into the miniature rock garden that came with the house. “Perhaps I’d bring her an expensive gift. Surely, I’d confess everything. I’d tell her that I tried to hide the drugs because I was terrified she wouldn’t treat me.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“I’d say that I was desperate. I’d flatter her more, tell her how wonderful she is, how she helps everyone, how she’s the only one. Things like that.”
He had offered his advice and I resented it. His wife called in from the kitchen in a staccato Spanish. “I’m not particularly good at negotiations,” I said, “but let me offer you a swap. My daughter is at this very moment being examined by Dr. Berson at the Mass. Eye and Ear. As you must know, Helga pronounced her cured. Do your best for me with Helga and I will keep you informed about Sarah.”
“What can I do?” he asked.
“Tell her we met and you are convinced that I am not a liar and that I spoke kindly and respectfully about her.” It was humiliating. I felt like a Jew begging a Pole for asylum.
“Let me think about it,” he said. I wondered if he was a Jew and if he recognized me as one. His name sounded Jewish, but for all I knew he might have been a German whose parents emigrated to Peru to escape the Nuremberg trials. Going home, I felt like a blind beggar.
That evening, I went to see Bronka, a Hampstead neighbor who had been my landlady in Paris in 1955 when Joan and I first lived there. She prepared a gorgeous meal that I tried but couldn’t eat.
“Relax, Andrew,” Bronka said. “You look like you’re headed for a nervous breakdown.” I sipped a Pouilly-Fumé that was making me nauseated.
“It is all probably very simple. A matter of money, and why shouldn’t it be? She probably doesn’t know how to ask for it since you are not one of her star improvers. And don’t think for a moment that it is only those cranks who are mixed up about money.”
A train, fresh out of Hampstead station, rumbled by, almost through Bronka’s garden. The crystal shook, and we had to wait till it passed to speak.
“When I first came to Paris immediately after the war, I was very sick. My nerves were shattered. I vomited whatever I ate.”
Bronka spent part of the war in concentration camps, part hidden in various Warsaw cellars. “My brother was in the French Resistance, and as soon as he saw me he sent me to a Communist doctor he knew well. I waited half the day in his waiting room. Finally he took me and began his examination. He knew I couldn’t pay, and he was brusque, even unkind. Each time the doorbell rang, he packed me and my bundle of clothes into a tiny bathroom until he finished with that paying patient. He was a good doctor, just not a very nice man. A few years later, Andrew, when I had some money, I went to him again. He treated me royally, like all those paying patients. I remember that he kissed my hand and asked about my family. As far as I could tell, he had no recollection, certainly no remorse, about the way he had treated me before.”
The next morning, Jorge Salomon called me at seven. He had just come home from Helga’s.
“She was furious that I spoke with you yesterday. She means to kick you out today.”
On the train to East Croydon, I felt almost cocky about the battle brewing, even titillated by being the unaccustomed butt of so much rage. I was now convinced that our struggle would be about money. Sta had withdrawn two thousand pounds from his Building Society account a few weeks before in case of just such eventualities, and I decided that if Sarah showed any clinical changes, I would stake all of it and more. I didn’t know what to do if she showed no change at all. From the top of the double-decker to Beckenham, I thought I could see better. Over the pub whose protruding sign the bus nearly sheared off each time we turned that corner, I deciphered the last word of its name. It was THE KING OF BOHEMIA.
Helga turned her profile to me as I walked in the door. Her face was white. As she followed me in, she began to yell. “Liar!” “Cheater!” “Scoundrel!” “Thief!!” No one had ever done that to me, never in my life. Doctors found me compliant, teachers generally gave me A’s. With blindness, I felt I was losing my energy, my control, my competence, but not, I thought, my charm.
“I won’t treat people like you,” she screamed as she pounded her fists. Like me? Who was more deserving? A decent enough husband, a good father, a painter who had been forging ahead toward the development of his middle years; Yale, class of 1953. Vera found me “dishy.” I had good and loyal friends. If my eyes were fixed, I would be a mover, a winner! But at Helga’s, I couldn’t produce.
“Your daughter caught you in your lies. You have wasted nearly three months of my time and the precious bee venom. Do you think they are free? How much do you think it will cost to fix you up now? I couldn’t even ask anyone for that much.” She was pacing now, in and out of the room, and panting. “It would take thousands of pounds.”
“How much?” I asked.
“A thousand pounds!” she barked.
“I could have it for you this afternoon.” I felt wonderful to be able to say it. I was calm and controlled. Amarillo Slim was calling another gigantic pot.
“This afternoon?” she asked, sitting down in her chair. “By four o’clock at the Grosvenor?”
“Yes. I need to make one phone call. May I use your phone?” I felt like Orson Welles or my uncle Max.
“Yes, of course, of course,” she said quietly.
I went out into the hall to telephone. “Sta, I’ll need a thousand pounds by three-thirty this afternoon.”
“I will get it ready for you straightaway,” Sta said.
“Just hold on to it,” I whispered. “I’m not sure I’ll use it.”
“Yes, yes,” Helga said as I came back inside. “It’s remarkable that this should happen today. A friend of mine is leaving on the early evening plane to Switzerland, and he could pick up the herbs that we’ll need to feed your new bees. You will, of course, have a few days rest, a period of transition from the old bees to the new, and then we will start all over again. I know what I must fight against to get into your retini
tis pigmentosa.”
I said nothing.
“Four o’clock in the lobby,” she said as she walked me to the door.
It seemed to me that I waited forever at the bus stop. I had to get in touch with Charlotte and Sarah immediately to know what to do. At each change on the way home, I ran from train to train, paying no attention to the people in my way. As I ran into Eton Rise, the phone was ringing.
“I have the money,” Sta said. “Come to pick it up whenever you wish.”
“Sta, I don’t know what to do. She wants to keep me another three months. She says the new bees will finally fix me up. I don’t believe her, Sta. How can anyone believe her?”
“You must believe her,” he said. “You have no choice but to believe her.”
“But the money, Sta, throwing all that money away . . .”
“Nonsense,” he said. “It’s only money, and it is well spent. If you have any trouble paying me back, don’t worry at all. I don’t need it and would like to offer it to you as a gift.”
“No, I can’t do that.”
“Have you heard from Charlotte yet?” he asked.
“No. I don’t know where in Boston to find her, but I have all morning to try.”
It was seven in the morning in Boston. I tried Dagmar’s house and found them. “Andy,” Charlotte said, “we tried to get you last night but you weren’t home. . . .”
“I was at Bronka’s,” I said quickly and defensively.
“There is absolutely no change in Sarah’s eyes.”
“Oh, my God! No change at all? What about the dark adaptation test? Nothing?”