When Bee returned to London she wrote Maddy a note, expressing admiration for the work, recounting her own activities since she'd left Great Western, ending with an expression of hope they might meet again, then mailed it off to Maddy care of Life.
It was nearly a year before she received a reply. Bee's letter finally caught up with Maddy in Tokyo, where she'd gone after spending a year in 'Nam. She was delighted to hear from her old friend. There'd been big changes in her life since their circus days. After Tommy's death, she'd lost her heart for shooting and guns, given them up, moved to California, finished college, become interested in photojournalism. Meantime, she'd married one of her teachers, a Nisei university professor of engineering named Harry Yamada, a marvelous man, twenty years her senior, supportive of her new and dangerous career.
She'd love to see Bee again, Maddy wrote. She had fond memories of their days together on the road. Sad that those wonderful times had ended so tragically. But, she went on, she believed in renewal and redemption, even in the case of Carson. She hadn't seen him, of course, but heard he also lived in San Francisco where he'd embarked on a career in commercial real estate. She had no intention of seeing him, yet she harbored no ill will. Of all the friends from the old days, her old pal Bee was the only one she truly missed.
Years passed. Bee and Maddy continued to correspond. Meetings were planned, in Paris, London and New York, but failed to take place on account of family obligations or work. The exchange of chatty letters began to ebb, replaced by brief notes scribbled on the inside flaps of Christmas cards.
More years passed. Maddy became world-famous. Bee subscribed to Life in order to follow her work. In the late sixties and early seventies Maddy's photographs appeared twelve times on the magazine's cover.
Meantime Bee's reputation grew. In 1970, her father passed away, leaving her as sole artist/engraver at the Watson & Watson firm. She took in apprentices, attempted to train them, but the pay was low, young people were impatient for advancement, and the handmade British "best gun," always a luxury item, was becoming prohibitively expensive.
By 1975 Bee had restricted her work to special-order one-offs for wealthy collectors. She no longer undertook commissions for standard hunting scenes, would only engrave scenes which had never previously been applied to arms.
Among her seventies and eighties favorites:
A pair of matching Granger sidelocks collectively called "The Justine," commissioned by the Turk, consisting of eight erotic scenes from Marquis de Sade's novel of the same title, embellished with gold and platinum inlays.
A Purdey called "The Oscar," commissioned by a famous British stage and screen actor, depicting key scenes from the life of Oscar Wilde.
"The Venus," a heavy-gauge Krieghoff over-under deeply incised with motifs from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, on commission from an Austrian collector.
An erotic gun called "The Goddess," ordered by an exclusive gun club in California, the scenes incised in bulino on a period virgin (unengraved and mint condition) Parker model Invincible, one of only three such guns known to exist.
I turn to Sasha. He holds his head in his hands. When I look again at Bee, she peers at me, eyes open in surprise.
"I've said something wrong, Kay?"
I shake my head.
"But something's upset you. I can tell."
"Why don't you show Bee your drawings," Sasha suggests.
I nod, pull my sketchbook from my camera bag, open it to my main drawing of the G.G.C. ritual gun, hand it to Bee.
She studies the series. "Yes, of course, this is 'The Goddess.' Not exactly, but fairly close." She looks at me, searchingly. "So you've seen it! This is why you've come."
"Not only seen it. It was nearly rammed into me," I tell her quietly.
"Oh, my God!" Bee drops her teacup; it hits the ground, rolls beneath the table. She shakes her head. "Bastards!" Tears pulse from her eyes. "Those awful little shits!"
"I was drugged," I tell her. "Luckily, before they went too far someone came along and stopped them."
"Hyenas!" Bee bites off the word. "I hate them! I told Maddy what they were doing. It made her furious. She vowed she'd stop them. Then—"
Bee blinks, shakes her head. She seems confused. Dazed myself, I ask for a timeout. The story has grown too entangled. In the space of an hour I've learned that years ago Ramsey Carson killed Maddy's first lover in a duel, and now Bee has learned that I, Maddy's student, was nearly raped by the gun she herself engraved for Carson's G.G.C.
Sasha helps me up; then together we follow Bee, who has offered to show us her hives.
We stop first at her shack, where she issues us beekeepers' helmets with veils, gloves and all-white jumpsuits, a necessary precaution, she tells us, since bees will often attack darkly dressed people, mistaking them for marauding bears.
On the walk to the hives she also tells us how, in 1988, she began to suffer from arthritis. Within months, the condition grew worse. Finding herself unable to complete commissions because of pain, she sold the London engraving shop and moved to California, where she'd long yearned to live.
Here, after trying various arthritis remedies, including conventional anti-inflammatories , she heard about apitherapy, the use of bee sting venom to relieve the pain of arthritis and other diseases.
At first she was skeptical. Then, because her name was Bee, she wondered if the coincidence could be karmic and therefore worth exploring.
"That probably sounds 'touchy-feely Bolinas' to you," she says, "but the truth is I was desperate. The pain was terrible. So I thought why not try it. I knew I wasn't allergic to bee venom. I'd received many stings in my girlhood and had never gone into anaphylactic shock. So I went several times to an apitherapist who placed bees on various of my acupuncture points. The stings didn't bother me much, and afterwards, to my surprise, my pain would practically disappear.
"No one's sure how it works," she tells us. "And there are plenty of old fogies who don't think it does. Lots of theories. One is that the venom boosts the immune system. Another that it promotes nerve transmissions. A third, the one I subscribe to, that it boosts the body's production of cortisone by as much as a thousand percent. All I know is it works for me."
She tells us how her experiences with apitherapy led to her training to become an apitherapist herself. Which in turn led quite naturally to her becoming a beekeeper, producing honey for herself and a limited production which she sells to local stores, along with bee pollen and beeswax.
Even from a distance we can hear the buzz. As we approach the hives, it grows louder and more ominous. I glance at Sasha, can see he's doubtful.
Bee says she believes bees can detect human fear, so if we feel uncomfortable, she warns, we probably oughtn't to come too close. She has four hives, she tells us, two inhabited by Carniolan bees, two by Italian. Both produce a wonderful mixed-flower honey from the nectars of coastal heather, lavender and bramble. She adds that she herself consumes a cup and a half of raw honey per day, to which she attributes her present good health and sense of well-being.
"Beekeeping is a Zen-like craft," she tells us. "You must move carefully, decisively. When you do it well, you feel an extraordinary connection with the earth. People have been keeping bees since ancient times. There are cave paintings of men gathering honey. The Greeks adored it, consumed it with milk and bread. The Romans cooked with it. Aristotle kept bees. Malta, in corrupted Greek, means 'honey island.' Then there're the bees themselves, fascinating creatures—the way they work, organize, the strange hypnotic dance the gatherers do to describe locations of nectar. My parents, for some reason, named me Bee. And back in the engraving shop my dad would call me his 'little honeybee' when I worked hard. I never thought much about it, just accepted it as an expression of his love. Now I wonder if he saw in me something of what I've since become. For as much as I loved engraving steel, I feel far happier and more in touch doing this."
She shows us the stack of trays in the hives, t
he bottom box, the hive body or brood chamber, presided over by the queen, the screen called the queen excluder that keeps the queen out of the supers where the bees make and store honey, and the uppermost shelf, which she calls "the attic," the only level from which she takes honey away. She tells us how, in cool weather, she sedates the hives with pine smoke, removes the upper shelf, brushes clinging bees off, then retrieves the precious, thick golden fluid.
An hour later, we're back at the patio table beneath the big pine, sipping tea again and feeling more relaxed. The sun is lower now, my vision is better. I take the opportunity to closely inspect Bee Watson's face.
Already I'm enthralled by this extraordinary woman, fascinated too by her amazing life. Studying her, I see surprisingly smooth skin for a person of her age, deep laughter lines, warmth and wisdom in the eyes and a suggestion too, in the curve of the mouth, that she has felt pain and loss yet has never given in to bitterness.
She and Maddy finally got together, their first meeting since August 1955. Though nearly thirty-five years had passed, they at once felt easy with one another, reminiscing, exchanging news. And then instead of falling silent, as is often the case after exuberant initial exchanges between reunited friends, they soon found a warm, effortless camaraderie.
Maddy confided that, on account of slower reflexes and failing vision, she expected to give up active photography in a few years.
"I'm going to devote myself to my students. I wish I could do something completely different the way you have, Bee," she said. "But I made my big career switch years ago."
Bee asked Maddy if she'd ever regretted giving up shooting. Maddy responded she had not, that taking pictures was far more gratifying.
"More weighty too," she told Bee, "in that the 'shots' are permanent. I can contemplate them. They're not just marks on a target that gets torn up."
"Some of your old targets were works of art," Bee replied.
Maddy laughed. "At first I missed the show, the drama of it, the spectacle! But later I got to like hiding behind my camera." She paused. "Of course, it isn't like that. Took me years to realize it. Though my face never appears in my pictures, I think I'm more present in them than I ever was trick-shooting before a crowd. The crowd's huge now, hundreds of thousands, looking closely at images I make with my hands and eyes. Those images are me. They reflect my vision. When I study my old pictures I continue to learn things about my subjects, but I believe I learn a great deal more about myself."
From time to time Bee and Maddy would meet in the city for lunch, or phone one another just to chat. Twice Maddy came out to Bolinas for weekends. On these visits they slept in adjoining hammocks strung up outdoors. Maddy loved the country, told Bee sleeping out like this reminded her of her Wyoming girlhood. Both times Bee tried to lure Maddy into picking up one of the rifles she kept around the place. Maddy refused.
"I just can't do it," she confessed. "It's a phobia. The notion makes me sick. I tell my students to photograph what they fear. And I've been photographing men with guns for years. But photographing and handling are two different things." Maddy paused. "You see, I think if I picked up a gun now, I'd feel a great desire to fire it. And if I did that . . . no telling where it might lead."
They spoke very little of Carson, Maddy simply mentioning again that he'd succeeded in business, had become rich and was occasionally cited in society columns as one of the more eligible bachelors in town. She didn't think Ram knew she lived nearby, or ever connected the Mandy Vail he'd once thought he loved to Maddy Yamada, photojournalist.
All this time, Bee kept up her gun-collector connections. Occasionally she'd receive requests, through the old Watson & Watson firm, for special-order erotic engraving. She turned all such commissions down. She'd lost interest in engraving, had embarked upon an entirely different sort of life. Still, she wasn't one to burn her bridges. She loved gun world gossip and solicited it in her letters.
She'd been aware for a time that a new collector of erotic guns had appeared on the scene and was aggressively buying everything in sight. It was only with the sale of the Farouk guns that she learned that this was Ramsey Carson.
At first she couldn't believe it. It seemed too great a coincidence. She made inquiries, and little by little, information filtered back. It took a while before she beheld the grand design. When she did she was appalled.
Carson, she learned, was founder and president of the same California gun club that had commissioned the erotic engraving on the Parker Invincible, "The Goddess." She also heard that ugly rumors about the club, particularly its ritual use of "The Goddess," were circulating in gun-collector circles.
Through her network of friends Bee was able to track these rumors back to an American film director, also a major gun collector, who claimed to have attended several Goddess Gun Club orgies. This gentleman had not been discreet; the club, Bee learned, was now the talk of gun-collecting Hollywood. Rumor had it that a top-ten male movie star had applied for membership.
Bee, not wishing to upset Maddy, kept this news to herself. Still, as the artist who had engraved "The Goddess," she felt distress over these awful tales. The erotic guns she'd worked on so lovingly over the years had been engraved to satisfy the yearnings of connoisseurs.
The notion that one of these arms with its inherent mystical power, which by her labor she'd turned into an object of art, was being corrupted by misuse began to haunt her dreams.
She phoned Ramsey Carson's office to request a meeting. An hour later he called her back.
She was struck by his voice, so slick and smooth. She could hear nothing in it of the aggressive roustabout from Great Western days.
"Been a long time, Bee. I was sad when I heard you sold the shop. For years I admired your work. I even hoped to commission something from you one day."
"You did commission something."
A little chuckle. "Yes, 'The Goddess.' So . . . you knew?"
"Not at the time. I do now."
"I also have the guns you and your dad engraved for Farouk."
"I know that too."
"Then I have no secrets from you, Bee. I wouldn't have used an intermediary except I was afraid you'd turn me down. Because of what happened . . . though it's been years. I've changed a lot. I'm sure you have too. At least I know your engraving's improved." Another little laugh, then the sincere tone favored by flatterers. "Your work's so good, Bee. The best! No one touches you. Perhaps no one ever will. When we acquired that Parker, you were the only one we had in mind to engrave it. I was pretty sure you wouldn't refuse me, but you understand, I couldn't take the chance."
Oh, yes, she understood! If she'd known "The Goddess" was for Ram, she'd have turned him down cold.
"What brings you to town, Bee?"
"Just traveling," she said. Before she called she'd decided she wouldn't mention she lived nearby. "And since I'm here I'd like to see your collection."
They arranged to meet in two days. When Ram offered to send a car for her, she told him she was staying with friends in Marin.
"Bring them along, why don't you?"
"I think not, Ram. Not everyone's so taken with erotic guns."
He laughed. "I create a scandal every time I bring mine out. It's just like I dropped my pants. People want to look away but can't. Which is why I do it, of course. To stir folks up, get the juices flowing . . . so to speak."
His home, on a quiet block in Presidio Heights, reminded Bee of townhouses she'd seen in Paris: gated street entrance leading to cobbled courtyard, gray stone building with mansard roof behind. Crossing the courtyard, Bee noted a great surround of blooming bougainvillea suffusing the entrance with a nearly overpowering bouquet.
She barely recognized the dashing, perfectly coiffed, middle-aged man who opened the door. She searched his face for the handsome eighteen-year-old she'd known back in Great Western days. That boy habitually wore T-shirts, jeans and cowboy boots. This man was decked out in gleaming black shoes and a beautifully tailored dark pin-stripe
d suit.
Most striking, the strutting youth she remembered had been transformed into a man who appeared to know exactly who he was. No awkwardness about him; now every gesture seemed assured, every modulation of expression carried weight. Ram Carson had turned himself into a convincing San Francisco gentleman.
He escorted her through a large living room reminiscent of great rooms in English country homes—grand fireplace, sofas covered in faded chintz, life-size ancestor portraits of aristocratic men holding guns, accompanied by slavish dogs. Then up a sweeping staircase to the gun room on the second floor.
The decor here reminded her of numerous gun rooms she'd visited through the years: glowing Persian rug, dark paneled walls, finely built cabinets with glass doors to exhibit the precious arms. There was a refectory table in the center upon which several guns were displayed, and deep, richly upholstered opposing leather Chesterfields where gentlemen could sit and handle these marvels of the gunsmith's art.
He handed her a glass of hundred-year-old cognac, then started showing his collection. Bee was impressed. Though smaller than the von Heinholz hoard, it was, Bee thought, better selected, each example being a "best of class."
The Farouk guns were as she remembered. Holding them again, running her fingers over the engraving, Bee felt tears spring to her eyes. These were the first arms that she and her father had engraved together.
"Tell me about them, Bee," Ram asked. "What was Farouk interested in?"
She shrugged. "Guns and sex, in equal order. When he found out they could be combined, he went berserk combing the world for fine engravers."
"So there were other guns?"
"Many. But none so fine as these. He was a vulgar man as kings go. Roly-poly fellow, spoiled and rich, without a thought in his head. He ate too much. Couldn't get enough of macaroni and cheese, which he'd slurp down with gallons of orangeade. He collected everything—art, sex toys, ancient sculptures, obscene cuckoo clocks. If Farouk coveted something, he bought it, or stole it if he could. He'd go into the houses of rich Cairenes, take what he wanted, and no one dared say a word. He collected women too, as if they were baubles. After a night of sex, he'd hand out jewelry which he'd tell them was from the royal treasury but which would turn out to be made of paste. He even made a pass at me—"
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