by Andrew Potok
I now picked up the phone and put in a call to my uncle Sta in London.
“Yes, Andy, dear Andy,” Sta said, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if it worked! I’ll call Mrs. Barnes straightaway. I’ll call everyone mentioned in the article. How could I have missed it? I take the Observer every Sunday.” Sta, one of the few remaining in my once-large family, settled in London after the war, and I saw him only sporadically. I was delighted with his immediate interest in the treatment. I had finally set things in motion.
I went over to my studio, to sit alone. I had built this little studio for Charlotte when we were married, the first carpentry I ever attempted, setting windows, hanging doors, cutting hefty lumber for her potter’s wheel. She now occupies what used to be my painting space, a big L at the back of the house, while my more orderly equipment fits easily here, the drawers full of paper clips, staples, Magic Markers, files packed with folders and drafts, cubbyholes of index cards, tape recorders, and tapes. I feel like a hothouse plant with the shades drawn to prevent glare, spots of light illuminating the piles of my sprawling work. As I type, my words disappear into an inaccessible sea of paper, retrieved for me days or weeks later by readers who fill tape after tape with my awkward prose, awaiting revision. If I don’t need the flow, the uninterrupted sense of a taped passage, I can still put my type-script under the zoom lens of my closed-circuit-TV system and read it with my own eyes slowly, letter by magnified letter, each 1 1⁄2 inches tall.
My walls are hung with enormous sheets of paper outlining projects with fat Magic Markers, an oversized calendar, and an American Foundation for the Blind poster with three-color graphics of white canes, braille dots, and other aids and appliances of the blind. Near me is a photographic blowup of a blind phantom sitting alone in the Odeon metro station, and next to it a reproduction of Matisse’s The Painter’s Family, which, but for memory, would be a fuzzy morsel of quilting. The three-pronged heavy-duty electric cords of my old power tools—my bench saw, jointer, sander, drills—have been replaced by tangles of thin wire emerging from wall sockets to maintain, through electricity, my contact with words.
In my old studio, now covered with clay dust, tubes of Rembrandt pigments once lay in neat rows, their labels printed exotically in four languages. A stupid-looking cross-legged Dutch boy with beret, upraised brush, and palette, sat on each tube, surrounded by a border of the gorgeous tint inside. The Rembrandts were the special colors—alizarin, manganese blue, laque de garance, viridian—used stingily, with deliberation; the rest of the jars, bottles, and tubes were a motley collection, gathered from all over Europe and America, caked with granules of pigment and oozing with separated linseed oil. The remains of a huge crate stood to one side of the easel. It had made several transatlantic crossings packed with stretched canvases, displaying on its surface a painted fragment of a Mayakovsky poem, read suspiciously by groups of customs agents upon each entry into the port of New York:
I feel
my “I”
is much too small for me.
Stubbornly a body pushes out of me.
Hello!
Who’s speaking?
Mama?
Mama!
Your son is gloriously ill!
Mama!
His heart is on fire,
Tell his sisters, Lyuda and Olya,
He has no nook to hide in.
The Observer article lay on the edge of my desk. It came to me by chance, and this made it even more significant. It was called “Can Bee Stings Cure Blindness?” and the Sunday it appeared, my London family, who would have spotted it, was dispersed or distracted. One was fasting at a health resort, two had gone to southern Europe to be packed in mud for the relief of arthritis, and Sta, it turned out, decided that particular Sunday to read the Times instead. My friend Mary in New York, looking through the foreign press, saw it and, with some trepidation, sent it to me. There was no mistaking it; the article spoke of my disease and of people whose lives had been similarly affected.
It was all there: the joyous testimonials of the cured and of the doctors who had been witness to the miracle. The author herself had obviously become a true believer. I put it under my Visualtek and read, letter by letter:
At 24, Joan Casey feared she was going to be blind for the rest of her life. She went to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, where they confirmed that she was suffering an incurable form of blindness called retinitis pigmentosa. Later the same day, in May last year, Mrs. Casey, an Irish girl living in London, went to a semidetached house to begin a course of treatment from Mrs. Helga Barnes. The treatment consisted of being stung in the head by specially medicated bees.
A fortnight later Mrs. Casey said she could read newsprint with her right eye, which had been totally blind for 12 years. After six weeks, she could thread a fine needle. The side and downward vision in the left eye returned. . . .
I kept the article near me all the time. I had made many photocopies, so that some were in my desk, some in my briefcase, and others were well placed in the community to gauge feelings of public reaction: surprise, hope, pity, or scorn.
As a rule I read so slowly with my Visualtek or my 10 times Diopter magnifiers that often I forgot the beginning of a sentence by the time I got to the end of it. But not this article. I knew it pretty much by heart. If a friend or colleague had not yet read it I jumped at the chance to hear it one more time.
Helga Barnes, 67, twice widowed, is a fair-haired bustling woman with a kindly face and shrewd eyes that tell you she’s nobody’s fool. She has a colourful turn of phrase, emphasized by a heavy Middle-European accent, undiminished by 40 years in England and two English husbands. . . .
. . . She talks freely about her life but what she won’t discuss is the feeding secret of her bees. Several pharmaceutical firms have made her offers for the formula of her bee venom content. She is afraid people would be exploited. Although bee sting treatment may seem eccentric, she makes the point that it is as logical as a doctor’s syringe and injection.
Her therapy, which she has been using for 48 years and the medical members of her family for a few generations before her, is a complicated and difficult one to implement. No one should imagine her results can be obtained through ordinary garden bees, whose stings can be highly dangerous. Mrs. Barnes’s bees are specially bred and fed for individual ailments.
They are not a cure-all, and Mrs. Barnes will not take on anyone she knows she cannot help. . . .
Mrs. Barnes treated 12 blind patients last summer, charging nothing. She gave up hope of recognition from the medical profession long ago—“Tell them to go to hell” she said—and just wants to show that she believes she has succeeded where doctors have failed.
. . . “Darling, it is a heaven. You have a blind person coming in and you put your arm around him and say, ‘Don’t worry, darling. You will be seeing.’ It is the most wonderful thing on earth to give somebody back his sight. It is beautiful for me because I beat the best men in the land!”
Parts of the article made me cringe. She had named her suburban house Sunkist Budapest and the license plate on her chauffeur-driven Daimler read: BEE 008. I wished things like this could be simple, not tacky, childish, and eccentric. I hoped these were silly, thoughtless aberrations behind which I would discover a thoughtful and original maverick.
I listened impatiently as a clinical ophthalmologist warned Observer readers to proceed with caution. I smiled again as a friend read:
Her work has been observed by Dr. Evelyn Ryder, consultant to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, who is fully qualified in orthodox medicine. . . .
“She’s getting remarkably good results with retinitis pigmentosa, sometimes within a week or even two or three days.
“The balance of the glands is affected by her therapy, which is a deep systemic treatment, affecting the functioning of the whole body, and there’s a change in its metabolic reactions. She is producing the most outstanding cures I’ve seen in fringe, unorthodox medicine.”
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Obsessed by the article, I had a dream: I was on a platform swaying on rickety stilts, very high above a checkered landscape. Hundreds of feet below, there was a happy scene of shade trees, lawns, water, and people, scarcely audible, splashing, singing, laughing. Moments before, the dream people had jumped, gaily, unselfconsciously, into the pool. Alone, I was becoming rigid with fear.
TWO
ON MONDAY MORNING I got on the bus for my weekly trip to Boston. I was carving out a unique place for myself in the blind world. With the support of new friends, I was becoming a kind of half amateur (necessary in my capacity as role model), half professional (necessary to be taken somewhat seriously by colleagues and clients alike) friend and counselor to people who were themselves in some stage of nonacceptance of our shared blight, retinitis pigmentosa.
In this unfamiliar world of hospitals I was partly the presentable consumer, partly the curious ex-artist around whom a small legend began to form, linked to the romance of galleries, museums, la vie bohème . In fact, though I felt decidedly like an intruder, I did everything possible to fit myself into their world, to become serious and professional. I bought myself a gray suit and a pair of cordovan “doctor” shoes with metal tabs nailed into their heels. The clickers of my shoes resounded importantly in the hospital’s corridors. My fleeting moments of self-assurance were largely due to the clickers’ sharp, aggressive tones, though inside those shoes clattered a slowly rotting fellow who trailed the corridor walls with his fingers.
The blind people I counseled considered me happy and successful, living proof that there was hope. I listened intently while they unburdened their grief. They could always count on a small anecdote from me illustrating some isolated triumph amid a hundred failures—a triumph of bravery in the subway system, of vanity subdued in the use of a white cane, of accepting some small humiliation that, in our previous lives, would have been clearly unacceptable. Only some of them recognized me as one of the walking, groping wounded like themselves. These wounds, as a matter of fact, were my only qualification for being there. As I urged people to lead independent lives and to accept their new blind selves, praising their strength and flexibility, I was already thinking of being home, blankets drawn up to my nose, bawling like a baby.
When I went out from my little office into the waiting room to call the next patient, neither of us could really see the other, and I could only hope that we would connect, patient and budding therapist, like a couple of chance electrons in a vacuum chamber. Still, it felt good to share the experience that isolated us all. Mostly we felt that no one could understand our confusing losses, our constantly deteriorating vision, the unpredictable course of our disease, the omnipresent threat to our livelihood, our social and family roles, our psychological integrity.
Thursday evenings my RP group met in a hot, steamy classroom at Boston University. During the winter, we sloshed through rain and snow, over icy sidewalks, crossing wide avenues, braving public transport. The trolleys outside on Commonwealth Avenue screeched, in our room the radiators banged and hissed, but somehow everyone always showed up to share one another’s successes and failures as newly blinded people.
On this particular evening, I spoke first. “There’s something I want to share with you right away,” I said, and I asked Freda, who ran the groups with me, to read the article aloud.
It transported the room into a children’s theater, our rapt faces riveted to every word. It struck at the center of our dreams, and its message locked within our shaky collective core.
“Jesus, Andy, you should go,” said Sheldon.
“And send for us,” added Craig, “if it works.”
Sheldon had been the only cure seeker among us till now. When he had described the difficult weekly trip to New York to have vitamins shot up his nose, we had urged him to stop.
“But he’s a real doctor,” Sheldon had said. “A big deal ophthalmologist.”
“Why doesn’t he let you take the goddamn vitamins home with you?” George had asked.
“I wanted to,” Sheldon had told us. “But his nurse said that it wouldn’t work at home.”
We had been furious, vowing to expose the doctor and anyone like him.
Now, after Freda read my article, the group was silent for a moment. Then, snapping out of our hypnotic state, we joked and bantered, trying to cover up our terrible vulnerability to such things. The article affected us deeply. Our adolescent humor couldn’t hide the total absorption of the reading, especially, I suppose, because it was I, usually the voice of reason, who planned to gamble his credibility on this new madness.
“I’m ashamed to admit how much this appeals to me,” I said. “More than vitamins or ultra-sound or cortisone . . .”
“Why?” Kevin asked. “It sounds diabolical.”
“I guess because it’s organic,” I said, finding reasonable explanations for the first time. “Because neither a drug company nor a doctor stands to benefit from it, because it’s given by a woman. I trust women. My ophthalmologist’s a woman, and she’s always been honest and wonderful with me. But listen,” I said, “I’m waiting to hear from my uncle. As soon as I do, I’ll share all of it with you.”
The next day, after work, I climbed into the only taxi at the stand in front of the hospital. I was anxious to get home to Vermont for a long weekend. “Greyhound terminal,” I said. No one answered. I sighed and waited, expecting the driver to return shortly. Then a thought occurred to me with a rush of adrenaline: maybe this wasn’t a taxi at all. I had noticed that it was two-toned, with something sticking out of its roof. I felt around the interior. A thick wire mesh separated me from the driver’s seat. Finally, scrambling for my belongings, I realized I was in a police car. A taxi had pulled up behind. “Hey, man,” the cabbie laughed. “I’d stay out of cop cars if I was you.” Mr. Magoo, that’s who I was. I slumped red-faced into his cab.
The bus ride home was long, the bus crowded with weekend trippers, late-winter skiers. I sat in the back and took tokes off joints being passed around.
Charlotte met me in Montpelier. I was stoned and felt dull, but I wanted to be greeted as a conquering hero, unabashed by blindness. Instead, we fought.
“We read the article in the group last night,” I said.
“What article?” she asked again.
“Jesus, can’t you remember anything?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “You’re not serious,” she added. “What did the group think? That you’re crazy?”
“They loved it,” I said.
“You always do go after big solutions, big drama,” she said spitefully. “Why don’t you ever settle for small, life-size answers?”
“Lay off me,” I said, and we drove without another word until we turned into our driveway.
“There’s an express letter for you from Sta on the kitchen counter,” Charlotte said.
Sta had contacted the cured and those who were currently undergoing Mrs. Barnes’s treatment. He talked to the article’s author and to the good homeopathic doctor who had sung her praises. They all urged me to come and come quickly. “If she agrees to take you,” the letter said, “everyone is certain that she will cure you.”
The next day I called her. I simply dialed Helga Barnes’s number in England, while Charlotte was in her pottery and the kids were out.
“I am going blind from retinitis pigmentosa,” I yelled into the phone.
“And I have a terrible laryngitis,” screamed Helga Barnes back at me. “I’ve been talking incessantly with people going blind from all over the world—New Zealand, South America, Belgium, Iran. . . .”
“I read the article about you in the Observer, and I am terribly excited by your treatment for RP.”
“Don’t be excited!” she rasped, truly hoarse. “I have to see you to know if I can help. . . .”
“Can I come then?”
“Oh, my God! All those Arabs and bloody Germans! Planeloads of them. And those filthy parasite doctors lining up outside my do
or. . . .”
“I can get there right away. . . .”
“All right, come then. But you must stay at the Grosvenor House, Park Lane.”
“I have an uncle in London. Can I stay with him?”
“No!” she screamed. “I want you at the Grosvenor with my Arabs. Call me as soon as you arrive.”
I put the phone down and shuddered. I knew I was hooked.
Trying not to blurt the news to anyone yet, I left the house and headed up the road with Charlie, my fat mutt, at my heels. Charlie and I stayed well to the side of the washboarded dirt road, trying to follow the hazy, uneven lines made by the gravel’s edge. Old rusted-out heaps of cars hurtle up and down this road, sounding like steel bands gone haywire, tail pipes dragging, front ends shuddering, parts of fenders thrown to the grassy knolls at the sides. We passed the same houses daily, the same dogs, the same children playing outside. Charlie whined as we approached another mutt’s turf, then barked and snarled, as always. Little bouncing, dancing dogs followed us, and together with a couple of stray children, we made a group of six or seven, growling and skipping our way through the Vermont countryside.
For a long way up, the land on both sides of the road is mine. I bought these hundred acres fifteen years ago, when I still saw perfectly. I was astounded to own the overgrown maples, the dead and dying elms, the birch, beech, spruce, and poplar eking out life from the ledgy soil, moss-covered and scented by pine needles.
I passed a hillock that during the sprouting summer is thick with trillium, devil’s paintbrush, shasta daisies, and under all, a tangle of wild strawberries. In the summers, I see as if through wads of dirty gauze; now I heard the snow being soaked up slowly, leaving crusty islands of granulated white. The woods were redolent with the musky smells of old leaves mixed, in the early-spring breeze, with an occasional deer carcass, the thawing remains of rabbits and birds. A lumber road trails into the deeper woods, up the steep hill into the old pasture where giant trees have been split by lightning. When the old sugar house fell under a heavy snow, I used the timbers for Charlotte’s kiln shack and the gray board for the bathroom upstairs.
