Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  “You did. And I hated you for it.”

  This saucy little girl child, so blond and pretty, had felt like a bit of a stranger then. Perhaps her mother’s child, I had thought, closer to Tulsa, Oklahoma, than Warsaw, Poland. Perhaps I was claiming her that day.

  “When he finally agreed that I could drive in the daytime,” Sarah said, “I had Rachel memorize the eye chart for me, just in case. I saw it perfectly, but I also knew it by heart.”

  “Anita memorized it for me when I got my first license,” I said. The arms around each other tightened, and Sarah put her head on my shoulder. What a wonder it was to have grown children, I thought. Each of us had a childhood in our past, and like friends, we could compare them. It felt precious and rare.

  “At school once, they had an eye doctor check our eyes,” Sarah said. “When he looked inside mine, he called his nurse and said: ‘Have a look at these, they’re covered with pigment.’ I was terrified. That son of a bitch,” Sarah added.

  “When I had my army physical, I was classified 1A because they didn’t look carefully enough. I had every intention of being a hero, but chickened out as I imagined my throat cut in some dark Korean trench. I went back to tell them about the RP. The doctor looked again and did the same thing your school doctor did. He called his buddies, and they all clucked about how terrible it looked.”

  We sat down under an enormous oak. “I’m so happy we’re going to be cured together,” I said.

  “Me too,” Sarah said. “Helga sounds a little bananas, though.”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  Sarah took over the couch in the living room while I kept Sta’s bed. That night, as I lay thinking of this marvelous deliverance, I thought of the night Sarah was born. I smiled with pleasure remembering the little clinic in Mallorca and Doctor Lizarbe, who looked like one of the lantern-jawed Hapsburgs painted by Velázquez. As Joan was being wheeled into the delivery room, she asked my mother, who was visiting, to come in with us. There, baby Sarah popped out like an olive pit from a bursting ripe olive. We all laughed and cried and congratulated one another, Joan and my mother and Dr. Lizarbe and the nurse and me. We felt love for everything and everyone.

  I remembered another doctor, one I hadn’t told Sarah about. I was fifteen at the time. He was bald and fat, with rimless glasses, and he came out with my parents and me into the marble hallway outside his office. He was trying to find a way to say something to me. We had already descended the two steps to the front door of his private entrance. My father was bowing and scraping. My mother smiled and nodded. “Mein boy,” he said, addressing me for the first time, “Mein boy, you should never have children. . . .”

  After Sarah’s birth, I painted a series of gory parturition figures, legs spread like spiders expelling tortured, screaming nubbins of flesh.

  “Brigitte Bardot,” my father called her when he saw Sarah. Even then she was strikingly beautiful.

  In Regent’s Park, true to her eighteen years, she told me that she wanted to cut off all her hair so that people would love her “for real reasons.”

  Helga could hardly believe her eyes when she saw Sarah. “My dear,” she said, “I had no idea. You are the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.” She leaned over to touch Sarah. “I’m so happy that I will cure you. A beautiful girl like you should never be blind.” She sat back and beamed.

  Sarah and I sat in two patients’ chairs in the middle of the room. Helga finally got up and walked over to a plate of bees. “Why didn’t you tell me, Mr. What-do-you-call-it, about your gorgeous daughter? Did you have a good trip, my dearest?” she asked Sarah. “How do you like what’s happening to your dear father?” She stepped behind Sarah, and I nearly grabbed her arm to stop her from putting bees in Sarah’s hair. But she did, and Sarah winced. “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it, darling?” she asked. Sarah said, “No,” but tears welled up in her eyes. What am I doing to her? I thought.

  On the train going home, Sarah said that the two bee stings weren’t terrible. She thought she could stand it. “And she’s a charming woman,” Sarah said. “A little nuts but a real sweetie.”

  When we got home, my friend Roy was sitting on the stoop at Eton Rise. He was on his way from Vermont to the Cannes Film Festival. That evening, in an Italian restaurant, we discussed the possibility of doing a film on Helga. I pictured the camera chronicling our cure, Helga’s rounds of the London hotels, scenes showing the traditional diagnosis and subsequent lack of treatment, and, of course, all the cured patients talking of their bizarre experience.

  Alone at Helga’s the next day, as Sarah nursed her first stings at home, I brought up the possibility of a film. She listened intently, sitting forward in her chair, her eyeglasses flashing with each nervous movement of her head.

  “I’m not interested in more publicity in the U.K.,” she said. “The Observer and the BBC are good enough for me. But the U.S. is a different matter. I would love to show those American doctors what Helga Barnes can do.”

  Helga sat back in her chair, scheming. One of her hands was fidgeting on her knee. “Let’s ask my Arabs to sponsor the film,” she said. “I tell you what, Mr. Potok,” she said, remembering my name, “I like the idea. As I’ve already told you, I will not charge for your daughter’s cure. Now I will also treat you for nothing. How does that sound to you?”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Barnes, but . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, “I will talk to some people about it. . . .”

  “I’m interested in making the film, not . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Off you go now. Off with you. And tomorrow bring that exquisite child of yours again. Cheerio, old scout!”

  We didn’t speak of the film again for several days. We began meeting other patients on each visit, and Helga’s publicity plans, like almost everything else about her, required confidentiality. But the chance meetings with others receiving treatment were instructive, particularly to Sarah, whose generous opinions of Helga were now being tempered through observation.

  As she opened the door for us one day, she was white with rage and ran back into the consulting room to continue screaming at a little boy who was curled up in a seldom-used soft chair.

  “You nasty little boy!” she screamed. “How do you expect me to treat you if you whine and cry every time I get near you? One more time and out with you! To go blind by yourself somewhere!”

  The boy’s mother, a young, bony Englishwoman named Mrs. Dorset, hovered over the child and his brother, who sat on the edge of the couch looking down. Both boys had black hair and black-rimmed glasses. The ten-year-old sobbed into his hands as Helga turned to Sarah and me.

  “Children aren’t brought up the way they used to be. These sniveling brats don’t know how to behave in public.” She looked at the older brother. “Now you,” she growled. “Show us what stuff you are made of.” She put several bees on the back of his tender neck. “Just look at your brave brother,” she jeered at the little one. “He will see perfectly again, not like you.” Mrs. Dorset moved from sofa to chair, ready to break down herself but managing to smile politely, trying to find a balance, a way to be in this intolerable craziness.

  We were silent witnesses, Sarah and I. I, the good liberal, outraged by injustice, didn’t say a word. Here, the penalty for even the most timid rebellion was the end of treatment and, we all thought, blindness.

  We met the mother and daughter from Manchester, wearing bright green and yellow Robin Hood hats. They sat on the couch holding hands, touching shoulders. The young woman was the one going blind with RP.

  “Meet my riffraff from Manchester,” Helga said to Sarah and me. “This is the American chappie I told you about,” she said to the women, “and his divine daughter.”

  She gestured the young woman to a chair in the middle of the room and began putting bees in her hair. The young woman howled, surprising us all. I had not seen another adult respond to the bees like that before.

  Helg
a was beside herself. “You bitchy little idiot,” she yelled, hoarse and out of breath. “I will not stand for this.” The young woman continued wailing uncontrollably.

  Her mother patted her hand, saying: “There, there, darling, it can’t be so bad. . . .”

  “Can’t be so bad?” Helga screamed in disbelief. “Can’t be so bad? What do you know about it, you old cow? I have a good mind to lay some bees on you, and then we’ll see how bad you think it is.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Barnes,” the helpless woman said, moving away.

  “Yes, Mrs. Barnes; no, Mrs. Barnes,” Helga mimicked. “Get out, both of you. I will not waste my time! Out, I tell you, out!”

  Her hands shook as she gave Sarah and me our bees, four for Sarah, ten for me. “Wow,” Sarah said when we got outside, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “Neither have I,” I said. “It was awful, but at least that won’t happen to us. She likes us, really likes us a lot.”

  Sarah began to mind her bee stings more and more. She felt weak, sometimes nauseated, and her plan to join an advanced ballet class, to systematically photograph London, and to keep house “in Sta’s little dollhouse,” petered out as she suffered almost constantly from the bee sickness. She slept badly, and if I happened to wake up at night, I would often hear her soaking her wounds in the bathtub or applying Nivea cream from a big pot we bought, or, for sport, killing cockroaches in Sta ’s bathroom.

  Our unique opportunity to spend this concentrated time together, to be cured together, began to be corroded by pain and anger. Sta and Edith tried to be especially nice to Sarah, but she became too irritated and self-involved to be able to respond to them with civility. “They’re just humoring me,” Sarah said, buried under the covers, facing the wall, a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves at the foot of the bed. “I am a guest, and they’re being nice because they have to. They have no way of knowing who I really am.” The paper-thin moods of her adolescence, the fierce angers and the sluggish depressions succeeded one another rapidly. At first, we blamed the bees for everything. Eventually, we understood that the pain, the itching, and Helga’s awfulness were only a part of it. The rest, provoked by the mad scene we had entered, had been building for a long time. We each had a list of disappointed expectations, and this felt like a time especially created to express formerly unexpressed resentments.

  “You never gave me credit for anything,” Sarah would say. “Everything Mark did was always better.”

  “That’s not true,” I would growl. “You’re lazy and unmotivated.”

  “I can’t ever be good enough for you! Nothing I do is serious or important. Like dance . . .”

  “What about dance! Why aren’t you dancing? You were going to. . . .”

  “You’re unfair,” Sarah would say. “I’m sick from the goddamn bees. . . .”

  “You just take, take, take. . . .”

  “Ha! You’re the one who never had time for me. You’re the one who was always in his studio painting.”

  “You’re sour and demanding, blaming everyone. . . .”

  “And your damned blindness,” Sarah would say. “It always has to be at the center of everything.”

  Sarah started going for walks alone, often returning home soaked to the skin from the London weather. She would then drop into the bathtub and go back to bed. I went out when Sarah was asleep or dozing. I walked gloomily along the ponds of the Heath or sat on a bench in Trafalgar Square gazing longingly at the portals of the National Gallery, or from Millbank up the long white stairs to the Tate. I thought of the Velázquez I had copied in the Louvre, the Goya at the Prado, the Matisse I made for Albers out of colored papers.

  Once, Helga yelled at Sarah for wearing a long cotton skirt. “You are too beautiful to be out in a rag,” she said. “Only cheap Australian girls in Earl’s Court wear clothes like that—and do you know why?—to hide the filth underneath.” Sarah was upset but said nothing. As a matter of fact, she smiled and nodded in agreement. We saved all our anger for each other.

  During a break in our hostilities, Sarah and I visited a distant cousin who kept an elegant flat in London and traveled regularly all over the world. Vera turned out to be a striking, voluptuous woman. She was rich with inherited wealth and still spoke with a faint Polish accent. She was very interested in our eyes, asking detailed questions. I was aware that she watched me with an intense fascination, particularly as I got up and navigated about the richly brocaded couches or fingered the precious figurines and the malachite eggs sitting on antique tables.

  “I think,” she said, “that people who are blind develop extraordinarily sharp senses. I mean all the other senses.”

  “It’s not really true.” I gave her my textbook speech of how blind people have to work hard to develop their hearing, touch, smell, but as I finished, I realized Vera couldn’t have cared less about my explanations. She wanted to believe in her theory, which aroused her imagination and, with it, her sexuality.

  “It would be one thing if you were totally blind and couldn’t see me at all,” she said, “but I can’t bear the thought of your eyes distorting me.”

  “Why should that bother you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Yes, I do. It’s because I’ve worked so hard at creating my visual image. Can you see me better if you come closer?”

  “Probably.” She moved her chair very close to mine. One of my knees was between her legs and one of hers between mine. I saw the sparkle in a blue-green eye, the smooth skin, the frizzy hair. She smelled of Ma Griffe. I looked down at her mouth and saw a provocative smile, a hint of pink tongue between full, moist lips.

  I felt Sarah glowering from the couch. “There,” I said, “I knew you were beautiful before, and now I’m sure of it.” Sarah couldn’t bear it and asked where the bathroom was. When she left the room, Vera said: “We must see each other while you are in London.”

  Sarah came back, and we all had a fancy tea, the fluted silver laid on a large marble coffee table.

  “You have a very dishy father,” Vera laughed.

  “He’s my father,” Sarah said, “and he can’t see very well.”

  Sarah felt much sicker the next day. When I called Helga to say that she wanted to skip a day of bees, Helga said: “I’ve been thinking about you and worrying.”

  “Worrying?” I asked, suddenly afraid. “About what?”

  “I don’t like the way you’re not improving. . . .”

  “But I’ve had some improvement. . . .”

  “Not enough.”

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Barnes?” I stammered as my knees gave way and I sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. “You kept telling me not to worry, that you have never failed and you won’t fail with me. . . .”

  “I know, I know,” she said impatiently, “but I am very discouraged. Not enough is happening. If something doesn’t happen soon, I’ll have to let you go. I don’t know. I must think about it.”

  When I hung up I called in to Sarah who was half asleep in the living room. “Sarah,” I said, “she’s just terrified me. She doesn’t think she can help me.”

  Sarah made a sleepy grunt.

  “Sarah,” I said, coming into the living room, “it may all be over soon. She wants to think about it and let me know. . . .”

  “What about me?” Sarah asked, not opening her eyes.

  “She didn’t say anything about you. I imagine she’ll want to keep working on you. It’s different.”

  Sarah turned from the wall to look at me. Then she turned back.

  Helga was very businesslike the next day. Tom Larkin, a fast-improving patient, was there, getting almost twenty stings in his bushy hair. “That should do you, you old scoundrel,” she said to him. “He comes once a week,” she told me, “for booster stings.” She slapped Tom on the back. “Get a haircut, for Christ’s sake,” she told him. Now that I had been threatened, I craved that familiarity of hers as I would have craved a reprieve from a rejecting lover. Tom
left bantering merrily with Helga. When she came back, Sarah and I sat shrouded in gloom.

  “I’ve been thinking, Mr. Potok, about the publicity,” she said quietly and carefully. “How can I accept publicity from people who don’t improve? What kind of publicity would that be? Of course I don’t know about your daughter yet, but as for you, it is discouraging.”

  “But what about my improvement?” I asked again.

  “I’ve been talking to my chartered accountant,” she continued. “He thinks I should not be keeping people who don’t improve quickly. He says that it’s bad for my reputation.”

  “But my improvement . . .”

  “Yes, I told him that you had some improvement, and he suggested that if you want to stay you should write me a letter describing the improvement carefully.” I perked up. “You should say how blind you were to begin with, how the bees have affected you, how you see differently now.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I can write that.”

  “And your daughter, too,” she said. “I want her to write how she is seeing better.”

  On our way home, we stopped at a stationer’s to buy good rag paper and envelopes. They were light blue and felt substantial to the touch. We stayed home all evening, writing and rewriting our testimonial letters. The next morning we handed them in.

  “Dear Mrs. Barnes,” mine said.

  I am writing you this letter to let you know how much the bee-venom therapy has already helped me, even though my treatment is hardly finished yet. When I came to London, I was practically blind. Now I can walk all alone, I see colors, I can read print a little, and altogether I see things more brightly in dim light. Expecting everything to get better still, I am extremely happy to be undergoing this remarkable treatment. It is well known, of course, that no one except you, Mrs. Barnes, is able to cure retinitis pigmentosa.

  Sarah wrote a similar letter, fabricating details about walking to a restaurant in the dark on unfamiliar streets and seeing everything clearly. Our letters were carefully read and turned out to be acceptable. I watched with a sinking feeling as our two light-blue envelopes were filed with the other testimonials.