by Andrew Potok
“Forty-three,” I said.
“There, you see,” he squealed, jumping a little. “That is very close. I can read it in your eyes. I have also read, my dear American friend, the following facts: You do have retinitis pigmentosa. Yes, that is true. You also have poor circulation and acid in your stomach. How do I know all this, you might ask? Ah, my friend, these are the secrets of the eyes. It is all there, waiting to be deciphered.” He rubbed his hands together. “Now, you must listen to me with diligence. You see, dear chap, if you have a carpet . . .”
“A what?” I asked.
“A carpet, a carpet—like this one here,” he said, pointing to the oriental rug on the floor. “If it is stained and filthy dirty, it is your duty to clean it up.” He paused. “You must scrub your carpet until it looks new,” he said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “It is, dear friend, just like your retina, this carpet.” He pronounced retina as if it rhymed with vagina. “Your retina is dirty and filthy. It needs cleaning.” He leaned toward me and whispered in conspiratorial fashion: “Your optic nerve is not damaged, and so you will never be blind. But you must do what I say to wipe your dirty retina clean.” He sat up straight. “You must wash your eyes twice a day by putting lukewarm water into your cupped hands, so, then blinking in the water eight times with each eye. You will see what marvels may be accomplished by this simple procedure.” He demonstrated eight exaggerated blinks in the air. “Then you must gently massage your eyes with your fingers. Like so. Very soothing.” His eyes remained closed. “Write all this down.” He waited. I had no pen and couldn’t see anyway. “A half hour before meals, you must drink a glass of lukewarm water, which will help the acid in your stomach.” I never had, as far as I know, excess acid in my stomach. “Then you must take vitamins . . . let us say B and D.” He looked up as if for divine inspiration. “Now, because your circulation is not what it should be, abstain once a week from eating meat. All the blood normally helping your digestion will rush up to your eyes. It will refresh them like a summer rain.”
We sat silently for a while as he cleaned his gold-rimmed little glasses on a cloth. “Do you wear spectacles, my friend?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Will you be good enough to show them to me?” I fished in my pocket and gave him my glasses. He examined them and said: “These spectacles are plus two hundred.” He knitted his brow and raised his index finger. “I can give you new ones that are only plus one-fifty. Now, you tell me, my friend. You are an intelligent man. Would you prefer to keep the two hundreds like the two thick blankets of an old man, or the one-fifties, the one-and-a-half blankets of a younger man?”
I said I would keep my glasses for the moment. He looked disappointed.
I tried to cheer him up by telling him about Helga. It had been his show, but I had some pretty amusing material of my own. “I am being stung by bees,” I began.
“Where, where?” he yelped.
“I don’t mean here, doctor. I mean I go daily to a woman who says she can cure me with bee stings.”
“Curious,” he said. “Very curious. But God’s ways are strange and wonderful. You will be all right,” he said, taking my hand in his. He extended my index finger and rubbed it gently back and forth. “This finger is like your optic nerve,” he said, rubbing back and forth, back and forth, “and the palm of your hand is like your retina. The nerve is strong and healthy. . . .” His head was nodding now as he rubbed, and his chair moved slightly forward and back. He was in a kind of trance as he swayed, eyes closed. I felt embarrassed.
“The nerve will fight the retina,” he announced, “and the nerve will win.”
“What do you mean ‘the nerve will win’?” I asked angrily.
“Ah, it is a struggle for health. . . .”
“It is not,” I said loudly.
“My friend, my friend,” he pleaded, “I am the doctor, do not forget. . . .”
“Oh, Helga,” I muttered under my breath.
“Medicine is not only fact. Far from it, far from it,” he said. I got up, and he asked me to visit him again on my next trip to London.
“When you return,” he said, “I can compare photographs. . . .”
“Photographs? What photographs?” I asked.
“The ones I snapped under the cloth,” he said. I was slowly moving toward the door. “In England,” he confided, “we charge ten pounds, preferably cash, if you can, my friend.”
I paid and ran down the carpeted stairs, sideswiping Bemari’s dowdy English secretary at the bottom. “I say, Mr. Potok,” she said.
“Open the door,” I commanded, and she scurried around the corner to press the bell that released the door lock.
“How could you do that to me?” I asked Dr. Ryder on the telephone. “The man is a charlatan. Wipe him off your list.”
“Well,” he said as I heard him puff on his pipe, “terribly sorry, old chap, really, terribly sorry.”
When Sarah came back from the south of England, I begged her, my Antigone, to do some more library work with me. We went again to the Swiss Cottage Library and came back with a pile of books on magic, quackery, and medicine.
We found some description of Bemari’s methods. It was called “irido-diagnosis” and claimed that the configuration of the iris, as the lines of the palm of the hand, was the key to the body’s functioning. Irido-diagnosticians divide the circular iris—suspended in the aqueous humor, perforated by the pupil and made of loose vascular connective tissue that, according to the distribution of melanin, shows up brown, or blue, green, or hazel—into some forty segments that, through some metaphysical chemistry, connect to the body’s organs and systems.
One book traced the idea for this early-warning system to the wizard Valentine, a medieval magician whose life and thought have otherwise passed unnoticed. It has been taken up again in this century and, until very recently, flourished mostly in Europe, but together with many other alternative methods so long disgraced in the United States, it has now made its way to America, especially to California. Like the dashboard of a car, the iris indicates the body’s unfastened seat belt, dangerous exhaust emissions, faulty brakes.
Signs are everywhere. Some show up on various parts of the body as lines, marks, lumps, or patterns, formed at birth or wrought by age and habit and illness. Others are conveniently placed in nature—God’s hidden messages— and fall into a dogma called the “Doctrine of Signatures,” which proclaims everything as a sign for everything else. Plants and minerals are blessed by natural signs or symbols indicating their medical use. Yellow wildflowers are thus presumed effective in cases of jaundice; “scorpion grass,” now called forget-me-nots, as an antidote to the scorpion’s sting; kidney-shaped weeds for renal conditions; “eye bright,” so named for its resemblance to an eye, for the maladies of that organ; the human shape of the mandrake root for almost everything troubling the species.
Sarah and I read about transferring one’s disease to rocks and stones. We read of amulets and scarabs, healing chants and charms, of strange manipulations, putrid inhalations. We read about remedies whose secret ingredients and passionate rituals made us blush with recognition. We recognized the vigor of impotent healers in Charles II’s frenzied physicians, who, on his deathbed, “drained his blood, scarified his flesh, tapped his veins, blistered his scalp, plastered his feet with pitch, blew hellebore up his nose, poured antimony and zinc down his throat, gave him julep for his spasms and purged his bowels.” In the feverish attempt to maintain life in the royal carcass, “they administered bezoar stones and heart tonics and, as a last resort, Charles’ own quack remedy, the King’s Drops.”
We found little about bees, although in 1716 a fellow named Salmon wrote in the London Dispensatory that “the whole Bee in Pouder given inwardly provokes Urine, opens all stoppages of Veins, breaks the Stone, is good against Cancer, Schirrus Tumors, the King’s Evil, Dropsie, dimness of Sight. They treat the Humour and restore Health. Their Ashes, made in to an Oyntm
ent cause Hair to grow specially in bald places.”
“Hey, Papa,” Sarah said, “your hair, too!”
Everywhere, we found claims for panaceas. Whether the versatile bee or the filings of the single horn of the unicorn (without which the savvy medieval traveler hardly ventured from the safety of home), they provided a cure for everything from the pox to impotence. Helga herself claimed cures for “arthritis and rheumatic disease, skin afflictions like weeping eczema, dermatitis, urticaria, and for asthma, hay fever, sinusitis, and diabetes. . . .” To me privately she added muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and dystonia, hereditary myopia, glaucoma, uveitis.
Even in the esoteric little world of retinitis pigmentosa, cures and cure-alls vied for patients. Friends began sending me articles from popular magazines, scandal sheets, and reputable scientific journals announcing new therapies, cataloging their many direct and indirect benefits, quoting witnesses and the newly “cured.” The British press, too, began to carry articles on RP cures in different parts of the world. Collections were taken, funds raised, labor and management donating in a teary spirit of unity to send RP kids for spectacular treatment with placental-tissue grafts, soups of ribonucleic acid, heavy metals, leucocytes, megadoses of restorative elixirs and potent chemicals. They were being shipped to Oregon, Boston, or New York, to Moscow, Switzerland, Brazil, or India, to Bulgaria, Rumania, or California. And everywhere someone got his money’s worth; someone produced for the hungry press, the donating bank managers, union leaders, tax accountants. DELIRIOUS MOTHER GIVES BABY LIFE OF SIGHT screamed the Daily Express or Mail or Standard, above pictures of pudgy Teresa, Leona, Georgina, with the Kremlin or the jungles of South America or the portico of a prestigious medical school in the background. IMPROVEMENT IN EVERY CASE TREATED roared some vitamin-pushing monthly or the Annals of American Science. I imagined Finland Station crowds cheering at Victoria or Waterloo or Paddington as half-blind children returned from around the globe, sight promised for life, while Sarah and I, obscure and uncelebrated, were being methodically punctured by mutant bees raised in a suburban semidetached by a bitter, raging old lady.
In all of this, healing began to appear more complex than our imaginations had allowed. As we chuckled at the cures of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, the Greeks, the Saxons, the medieval Europeans, we began to realize that turtles’ brains, verdigris, and the saltpeter of Upper Egypt cured people. Fixed within their ancient paradigm, these remedies cured for the same reasons much of our medicine cures: faith and imagination and will. Sometimes they cured scientifically, because the prescribed goat liver throbbed with vitamin A. Mostly, they healed, as we still often heal, because of our bodies’ own restorative power, unless those powers are incapacitated by too much tampering.
We read about Emile Coué, a French chemist of the early part of this century, who was impressed by cures he effected by mistakenly handing out capsules of distilled water. He opened a free clinic in Nancy and lectured extensively on the power of autosuggestion. His motto was: Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Couéism stressed the education of the imagination, not the training of the will. There is, he said, a receptive ambience of the mind that can be brought to bear on disease through disciplined enlightenment. The power for self-healing is buried deep within, Coué thought, and we are all capable of peeling off the repressed layers of rationalism to uncover it.
Sarah’s eyes burned from so much reading. She closed them and leaned back against the wall. I suspected that we both had learned too much about suggestion and placebo to be affected by it.
Most of my life I had escaped RP treatments. What I couldn’t always escape was the advice of my mother’s customers and friends who, like her, could not accept the fact that this blight of mine was incurable. In the chic grayness of my mother’s showrooms, they sat with her after a fitting and filled her head with fabulous stories of the “biggest doctor in New York” or Texas or all of Europe. To satisfy her, I occasionally chose from a long accumulating list, that included a rejuvenation clinic in the Bahamas and the latest marvel of Bulgarian ophthalmology. Once I chose a Park Avenue doctor because his office was reputed to be a prototype of modern interior design.
It was indeed sumptuous, with wall-to-wall fish tanks, whose inhabitants lived in a splendor equaled only by the environments created at the Museum of Natural History. Philodendrons crawled along thick and springy carpets, choice lemon trees stood among the Eames and Le Corbusier chairs, while soft indirect light soothed one’s weary eyes.
Her auburn hair washed with streaks of gold, the doctor’s secretary took my history and asked me to read a hand-held eye chart in a long hallway.
“Why here?” I asked. “Doesn’t the doctor want to do that in his office?”
“This is not for correction,” she said with a hint of a French accent. “It is simply to form a general picture.”
“I can’t see a thing in this hall,” I said despondently. “I don’t want to do the chart now.” I felt humiliated by my eyes in front of this fancy, attractive lady.
The doctor himself was from one of those countries supposed to have produced the very finest of that year’s eye specialists. Head to toe, he was pure Gucci-St. Laurent. After examining my eyes, he dictated to his cashmere-and-tweed secretary, as he looked out the window, tapping on his clipboard with bronzed fingers. “Advanced retinitis pigmentosa,” he said in a bewitching Mediterranean accent. “Heavy pigment distributed over both retinas, a pale spiculated optic nerve, constricted vessels, incipient cataracts . . . ,” on and on. He was saying nothing I hadn’t heard before, but he wasn’t even speaking to me. After a musical dictation, he turned to me. “You must move to Arizona,” he said. “Perhaps New Mexico . . . ,” where the climate, I supposed, would have soothed my frayed and weathered retinas.
“I am a painter, you know,” I blurted out for no apparent reason.
“Yes, I know. I own one of your prints. . . .”
“Really?” I said.
“It hangs in the hallway. Can you see it in that light?”
“No,” I said, “not in there.”
“Oh, dear,” said his secretary.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I can still paint.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, looking down.
“Come back in a year,” the doctor said. “In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you started to learn some braille.”
How I hated these doctor relationships. They made me feel poor and stupid and like a bad child who had gotten sick with a disease they couldn’t fix.
Even Sarah, so new at the doctor game, had already accumulated her share of experiences. At one point, Dr. Berson, pursuing a tempting hypothesis, asked her and other teenagers with RP to volunteer occluding one eye for a period of several years. He had observed that the retinas of laboratory rats exposed to strong light deteriorated much faster than the retinas of rats living in darkness. He arranged with an artist to paint a likeness of the patient’s eye on the opaque contact lens so that, though effectively blinded, the eye appeared normal. The stakes were high: sacrifice one eye for years in the hope that it would be preserved for future use. Sarah thought about it for a few weeks, had several nightmares, and decided not to participate in the program.
Sarah was giggling now. “Papa, listen to this. It’s advice to doctors,” she said. “It’s from the Turner book.”
When called to a patient, commend yourself to God and to the angel who guided Tobias. On this we may learn as much as possible from the messenger so that if you can discover nothing from the patient’s pulse, you may still astonish him and gain his confidence from your knowledge of the case. On arrival, ask the friends if the patient had confessed, for if you bid him to do so after the examination, it will frighten him. Do not be in a hurry to give an opinion, for his friends will be more grateful for your judgment if they have to wait for it. Tell the patient you will, with God’s help, cure him, but inform his friends that the cure is
a serious one. Suppose you know nothing, say there’s an obstruction of the liver. Perhaps the patient will reply, “Nay, Master, it’s my head or my legs that trouble me.” Repeat that it comes from the liver and repeatedly use the word obstruction for patients do not understand it, which is important.
Later that day, Sarah came across a plaintive wail from a monk at the time of the closing of the English monasteries. “I have no other means for my maintenance but to turn physician. God knows how many men’s lives it will cost.”
A week after she left, Helga came back from Abu Dhabi. She called early in the morning to announce her return. “I have sold out to the Arabs,” she said. “Everything. I leave in October.”
“Really, Mrs. Barnes?” I said. October sounded safe enough. If I weren’t cured by October . . . “Can you take all that heat, that desert?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“The heat? What do I care about the heat? They are building me a clinic. They have already started. I will see only as many patients as I like. They will give me a beautiful house to live in, a lot of servants, a lot of money. . . .”
“But it’s so far away from everything you know,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she answered. “I will put that filthy Abu Dhabi on the map for them. I have arranged to spend seven months of the year there, the rest in England, if the revenue man doesn’t take it all away from me. These Arabs love me,” she continued, “and what can those dirty Americans do for me except send me more blighters like you?”
When Sarah and I went for our treatment, Helga was flushed with rage. It seemed to have nothing to do with us. She stomped her hard black shoes on the floor, screaming that no one in the West cared about her; that people were begging the postman for her address, then lining up outside her door, waiting to be cured. I wondered what had really happened to her on the banks of the Persian Gulf.
I tried to imagine her life outside these rooms. I tried to picture a history, a childhood, the pangs and dreams of adolescence. Locked within the tangle of her craziness was her battered persona, a one-dimensional mask. I tried to picture her husband, their touching each other, sex. “Commander Barnes was a very proper man,” she had said. “Our marriage was made in heaven.” And once she complained bitterly that a young Australian woman had dissipated her cure by too much sex. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she had said. “You can do it sometimes just by thinking about it too much.”
