Polly Chalmers's arthritis relief

Polly Chalmers’s arthritis relief is an abrupt improvement in a long-standing, painful condition, experienced as a return to ordinary use of her hands after she receives an azka charm from Leland Gaunt. The relief is both practical and emotionally persuasive: Polly can sew again and believes she is well, while Alan Pangborn sees the charm as a possible instrument of Gaunt’s influence and struggles to make her doubt its benefit.

The condition and the change

Polly’s hands have been impaired by chronic arthritis. Her crooked fingers and Heberden’s nodes remain visible even as the swelling diminishes, making the change less a disappearance of the condition than a marked alteration in what her hands can do. The contrast is especially clear at the sewing shop: after pain had forced her to leave work early the previous Friday, she is singing and using a sewing machine again when Rosalie Drake returns.

The improvement is measurable in movement as well as in Polly’s account of pain. She slowly curls her fingers into loose fists and opens them again, carefully but successfully. She tells Rosalie that she has not been able to make that motion for at least a month; privately, the loss of that ability had lasted longer, since April or May, and making a fist had brought serious pain. The careful movement gives the change a concrete measure: this is not merely a better mood, but a newly available action.

Polly does not describe the improvement as an ordinary remission. She acknowledges that she has experienced periods of reduced symptoms over the previous five or six years, but insists that even her best earlier spells did not feel like this. In her judgment, the difference is fundamental: she feels almost well again. Her certainty draws on years of living with the condition, even as the suddenness of the change leaves its cause open to question.

The charm and its perceived effects

Polly’s improvement follows her receipt of the azka from Leland Gaunt, and she treats the timing as evidence that the charm works. When she explains this to Alan, she recalls that two days earlier, while in agony, she had begun to consider double amputation as a possible solution. By the time she speaks with him, the pain has receded to what her doctor calls fugitive pain, which she feels may be disappearing. She compares her willingness to try the charm with having tried a brown-rice diet the year before: in her view, seeking relief is not inherently irrational when pain has so narrowed her choices.

The object itself intensifies the disagreement. Alan sees a small, irregular silver piece, its lower half pierced with tiny holes. As he looks at it, he feels an immediate aversion and resists an impulse to take it from Polly. She says it sometimes feels as if something moves inside it, but presents that impression lightly. When she puts the charm back beneath her blouse and fastens the buttons with fingers that are plainly more limber, Alan’s unease diminishes only temporarily; his suspicion that Gaunt is conning her remains.

The scene gives the charm two competing meanings without resolving them through Polly’s experience alone. For Polly, its apparent effect is compelling because it answers an urgent need and restores activities she had lost. For Alan, the improvement is real enough to trouble his skepticism, but its association with Gaunt makes it dangerous rather than reassuring. He wonders whether belief might somehow have unlocked a healing capacity, while recognizing that he has no basis for claiming that a person can simply think away a physical disease.

Polly and Alan’s disagreement

Polly’s defense of the charm is also a defense of her knowledge of her own body. She reminds Alan that he does not live with the oversized telephone buttons or the oversized Percodan prescription. Her anger has a personal context: on Sunday she had been as doubtful as he is now, but the change since then has made it difficult to accept his attempt to explain it away. She is not arguing from abstract faith alone; she is comparing the pain and function she knows with the condition she is experiencing now.

Alan approaches the subject cautiously, trying to suggest that her improvement could have another explanation. Polly answers that she knows what her own remissions feel like and that this is different. Her response makes the conflict more complicated than a simple opposition between reason and superstition. Alan has cause to mistrust Gaunt, while Polly has immediate evidence in her hands and a history against which she can judge the change. Neither can settle the question for the other.

The exchange also shows how relief can become persuasive before its source is understood. Polly’s fingers can close more easily, and that physical change lends authority to the charm. Alan’s concern, meanwhile, is heightened by the object’s association with Gaunt and his awareness that Polly is not the only person he may be deceiving. The relief therefore binds Polly more closely to a questionable transaction even as it gives her genuine-seeming respite from pain.

Narrative significance

Polly’s arthritis relief matters because it turns a supernatural bargain into an intimate, bodily question. The charm is not attractive only as a mysterious object: it appears to answer years of pain, the daily limitations of impaired hands, and a moment when Polly had considered an extreme response to her suffering. The more concrete the benefit seems—the reduced swelling, the returned movement, the sewing machine—the harder it is for Alan to challenge the means by which it arrived.

The episode preserves the difference between symptom relief and certainty about cause. Polly’s improvement is presented through specific changes in pain and movement, but Alan’s suspicion about Gaunt is not disproved, and Polly’s confidence does not establish what the charm has done. That unresolved tension is central to the event: bodily relief can be real as an experience while remaining entangled with manipulation, doubt, and the desire to believe that suffering has finally lifted.