by John Irving
Melony sat for the reading Indian-style--on top of her bed covers, her underpants not quite big enough for her, her hands on her hips, her elbows pointed out like wings, her considerable bosom thrust forward; a bit of her big, bare belly was exposed. Every night, Mrs. Grogan, who directed the girls' division, would say, "Won't you catch cold outside your covers, Melony?"
"Nope," Melony would say, and Mrs. Grogan would sigh--it was almost a groan. That was her nickname: Mrs. Groan. Her authority rested in her ability to make the girls think that they caused her pain by doing harm to themselves or each other.
"Oh, that hurts me to see that," she would tell them when they fought, pulled hair, gouged eyeballs, bit each other in the face. "That really hurts me." Her method was effective with the girls who liked her. It was not effective with Melony. Mrs. Grogan was especially fond of Melony, but she felt she was a failure at making Melony like her.
"Oh, it hurts me, Melony, to see you catching cold--outside your covers," Mrs. Grogan would say, "only partially clothed. That really hurts me."
But Melony would stay put, her eyes never leaving Homer Wells. She was bigger than Mrs. Grogan, she was too big for the girls' division. She was too big to be adopted. She's too big to be a girl, thought Homer Wells. Bigger than Nurse Edna, bigger than Nurse Angela--almost as big as Dr. Larch--she was fat, but her fat looked solid. Although he had not competed in the three-legged race for several years, Homer Wells also knew that Melony was strong. Homer had decided not to compete as long as he would be paired with Melony--and he would be paired with her as long as he was the oldest boy and she was the oldest girl.
In reading aloud from Jane Eyre, Homer needed to keep his eyes off Melony; one look at her would remind him of having his leg tied to hers. He sensed that she resented his withdrawal from the annual competition. He was also afraid that she might sense how he liked her heaviness--how fat, to an orphan, seemed such good fortune.
The sweeter passages of Jane Eyre (too sweet, for Homer Wells) brought tears to the eyes of the girls in the girls' division, and drew the most plaintive sighs and moans from Mrs. Grogan, but these same, sweeter passages extracted from Melony the most tortured breathing--as if sweetness provoked in her an anger barely restrainable.
The end of Chapter Four provided Melony with too much anger to restrain.
" 'That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony,' " Homer Wells read to them; hearing Melony hiss at the words "peace" and "harmony," he bravely read on. " 'And in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchanting stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs,' " Homer continued, glad there was only one more sentence to get through; he saw Melony's broad chest heave. " 'Even for me [chirped little Jane Eyre], life had its gleams of sunshine.' "
" 'Gleams of sunshine'!" Melony shouted in violent disbelief. "Let her come here! Let her show me the gleams of sunshine!"
"Oh, how it hurts me, Melony--to hear you say that," Mrs. Grogan said.
"Sunshine?" Melony said with a howl. The younger girls crawled all the way under their bedcovers; some of them began to cry.
"The pain this causes me, I don't know if I can bear it, Melony," Mrs. Grogan said.
Homer Wells slipped away. It was the end of the chapter, anyway. He was due at the boys' division. This time the giggles attendant on his departure were mixed with sobs and with Melony's derision.
"Gleams!" Melony called after him.
"How this hurts us all," Mrs. Grogan said more firmly.
Outside, the night seemed full of new scents to Homer Wells. Mingled with the sawdust smell and the rank cigars, was that a waft of the raucous perfume drifting over him from the former whore hotel? And something like sweat from the bingo-for-money room? The river itself gave off a smell.
In the boys' division, they were waiting for him. Some of the smaller ones had fallen asleep. The others were open-eyed--seemingly, open-mouthed, like baby birds; Homer felt he was rushing from nest to nest, his voice feeding them as they always cried for more. His reading, like food, made them sleepy, but it often woke Homer up. He usually lay awake after the nightly benediction--the ince in "Princes" and the ing in "Kings" still rang in the dark room. Sometimes he wished he could sleep in the baby room; the constant waking and crying there might be more rhythmic.
The older orphans had their irritating habits. One of Nurse Edna's John Wilburs slept on a rubber sheet; Homer would lie awake, waiting to hear him wet his bed. Some nights Homer would wake the child, march him to the toilet, point his tiny pecker in the right direction, and whisper, "Pee, John Wilbur. Pee now. Pee here." The child, asleep on his feet, would hold it back, waiting for the welcoming rubber sheet, that familiar dent and warm puddle in the bed.
Some nights, when he felt irritable, Homer Wells would simply stand by John Wilbur's bedside and whisper his command in the boy's ear: "Pee!" With almost instantaneous results!
More upsetting was Nurse Angela's name-child, the sickly little Fuzzy Stone. Fuzzy had a cough, a constant dry hack. He had wet, red eyes. He slept inside a humidified tent; a waterwheel cranked by a battery and a fan to distribute the vapor ran all night. Fuzzy Stone's chest sounded like a tiny, failing motor; the damp, cool sheets enclosing him fluttered through the night like the tissue of a giant, semi-transparent lung. The waterwheel, the fan, Fuzzy Stone's dramatic gasps--they merged in Homer's mind. If one of the three were to stop, Homer doubted he'd know which two were still alive.
Dr. Larch told Homer that he suspected Fuzzy Stone was allergic to dust; that the boy was born and slept in a former sawmill was doubtlessly not the best thing for him. A child with chronic bronchitis was not easily adoptable. Who wants to take home a cough?
When Fuzzy Stone's coughing was too much for Homer Wells, when the various engines that struggled to maintain Fuzzy were too much on Homer's mind--lungs, waterwheel and fan--Homer would quietly seek out the baby room. Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna was always there, usually awake and tending to one of the babies. Sometimes, when the babies were quiet, even the nurse on duty was sleeping, and Homer Wells would tiptoe past them all.
One night he saw one of the mothers standing in the baby room. She did not appear to be looking for her baby in particular; she was just standing in her hospital gown in the middle of the baby room, her eyes closed, absorbing the smells and sounds of the baby room through her other senses. Homer was afraid the woman would wake up Nurse Angela, who was dozing on the duty bed; Nurse Angela would have been cross with her. Slowly, as Homer imagined you might assist a sleepwalker, he led the woman back to the mothers' room.
The mothers were often awake when he went to peek in on them. Sometimes he would get someone a glass of water.
The women who came to St. Cloud's for the abortions rarely stayed overnight. They required less time to recover than the women who had delivered, and Dr. Larch discovered that they were most comfortable if they arrived in the morning, shortly before light, and left in the early evening, just after dark. In the daytime, the sound of the babies was not so prevailing because the noise the older orphans made, and the talk among the mothers and the nurses, confused everything. It was the sound of the newborn babies that, Dr. Larch observed, upset the women having the abortions. At night--except for John Wilbur's peeing and Fuzzy Stone's cough--the waking babies and the owls made the only sounds at St. Cloud's.
It was a simple enough observation to make: the women having abortions were not comforted to hear the cries and prattle of the newborn. You could not plan the exact hour for a delivery, but Larch tried to plan the abortions for the early morning, which gave the women the whole day to recover and allowed them to be gone by evening. Some of the women traveled a long way--in these cases, Larch recommended that they come to St. Cloud's the night before their abortions, when he could give them something strong to help them sleep; they'd have the whole of the next day to recover.
If one of those women spent the night, it was never in the room with the expectant or delivered mothers. Homer Wells--in his insomniac tour
of St. Cloud's--saw that, in sleep, the expressions of these overnight visitors were no more nor less troubled than the expressions of the women who were having (or who'd already had) babies. Homer Wells would try to imagine his own mother among the faces of the sleeping and the wakeful women. Where was she waiting to get back to--when the pain of her labor was behind her? Or was there no place she wanted to go? And what, when she was lying there, was his father thinking--if he even knew he was a father? If she even knew who he was.
These are the things the women would say to him:
"Are you in training to be a doctor?"
"Are you going to be a doctor when you grow up?"
"Are you one of the orphans?"
"How old are you? Hasn't anyone adopted you yet?"
"Did someone send you back?"
"Do you like it here?"
And he would answer:
"I might become a doctor."
"Of course Doctor Larch is a good teacher."
"That's right: one of the orphans."
"Almost sixteen. I tried being adopted, but it just wasn't for me."
"I wanted to come back."
"Of course I like it here!"
One of the women--very expectant, her belly huge under a taut sheet--asked him, "Do you mean, if someone wanted to adopt you, you wouldn't go?"
"I wouldn't go," said Homer Wells. "Right."
"You wouldn't even consider it?" the woman asked. He almost couldn't look at her--she seemed so ready to explode.
"Well, I guess I'd think about it," Homer Wells said. "But I'd probably decide to stay, as long as I can help out around here--you know, be of use."
The pregnant woman began to cry. "Be of use," she said, as if she'd learned to repeat the pigtails of sentences from listening to Homer Wells. She pulled down the sheet, she pulled up her hospital gown; Nurse Edna had already shaved her. She put her hands on her great belly. "Look at that," she whispered. "You want to be of use?"
"Right," said Homer Wells, who held his breath.
"No one but me ever put a hand on me, to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen," the woman said. "You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick, or listen to it move."
"I don't know," said Homer Wells.
"Don't you want to touch it or put your ear down to it?" the woman asked him.
"Okay," said Homer Wells, putting his hand on the woman's hot, hard belly.
"Put your ear down against it, too," the woman advised him.
"Right," Homer said. He touched his ear very lightly to her stomach but she strongly pressed his face against her; she was like a drum--all pings! and pongs! She was a warm engine--shut off, but still tapping with heat. If Homer had been to the ocean, he would have recognized that she was like the tide, like surf--surging in and out and back and forth.
"No one should have a baby if there's no one who wants to sleep with his head right there," the woman whispered, patting the place where she roughly held Homer's face. Right where? Homer wondered, because there was no comfortable place to put his head, no place between her breasts and her belly that wasn't round. Her breasts, at least, looked comfortable, but he knew that wasn't where she wanted his head. He found it hard to imagine, from all the noise and motion inside her, that the woman was carrying only one baby. Homer Wells thought that the woman was going to give birth to a tribe.
"You want to be of use?" the woman asked him, crying gently now.
"Yes. Be of use," he said.
"Sleep right here," the woman told him. He pretended to sleep with his face against the noisy boulder, where she held him snug. He knew when her water had broken before she knew it--she had fallen that soundly asleep. He went and found Nurse Edna without waking the woman, who before dawn delivered a seven-pound baby girl. Since neither Nurse Edna nor Nurse Angela was in charge of naming the girl orphans, after a few days someone there gave her a name--probably Mrs. Grogan, who favored Irish names, or if Mrs. Grogan had momentarily exhausted her supply, the secretary who typed badly and was responsible for "Melony" instead of "Melody"; she also enjoyed naming the little girls.
Homer Wells never knew which one she was, but he kept looking for her, as if his nighttime vigil with his face upon the mother's jumping belly might have given him the senses necessary to recognize her child.
He never would recognize her, of course. All he had to go on was the fluid sound of her, and how she'd moved under his ear, in the dark. But he kept looking; he watched the girls in the girls' division as if he expected her to do something that would give her away.
He even admitted his private game to Melony once, but Melony was, typically, derisive. "Just what do you think the kid's going to do so you'll know which one she is?" Melony asked. "Is she going to gurgle, is she going to fart--or kick you in the ear?"
But Homer Wells knew he was just playing a game by himself, with himself; orphans are notorious for interior games. For example, one of the oldest games that orphans play is imagining that their parents want them back--that their parents are looking for them. But Homer had spent an evening with the mystery baby's mother; he'd heard all about the mystery baby's father--and his lack of interest in the matter. Homer knew that the mystery baby's parents weren't looking for her; that may have been why he decided he'd look for her. If that baby girl was growing up, and if she was playing the old orphans' game, wouldn't it be better if there was at least someone who was looking for her--even if it was just another orphan?
Dr. Larch tried to talk to Homer about Melony's anger.
"Anger is a funny thing," Dr. Larch began, believing that anger was an unfunny thing.
"I mean, I agree, the passage about the 'gleams of sunshine'--okay, it's sappy," Homer said. "It's one of those things--it makes you wince when you read it, but it's just what Jane would say, it's just like her, so what can you do?" Homer asked. "But Melony was violent about it."
Dr. Larch knew that Melony was one of the few orphans still at St. Cloud's who was not born at St. Cloud's. She'd been left at the hospital entrance one early morning when she'd been four or five; she was always so big for her age, it had been hard to tell how old she was. She hadn't talked until she was eight or nine. At first, Larch thought she might be retarded, but that wasn't the problem.
"Melony was always angry," Dr. Larch tried to explain. "We don't know about her origins, or her early years, and she may not know herself what all the sources of her anger are." Larch was deliberating--whether or not he should tell Homer Wells that Melony had been adopted and had been returned more times than Homer. "Melony had several unfortunate experiences in foster homes," Dr. Larch said cautiously. "If you have the opportunity to ask her about her experiences--and if she wants to talk about them--it might provide her with a welcome release for some of her anger."
"Ask her about her experiences," said Homer Wells, shaking his head. "I don't know," he said. "I never tried to talk to her."
Dr. Larch already regretted his suggestion. Perhaps Melony would remember her first foster family and tell Homer about them; they had sent her back because she allegedly bit the family dog in an altercation concerning a ball. It wasn't just the one fracas that upset the family; they claimed that Melony repeatedly bit the dog. For weeks after the incident, she would creep up on the animal and surprise it when it was eating, or when it was asleep. The family accused Melony of driving the dog crazy.
Melony had run away from the second and third families, alleging that the men in the families, either fathers or brothers, had taken a sexual interest in her. The fourth family claimed that Melony had taken a sexual interest in a younger, female child. In the case of number five: the husband and wife eventually separated because of Melony's relationship with the husband--the wife claimed that her husband had seduced Melony, the husband claimed that Melony had seduced (he said "attacked") him. Melony was not ambiguous about the matter. "No one seduces me!" she told Mrs. Grogan proudly. In the case of number six: the husband had died of a h
eart attack shortly after Melony's arrival, and the wife had sent the girl back to St. Cloud's because she felt unequipped for the task of raising Melony alone. (Melony's only remark to Mrs. Grogan had been: "You bet she's unequipped!")
All this, suddenly, Dr. Larch imagined Homer hearing firsthand from Melony; the vision disturbed him. He feared that he had made Homer Wells his apprentice--an attendant to the gritty operation of St. Cloud's--while at the same time he could not resist screening the boy from some of the harder truths.
It was so like Nurse Angela, of course, to call Homer Wells "angelic," and so like Nurse Edna to speak of the boy's "perfection" and of his "innocence," but Dr. Larch worried about Homer's contact with the damaged women who sought the services of St. Cloud's--those departing mothers in whose characters and histories the boy must be seeking some definition of his own mother. And the troubled women who were scraped clean and went away leaving no one behind (just the products of conception)--what impression did they make on the boy?
Homer Wells had a good, open face; it was not a face that could hide things--every feeling and thought was visible upon it, the way a lake in the open reflects every weather. He had a good hand for holding and eyes you could confess to; Dr. Larch was worried about the specific details of the life stories Homer would be exposed to--not simply the sordidness but also the abundant rationalizations he would hear.
And now Melony, the undisputed heavyweight of the girls' division, had disturbed the boy with her anger--with what Dr. Larch suspected was only the tip of the iceberg of her power; her potential for educating Homer Wells seemed to be both terrible and vast.
Melony began her contribution to Homer's education the very next evening when he read to the girls' division. Homer had arrived early (hoping to leave early), but he found the girls' dormitory quarters in disarray. Many of the girls were out of their beds--some of them shrieking when they saw him; their legs were bare. Homer was embarrassed; he stood under the hanging bulb in the communal bedroom, searching the room without success for Mrs. Grogan, who was always nice to him, and clutching his copy of Jane Eyre in both hands--as if the wild girls were likely to tear it away from him.