by John Irving
I desired liberty . . .
But it would have been cruel to continue. Jane Eyre had already made her point. Homer and Melony had already had several such afternoons--those days that tire you out about your whole life!
This night the air between the girls' and boys' division seemed odorless and void of history. It was simply dark outside.
When he went back to the boys' division, Nurse Angela told him that John Wilbur was gone--adopted!
"A nice family," Nurse Angela told Homer happily. "The father of the family used to be a bed-wetter. They're going to be very sympathetic."
As was Dr. Larch's habit, when someone was adopted, his routine benediction to the boys in the darkness was altered slightly. Before he addressed them as "Princes of Maine," as "Kings of New England," he made an oddly formal announcement.
"Let us be happy for John Wilbur," Wilbur Larch said. "He has found a family. Good night, John," Dr. Larch said, and the boys murmured after him:
"Good night, John!"
"Good night, John Wilbur."
And Dr. Larch would pause respectfully before saying the usual: "Good night, you Princes of Maine--you Kings of New England!"
Homer Wells looked at a little of Gray's Anatomy in the candlelight allowed him before he tried to go to sleep. It was not just John Wilbur's peeing that was missing from the night; something else was gone. It took Homer a while to detect what was absent; it was the silence that finally informed him. Fuzzy Stone and his noisy apparatus had been taken to the hospital. Apparently, the breathing contraption--and Fuzzy--required more careful monitoring, and Dr. Larch had moved the whole business into the private room, next to surgery, where Nurse Edna or Nurse Angela could keep a closer eye on Fuzzy.
It was not until Homer Wells had some experience with dilatation and curettage that he would know what Fuzzy Stone resembled: he looked like an embryo--Fuzzy Stone looked like a walking, talking fetus. That was what was peculiar about the way you could almost see through Fuzzy's skin, and his slightly caved-in shape; that was what made him appear so especially vulnerable. He looked as if he were not yet alive but still in some stage of development that should properly be carried on inside the womb. Dr. Larch told Homer that Fuzzy had been born prematurely--that Fuzzy's lungs had never adequately developed. Homer would not have a picture of what this meant until he confronted the few recognizable parts in his first look at the standard procedure for removing the products of conception.
"Are you listening, Homer?" Wilbur Larch asked, when the procedure was over.
"Yes," Homer Wells said.
"I'm not saying it's right, you understand? I'm saying it's her choice--it's a woman's choice. She's got a right to have a choice, you understand?" Larch asked.
"Right," said Homer Wells.
When he couldn't sleep, he thought about Fuzzy Stone. When Homer went down to the private room, next to surgery, he couldn't hear the breathing apparatus. He stood very still and listened; he could always track Fuzzy down by his sound--lungs, waterwheel and fan--but the silence Homer Wells listened to made a more startling noise to him than the sound of that snake hitting the roof while his finger was in Melony's mouth.
Poor Melony, he thought. She now listened to Jane Eyre as if it were her life story being told to her, and the only thing she ever said to Homer Wells was to remind him of his promise. ("You won't leave here before I do, remember? You promised.")
"Where is he?" Homer asked Dr. Larch. "Where's Fuzzy?"
Dr. Larch was at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office, where he was--very late--almost every night.
"I was thinking of a way to tell you," Larch said.
"You said I was your apprentice, right?" Homer asked him. "If that's what I am, I should be told. If you're teaching me, you can't leave anything out. Right?"
"That's right, Homer," Dr. Larch agreed. How the boy had changed! How does one mark the passage of time in an orphanage? Why hadn't Larch noticed that Homer Wells needed a shave? Why hadn't Larch taught him to do that? I am responsible for everything--if I am going to be responsible at all, Larch reminded himself.
"Fuzzy's lungs weren't strong enough, Homer," Dr. Larch said. "They never developed properly. He was susceptible to every respiratory infection that I ever saw."
Homer Wells let it pass. He regretted that Fuzzy had seen the photograph. Homer was growing up; he was starting the process of holding himself responsible for things. That photograph had upset Fuzzy Stone; there was nothing Homer, or even Dr. Larch, could have done for Fuzzy's lungs, but the photograph hadn't been necessary.
"What are you going to tell the little ones?" Homer asked Dr. Larch.
Wilbur Larch looked at Homer; God, how he loved what he saw! Proud as a father, he had trouble speaking. His affection for Homer Wells had virtually etherized him. "What do you think I should say, Homer?" Dr. Larch asked.
It was Homer's first decision as an adult. He thought about it very carefully. In 193_, he was almost sixteen. He was beginning the process of learning how to be a doctor at a time when most boys his age were learning how to drive a car. Homer had not yet learned how to drive a car; Wilbur Larch had never learned how to drive a car.
"I think," said Homer Wells, "that you should tell the little ones what you usually tell them. You should tell them that Fuzzy has been adopted."
Wilbur Larch watched Homer carefully. In A Brief History of St. Cloud's, he would write, "How I resent fatherhood! The feelings it gives one: they completely ruin one's objectivity, they wreck one's sense of fair play. I worry that I have caused Homer Wells to skip his childhood--I worry that he has absolutely skipped being a child! But many orphans find it easier to skip childhood altogether than to indulge themselves as children when they are orphans. If I helped Homer Wells to skip his childhood, did I help him skip a bad thing? Damn the confusion of feeling like a father! Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from one's vision what correct behavior is." When he wrote that line, Wilbur Larch saw the cloud created in the photographer's studio, the cloud that so falsely edged the photograph of Mrs. Eames's daughter with the pony; he launched off into a paragraph on "clouds." (The terrible weather in inland Maine; "the clouds of St. Cloud's," and so forth.)
When Homer Wells suggested to Dr. Larch that he tell the little ones that Fuzzy Stone had been adopted, Larch knew that Homer was right; there were no clouds around that decision. The next night, Wilbur Larch followed the advice of his young apprentice. Perhaps because he was lying, he forgot the proper routine. Instead of beginning with the announcement about Fuzzy Stone, he gave the usual benediction; he got the whole business out of order.
"Good night, you Princes of Maine--you Kings of New England!" Dr. Larch addressed them in the darkness. Then he remembered what he was supposed to say. "Oh!" he said aloud, in a startled voice that caused one of the little orphans to leap in his bed in fright.
"What's wrong?" cried Snowy Meadows, who was always throwing up; he did not throw up only when confronted with the image of a woman with what he thought was a pony's intestines in her mouth.
"Nothing's wrong!" Dr. Larch said heartily, but the whole room of boys was charged with anxiety. Into this jumpy atmosphere, Larch tried to say the usual about the unusual. "Let us be happy for Fuzzy Stone," Dr. Larch said. Homer Wells knew what was meant when it was said that you could hear a pin drop. "Fuzzy Stone has found a family," Dr. Larch said. "Good night, Fuzzy."
"Good night, Fuzzy!" someone said. But Homer Wells heard a pause in the air; it had all been done out of order, and not everyone was completely convinced.
"Good night, Fuzzy!" Homer Wells said with authority, and a few of the little voices followed him.
"Good night, Fuzzy!"
"Good night, Fuzzy Stone!"
Homer Wells also knew what was meant when it was said that silence could be deafening. After Dr. Larch had left them, little Snowy Meadows was the first to speak.
"Homer?" Snowy said.
"Right here," said Homer
Wells in the darkness.
"How could anyone adopt Fuzzy Stone, Homer?" Snowy Meadows asked.
"Who could do it?" said little Wilbur Walsh.
"Someone with a better machine," said Homer Wells. "Someone who had a better breathing machine than the one Doctor Larch built for Fuzzy. It's a family that knows all about breathing machines. It's the family business," he added. "Breathing machines."
"Lucky Fuzzy!" someone said in a wondering voice.
Homer knew he had convinced them when Snowy Meadows said, "Good night, Fuzzy."
Homer Wells, not yet sixteen--an apprentice surgeon, a veteran insomniac--walked down to the river that had carried away so many pieces of the history of St. Cloud's. The loudness of the river was a comfort to Homer, more comforting than the silence in the sleeping room that night. He stood on the riverbank where the porch to the sawyers' lodge had been, where he'd seen the hawk come from the sky more quickly than the snake could swim to shore--and the snake had been very fast.
If Wilbur Larch had seen Homer there, he would have worried that the boy was saying good-bye to his own childhood--too soon. But Dr. Larch had ether to help him sleep, and Homer Wells had no cure for his insomnia.
"Good night, Fuzzy," Homer said over the river. The Maine woods, typically, let the remark pass, but Homer insisted that he be heard. "Good night, Fuzzy!" he cried as loud as he could. And then louder, "Good night, Fuzzy!" He yelled it and yelled it--the grown-up boy whose crying had once been a legend upriver in Three Mile Falls.
"Good night, Fuzzy Stone!"
4
Young Dr. Wells
"In other parts of the world," wrote Wilbur Larch, "there is what the world calls 'society.' Here in St. Cloud's we have no society--there are not the choices, the better-than or worse-than comparisons that are nearly constant in any society. It is less complicated here, because the choices and comparisons are either obvious or nonexistent. But having so few options is what makes an orphan so desperate to encounter society--any society, the more complex with intrigue, the more gossip-ridden, the better. Given the chance, an orphan throws himself into society--the way an otter takes to the water."
What Wilbur Larch was thinking of, regarding "options," was that Homer Wells had no choice concerning either his apprenticeship or Melony. He and Melony were doomed to become a kind of couple because there was no one else for them to couple with. In society, it would have mattered if they were suited for each other; that they were not suited for each other didn't matter in St. Cloud's. And since Homer had exhausted the resources of the dismal tutors employed at St. Cloud's, what else was there for him to learn if he didn't learn surgery? Specifically, obstetrical procedure. And what was far simpler for Dr. Larch to teach him: dilatation and curettage.
Homer Wells kept his notes in one of Dr. Larch's old medical school notebooks; Larch had been a cramped, sparse notetaker--there was plenty of room. In Larch's opinion, there was no need for Homer to have a notebook of his own. Wilbur Larch had only to look around him to see what paper cost. The trees were gone; they had been replaced by orphans--all for paper.
Under the heading "D&C," Homer wrote: "The woman is most secure in stirrups." In Dr. Larch's procedure, she was also shaved.
"The VAGINAL area is prepared with an ANTISEPTIC SOLUTION," wrote Homer Wells; he did a lot of CAPITALIZING--it was related to his habit of repeating the ends of sentences, or key words. "The UTERUS is examined to estimate its size. One hand is placed on the ABDOMINAL WALL; two or three fingers of the other hand are in the VAGINA. A VAGINAL SPECULUM, which looks like a duck's bill, is inserted in the VAGINA--through which the CERVIX is visible. (The CERVIX," he wrote parenthetically, as if to remind himself, "is the necklike part of the lower, constricted end of the UTERUS.) The hole in the middle of the CERVIX is the entrance of the UTERUS. It is like a cherry Life Saver. In PREGNANCY the CERVIX is swollen and shiny.
"With a series of METAL DILATORS, the CERVIX is dilated to admit entrance of the OVUM FORCEPS. These are tongs with which the doctor grabs at what's inside the UTERUS. He pulls what he can out."
What this was (what Homer meant) was blood and slime. "The products of conception," he called it.
"With a CURETTE," noted Homer, "the WALL OF THE UTERUS is scraped clean. One knows when it's clean when one hears a gritty sound."
And that's all that was entered in the notebook concerning dilatation and the process of curetting. As a footnote to this procedure, Homer added only this: "The WOMB one reads about in literature is that portion of the GENITAL TRACT in which the FERTILIZED OVUM implants itself." A page number was jotted in the margin of this notebook entry--the page in Gray's Anatomy that begins the section "The Female Organs of Generation," where the most useful illustrations and descriptions can be found.
By 194_, Homer Wells (not yet twenty) had been a midwife to countless births and the surgical apprentice to about a quarter as many abortions; he had delivered many children himself, with Dr. Larch always present, but Larch had not allowed Homer to perform an abortion. It was understood by both Larch and Homer that Homer was completely able to perform one, but Larch believed that Homer should complete medical school--a real medical school--and serve an internship in another hospital before he undertook the operation. It was not that the operation was complicated; it was Larch's opinion that Homer's choice should be involved. What Larch meant was that Homer should know something of society before he made the decision, by himself, whether to perform abortions or not.
What Dr. Larch was looking for was someone to sponsor Homer Wells. Larch wanted someone to send the boy to college, not only in order for Homer to qualify for admission to medical school but also in order to expose Homer to the world outside St. Cloud's.
How to advertise for such a sponsor was a puzzle to Wilbur Larch. Should he ask his colleague and correspondent at The New England Home for Little Wanderers if he could make use of their large mailing list?
ACCOMPLISHED MIDWIFE & QUALIFIED ABORTIONIST
SEEKS SPONSOR FOR COLLEGE YEARS
--PLUS MEDICAL SCHOOL EXPENSES!
Where was the society where Homer Wells could fit in? wondered Wilbur Larch.
Mainly, Larch knew, he had to get his apprentice away from Melony. The two of them together: how they depressed Larch! They struck the doctor as a tired and loveless married couple. What sexual tensions Melony had managed to conduct between them in the earlier years of their angry courtship seemed absent now. If they still practiced a sexual exchange, they practiced infrequently and without enthusiasm. Over lunch they sat together without speaking, in plain view of the girls' or of the boys' divisions; together they examined the well-worn copy of Gray's Anatomy as if it were the intricate map they had to follow if they were ever to find their way out of St. Cloud's.
Melony didn't even run away anymore. It appeared to Dr. Larch that some wordless, joyless pact bound Homer and Melony together. Their sullenness toward each other reminded Dr. Larch of Mrs. Eames's daughter, who would spend eternity with a pony's penis in her mouth. Melony and Homer never fought; they never argued; Melony seemed to have given up raising her voice. If there was still anything sexual between them, Larch knew that it happened randomly, and only out of the keenest boredom.
Larch even got Melony a job as live-in help for a well-to-do old woman in Three Mile Falls. It may have been that the woman was a cranky invalid who would have complained about anyone; she certainly complained about Melony--she said Melony was "insensitive," that she was never "forthcoming" with conversation, and that, in regard to such physical attentions as helping her in and out of her bath, the girl was "unbelievably rough." Dr. Larch could believe it, and Melony herself complained; she said she preferred to live at St. Cloud's; if she had to have a job, she wanted one she could go to and then leave.
"I want to come home at night," she told Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch. Home? Larch thought.
There was another job, in town, but it required that Melony know how to drive. Although Dr. Larch even found a
local boy to teach Melony, her driving thoroughly frightened the young man and she needed to take the driver's examination for her license three times in order to pass it once. She then lost the job--delivering parts and tools for a building contractor. She was unable to account for more than two hundred miles that had accumulated in one week on the delivery van's odometer.
"I just drove to places because I was bored," she told Dr. Larch, shrugging. "And there was a guy I was seeing, for a couple of days."
Larch fretted that Melony, who was almost twenty, was now unemployable and unadoptable; she had grown dependent on her proximity to Homer Wells, although whole days passed when there didn't appear to be a word between them--in fact, no intercourse beyond mere presence was observable for weeks in succession (if Melony's presence could ever be called "mere"). Because of how much Melony depressed Dr. Larch, Dr. Larch assumed that her presence was depressing to Homer Wells.
Wilbur Larch loved Homer Wells--he had never loved anyone as he loved that boy, and he could not imagine enduring a life at St. Cloud's without him--but the doctor knew that Homer Wells had to have an authentic encounter with society if the boy was going to have a chosen life at all. What Larch dreamed of was that Homer would venture out in the world and then choose to come back to St. Cloud's. But who would choose such a thing? Larch wondered.
Maine had many towns; there wasn't one as charmless as St. Cloud's.
Larch lay down in the dispensary and sniffed a little ether. He recalled Portland's safe harbor; his mind ticked off the towns, either east or inland from Portland, and his lips tried the towns with the good, Maine names.
(Inhale, exhale.) Wilbur Larch could almost taste those towns, their vapory names. There was Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, there was Vassalborough and Nobleboro and Waldoboro, there was Wiscasset and West Bath, Damariscotta and Friendship, Penobscot Bay and Sagadahoc Bay, Yarmouth and Camden, Rockport and Arundel, Rumford and Biddeford and Livermore Falls.