by John Irving
Another ten hours after the onset of the woman’s contractions, she delivered herself of a boy—four pounds, eleven ounces, in good condition. The mother’s improvement was rapid—as Homer had expected. There were no more convulsions, her blood pressure returned to normal, the traces of albumin in her urine were minimal.
In the evening of the day after the morning when he had gone to the station to retrieve the body that the stationmaster would neither keep nor relinquish, Wilbur Larch—together with the rescued cadaver soon to be called Clara—returned tired and triumphant to St. Cloud’s. He had followed the body to Three Mile Falls, but the stationmaster there had registered such horror that the body was never unloaded from the train; it had traveled on, and Larch had traveled after it, arriving at the next, and at the next station, always a train behind. No one wanted Clara, except to put her in the ground, and it was thought that this should not be the responsibility of a stationmaster—who would surely not accept, at his station, a body that no one came forward for. Clara was a body clearly not intended for the ground. The unearthly sloshing sound of the embalming fluid, the leathery skin, the outer-space colors of the occasionally exposed arteries and veins—“Whatever that is, I don’t want it here,” said the stationmaster in Three Mile Falls.
And so Clara went from Three Mile Falls to Misery Gore, to Moxie Gore, to East Moxie—on and on. Larch got in a terrible row with the stationmaster in Harmony, Maine, where Clara had stopped for a few minutes—giving the railroad personnel the fright of their lives—before she’d been sent on.
“That was my body!” Larch screamed. “It had my name on it, it is intended for the instruction of a student of medicine who is training with me in my hospital in Saint Cloud’s. It’s mine!” Larch yelled. “Why are you sending it in the wrong direction? Why are you sending it away from me?”
“It came here, didn’t it?” the stationmaster said. “It didn’t get taken at Saint Cloud’s, it appears to me.”
“The stationmaster in Saint Cloud’s is crazy!” Larch hollered; he gave a little hop—a little jump, which made him appear a little crazy, too.
“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t,” said the stationmaster in Harmony. “All I know is, the body come here and I sent it on.”
“For Christ’s sake, it’s not haunted!” Larch said with a wail.
“Didn’t say it was,” said the stationmaster. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t—wasn’t here long enough to tell.”
“Idiots!” Larch shouted, and took the train. In Cornville (where the train didn’t stop), Wilbur Larch screamed out the window at a couple of potato farmers who were waving at the train. “Maine is full of morons!” he yelled, riding on.
In Skowhegan, he asked the stationmaster just where in Hell he thought the damn body was going. “Bath, I suppose,” the Skowhegan stationmaster said. “That’s where it came from, and if nobody wants it at the other end, that’s where it’s going back to.”
“Somebody does want it at the other end!” screamed Wilbur Larch. “I want it.”
The body had been sent to the hospital in St. Cloud’s from the hospital in Bath; a woman who was a willing body-donor had died, and the pathologist at Bath Memorial Hospital knew that Wilbur Larch was looking for a fresh female.
Dr. Larch caught up with Clara in Augusta; Augusta was very sophisticated, for Maine, and the stationmaster simply saw that the body was going the wrong way. “Of course it’s going the wrong way!” Wilbur Larch cried.
“Damndest thing,” the stationmaster said. “Don’t they speak English up in your parts?”
“They don’t hear English!” Larch yelled. “I’d like to send a cadaver to every damn one of those towns—one a day!”
“That sure would rile up a bunch of folks,” the stationmaster said dryly, wondering how “riled up” Dr. Larch was going to get.
On the long ride back to St. Cloud’s with Clara, Dr. Larch didn’t calm down. In each of the towns that offended him—in Harmony, especially, but in East Moxie and in Moxie Gore, and in all the rest of them, too—he offered his opinions to the respective stationmasters while the train paused at the stations. “Moronville,” he told the stationmaster in Harmony. “Tell me one thing that’s harmonious here—one thing!”
“It was pretty harmonious before you and your damn body got here,” the stationmaster said.
“Moronville!” Larch shouted out the window as the train pulled away. “Idiotsburg!”
To his great disappointment, when the train arrived in St. Cloud’s, the stationmaster was not there. “Lunch,” someone told Dr. Larch, but it was early evening.
“Perhaps you mean supper?” Dr. Larch asked. “Perhaps the stationmaster doesn’t know the difference,” he said nastily; he hired the help of two louts to lug Clara up the hill to the boys’ division.
He was surprised by the disarray in which Homer Wells had left body number two. In the excitement of the emergency, Homer had forgotten to put body number two away, and Larch ordered the two oafs to carry Clara in there—not preparing the simpletons for the shopworn cadaver exposed on the table. One of the clods ran into a wall. Terrible crying out and jumping around! Larch went shouting through the orphanage, looking for Homer.
“Here I am, running after a new body for you—across half the damn state of Maine—and you leave a mess like that just lying out in the open where any fool can fall upon it! Homer!” Dr. Larch yelled. “Goddamn it,” he muttered to himself, “there is no way a teen-ager is going to be an adult ahead of his own, good time—no way you can expect a teen-ager to accept adult responsibilities, to do an adult’s Goddamn job!” He went muttering all over the boys’ division, looking for Homer Wells, but Homer had collapsed on Larch’s white-iron bed in the dispensary and had fallen into the deepest sleep. The aura of ether surrounding that spare bed under that eastern window might have enhanced Homer’s drowsiness, but he scarcely needed ether to sleep; he had been up for nearly forty hours with the eclampsia patient—delivering her and her child.
Nurse Angela interrupted Dr. Larch before he could find Homer Wells and wake him up.
“What’s happening around here?” Larch demanded to know. “Is no one the least bit interested in where in Hell I’ve been? And why has that boy left his body looking like a war casualty? I go away overnight and just look at this place.”
But Nurse Angela straightened him out. She told him it had been the worst case of puerpural convulsions she’d ever seen, and she had seen some—in her time. Wilbur Larch had seen some, too. In his days at the Boston Lying-In, he’d lost a lot of women to eclampsia, and even in 194_, about a quarter of the deaths in childbirth were credited to these convulsions.
“Homer did this?” Larch asked Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna; he was reading the report; he had examined the mother, who was fine, and the premature baby boy, who was normal and healthy.
“He was almost as calm as you, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said admiringly. “You can be real proud of him.”
“He is an angel, in my opinion,” Nurse Angela said.
“He looked a little grim when he had to break the water,” Nurse Edna remembered, “but he did everything just right.”
“He was as sure as snow,” Nurse Angela said.
He did almost everything right, Wilbur Larch was thinking; it really was amazing. Larch thought it was a slight error that Homer had failed to record the exact number of convulsions in the second twelve-hour period (especially after correctly counting them in the first twelve hours), and Homer had not mentioned the number or the severity of the convulsions (or if there were any) in the ten-hour period after the patient’s labor contractions began and before she delivered. Minor criticism. Wilbur Larch was a good teacher; he knew that this criticism was better withheld. Homer Wells had performed all the hard parts correctly; his procedure had been perfect.
“He’s not even twenty—is he?” Larch asked. But Nurse Edna had gone to bed, she was exhausted; in her dreams she would mingle Homer’s heroism with her already c
onsiderable love for Larch; she would sleep very well. Nurse Angela was still up, in her office, and when Dr. Larch asked her why the premature baby had not been named, she told Larch that it was Nurse Edna’s turn and Nurse Edna had been too tired.
“Well, it’s just a matter of form,” said Wilbur Larch. “You name it, then—I want it named. It won’t kill you to go out of turn, will it?”
But Nurse Angela had a better idea. It was Homer’s baby—he had saved it, and the mother. Homer Wells should name this one, Nurse Angela said.
“Yes, you’re right, he should,” Dr. Larch replied, filling with pride in his wonderful creation.
Homer Wells would wake to a day of naming. In the same day he would be faced with naming body number three and his first orphan. He would name the new body Clara, and what else could he have named a baby boy except David Copperfield? He was reading Great Expectations at the time and he preferred Great Expectations to David Copperfield as a book. But he would not name anyone Pip, and he didn’t care for the character of Pip as much as he cared for little David. It was an easy decision, and he woke that morning very refreshed and capable of more demanding decisions than that one.
He had slept almost through the night. He woke only once on the dispensary bed, aware that Dr. Larch was back; Larch was in the room, probably looking at him, but Homer kept his eyes closed. He somehow knew Larch was there because of the sweet scent of ether, which Larch wore like cologne, and because of the steadiness of Larch’s breathing. Then he felt Larch’s hand—a doctor’s hand, feeling for fever—pass very lightly over his forehead. Homer Wells, not yet twenty—quite accomplished in obstetrical procedure and as knowledgeable as almost any doctor on the care of “the female organs of generation”—lay very still, pretending to sleep.
Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Larch whisper, “Good work, Homer.” He felt a second, even lighter kiss. “Good work, my boy,” the doctor said, and then left him.
Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried—when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch’s pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.
Of course Melony had kissed him; she didn’t do it much anymore, but she had. And Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had kissed him silly, but they kissed everyone. Dr. Larch had never kissed him before, and now he had kissed him twice.
Homer Wells cried because he’d never known how nice a father’s kisses could be, and he cried because he doubted that Wilbur Larch would ever do it again—or would have done it, if he’d thought Homer was awake.
Dr. Larch went to marvel at the good health of the eclampsia patient and at her thriving, tiny child—who, in the morning, would become the orphan David Copperfield (“David Copperfield, Junior,” Dr. Larch would enjoy saying). Then Larch went to the familiar typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office, but he couldn’t write anything. He couldn’t even think, he was so agitated from kissing Homer Wells. If Homer Wells had received his first fatherly kisses, Dr. Larch had given the first kisses he had ever given—fatherly, or otherwise—since the day in the Portland boardinghouse when he caught the clap from Mrs. Eames. And the kisses he gave to Mrs. Eames were more in the nature of explorations than they were gifts of love. Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what will happen to me when Homer has to go?
Where he would go was hardly a place of comparable excitement, of comparable challenge, of comparable sadness, of comparable gloom; but where he would go was nice, and what would Homer Wells, with his background, make of nice? Wouldn’t it simply seduce him? Wouldn’t anyone rather have nice?
What did Heart’s Haven or Heart’s Rock know of trouble, and what did anyone do there to be of use?
Yes, Olive Worthington suffered her brother Bucky’s intrusions—his well-digging slime in her swimming pool and his trekking across her rugs. Big deal. Yes, Olive worried if young Wally would have gumption, if he would really learn and contribute to the apple-growing business—or would the pretty boy become, like Senior, a good-timer turning pathetic? But what were these worries compared to the business of St. Cloud’s? Compared to the Lord’s work and the Devil’s work, weren’t these concerns trivial? Wasn’t life in nice places shallow?
But trouble can come to nice places, too; trouble travels, trouble visits. Trouble even takes holidays from the places where it thrives, from places like St. Cloud’s. The trouble that visited Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock was a fairly trivial and common form of trouble; it began, as trouble often does, with falling in love.
“Here in St. Cloud’s,” wrote Wilbur Larch, “I don’t imagine that anyone falls in love; it would be too evident a luxury, to fall in love here.” Larch didn’t know that Nurse Edna had been in love with him from day one, but he was correct in supposing that it hadn’t been exactly love that passed between Melony and Homer Wells. And what clung to each of them after the first passion had passed was surely not love. And that picture of Mrs. Eames’s daughter with the pony’s penis in her mouth: that photograph was the oldest resident of St. Cloud’s—and surely it had no love in it. That picture was as far from love as Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock were from St. Cloud’s.
“In other parts of the world,” wrote Wilbur Larch, “I imagine that people fall in love all the time.”
If not all the time, a lot. Young Wally Worthington, for example, thought he’d been in love twice before he was twenty, and once when he was twenty-one; now, in 194_ (he was just three years older than Homer Wells), Wally fell full-force in love for the fourth time. He didn’t know that this time would be for keeps.
The girl young Wally’s heart would select for life was a lobsterman’s daughter; he was no ordinary lobsterman, and it was no surprise to anyone that he had an extraordinary daughter. Raymond Kendall was so good at lobstering that other lobstermen, through binoculars, watched him pull and bait a pot. When he changed his mooring lines, they changed theirs. When he didn’t go to sea but stayed at home, or at his dock mending pots, they stayed home, too, and mended theirs. But they couldn’t match him; he had so many pots in the water that his personalized black and orange buoys gave the Heart’s Haven harbor the razzle-dazzle of collegiate competition. Once a contingent of Yale men from the Haven Club beseeched Raymond Kendall to change his colors to blue and white, but Kendall only muttered that he didn’t have time for games. Other contingents from the Haven Club would beseech him; the subject was rarely the color of his lobster buoys.
The Haven Club faced the far jetty of Heart’s Haven Harbor, where Raymond Kendall’s lobster pound and dock were long established. Kendall lived above the pound, which might have enticed a more superficial man to comply with the Haven Club’s requests that he beautify his immediate environs. His establishment was considered, by summer people’s standards, an eyesore on a harborfront of otherwise natural and/or expensively groomed beauty. Even his bedroom window was hung with buoys in various stages of repainting. The lobster pots undergoing repairs were piled so high on his dock that it was impossible, from shore, to see if boats were moored on the far side of the dock. The parking lot for the lobster pound was nearly full—and not of customers’ cars (there was never enough room for the customers); it was full of the various trucks and cars that Raymond Kendall was “working on,” and full of the vast and oily inboard engines for his lobster boats.
Everything surrounding the harborfront property of Raymond Kendall was teeming with a messy mechanic’s condition of total overhaul; everything was in progress, incomplete, dismantled, still wet, waiting for parts—and, for noise, there were the constant grinding sounds of the generator that ran the water tanks for the lobsters in the pound and the greasy belching of an inboard engine idling at the dock. And then there was the smell: of tarred rope, of that slightly-different-from-fishy fishin
ess that a lobster has, of the fuel and motor oil that slicked the ocean at his dock (which was matted with seaweed, studded with periwinkles, festooned with yellow oilskin suits hung out to dry). Raymond Kendall lived his work; he liked his work in evidence around him; the jetty end of Heart’s Haven Harbor was his artist’s studio.
He was not just an artist with lobster, he also was an expert at fixing things—at keeping everything anyone else would throw away running. If asked, Raymond Kendall wouldn’t tell you he was a lobsterman; it was not that he was ashamed of it, but he was prouder of his qualities as a mechanic. “I’m just a tinkerer,” he liked to say.
And if the Haven Club complained about the constant evidence of his tinkering, which they strongly felt tarnished their splendid view, they didn’t complain too much; Raymond Kendall fixed what belonged to them, too. For example, he repaired the filter system for their swimming pool—in the days when no one had pools, when no one else would have touched it and Ray Kendall himself had never seen a filter system before. “I suppose it just does what you’d think it should,” he said, taking ten minutes with the job.
It was rumored that the only thing Ray Kendall threw away was uneaten food, which he threw overboard or off the end of his dock. “Just feeding the lobsters, which feed me,” he would say to anyone who complained. “Just feeding the sea gulls, who are hungrier than you and me.”
It was rumored he had more money than Senior Worthington; there was almost no evidence of his spending any—except on his daughter. Like the children of the Haven Club members, she went to a private boarding school; and Raymond Kendall paid the considerable annual dues for a Haven Club membership—not for himself (he went to the club only on request: to fix things) but for his daughter, who’d learned to swim in the heated pool there, and who’d taken her tennis lessons on the same courts graced by young Wally Worthington. Kendall’s daughter had her own car, too—it looked out of place in the Haven Club parking lot. It was a lobster-pound-parking-lot sort of car, a mishmash of the parts that were still serviceable from other cars; one of its fenders was unpainted and was attached with wires; it had a Ford insignia on its hood and a Chrysler emblem on the trunk, and the passenger-side door was sealed completely shut. However, its battery never went dead in the Haven Club lot; it was never this relic that wouldn’t start; when one of the Haven Club members had a car that wouldn’t start, he went looking for Raymond Kendall’s daughter, who kept jumper cables in her sturdy wreck and had been taught by her father how to use them.