by John Irving
Whatever that is, it looks like fingers, he thought. Gradually, he stopped looking at other things in the room. He stared at the fingertips; a part of his mind said, Get up and see what that is! Another part of his mind made his body feel sunken into the easy chair and held down there by a great weight.
It can’t be fingers! he thought; he kept staring, he kept sitting.
Nurse Edna wanted to tell Dr. Larch that he should, for once, let his feelings speak for him—that he should tell Homer Wells what he felt—but she stood quietly listening at the operating room door. The stationmaster’s chest cracked a few more times. This didn’t discomfort her—Nurse Edna was a professional—and she could tell by the precision of the snaps she heard that Dr. Larch had chosen to occupy his emotions with a task. It’s his decision, she told herself. She went outside to see how that nice young couple were doing.
The young man was doing whatever young men do while peering under the hoods of cars, and the girl was resting, semi-reclined in the Cadillac’s spacious back seat. The convertible top was still down. Nurse Edna bent over Candy and whispered to her, “You’re as pretty as a picture!” Candy smiled warmly. Nurse Edna could see how exhausted the girl was. “Listen, dear,” Nurse Edna said to her. “Don’t be shy—if you’re worried about your spotting,” Nurse Edna said to her confidentially, “or if you have any peculiar cramps, speak to Homer about it. Promise me you won’t be shy about it, dear. And most certainly, if you run a fever—promise me,” Nurse Edna said.
“I promise,” Candy said, blushing.
Melony was struggling to inscribe the copy of Little Dorrit she had stolen for Homer when she heard Mary Agnes Cork throwing up in the bathroom.
“Shut up!” Melony called, but Mary Agnes went on retching. She’d eaten two jars of apple-cider jelly, one jar of honey and another of crab-apple jelly. She thought it was the honey that did it.
Smoky Fields had already thrown up. He’d eaten all his jars, of everything, and a jar belonging to one of the little Walshes. He lay miserably in his bed, listening to Curly Day crying and Nurse Angela talking on and on.
TO HOMER “SUNSHINE” WELLS
FOR THE PROMISE
YOU MADE ME
Melony wrote. She glanced out her window, but there was nothing going on. It wasn’t dark; it wasn’t time for the two women she’d watched arrive in the morning to be heading downhill for their return train—to wherever.
LOVE, MELONY
Melony added, as Mary Agnes groaned and heaved again.
“You dumb little bitch pig!” Melony called.
Homer Wells walked into the operating room when Wilbur Larch had successfully exposed the stationmaster’s heart. Larch was not surprised to see no evidence of heart disease, no dead-muscle tissue (“No infarction,” he said to Homer, without looking up at him)—in short, no damage to the heart of any kind.
“The stationmaster had a healthy heart,” Dr. Larch announced to Homer Wells. No “massive” heart attack had dropped the stationmaster, as Larch had suspected. It appeared there had been a very sudden change in the heart’s rhythm. “Arrhythmia, I think,” Dr. Larch said to Homer Wells.
“His heart just stopped, right?” Homer asked.
“I think that he suffered some shock, or fright,” said Wilbur Larch.
Homer Wells could believe that—just by looking at the stationmaster’s face. “Right,” he said.
“Of course there could be a clot in the brain,” said Wilbur Larch. “Where should I look?” he asked Homer familiarly.
“The brain stem,” said Homer Wells.
“Right,” Wilbur Larch said. “Good boy.”
When Homer Wells saw the stationmaster’s brain stem exposed, he felt that Dr. Larch was busy enough—with both hands—for it to be safe to say what Homer wanted to say.
“I love you,” said Homer Wells. He knew he had to leave the room, then—while he could still see the door—and so he started to leave.
“I love you, too, Homer,” said Wilbur Larch, who for another minute or more could not have seen a blood clot in the brain stem if there had been one to see. He heard Homer say “Right” before he heard the door close.
In a while, he could make out the brain stem clearly; there was no clot.
“Arrhythmia,” Wilbur Larch repeated to himself. Then he added, “Right,” as if he were now speaking for Homer Wells. Dr. Larch put his instruments aside; he gripped the operating table for a long time.
Outside, Homer Wells stuck his bag in the Cadillac’s trunk, smiled at Candy in the back seat, helped Wally raise the convertible’s top; it would be dark soon, and especially cold for Candy in the back seat if they left the top down.
“See you in two days!” Nurse Edna said to Homer, too loudly.
“Two days,” Homer repeated, too quietly. She pecked his cheek; he patted her arm. Nurse Edna then turned and trotted to the hospital entrance; both Candy and Wally appeared impressed that the woman could move so quickly. When she was inside the hospital, Nurse Edna went directly to the dispensary and threw herself on the bed; if she had a soft heart, she had a strong stomach—it hardly mattered to her that the stationmaster’s body had spent much of the day on that bed, or that the mud from his boots had soiled the top sheet.
Dr. Larch was still gripping the operating table when he heard the stationmaster’s assistant scream. There was just one scream, followed by a prolonged series of whimpers. Homer and Candy and Wally never heard the scream; Wally had already started the car.
The assistant had waited the longest time before forcing himself out of the deep, low chair. He had not wanted to look more closely at the contents of the white enameled examining tray, but the little fingers had beckoned to him and he had felt himself drawn to the tray, where a full and close-up view of the opened-up fetus had caused him (like Curly Day) to wet his pants. He screamed when he discovered that his legs wouldn’t move; the only way he could manage to leave Nurse Angela’s office was on all fours; he went whimpering down the hall like a beaten dog. Dr. Larch blocked his way at the operating room door.
“What is the matter with you?” Larch asked the assistant scathingly.
“I brought you all his catalogues!” the stationmaster’s assistant managed to say while still on all fours.
“Catalogues?” said Larch, with evident distaste. “Stand up, man! What’s wrong with you?” He seized the quaking assistant under his armpits and drew him, trembling, to his feet.
“I just wanted to view the body,” the assistant protested weakly.
Wilbur Larch shrugged. What is this fascination the world has with death? he wondered, but he stepped aside, ushering the assistant into the operating room where the stationmaster, with his heart and his brain stem very well exposed, was instantly in view.
“A sudden change in the heart’s rhythm,” Wilbur Larch explained. “Something frightened him to death.” It was not hard for the assistant to imagine being frightened to death, although he thought that the stationmaster appeared to have been run over by a train—or else had fallen victim to the same evil responsible for the hideous baby upon the typewriter.
“Thank you,” the assistant whispered to Dr. Larch, then ran so fast down the hall and outdoors that the sound of his footsteps roused Nurse Edna from her weeping; her own crying had prevented her from hearing the assistant’s screams or his whimpers.
It seemed to Nurse Angela that nothing would console Curly Day, and so she attempted to make herself comfortable on his narrow bed, believing she was in for a long night.
Dr. Larch sat in his usual place, at the typewriter; the fetus displayed by Homer Wells disturbed him not in the slightest. Perhaps he appreciated that Homer had left something behind that would need attention—busy work, busy work, give me busy work, thought Wilbur Larch. Just before night fell, he leaned forward in his chair enough to turn on the desk lamp. Then he settled back in the chair in which he had spent so many evenings. He appeared to be waiting for someone. It was not yet dark but he c
ould hear an owl outside—very distinctly. He knew the wild wind from the coast must have dropped.
When it was still light, Melony looked out her window and saw the Cadillac pass. The passenger side of the car faced the girls’ division, and Melony had no trouble recognizing Homer Wells in the passenger seat—his profile turned to her. He sat rigidly, as if he were holding his breath; he was. If he had seen her—or worse, if he had needed to speak to her in order to finalize his escape—he knew he couldn’t have succeeded in saying to her that he would be back in just two days. Melony knew what a lie was and what a promise was, and she knew the instant that a promise was broken. She saw a flash of the beautiful girl with the long legs in the back seat of the car, and she supposed that the handsome young man was driving; she had a longer, better look at the profile of Homer Wells. When she slammed the stolen copy of Little Dorrit shut, the ink was still wet and her inscription was smudged. She threw the book against the wall, which only Mrs. Grogan heard—Mary Agnes was still violently ill and too much surrounded by her own noise.
Melony put herself straight to bed without her dinner. Mrs. Grogan, worried about her, went to Melony’s bed and felt her forehead, which was feverish, but Mrs. Grogan could not coax Melony to drink anything. All Melony said was, “He broke his promise.” Later, she said, “Homer Wells has left Saint Cloud’s.”
“You have a little temperature, dear,” said Mrs. Grogan, but when Homer Wells didn’t come to read Jane Eyre aloud that evening, Mrs. Grogan started paying closer attention. She allowed Melony to read to the girls that evening; Melony’s voice was oddly flat and passionless. Melony’s reading from Jane Eyre depressed Mrs. Grogan—especially when she read this part:
. . . it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it . . .
Why, the girl didn’t bat an eye! Mrs. Grogan observed.
Nurse Angela had hardly any more success, reading aloud to the boys’ division from Dickens. Dickensian description was too strenuous for her—she got lost in the longer passages—and when she had to keep going back to the beginning, she saw that the boys were losing interest.
Nurse Edna tried her best with the nightly benediction; Dr. Larch refused to leave Nurse Angela’s office; he said he was listening to an owl, and he wanted to keep listening. Nurse Edna felt extremely self-conscious with the benediction, which she’d never fully understood in the first place—she took it to be a kind of private joke between Dr. Larch and the universe. Her voice was too shrill, and startled sick little Smoky Fields out of sleep, and produced a long, loud wail from Curly Day—before Curly returned to his more steady sobbing.
“Good night, you Princes of Maine! You Kings of New England!” Nurse Edna peeped. Where is Homer? several voices whispered, while Nurse Angela continued to rub Curly Day between his shoulder blades in the darkness.
Nurse Edna, extremely agitated by Dr. Larch’s behavior, got up the nerve to march right down to Nurse Angela’s office. She was going to walk right in and tell Dr. Larch that he should go give himself a good snort of ether and then get a good night’s sleep! But Nurse Edna grew more timid as she approached the solitary light shining from the office. Nurse Edna hadn’t known about the fetal autopsy, either, and when she rather cautiously peered into Nurse Angela’s office, she was given quite a turn by the gruesome fetus. Dr. Larch just sat at the typewriter, unmoving. He was composing in his mind the first of many letters he would write to Homer Wells. He was attempting to gentle his anxieties and calm his thoughts. Please be healthy, please be happy, please be careful, Wilbur Larch was thinking—the darkness edging in around him, the supplicant hands of the murdered baby from Three Mile Falls reaching out to him.
6
Ocean View
For the first two weeks that Homer Wells was gone from St. Cloud’s, Wilbur Larch let the mail pile up unanswered, Nurse Angela struggled with the longer and denser sentences of Charles Dickens (which had a curious effect on the boys’ attention; they hung on her every word, holding their breath for the errors they anticipated), and Mrs. Grogan suffered Melony’s deadpan rendition of Charlotte Brontë. Near the end of Chapter Twenty-seven, Mrs. Grogan could detect a bare minimum of Jane Eyre’s “indomitable” spirit in Melony’s voice.
“I care for myself,” Melony read. “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Good girl, thought Mrs. Grogan, please be a good girl. She told Dr. Larch that, although Melony’s reading voice depressed her, Melony should be encouraged; she should be given more responsibility.
Nurse Angela said she’d be glad to give up on Dickens. Dr. Larch surprised them all. When Homer Wells had been gone for three weeks, Dr. Larch announced that he didn’t give a damn who read what to whom. He had ceased to care about the benediction altogether, and so Nurse Edna—although it would never feel quite natural to her—persisted with the nightly salutation to the imagined Princes of Maine, “the dear little Kings of New England.”
Mrs. Grogan became so firmly transfixed by Melony’s reading voice that she now accompanied Melony to the boys’ division and listened, with the nervous boys, to Melony read Dickens. Melony’s voice was too even-pitched for Dickens; she plodded her way—she made no mistakes but she never adjusted her cadence; she presented bustle and sunshine with the same heavy speech she used for gloom and fog. By her stern countenance, Mrs. Grogan saw that Melony was analyzing as she read—but the subject of her analysis was not Charles Dickens; Melony was searching through Dickens for specific characteristics she associated with Homer Wells. Sometimes, by the intense concentration on Melony’s face, Melony seemed close to discovering Homer’s whereabouts in the England of another century. (Dr. Larch had told Melony that Homer’s actual whereabouts were not her business.)
Never mind that Melony murdered every moment of Dickensian wit with her ferocity, or that the rich and colorful details of character and place were turned uniformly drab by her voice. “The girl has no lilt,” Nurse Edna complained. Never mind: the boys were terrified of Melony, and their fears made them pay more attention to her than they had ever paid to Homer Wells. Sometimes the interest in the literature isn’t in the literature—the boys’ division was an audience like any other: self-interest, personal memories, their secret anxieties crept into their perceptions of what they heard (regardless of what Charles Dickens had done and what Melony did to him).
Not feeling completely comfortable with leaving the girls’ division unattended while she trotted to the boys’ to hear Melony read, Mrs. Grogan developed the habit of following the excerpt from Jane Eyre with a short prayer that clung, both lovely and ominous, to the pale and stained bedspreads on which the moonlight glowed long after Melony and Mrs. Grogan had left the girls to themselves. Even Mary Agnes Cork was struck silent—if not exactly rendered well behaved—by Mrs. Grogan’s prayer.
If Mrs. Grogan had known that the prayer was English in origin, she might not have used it; she had heard it on the radio and memorized it, and she always spoke it to herself before she allowed herself to sleep. The prayer was written by Cardinal Newman. When Melony started reading to the boys, Mrs. Grogan made her personal prayer public.
“Oh Lord,” she said in the hall light, in the open doorway, while Melony stood restlessly beside her. “Oh Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
“Amen,” Melony would say—not quite facetiously, but certainly not reverentially. She said it the way she read from Charlotte Brontë and from Charles Dickens—it gave Mrs. Grogan a chill, although the summer nights were warm and humid and she needed to take two steps for every one of Melony’s, just to keep pace with Melony on her determined journey to the boys’ division. The way Melony said “Amen” was the way she said e
verything. Hers was a voice without a soul, Mrs. Grogan thought—her teeth chattering as she sat in a chair in the boys’ division, slightly out of the light, behind Melony, watching her broad back. Something in Mrs. Grogan’s transfixed appearance may have been responsible for the rumor begun in the boys’ division, possibly by Curly Day: that Mrs. Grogan had never gone to school, was actually illiterate, was incapable of reading even a newspaper to herself—and was, therefore, in Melony’s control.
The little boys, lying frightened in their beds, felt that they were in Melony’s control, too.
Nurse Edna was so disquieted by Melony’s reading that she couldn’t wait to launch into her Princes of Maine and Kings of New England refrain (even if she didn’t know what it meant). Nurse Edna suggested that Melony was to blame for an increase in nightmares in the boys’ division and that she should be removed from her responsibilities as reader. Nurse Angela disagreed; if Melony persisted in casting an evil presence, it was because she’d not been given enough responsibility. Also, Nurse Angela said, maybe there weren’t more nightmares: with Homer Wells gone (it had now been a month), perhaps it was simply that Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela heard those suffering from night terrors—in the past, Homer heard them first and tended to them.
Mrs. Grogan was in favor of increasing Melony’s responsibilities; she felt the girl was at the threshold of a change—she might either rise above her own bitterness or descend more deeply into it. It was Nurse Angela who suggested to Dr. Larch that Melony might be of use.