by John Irving
Dr. Larch tried to comfort Mrs. Grogan, who said she wished only that she’d had more money for Melony to steal. “And my coat’s not waterproof,” Mrs. Grogan complained. “She should have a real raincoat in this state.”
Dr. Larch tried to reassure Mrs. Grogan; he asserted that Melony was not a little girl. “She’s twenty-four or twenty-five,” Larch reminded Mrs. Grogan.
“I think her heart is broken,” said Mrs. Grogan miserably.
Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign—wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.
The book that Melony had left behind was a puzzle to both Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch. They read the dedication to Homer “Sunshine” Wells, which touched Mrs. Grogan deeply.
Neither of them had any luck reading Little Dorrit, either. Mrs. Grogan never would get to the “villainous” prison; the staring sun in Marseilles outstared her, it was too powerfully blinding. Dr. Larch, who—in the absence of Homer Wells and Melony—resumed his responsibilities as the nightly reader to both the boys’ and the girls’ divisions, attempted to read Little Dorrit to the girls; wasn’t the main character a girl? But the contrast between the scorched air in the Marseilles sun and the tainted air in the Marseilles prison created such a powerful sleeplessness among the girls that Larch was relieved to give up on the book in Chapter Three, which had an unfortunate title, for orphans: “Home.” He began the description of London on a Sunday evening—hounded by church bells.
“ ‘Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot,’ ” read Dr. Larch, and then he stopped; we need no more melancholy here, he thought.
“Wouldn’t we rather wait, and read Jane Eyre again?” Dr. Larch asked; the girls nodded eagerly.
Knowing that the beautiful boy with the face of a benefactor must have a mother with the heart for benefiting those who existed in (as she had written herself) “less fortunate circumstances,” Dr. Larch wrote Olive Worthington.
My Dear Mrs. Worthington,
Here in St. Cloud’s, we depend on our few luxuries and imagine (and pray) they will last forever. If you would be so kind, please tell Homer that his friend Melony has left us—her whereabouts are unknown—and that she took with her our only copy of Jane Eyre. The orphans in the girls’ division were accustomed to hearing this book read aloud—in fact, Homer used to read to them. If Homer could discover a replacement copy, the little girls and I would remain in his debt. In other parts of the world, there are bookshops . . .
Thus, Larch knew, he had accomplished two things. Olive Worthington herself would send him a replacement Jane Eyre (he doubted very much that it would be a secondhand copy), and Homer would receive the important message: Melony was out. She was loose in the world. Larch thought that Homer should know this, that he might want to keep an eye open for her.
As for Little Dorrit, Nurse Edna read Melony’s inscription and wept. She was not a big reader, Edna; she penetrated no farther than the inscription. Nurse Angela had already been defeated by Dickens; she blinked once, briefly, at the sun in Marseilles and failed to turn the page.
For years Candy’s unread copy would rest in Nurse Angela’s office; those nervously awaiting interviews with Dr. Larch would pick up Little Dorrit as they would pick up a magazine—restlessly, inattentively. Larch rarely kept anyone waiting past the first glare of the sun. And most preferred to scan the odd assortment of catalogues. The seeds, the fishing equipment, the stupendous undergarments—the latter modeled in an otherworldly way: on those headless, legless, armless stumps that were the period’s version of the standard dressmaker’s dummy.
“In other parts of the world,” Dr. Larch began once, “they have nursing bras.” But this thought led him nowhere; it fell as a fragment into the many, many pages of A Brief History of St. Cloud’s.
Little Dorrit seemed condemned to an unread life. Even Candy, who replaced her stolen copy (and always wondered what happened to it), would never finish the book, although it was required reading for her class. She, too, could not navigate past the sun’s initial assault on her senses; she suspected her difficulty with the book arose from its power to remind her of her discomfort on the long journey to and from St. Cloud’s—and of what had happened to her there.
She would especially remember the ride back to the coast—how she’d stretched out in the back seat, with only the dash lights of the Cadillac and the glowing ash end of Wally’s cigarette shining bright but small in the surrounding darkness. The tires of the big car hummed soothingly; she was grateful for Homer’s presence because she didn’t have to talk to—or listen to—Wally. She couldn’t even hear what Wally and Homer were saying to each other. “Life stories,” Wally would say to her later. “That kid’s had quite a life, but I should let him tell you.”
The drone of their conversation was as rhythmic as the tire song, but—as weary as she was—she couldn’t sleep. She thought about how much she was bleeding—maybe more than she should be, she worried. Between St. Cloud’s and the coast, she asked Wally three times to stop the car. She kept checking her bleeding and changing the pad; Dr. Larch had given her quite a few pads—but would there be enough, and how much bleeding was too much? She looked at the back of Homer’s head. If it’s worse tomorrow, or as bad the next day, she thought, I’ll have to ask him.
When Wally went to the men’s room and left them alone in the car, Homer spoke to her, but he didn’t turn around. “You’re probably having cramps, about as bad as you get with your period,” he said. “You’re probably bleeding, but not like you bleed during your period—nothing near what it is, at your heaviest time. If the stains on the pad are only two or three inches in diameter, that’s okay. It’s expected.”
“Thank you,” Candy whispered.
“The bleeding should taper off tomorrow, and get much lighter the next day. If you’re worried, you should ask me,” he said.
“Okay,” Candy said. She felt so strange: that a boy her own age should know this much about her.
“I’ve never seen a lobster,” said Homer Wells, to change the subject—to allow her to be the authority.
“Then you’ve never eaten one, either,” Candy said cheerfully.
“I don’t know if I want to eat something I’ve never seen,” Homer said, and Candy laughed. She was laughing when Wally got back in the car.
“We’re talking about lobsters,” Homer explained.
“Oh, they’re hilarious,” Wally said, and all three of them laughed.
“Wait till you see one!” Candy said to Homer. “He’s never seen one!” she told Wally.
“They’re even funnier when you see them,” Wally said. Candy’s laughter hurt her; she stopped very suddenly, but Homer laughed more. “And wait till they try to talk to you,” Wally added. “Lobsters really break me up, every time they try to talk.”
When he and Wally stopped laughing, Homer said, “I’ve never seen the ocean, you know.”
“Candy, did you hear that?” Wally asked, but Candy had released herself with her brief laughter; she was sound asleep. “You’ve never seen the ocean?” Wally asked Homer.
“That’s right,” said Homer Wells.
“That’s not funny,” said Wally seriously.
“Right,” Homer said.
A little later, Wally said, “You want to drive for a while?”
“I don’t know how to drive,” Homer said.
“Really?” Wally asked. And later still—it was almost midnight—Wally asked, “Uh, have you ever been with a girl—made love to one, you know?” But Homer Wells had also felt released: he had laughed out loud with his new friends. The young but veteran insomniac had fallen asleep. Would Wally have been surprised to know that Homer hadn’t laughed out loud with friends before, either? And possibly Homer would have had difficulty characterizing his relationship with Melo
ny as a relationship based on making love.
What a new sense of security Homer had felt in that moment of laughter with friends in the enclosed dark of the moving car, and what a sense of freedom the car itself gave to him—its seemingly effortless journeying was a wonder to Homer Wells, for whom the idea of motion (not to mention the sense of change) was accomplished only rarely and only with enormous strife.
“Candy?” Wally whispered. And a little later, he whispered, “Homer?” He rather liked the idea of steering these two through the blackened world, of being their guide through the night, and their protector from whatever lay just beyond the headlights’ reach.
“Well, buddy,” Wally said to the sleeping Homer Wells, “it’s high time you had some fun.”
Wilbur Larch, almost a month later—still waiting to hear from Homer Wells and too proud to write the first letter—wondered about the “fun” Homer was having. Swimming lessons! he thought. What does one wear for swimming in a heated pool? How do they heat the pool, and how much do they heat it?
In 194_, the pool at the Haven Club was the first heated swimming pool in Maine. Although Raymond Kendall thought it was ridiculous to heat water for purposes other than cooking and bathing, he had invented the heating system for the Haven Club pool. It was just an exercise in mechanics for Ray.
“If you learn to swim in the ocean,” Ray told Homer, “you’ll learn the proper response for a body to make to all that water.”
“But you don’t know how to swim, Daddy,” Candy said.
“That’s what I mean,” Ray said, winking at Homer Wells. “You set foot in the ocean, or fall in, you’ll have enough sense never to set foot in it again—it’s too cold!”
Homer liked Candy’s father, perhaps because surgery is the mechanics of medicine and Homer’s early training had been surgical. He made instant identification with the machinery with which Ray Kendall worked, both the apple farm equipment and the mechanisms for hauling the lobsters and keeping them alive.
Contrary to Wally’s promise to him regarding the humor of lobsters, Homer was unamused by his first look at the creatures. They crammed the tank in Ray Kendall’s lobster pound, crawling over each other, their claws pegged shut so that they wielded them underwater like ineffective clubs. Homer knew he had seen a good reason for learning how to swim. If one ever fell in the sea, one wouldn’t want to fall to the bottom where these creatures lived. It was some while before Homer learned that the lobsters did not cover the ocean’s floor in such density as they occupied the tank. The first question that leaped to his mind did not concern how a lobster ate or how it multiplied—but why it lived at all.
“There’s got to be something that picks up what’s lying around,” Ray Kendall advised Homer.
“It’s the garbage monster of the ocean’s floor,” Wally said laughing—he always laughed when he discussed lobster.
“The sea gull cleans up the shore,” Ray Kendall said. “The lobster cleans up the bottom.”
“Lobsters and sea gulls,” Candy said, “they take what’s left over.”
Wilbur Larch might have observed that they were given the orphan’s share. This occurred to Homer Wells, who discovered he could spend time watching lobsters, with dread, and sea gulls, with pleasure—while watching both with awe and respect.
Years later, when she became the proud owner of the first TV set in Heart’s Rock, Olive Worthington would say that Homer Wells was the only person who ever pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the tank in Ray Kendall’s lobster pound “as if he were watching the news on television.”
Homer pulled lobster pots with Candy’s father on Sundays—not for money but to be out on the water and to be around Ray. Six days a week Homer worked with Wally in the orchards. The ocean was visible from only one of Ocean View’s several orchards but the presence of the sea was felt throughout the farm, especially in the early-morning fog, and when a sea breeze freshened the summer heat—and because of the sea gulls who circled inland and occasionally perched in the trees. They were more partial to blueberries than to apples but their presence was an irritation to Olive, who from her early years among the clams had no love for the raucous birds, and who fought with the gulls over the small plot of blueberries she was cultivating—the blueberries were protected with low-hung nets, but the gulls and the crows were smart enough to walk under the nets.
Among orphans, thought Homer Wells, sea gulls are superior to crows—not in intelligence or in personality, he observed, but in the freedom they possess and cherish. It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.
Wilbur Larch knew that freedom was an orphan’s most dangerous illusion, and when he finally heard from Homer, he scanned the oddly formal letter, which was disappointing in its lack of detail. Regarding illusions, and all the rest, there was simply no evidence.
“I am learning to swim,” wrote Homer Wells. (I know! I know! Tell me about it! thought Wilbur Larch.) “I do better at driving,” Homer added.
“Mrs. Worthington is very nice.” (I could have guessed that! thought Wilbur Larch.) “She knows everything about apples.
“Candy’s father is very nice, too,” Homer Wells wrote to Dr. Larch. “He takes me out on his lobster boat, and he is teaching me how an engine works.” (Do you wear a life jacket on the lobster boat? Wilbur Larch wanted to know. You think an engine is so special? I could teach you how the heart works, thought Wilbur Larch—his own heart teaching him about itself, and much more than its function as a muscle.)
“Candy and Wally are wonderful!” Homer wrote. “I go everywhere with them. I sleep in Wally’s room. I wear his clothes. It’s great that we’re the same size, although he is stronger. Candy and Wally are getting married, one day, and they want to have lots of children.” (Tell me about the swimming lessons, thought Wilbur Larch. Watch out for the swimming lessons.)
“Poor Mr. Worthington—everyone calls him Senior,” Homer wrote. (Ah-ha! thought Wilbur Larch. So something isn’t perfect, is it? What’s “poor” about Mr. Worthington?)
He asked Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna what they thought of the name “Senior.” They agreed it was different.
“It sounds stupid to me,” said Wilbur Larch.
Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna told him he wasn’t being fair. The boy had departed with his blessings—more, with his encouragement. They agreed Homer could have written something and sent it sooner than six weeks, but they argued that this indicated only how happy he was—how busy and how glad to be busy, too. And what experience did Homer Wells have with writing letters, or with writing of any kind? they wanted to know.
“You want him to be a doctor, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said, “but it’s his life.”
“Do you expect him to be a writer, too?” Nurse Angela chimed in.
“And never get married?” Nurse Edna asked dangerously.
I expect him to be of use, thought Wilbur Larch tiredly. And I want him with me; this last wish he knew was unfair. In the dispensary, he rested from the summer heat. All that glass and steel were somehow cooling, and the ether fumes evaporated more slowly in the humidity. He seemed to be traveling both farther away and for longer in his ether dreams now. When he came out of the ether, he seemed to come out of it more slowly. I’m getting older, he repeated to himself.
A beautiful and untouched copy of Jane Eyre arrived from Mrs. Worthington, and Wilbur Larch read more spiritedly to the girls—the newness of the story refreshed him. It even enlivened his weary approach to the sad conclusion to Great Expectations. (He never believed the part about Pip and Estella being happy ever after; he never believed that about anyone.)
A pattern of correspondence slowly developed between Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells. Homer would sketch the barest facts of his life in Heart’s Rock and Heart’s Haven; he would give Dr. Larch a glimpse, like the far-off visibility of the ocean from the one orchard at Ocean View where sighting the sea was possible. He would send Dr. Larch a page, maybe two pages once
a week or every other week. To this speck on the horizon Dr. Larch would respond with the full orchestration of the written word: questions (which would never be answered) regarding the specificity that was lacking in Homer’s last letter (“What precisely is the matter with Mr. Worthington?”) and a flood of details concerning the daily grimness of St. Cloud’s. As much as Dr. Larch disdained the gossipy instinct of Snowy Meadows for “keeping up” with the orphanage, Dr. Larch provided Homer Wells with a virtual alumni newsletter and with a calendar of hospital and social events. His letters to Homer Wells were longer than his longest entries in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s, and they were written and mailed the day following Dr. Larch’s receipt of the most minimal scrawl from Homer.
“You can’t expect the boy to keep up with you, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna advised Dr. Larch.
“You can’t expect him to compete with you,” Nurse Angela said.
“What the hell is wrong with this Senior Worthington character?” Dr. Larch asked.
“Homer said it was a drinking problem, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna reminded him.
“What do you want to know—the brand of hooch?” Nurse Angela asked.
But what Wilbur Larch expected from his young apprentice was only what he thought he had taught him: clinical analysis, the exact definition of characteristics associated with light, medium, or heavy drinking. Are we talking about a guy who makes a fool out of himself at parties? Wilbur Larch wondered. Or is this something severe and chronic?
Because Homer Wells had never seen a drunk before, he was—at first—even more easily deceived by Senior Worthington’s appearance than Senior’s immediate family and friends were; and Homer was as ready as they were to accept Senior’s deterioration in cognition as the natural result of alcoholism. A man long admired in Heart’s Rock and Heart’s Haven, especially for the sweetness of his disposition, Senior had become short-tempered, irritable, and even aggressive on occasion. Following the incident with the grasshopper pie, Olive wouldn’t allow him to go to the Haven Club without her: Senior had plastered an entire grasshopper pie against the chest of a nice, young lifeguard and needed to be restrained, then, from further smearing the pale-green ingredients on the rump of a nice, young waitress. “He was showing off,” Senior said of the lifeguard. “He was just standing there,” he explained.