by John Irving
“No, I’ll bet you learned somethin’,” Ray said. “You’re a learner. I know, because I was one. Once you see how somethin’ is done, you know how to do it yourself; that’s all I mean.” Ray had taught Homer oil changes and lubrications, plugs and points and engine timing, fuel-line maintenance and front-end alignment; he’d shown the boy how to tighten a clutch, and—to Ray’s astonishment—Homer had remembered. He’d also shown him a valve job and how to replace the universal. In one summer Homer Wells had learned more about mechanics than Wally knew. But it wasn’t just Homer’s manual dexterity that Ray was fond of; Ray respected loneliness, and an orphan, he imagined, had a fair share of that.
“Shoot,” said Ray, “I’ll bet there’s nothing’ you couldn’t learn—nothin’ your hands wouldn’t remember, if your hands ever got to hold it, whatever it was.”
“Right,” said Homer Wells, smiling. He remembered the perfect balance in the set of dilators with the Douglass points; how you could hold one steadily between your thumb and index finger just by resting the shaft against the pad of your middle finger. It would move only and exactly when and where you moved it. And how wonderfully precise it was, Homer thought: that the vaginal speculum comes in more than one size; that there was always a size that was just right. And how sensitive an adjustment could be accomplished by just a half turn of the little thumbscrew, how the duck-billed speculum could hold the lips of the vagina open exactly wide enough.
Homer Wells, twenty-one, breathing in the steam from the hot tea, sat waiting for his life to begin.
In the Cadillac with Wally, driving back to Ocean View—the rock-and-water prettiness of Heart’s Haven giving way to the scruffier, more tangled land of Heart’s Rock—Homer said, “I was wondering—but don’t tell me if you’d rather not talk about it—I was just wondering how it happened that Candy got pregnant. I mean, weren’t you using anything?”
“Sure I was,” Wally said. “I was using one of Herb Fowler’s rubbers, but it had a hole in it.”
“It had a hole in it?” said Homer Wells.
“Not a big one,” Wally said, “but I could tell it had a hole—you know, it leaked.”
“Any hole is big enough,” Homer said.
“Sure is,” Wally said. “The way he carries the things around with him, it probably got poked by something in his pocket.”
“I guess you don’t use the rubbers Herb throws at you anymore,” said Homer Wells.
“That’s right,” Wally said.
When Wally was asleep—as peacefully as a prince, as out-to-the-world as a king—Homer Wells slipped out of bed, found his pants, found the rubbers in the pocket, and took one to the bathroom where he filled it up with water from the cold water tap. The hole was tiny but precise—a fine but uninterrupted needle of water streamed out of the end of the rubber. The hole was bigger than a pinprick but not nearly so large as a nail would make; maybe Herb Fowler used a thumbtack, or the point of a compass, thought Homer Wells.
It was a deliberate sort of hole, perfectly placed, dead center. The thought of Herb Fowler making the holes made Homer Wells shiver. He remembered the first fetus he’d seen, on his way back from the incinerator—how it appeared to have fallen from the sky. He recalled the extended arms of the murdered fetus from Three Mile Falls. And the bruise that was green-going-to-yellow on Grace Lynch’s breast. Had Grace’s journey to St. Cloud’s originated with one of Herb Fowler’s prophylactics?
In St. Cloud’s he had seen anguish and the plainer forms of unhappiness—and depression, and destructiveness. He was familiar with mean-spiritedness and with injustice, too. But this is evil, isn’t it? wondered Homer Wells. Have I seen evil before? He thought of the woman with the pony’s penis in her mouth. What do you do when you recognize evil? he wondered.
He looked out Wally’s window—but in the darkness, in his mind’s eye, he saw the eroded, still unplanted hillside behind the hospital and the boys’ division at St. Cloud’s; he saw the thick but damaged, sound-absorbing forest beyond the river that carried away his grief for Fuzzy Stone. If he had known Mrs. Grogan’s prayer, he would have tried it, but the prayer that Homer used to calm himself was the end of Chapter 43 of David Copperfield. There being twenty more chapters to go, these words were perhaps too uncertain for a prayer, and Homer spoke them to himself uncertainly—not as if he believed the words were true, but as if he were trying to force them to be true; by repeating and repeating the words he might make the words true for him, for Homer Wells:
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.
But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.
In the morning Wally left, halfheartedly, for the university in Orono. The next day, Candy left for Camden Academy. The day before the picking crew arrived at Ocean View, Homer Wells—the tallest and oldest boy at Cape Kenneth High School—attended the first class meeting of Senior Biology. His friend Debra Pettigrew had to lead him to the laboratory; Homer got lost en route and wandered into a class called Wood Shop.
The textbook for Senior Biology was B. A. Bensley’s Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit; the text and illustrations were intimidating to the other students, but the book filled Homer Wells with longing. It was a shock for him to realize how much he missed Dr. Larch’s well-worn copy of Gray’s. Homer, at first glance, was critical of Bensley; whereas Gray’s began with the skeleton, Bensley began with the tissues. But the teacher of the class was no fool; a cadaverous man was Mr. Hood, but he pleased Homer Wells by announcing that he did not intend to follow the text exactly—the class, like Gray’s, would begin with the bones. Comforted by what, for him, was routine, Homer relished his first look at the ancient yellowed skeleton of a rabbit. The class was hushed; some students were repulsed. Wait till they get to the urogenital system, thought Homer Wells, his eyes skimming over the perfect bones; but this thought shocked him, too. He realized he was looking forward to getting to the poor rabbit’s urogenital system.
He had a lateral view of the rabbit’s skull; he tested himself with the naming of parts—it was so easy for him: cranial, orbital, nasal, frontal, mandible, maxilla, premaxilla. How well he remembered Clara and the others who had taught him so much!
As for Clara, she was finally put to rest in a place she might not have chosen for herself—the cemetery in St. Cloud’s was in the abandoned part of town. Perhaps this was appropriate, thought Dr. Larch, who supervised Clara’s burial, because Clara herself had been abandoned—and surely she had been more explored and examined than she had ever been loved.
Nurse Edna was shocked to see the departing coffin, but Nurse Angela assured her that none of the orphans had passed away in the night. Mrs. Grogan accompanied Dr. Larch to the cemetery; Larch had asked her to come with him because he knew that Mrs. Grogan enjoyed every opportunity to say her prayer. (There was no minister or priest or rabbi in St. Cloud’s; if holy words were in order, someone from Three Mile Falls came and said them. It was a testimony to Wilbur Larch’s increasing isolationism that he refused to send to Three Mile Falls for anything, and that he preferred Mrs. Grogan—if he was forced to listen to holy words at all.)
It was the first burial that Wilbur Larch had wept over; Mrs. Grogan knew that his tears were not for Clara. Larch wouldn’t have buried Clara if he’d thought that Homer Wells would ever be coming back.
“Well, he’s wrong,” Nurse Angela said. “Even a saint can make a mistake. Homer Wells will be back. He belongs here, like it or not.”
Is it the ether? Dr. Larch wondered. He meant, was it the ether that gave him the sense, increasingly, that he knew everything that was going to happen? For example, he had anticipated the letter that arrived for F. Stone—forwarded from Fuzzy’s P.O. box address. “Is this some sick joke?” Nurse Angela asked, turning the envelope a
round and around.
“I’ll take that, please,” Dr. Larch said. It was from the board of trustees, as he had expected. That was why they’d wanted those follow-up reports from him and why they’d requested the addresses of the orphans. They were checking up on him, Larch knew.
The letter to Fuzzy began with cordial good wishes; it said that the board knew a great deal about Fuzzy from Dr. Larch, but they wished to know anything further about Fuzzy’s “St. Cloud’s experience”—anything, naturally, that he wanted to “share” with them.
The “St. Cloud’s experience” sounded to Wilbur Larch like a mystical happening. The attached questionnaire made him furious, although he did amuse himself by trying to imagine which of the questions had been conceived by the tedious Dr. Gingrich and which of them had flowed from the chilling mind of Mrs. Goodhall. Dr. Larch also had fun imagining how Homer Wells and Snowy Meadows and Curly Day—and all the others—would answer the silly questionnaire, but he took the immediate business very seriously. He wanted Fuzzy Stone’s answers to the questionnaire to be perfect. He wanted to be sure that the board of trustees would never forget Fuzzy Stone.
There were five questions. Every single one of them was based upon the incorrect assumption that every child must have been at least five or six years old before he—or she—was adopted. This and other stupidities convinced Wilbur Larch that Dr. Gingrich and Mrs. Goodhall were going to be easy adversaries.
1. Was your life at St. Cloud’s properly supervised? (Please include in your answer if you ever felt that your treatment was especially affectionate, or especially instructive; we would certainly want to hear if you felt your treatment was ever abusive.)
2. Did you receive adequate medical attention at St. Cloud’s?
3. Were you adequately prepared for your new life in a foster home, and do you feel your foster home was carefully and correctly chosen?
4. Would you suggest any possible improvements in the methods and management of St. Cloud’s? (Specifically, would you feel things might have gone more smoothly for you if there had been a more youthful, energetic staff in residence—or perhaps, simply a larger staff?)
5. Was any attempt made to integrate the daily life of the orphanage with the life of the surrounding community?
“What community?” screamed Wilbur Larch. He stood at the window in Nurse Angela’s office and stared at the bleak hillside where Wally had wanted to plant apple trees. Why hadn’t they come back and planted the stupid trees, even if all that business was just to please me? Larch wondered.
“What community?” he howled.
Oh yes, he thought, I could have asked the stationmaster to offer them religious instruction—to speak to them about the terrifying chaos of homeless souls hovering in every niche of the sky. I could have asked that worthy gentleman to display his underwear catalogues, too.
I could have asked the family of child beaters from Three Mile Falls to come once a week and give lessons. I could have detained a few of the women having abortions and asked them to reveal, to all of us, why they didn’t want to have children at that particular moment in their lives; or I could have invited a few of the mothers back—they could have explained to the children why they were left here! That would have been instructive! Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what a community we could have been—if only I’d been more youthful, more energetic!
Oh yes, I have made some mistakes, he thought; and for a black hour or two, he remembered some of them. If only I knew how to build a breathing machine, he thought—if only I could have come up with a different set of lungs for Fuzzy.
And maybe Homer Wells will tell them that he was not “adequately prepared” for his first view of the fetus on the hill. And had there been a way to prepare Homer for Three Mile Falls, for the Drapers of Waterville, or for the Winkles being swept away? What was my choice? wondered Wilbur Larch. I suppose that I could have not apprenticed him.
“We are put on this earth to be of use,” Wilbur Larch (as Fuzzy Stone) wrote to the board of trustees. “It is better to do than to criticize,” wrote that young idealist, Fuzzy Stone. “It is better to do anything than to stand idly by.” You tell ’em, Fuzzy! thought Dr. Larch.
And so Fuzzy Stone told the board of trustees that the hospital at St. Cloud’s was a model of the form. “It was Larch who made me want to be a doctor,” Fuzzy wrote. “That old guy, Larch—he’s an inspiration. You talk about energy: the guy is as full of pep as a teen-ager.
“You better be careful about sending any young people to St. Cloud’s—old Larch will work them so hard, they’ll get sick. They’ll get so tired out, they’ll retire in a month!
“And you think those old nurses don’t do a day’s work? Let me tell you, when Nurse Angela is pitching for stickball, you’d think you were competing in an Olympic event. You talk about affectionate—that’s them, all right. They’re always hugging and kissing you, but they know how to shake some sense into you, too.
“You talk about supervised,” Fuzzy Stone wrote. “Did you ever find out that you were being watched by owls? That’s Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela—they’re owls, they don’t miss a thing. And some of the girls used to say that Mrs. Grogan knew what they did before they did it—before they even knew they were going to do it!
“And you talk about community,” wrote Fuzzy Stone. “St. Cloud’s was something special. Why, I remember people would get off the train and walk up the hill just to look the place over—it must have been because we were such a model community, for that area. I just remember these people, coming and going, coming and going—they were just there to look us over, as if we were one of the marvels of Maine.”
One of the marvels of Maine? thought Wilbur Larch, struggling to get control of himself. A stray puff of wind blew in the open window in Nurse Angela’s office, carrying some of the black smoke from the incinerator with it; the smoke brought Larch nearer to his senses. I’d better stop, he thought. I don’t want to get carried away.
He rested in the dispensary after his historical effort. Nurse Edna looked in on him once; Wilbur Larch was one of the marvels of Maine to her, and she was worried about him.
Larch was a little worried himself, when he woke. Where had the time gone? The problem is that I have to last, he thought. He could rewrite history but he couldn’t touch time; dates were fixed; time marched at its own pace. Even if he could convince Homer Wells to go to a real medical school, it would take time. It would take a few years for Fuzzy Stone to complete his training. I have to last until Fuzzy is qualified to replace me, thought Wilbur Larch.
He felt like hearing Mrs. Grogan’s prayer again, and so he went to the girls’ division a little early for his usual delivery of Jane Eyre. He eavesdropped in the hall on Mrs. Grogan’s prayer; I must ask her if she’d mind saying it to the boys, he thought, then wondered if it would confuse the boys, coming so quickly on the heels of, or just before, the Princes of Maine, Kings of New England benediction. I get confused myself sometimes, Dr. Larch knew.
“Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at the last.”
Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.
When Homer Wells read the questionnaire sent him by the St. Cloud’s board of trustees, he did not know exactly what made him anxious. Of course Dr. Larch and the others were getting older, but they were always “older” to him. It did occur to him to wonder what might happen to St. Cloud’s when Dr. Larch was too old, but this thought was so troubling that he tucked the questionnaire and the return envelope to the board into his copy of Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit. Besides, it was the day the migrants arrived; it was harvest time at Ocean View, and Homer Wells was busy.
He and Mrs. Worthington met the picking crew at the apple mart, and led them to their quarters in the cider house—more than half the crew had picked at Ocean View before and knew the wa
y, and the crew boss was what Mrs. Worthington called “an old hand.” He looked very young to Homer. It was the first year that Mrs. Worthington dealt directly with the picking crew and their boss; the hiring relationship, by mail, had been one of Senior Worthington’s responsibilities, and Senior had always maintained that if you kept a good crew boss, year after year, all the hiring—and the necessary taking-charge of the crew during the harvest—would be conducted by the boss.
His name was Arthur Rose, and he looked about Wally’s age—just barely older than Homer—although he must have been older; he’d been the crew boss for five or six years. One year Senior Worthington had written to the old man who’d been his crew boss for as long as Olive could remember and Arthur Rose had written back to Senior saying he was going to be the crew boss now—“the old boss,” Arthur Rose had written, “he’s dead tired of traveling.” As it turned out, the old boss was just dead, but Arthur Rose had done a good job. He brought the right number of pickers, and very few of them ever quit, or ran off, or lost more than a day or two of good work because of too much drinking. There seemed to be a firm control over the degree of fighting among them—even when they were accompanied by a woman or two. And when there was an occasional child among them, the child behaved. There were always pickers who fell off ladders, but there’d been no serious injuries. There were always small accidents around the cider press—but that was fast, often late-night work, when the men were tired or drinking a little. And there was the predictable clumsiness or drinking that led to the infrequent accidents involved in the almost ritualistic use of the cider house roof.
Running a farm had given Olive Worthington a warm feeling for the daylight hours and a grave suspicion of the night; the most trouble that people got into, in Olive’s opinion, was trouble that they encountered because they stayed up too late.
Olive had written Arthur Rose of Senior’s death, and told him that the picking-crew responsibility of Ocean View had now fallen to her. She wrote him at the usual address—a P.O. box in a town called Green, South Carolina—and Arthur Rose responded promptly, both with his condolences and with his assurance that the crew would arrive as always, on time and in correct numbers.