by John Irving
Olive always had the radio on, and so she was one of those people who needed to hear things several times before she really heard them at all. She was baking an apple pie, and simmering applesauce, and only the unusual urgency in the announcer’s voice caused her to pay attention to the radio at all.
Homer Wells was in Wally’s room, reading David Copperfield and thinking about Heaven—“. . . that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.” I think I would prefer to love Candy here, “on earth,” Homer Wells was thinking—when Olive interrupted him.
“Homer!” Olive called upstairs. “Where is Pearl Harbor?”
He was the wrong person to ask; Homer Wells had seen the whole world only once, and briefly—and flat against the blackboard. He’d had difficulty locating South Carolina; not only did he not know where Pearl Harbor was, he also didn’t know what it was.
“I don’t know!” he called downstairs.
“Well, the Japanese have just bombed it!” Olive called to him.
“You mean, with planes?” asked Homer Wells. “From the sky?”
“Of course from the sky!” Olive shouted. “You better come listen to this.”
“Where is Pearl Harbor?” Candy asked her father.
“Ssshhh!” said Raymond Kendall. “If we just listen, maybe they’ll say.”
“How could they get away with an attack?” Candy asked.
“Because someone wasn’t doing his job,” Ray said.
The first reports were garbled. There was mention of California falling under attack, or even being invaded. Many listeners were confused from the beginning; they thought Pearl Harbor was in California.
“Where is Hawaii?” Mrs. Grogan asked. They were having tea and cookies and listening to the radio, for music, when they’d heard the news.
“Hawaii is in the Pacific,” said Wilbur Larch.
“Oh, that’s very far away,” Nurse Edna said.
“Not far enough away,” Dr. Larch said.
“There’s going to be another war, isn’t there?” Nurse Angela asked.
“I guess it’s already started,” said Wilbur Larch, while Wally—to whom this war would mean the most—watched Fred Astaire; Fred just kept dancing and dancing, and Wally thought he could go on watching such a display of grace for hours.
Melony and Lorna were listening to the radio in the parlor of the boardinghouse where Lorna lived. It was a women-only boardinghouse; the women were either quite old or, like Lorna, only recently separated from their husbands. On this Sunday afternoon, most of the women listening to the radio were old.
“We should just bomb Japan,” Melony said. “No messing around—just blow up the whole country.”
“You know how come Japs got squinty eyes?” Lorna asked. Melony, and all the old women, listened intently. “Because they masturbate all the time—both the men and the women. They just do it all the time.”
There was either a polite or a stunned silence, or both. In Melony’s case, her silence was polite.
“Is this a joke?” she asked her friend respectfully.
“Of course it’s a joke!” Lorna cried.
“I don’t get it, I guess,” Melony admitted.
“How come Japs got squinty eyes?” Lorna asked. “Because they masturbate all the time.” She paused.
“That’s what I thought you said,” Melony said.
“Because they shut their eyes every time they come!” Lorna said. “Their eyes get tired from all that opening and closing. That’s why they can’t open their eyes all the way! Get it?” Lorna asked triumphantly.
Still self-conscious about her teeth, Melony managed a tight-lipped smile. Anyone seeing the old women in the boardinghouse parlor would not have known exactly what filled them with fear and trembling: the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, or Lorna and Melony.
And young Wally Worthington, who was so itchy to be a hero, danced out on the streets of Orono, where he heard the news. President Roosevelt would call it a “day of infamy,” but that day meant more than infamy to Wally, whose noble and adventurous heart longed to fly a B-24 Liberator: a heavy bomber, four engines, used for bombing bridges, oil refineries, fuel depots, railroad tracks, and so forth. Somewhere, on that “day of infamy,” there was a B-24 Liberator bomber waiting for young Wally Worthington to learn how to fly it.
People in Heart’s Haven and in Heart’s Rock always said that Wally had everything: money, looks, goodness, charm, the girl of his dreams—but he had courage, too, and he had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and restlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
Wally enlisted in the Army Air Corps before Christmas, but they allowed him to spend Christmas at home. It would take the Army Air Corps more than a year to teach Wally the grim arts of aerial warfare.
“By that time,” he told Olive and Candy in the kitchen at Ocean View, “all the fighting will probably be over. That would be just my luck.”
“That would be lucky,” Olive said. Candy nodded her head.
“Right!” said Homer Wells, from the other room. He was still thinking about being excused from his physical; Dr. Larch’s account of Homer’s heart history had sufficed. Physical examinations were given only to people who were Class I. Homer Wells was Class IV. According to his family physician, Homer had congenital pulmonic stenosis; Homer’s “family physician” was Dr. Larch, whose letter to the local medical advisory board had been accepted as evidence enough for Homer’s deferment—Larch was also a member of the local board.
“I asked her to marry me, but she wouldn’t,” Wally told Homer in their shared bedroom. “She said she’d wait for me, but she wouldn’t marry me. She said she’d be my wife, but not my widow.”
“Is that what you call waiting and seeing?” Homer asked Candy the next day.
“Yes,” Candy said. “For years I’ve expected to be married to Wally. You came along second. I have to wait and see about you. And now comes the war. I have to wait and see about the war, too.”
“But you made him a promise,” said Homer Wells.
“Yes,” Candy said. “Isn’t a promise like waiting and seeing? Did you ever make a promise, and mean it—and break it?” Homer Wells’s reaction was an involuntary cringe, as sudden and uncontrollable as if Candy had called him “Sunshine.”
During Christmas dinner, Raymond Kendall, trying to relieve the silence, said, “I would have chosen submarines.”
“You’d end up feeding lobsters,” Wally said.
“That’s okay,” said Ray. “They been feeding me.”
“You got a better chance in a plane,” Wally said.
“Yes, a chance,” Candy said scornfully. “Why would you want to be anywhere where all you get is a chance?”
“Good question,” Olive said crossly. She let the silver serving fork fall to the meat platter with such force that the goose appeared to flinch.
“A chance is enough,” said Homer Wells, who did not immediately recognize the tone in his own voice. “A chance is all we get, right? In the air, or underwater, or right here, from the minute we’re born.” Or from the minute we’re not born, he thought; now he recognized his tone of voice—it was Dr. Larch’s.
“That’s a rather grim philosophy,” Olive said.
“I thought you were studying anatomy,” Wally said to Homer, who looked at Candy, who looked away.
They sent Wally to Fort Meade, Maryland, for the month of January. He was a faithful but terrible letter writer; he wrote his mother, he wrote to Homer and to Candy, and even to Ray, but he never explained anything; if there was a plan to what they were teaching him, Wally either didn’t know it or couldn’t describe it. He simply wrote in tedious detail about the last thing that had occupied his mind before beginning the letter; this included the pouch he had devised to hang from his bunk bed to separate his sho
e polish from his toothpaste and the best-name-for-a-plane competition that dominated the imaginative life of Company A. He was also delighted that a cook sergeant had taught him more limericks than Senior, in his last years, had been able to remember. Every letter Wally wrote, to anyone, included a limerick; Ray liked them, and Homer liked them, but they made Candy angry and Olive was appalled. Candy and Homer showed each other the limericks Wally sent them, until Homer realized that this made Candy even angrier: the limericks Wally chose to send Candy were very mild-mannered compared to the ones Wally sent to Homer. For example, he sent this to Candy:
There was a young lady of Exeter,
So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
One was even so brave
As to take out and wave
The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.
He sent this to Homer Wells:
There was a young lady named Brent
With a cunt of enormous extent
And so deep and so wide,
The acoustics inside
Were so good you could hear when you spent.
Wally sent Ray limericks of a similar kind:
There’s an unbroken babe from Toronto
Exceedingly hard to get onto
But when you get there
And have parted the hair,
You can fuck her as much as you want to.
God knows what limericks Wally sent to Olive—where does Wally find ones that are decent enough? wondered Homer, who, in the evenings after Wally had gone and Candy had gone back to school, lay listening to his heart. It would help, he thought, if he knew what to listen for.
Wally was sent to St. Louis—the Jefferson Barracks, Flight 17, 28th School Squadron. It struck Homer Wells that the Army Air Corps might have modeled itself on Gray’s Anatomy—manifesting a steadfast belief in categories and in everything having a name. It was reassuring to Homer Wells; in his mind, this endless categorizing made Wally safer, but Homer couldn’t convince Candy of this.
“He’s safe one minute, and in another minute he’s not safe,” she said, shrugging.
“Look after Homer, look after his heart,” Wally had written her.
“And who’s looking after my heart? Yes, I’m still angry,” she wrote him, although he hadn’t asked.
But if she was angry with Wally, she was also loyal; she was keeping her promise, about the waiting and seeing. She kissed Homer when she saw him, and when they said good-bye, but she wouldn’t encourage him.
“We’re just good pals,” she told her father; Ray hadn’t asked.
“I can see that,” Ray said.
The work in the orchards was light that winter; pruning was the main job. The men took turns teaching Homer how to prune. “You make your big cuts in the subfreezing weather,” Meany Hyde told him.
“A tree don’t bleed so much when it’s cold,” was how Vernon Lynch put it, hacking away.
“There’s less chance of an infection when it’s cold,” said Herb Fowler, who was not so free with the prophylactics in the winter months, perhaps because he would have needed to take his gloves off to get at them; but Homer felt sure that Herb was being wary ever since Homer had asked him about the holes.
“Are there holes?” Herb had replied. “Manufacturer’s defect, I suppose.”
But later he’d come up to Homer and whispered to him, “Not all of them’s got holes.”
“You have a system?” Homer asked. “Which ones have holes and which don’t?”
“It’s not my system,” Herb Fowler said. “Some got holes, some don’t. Manufacturer’s defect.”
“Right,” said Homer Wells, but rubbers were rarely flung his way now.
Meany Hyde’s wife, Florence, was pregnant again, and all winter Big Dot Taft and Irene Titcomb made jokes about Meany’s potency.
“You keep away from me, Meany,” Big Dot would say. “I’m not even lettin’ you sip my coffee. I think all you gotta do is breathe on somebody and they’re pregnant.”
“Well, that’s all he did to me!” Florence would say, and Big Dot Taft would roar.
“Dontcha go givin’ the men any breathin’ lessons, Meany,” Irene Titcomb said.
“Meany can knock you up just by kissin’ your ears,” Florence Hyde said proudly, glorying in her pregnancy.
“Gimme some earmuffs,” said Squeeze Louise Tobey. “Gimme one of them ski hats.”
“Gimme a dozen of Herb’s rubbers!” said Irene Titcomb.
No, don’t take any, thought Homer Wells. That’s probably how she got that way. Homer was staring at Florence Hyde. It was riveting to him to see someone enjoying her pregnancy.
“Honestly, Homer,” said Big Dot Taft, “ain’t you ever seen anyone about to have a baby before?”
“Yes,” said Homer Wells, who looked away. Grace Lynch was staring at him, and he looked away from her, too.
“If I was your age,” Vernon Lynch told Homer, when they were pruning in an orchard called Cock Hill, “I’d enlist. I’d do what Wally’s doing.”
“I can’t,” said Homer Wells.
“They don’t take orphans?” Vernon asked.
“No,” Homer said. “I have a heart defect. Something I was born with.”
Vernon Lynch was not a gossip, but that was all that Homer needed to say—the workers at Ocean View not only forgave Homer for not enlisting, they even began to take care of him. They treated him the way Dr. Larch would have liked to see him treated.
“You know, I didn’t mean anything,” Herb Fowler told Homer. “About the manufacturer’s defect. I wouldn’t have said that if I’d known about your heart.”
“That’s okay,” Homer said.
And in the early spring, when it was time to mend the boxes for the beehives, Ira Titcomb rushed to assist Homer, who was struggling with a particularly heavy pallet.
“Don’t strain yourself, Jesus!” Ira said.
“I can manage, Ira. I’m stronger than you are,” Homer said, not understanding—at first—Ira’s concern.
“I heard your heart’s not as strong as the rest of you,” Ira said.
On Mother’s Day, Vernon Lynch taught him how to operate the sprayers by himself. He insisted on giving Homer another lecture on the use of the respirator. “You of all people,” Vernon told him, “better keep this thing on, and keep it clean.”
“Me of all people,” said Homer Wells.
Even Debra Pettigrew forgave him for his seemingly undefined friendship with Candy. As the weather warmed up, they went parking again, and one night they managed some lingering kisses in the Pettigrews’ unoccupied summer house on Drinkwater Lake; the shut-up, cold smell of the house reminded Homer of his first days in the cider house. When his kisses seemed too calm, Debra grew restless; when his kisses seemed too passionate, Debra said, “Careful! Don’t get too excited.” He was a young man with unusual kindness, or else he might have suggested to Debra that nothing she allowed him to do would ever endanger his heart.
It was spring. Wally was sent to Kelly Field—San Antonio, Texas—for Air Corps cadet training (Squadron 2, Flight C), and Melony thought that the time was right for her to hit the road again.
“You’re crazy,” Lorna told her. “The more of a war there is, the more good jobs there are for us. The country needs to build stuff—it don’t need to eat more apples.”
“Fuck what the country needs,” Melony said. “I’m lookin’ for Homer Wells, and I’m gonna find him.”
“So will I see you next winter?” Lorna asked her friend.
“If I don’t find Ocean View or Homer Wells,” Melony said.
“So I’ll see you next winter,” Lorna said. “You’re lettin’ a man make an asshole out of you.”
“That’s just what I’m not lettin’ him do,” Melony said.
Mrs. Grogan’s coat had seen better days, but the bundle of belongings contained within the grasp of Charley’s belt had grown substantially. Melony had made money in the shipyards, and she’d treated herself
to a few sturdy articles of a workingman’s clothing, including a good pair of boots. Lorna gave her a present as she was leaving.
“I used to knit,” Lorna explained. It was a child’s woolen mitten—just the left-hand mitten—and too small for Melony, but the colors were very pretty. “It was gonna be for a baby I never had, ’cause I didn’t stay married long enough. I never got the right hand finished.” Melony stared at the mitten, which she held in her hand—the mitten was very heavy; it was full of ball bearings that Lorna had swiped from the shipyards. “It’s a super weapon,” Lorna explained, “in case you meet anyone who’s a bigger asshole than you are!”
The gift brought tears to Melony’s eyes, and the women hugged each other good-bye. Melony left Bath without saying good-bye to young Mary Agnes Cork, who would have done anything to please her, who asked all her school friends—and everyone who appeared at Ted and Patty Callahan’s to browse the antiques—if any of them had ever heard of an apple orchard called Ocean View. If this knowledge might make Melony her friend, Mary Agnes Cork would never stop inquiring. After Melony left Bath, Lorna realized how much she missed her friend; Lorna discovered that she was asking about Ocean View all the time—as if this inquiry was as necessary and loyal a part of her friendship with Melony as the gift of that woolen weapon.
This meant that now there were three of them, all looking for Homer Wells.
That summer they moved Wally from San Antonio to Coleman, Texas. “I wish someone would declare war on Texas,” he wrote Homer. “That might be some justification for being here.” He claimed he was flying in his undershorts and socks—that was all any of them could stand to wear in such unrelenting heat.
“Where does he think he’s going?” Candy complained to Homer. “Does he expect a perfect climate? He’s going to a war!” Homer sat opposite her on Ray Kendall’s dock, the snail population forever influenced by their conversation.
In the cool cement-floor classroom at Cape Kenneth High, Homer would unroll the map of the world; there would rarely be anyone present besides the janitor, who was no better informed about geography than Homer Wells. Homer used the summer solitude to study the places of the world where he thought it would be likely that Wally would go.