by John Irving
It was hot in the delivery room. The warm weather had been unexpected; because no one had put the screens on, Larch refused to open any windows.
At the knowledge that the child, one way or another, would be named after her, Nurse Angela wept so hard that Larch insisted that she change her mask. Nurse Edna was too short to reach the sweat on Larch’s forehead; she missed some of it. As the baby’s head emerged, a drop of Larch’s sweat baptized the child squarely on its temple—literally before it was entirely born—and Homer Wells could not help thinking that this was not unlike David Copperfield being born with a caul.
When the shoulders did not follow quickly enough to please Larch, he took the chin and occupit in both hands and drew the infant downward until, in a single, easy, upward motion, he delivered the posterior shoulder first. Homer Wells, biting his lip, nodded his approval as the anterior shoulder—and the rest of the child—followed.
“It’s an Angel!” Nurse Edna announced to Candy, who was still smiling an ether smile. Nurse Angela, who had soaked through another mask, had to turn away.
Only after the placenta was born did Dr. Larch say, as he sometimes did, “Perfect!” Then, as he never before had done, he kissed Candy—albeit through his mask—squarely between her wide-open, out-of-ether eyes.
The next day it snowed, and snowed—an angry April snowstorm, desperate not to relinquish the winter—and Homer looked at his newly planted apple orchard with concern; the frail, snow-covered trees reminded him of the luckless geese who’d made an ill-timed landing in the mill pond.
“Stop worrying about the trees,” said Wilbur Larch. “They’re on their own now.”
So was Angel Wells—eight pounds, seven ounces and neither an orphan nor an abortion.
One week short of May, there was still too much snow in St. Cloud’s for it to be mud season yet. Homer Wells had shaken the individual branches of each of his apple trees; and mouse tracks around one particularly vulnerable-looking Winter Banana had caused him to scatter poison oats and poison corn. Every tree had a metal sleeve around its slender trunk. Deer had already nibbled the row of Macs planted nearest the woods. Homer put out a salt lick for the deer, deeper into the woods, in hopes that the salt would keep them there.
Candy was nursing Angel, whose crusty remnant of an umbilical had fallen off cleanly and whose circumcision had healed. Homer had circumcised his son.
“You need the practice,” Dr. Larch had told him.
“You want me to practice on my son?” Homer had asked.
“May it be the only pain you ever cause him,” Wilbur Larch had replied.
There was still ice on the inside of the windowpanes in the morning. Homer would hold his finger to the pane until his finger was bright red, wet and cold, and then he’d touch Candy with the finger—which woke her up when she was slow to respond to his gentler touching of her stubble. Homer and Candy loved how they fit together in the bed again and how Angel could fit between them when Candy was nursing him, and how Candy’s milk would sometimes wake them both up before Angel’s crying would. They agreed: they had never been happier. So what if the sky, when it was almost May, was still the slate color of February, and still streaked with sleet? So what if the secret they kept in St. Cloud’s could not be kept forever—and was already a secret that half of Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock had the sense to figure out for themselves? People from Maine don’t crowd you; they let you come to your senses in your own, good time.
Every two days there was a ritual weighing of Angel Wells, which was always conducted in the dispensary—Nurse Angela keeping the record, Dr. Larch and Homer taking turns at poking Angel’s belly, looking into Angel’s eyes and feeling Angel’s grip. “Admit it,” Nurse Edna said to Candy and Homer at one such weighing-in ceremony. “You like it here.”
That day, in St. Cloud’s, it was thirty-three degrees; the wet snow, with which the morning had begun, had turned to freezing rain. That day, in Heart’s Rock, Olive Worthington had her own secret. Perhaps if Homer and Candy had been more forthcoming to her, Olive would have shared her secret with them; she would have grabbed the phone and called them. But people from Maine don’t like the telephone, a rude invention; especially in the case of important news, a telephone catches you too off-guard. A telegram provides you with a decent, respectful interval in which to gather your senses and respond. Olive sent them her secret in a telegram; that gave everyone a little more time.
Candy would see the telegram first. She was nursing Angel in the girls’ division, to quite an appreciative audience of girl orphans, when Mrs. Grogan brought her the telegram, which one of the lackeys who slaved for the stationmaster had finally gotten around to delivering. The telegram was an obvious shock to Candy, who quite abruptly handed Angel to Mrs. Grogan, although Angel did not appear to be through nursing. It astonished Mrs. Grogan that Candy did not even pause to properly replace her breast in her bra—she just buttoned her blouse over herself and, in spite of the weather, ran outdoors and across to the hospital entrance of the boys’ division.
At the time, Homer was asking Dr. Larch if he (Larch) thought that an X ray of his (Homer’s) heart might prove instructive to Homer. Wilbur Larch was thinking very carefully about his answer when Candy burst upon them.
Olive Worthington was a Yankee who knew the price of a telegram, the cost of words, yet her enthusiasm for her subject had clearly carried her away; she went far beyond her usual, shorthand self.
WALLY FOUND ALIVE/STOP/
RECOVERING ENCEPHALITIS CEYLON/STOP/
LIBERATED FROM RANGOON BURMA/STOP/
TEMPERATURE NINETY-TWO DEGREES/STOP/
WEIGHT ONE HUNDRED FIVE POUNDS/STOP/
PARALYZED/STOP/
LOVE OLIVE
“A hundred and five pounds,” said Homer Wells.
“Alive,” Candy whispered.
“Paralyzed,” Nurse Angela said.
“Encephalitis,” said Wilbur Larch.
“How could his temperature be ninety-two degrees, Wilbur?” Nurse Edna asked.
Dr. Larch didn’t know; he wouldn’t venture a guess. It was another one of those details—the clarification of which would take quite a long time. For Captain Worthington, who had abandoned his plane over Burma—about ten months ago—the clarification of many such details would take years.
It was raining so heavily when he jumped, it seemed to Wally that his parachute had to push against the rain to open. Yet the roar of the plane was so near, Wally was afraid he’d pulled the cord too soon. He was afraid of the bamboo—he’d heard stories of fliers being impaled by it—but he missed the bamboo and landed in a teak tree, a branch of which separated his shoulder. His head may have hit the trunk, or else the pain in his shoulder caused him to lose consciousness. It was dark when he woke up, and since he couldn’t see how far below the ground was, he didn’t dare to free himself from the chute cords until morning. Then he gave himself too much morphine—for his shoulder—and lost the syringe in the dark.
In his haste to abandon the plane, he’d not had time to locate a machete; in the morning he spent quite a while cutting through the chute cords—using only the bayonet in his ankle sheath, and having the use of only one strong arm. He was lowering himself to the ground when his dog tags caught on a vine, and because of his bad shoulder he could neither support all his weight with one arm nor free the tags, and so he lost them; the chain cut his neck when the tags came off, and he landed on an old teakwood log what was hidden under the ferns and the dead palm fronds. The log rolled, and he sprained his ankle. When he realized that in the monsoon weather he would never know east from west, that was when he discovered that his compass was gone. He rubbed some sulfa powder on his cut neck.
Wally had no idea where China was; he picked his way by moving through whatever was the least dense. In this way, after three days, he had the impression that the jungle was either thinning out or that he was getting better at picking his way through it. China was east of Wally, but Wally went s
outh; China was up—over the mountains—but Wally sought the valleys. Where Wally was, the valleys ran southwesterly. He was right about one thing: the jungle was thinning out. It was also getting warmer. Every night he climbed a tree and slept in its crotch. The large, twisted trunks of the peepul tree—as gnarled as giant, wooden cables—made the best crotches for sleeping, but Wally wasn’t the first creature to figure this out. One night, at eye level, in the crotch of a peepul tree next to him, a leopard was examining itself for ticks. Wally followed the leopard’s example, and discovered several. He gave up trying to remove the leeches.
One day he saw a python—a small one, about fifteen feet. It was lying on a rock, swallowing something the approximate size and shape of a beagle. Wally guessed it was a monkey, although he couldn’t remember if he had seen any monkeys. He had seen monkeys, of course, but he’d forgotten them; he had a fever. He tried to take his temperature, but the thermometer in his first-aid kit was broken.
The day he saw a tiger swim across a river was the day he began to notice the mosquitoes; the climate was changing. The river with the tiger in it had produced a broader valley; the forest was changing, too. He caught a fish with his hands and ate its liver raw; he cooked frogs as big as cats, but their legs were fishier than the frog legs he remembered. Perhaps it was the lack of garlic.
He ate something that was the consistency of a mango and had no taste whatsoever; the fruit left a musty aftertaste, and for a whole day he vomited and had chills. Then the river where he’d seen the tiger turned into a bigger river; the monsoon water had a powerful current; Wally was encouraged to build a raft. He remembered the rafts he had engineered for travel on Drinkwater Lake, and he cried to think how much harder it was to build a raft with bamboo and vines than with pitch pine and ropes—and stray boards and nails. And how much heavier the green bamboo was, too. It didn’t matter that the raft leaked; it barely floated; and if he needed to portage, he knew he couldn’t carry it.
He noticed more mosquitoes, especially when the river broadened and the current slowed down, and he just drifted. He had no idea how many days he drifted, or when he first knew for certain that he had a fever; about the time he saw the rice paddies and the water buffaloes, he would say later. One day he would remember waving to the women in the rice paddies; they looked so surprised to see him.
When Wally saw the rice paddies, he must have known he’d gone the wrong way. He had gone into the heart of Burma, which is shaped like a kite with a long tail; he was much nearer to Mandalay then he was to China, and the Japanese held Mandalay. But Wally had a fever of one hundred four; he just drifted; sometimes, he couldn’t tell the river from the rice paddies. It was strange how both the men and women wore long skirts, but only the men covered their hair; they wore what looked like baskets on their heads, and the baskets were wrapped with strips of brightly colored silk. The women’s heads were bare, but many of them put flowers in their hair. Both the men and the women braided their hair. They seemed to be eating all the time, but they were just chewing betel nuts. Their teeth were stained; their lips made them appear as if they’d been drinking blood, but that was just the betel juice.
The shelters they took Wally to were all alike—one-story, thatched houses on bamboo stilts; the families ate outdoors on a porch. They gave him rice and tea and lots of things with curry. When his fever went down, Wally ate panthay khowse (noodles and chicken) and nga sak kin (curried fish balls). Those were the first words that his Burmese rescuers tried to teach him, but Wally misunderstood; he thought nga sak kin was the name of the man who had carried him off the raft and held Wally’s head steady while the man’s wife fed Wally with her fingers. She was wonderfully small and wore a sheer white blouse; her husband touched the blouse and called it by name, trying to teach Wally more of his language.
“Aingyis,” the man said, and Wally thought that was the wife’s name. She smelled like the inside of the thatched houses—she smelled like chintz and lemon rind.
They were such a nice couple, Nga Sak Kin and Aingyis; Wally repeated their names out loud and smiled. They smiled back at him, Mr. Curried Fish Balls and his wife, Mrs. Blouse. She smelled as sticky-sweet as frangipani; she smelled as citrous as bergamot.
With the fever had come the stiffness in his neck and back, but when the fever broke and he stopped vomiting—when the headaches were over and the shaking chills were gone, and he wasn’t even nauseous anymore—that was when he noticed the paralysis. At that time, it was a stiff paralysis in both his lower and upper extremities. (“Spasticity,” Wilbur Larch would have called it.) Wally’s arms and legs stuck straight out and he couldn’t move them; he was delirious for two or three weeks and when he tried to talk, his speech was thick and slow. He had trouble eating because of the tremors in his lips and tongue. He couldn’t empty his bladder, and the natives had to catheterize him with a tiny, rough bamboo shoot—in order for him to urinate at all.
And they kept moving him. They always moved him over water. Once he saw elephants; they were dragging logs out of the forests. The surface of the water was forever interrupted with turtles and black snakes and water hyacinths, and betel juice—a darker red than the blood that traced Wally’s urine.
“Nga Sak Kin?” Wally asked. “Aingyis?” he asked. Where had they gone? Although the faces of his rescuers kept changing, they seemed to understand him. Must come from a big family, Wally thought. “I’m paralyzed, aren’t I?” he asked the small, pretty men and women, who always smiled. One of the women washed and combed his hair; her whole family watched Wally’s hair drying in the sun—the blond light leaping into it as it dried: how that impressed them!
They gave him a long sheer white blouse to wear. “Aingyis,” they said. Oh, it’s a present from her! he thought. Then they covered his blond hair with a dark wig—it was a waxy pigtail, and they piled it high on top of his head and studded it with flowers. The children giggled. They shaved his face so close his skin burned; they shaved his legs—below the knee, where his legs protruded from the long skirt they made him wear. The game was to make him a woman. The game was to make him safe, to make him blend in. Because his face was so pretty, it was easier for them to make him a woman than a man; the ideal Burmese woman has no breasts.
It is a shame that they weren’t more careful when they catheterized him—they were so careful about everything else. The bamboo shoot wasn’t always clean; the catheter’s roughness hurt him and made him bleed, but it was the dirtiness that would give him the infection. The infection would make him sterile. The epididymis, Wilbur Larch could have informed him, is a single coiled tube in which the sperm mature after leaving the testicle. Epididymitis (an infection of that little tube) prevents sperm from reaching the sperm duct. In Wally’s case, the infection would permanently seal his tube.
They were correct to catheterize him—it was only the how that was wrong. He suffered urinary retention, his bladder was distended—they had no choice but to relieve him. At times, Wally would wonder if there wasn’t an easier way—or if the bamboo was clean—but what could he say to them? “Aingyis,” he would say. “Nga Sak Kin?” he would ask them.
Months later, he would hear bombing. “Irrawaddy,” they would explain. They were bombing the oil fields along the Irrawaddy. Wally knew where he was. He used to bomb those fields, too. Before he heard the bombing (and, as always, disguised as a woman), he was taken to a doctor in Mandalay. His eyes were smarting because they’d rubbed a curry paste on his face to make him look brown. But, up close, with those blue eyes and that patrician nose, he couldn’t have fooled anyone. He saw many Japanese in Mandalay. The doctor had trouble explaining to Wally what was wrong with him. He said the following in English: “Japanese B mosquito.”
“I was bitten by a Japanese mosquito?” Wally said. But what’s a B mosquito? he wondered. He no longer needed a catheter to pee, but the infection had done its damage.
By the time he heard the bombing of the Irrawaddy, the paralysis had left his upper extremi
ties—he had the full use of his arms, again—and the spasticity had left his legs; although his legs were still paralyzed, it was a flaccid paralysis and not quite symmetrical (his left leg was more dead than his right). His bladder was okay, and except for the effects of curry, his bowels were okay, too; what he could detect of his sexual function felt normal.
“There are no autonomic effects to encephalitis,” Wilbur Larch would explain to Candy and to Homer Wells.
“What’s that mean?” Candy asked.
“It means that Wally can have a normal sex life,” said Homer Wells, who didn’t know about Wally’s epididymis. Wally would have a normal sex life, but he wouldn’t have an adequate sperm count. He would still have orgasm and ejaculation—since so much of the ejaculate is made in the prostate, which is quite a way downstream. He just could never make his own baby.
At the time, none of them knew Wally had been sterilized; they knew only about the encephalitis.
Wally caught it from the mosquitoes. It was called Japanese B encephalitis, and it was quite common in Asia during the war. “It is an arthropod-borne virus,” Wilbur Larch explained.
Residual flaccid paralysis of the lower extremities was not a common effect of the disease, but it was well enough known to be documented. There are numerous changes that occur in the tissue of the brain, but the changes in the spinal cord look very much like polio. The incubation period is about a week long and the acute disease process lasts only a week or ten days; the recovery is very slow, with muscular tremors lasting sometimes for months.
“Considering that it comes from birds, it’s a big disease,” Wilbur Larch said to Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela. The mosquito picks up the virus from birds and transmits it to men and other large animals.
Wally’s face was so pretty, and he’d lost so much weight: that was why they disguised him as a woman. The Japanese were both attracted to and intimidated by the Burmese women—especially the Padaung women with their high brass collars wound in spirals to stretch their necks. That Wally was a woman and an invalid made him an untouchable. That they had made him look Eurasian also made him an outcast.