by John Irving
They weren't that kind of family. That was a favorite fantasy of Nurse Angela's--she hated smoking; just the look of a cigarette dangling from anyone's mouth made her remember a French-speaking Indian who'd come to see her father about digging a well and had stuck his cigarette in one of her cat's faces, burning its nose!--the cat, an especially friendly spayed female, had jumped up in the Indian's lap. That cat had been named Bandit--she'd had the classic masked face of a raccoon. Nurse Angela had restrained herself from naming any of the orphans after Bandit--she thought of Bandit as a girl's name.
But the family from Three Mile Falls were not sadists of a very known kind. An older man and his younger wife lived with his grown-up children of a previous marriage; the young wife wanted a child of her own, but she couldn't get pregnant. Everyone in the family thought it would be nice for the young wife to have her own baby. What no one mentioned was that one of the grown-up children from the previous marriage had had a baby, illegitimately, and she hadn't cared for it very well, and the baby had cried and cried and cried. Everyone complained about the baby crying, night and day, and one morning the grown-up daughter had simply taken her baby and gone. She left only this note behind:
I'M SICK OF HEARING FROM ALL OF YOU ABOUT HOW MUCH MY BABY CRIES. I GUESS IF I GO YOU WON'T MISS THE CRYING OR ME EITHER.
But they did miss the crying--everyone missed that wonderful, bawling baby and the dear, dim-witted daughter who had taken it away.
"Be sure nice to have a baby crying around here again," someone in the family had remarked, and so they went and got themselves a baby from St. Cloud's.
They were the wrong family to be given a baby who wouldn't cry. Homer's silence was such a disappointment to them that they took it as a kind of affront and challenged each other to discover who among them could make the baby cry first; after first they progressed to loudest, after loudest came longest.
They first made him cry by not feeding him, but they made him cry loudest by hurting him; this usually meant pinching him or punching him, but there was ample evidence that the baby had been bitten, too. They made him cry longest by frightening him; they discovered that startling babies was the best way to frighten them. They must have been very accomplished at achieving the loudest and longest in order to have made Homer Wells's crying a legend in Three Mile Falls. It was especially hard to hear anything in Three Mile Falls--not to mention how hard it was to make a legend out of anything there.
The falls themselves made such a steady roar that Three Mile Falls was the perfect town for murder; no one there could hear a shot or a scream. If you murdered someone in Three Mile Falls and threw the body in the river at the falls, the body couldn't possibly be stopped (or even slowed down, not to mention found) until it went three miles downriver to St. Cloud's. It was therefore all the more remarkable that the whole town heard the kind of crying Homer Wells made.
It took Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna about a year before Homer Wells stopped waking up with a scream or letting out a wail whenever someone crossed his field of vision, or whenever he heard a human sound, even a chair being dragged across the floor, or even a bed creak, a window shut, a door open. Every sight and sound connected with a human being who might possibly be headed in Homer's direction produced a high, stammering shout and such tearful blubbering that anyone visiting the boys' division would have thought that the orphanage was, in fairy-tale fashion, a torture shop, a prison of child molestation and abuse beyond imagining.
"Homer, Homer," Dr. Larch would say soothingly--while the boy burned scarlet and refilled his lungs. "Homer, you're going to get us investigated for murder! You're going to get us shut down."
Poor Nurse Edna and poor Nurse Angela were probably more permanently scarred by the family from Three Mile Falls than Homer Wells was, and the good and the great St. Larch never fully recovered from the incident. He had met the family; he'd interviewed them all--and been horribly wrong about them; and he'd seen them all again on the day he went to Three Mile Falls to bring Homer Wells back to St. Cloud's.
What Dr. Larch would always remember was the fright in all of their expressions when he'd marched into their house and taken Homer up in his arms. The fear in their faces would haunt Dr. Larch forever, the epitome of everything he could never understand about the great ambiguity in the feelings people had for children. There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies--and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter. Sometimes the mind didn't want the babies, but sometimes the mind was so perverse that it made other people have babies they knew they didn't want. For whom was this insisting done? Dr. Larch wondered. For whom did some minds insist that babies, even clearly unwanted ones, must be brought, screaming, into the world?
And when other minds thought they wanted babies but then couldn't (or wouldn't) take proper care of them . . . well, what were these minds thinking? When Dr. Larch's mind ran away with him on the subject, it was always the fear in those faces of the family from Three Mile Falls that he saw, and Homer Wells's legendary howl that he heard. The fear in that family was fixed in St. Larch's vision; no one, he believed, who had seen such fear should ever make a woman have a baby she didn't want to have. "NO ONE!" Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. "Not even someone from the Ramses Paper Company!"
If you had an ounce of sanity, you would not speak against abortion to Dr. Wilbur Larch--or you would suffer every detail there was to know about the six weeks Homer Wells spent with the family from Three Mile Falls. This was Larch's only way of discussing the issue (which was not even open to debate with him). He was an obstetrician, but when he was asked--and when it was safe--he was an abortionist, too.
By the time Homer was four he didn't have those dreams anymore--the ones that could awaken every living soul in St. Cloud's, the dreams that caused one night watchman to resign ("My heart," he said, "won't take another night of that boy") and that resided so soundly in the memory of Dr. Wilbur Larch that he was known, for years, to hear babies crying in his sleep and to roll over saying, "Homer, Homer, it's all right now, Homer."
At St. Cloud's, of course, babies were always crying in everyone's sleep, but no baby ever woke up crying in quite the manner that Homer Wells managed it.
"Lord, it's as if he was being stabbed," Nurse Edna would say.
"As if he was being burned with a cigarette," Nurse Angela would say.
But only Wilbur Larch knew what it was really like--that way that Homer Wells woke up and (in his violent waking) woke everyone else. "As if he were being circumcised," Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. "As if someone were snipping his little penis--over and over again, just snipping it and snipping it."
The third foster family to fail with Homer Wells was a family of such rare and championship qualities that to judge humanity by this family's example would be foolish. They were that good a family. They were that perfect, or Dr. Larch would not have let Homer go to them. After the family from Three Mile Falls, Dr. Larch was being especially careful with Homer.
Professor Draper and his wife of nearly forty years lived in Waterville, Maine. Waterville was not much of a college town in 193_, when Homer Wells went there; but if you compared Waterville to St. Cloud's, or to Three Mile Falls, you would have to say that Waterville was a community of moral and social giants. Though still inland, it was of considerably higher elevation--there were nearby mountains, and from these there were actual vistas; mountain life (like the life on an ocean, or on the plains, or on open farmland) affords the inhabitant the luxury of a view. Living on land where you can occasionally see a long way provides the soul with a perspective of a beneficially expansive nature--or so believed Professor Draper; he was a born teacher.
"Unfarmed valley land," he would intone, "which I associate with forests too low and too dense to provide a view, tends to cramp the uplifting qualities of human nature and enhance those instincts which are mean-spirited and small."
"Now, Homer," Mrs. Draper would say. "The professor is a bor
n teacher. You have to take him with a grain of salt."
Everyone called her Mom. No one (including his grown children and his grandchildren) called him anything but Professor. Even Dr. Larch didn't know what his first name was. If his tone was professorial, at times even officious, he was a man of very regular habits and temperament, and his manner was jocular.
"Wet shoes," the professor once said to Homer, "are a fact of Maine. They are a given. Your method, Homer, of putting wet shoes on a windowsill where they might be dried by the faint appearance, albeit rare, of the Maine sun, is admirable for its positivism, its determined optimism. However," the professor would go on, "a method I would recommend for wet shoes--a method, I must add, that is independent of the weather--involves a more reliable source of heat in Maine: namely, the furnace. When you consider that the days when shoes get wet are days, as a rule, when we don't see the sun, you'll recognize the furnace-room method as having certain advantages."
"With a grain of salt, Homer," Mrs. Draper would tell the boy. Even the professor called her Mom; even Mom called him Professor.
If Homer Wells found the professor's conversation abounding in pithy maxims, he didn't complain. If Professor Draper's students at the college and his colleagues in the history department thought that the professor was a sententious bore--and tended to flee his path like rabbits escaping the slow but nose-to-the-ground hound--they could not influence Homer's opinion of the first father figure in his life to rival Dr. Larch.
Homer's arrival in Waterville was greeted by the kind of attention the boy had never known. Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna were emergency providers, and Dr. Larch an affectionate, if stern and distracted, overseer. But Mrs. Draper was a mom's mom; she was a hoverer. She was up before Homer was awake; the cookies she baked while he ate his breakfast were miraculously still warm in his lunch bag at noon. Mom Draper hiked to school with Homer--they went overland, disdaining the road; it was her "constitutional," she said.
In the afternoons, Professor Draper met Homer in the school's playground--school's end seemed magically timed to coincide with the professor's last class of the day at the college--and they would tramp home together. In the winter, which in Waterville came early, this was a literal tramping--on snowshoes, the mastery of which the professor placed on a level of learning to read and write.
"Use the body, use the mind, Homer," the professor said.
It's easy to see why Wilbur Larch was impressed with the man. He vigorously represented usefulness.
In truth, Homer liked the routine of it, the tramp, tramp of it, the utter predictability of it. An orphan is simply more of a child than other children in that essential appreciation of the things that happen daily, on schedule. For everything that promises to last, to stay the same, the orphan is a sucker.
Dr. Larch ran the boys' division with as many of the simulated manifestations of daily life as are possible to cultivate at an orphanage. Meals were promptly served at the same time, every day. Dr. Larch would read aloud at the same evening hour for the same length of time, even if it meant leaving a chapter in midadventure, with the boys shouting, "More, more, just read the next thing that happens!"
And St. Larch would say, "Tomorrow, same time, same place." There would be groans of disappointment, but Larch knew that he had made a promise; he had established a routine. "Here in St. Cloud's," he wrote in his journal, "security is measured by the number of promises kept. Every child understands a promise--if it is kept--and looks forward to the next promise. Among orphans, you build security slowly but regularly."
Slow but regular would describe the life that Homer Wells led with the Drapers in Waterville. Every activity was a lesson; each corner of the comfortable old house held something to be learned and then counted upon.
"This is Rufus. He's very old," the professor would say, introducing Homer to the dog. "This is Rufus's rug, this is his kingdom. When Rufus is sleeping on his kingdom, do not wake him--unless you are prepared for him to snap." Whereupon the professor would rouse the ancient dog, who would snap awake--and then appear to puzzle over the air he had bitten, tasting in it the Drapers' grown-up children, now married and with children of their own.
Homer met them all for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving with the Drapers was an experience in family guaranteed to make other families feel inferior. Mom would outdo herself at momness. The professor had a lecture ready on every conceivable subject: the qualities of white meat, and of dark; the last election; the pretension of salad forks; the superiority of the nineteenth-century novel (not to mention other aspects of that century's superiority); the proper texture of cranberry sauce; the meaning of "repentance"; the wholesomeness of exercise (including a comparison between splitting wood and ice skating); the evil inherent in naps. To each laboriously expressed opinion of the professor's, his grown children (two married women, one married man) would respond with a fairly balanced mixture of:
"Just so!"
"Isn't that always the way?"
"Right again, Professor!"
These robotlike responses were punctuated, with equal precision, by Mom's oft-repeated, "Grain of salt, grain of salt."
Homer Wells listened to these steady rhythms like a visitor from another world trying to decipher a strange tribe's drums. He couldn't quite catch on. The seeming constancy of everyone was overwhelming. He wouldn't know until he was much older just which it was that didn't set well with him--the implicit (and explicit) and self-congratulatory do-gooderism, or the heartiness with which life was tediously oversimplified.
Whichever it was, he stopped liking it; it became an obstacle in the path he was looking for that led to himself--to who he was, or should be. He remembered various Thanksgivings at St. Cloud's. They were not so cheery as the Waterville Thanksgiving with the Draper family, but they seemed a lot more real. He remembered how he had felt of use. There were always babies who couldn't feed themselves. There was the likelihood of a snowstorm that would knock out the electricity; Homer was put in charge of the candles and the kerosene lamps. He was also in charge of helping the kitchen staff clear, of helping Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna comfort the crying--of being Dr. Larch's messenger: the most prized responsibility that was conferred in the boys' division. Before he was ten, and long before he would be given such explicit instruction from Dr. Larch, Homer felt full of usefulness at St. Cloud's.
What was it about Thanksgiving at the Drapers' that contrasted so severely with the same event at St. Cloud's? Mom had no match as a cook; it couldn't have been the food--which, at St. Cloud's, suffered from a visible and seemingly terminal grayness. Was it the saying of grace? At St. Cloud's, grace was a rather blunt instrument--Dr. Larch not being a religious man.
"Let us be thankful," he would say, and then pause--as if he were truly wondering, What for? "Let us be thankful for what kindness we have received," Larch would say, cautiously looking at the unwanted and abandoned around him. "Let us be thankful for Nurse Angela and for Nurse Edna," he would add, with more assurance in his voice. "Let us be thankful that we've got options, that we've got second chances," he added once, looking at Homer Wells.
The event of grace--at Thanksgiving, at St. Cloud's--was shrouded with chance, with understandable caution, with typically Larchlike reserve.
Grace at the Drapers' was effusive and strange. It seemed somehow connected with the professor's definition of the meaning of "repentance." Professor Draper said that the start of real repentance was to accept yourself as vile. For grace, the professor cried out, "Say after me: I am vile, I abhor myself, but I am thankful for everyone in my family!" They all said so--even Homer, even Mom (who for once withheld her recommended grain of salt).
St. Cloud's was a sober place, but its manner of giving what little thanks it could seemed frank, sincere. Some contradiction in the Draper family occurred to Homer Wells for the first time at Thanksgiving. Unlike St. Cloud's, life in Waterville seemed good--babies, for example, were wanted. Where did "repentance" come from, then? Was there guilt attac
hed to feeling lucky? And if Larch (as Homer had been told) was named from a tree, God (whom Homer heard a lot about in Waterville) seemed to be named from even tougher stuff: maybe from mountain, maybe from ice. If God was sobering in Waterville, the Draper Thanksgiving was--to Homer's surprise--a drunken occasion.
The professor was, in Mom's words, "in his cups." This, Homer deduced, meant that the professor had consumed more than his normal, daily amount of alcohol--which, in Mom's words, made him only "tipsy." Homer was shocked to see the two married daughters and the married son behave as if they were in their cups, too. And since Thanksgiving was special and he was allowed to stay up late--with all the grandchildren--Homer observed that nightly occurrence he had previously only heard as he was falling asleep: the thudding, dragging, shuffling sound, and the muffled voice of reason, which was the professor slurring his protest of the fact that Mom forcibly assisted him upstairs and with astonishing strength lifted him to and deposited him upon the bed.
"Value of exercise!" shouted the grown and married son, before toppling from the green chaise and collapsing upon the rug--beside old Rufus--as if he'd been poisoned.
"Like father, like son!" said one of the married daughters. The other married daughter, Homer noted, had nothing to say. She slept peacefully in the rocking chair; her whole hand--above the second knuckle joints--was submerged in her nearly full drink, which rested precariously in her lap.
The unmanaged grandchildren violated the house's million rules. The professor's passionate readings of various riot acts were seemingly ignored for Thanksgiving.
Homer Wells, not yet ten, crept quietly to his bed. Invoking an especially sad memory of St. Cloud's was a way he frequently forced sleep upon himself. What he remembered was the time he saw the mothers leaving the orphanage hospital, which was within view of the girls' division and which adjoined the boys' division--they were architecturally linked by a long shed, formerly a storage room for spare blades to the circular saw. It was early morning, but it was still dark out and Homer needed the coach lights in order to see that it was snowing. He slept badly and was often awake for the arrival of the coach, which came from the railroad station and delivered to St. Cloud's the kitchen and cleaning staff and the first hospital shift. The coach was simply an abandoned railroad car; set on sled runners in the winter, it was a converted sleigh, pulled by horses. When there wasn't enough snow on the dirt road, the sled runners struck sparks against the stones in the ground and made a terrible grating noise (they were reluctant to change the runners for wheels until they knew the winter was over). A bright light, like a flare, sputtered by the heavily blanketed driver on the makeshift carriage seat; softer lights winked inside the coach car.
