by John Irving
And so forth.
The third tutor, a retired schoolteacher from Camden, was an old, unhappy man who lived with his daughter's family because he couldn't take care of himself. He taught history, but he had no books. He taught the world from memory; he said the dates weren't important. He was capable of sustaining a rant about Mesopotamia for a full half hour, but when he paused for breath, or for a sip of water, he would find himself in Rome, or in Troy; he would recite long, uninterrupted passages from Thucydides, but a mere swallow would transport him to Elba, with Napoleon.
"I think," Nurse Edna once remarked to Dr. Larch, "that he manages to give a sense of the scope of history."
Nurse Angela rolled her eyes. "Whenever I try to listen to him," she said, "I can think of a hundred good reasons for war."
She meant, Homer Wells understood, that no one should live so long.
It is easy to understand why Homer was more fond of doing chores than he was fond of education.
Homer's favorite chore was selecting, for Dr. Larch, the evening reading. He was supposed to estimate a passage that would take Dr. Larch exactly twenty minutes to read; this was difficult because when Homer read aloud to himself, he read more slowly than Dr. Larch, but when he simply read to himself, he read more quickly than Dr. Larch could read aloud. At twenty minutes an evening, it took Dr. Larch several months to read Great Expectations, and more than a year to read David Copperfield--at the end of which time, St. Larch announced to Homer that he would start at the beginning of Great Expectations again. Except for Homer, the orphans who'd first heard Great Expectations had moved on.
Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickensian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud's. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud--it was a successful soporific for the children who didn't know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, the evening reading provided them with a way to leave St. Cloud's in their dreams, in their imaginations.
Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. ("What in hell else would you read to an orphan?" Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)
And so Homer Wells was familiar with the vision of that gibbet in the marshland--"with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate"--and Homer's imagination of the orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch . . . the beautiful Estella, the vengeful Miss Havisham . . . provided him with sharper details when, falling asleep, he would follow the ghostly mothers who left St. Cloud's in the cover of darkness, and boarded the horse-drawn coach car, or, later, the bus which replaced the coach, and gave Homer Wells his first sensation of the passage of time, of progress. Soon after the bus replaced the coach, all bus service in St. Cloud's was discontinued. Thereafter, the mothers walked; this gave Homer further understanding of progress.
The mothers he saw in his sleep never changed. But the men who had not bothered to accompany them to St. Cloud's--where were they? Homer liked the part in Great Expectations when Pip is just starting out and he says that "the mists had all solemnly risen . . . and the world lay spread before me." A boy from St. Cloud's knew plenty about "mists"--they were what shrouded the river, the town, the orphanage itself; they drifted downriver from Three Mile Falls; they were what concealed one's parents. They were the clouds of St. Cloud's that allowed one's parents to slip away, unseen.
"Homer," Dr. Larch would say, "one day you'll get to see the ocean. You've only been as far as the mountains; they're not nearly as spectacular as the sea. There's fog on the coast--it can be worse than the fog here--and when the fog lifts, Homer . . . well," said St. Larch, "that's a moment you must see."
But Homer Wells had already seen it, he'd already imagined it--"the mists . . . all solemnly risen." He smiled at Dr. Larch and excused himself; it was time to ring a bell. That was what he was doing--bell-ringing--when his fourth foster family arrived at St. Cloud's to fetch him. Dr. Larch had prepared him very well; Homer had no trouble recognizing the couple.
They were, in today's language, sports-oriented; in Maine, in 193_, when Homer Wells was twelve, the couple who wanted to adopt him were simply thought fanatical about everything that could be done outdoors. They were a white-water-canoeing couple, an ocean-sailing couple--a mountain-climbing, deep-sea-diving, wilderness-camping couple. A one-hundred-mile (at forced-march-pace) tramping couple. Athletes--but not of organized sports; they were not a sissy-sport couple.
The day they arrived at St. Cloud's, Homer Wells rang the bell for ten o'clock fourteen times. He was transfixed by them--by their solid, muscular looks, by their loping strides, by his safari hat, by her bushwacking machete in a long sheath (with Indian beads) at her cartridge belt. They both wore boots that looked lived in. Their vehicle was a homemade pioneer of what would years later be called a camper; it looked equipped to capture and contain a rhino. Homer instantly foresaw that he would be made to hunt bears, wrestle alligators--in short, live off the land. Nurse Edna stopped him before he could ring fifteen o'clock.
Wilbur Larch was being cautious. He didn't fear for Homer's mind. A boy who has read Great Expectations and David Copperfield by himself, twice each--and had each word of both books read aloud to him, also twice--is more mentally prepared than most. Dr. Larch felt that the boy's physical or athletic development had been less certain. Sports seemed frivolous to Larch when compared to the learning of more necessary, more fundamental skills. Larch knew that the St. Cloud's sports program--which consisted of indoor football in the dining hall when there was bad weather--was inadequate. In good weather, the boys' and girls' divisions played tag, or kick the can, or sometimes Nurse Edna or Nurse Angela pitched for stickball. The ball was composed of several socks wrapped in adhesive tape; it moved poorly. Larch had nothing against an outdoor life; he also knew nothing about one. He guessed that a little of its wasted energy (wasted to Larch) would be good for Homer--possibly such physical activity might enhance the boy's sense of humor.
The couple's name was a source of humor for Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela. Their married name was Winkle--he was called Grant, she was called Billy. They were members of Maine's very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn't make a cent, but they didn't need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned. The Winkles were in the business of manufacturing sensations for people who were so removed from any sensations of their own making or circumstances that only high (but simulated) adventure could provoke any response from them at all. Dr. Larch was not impressed with the Winkles' "business"; he knew that they were simply rich people who did exactly what they wanted to do and needed to call what they did something more serious-sounding than play. What impressed Larch with the Winkles was that they were deliriously happy. Among adults--and among orphans--Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
"In other parts of the world," Dr. Larch wrote, "delirious happiness is thought to be a state of mind. Here in St. Cloud's we recognize that delirious happiness is possible only for the totally mindless. I would call it, therefore, that thing most rare: a state of the soul." Larch was often facetious when he discussed the soul. He liked to tease Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela in the operating room, where the subject of the soul could catch the dear nurses off-guard.
Once, with a body open on the table, Larch pointed dramatically to a smooth, maroon shape beneath the rib cage and above the belly's viscera; it looked like a three-pound loaf of bread, or a slug with two great lobes. "Look!" Larch whispered. "You rarely see it, but we've caught it napping. Look quickly before it moves!" The nurs
es gaped. "The soul," Larch whispered reverentially. In fact, it was the body's largest gland, empowered with skills also ascribed to the soul--for example, it could regenerate its own abused cells. It was the liver, which Larch thought more of than he thought of the soul.
But whether the delirious happiness of the Winkles was a state of mind or a state of the soul, Wilbur Larch wished that some of it could rub off on Homer Wells. The Winkles had always wanted a child--"to share the world of nature with us," they said, "and just to make a child happy, of course." Looking at them, Dr. Larch had his own ideas as to why they could not successfully breed. Lack of the essential concentration, Larch thought; Larch suspected that the Winkles never stopped moving long enough to mate. Perhaps, he speculated, looking at Billy Winkle, she is not really a woman.
Grant had a plan. He has no face, Dr. Larch noticed, trying to discern the man's blunt features, somewhere between his blond beard and his blonder hair. The hair was cropped in bangs, completely concealing a low forehead. The cheeks, or what Larch could see of them, were a ridge, the eyes hidden behind them. The rest was beard--a blond underbrush that Dr. Larch imagined Billy Winkle needed her machete to hack through. Grant's plan was that they borrow Homer for a little moose-watching. The Winkles were going on a canoe trip and portage through the northern State Forest, the principal fun of which was to see moose. A secondary pleasure would be introducing Homer Wells to a little white water.
St. Larch felt that such a trip, in the massive hands of the Winkles, wouldn't be dangerous for Homer. He felt less sure that Homer would want to stay with these people, to actually be adopted by them. He hardly worried that the Winkles' craziness would bother the boy, and it wouldn't have. What boy is troubled by perpetual adventure? What Wilbur Larch suspected was that the Winkles would bore Homer to tears, if not to death. A camping trip in the State Forest--white water now and then, a moose or two--might give the boy an idea of whether or not he could stand Grant and Billy forever.
"And if you have a good time in the woods," Grant Winkle told Homer cheerfully, "then we'll take you out on the ocean!" They probably ride whales, Homer imagined. They tease sharks, Dr. Larch thought.
But Dr. Larch wanted Homer to try it, and Homer Wells was willing--he would try anything for St. Larch.
"Nothing dangerous," Larch said sternly to the Winkles.
"Oh, no, cross our hearts!" cried Billy; Grant crossed his, too.
Dr. Larch knew there was only one road that ran through the northern State Forest. It was built by, and remained the property of, the Ramses Paper Company. They were not allowed to cut the trees in the State Forest, but they could drive their equipment through it en route to the trees that were theirs. Only this--that Homer was going anywhere near where the Ramses Paper Company was operating--troubled Dr. Larch.
Homer was surprised at how little room there was in the cab of the homemade safari vehicle that the Winkles drove. The equipment it carried was impressive: the canoe, the tent, the fishing gear, the cooking miscellany, the guns. But there was little room for the driver and the passengers. In the cab, Homer sat on Billy's lap; it was a big lap but strangely uncomfortable because of the hardness of her thighs. Homer had felt a woman's lap only once before, during St. Cloud's annual three-legged race.
Once a year the boys' and girls' divisions amused the town with this race. It was a fund-raiser for the orphanage, so everyone endured it. The last two years Homer had won the race--only because his partner, the oldest girl in the girls' division, was strong enough to pick him up and run with him in her arms across the finish line. The idea was that a boy and a girl of comparable age fastened his left leg to her right; they then hopped toward the finish line, on each of their free legs, dragging the miserable so-called third leg between them. The big girl from the girls' division hadn't needed to drag Homer--she cheated, she just carried him. But last year she had fallen at the finish line, pulling Homer into her lap. By mistake, trying to get out of her lap, he'd put his hand on her breast and she'd sharply pinched what the private school boy in Waterville had called his pecker.
Her name was Melony, which was, like several of the orphans' names in the girls' division, a typographical error. Melony's name had been, officially, Melody--but the girls' division secretary was a terrible typist. The mistyping was a fortunate mistake, actually, because there was nothing melodious about the girl. She was about sixteen (no one really knew her exact age), and there was in the fullness of her breasts and in the roundness of her bottom very much the suggestion of melons.
In the long ride north, Homer worried that Billy Winkle might pinch his pecker, too. He watched the houses disappear, and the farm animals; other cars and trucks were gone from the roads. Soon it was just a road, a single road--most often, it ran alongside water; the water ran fast. Ahead of them--for hours, it seemed--loomed a mountain that had snow on the top, although it was July. The mountain had an Indian name.
"That's where we're going, Homer!" Grant Winkle told the boy. "Just under all that snow, there's a lake."
"The moose are crazy about the lake," Billy told Homer, "and you'll be crazy about the lake, too."
Homer didn't doubt it. It was an adventure. Dr. Larch had told him he didn't have to stay.
The Winkles stopped for the night before it got dark. Between the single road and the rushing water, they pitched a tent with three rooms in it. They lit a cookstove in one of the rooms, and Billy did one hundred sit-ups in another room (Homer held her feet) while Grant caught some brook trout. It was such a cool evening, there weren't any bugs; they kept the lamps running long after dark, with the tent flaps open. Grant and Billy told adventure stories. (In his journal, Dr. Larch would later write, "What the hell else would they tell?")
Grant told about the sixty-year-old lawyer who had hired them to show him a bear giving birth. Billy showed Homer her bear scars. And then there was the man who had asked the Winkles to cast him adrift at sea in a small boat--with only one oar. This man had been interested in the sensation of survival. He wanted to see if he could find his way back to land, but he wanted the Winkles to observe him and rescue him if he was getting into real trouble. The trick to that was not letting the man know he was being observed. At night--when the fool fell asleep and drifted farther out to sea--the Winkles would cautiously tow him toward shore. But in the morning--once, even within sight of land--the man always found a way to get lost again. They finally had to rescue him when they caught him drinking salt water; he'd been so disappointed, he gave them several bad checks before he finally paid his adventure fee.
"Adventure fee" was Billy's name for it.
Homer thought it might make his would-be adoptive parents self-conscious if he told them any stories about life at St. Cloud's--or worse, about Thanksgiving in Waterville. He felt he had to contribute something to the campfire spirit of this present adventure, but the only good stories he knew were Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Dr. Larch had let him take the copy of Great Expectations with him; it was Homer's favorite of the two. Homer asked the Winkles if he could read them a little of his favorite story. Of course, they said, they'd love it; they'd never been read to, not that they could remember. Homer was a little nervous; as many times as he'd read Great Expectations, he'd never read aloud to an audience before.
But he was wonderful! He even mastered what he guessed was Joe Gargery's accent, and by the time he got to the part where Mr. Wopsle cries out, " 'No!' with the feeble malice of a tired man," Homer sensed he had found the proper voice for the whole tale--he felt he might also have discovered his first talent. Unfortunately, talented though he was, his reading put the Winkles fast asleep. Homer kept reading by himself, through the end of Chapter 7. Maybe it's not my reading, Homer thought; maybe it's the Winkles--all her sit-ups, all his trout-catching, all the fierce rigor of the indisputably great outdoors.
Homer attempted to arrange the Winkles' sleeping bag--a huge, single bag--comfortably around them. He blew out the lamps. He went to his own roo
m in the vast tent and crawled into his own sleeping bag. He lay with his head by the open tent flap; he could see the stars; he could hear the nearby crashing water. It did not remind him of Three Mile Falls, because the stream here was so different from that river. It was just as fast, but it ran through a deep, narrow gorge--sparkling clean, round-bouldered, with glossy pools where Grant had caught the trout. It was not unpleasant imagining further adventures with the Winkles, but Homer had more trouble imagining a moose. Exactly how big would a moose be? Bigger than the Winkles?
Homer exhibited no mistrust, and certainly no fear, of the Winkles. He felt for them only a detached wariness--he was sure they weren't dangerous but they were of a slightly altered species. He fell asleep confusing the Winkles, in his child's mind, with moose. In the morning he woke up to the sound of what he was sure were moose--only to discover that it was the Winkles in the tent room next to his. The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles' inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.
Homer politely feigned sleep. The Winkles then roused him playfully. Like large dogs, they burst into his room on all fours, tugging at his sleeping bag with their teeth. They were going to swim! they told him. They were such large people, Homer wondered at the sheer abundance of their active flesh. He also wondered how they intended to swim in the raging stream without being bashed against the boulders and swept away. Homer didn't know how to swim--not even in calm water.
But the Winkles were old hands at outdoor feats of skill, and they were cunning with equipment. They threw a line across the rapids; it was called a survival rope, they told Homer. The rope attached to a rakelike cluster of spikes, which Grant Winkle neatly lodged among the rocks on the far shore of the roaring river; he then strung a second rope to this one, and then a third. These additional ropes were complicated, with metal eyelets and hooks and adjustable safety straps that went around the Winkles themselves and held them tightly at their waists. With the assistance of this truly adventuresome gear, the Winkles were able to bounce, semi-suspended, into the thick of the rapids--where they were tossed about like bathtub toys while remaining safely in the same place, attached to each other and to the so-called survival rope. It was fun for Homer to watch them. The water seemed to swallow them completely at times--streaming sheets of it would engulf them and suck them down. Yet they would emerge in seconds, bouncing, appearing to walk across the churning, rolling foam. They played in midstream like giant, blond otters. Homer was very nearly convinced of their mastery of the elements--at least of water--and felt himself to be on the verge of asking them to let him try the game of showering in the rapids when it occurred to him that they couldn't hear him. If he'd called out to them--even if he'd screamed--the whoosh of the turbid water all around the Winkles would have drowned out any noise he could muster.
