by John Irving
He found the kitchen, and several servants busy in it, and gave away about two hundred dollars there.
He went out on the grounds and gave the last of the money, another two hundred dollars, to a gardener who was on his knees in a flower bed by the main door. He would have liked to have handed the empty envelope back to Mrs. Channing-Peabody; the grand lady was hiding from him. He tried to fold the envelope and pin it to the main door under the big brass door knocker; the envelope kept blowing free in the wind. Then he got angry and waded it up in a ball and threw it into a manicured circle of green lawn, which served as a rotary for the main driveway. Two croquet players on a far lawn held up their game and stared first at the crumpled envelope and then at the blue summer sky, as if a lightning bolt, at the very least, were momentarily expected to strike Larch dead.
On his way back to Portland, Wilbur Larch reflected on the last century of medical history--when abortion was legal, when many more complex procedures than a simple abortion were routinely taught medical students: such things as utero decapitation and fetal pulverization (these in lieu of the more dangerous Caesarean section). He mumbled those words to himself: utero decapitation, fetal pulverization. By the time he got back to Portland, he had worked the matter out. He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this "the Lord's work." And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this "the Devil's work," but it was all the Lord's work to Wilbur Larch. As Mrs. Maxwell had observed: "The true physician's soul cannot be too broad and gentle."
Later, when he would have occasion to doubt himself, he would force himself to remember: he had slept with someone's mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter's cigar. He could quite comfortably abstain from having sex for the rest of his life, but how could he ever condemn another person for having sex? He would remember, too, what he hadn't done for Mrs. Eames's daughter, and what that had cost.
He would deliver babies. He would deliver mothers, too.
In Portland, a letter from St. Cloud's awaited him. When the Maine State board of medical examiners sent him to St. Cloud's, they could not have known Wilbur Larch's feeling for orphans--nor could they have known his readiness to leave Portland, that safe harbor from which the Great Eastern had sailed with no plans for return. And they would never know that in the first week Wilbur Larch spent in St. Cloud's, he founded an orphanage (because it was needed), delivered three babies (one wanted, two inevitable--one would be another orphan), and performed one abortion (his third). It would take Larch some years to educate the population regarding birth control--the ratio would endure for some time: one abortion for every three births. Over the years, it would go to one in four, then to one in five.
During World War I, when Wilbur Larch went to France, the replacement physician at the orphanage would not perform abortions; the birth rate would climb, the number of orphans would double, but the replacement physician said to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela that he was put on this earth to do the Lord's work, not the Devil's. This feeble distinction would later prove useful to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna, and to Dr. Wilbur Larch, who wrote his good nurses from France that he had seen the real Devil's work: the Devil worked with shell and grenade fragments, with shrapnel and with the little, dirty bits of clothing carried with a missile into a wound. The Devil's work was gas bacillus infection, that scourge of the First World War--Wilbur Larch would never forget how it crackled to the touch.
"Tell him," Larch wrote Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, "tell that fool [he meant his replacement] that the work at the orphanage is all the Lord's work--everything you do, you do for the orphans, you deliver them!"
And when the war was over, and Wilbur Larch came home to St. Cloud's, Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela were already familiar with the proper language for the work of St. Cloud's--the Lord's work and the Devil's work, they called it, just to keep it straight between themselves which operation was being performed when. Wilbur Larch went along with it--it was useful language--but both nurses were in agreement with Larch: that it was all the Lord's work that they were performing.
It was not until 193_ that they encountered their first problem. His name was Homer Wells. He went out into the world and came back to St. Cloud's so many times that it was necessary to put him to work; by the time a boy is a teen-ager, he should be of use. But would he understand? the nurses and Dr. Larch wondered. Homer had seen the mothers come and go, and leave their babies behind, but how long before he started counting heads--and realized that there were more mothers coming and going than there were babies left behind? How long before he observed that not all the mothers who came to St. Cloud's were visibly pregnant--and some of them didn't even stay overnight? Should they tell him? the nurses and Dr. Larch wondered.
"Wilbur," Nurse Edna said, while Nurse Angela rolled her eyes, "the boy has the run of the place--he's going to figure it out for himself."
"He's growing older every minute," Nurse Angela said. "He's learning something new every day."
It was true that they never let the women recovering from the abortions rest in the same room with the new mothers, who were gaining their strength to leave their babies behind; that was something even a child could observe. And Homer Wells was frequently in charge of emptying the wastebaskets--all the wastebaskets, even the operating-room wastebaskets, which were leakproof and taken directly to the incinerator.
"What if he looks in a wastebasket, Wilbur?" Nurse Edna asked Dr. Larch.
"If he's old enough to look, he's old enough to learn," St. Larch replied.
Perhaps Larch meant: if he's old enough to recognize what there was to be seen. After the Lord's work, or after the Devil's, much that would be in the wastebasket would be the same. In most cases: blood and mucus, cotton and gauze, placenta and pubic hair. Both nurses told Dr. Larch there was no need to shave a patient for an abortion, but Larch was fussy; and if it was all the Lord's work, he thought, let it all look the same. The wastebaskets that Homer Wells would carry to the incinerator held the history of St. Cloud's: the clipped ends of the silk and gut sutures, fecal matter and soap suds from the enemas, and what Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela feared Homer Wells would see--the so-called products of conception, a human fetus, or a recognizable part thereof.
And that is how Homer Wells (an unlucky thirteen) would discover that both the quick and the not quick were delivered at St. Cloud's. One day, walking back from the incinerator, he saw a fetus on the ground: it had fallen from the wastebasket he'd been carrying, but when he saw it, he assumed it had fallen from the sky. He bent over it, then he looked for the nest it might have dropped from--only there were no trees. Homer Wells knew that birds didn't deliver their eggs in flight--or that an egg, while falling, couldn't lose its shell.
Then he imagined that some animal had miscarried--in an orphanage, around a hospital, one heard that word--but what animal? It weighed less than a pound, it was maybe eight inches long, and that shadow on its almost translucent head was the first phase of hair, not feathers; and those were almost eyebrows on its scrunched face; it had eyelashes, too. And were those nipples--those little pale pink dots emerging on that chest the size of a large thumb? And those slivers at the fingertips and at the toes--those were nails! Holding the whole thing in one hand, Homer ran with it, straight to Dr. Larch. Larch was sitting at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; he was writing a letter to The New England Home for Little Wanderers.
"I found something," Homer Wells said. He held out his hand, and Larch took the fetus from him and placed it on a clean white piece of typing paper on Nurse Angela's desk. It was about three months--at the most, four. Not quite quick, Dr. Larch knew, but almost. "What is it?" Homer Wells asked.
"The Lord's work," said Wilbur Larch, that saint of St. Cloud's, because that was when he realized that this was also the Lord's work: teaching Homer Wells, telling him everything, making sure he learned right from wrong. It was a lot of work, the Lord's work, but if one
was going to be presumptuous enough to undertake it, one had to do it perfectly.
3
Princes of Maine, Kings of New England
"Here in St. Cloud's," Dr. Larch wrote, "we treat orphans as if they came from royal families."
In the boys' division, this sentiment informed his nightly blessing--his benediction, shouted over the beds standing in rows in the darkness. Dr. Larch's blessing followed the bedtime reading, which--after the unfortunate accident to the Winkles--became the responsibility of Homer Wells. Dr. Larch wanted to give Homer more confidence. When Homer told Dr. Larch how he had loved reading to the Winkles in their safari tent--and how he thought he had done it well, except that the Winkles had fallen asleep--the doctor decided that the boy's talent should be encouraged.
In 193_, almost immediately after seeing his first fetus, Homer Wells began reading David Copperfield to the boys' division, just twenty minutes a crack, no more, no less; he thought it would take him longer to read it than it took Dickens to write it. Faltering at first--and teased by the very few boys who were near his own age (no boy was older)--Homer improved. Every night he would murmur aloud to himself that book's opening passage. It had the effect of a litany--on occasion, it allowed him to sleep peacefully.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero
of my own life, or whether that station will
be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life," Homer whispered to himself. He remembered the dryness in his eyes and nose in the furnace room at the Drapers' in Waterville; he remembered the spray from the water that had swept the Winkles away; he remembered the cool, damp, curled-in-on-itself beginning that lay dead in his hand. (That thing he had held in his hand could not have been a hero.)
And after "lights out," and Nurse Edna or Nurse Angela had asked if anyone wanted a last glass of water, or if anyone needed a last trip to the potty--when those dots of light from the just-extinguished lamps still blinked in the darkness, and every orphan's mind was either sleeping, dreaming, or lingering with David Copperfield's adventures--Dr. Larch would open the door from the hall, with its exposed pipes and its hospital colors.
"Good night!" he would call. "Good night--you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England!" (That thing Homer had held in his hand was no prince--it hadn't lived to be king.)
Then, bang!--the door would close, and the orphans would be left in a new blackness. Whatever image of royalty that they could conjure would be left to them. What princes and kings could they have seen? What futures were possible for them to dream of? What royal foster families would greet them in sleep? What princesses would love them? What queens would they marry? And when would they escape the darkness left with them after Larch closed the door, after they could no longer hear the retreating squeaks of Nurse Edna's and Nurse Angela's shoes? (That thing he had held in his hand could not have heard the shoes--it had the smallest, most wrinkled ears!)
For Homer Wells, it was different. He did not imagine leaving St. Cloud's. The Princes of Maine that Homer saw, the Kings of New England that he imagined--they reigned at the court of St. Cloud's, they traveled nowhere; they didn't get to go to sea; they never even saw the ocean. But somehow, even to Homer Wells, Dr. Larch's benediction was uplifting, full of hope. These Princes of Maine, these Kings of New England, these orphans of St. Cloud's--whoever they were, they were the heroes of their own lives. That much Homer could see in the darkness; that much Dr. Larch, like a father, gave him.
Princely, even kingly behavior was possible, even at St. Cloud's. That seemed to be what Dr. Larch was saying.
Homer Wells dreamed he was a prince. He lifted up his eyes to his king: he watched St. Larch's every move. It was the astonishing coolness of the thing that Homer couldn't forget.
"Because it was dead, right?" he asked Dr. Larch. "That's why it was cool, right?"
"Yes," said Dr. Larch. "In a way, Homer, it was never alive."
"Never alive," said Homer Wells.
"Sometimes," Dr. Larch said, "a woman simply can't make herself stop a pregnancy, she feels the baby is already a baby--from the first speck--and she has to have it--although she doesn't want it and she can't take care of it--and so she comes to us and has her baby here. She leaves it here, with us. She trusts us to find it a home."
"She makes an orphan," said Homer Wells. "Someone has to adopt it."
"Someone usually adopts it," Dr. Larch said.
"Usually," said Homer Wells. "Maybe."
"Eventually," Dr. Larch said.
"And sometimes," said Homer Wells, "the woman doesn't go through with it, right? She doesn't go through with having the baby."
"Sometimes," said Dr. Larch, "the woman knows very early in her pregnancy that this child is unwanted."
"An orphan, from the start," said Homer Wells.
"You might say," said Wilbur Larch.
"So she kills it," said Homer Wells.
"You might say," said Wilbur Larch. "You might also say that she stops it before it becomes a child--she just stops it. In the first three or four months, the fetus--or the embryo (I don't say, then, 'the child')--it does not quite have a life of its own. It lives off the mother. It hasn't developed."
"It's developed only a little," said Homer Wells.
"It hasn't moved, independently," said Dr. Larch.
"It doesn't have a proper nose," said Homer Wells, remembering it. On the thing he had held in his hand, neither the nostrils nor the nose itself had developed to its downward slope; the nostrils pointed straight out from the face, like the nostrils of a pig.
"Sometimes," said Dr. Larch, "when a woman is very strong and knows that no one will care for this baby if she has it, and she doesn't want to bring a child into the world and try to find it a home--she comes to me and I stop it."
"Tell me again, what's stopping it called?" asked Homer Wells.
"An abortion," Dr. Larch said.
"Right," said Homer Wells. "An abortion."
"And what you held in your hand, Homer, was an aborted fetus," Dr. Larch said. "An embryo, about three to four months."
"An aborted fetus, an embryo, about three to four months," said Homer Wells, who had an irritating habit of repeating the pigtails of sentences very seriously, as if he were planning to read them aloud, like David Copperfield.
"And that's why," Dr. Larch said patiently, "some of the women who come here don't look pregnant . . . the embryo, the fetus, there's just not enough of it for it to show."
"But they all are pregnant," said Homer Wells. "All the women who come here--they're either going to have an orphan, or they're going to stop it, right?"
"That's right," Dr. Larch said. "I'm just the doctor. I help them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion."
"An orphan or an abortion," said Homer Wells.
Nurse Edna teased Dr. Larch about Homer Wells. "You have a new shadow, Wilbur," she said.
"Doctor Larch," Nurse Angela said, "you have developed an echo. You've got a parrot following you around."
"God or whatever, forgive me," wrote Dr. Larch. "I have created a disciple, I have a thirteen-year-old disciple."
By the time Homer was fifteen, his reading of David Copperfield was so successful that some of the older girls in the girls' division asked Dr. Larch if Homer might be persuaded to read to them.
"Just to the older girls?" Homer asked Dr. Larch.
"Certainly not," said Dr. Larch. "You'll read to all of them."
"In the girls' division?" Homer asked.
"Well, yes," Dr. Larch said. "It would be awkward to have all the girls come to the boys' division."
"Right," said Homer Wells. "But do I read to the girls first or to the boys first?"
"The girls," Larch said. "The girls go to bed earlier than the boys."
"They do?" Homer asked.
"They do here," Dr. Larch said.
"And do I read them the same passage?" Homer asked. He was, at t
he time, in his fourth journey through David Copperfield, only his third aloud--at Chapter 16, "I Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One."
But Dr. Larch decided that girl orphans should hear about girl orphans--in the same spirit that he believed boy orphans should hear about boy orphans--and so he assigned Homer the task of reading aloud to the girls' division from Jane Eyre.
It struck Homer immediately that the girls were more attentive than the boys; they were an altogether better audience--except for the giggles upon his arrival and upon his departure. That they should be a better audience surprised Homer, for he found Jane Eyre not nearly so interesting as David Copperfield; he was convinced that Charlotte Bronte was not nearly as good a writer as Charles Dickens. Compared to little David, Homer thought, little Jane was something of a whiner--a sniveler--but the girls in the girls' division always cried for more, for just one more scene, when, every evening, Homer would stop and hurry away, out of the building and into the night, racing for the boys' division and Dickens.
The night between the boys' and girls' division frequently smelled of sawdust; only the night had kept the memory of the original St. Cloud's intact, dispensing in its secretive darkness, the odors of the old sawmills and even the rank smell of the sawyers' cigars.
"The night sometimes smells like wood and cigars," Homer Wells told Dr. Larch, who had his own memory of cigars; the doctor shuddered.
The girls' division, Homer thought, had a different smell from the boys', although the same exposed pipes, the same hospital colors, the same dormitory discipline prevailed. On the one hand, it smelled sweeter; on the other hand, it smelled sicker--Homer had difficulty deciding.
For going to bed, the boys and girls dressed alike--undervests and underpants--and whenever Homer arrived at the girls' division, the girls were already in their beds, with their legs covered, some of them sitting up, some of them lying down. The very few with visible breasts were usually sitting with their arms folded across their chests to conceal their development. All but one--the biggest one, the oldest one; she was both bigger and older than Homer Wells. She had carried Homer across the finish line of a particularly famous three-legged race--she was the one called Melony, who was meant to be Melody; the one whose breasts Homer had mistakenly touched, the one who'd pinched his pecker.
