by John Irving
East of Cape Kenneth, the tourist trap, lies Heart's Haven; inland from the small, pretty harbor town that's called a haven squats the town of Heart's Rock. The rock in Heart's Rock is named for the uninhabited rock island that appears to float like a dead whale in the otherwise perfect harbor of Heart's Haven. It is an eyesore island, unloved by the people of Heart's Haven; perhaps they were moved to name the eyesore town of Heart's Rock after their bird-beshitted and fish-belly-white rock. Nearly covered at high tide, and lying fairly flat in the water, it lists slightly--hence its name: Dead Whale Rock. There is no actual "rock" in Heart's Rock, which is not a town deserving to be looked down upon; it is only five miles inland, and from some of its hills the ocean is visible; in most of the town, the sea breeze is refreshingly felt.
But compared to Heart's Haven, every other town is a mongrel. When condemning Heart's Rock, the people of Heart's Haven do not mention the simple quaintness of the town's only stores--Sanborn's General Store and Titus Hardware and Plumbing. The people of Heart's Haven are more likely to mention Drinkwater Lake, and the summer cottages on its murky shores. A not-very-fresh freshwater lake, more of a pond--because by mid-July the bottom is cloudy and rank with algae--Drinkwater Lake is Heart's Rock's only offering to summer people. People who summer on Drinkwater Lake have not traveled far; they may live elsewhere in Heart's Rock--or, even more rustically, in Kenneth Corners. The summer camps and cottages that dot the lakeshore are also used during the hunting-season weekends in the fall. The cottages and camps have names of a striving wishfulness. Echo's End, and Buck's Last Stand (this one is decked with antlers); there is one called Endless Weekend, with a floating dock; one called Wee Three, suggesting inhabitants of an almost unbearable cuteness; and a frank sort of place called Sherman's Hole in the Ground, which is an accurate description.
In 194_ Drinkwater Lake was already cluttered, and by 195_ it would become intolerably busy with powerboats and water skis--propellers fouled and oars festooned with the slime-green algae stirred up from the bottom. The lake is too woodsy to let the wind through; sailboats always die on the dead-calm surface, which is perfect for hatching mosquitoes, and over the years the accumulated children's urine and gasoline would give the lake an unwell, glossy sheen. There are wonderfully remote lakes in Maine, but Drinkwater Lake was never one of them. The occasional, bewildered canoeist looking for the wilderness would not find it there. The wild-hearted, departed Winkles would not have favored the place. You would not willingly drink the water of Drinkwater Lake, and there are many tiresome jokes on that subject, all conceived in Heart's Haven, where the habit of judging Heart's Rock by its single, sorry body of water is longstanding.
When Homer Wells would first see Drinkwater Lake, he would imagine that if there were ever a summer camp for the luckless orphans of St. Cloud's, it would be situated in the bog that separates Echo's End from Sherman's Hole in the Ground.
Not all of Heart's Rock was so ugly. It was a town of stay-put people on fairly open, neatly farmed land; it was dairy-cow country, and fruit-tree country. In 194_, the Ocean View Orchard on Drinkwater Road, which connected Heart's Rock to Heart's Haven, was pretty and plentiful--even by the standards of the spoiled and hard-to-please of Heart's Haven. Although the Ocean View Orchards were in Heart's Rock, there was a Heart's Haven look to the place; the farmhouse had flagstone patios, the grounds were landscaped with rose bushes--like the Heart's Haven homes on the more elegant coast--and the lawns spreading from the main house to the swimming pool, all the way to the nearest apple orchard, were kept up and fussed over by the same yard gangs who made the Heart's Haven lawns look so much like putting greens.
The owner of Ocean View Orchards, Wallace Worthington, even had a Heart's Haven kind of name--meaning, it was not a local-sounding name. Indeed not, because Wallace Worthington was from New York; he'd fled investments for apple farming just before everyone's investments crashed, and if he didn't know all there was to know about apples--being a gentleman farmer, in soul and in bones (and in clothes)--he knew almost everything about money and had hired the right foremen to run Ocean View (men who did know apples).
Worthington was a perpetual board member at the Haven Club; he was the only member whose position on the board was never voted--and the only Heart's Rock resident who was a Haven Club member. Since his orchard employed half the locals of Heart's Rock, Wallace Worthington had the rare distinction of being appreciated in both towns.
Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabody's, where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion--the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.
You'd have to live in Heart's Rock or in Heart's Haven--and be familiar with the social histories of the towns--to know that Wallace Worthington's wife was not every inch a queen; she certainly looked like a queen and conducted herself, every inch, as such. But the townspeople knew that Olive Worthington--although a Heart's Haven native--had come from the wrong part of town. Society is so complex that even Heart's Haven had a wrong part to it.
Olive Worthington was born Alice Bean; to the knowledgeable, she was Bruce Bean's (the clam-digger's) daughter; she was Bucky Bean's (the well-digger's) clever sister--which falsely implied that Bucky wasn't clever; he was at least cleverer than his father, Bruce. Well-digging (the business of Nurse Angela's father, the business that yielded Homer Wells a name) was good-paying work: well-digging beats clam-digging by dollars and by miles, as they say in Maine.
Olive Worthington grew up selling clams out of the back of a pickup truck that leaked ice. Her mother, Maud, never talked; she kept a cracked makeup mirror on a chopping block at the crowded corner of a kitchen counter--her cosmetics, which fascinated her, mingled with stray clams. A large clam shell was her only ashtray. Sometimes the black and gritty skin discarded from the neck of a cleaned clam clung to a bottle of her Blush-Up. She died of lung cancer when Olive was still in high school.
Alice Bean became a Worthington by marrying Wallace Worthington; she became an Olive by altering her own name at the town clerk's office in Heart's Haven. It was a willful, legal change-of-name form that she filled out--easy to do, in part because it required the changing of only two letters to make an Alice into an Olive. There was no end to the way the locals liked to play with the name Olive, as if they were moving around in their mouths the disagreeable pits of that odd food; and behind her back, there were many who still called her Alice Bean, though only her brother Bucky would call Olive Alice to her face. Everyone else respected her enough to say Olive if that's what she wanted to hear, and it was agreed that although she married a Worthington, and therefore had married into apples and money, she had got no bargain in Wallace.
Cheerful, fun-loving, a good-timer, Wallace Worthington was generous and kind. He adored Olive and everything about her--her gray eyes and her ash-blond hair turning softly to pearl, and her college-learned New British accent (which was often imitated at the Haven Club). Her brother Bucky's success as a well-digger had paid for Olive's college accent, without which she might not have enticed Wallace Worthington to notice her. It may have been gratitude that caused Olive to tolerate Bucky calling her Alice to her face. She even tolerated his predictable appearances at Ocean View Orchards--his boots always muddy with that clay-colored muck from the middle of the earth, the stuff only well-diggers find. Olive tried not to cringe while he tromped about the house in those boots, calling her "Alice Baby," and on hot summer days he would dive into the swimming pool in all his clothes, leaving only those middle-earth boots out of the bright water (which he left sloshing in Atlantic turmoil and clay-colored at the edges). Bucky Bean could leave a ring on a swimming pool the way a dirty child could ring a bathtub.
For all that Olive Worthington had been spared, by escaping the Alice Bean in herself, there was something wrong with Wallace Worthington. Despite his being a real gentleman, an
d excellent at teasing the Republicans at the Haven Club, and fair to his orchardmen (he provided them with health insurance policies at his expense at a time when most farm workers were living below the standard of minimum everything)--despite Wallace Worthington's lovable flamboyance (all the farm and personal vehicles at Ocean View Orchards bore his monogram on a big, red apple!), despite everything that was grand about Wallace, he appeared to be drunk all the time, and he exhibited such a childish quality of hyperactivity and restlessness that everyone in Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock agreed that he must certainly be no prize to live with.
He was drunk at the Haven Club when he lowered the net at center court (which he could not seem to adjust properly) by cutting through it with the saw blade of his jackknife. He was drunk again at the Haven Club when Dr. Darryrimple had his stroke; Wallace tossed the old gentleman into the shallow end of the pool--"to revive him," he said later. The old fellow nearly drowned in addition to suffering his stroke, and the offended Darryrimples were so outraged that they canceled membership. And Wallace was drunk in his own orchards when he drove his Cadillac headlong into the five-hundred-gallon Hardie sprayer, dousing himself and his oyster-white convertible with chemicals that gave him a rash in his lap and permanently bleached the Cadillac's scarlet upholstery. He was drunk again when he insisted on driving the tractor that towed the flatbed with half of Ira Titcomb's beehives on it, promptly dumping the load--the honey, the hives, and millions of angry bees--at the intersection of Drinkwater Road and Day Lane (getting himself badly stung). Also stung were Everett Taft and his wife, Dot, and Dot's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who were working in the Day Lane orchard at the time of the accident.
Yet no one doubted that Wallace Worthington was faithful to Olive--the cynics saying that he was too drunk to get it up with anyone else, and possibly too drunk to get it up with Olive. It was clear he had gotten it up with her at least once; he had produced a son, just turning twenty in 194_, as big and handsome and charming as his father, with his mother's smoky eyes and with not quite her former blondness (his was tawny, not ash); he even had a bit of her New British accent. Wallace Worthington, Junior, was too good-looking ever to be called Junior (he was called Wally). From the day of Wally's birth, Wallace Worthington was called Senior, even by Olive and eventually by Wally.
And this is only a beginning to an understanding of the societies of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock. If he had known only this much, Dr. Larch might have tried to keep Homer Wells away from the place; he might have guessed that Homer's life would get complicated there. What did an orphan know about gossip, or care about class? But to Wilbur Larch Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock were very pretty names, improved by ether.
If Dr. Larch had spent some time around Senior Worthington, Larch might have figured out that the man was unfairly judged; of course he drank too much--many people who drink at all drink too much. But Senior was not a drunk. He bore the classic, clinical features of Alzheimer's disease, and Wilbur Larch would have spotted it for what it was--a progressive organic brain syndrome. Alzheimer's presenile dementia is marked by deterioration of intellect, failure of memory and a striking appearance of rapid aging in a patient in middle life, symptoms that become progressively more severe over a period of just a few years and terminate in death. Restlessness, hyperactivity, defective judgment are other hallmarks of the disease. But as keen as the wit in Heart's Haven was, the townspeople didn't know the difference between drunkenness and Alzheimer's disease; they were dead-sure they had the Worthingtons figured out.
They misjudged Olive Worthington, too. She had earned her name. She might have been desperate to leave the clam level of life, but she knew what work was; she had seen how quickly the ice in the pickup melted, how short a time the clams could be kept cool. She knew hustle, she knew know-how. She saw, instantly, that Wallace Worthington was good about money and weak on apples, and so she took up apples as her cause. She found out who the knowledgeable foremen were and she gave them raises; she fired the others, and hired a younger, more reliable crew. She baked apple pies for the families of the orchardmen who pleased her, and she taught their wives the recipe, too. She installed a pizza oven in the apple mart and soon could turn out forty-eight pies in one baking, adding greatly to the business over the counter at harvest time--formerly reserved for apple cider and apple jelly. She overpaid for the damages to Ira Titcomb's beehives and soon was selling apple blossom honey over the counter, too. She went to the university and learned everything about cross-pollination and how to plant a new-tree orchard; she learned more about mousing, and suckering, and thinning, and the new chemicals than the foremen knew, and then she taught them.
Olive had a vision of her silent mother, Maud, mesmerized by her own fading image in the makeup mirror--clams everywhere around her. The little cotton balls dabbed with cosmetics (the color of the clay on her brother Bucky's terrible boots) were flecked with the ashes from the cigarettes overstuffing the clam-shell ashtray. These images strengthened Olive. She knew the life she had escaped, and at Ocean View Orchards she more than earned her keep; she took the farm out of Senior's careless hands, and she ran it very intelligently for him.
At night, coming back from the Haven Club (she always drove), Olive would leave Senior passed out in the passenger seat and put a note on her son Wally's pillow, asking him, when he got home, to remember to carry his father up to bed. Wally always did so; he was a golden boy, not just a picture of one. The one night that young Wally had drunk too much to carry his father to bed, Olive Worthington was quick to point out to her son the error of his ways.
"You may resemble your father, with my permission, in every aspect but in his drunkenness," she told Wally. "If you resemble him in that aspect, you will lose this farm--and every penny made by every apple. Do you think your father could prevent me from doing that to you?"
Wally looked at his father, whom he had allowed to sleep all night in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, now mottled by spraying chemicals. It was obvious to the boy that Senior Worthington could prevent nothing.
"No, Mom," Wally said to his mother respectfully--not just because he was educated and polite (he could have taught tennis and manners at the Haven Club, and taught them well), but also because he knew his mother, Olive Worthington, hadn't "married into" anything more than a little working cash. The work had been supplied by her; Wilbur Larch would have respected that.
The sadness was that Olive, too, misjudged poor Senior, who was only a tangential victim of alcoholism and a nearly complete victim of Alzheimer's disease.
There are things that the societies of towns know about you, and things that they miss. Senior Worthington was baffled by his own deterioration, which he also believed to be the result of the evils of drink. When he drank less--and still couldn't remember in the morning what he'd said or done the evening before; still saw no relenting of his remarkably speeded-up process of aging; still hopped from one activity to the next, leaving a jacket in one place, a hat in another, his car keys in the lost jacket--when he drank less and still behaved like a fool, this bewildered him to such an extreme that he began to drink more. In the end, he would be a victim of both Alzheimer's disease and alcoholism; a happy drunk, with unexplained plunges of mood. In a better, and better-informed world, he would have been cared for like the nearly faultless patient that he was.
In this one respect Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock resembled St. Cloud's: there was no saving Senior Worthington from what was wrong with him, as surely as there had been no saving Fuzzy Stone.
In 193_, Homer Wells began Gray's Anatomy--at the beginning. He began with osteology, the skeleton. He began with bones. In 194_, he was making his third journey through Gray's Anatomy, some of which he shared with Melony. Melony showed a wayward concentration, though she confessed interest in the complexity of the nervous system, specifically the description of the twelfth or hypoglossal nerve, which is the motor nerve of the tongue.
"What's a motor nerve?" Melony aske
d, sticking out her tongue. Homer tried to explain, but he felt tired. He was making his sixth journey through David Copperfield, his seventh through Great Expectations, his fourth through Jane Eyre. Only last night he had come to a part that always made Melony cringe--which made Homer anxious.
It's near the beginning of Chapter Twelve, when Jane shrewdly observes, "It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."
"Just remember, Sunshine," Melony interrupted him. "As long as I stay, you stay. A promise is a promise."
But Homer Wells was tired of Melony making him anxious. He repeated the line, this time reading it as if he were personally delivering a threat.
"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." Mrs. Grogan looked taken aback at the ominousness in his voice.
He copied the line in a handwriting nearly as orderly and cramped as Dr. Larch's; Homer typed it on Nurse Angela's typewriter, making only a few mistakes. And when Wilbur Larch was "just resting" in the dispensary, Homer crept up on the tired saint and placed the piece of paper with the quotation from Jane Eyre on Dr. Larch's rising and falling chest. Dr. Larch felt less threatened by the actual text of the quotation than he felt a general unease: that Homer knew Dr. Larch's ether habit so exactly that the boy could approach his bed undetected. Or am I using a little more of this stuff than I used to? Larch wondered.
Was it meant as a message that Homer had used the ether cone to hold the Jane Eyre quotation to Larch's chest?
"History," wrote Dr. Larch, "is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes."
He may have been referring to something as small as the apostrophe that someone added to the original St. Clouds. His point is also illuminated by the case of the heart in both Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock, a case similar in error to how Melody became forever a Melony. The explorer credited with the discovery of the fine, pretty harbor at Heart's Haven--a seafaring man named Reginald Hart--was also the first settler of Heart's Rock to clear land and try to be a farmer. The general illiteracy of the times, and of the times following Reginald Hart's death, prevailed; no one knew of any written difference between one heart and another. The first settlers of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock, probably never knowing that Reginald Hart had been given the name of a deer, quite comfortably named their towns after an organ.
