by John Irving
More shocking (to Homer's mind) was what he could gather of his own feelings. He already knew that he loved Candy, and wanted her; now he discovered that--more than wanting her--he wanted her child.
They were just another trapped couple, more comfortable with their illusions than they were with the reality of their situation.
"After the harvest," Homer said to Candy, "we'll go to Saint Cloud's. I'll say that they need me there. It's probably true, anyway. And because of the war, no one else is paying attention to them. You could tell your dad it's just another kind of war effort. We could both tell Olive that we feel an obligation--to be where we're really needed; to be of more use."
"You want me to have the baby?" Candy asked him.
"I want you to have our baby," said Homer Wells. "And after the baby's born, and you're both recovered, we'll come back here. We'll tell your dad, and Olive--or we'll write them--that we've fallen in love, and that we've gotten married."
"And that we conceived a child before we did any of that?" Candy asked.
Homer Wells, who saw the real stars above the blackened coast of Maine--bright and cold--envisioned the whole story very clearly. "We'll say the baby is adopted," he said. "We'll say we felt a further obligation--to the orphanage. I do feel that, in a way, anyway," he added.
"Our baby is adopted?" Candy asked. "So we have a baby who thinks it's an orphan?"
"No," Homer said. "We have our own baby, and it knows it's all ours. We just say it's adopted--just for Olive's sake, and just for a while."
"That's lying," Candy said.
"Right," said Homer Wells. "That's lying for a while."
"Maybe--when we came back, with the baby--maybe we wouldn't have to say it was adopted. Maybe we could tell the truth then," Candy said.
"Maybe," Homer said. Maybe everything is waiting and seeing, he thought. He put his mouth on the back of her neck; he nuzzled into her hair.
"If we thought that Olive could accept it, if we thought that she could accept--about Wally," Candy added, "then we wouldn't have to lie about the baby being adopted, would we?"
"Right," said Homer Wells. What is all this worrying about lying? he wondered, holding Candy tightly as she softly cried. Was it true that Wilbur Larch had no memory of Homer's mother? Was it true that Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna had no memory of his mother, either? Maybe it was true, but Homer Wells would never have blamed them if they had lied; they would have lied only to protect him. And if they'd remembered his mother, and his mother was a monster, wasn't it better that they'd lied? To orphans, not every truth is wanted.
And if Homer had discovered that Wally had died in terrible pain or with prolonged suffering--if Wally had been tortured, or had burned to death, or had been eaten by an animal--Homer certainly would have lied about that. If Homer Wells had been an amateur historian, he would have been as much of a revisionist as Wilbur Larch--he would have tried to make everything come out all right in the end. Homer Wells, who always said to Wilbur Larch that he (Larch) was the doctor, was more of a doctor than he knew.
The first night of cider making he shared the work of the press and grinder with Meany Hyde and Everett Taft; Big Dot and her kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, were the bottlers. Debra was sullen at the prospect of messy work; she complained about the slopping and the spilling, and her irritation was further enhanced by the presence of Homer Wells, to whom she had not been speaking--Debra's understanding that Candy and Homer had become partners in a certain grief was markedly colored by her suspicion that Candy and Homer had become partners in a certain pleasure, too. At least Debra had not reacted generously to Homer's suggestion that they just be friends. Homer was puzzled by Debra's hostility, and assumed that his years in the orphanage had deprived him of some perfectly sensible explanation for her behavior. It seemed to Homer that Debra had always denied him access to anything more than her friendship. Why was she now incensed that he asked no more of her than that?
Meany Hyde announced to Homer and Everett Taft that this would be his first and last night press of the harvest because he wanted to stay home with Florence--"Now that her time is approachin'," Meany said.
When Mr. Rose pressed cider, there was a very different feeling in the fermented air. For one thing, everything went more quickly; the pressing was a kind of contest. For another, there was a tension that Mr. Rose's authority created--and the knowledge of those tired men asleep, or trying to sleep, in the next room, lent to the working of the grinder and the press a sense of hurry (and of perfection) that one feels only on the edge of exhaustion.
Debra Pettigrew's future heaviness grew more and more apparent the wetter she got; there was a matching slope in the sisters' shoulders, and even a slackness in the backs of Debra's arms that would one day yield the massive jiggles that shivered through Big Dot. In sisterly imitation, they wiped the sweat from their eyes with their biceps--not wanting to touch their faces with their cider-sweet and sticky hands.
After midnight, Olive brought them cold beer and hot coffee. When she had gone, Meany Hyde said, "That Missus Worthington is a thoughtful woman--here she is not only bringin' us somethin' but givin' us a choice."
"And her with Wally gone," said Everett Taft. "It's a wonder she even thought of us."
Whatever is brought to me, whatever is coming, Homer thought, I will not move out of its way. Life was finally about to happen to him--the journey he proposed making, back to St. Cloud's, was actually going to give him his freedom from St. Cloud's. He would have a baby (if not a wife, too); he would need a job.
Of course I'll take the baby trees, and plant them, he was thinking--as if apple trees would satisfy St. Cloud's, as if his planting them would satisfy what Wilbur Larch wanted from him.
By the end of the harvest, the light grew grayer and the orchards were darker in the daytime, although more light passed through the empty trees. The picking crew's inexperience was visible in the shriveled apples still clinging to the hard-to-reach limbs. The ground was already frozen in St. Cloud's. Homer would have to make a special trip for the baby trees. He would plant them in the spring; it would be a spring baby.
Homer and Candy worked only the night shifts at Cape Kenneth Hospital now. The days when Ray was building the torpedoes were the days Homer could spend with Candy, in her room above the lobster pound.
There was a freedom about their lovemaking, now that Candy was already pregnant. Although she could not tell him--not yet--Candy loved making love to Homer Wells; she enjoyed herself much more than she had been able to with Wally. But she could not bring herself to say aloud that anything was better than with Wally; although making love was better with Homer, she doubted that this was Wally's fault. She and Wally had never had the time to feel so free.
"The girl and I are coming," Homer wrote to Dr. Larch. "She's going to have my baby--neither an abortion nor an orphan."
"A wanted baby!" Nurse Angela said. "We're going to have a wanted baby!"
"If not a planned one," said Wilbur Larch, who stared out the window of Nurse Angela's office as if the hill that rose outside the window had personally risen against him. "And I suppose he's going to plant the damn trees," said Dr. Larch. "What does he want a baby for? How can he have a baby and go to college--or to medical school?"
"When was he ever going to go to medical school, Wilbur?" Nurse Edna asked.
"I knew he'd be back!" Nurse Angela shouted. "He belongs with us!"
"Yes, he does," said Wilbur Larch. Involuntarily, and somewhat stiffly, his back straightened, his knees braced, his arms reached out and the fingers of his hands partially opened--as if he were preparing to receive a heavy package. Nurse Edna shuddered to see him in such a pose, which reminded her of the fetus from Three Mile Falls, that dead baby whose posture of such extreme supplication had been arranged by Homer Wells.
Homer said to Olive Worthington: "I hate to leave, especially with Christmas coming, and all those memories--but there is something, and someone, I've been neglecting. It's really al
l of them at Saint Cloud's--nothing changes there. They always need the same things, and now that there's a war, and everyone is making an effort for the war, I think Saint Cloud's is more forgotten than ever. And Doctor Larch isn't getting any younger. I should be of more use than I am here. With the harvest over, I don't feel I have enough to do. At Saint Cloud's, there's always too much to do."
"You're a fine young man," said Olive Worthington, but Homer hung his head. He remembered what Mr. Rochester said to Jane Eyre:
"Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life."
It was an early November morning in the kitchen at Ocean View; Olive had not done her hair or put her makeup on. The gray in the light, and in her face and in her hair, made Mrs. Worthington look older to Homer. She was using the string of her tea bag to wring the last of the tea from the bag, and Homer could not raise his eyes from the ropy, knotted veins in the backs of her hands. She had always smoked too much, and in the morning she always coughed.
"Candy is coming with me," said Homer Wells.
"Candy is a fine young woman," Olive said. "It is most unselfish of you both--when you could be enjoying yourselves--to give comfort and companionship to unwanted children." The string across the belly of the tea bag was so taut that Homer thought it would slice through the bag. Olive's voice was so formal that she might have been speaking at an awards ceremony describing the heroism that was worthy of prizes. She was trying her hardest not to cough. When the string tore the tea bag, some of the wet leaves stuck to the yolk of her uneaten soft-boiled egg, which was perched in a china egg cup that Homer Wells had once mistaken for a candlestick holder.
"I could never thank you enough for everything you've done for me," Homer said. Olive Worthington just shook her head; her shoulders were squared, her chin was up, the straightness of her back was formidable. "I'm so sorry about Wally," said Homer Wells. There was the slightest movement in Olive's throat, but the muscles of her neck were rigid.
"He's just missing," Olive said.
"Right," said Homer Wells. He put his hand on Olive's shoulder. She gave no indication that the presence of his hand was either a burden or a comfort, but after they remained like that for a while, she turned her face enough to rest her cheek on top of his hand; there they remained for a while longer, as if posing for a painter of the old school--or for a photographer who was waiting for the unlikely: for the November sun to come out.
Olive insisted that he take the white Cadillac.
"Well," Ray said to Candy and to Homer, "I think it's good for you both that you stick together." Ray was disappointed that neither Homer nor Candy acknowledged his observation with any enthusiasm; as the Cadillac was leaving the lobster pound parking lot, Ray called out to them: "And try havin' some fun together!" Somehow, he doubted that they had heard him.
Who goes to St. Cloud's to have fun?
I have not really been adopted, thought Homer Wells. I am not really betraying Mrs. Worthington; she never said she was my mother. Even so, Homer and Candy did not talk a lot on the drive.
On their journey inland, the farther north they drove, the more the leaves had abandoned the trees; there was a little snow in Skowhegan, where the ground resembled an old man's face in need of a shave. There was more snow in Blanchard and in East Moxie and in Moxie Gore, and they had to wait an hour in Ten Thousand Acre Tract where a tree was down--across the road. The snow had drifted over the tree, the smashed shape of which resembled a toppled dinosaur. In Moose River and in Misery Gore, and in Tomhegan, too, the snow had come to stay. The drifts along the roadside were shorn so sharply by the plow--and they stood so high--that Candy and Homer could detect the presence of a house only by chimney smoke, or by the narrow paths chopped through the drifts that were here and there stained by the territorial pissing of dogs.
Olive and Ray and Meany Hyde had given them extra gas coupons. They had decided to take the car because they thought that it would be nice to have a means to get away from St. Cloud's--if only for short drives--but by the time they reached Black Rapids and Homer had put the chains on the rear tires, they realized that the winter roads (and this was only the beginning of the winter) would make most driving impossible.
If they had asked him, Dr. Larch would have saved them the trouble of bringing the car. He would have said that no one comes to St. Cloud's for the purpose of taking little trips away from it; he would have suggested, for fun, that they could always take the train to Three Mile Falls.
With the bad roads and the failing light and the snow that began to fall after Ellenville, it was already dark when they reached St. Cloud's. The headlights of the white Cadillac, climbing the hill past the girls' division, illuminated two women walking down the hill toward the railroad station--their faces turning away from the light. Their footing looked unsure; one of them didn't have a scarf; the other one didn't have a hat; the snow winked in the headlights as if the women were throwing diamonds in the air.
Homer Wells stopped the car and rolled down the window. "May I give you a ride?" he asked the women.
"You're goin' the wrong way," one of them said.
"I could turn around!" he called to them. When they walked on without answering him, he drove ahead to the hospital entrance of the boys' division and turned out the headlights. The snow falling in front of the light in the dispensary was the same kind of snow that had been falling the night that he arrived in St. Cloud's after his escape from the Drapers in Waterville.
There had been something of a brouhaha between Larch and his nurses about where Homer and Candy would sleep. Larch assumed that Candy would sleep in the girls' division and that Homer would sleep where he used to sleep, with the other boys, but the women reacted strongly to this suggestion.
"They're lovers!" Nurse Edna pointed out. "Surely they sleep together!"
"Well, surely they have," Larch said. "That doesn't mean that they have to sleep together here."
"Homer said he was going to marry her," Nurse Edna pointed out.
"Going to," grumbled Wilbur Larch.
"I think it would be nice to have someone sleeping with someone else here," Nurse Angela said.
"It seems to me," said Wilbur Larch, "that we're in business because there's entirely too much sleeping together."
"They're lovers!" Nurse Edna repeated indignantly.
And so the women decided it. Candy and Homer would share a room with two beds on the ground floor of the girls' division; how they arranged the beds was their own business. Mrs. Grogan said that she liked the idea of having a man in the girls' division; occasionally, the girls complained of a prowler or a peeping tom; having a man around at night was a good idea.
"Besides," Mrs. Grogan said, "I'm all alone over there--you three have each other."
"We all sleep alone over here," Dr. Larch said.
"Well, Wilbur," Nurse Edna said, "don't be so proud of it."
Olive Worthington, alone in Wally's room, regarded the two beds, Homer's and Wally's--both beds were freshly made up, both pillows were without a crease. On the night table between their beds was a photograph of Candy teaching Homer how to swim. Because there was no ashtray in the boys' room, Olive held her free hand in a cupped position under the long, dangling ash of her cigarette.
Raymond Kendall, alone above the lobster pound, viewed the triptych of photographs that stood like an altarpiece on his night table, next to his socket wrench set. The middle photograph was of himself as a young man; he was seated in an uncomfortable-looking chair, his wife was in his lap; she was pregnant with Candy; the chair was in apparent danger. The left-hand photograph was Candy's graduation picture, the right-hand photograph was of Candy with Wally--their tennis racquets pointed at each other, like guns. Ray had no picture of Homer Wells; he needed only to look out the window at his dock in order to imagine Homer clearly; Ray could not look at his dock and think of Homer Wells without hearing the snails rain upon the water.
Nurse Edna had tried to keep a
little supper warm for Homer and Candy; she had put the disappointing pot roast in the instrument sterilizer, which she checked from time to time. Mrs. Grogan, who was praying in the girls' division, did not see the Cadillac come up the hill. Nurse Angela was in the delivery room, shaving a woman who had already broken her bag of waters.
Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela's empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch's reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer Wells was inclined to hurry--in order not to miss the bedtime story.
Meany Hyde's wife, Florence, was delivered of a healthy baby boy--nine pounds, two ounces--shortly after Thanksgiving, which Olive Worthington and Raymond Kendall celebrated in a fairly formal and quiet fashion at Ocean View. Olive invited all her apple workers for an open house; she asked Ray to help her host the occasion. Meany Hyde insisted to Olive that his new baby was a definite sign that Wally was alive.
"Yes, I know he's alive," Olive told Meany calmly.
It was not too trying a day for her, but she did find Debra Pettigrew sitting on Homer's bed in Wally's room, staring at the photograph of Candy teaching Homer how to swim. And not long after ushering Debra from the room, Olive discovered Grace Lynch sitting in the same dent Debra had made on Homer's bed. Grace, however, was staring at the questionnaire from the board of trustees at St. Cloud's, the one that Homer had never filled out and had left tacked to the wall of Wally's room as if they were unwritten rules.
And Big Dot Taft broke down in the kitchen while telling Olive about one of her dreams. Everett had found her, in her sleep, dragging herself across the bedroom floor toward the bathroom. "I didn't have no legs," Big Dot told Olive. "It was the night Florence's boy was born, and I woke up without no legs--only I didn't really wake up, I was just dreamin' that there was nothin' left of me, below the waist."
