by John Irving
"Of course," Olive said. "I'll help you, too." She carried Angel to Wally's room, where Homer was surprised to see a crib--and more baby things, for just one baby, than could have been collected in a thorough search of both the boys' and girls' divisions in St. Cloud's.
An army of bottles, for the formula, awaited Homer in the kitchen. Olive had even bought a special pot for sterilizing the nipples. In the linen closet, there were more diapers than there were pillowcases and sheets and towels. For the first time in his life, Homer felt that he'd been adopted. To his horror, he saw that Olive loved him.
"I think that you and Angel should have Wally's room," Olive said; she had obviously been busy, planning. "Wally won't be able to climb stairs, so I'm having the dining room made into a bedroom--we can always eat in the kitchen, and the dining room has that terrace for when the weather's nice. I'm having a ramp built from the terrace to the patio around the pool, for the wheelchair."
As Homer held her while she cried, a new guilt surrounded him, like the nightfall, that ever-old, ever-new remorse that Mr. Rochester had told Jane Eyre to dread, that "poison of life."
In the second week of May, Ira Titcomb and Homer worked alongside each other, putting the bees out in the orchards. It was the start of blossom time, the night before Mother's Day, when they put out the hives. Everyone remembered Mother's Day that year; no one forgot Olive. The house was full of little presents and lots of apple blossoms, and some of the work crew even gave Homer a Mother's Day present--they thought it was so funny that he'd adopted a baby.
"Just imagine you with your very own baby!" was the way Big Dot Taft put it.
In the apple mart, where they were giving the display tables a fresh coat of paint, there were two babies on display--Angel Wells and Florence and Meany Hyde's boy, Pete. Pete Hyde looked like a potato compared to Angel Wells--which is to say that his disposition was entirely bland and he had no apparent bones in his face.
"Well, Homer, your Angel is an Angel," Florence Hyde would say, "and my Pete's a Pete."
The apple-mart women teased him endlessly; Homer just smiled. Debra Pettigrew was especially interested in handling Angel Wells; she would look intently into the baby's face for the longest time before announcing that she was sure the baby was going to look just like Homer. "Only more aristocratic," she guessed. Squeeze Louise said the baby was "too precious for words." When Homer was out in the field, either Olive or one of the apple-mart women looked after Angel, but most of the time Candy looked after her baby.
"We kind of adopted him together," she would explain. She said it so often that Olive said Candy was as much of a mother to that child as Homer was, and Olive therefore--as a kind of joke--gave Candy a Mother's Day present, too. All the while, the bees did their work, carrying pollen from the Frying Pan to Cock Hill, and the honey leaked between the clapboards that housed the hives.
One morning, on a corner of the newspaper, Homer Wells saw Olive's handwriting--a penciled remark above the day's headlines, any one of which might have prompted Olive to respond. But somehow Homer thought the remark was written to him.
INTOLERABLE DISHONESTY
Olive had written.
And one night Candy overheard Ray. Her bedroom light was out; in the pitch dark she heard her father say, "It's not wrong, but it's not right." At first she thought he was on the telephone. After she drifted back to sleep, the sound of her door opening and closing woke her up again, and she realized Ray had been sitting in her room with her--addressing her in her sleep, in the darkness.
And some of the nights in blossom time, Candy would say to Homer, "You're an overworked father."
"Isn't he?" Olive would say admiringly.
"I'm going to take this kid off your hands for the night," Candy would say, and Homer would smile through the tension of these exchanges. He would wake up alone in Wally's room in anticipation of Angel needing his bottle. He could imagine Raymond Kendall getting up to heat the formula and Candy being in her bed with the bottle of formula in as near an approximation of the correct angle of her breast as she could arrange it.
Ray's torpedo parts were stolen from Kittery Navy Yard; both Homer and Candy knew that's how he got them, but only Candy criticized Ray for it.
"I've caught more mistakes in the way they do things than they know things to do," Ray said. "Not likely they could catch me."
"But what's it for, anyway?" Candy asked her father. "I don't like there being a bomb here--especially when there's a baby in the house."
"Well, when I got the torpedo," Ray explained, "I didn't know about the baby."
"Well, you know now," Candy said. "Why don't you fire it at something--at something far away."
"When it's ready, I'll fire it," Ray said.
"What are you going to fire it at?" Homer asked Raymond Kendall.
"I don't know," Ray said. "Maybe the Haven Club--the next time they tell me I spoil their view."
"I don't like not knowing what you're doing something for," Candy told her father when they were alone.
"It's like this," Ray said slowly. "I'll tell you what it's like--a torpedo. It's like Wally, comin' home. You know he's comin', you can't calculate the damage."
Candy asked Homer for an interpretation of Ray's meaning.
"He's not telling you anything," Homer said. "He's fishing--he wants you to tell him."
"Suppose it all just goes on, the way it is?" Candy asked Homer, after they had made love in the cider house--which had not yet been cleaned for use in the harvest.
"The way it is," said Homer Wells.
"Yes," she said. "Just suppose that we wait, and we wait. How long could we wait?" she asked. "I mean, after a while, suppose it gets easier to wait than to tell?"
"We'll have to tell, sometime," said Homer Wells.
"When?" Candy asked.
"When Wally comes home," Homer said.
"When he comes home paralyzed and weighing less than I weigh," Candy said. "Is that when we spring it on him?" she asked.
Are there things you can't ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it--it seems to cut on its own--but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.
"We have to know where we're going," said Homer Wells.
"But what if we don't know?" Candy asked. "What if we know only how we want to stay? What if we wait and wait?"
"Do you mean that you won't ever know if you love him or me?" Homer asked her.
"It may be all confused by how much he's going to need me," Candy said. Homer put his hand on her--where her pubic hair had grown back, almost exactly as it was.
"You don't think I'll need you, too?" he asked her. She rolled to her other hip, turning her back to him--but at the same time taking his hand from where he'd touched her and clamping his hand to her breast.
"We'll have to wait and see," she said.
"Past a certain point, I won't wait," said Homer Wells.
"What point is that?" Candy asked. Because his hand was on her breast, he could feel her holding her breath.
"When Angel is old enough to either know he's an orphan or know who his parents are," Homer said. "That's the point. I won't have Angel thinking he's adopted. I won't have him not knowing who his mother and father are."
"I'm not worried about Angel," Candy said. "Angel will get lots of love. I'm worried about you and me."
"And Wally," Homer said.
"We'll go crazy," Candy said.
"We won't go crazy," Homer said. "We've got to take care of Angel and make him feel loved."
"But what if I don't feel loved, or you don't--what then?" Candy asked him.
"We'll wait until then," said Homer Wells. "We'll just wait and see," he said, almost with a vengeance. A spring breeze blew over them, bearing with it the sickly-sweet stench of rotten apples. The smell
had an almost-ammonia power that so overwhelmed Homer Wells that he released Candy's breast and covered his mouth and nose with his hand.
It was not until the summer when Candy first heard directly from Wally. She got an actual letter--her first communication from him since he'd been shot down a year ago.
Wally had spent six weeks in Mr. Lavinia Hospital in Ceylon. They had not wanted to move him from there until he'd gained fifteen pounds, until his muscle tremors had ceased and his speech had lost the daydreaming vacantness of malnutrition. He wrote the letter from another hospital, in New Delhi; after a month in India, he had gained an additional ten pounds. He said that he'd learned to put cinnamon in his tea, and that the slap of sandals was nearly constant in the hospital.
They were promising him that they would allow him to commence the long trip home when he weighed one hundred forty pounds and when he had mastered a few basic exercises that were essential to his rehabilitation. He couldn't describe the route of his proposed voyage home because of the censors. Wally hoped that the censors would understand--in the light of his paralysis--that it was necessary for him to say something about his "perfectly normal" sexual function. The censors had allowed this to pass. Wally still didn't know he was sterile; he knew he'd had a urinary tract infection, and that the infection was gone.
"And how is Homer? How I miss him!" Wally wrote.
But that was not the part of the letter that devastated Candy. Candy was so devastated by the beginning of the letter that the rest of the letter was simply a continuing devastation to her.
"I'm so afraid that you won't want to marry a cripple," Wally began.
In her single bed, tugged into sleep and into wakefulness by the tide, Candy stared at the picture of her mother on the night table. She would have liked a mother to talk to at the moment, and perhaps because she had no memory of her mother she remembered the first night she had arrived at the orphanage. Dr. Larch had been reading to the boys from Great Expectations. Candy would never forget the line that she and Homer had walked in on.
" 'I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness,' " Wilbur Larch had read aloud. Either Dr. Larch had predetermined that he would end the evening's reading with that line, or else he had only then noticed Candy and Homer Wells in the open doorway--the harsh hall light, a naked bulb, formed a kind of institutional halo above their heads--and had lost his place in the book, causing him, spur-of-the-moment, to stop reading. For whatever reason, that perception of wretchedness had been Candy's introduction to St. Cloud's, and the beginning and the end of her bedtime story.
10
Fifteen Years
For fifteen years they were a couple: Lorna and Melony. They were set in their ways. Once the young rebels of the women-only boardinghouse, they now occupied the choicest rooms--with the river view--and they served as superintendents to the building for a consideration regarding their rent. Melony was handy. She had learned plumbing and electricity at the shipyard where she was one of a staff of three electricians. (The other two were men, but they never messed with Melony; no one ever would.)
Lorna became more domestic. She lacked the concentration for advanced training at the shipyard, but she remained an employee--"Stay on for the pension plan," Melony had advised her. Lorna actually liked the assembly-line monotony, and she was smart about signing up for the overtime pay shifts--she was willing to work at odd hours if she could work less. Her being out late bothered Melony.
Lorna became increasingly feminine. She not only wore dresses (even to work) and used more makeup and perfume (and watched her weight); her voice, which had once been harsh, actually softened and she developed a smile (especially when she was being criticized). Melony found her increasingly passive.
As a couple, they rarely fought because Lorna would not fight back. In fifteen years, she had discovered that Melony relented if there wasn't a struggle; given any resistance, Melony would never quit.
"You don't fight fair," Melony would occasionally complain.
"You're much bigger than I am," Lorna would say coyly.
An understatement. By 195_, when Melony was forty-something (no one knew exactly how old she was), she weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds. She was five feet eight inches tall; she was almost fifty inches around at her chest, which meant that she wore men's shirts (large; anything smaller than a seventeen-inch neck wouldn't fit her; because her arms were short, she always had to roll up the sleeves). She had a thirty-six-inch waist, but only a twenty-eight-inch inseam (which meant that she had to roll up the cuffs of her trousers or have Lorna shorten them). Melony's pants were always so tight across her thighs that they quickly lost their crease there, but they were very baggy in the seat--Melony was not fat-assed, and she had the nondescript hips of most men. She had small feet, which always hurt her.
In fifteen years she'd been arrested only once--for fighting. Actually, the charge was assault, but in the end she was stuck with nothing more damaging than a disturbance of the peace. She'd been in the ladies' room of a pizza bar in Bath when some college boy had tried to engage Lorna in conversation. When he saw Melony take her place beside Lorna at the bar, he whispered to Lorna, "I don't think I could find anyone for your friend." He was imagining a possible double-date situation.
"Speak up!" Melony said. "Whispering is impolite."
"I said, I don't think I could find a date for you," the boy said boldly.
Melony put her arm around Lorna and cupped her breast.
"I couldn't find a sheep dog that would hold still for you," Melony told the college boy.
"Fucking dyke," he said as he was leaving. He thought he'd spoken quietly enough--and strictly to impress the shipyard workers at the far end of the bar; he couldn't have known that the men were Melony's coworkers. They held the college boy while Melony broke his nose with a metal napkin container.
The way that Melony liked to fall asleep was with her big face on Lorna's tight bare belly; Lorna could always tell when Melony had fallen asleep because of the change in Melony's breathing, which Lorna could feel against her pubic hair. In fifteen years, there was only one night when Lorna had to ask her friend to move her heavy head before she had soundly fallen asleep.
"What is it? You got cramps?" Melony asked.
"No, I'm pregnant," Lorna said. Melony thought it was a joke until Lorna went into the bathroom to be sick.
When Lorna came back to bed, Melony said, "I want to try to understand this, calmly. We've been like a married couple for fifteen years, and now you're pregnant." Lorna curled herself into a ball around one of the pillows; she covered her head with the other pillow. Her face and her stomach and her private parts were protected, but still she trembled; she began to cry. "I guess what you're telling me," Melony went on, "is that when women are fucking each other, it takes a lot longer for one of them to get pregnant than when a woman is fucking some guy. Right?" Lorna didn't answer her; she just went on sniveling. "Like about fifteen years--like that long. It takes fifteen years for women to get pregnant when they're just fucking other women. Boy, that's some effort," Melony said.
She went to the window and looked at the view of the Kennebec; in the summer, the trees were so leafy that the river was hard to see. She let a summer breeze dry the sweat on her neck and chest before she started packing.
"Please don't go--don't leave me," Lorna said; she was still all balled up on the bed.
"I'm packing up your things," Melony said. "I'm not the one who's pregnant. I don't have to go nowhere."
"Don't throw me out," Lorna said miserably. "Beat me, but don't throw me out."
"You take the train to Saint Cloud's. When you get there, you ask for the orphanage," Melony told her friend.
"It was just a guy--just one guy, and it was just once!" Lorna cried.
"No, it wasn't," Melony said. "A guy gets you pregnant fast. With women, it takes fifteen years."
When she had packed up Lorna's things, Melony stood over the bed and s
hook her friend, who tried to hide under the bedcovers. "Fifteen years!" Melony cried. She shook Lorna, and shook her, but that was all she did to her. She even walked Lorna to the train. Lorna looked very disheveled, and it was only the early morning of what would be a wilting summer day.
"I ask for the orphanage?" Lorna asked numbly. In addition to her suitcase, Melony handed Lorna a large carton.
"And you give this to an old woman named Grogan--if she's still alive," Melony said. "Don't say nothing to her, just give it to her. And if she's dead, or not there anymore," Melony started to say; then she stopped. "Forget that," she said. "She's either there or she's dead, and if she's dead, bring the carton back. You can give it back to me when you pick up the rest of your stuff."
"The rest of my stuff?" Lorna said.
"I was faithful to you. I was loyal as a dog," Melony said, more loudly than she'd meant to speak, because a conductor looked at her strangely--as if she were a dog. "You see somethin' you want, shitface?" Melony asked the conductor.
"The train is about to leave," he mumbled.
"Please don't throw me out," Lorna whispered to Melony.
"I hope you have a real monster inside you," Melony told her friend. "I hope it tears you to pieces when they drag it out your door."
Lorna fell down in the aisle of the train, as if she'd been punched, and Melony left her in a heap. The conductor helped Lorna to her feet and into her seat; out the window of the moving train, he watched Melony walking away. That was when the conductor noticed that he was shaking almost as violently as Lorna.
Melony thought about Lorna arriving in St. Cloud's--that turd of a stationmaster (would he still be there?), that long walk uphill with her suitcase and the large carton for Mrs. Grogan (could Lorna make it?), and would the old man still be in the business? She'd not been angry for fifteen years, but now here was another betrayal and Melony pondered how readily her anger had returned; it made all her senses keener. She felt the itch to pick apples again.
She was surprised that it was not with vengeance that she thought of Homer Wells. She remembered how she'd first loved having Lorna as a pal--in part, because she could complain to Lorna about what Homer had done to her. Now Melony imagined she'd like to complain about Lorna to Homer Wells.
