by John Irving
"Maybe it's not as bad as we think," Dr. Gingrich said tiredly. He had seen the young couple leave the hotel, and they had filled him with melancholy.
"Let somebody go there and see," Mrs. Goodhall said, the dark chandelier above her small gray head.
Then, in the nick of time--in everyone's opinion--a new nurse came to St. Cloud's. Remarkably, she appeared to have found out about the place all by herself. Nurse Caroline, they called her; she was constantly of use, and a great help when Melony's present for Mrs. Grogan arrived.
"What is it?" Mrs. Grogan asked. The carton was almost too heavy for her to lift; Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had brought it over to the girls' division together. It was a sweltering summer afternoon; still, because it had been a perfectly windless day, Nurse Edna had sprayed the apple trees.
Dr. Larch came to the girls' division to see what was in the package.
"Well, go on, open it," he said to Mrs. Grogan. "I haven't got all day."
Mrs. Grogan was not sure how to attack the carton, which was sealed with wire and twine and tape--as if a savage had attempted to contain a wild animal. Nurse Caroline was called for her help.
What would they do without Nurse Caroline? Larch wondered. Before the package for Mrs. Grogan, Nurse Caroline had been the only large gift that anyone sent to St. Cloud's; Homer Wells had sent her from the hospital in Cape Kenneth. Homer Wells knew that Nurse Caroline believed in the Lord's work, and he had persuaded her to go where her devotion would be welcome. But Nurse Caroline had trouble opening Melony's present.
"Who left it?" Mrs. Grogan asked.
"Someone named Lorna," Nurse Angela said. "I never saw her before."
"I never saw her before, either," said Wilbur Larch.
When the package was opened, there was still a mystery. Inside was a huge coat, much too large for Mrs. Grogan. An Army surplus coat, made for the Alaskan service, it had a hood and a fur collar and was so heavy that when Mrs. Grogan tried it on, it almost dragged her to the floor--she lost her balance a little and wobbled around like a top losing its spin. The coat had all sorts of secret pockets, which were probably for weapons or mess kits--"Or the severed arms and legs of enemies," said Dr. Larch.
Mrs. Grogan, lost in the coat and perspiring, said, "I don't get it." Then she felt the money in one of the pockets. She took out several loose bills and counted them, which was when she remembered that it was the exact amount of money that Melony had stolen from her when Melony had left St. Cloud's--and taken Mrs. Grogan's coat with her--more than fifteen years ago.
"Oh, my God!" Mrs. Grogan cried, fainting.
Nurse Caroline ran to the train station, but Lorna's train had already left. When Mrs. Grogan was revived, she cried and cried.
"Oh, that dear girl!" she cried, while everyone soothed her and no one spoke; Larch and Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna remembered Melony as anything but "dear." Larch tried on the coat, which was also too big and heavy for him; he staggered around in it for a while, frightening one of the smaller girls in the girls' division who'd come into the lobby to investigate Mrs. Grogan's cries.
Larch found something in another pocket: the snipped, twisted ends of some copper wire and a pair of rubber-handled, insulated wirecutters.
On his way back to the boys' division, Larch whispered to Nurse Angela: "I'll bet she robbed some electrician."
"A big electrician," Nurse Angela said.
"You two," Nurse Edna scolded them. "It's a warm coat, anyway--at least it will keep her warm."
"It'll give her a heart attack, lugging it around," Dr. Larch said.
"I can wear it," Nurse Caroline commented. It was the first time that Larch and his old nurses realized that Nurse Caroline was not only young and energetic, she was also big and strong--and, in a much less crude and vulgar way, a little reminiscent of Melony (if Melony had been a Marxist, thought Wilbur Larch--and an angel).
Larch had trouble with the word "angel" since Homer Wells and Candy had taken their son away from St. Cloud's. Larch had trouble with the whole idea of how Homer was living. For fifteen years, Wilbur Larch had been amazed that the three of them--Homer and Candy and Wally--had managed it; he wasn't at all sure what they had managed, or at what cost. He knew, of course, that Angel was a wanted child, and well loved, and well looked after--or else Larch couldn't have remained silent. It was difficult for him to remain silent about the rest of it. How had they arranged it?
But who am I to advocate honesty in all relationships? he wondered. Me with my fictional histories, me with my fictional heart defects--me with my Fuzzy Stone.
And who was he to ask exactly what the sexual relationship was? Did he need to remind himself that he had slept with someone else's mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter's cigar? That he had allowed to die a woman who had put a pony's penis in her mouth for money?
Larch looked out the window at the apple orchard on the hill. That summer of 195_, the trees were thriving; the apples were mostly pale green and pink, the leaves were a vibrant dark green. The trees were almost too tall for Nurse Edna to spray with the Indian pump. I should ask Nurse Caroline to take over the tending of them, Dr. Larch thought. He wrote a note to himself and left it in the typewriter. The heat made him drowsy. He went to the dispensary and stretched himself out on the bed. In the summer, with the windows open, he could risk a slightly heavier dose, he thought.
The last summer that Mr. Rose was in charge of the picking crew at Ocean View was the summer of 195_, when Angel Wells was fifteen. All that summer, Angel had been looking forward to the next summer--when he would be sixteen, old enough to have his driver's license. By that time, he imagined, he would have saved enough money--from his summer jobs in the orchards and from his contribution to the harvests--to buy his first car.
His father, Homer Wells, didn't own a car. When Homer went shopping in town or when he volunteered at the hospital in Cape Kenneth, he used one of the farm vehicles. The old Cadillac, which had been equipped with a hand-operated brake and accelerator so Wally could drive it, was often available, and Candy had her own car--a lemon-yellow Jeep, in which she had taught Angel to drive and which was as reliable in the orchards as it was sturdy on the public roads.
"I taught your father how to swim," Candy always told Angel. "I guess I can teach you how to drive."
Of course Angel knew how to drive all the farm vehicles, too. He knew how to mow, and how to spray, and how to operate the forklift. The driver's license was simply necessary, official approval of something Angel already did very well on the farm.
And, for a fifteen-year-old, he looked much older. He could have driven all over Maine and no one would have questioned him. He would be taller than his boyish, round-faced father (they were dead even as the summer began), and there was a defined angularity in the bones of his face that made him seem already grown up; even the trace of a beard was there. The shadows under his eyes were not unhealthy-looking; they served only to accent the vivid darkness of his eyes. It was a joke between father and son: that the shadows under Angel's eyes were "inherited." "You get your insomnia from me," Homer Wells would tell his son, who still thought he was adopted. "You've got no reason to feel adopted," his father had told him. "You've got three parents, really. The best that most people get is two."
Candy had been like a mother to him, and Wally was a second father--or the favorite, eccentric uncle. The only life Angel had known was a life with all of them. At fifteen, he'd never suffered so much as a change of rooms; everything had been the same since he could remember it.
He had what had been Wally's room, the one Wally had shared with Homer. Angel had been born into a real boy's room: he'd grown up surrounded by Wally's tennis and swimming trophies, and the pictures of Candy with Wally (when Wally's legs worked), and even the picture of Candy teaching Homer how to swim. Wally's Purple Heart (which Wally had given to Angel) was hung on the wall over the boy's bed; it concealed an oddly smeared fingerprint--Olive's fingerprint, from the night when s
he'd crushed a mosquito against that wall, which was the same night Angel Wells had been conceived in the cider house. After fifteen years, the wall needed a fresh coat of paint.
Homer's room down the hall had been the master bedroom; it had been Olive's room and the room where Senior had died. Olive herself had died in Cape Kenneth Hospital before the war was over, even before they'd sent Wally home. It was an inoperable cancer, which spread very quickly after they'd done the exploratory.
Homer and Candy and Ray had taken turns visiting her; one of them was always with Angel but Olive was never alone. Homer and Candy had said--privately, only to each other--that things might have worked out differently if Wally had made it back to the States before Olive died. Because of Wally's precariousness and the added difficulty of moving him in wartime, it was thought best not to tell Wally of Olive's cancer; that was how Olive had wanted it, too.
In the end, Olive thought Wally had come home. She was pumped so full of pain-killers that she mistook Homer for Wally in their last few meetings. Homer had been in the habit of reading to her--from Jane Eyre, from David Copperfield, and from Great Expectations--but he gave that up when Olive's attention began to wander. The first few times Olive confused Homer with Wally, Homer couldn't be sure whom she thought she was addressing.
"You must forgive him," Olive said. Her speech was slurred. She took Homer's hand, which she did not really hold so much as contain in her lap.
"Forgive him?" said Homer Wells.
"Yes," Olive said. "He can't help how much he loves her, or how much he needs her."
To Candy, Olive was clearer. "He's going to be crippled. And he's going to lose me. If he loses you, too, who's going to look after him?"
"I'll always look after him," Candy said. "Homer and I will look after him."
But Olive was not so drugged that she failed to detect and dislike the ambiguity of Candy's answer. "It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived, Candy," she said. With the drugs she was taking, Olive felt a perfect freedom. It was not for her to tell them that she knew what she knew; it was for them to tell her what they were keeping from her. Until they told her, she could keep them guessing about what she knew.
To Homer, Olive said: "He's an orphan."
"Who is?" Homer asked.
"He is," she said. "Don't you forget how needy an orphan is. He'll take everything. He's come from having nothing--when he sees what he can have, he'll take everything he sees. My son," Olive said, "don't blame anyone. Blame will kill you."
"Yes," said Homer Wells, who held Olive's hand. When he bent over her, to hear how she was breathing, she kissed him as if he were Wally.
"Blame will kill you," he repeated to Candy, after Olive had died. " 'Dread remorse,' " said Homer Wells, forever recalling Mr. Rochester's advice.
"Don't quote to me," Candy told him. "The thing is, he's coming home. And he doesn't even know his mother's dead. Not to mention," Candy said; then she stopped talking.
"Not to mention," said Homer Wells.
Candy and Wally were married less than a month after Wally returned to Ocean View; Wally weighed one hundred forty-seven pounds, and Homer Wells pushed the wheelchair down the church aisle. Candy and Wally occupied the converted bedroom on the ground floor of the big house.
Homer Wells had written to Wilbur Larch, shortly after Wally had come home. Olive's death (Homer wrote to Larch) had "fixed" things for Candy and Wally more securely than Wally's paralysis, or than whatever sense of betrayal and guilt might have plagued Candy.
"Candy's right: don't worry about Angel," Wilbur Larch had written to Homer Wells. "Angel will get enough love. Why would he feel like an orphan if he never is one? If you're a good father to him, and Candy's a good mother to him--and if he's got Wally loving him, too--do you think he's going to start missing some idea of who his so-called real father is? The problem is not going to be Angel's problem. It's going to be yours. You're going to want him to know you're his real father, because of you--not because he's going to need to know. The problem is, you're going to need to tell. You and Candy. You're going to be proud. It will be for you, and not for Angel, that you're going to want to tell him he's no orphan."
And to himself, or as an entry in A Brief History of St. Cloud's, Wilbur Larch wrote: "Here in St. Cloud's we have just one problem. His name is Homer Wells. He's a problem, wherever he goes."
Aside from the darkness in his eyes and an ability to sustain a pensive, faraway look that was both alert and dreaming, Angel Wells resembled his father very little. He never thought of himself as an orphan; he knew he had been adopted, and he knew he came from where his father came from. And he knew he was loved; he had always felt it. What did it matter that he called Candy "Candy" and Homer "Dad"--and Wally "Wally"?
This was the second summer that Angel Wells had been strong enough to carry Wally--up some steps, or into the surf, or out of the shallow end of the pool and back into the wheelchair. Homer had taught Angel how to carry Wally into the surf, when they went to the beach. Wally was a better swimmer than any of them, but he needed to get into deep enough water so that he could either float over a wave or duck under one.
"You just can't let him get dragged around in the shallow water," Homer had explained to his son.
There were some rules regarding Wally (there were always rules, Angel had observed). As good a swimmer as he was, Wally was never allowed to swim alone, and for many summers now, Angel Wells had been Wally's lifeguard whenever Wally swam his laps or just floated in the pool. Almost half the physical contact between Wally and Angel occurred in the water, where they resembled otters or seals. They wrestled and dunked each other so ferociously that Candy couldn't help being anxious at times for both of them.
And Wally was not allowed to drive alone; even though the Cadillac had hand-operated controls, someone else had to collapse the wheelchair and put it in or take it out of the back of the car. The first collapsible wheelchairs were quite heavy. Although Wally would occasionally drag himself through the ground floor of the house using one of those metal walkers, his legs were mere props; in unfamiliar terrain, he needed his wheelchair--and in rough terrain, he needed a pusher.
So many times the pusher had been Angel; and so many times Angel had been the passenger in the Cadillac. Although Homer and Candy might have complained if they had known, Wally had long ago taught Angel to drive the Cadillac.
"The hand controls make it easy, kiddo," Wally would say. "Your legs don't have to be long enough to reach the pedals." That was not what Candy had told Angel about teaching him to drive in the Jeep. "Just as soon as your legs are long enough to reach the pedals," she had told him, kissing him (which she did whenever she had the excuse), "I'll teach you how to drive."
When the time came, it never occurred to Candy that Angel had been so easy to teach because he'd been driving the Cadillac for years.
"Some rules are good rules, kiddo," Wally would tell the boy, kissing him (which Wally did a lot, especially in the water). "But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully."
"It's dumb that I have to be sixteen before I get a driver's license," Angel told his father.
"Right," said Homer Wells. "They should make an exception for kids who grow up on farms."
Sometimes Angel played tennis with Candy, but more often he hit balls back to Wally, who maintained his good strokes even sitting down. The club members had complained a little about the wheelchair tracks on the clay--but what would the Haven Club have been without tolerating one or another Worthington eccentricity? Wally would set the wheelchair in a fixed position and hit only forehands for fifteen or twenty minutes; Angel's responsibility was to get the ball exactly to him. Then Wally would move the chair and hit only backhands.
"It's actually better practice for you than for me, kiddo," Wally would tell Angel. "At least, I'm not getting any better." Angel got a lot better; he was so much better than Candy that it sometimes hurt his mother's feelings w
hen she detected how boring it was for Angel to play with her.
Homer Wells didn't play tennis. He had never been a games man, he had resisted even the indoor football at St. Cloud's--although he occasionally dreamed of stickball, usually with Nurse Angela pitching; she was always the hardest to hit. And Homer Wells had no hobbies--nothing beyond following Angel around, as if Homer were his son's pet, a dog waiting to be played with. Pillow fights in the dark; they'd been popular for a few years. Kissing each other good night, and then finding excuses to repeat the ritual--and finding novel ways to wake each other in the mornings. If Homer was bored, he was also busy. He had continued his volunteer work for Cape Kenneth Hospital; in a sense, he had never stopped his war effort, his service as a nurses' aide. And he was a veteran reader of medical literature. The Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine were very acceptably piled up on the tables and in the bookcases of the Ocean View house. Candy objected to the illustrations in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
"I need a little intellectual stimulation around here," Homer Wells would say whenever Candy complained about the graphic nature of this material.
"I just don't think that Angel has to see it," Candy said.
"He knows I have a little background in the subject," Homer said.
"I don't object to what he knows, I object to the pictures," Candy said.
"There's no reason to mystify the subject for the child," Wally said, taking Homer's side.
"There's no need to make the subject grotesque, either," Candy argued.
"I don't think it's either a mystery or grotesque," Angel said, that summer he was fifteen. "It's just interesting."
"You're not even going out with girls, yet," Candy said, laughing, and taking the opportunity to kiss him. But when she bent over him to kiss him, she saw in her son's lap the illustration that was featured in an article on vaginal operations. The illustration indicated the lines of incision for the removal of the vulva and a primary tumor in an extended radical vulvectomy.
