by John Irving
Homer exhibited no mistrust, and certainly no fear, of the Winkles. He felt for them only a detached wariness—he was sure they weren’t dangerous but they were of a slightly altered species. He fell asleep confusing the Winkles, in his child’s mind, with moose. In the morning he woke up to the sound of what he was sure were moose—only to discover that it was the Winkles in the tent room next to his. The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles’ inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.
Homer politely feigned sleep. The Winkles then roused him playfully. Like large dogs, they burst into his room on all fours, tugging at his sleeping bag with their teeth. They were going to swim! they told him. They were such large people, Homer wondered at the sheer abundance of their active flesh. He also wondered how they intended to swim in the raging stream without being bashed against the boulders and swept away. Homer didn’t know how to swim—not even in calm water.
But the Winkles were old hands at outdoor feats of skill, and they were cunning with equipment. They threw a line across the rapids; it was called a survival rope, they told Homer. The rope attached to a rakelike cluster of spikes, which Grant Winkle neatly lodged among the rocks on the far shore of the roaring river; he then strung a second rope to this one, and then a third. These additional ropes were complicated, with metal eyelets and hooks and adjustable safety straps that went around the Winkles themselves and held them tightly at their waists. With the assistance of this truly adventuresome gear, the Winkles were able to bounce, semi-suspended, into the thick of the rapids—where they were tossed about like bathtub toys while remaining safely in the same place, attached to each other and to the so-called survival rope. It was fun for Homer to watch them. The water seemed to swallow them completely at times—streaming sheets of it would engulf them and suck them down. Yet they would emerge in seconds, bouncing, appearing to walk across the churning, rolling foam. They played in midstream like giant, blond otters. Homer was very nearly convinced of their mastery of the elements—at least of water—and felt himself to be on the verge of asking them to let him try the game of showering in the rapids when it occurred to him that they couldn’t hear him. If he’d called out to them—even if he’d screamed—the whoosh of the turbid water all around the Winkles would have drowned out any noise he could muster.
He had resolved, therefore, to remain sitting on the shore and watch his would-be adoptive parents play, when the ground began to shake under him. He knew this more from certain badly told stories, in badly written children’s books, than from the felt recognition of the moving ground itself; in those children’s books, when something terrible is about to happen, the ground always shakes. He almost chose not to believe it, but the ground was unmistakably trembling; a dull hammering reached his ears.
Homer watched the Winkles more closely, believing them to be in control of everything. The Winkles continued to play in the rapids; they heard nothing, they didn’t feel the ground shake because they weren’t on the ground.
Oh my God, a moose is coming! thought Homer Wells. He stood up. He watched his feet hop—all by themselves—on the jumping ground. It is a herd of moose! he thought. To add to the hammering sound, Homer now heard sharper noises: cracks, some as startling as pistol shots. He looked at the Winkles and could tell that they’d heard these harsh slaps, too. Whatever it was that was coming, the Winkles were familiar with it; their entire attitude changed—they were no longer playful. They seemed to be struggling, and on their faces (now disappearing in the rushing white froth) their expressions were both knowledgeable and frightened. When they got a second to look (between plunges into the rapids), they looked upstream.
So did Homer—in time to see the log drive when it was about twenty-five yards away. The trees along the shoreline were occasionally snapped off as cleanly as kindling snapped over a knee—by a random log as big as a telephone pole but stouter, hurtling out of the water, striking a boulder and spinning for twenty feet through the air, leveling a patch of forest wherever it crashed and rolled on. The mass of logs, each as big as telephone poles, moved swiftly downstream with a wall of water in front of it. This water was not like the clear water of the river, but muddy with turmoil, clogged with slabs of bark, messy with whole chunks of ground that had been gouged out of the shore. The Ramses Paper Company called it a modest log drive; they said there’d been no more than four hundred, maybe seven hundred logs in that particular drive downriver.
Homer Wells was still running when he reached the road, where he was safe. He turned in time to see the logs surge by. A line from the tent had been attached to the Winkles’ survival rope, and the entire tent and everything in it (Homer’s copy of Great Expectations, too) were swept downstream in the pounding flow and charge of logs. The Ramses Paper Company wouldn’t recover Billy and Grant’s bodies for three days; they found them nearly four miles away.
Homer Wells was fairly calm. He looked upstream, waiting for more of anything; upstream was clearly the direction whatever might come next would come from. After a while, he relaxed; he examined the Winkles’ safari vehicle, which looked naked without the tent and the kitchen equipment. He found some fishing gear, but he didn’t dare to fish; it meant standing too close to the stream. He found some guns, but he had no idea how they worked (he felt comforted that the guns were there, however). He chose the biggest, most dangerous-looking one—a twelve-gauge, double-barrel shotgun—and dragged it around with him.
He was quite hungry by midafternoon, but before it was dark he heard a logging truck coming nearer and nearer; he knew it was a full one because of the straining sound of the gears. It was also a piece of luck (on the order of his not knowing how to swim, and therefore not joining the Winkles in their sport) that the truck was going Homer’s way.
“Saint Cloud’s,” he told the baffled driver, who was impressed with the shotgun.
It was a Ramses Paper Company truck, and Dr. Larch was at first furious to see it pull up to the hospital entrance. “Unless this is an absolute emergency,” he told the smitten Nurse Edna, “I will not do a stitch of work on anyone from that company!” Larch was actually disappointed to see Homer Wells, and alarmed to see the shotgun. Homer had the bewildered expression on his face of the many patients Larch had observed emerging from the spell of ether.
“You didn’t give the Winkles much of a chance, Homer,” Dr. Larch said gravely. Then Homer explained why he’d come back so soon.
“You mean the Winkles are gone?” Dr. Larch asked.
“Swept away,” said Homer Wells. “Whoosh!”
That was when Wilbur Larch gave up on finding Homer Wells a home. That was when Dr. Larch said that Homer could stay at St. Cloud’s for as long as Homer felt he belonged there. That was when St. Larch said, “Well, then, Homer, I expect you to be of use.”
For Homer Wells, this was easy. Of use, he felt, was all that an orphan was born to be.
2
The Lord’s Work
A child of Maine, Wilbur Larch was born in Portland in 186_—the son of a sullen, tidy woman who was among the staff of cooks and housekeepers for a man named Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland and the so-called father of the Maine law that introduced Prohibition to that state. Neal Dow once ran for the presidency as the candidate of the Prohibition Party, but he won barely ten thousand votes—proving that the general voter was wiser than Wilbur Larch’s mother, who worshiped her employer and saw herself more as his co-worker for temperance reform than as his servant (which she was).
Interestingly, Wilbur Larch’s father was a drunk—no small feat in the Portland of Mayor Dow’s day. It was permitted to advertise beer in the shop windows—Scotch ale and bitter beer, which Wilbur Larch’
s father consumed copiously; it was necessary, he claimed, to drink these weak brews by the bucketful in order to get a buzz on. To young Wilbur, his father never looked drunk—he never staggered or fell or lay in a stupor, he never shouted or slurred his speech. Rather, he had about him the appearance of one perpetually surprised, of one given to frequent and sudden revelations that would stop him in his tracks, or in midsentence, as if something had just come to him (or had just escaped him) that had preoccupied him for days.
He shook his head a lot, and all his life dispensed this misinformation: that the nineteen-thousand-ton ship the Great Eastern, which was built in Portland, was destined to sail the North Atlantic between Europe and Maine. It was the opinion of Wilbur Larch’s father that the two best wharves in Portland Harbor had been built specifically for the Great Eastern, that the new and huge hotel in Portland had been built expressly to house the Great Eastern’s passengers, and that someone evil or at least corrupt or just plain foolish was responsible for keeping the Great Eastern from returning to her home port in Maine.
Wilbur Larch’s father had worked as a lathe operator during the building of the Great Eastern, and perhaps the complaining noise of that machinery and the constant buzz he felt from all the beer he consumed had deceived him. The Great Eastern had not been built for voyages to and from Portland; she was originally intended for the route to Australia, but the many delays in getting her to sea drove her owners to bankruptcy and she was purchased for use on the North Atlantic route for which she proved unsuitable. She was, in fact, a failure.
So Wilbur Larch’s father had an addled memory of his days as a lathe operator, and he had considerable loathing for temperance reform, his wife’s beliefs and his wife’s employer, Mayor Neal Dow himself. In the opinion of Wilbur Larch’s father, the Great Eastern didn’t return to Portland because of Prohibition—that curse which had limited him to a bilious dependency on Scotch ale and bitter beer. Since Wilbur knew his father only in the man’s later years, when the Great Eastern was gone and his father was a porter in the Portland station of the Grand Trunk Railway, he could only imagine why working a wood-turning machine had been the high point of his father’s life.
As a boy, it never occurred to Wilbur Larch that his father’s missing fingers were the result of too many Scotch ales and bitter beers while operating the lathe—“just accidents,” his father said—or that his mother’s zeal for temperance reform might be the result of a lathe operator’s demotion to porter. Of course, Wilbur realized later, his parents were servants; their disappointment made Wilbur become what his teachers called a whale of a student.
Although he grew up in the mayor’s mansion, Wilbur Larch always used the kitchen entrance and ate his meals with the great prohibitionist’s hired help; his father drank his meals, down at the docks. Wilbur Larch was a good student because he preferred the company of books to overhearing his mother’s talk of temperance with Mayor Dow’s servants.
He went to Bowdoin College, and to Harvard Medical School—where a fascination with bacteria almost deterred him from practicing medicine, almost turned him into a laboratory animal, or at least a bacteriologist. He had a gift for the field, his professor told him, and he enjoyed the careful atmosphere of the laboratory; also, he had a burning desire to learn about bacteria. For nearly a year of medical school young Wilbur carried a bacterium that so offended and pained him that he was driven by more than scientific curiosity to discover its cure. He had gonorrhea: a gift, indirectly, from his father. The old man, in his beer buzz, had been so proud of Wilbur that he sent him to medicine school in 188_ with a present. He bought the boy a Portland whore, setting up his son with a night of supposed pleasure in one of the wharfside boardinghouses. It was a present the boy had been too embarrassed to refuse. His father’s selfish nostalgia allowed him so few gestures toward his son; his mother’s bitter righteousness was selfish in her own way; young Wilbur was touched that his father had offered to give him anything.
In the boardinghouse—the wood dry with salt and a sea-damp clinging to the curtains and to the bedspread—the whore reminded Wilbur of one of his mother’s more attractive servant-colleagues; he shut his eyes and tried to imagine that he was embarking on a forbidden romance in a back room of the mayor’s mansion. When he opened his eyes, he saw the candlelight deepening the stretch marks across the whore’s abdomen; he didn’t know they were stretch marks, then. The whore seemed unconcerned whether Wilbur noticed the stretch marks or not; in fact, as they fell asleep with his head on her stomach, he was vaguely wondering if the woman’s wrinkles would transfer to his face—marking him. A sharp, unpleasant smell awakened him and he moved quickly off the woman, without disturbing her. In a chair in the room, the one where she’d put her clothes, someone was smoking a cigar—Wilbur saw the end glow brighter with each inhalation. He assumed that a man—the whore’s next customer—was politely waiting for him to leave, but when he asked if there was a fresh candle to light (he needed to locate his clothes), it was a young girl’s voice that answered him.
“You could have had me for less,” was all she said. He could not see her distinctly but—since there was no fresh candle—she lit his way to his clothes by puffing earnestly on her cigar, casting both a red glow and a haze of smoke over his search. He thanked her for her help, and left.
On the morning train to Boston, he was embarrassed to meet the whore again. A chatty woman in the daylight, she was carrying a bandbox with the authority of a chronic shopper; he felt obliged to give her his seat on the overcrowded train. A young girl was traveling with the whore—“my daughter,” the whore said, indicating the girl with a jab of her thumb. The daughter reminded Wilbur that they’d already met by breathing her astonishingly foul cigar breath into his face. She was a girl not quite Wilbur’s age.
The whore’s name was Mrs. Eames—“She rhymes with screams!” Wilbur’s father had told him. Mrs. Eames told Wilbur she was a widow who lived a proper life in Boston, but that in order to afford such a life she found it necessary to sell herself in some out-of-the-way town. She begged Wilbur to allow her to keep her appearances and her reputation intact—in Boston. Wilbur not only assured her that her reputation was safe with him; he also, unasked, paid her more money of his own, on the spot, than his father had originally paid the woman. The amount of the original payment, he learned later—when his father told Wilbur that Mrs. Eames was a proper Portlander of good reputation who occasionally was obliged to sell herself in Boston so that she might afford to keep up her appearances in Portland. As an old favor to Wilbur’s father, she had allowed—“Just this once!”—the exception of lowering herself in her hometown.
Wilbur’s father didn’t know that Mrs. Eames had a daughter, who—by her own confession—cost less than her mother and made no pretense of keeping up appearances in either Boston or Portland. The sullen girl never spoke on the train ride into Boston’s North Station; her cigar breath and her scornful gaze spoke for her. Wilbur never told his father that there was some contradiction regarding which town Mrs. Eames had a good reputation in, and he never told his father that he caught the clap from Mrs. Eames, who might not have known she had it.
At medical school, Wilbur learned that gonorrhea could live in the Fallopian tubes of females for years. Only the appearance of an abscess in the pelvis might allow the woman to know that she carried the disease. The symptomatology, the discharge and so forth, could go unnoticed for a long time. It did not go unnoticed in Wilbur Larch; the bacterial infection, in these prepenicillin days, lived on for months in young Wilbur, giving him his passionate interest in bacteriology before burning itself out. It left his urethra scarred and his prostate rocky. It left him fond of ether, too—because the ether sleeps he occasionally administered to himself relieved him of the burning sensation he experienced, both when he urinated and when he dreamed. This singular and painful encounter with sexual pleasure—in combination with Wilbur’s memory of his parents’ loveless marriage—convinced the would-be docto
r that a life of sexual abstinence was both medically and philosophically sound.
In the same year, 188_, that Wilbur Larch became a doctor, Neal Dow died. In grief, Wilbur Larch’s mother shortly followed her temperance hero to the grave. A few days later, Wilbur’s father auctioned every item from their servants’ rooms in the former mayor’s mansion and rode the Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal, a town less temperance-minded than Portland, and where Wilbur Larch’s father pushed his liver beyond limits. His body was returned to Portland on the same Grand Trunk Railway that had carried the former lathe operator away. Wilbur Larch met the train; he played the porter to his father’s remains. From the near-cadavers of the cirrhotic that he had seen during his first internship, young Dr. Larch knew exactly what must have been his father’s condition at the end. Cirrhosis turns the liver to a mass of scars and lumps, the skin reflects the bile of jaundice, the stools lighten, the urine darkens, the blood doesn’t clot. Dr. Larch doubted that his father would have even noticed the accompanying impotence.
How moving to conclude that young Larch chose to be an obstetrician because the loss of his parents inspired him to bring more children into the world, but the road that led Larch to obstetrics was strewn with bacteria. The demonstrator of bacteriology at Harvard Medical School, a Dr. Harold Ernst, is best remembered as one of the first college baseball pitchers to throw a curve ball; he was also the first college baseball player to become a bacteriologist. In the early morning laboratory, before Dr. Ernst—the former curve-ball pitcher—would arrive to set up his demonstrations, young Wilbur Larch would be all alone. He didn’t feel alone in the presence of so many bacteria growing in the little Petri dishes, in the presence of the bacteria inhabiting his urethra and his prostate gland.
