by John Irving
“And that’s why,” Dr. Larch said patiently, “some of the women who come here don’t look pregnant . . . the embryo, the fetus, there’s just not enough of it for it to show.”
“But they all are pregnant,” said Homer Wells. “All the women who come here—they’re either going to have an orphan, or they’re going to stop it, right?”
“That’s right,” Dr. Larch said. “I’m just the doctor. I help them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion.”
“An orphan or an abortion,” said Homer Wells.
Nurse Edna teased Dr. Larch about Homer Wells. “You have a new shadow, Wilbur,” she said.
“Doctor Larch,” Nurse Angela said, “you have developed an echo. You’ve got a parrot following you around.”
“God or whatever, forgive me,” wrote Dr. Larch. “I have created a disciple, I have a thirteen-year-old disciple.”
By the time Homer was fifteen, his reading of David Copperfield was so successful that some of the older girls in the girls’ division asked Dr. Larch if Homer might be persuaded to read to them.
“Just to the older girls?” Homer asked Dr. Larch.
“Certainly not,” said Dr. Larch. “You’ll read to all of them.”
“In the girls’ division?” Homer asked.
“Well, yes,” Dr. Larch said. “It would be awkward to have all the girls come to the boys’ division.”
“Right,” said Homer Wells. “But do I read to the girls first or to the boys first?”
“The girls,” Larch said. “The girls go to bed earlier than the boys.”
“They do?” Homer asked.
“They do here,” Dr. Larch said.
“And do I read them the same passage?” Homer asked. He was, at the time, in his fourth journey through David Copperfield, only his third aloud—at Chapter 16, “I Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One.”
But Dr. Larch decided that girl orphans should hear about girl orphans—in the same spirit that he believed boy orphans should hear about boy orphans—and so he assigned Homer the task of reading aloud to the girls’ division from Jane Eyre.
It struck Homer immediately that the girls were more attentive than the boys; they were an altogether better audience—except for the giggles upon his arrival and upon his departure. That they should be a better audience surprised Homer, for he found Jane Eyre not nearly so interesting as David Copperfield; he was convinced that Charlotte Brontë was not nearly as good a writer as Charles Dickens. Compared to little David, Homer thought, little Jane was something of a whiner—a sniveler—but the girls in the girls’ division always cried for more, for just one more scene, when, every evening, Homer would stop and hurry away, out of the building and into the night, racing for the boys’ division and Dickens.
The night between the boys’ and girls’ division frequently smelled of sawdust; only the night had kept the memory of the original St. Cloud’s intact, dispensing in its secretive darkness, the odors of the old sawmills and even the rank smell of the sawyers’ cigars.
“The night sometimes smells like wood and cigars,” Homer Wells told Dr. Larch, who had his own memory of cigars; the doctor shuddered.
The girls’ division, Homer thought, had a different smell from the boys’, although the same exposed pipes, the same hospital colors, the same dormitory discipline prevailed. On the one hand, it smelled sweeter; on the other hand, it smelled sicker—Homer had difficulty deciding.
For going to bed, the boys and girls dressed alike—undervests and underpants—and whenever Homer arrived at the girls’ division, the girls were already in their beds, with their legs covered, some of them sitting up, some of them lying down. The very few with visible breasts were usually sitting with their arms folded across their chests to conceal their development. All but one—the biggest one, the oldest one; she was both bigger and older than Homer Wells. She had carried Homer across the finish line of a particularly famous three-legged race—she was the one called Melony, who was meant to be Melody; the one whose breasts Homer had mistakenly touched, the one who’d pinched his pecker.
Melony sat for the reading Indian-style—on top of her bed covers, her underpants not quite big enough for her, her hands on her hips, her elbows pointed out like wings, her considerable bosom thrust forward; a bit of her big, bare belly was exposed. Every night, Mrs. Grogan, who directed the girls’ division, would say, “Won’t you catch cold outside your covers, Melony?”
“Nope,” Melony would say, and Mrs. Grogan would sigh—it was almost a groan. That was her nickname: Mrs. Groan. Her authority rested in her ability to make the girls think that they caused her pain by doing harm to themselves or each other.
“Oh, that hurts me to see that,” she would tell them when they fought, pulled hair, gouged eyeballs, bit each other in the face. “That really hurts me.” Her method was effective with the girls who liked her. It was not effective with Melony. Mrs. Grogan was especially fond of Melony, but she felt she was a failure at making Melony like her.
“Oh, it hurts me, Melony, to see you catching cold—outside your covers,” Mrs. Grogan would say, “only partially clothed. That really hurts me.”
But Melony would stay put, her eyes never leaving Homer Wells. She was bigger than Mrs. Grogan, she was too big for the girls’ division. She was too big to be adopted. She’s too big to be a girl, thought Homer Wells. Bigger than Nurse Edna, bigger than Nurse Angela—almost as big as Dr. Larch—she was fat, but her fat looked solid. Although he had not competed in the three-legged race for several years, Homer Wells also knew that Melony was strong. Homer had decided not to compete as long as he would be paired with Melony—and he would be paired with her as long as he was the oldest boy and she was the oldest girl.
In reading aloud from Jane Eyre, Homer needed to keep his eyes off Melony; one look at her would remind him of having his leg tied to hers. He sensed that she resented his withdrawal from the annual competition. He was also afraid that she might sense how he liked her heaviness—how fat, to an orphan, seemed such good fortune.
The sweeter passages of Jane Eyre (too sweet, for Homer Wells) brought tears to the eyes of the girls in the girls’ division, and drew the most plaintive sighs and moans from Mrs. Grogan, but these same, sweeter passages extracted from Melony the most tortured breathing—as if sweetness provoked in her an anger barely restrainable.
The end of Chapter Four provided Melony with too much anger to restrain.
“ ‘That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony,’ ” Homer Wells read to them; hearing Melony hiss at the words “peace” and “harmony,” he bravely read on. “ ‘And in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchanting stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs,’ ” Homer continued, glad there was only one more sentence to get through; he saw Melony’s broad chest heave. “ ‘Even for me [chirped little Jane Eyre], life had its gleams of sunshine.’ ”
“ ‘Gleams of sunshine’!” Melony shouted in violent disbelief. “Let her come here! Let her show me the gleams of sunshine!”
“Oh, how it hurts me, Melony—to hear you say that,” Mrs. Grogan said.
“Sunshine?” Melony said with a howl. The younger girls crawled all the way under their bedcovers; some of them began to cry.
“The pain this causes me, I don’t know if I can bear it, Melony,” Mrs. Grogan said.
Homer Wells slipped away. It was the end of the chapter, anyway. He was due at the boys’ division. This time the giggles attendant on his departure were mixed with sobs and with Melony’s derision.
“Gleams!” Melony called after him.
“How this hurts us all,” Mrs. Grogan said more firmly.
Outside, the night seemed full of new scents to Homer Wells. Mingled with the sawdust smell and the rank cigars, was that a waft of the raucous perfume drifting over him from the former whore hotel? And something like sweat from the bingo-for-money room? The river itself gave off a smell.
In the boys’ division, they were waiting for him
. Some of the smaller ones had fallen asleep. The others were open-eyed—seemingly, open-mouthed, like baby birds; Homer felt he was rushing from nest to nest, his voice feeding them as they always cried for more. His reading, like food, made them sleepy, but it often woke Homer up. He usually lay awake after the nightly benediction—the ince in “Princes” and the ing in “Kings” still rang in the dark room. Sometimes he wished he could sleep in the baby room; the constant waking and crying there might be more rhythmic.
The older orphans had their irritating habits. One of Nurse Edna’s John Wilburs slept on a rubber sheet; Homer would lie awake, waiting to hear him wet his bed. Some nights Homer would wake the child, march him to the toilet, point his tiny pecker in the right direction, and whisper, “Pee, John Wilbur. Pee now. Pee here.” The child, asleep on his feet, would hold it back, waiting for the welcoming rubber sheet, that familiar dent and warm puddle in the bed.
Some nights, when he felt irritable, Homer Wells would simply stand by John Wilbur’s bedside and whisper his command in the boy’s ear: “Pee!” With almost instantaneous results!
More upsetting was Nurse Angela’s name-child, the sickly little Fuzzy Stone. Fuzzy had a cough, a constant dry hack. He had wet, red eyes. He slept inside a humidified tent; a waterwheel cranked by a battery and a fan to distribute the vapor ran all night. Fuzzy Stone’s chest sounded like a tiny, failing motor; the damp, cool sheets enclosing him fluttered through the night like the tissue of a giant, semi-transparent lung. The waterwheel, the fan, Fuzzy Stone’s dramatic gasps—they merged in Homer’s mind. If one of the three were to stop, Homer doubted he’d know which two were still alive.
Dr. Larch told Homer that he suspected Fuzzy Stone was allergic to dust; that the boy was born and slept in a former sawmill was doubtlessly not the best thing for him. A child with chronic bronchitis was not easily adoptable. Who wants to take home a cough?
When Fuzzy Stone’s coughing was too much for Homer Wells, when the various engines that struggled to maintain Fuzzy were too much on Homer’s mind—lungs, waterwheel and fan—Homer would quietly seek out the baby room. Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna was always there, usually awake and tending to one of the babies. Sometimes, when the babies were quiet, even the nurse on duty was sleeping, and Homer Wells would tiptoe past them all.
One night he saw one of the mothers standing in the baby room. She did not appear to be looking for her baby in particular; she was just standing in her hospital gown in the middle of the baby room, her eyes closed, absorbing the smells and sounds of the baby room through her other senses. Homer was afraid the woman would wake up Nurse Angela, who was dozing on the duty bed; Nurse Angela would have been cross with her. Slowly, as Homer imagined you might assist a sleepwalker, he led the woman back to the mothers’ room.
The mothers were often awake when he went to peek in on them. Sometimes he would get someone a glass of water.
The women who came to St. Cloud’s for the abortions rarely stayed overnight. They required less time to recover than the women who had delivered, and Dr. Larch discovered that they were most comfortable if they arrived in the morning, shortly before light, and left in the early evening, just after dark. In the daytime, the sound of the babies was not so prevailing because the noise the older orphans made, and the talk among the mothers and the nurses, confused everything. It was the sound of the newborn babies that, Dr. Larch observed, upset the women having the abortions. At night—except for John Wilbur’s peeing and Fuzzy Stone’s cough—the waking babies and the owls made the only sounds at St. Cloud’s.
It was a simple enough observation to make: the women having abortions were not comforted to hear the cries and prattle of the newborn. You could not plan the exact hour for a delivery, but Larch tried to plan the abortions for the early morning, which gave the women the whole day to recover and allowed them to be gone by evening. Some of the women traveled a long way—in these cases, Larch recommended that they come to St. Cloud’s the night before their abortions, when he could give them something strong to help them sleep; they’d have the whole of the next day to recover.
If one of those women spent the night, it was never in the room with the expectant or delivered mothers. Homer Wells—in his insomniac tour of St. Cloud’s—saw that, in sleep, the expressions of these overnight visitors were no more nor less troubled than the expressions of the women who were having (or who’d already had) babies. Homer Wells would try to imagine his own mother among the faces of the sleeping and the wakeful women. Where was she waiting to get back to—when the pain of her labor was behind her? Or was there no place she wanted to go? And what, when she was lying there, was his father thinking—if he even knew he was a father? If she even knew who he was.
These are the things the women would say to him:
“Are you in training to be a doctor?”
“Are you going to be a doctor when you grow up?”
“Are you one of the orphans?”
“How old are you? Hasn’t anyone adopted you yet?”
“Did someone send you back?”
“Do you like it here?”
And he would answer:
“I might become a doctor.”
“Of course Doctor Larch is a good teacher.”
“That’s right: one of the orphans.”
“Almost sixteen. I tried being adopted, but it just wasn’t for me.”
“I wanted to come back.”
“Of course I like it here!”
One of the women—very expectant, her belly huge under a taut sheet—asked him, “Do you mean, if someone wanted to adopt you, you wouldn’t go?”
“I wouldn’t go,” said Homer Wells. “Right.”
“You wouldn’t even consider it?” the woman asked. He almost couldn’t look at her—she seemed so ready to explode.
“Well, I guess I’d think about it,” Homer Wells said. “But I’d probably decide to stay, as long as I can help out around here—you know, be of use.”
The pregnant woman began to cry. “Be of use,” she said, as if she’d learned to repeat the pigtails of sentences from listening to Homer Wells. She pulled down the sheet, she pulled up her hospital gown; Nurse Edna had already shaved her. She put her hands on her great belly. “Look at that,” she whispered. “You want to be of use?”
“Right,” said Homer Wells, who held his breath.
“No one but me ever put a hand on me, to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen,” the woman said. “You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick, or listen to it move.”
“I don’t know,” said Homer Wells.
“Don’t you want to touch it or put your ear down to it?” the woman asked him.
“Okay,” said Homer Wells, putting his hand on the woman’s hot, hard belly.
“Put your ear down against it, too,” the woman advised him.
“Right,” Homer said. He touched his ear very lightly to her stomach but she strongly pressed his face against her; she was like a drum—all pings! and pongs! She was a warm engine—shut off, but still tapping with heat. If Homer had been to the ocean, he would have recognized that she was like the tide, like surf—surging in and out and back and forth.
“No one should have a baby if there’s no one who wants to sleep with his head right there,” the woman whispered, patting the place where she roughly held Homer’s face. Right where? Homer wondered, because there was no comfortable place to put his head, no place between her breasts and her belly that wasn’t round. Her breasts, at least, looked comfortable, but he knew that wasn’t where she wanted his head. He found it hard to imagine, from all the noise and motion inside her, that the woman was carrying only one baby. Homer Wells thought that the woman was going to give birth to a tribe.
“You want to be of use?” the woman asked him, crying gently now.
“Yes. Be of use,” he said.
“Sleep right here,” the woman told him. He pretended to sleep with his face ag
ainst the noisy boulder, where she held him snug. He knew when her water had broken before she knew it—she had fallen that soundly asleep. He went and found Nurse Edna without waking the woman, who before dawn delivered a seven-pound baby girl. Since neither Nurse Edna nor Nurse Angela was in charge of naming the girl orphans, after a few days someone there gave her a name—probably Mrs. Grogan, who favored Irish names, or if Mrs. Grogan had momentarily exhausted her supply, the secretary who typed badly and was responsible for “Melony” instead of “Melody”; she also enjoyed naming the little girls.
Homer Wells never knew which one she was, but he kept looking for her, as if his nighttime vigil with his face upon the mother’s jumping belly might have given him the senses necessary to recognize her child.
He never would recognize her, of course. All he had to go on was the fluid sound of her, and how she’d moved under his ear, in the dark. But he kept looking; he watched the girls in the girls’ division as if he expected her to do something that would give her away.
He even admitted his private game to Melony once, but Melony was, typically, derisive. “Just what do you think the kid’s going to do so you’ll know which one she is?” Melony asked. “Is she going to gurgle, is she going to fart—or kick you in the ear?”
But Homer Wells knew he was just playing a game by himself, with himself; orphans are notorious for interior games. For example, one of the oldest games that orphans play is imagining that their parents want them back—that their parents are looking for them. But Homer had spent an evening with the mystery baby’s mother; he’d heard all about the mystery baby’s father—and his lack of interest in the matter. Homer knew that the mystery baby’s parents weren’t looking for her; that may have been why he decided he’d look for her. If that baby girl was growing up, and if she was playing the old orphans’ game, wouldn’t it be better if there was at least someone who was looking for her—even if it was just another orphan?
Dr. Larch tried to talk to Homer about Melony’s anger.
