by John Irving
Under the heading “D&C,” Homer wrote: “The woman is most secure in stirrups.” In Dr. Larch’s procedure, she was also shaved.
“The VAGINAL area is prepared with an ANTISEPTIC SOLUTION,” wrote Homer Wells; he did a lot of CAPITALIZING—it was related to his habit of repeating the ends of sentences, or key words. “The UTERUS is examined to estimate its size. One hand is placed on the ABDOMINAL WALL; two or three fingers of the other hand are in the VAGINA. A VAGINAL SPECULUM, which looks like a duck’s bill, is inserted in the VAGINA—through which the CERVIX is visible. (The CERVIX,” he wrote parenthetically, as if to remind himself, “is the necklike part of the lower, constricted end of the UTERUS.) The hole in the middle of the CERVIX is the entrance of the UTERUS. It is like a cherry Life Saver. In PREGNANCY the CERVIX is swollen and shiny.
“With a series of METAL DILATORS, the CERVIX is dilated to admit entrance of the OVUM FORCEPS. These are tongs with which the doctor grabs at what’s inside the UTERUS. He pulls what he can out.”
What this was (what Homer meant) was blood and slime. “The products of conception,” he called it.
“With a CURETTE,” noted Homer, “the WALL OF THE UTERUS is scraped clean. One knows when it’s clean when one hears a gritty sound.”
And that’s all that was entered in the notebook concerning dilatation and the process of curetting. As a footnote to this procedure, Homer added only this: “The WOMB one reads about in literature is that portion of the GENITAL TRACT in which the FERTILIZED OVUM implants itself.” A page number was jotted in the margin of this notebook entry—the page in Gray’s Anatomy that begins the section “The Female Organs of Generation,” where the most useful illustrations and descriptions can be found.
By 194_, Homer Wells (not yet twenty) had been a midwife to countless births and the surgical apprentice to about a quarter as many abortions; he had delivered many children himself, with Dr. Larch always present, but Larch had not allowed Homer to perform an abortion. It was understood by both Larch and Homer that Homer was completely able to perform one, but Larch believed that Homer should complete medical school—a real medical school—and serve an internship in another hospital before he undertook the operation. It was not that the operation was complicated; it was Larch’s opinion that Homer’s choice should be involved. What Larch meant was that Homer should know something of society before he made the decision, by himself, whether to perform abortions or not.
What Dr. Larch was looking for was someone to sponsor Homer Wells. Larch wanted someone to send the boy to college, not only in order for Homer to qualify for admission to medical school but also in order to expose Homer to the world outside St. Cloud’s.
How to advertise for such a sponsor was a puzzle to Wilbur Larch. Should he ask his colleague and correspondent at The New England Home for Little Wanderers if he could make use of their large mailing list?
ACCOMPLISHED MIDWIFE & QUALIFIED ABORTIONIST
SEEKS SPONSOR FOR COLLEGE YEARS
—PLUS MEDICAL SCHOOL EXPENSES!
Where was the society where Homer Wells could fit in? wondered Wilbur Larch.
Mainly, Larch knew, he had to get his apprentice away from Melony. The two of them together: how they depressed Larch! They struck the doctor as a tired and loveless married couple. What sexual tensions Melony had managed to conduct between them in the earlier years of their angry courtship seemed absent now. If they still practiced a sexual exchange, they practiced infrequently and without enthusiasm. Over lunch they sat together without speaking, in plain view of the girls’ or of the boys’ divisions; together they examined the well-worn copy of Gray’s Anatomy as if it were the intricate map they had to follow if they were ever to find their way out of St. Cloud’s.
Melony didn’t even run away anymore. It appeared to Dr. Larch that some wordless, joyless pact bound Homer and Melony together. Their sullenness toward each other reminded Dr. Larch of Mrs. Eames’s daughter, who would spend eternity with a pony’s penis in her mouth. Melony and Homer never fought; they never argued; Melony seemed to have given up raising her voice. If there was still anything sexual between them, Larch knew that it happened randomly, and only out of the keenest boredom.
Larch even got Melony a job as live-in help for a well-to-do old woman in Three Mile Falls. It may have been that the woman was a cranky invalid who would have complained about anyone; she certainly complained about Melony—she said Melony was “insensitive,” that she was never “forthcoming” with conversation, and that, in regard to such physical attentions as helping her in and out of her bath, the girl was “unbelievably rough.” Dr. Larch could believe it, and Melony herself complained; she said she preferred to live at St. Cloud’s; if she had to have a job, she wanted one she could go to and then leave.
“I want to come home at night,” she told Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch. Home? Larch thought.
There was another job, in town, but it required that Melony know how to drive. Although Dr. Larch even found a local boy to teach Melony, her driving thoroughly frightened the young man and she needed to take the driver’s examination for her license three times in order to pass it once. She then lost the job—delivering parts and tools for a building contractor. She was unable to account for more than two hundred miles that had accumulated in one week on the delivery van’s odometer.
“I just drove to places because I was bored,” she told Dr. Larch, shrugging. “And there was a guy I was seeing, for a couple of days.”
Larch fretted that Melony, who was almost twenty, was now unemployable and unadoptable; she had grown dependent on her proximity to Homer Wells, although whole days passed when there didn’t appear to be a word between them—in fact, no intercourse beyond mere presence was observable for weeks in succession (if Melony’s presence could ever be called “mere”). Because of how much Melony depressed Dr. Larch, Dr. Larch assumed that her presence was depressing to Homer Wells.
Wilbur Larch loved Homer Wells—he had never loved anyone as he loved that boy, and he could not imagine enduring a life at St. Cloud’s without him—but the doctor knew that Homer Wells had to have an authentic encounter with society if the boy was going to have a chosen life at all. What Larch dreamed of was that Homer would venture out in the world and then choose to come back to St. Cloud’s. But who would choose such a thing? Larch wondered.
Maine had many towns; there wasn’t one as charmless as St. Cloud’s.
Larch lay down in the dispensary and sniffed a little ether. He recalled Portland’s safe harbor; his mind ticked off the towns, either east or inland from Portland, and his lips tried the towns with the good, Maine names.
(Inhale, exhale.) Wilbur Larch could almost taste those towns, their vapory names. There was Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, there was Vassalborough and Nobleboro and Waldoboro, there was Wiscasset and West Bath, Damariscotta and Friendship, Penobscot Bay and Sagadahoc Bay, Yarmouth and Camden, Rockport and Arundel, Rumford and Biddeford and Livermore Falls.
East of Cape Kenneth, the tourist trap, lies Heart’s Haven; inland from the small, pretty harbor town that’s called a haven squats the town of Heart’s Rock. The rock in Heart’s Rock is named for the uninhabited rock island that appears to float like a dead whale in the otherwise perfect harbor of Heart’s Haven. It is an eyesore island, unloved by the people of Heart’s Haven; perhaps they were moved to name the eyesore town of Heart’s Rock after their bird-beshitted and fish-belly-white rock. Nearly covered at high tide, and lying fairly flat in the water, it lists slightly—hence its name: Dead Whale Rock. There is no actual “rock” in Heart’s Rock, which is not a town deserving to be looked down upon; it is only five miles inland, and from some of its hills the ocean is visible; in most of the town, the sea breeze is refreshingly felt.
But compared to Heart’s Haven, every other town is a mongrel. When condemning Heart’s Rock, the people of Heart’s Haven do not mention the simple quaintness of the town’s only stores—Sanborn’s General Store and Titus Hardware and Pl
umbing. The people of Heart’s Haven are more likely to mention Drinkwater Lake, and the summer cottages on its murky shores. A not-very-fresh freshwater lake, more of a pond—because by mid-July the bottom is cloudy and rank with algae—Drinkwater Lake is Heart’s Rock’s only offering to summer people. People who summer on Drinkwater Lake have not traveled far; they may live elsewhere in Heart’s Rock—or, even more rustically, in Kenneth Corners. The summer camps and cottages that dot the lakeshore are also used during the hunting-season weekends in the fall. The cottages and camps have names of a striving wishfulness. Echo’s End, and Buck’s Last Stand (this one is decked with antlers); there is one called Endless Weekend, with a floating dock; one called Wee Three, suggesting inhabitants of an almost unbearable cuteness; and a frank sort of place called Sherman’s Hole in the Ground, which is an accurate description.
In 194_ Drinkwater Lake was already cluttered, and by 195_ it would become intolerably busy with powerboats and water skis—propellers fouled and oars festooned with the slime-green algae stirred up from the bottom. The lake is too woodsy to let the wind through; sailboats always die on the dead-calm surface, which is perfect for hatching mosquitoes, and over the years the accumulated children’s urine and gasoline would give the lake an unwell, glossy sheen. There are wonderfully remote lakes in Maine, but Drinkwater Lake was never one of them. The occasional, bewildered canoeist looking for the wilderness would not find it there. The wild-hearted, departed Winkles would not have favored the place. You would not willingly drink the water of Drinkwater Lake, and there are many tiresome jokes on that subject, all conceived in Heart’s Haven, where the habit of judging Heart’s Rock by its single, sorry body of water is long-standing.
When Homer Wells would first see Drinkwater Lake, he would imagine that if there were ever a summer camp for the luckless orphans of St. Cloud’s, it would be situated in the bog that separates Echo’s End from Sherman’s Hole in the Ground.
Not all of Heart’s Rock was so ugly. It was a town of stay-put people on fairly open, neatly farmed land; it was dairy-cow country, and fruit-tree country. In 194_, the Ocean View Orchard on Drinkwater Road, which connected Heart’s Rock to Heart’s Haven, was pretty and plentiful—even by the standards of the spoiled and hard-to-please of Heart’s Haven. Although the Ocean View Orchards were in Heart’s Rock, there was a Heart’s Haven look to the place; the farmhouse had flagstone patios, the grounds were landscaped with rose bushes—like the Heart’s Haven homes on the more elegant coast—and the lawns spreading from the main house to the swimming pool, all the way to the nearest apple orchard, were kept up and fussed over by the same yard gangs who made the Heart’s Haven lawns look so much like putting greens.
The owner of Ocean View Orchards, Wallace Worthington, even had a Heart’s Haven kind of name—meaning, it was not a local-sounding name. Indeed not, because Wallace Worthington was from New York; he’d fled investments for apple farming just before everyone’s investments crashed, and if he didn’t know all there was to know about apples—being a gentleman farmer, in soul and in bones (and in clothes)—he knew almost everything about money and had hired the right foremen to run Ocean View (men who did know apples).
Worthington was a perpetual board member at the Haven Club; he was the only member whose position on the board was never voted—and the only Heart’s Rock resident who was a Haven Club member. Since his orchard employed half the locals of Heart’s Rock, Wallace Worthington had the rare distinction of being appreciated in both towns.
Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabody’s, where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion—the rich people’s abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.
You’d have to live in Heart’s Rock or in Heart’s Haven—and be familiar with the social histories of the towns—to know that Wallace Worthington’s wife was not every inch a queen; she certainly looked like a queen and conducted herself, every inch, as such. But the townspeople knew that Olive Worthington—although a Heart’s Haven native—had come from the wrong part of town. Society is so complex that even Heart’s Haven had a wrong part to it.
Olive Worthington was born Alice Bean; to the knowledgeable, she was Bruce Bean’s (the clam-digger’s) daughter; she was Bucky Bean’s (the well-digger’s) clever sister—which falsely implied that Bucky wasn’t clever; he was at least cleverer than his father, Bruce. Well-digging (the business of Nurse Angela’s father, the business that yielded Homer Wells a name) was good-paying work: well-digging beats clam-digging by dollars and by miles, as they say in Maine.
Olive Worthington grew up selling clams out of the back of a pickup truck that leaked ice. Her mother, Maud, never talked; she kept a cracked makeup mirror on a chopping block at the crowded corner of a kitchen counter—her cosmetics, which fascinated her, mingled with stray clams. A large clam shell was her only ashtray. Sometimes the black and gritty skin discarded from the neck of a cleaned clam clung to a bottle of her Blush-Up. She died of lung cancer when Olive was still in high school.
Alice Bean became a Worthington by marrying Wallace Worthington; she became an Olive by altering her own name at the town clerk’s office in Heart’s Haven. It was a willful, legal change-of-name form that she filled out—easy to do, in part because it required the changing of only two letters to make an Alice into an Olive. There was no end to the way the locals liked to play with the name Olive, as if they were moving around in their mouths the disagreeable pits of that odd food; and behind her back, there were many who still called her Alice Bean, though only her brother Bucky would call Olive Alice to her face. Everyone else respected her enough to say Olive if that’s what she wanted to hear, and it was agreed that although she married a Worthington, and therefore had married into apples and money, she had got no bargain in Wallace.
Cheerful, fun-loving, a good-timer, Wallace Worthington was generous and kind. He adored Olive and everything about her—her gray eyes and her ash-blond hair turning softly to pearl, and her college-learned New British accent (which was often imitated at the Haven Club). Her brother Bucky’s success as a well-digger had paid for Olive’s college accent, without which she might not have enticed Wallace Worthington to notice her. It may have been gratitude that caused Olive to tolerate Bucky calling her Alice to her face. She even tolerated his predictable appearances at Ocean View Orchards—his boots always muddy with that clay-colored muck from the middle of the earth, the stuff only well-diggers find. Olive tried not to cringe while he tromped about the house in those boots, calling her “Alice Baby,” and on hot summer days he would dive into the swimming pool in all his clothes, leaving only those middle-earth boots out of the bright water (which he left sloshing in Atlantic turmoil and clay-colored at the edges). Bucky Bean could leave a ring on a swimming pool the way a dirty child could ring a bathtub.
For all that Olive Worthington had been spared, by escaping the Alice Bean in herself, there was something wrong with Wallace Worthington. Despite his being a real gentleman, and excellent at teasing the Republicans at the Haven Club, and fair to his orchardmen (he provided them with health insurance policies at his expense at a time when most farm workers were living below the standard of minimum everything)—despite Wallace Worthington’s lovable flamboyance (all the farm and personal vehicles at Ocean View Orchards bore his monogram on a big, red apple!), despite everything that was grand about Wallace, he appeared to be drunk all the time, and he exhibited such a childish quality of hyperactivity and restlessness that everyone in Heart’s Haven and in Heart’s Rock agreed that he must certainly be no prize to live with.
He was drunk at the Haven Club when he lowered the net at center court (which he could not seem to adjust properly) by cutting through it with the saw blade of his jackknife. He was drunk again at the Haven Club when Dr. Darryrimple had his stroke; Wallace tossed the old gentleman into the shallow end of the pool—“
to revive him,” he said later. The old fellow nearly drowned in addition to suffering his stroke, and the offended Darryrimples were so outraged that they canceled membership. And Wallace was drunk in his own orchards when he drove his Cadillac headlong into the five-hundred-gallon Hardie sprayer, dousing himself and his oyster-white convertible with chemicals that gave him a rash in his lap and permanently bleached the Cadillac’s scarlet upholstery. He was drunk again when he insisted on driving the tractor that towed the flatbed with half of Ira Titcomb’s beehives on it, promptly dumping the load—the honey, the hives, and millions of angry bees—at the intersection of Drinkwater Road and Day Lane (getting himself badly stung). Also stung were Everett Taft and his wife, Dot, and Dot’s kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who were working in the Day Lane orchard at the time of the accident.
Yet no one doubted that Wallace Worthington was faithful to Olive—the cynics saying that he was too drunk to get it up with anyone else, and possibly too drunk to get it up with Olive. It was clear he had gotten it up with her at least once; he had produced a son, just turning twenty in 194_, as big and handsome and charming as his father, with his mother’s smoky eyes and with not quite her former blondness (his was tawny, not ash); he even had a bit of her New British accent. Wallace Worthington, Junior, was too good-looking ever to be called Junior (he was called Wally). From the day of Wally’s birth, Wallace Worthington was called Senior, even by Olive and eventually by Wally.
And this is only a beginning to an understanding of the societies of Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock. If he had known only this much, Dr. Larch might have tried to keep Homer Wells away from the place; he might have guessed that Homer’s life would get complicated there. What did an orphan know about gossip, or care about class? But to Wilbur Larch Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock were very pretty names, improved by ether.
