by John Irving
“I wouldn’t go that far, old boy,” Wally said.
Homer didn’t tell Wally about embarrassing Mr. Hood, or how the man seemed changed by the incident. If Mr. Hood had always been cadaverous, now there was an insomnia about his presence, too—as if he were not only dead but also working too hard; staying up late; boning up on his rabbit anatomy; trying to keep all the uteri straight. His tiredness made him slightly less cadaverous, but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human. Mr. Hood began to look as if he were waiting for his retirement, hoping that he could get there.
Where have I seen that look before? wondered Homer Wells.
Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or even Mrs. Grogan, could have reminded him; they were all familiar with that look—that strained combination of exhaustion and expectation, that fierce contradiction between grim anxiety and childlike faith. For years that look had penetrated even the most innocent expressions of Wilbur Larch; lately, Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and even Mrs. Grogan, had recognized the look in their own expressions.
“What are we waiting for?” Nurse Edna asked Nurse Angela one morning. There was an aura of something pending, some form of inevitable change. These good women were as insulted by the now-famous Goodhall-Gingrich questionnaire as they felt sure Dr. Larch had been; Larch did seem unusually cheered by the remarks of the former Snowy Meadows; the board had thought Snowy’s response was so praiseworthy that they’d sent it along for Dr. Larch to see.
To the question of being “properly supervised,” Snowy said that Dr. Larch and the nurses never let him out of their sight. To the question regarding whether or not the medical attention was “adequate,” Snowy Meadows advised the board to “just ask Fuzzy Stone.” In Snowy’s opinion, Dr. Larch had breathed for Fuzzy. “You never heard a worse set of lungs,” said Snowy Meadows, “but old Larch just hooked the kid up to a real life-saver.” And to the question of whether or not the foster home was “carefully and correctly chosen,” Snowy Meadows claimed that Dr. Larch was a genius at this delicate guesswork. “How could the guy have known that I was going to fit right in with a furniture family? Well, I’m telling you, he did know,” Snowy Meadows (now Robert Marsh) wrote to the board. “You know, private property, the world of personal possessions—that doesn’t mean the world to everybody. But let me tell you,” Snowy Meadows said, “furniture means the world to an orphan.”
“One of you must have dropped that boy on his head,” Wilbur Larch said to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela, although they could tell he was very pleased by Snowy’s remarks.
But just to be fair, the board sent Larch Curly Day’s slightly less enthusiastic response to the questionnaire. Roy Rinfret of Boothbay was seething with resentment. “I was no more prepared to be adopted by druggists than I was prepared to have my belly-cord cut,” wrote Roy “Curly” Rinfret. “The most beautiful couple in the world walked off with someone who didn’t even need or want to be adopted, and I got nabbed by druggists!” Curly complained. “You call it being supervised when little children are stumbling over dead bodies?” Curly Day asked the board. “Imagine this: on the day I find a dead man in the grass, the couple of my dreams adopts someone else, Dr. Larch tells me that an orphanage is not a pet store, and shortly thereafter, two druggists hire me to work in their drugstore for free—and you call that being adopted!”
“Why, that ungrateful little snot!” said Nurse Angela.
“Why, Curly Day, aren’t you ashamed?” Nurse Edna asked the indifferent air.
“If that boy were here,” Nurse Angela said, “I’d take him over my knee, I would!”
And why hasn’t our Homer Wells filled out the questionnaire? the women wondered.
Speaking of “ungrateful,” thought Wilbur Larch, although he held his tongue.
Nurse Angela did not hold hers. She wrote directly to Homer Wells, which would have irritated Dr. Larch if he’d known. Nurse Angela came right to the point. “That questionnaire is the least you can do,” she wrote Homer. “We all could use a little support. Just because you’re having the time of your life (I suppose), don’t you dare forget how to be of use—don’t you forget where you belong. And if you happen to run into any young doctors or nurses who would be sympathetic to our situation, I think you know that you’d better recommend us to them—and them to us. We’re not getting any younger, you know.”
My dear Homer [wrote Dr. Larch, in the next day’s mail],
It’s come to my attention that the board of trustees is attempting to communicate with several former residents of St. Cloud’s in the form of a ridiculous questionnaire. Answer it as you see fit, but please do answer it. And you must be prepared for some other, more troubling correspondence from them. It was necessary for me to be frank with them regarding the health of the orphans. Although I saw no reason to tell them I had “lost” Fuzzy Stone to a respiratory ailment—what good would that admission do Fuzzy?—I did tell the board about your heart. I felt that if anything ever happened to me, there should be someone who knew. I do apologize for not telling you about your condition. I am telling you now because, reconsidering the matter, I would never want you to hear about your heart from someone else first. Now, DON’T BE ALARMED! I would not even describe your heart as a condition, the condition is so slight: you had a fairly substantial heart murmur as a small child, but this had almost entirely disappeared when I last checked you—in your sleep; you wouldn’t remember—and I have delayed even mentioning your heart to you for fear of worrying you needlessly. (Such worrying might aggravate the condition.) You have (or had) a pulmonary valve stenosis, but PLEASE DON’T WORRY! It is nothing, or next to nothing. If you’re interested in more details, I can provide them. For now, I just didn’t want you being upset by some fool thing you might hear from that fool board of trustees. Aside from avoiding any situation of extreme stress or extreme exertion, I want you to know that you can almost certainly lead a normal life.
A normal life? thought Homer Wells. I am a Bedouin with a heart condition and Dr. Larch is telling me I can lead a normal life? I am in love with my best—and only—friend’s girlfriend, but is that what Larch would call “extreme stress”? And what was Melony to me if not “extreme exertion”?
Whenever Homer Wells thought of Melony (which was not often), he missed her; then he was angry at himself. Why should I miss her? he wondered. He tried not to think about St. Cloud’s; the longer he stayed away, the more extreme life there appeared to him—yet when he thought of it, he missed it, too. And Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna and Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch, he missed them all. He was angry at himself for that, too; there were absolutely no signals from his heart to tell him that the life at St. Cloud’s was the life he wanted.
He liked the life at Ocean View. He wanted Candy, and some life with her. When she went back to Camden, he tried not to think about her; and since he could not think of Wally without thinking of Candy, he was relieved when Wally went back to Orono—although he had missed Wally all that fall.
“When an orphan is depressed,” wrote Wilbur Larch, “he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs.
“When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know,” Dr. Larch wrote. “I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate—your own, and everybody else’s.”
And so Homer Wells answered the questionnaire; he sang a hymn of praise to St. Cloud’s. He mentioned the “restoration” of the abandoned buildings of St. Cloud’s as one of the many attempts made “to integrate the daily life of the orphanage with the life of the surrounding community.” He also lied to Nurse Angela, but it was just a little lie
—one of those that are intended to make other people feel better. He wrote to her that he had lost the original questionnaire—which was the only reason he had been so tardy in returning it. Perhaps the board would be kind enough to send him another? (When he received the second questionnaire from the board, he would know it was time to send the one he had so arduously filled out—that way he would appear to have filled it out spontaneously, off the top of his head.)
He wrote with feigned calmness to Dr. Larch. He would appreciate further details regarding his pulmonary valve stenosis. Did Dr. Larch think it necessary, for example, for Homer to have monthly checkups? (Dr. Larch would think it unnecessary, of course.) And were there signs of trouble that Homer himself might detect; were there ways that he could listen for his perhaps-returning murmur? (Calm yourself, Dr. Larch would advise; that was the best thing—staying calm.)
In an effort to calm himself, Homer tacked the extra questionnaire—which he did not fill out—to the wall of Wally’s room, right by the light switch, so that the questions regarding life at St. Cloud’s occupied a position of ignored authority quite similar to the page of rules that were yearly tacked up in the cider house. As Homer came and went, he regarded those questions he had answered with such able lies—for example, it was quite a kick for him to contemplate “any possible improvements in the methods and management of St. Cloud’s” each time he entered and left Wally’s room.
At night, now, Homer’s insomnia kept time to a new music; the winter branches of the picked apple trees rattling against each other in the early December wind made a brittle click-clack sound. Lying in his bed—a moonlight the color of bone starkly outlining his hands folded on his chest—Homer Wells thought the trees might be trying to shake the snow off their branches, in advance of the snow itself.
Perhaps the trees knew that a war was coming, too, but Olive Worthington didn’t think about it. She had heard the orchard’s winter rattle for many years; she had seen the winter branches bare, then lacy with snow, and then bare again. The coastal winds gave the brittle orchard such a shaking that the clashing trees resembled frozen soldiers in all the postures of saber-rattling, but Olive had heard so many years of this season that she never knew a war was coming. If the trees seemed especially naked to her that December, she thought it was because she faced her first winter without Senior.
“Grown-ups don’t look for signs in the familiar,” noted Dr. Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s, “but an orphan is always looking for signs.”
Homer Wells, at Wally’s window, searched the skeletal orchard for the future—his own, mainly, but Candy’s too, and Wally’s. Dr. Larch’s future was certainly out there, in those winter branches—even Melony’s future. And what future would there be for the Lord’s work? wondered Homer Wells.
The war that was about to be did not announce itself in signs at St. Cloud’s; both the familiar and the unfamiliar were muted there by ritual and by custom. A pregnancy terminated in a birth or in an abortion; an orphan was adopted or was waiting to be adopted. When there was a dry and snowless cold, the loose sawdust irritated the eyes and the noses and the throats of St. Cloud’s; only briefly, when the snow lay newly fallen, was the sawdust gone from the air. When there was a thaw, the snow melted down and the matted sawdust smelled like wet fur; when there was a freeze, the sawdust reappeared—dry again, somehow on top of the old snow—and again the eyes itched, the noses ran, and the throats could never quite clear themselves of it.
“Let us be happy for Smoky Fields,” Dr. Larch announced in the boys’ division. “Smoky Fields has found a family. Good night, Smoky.”
“Good night, Thmoky!” said David Copperfield.
“G’night!” young Steerforth cried.
Good night, you little food hoarder, Nurse Angela thought. Whoever took him, she knew, would soon learn to lock the refrigerator.
In the December morning, at the window where Melony once allowed the world to pass both with and without comment, Mary Agnes Cork watched the women walking uphill from the train station. They don’t look pregnant, Mary Agnes thought.
On the bleak hill where Wally Worthington once imagined apple trees, young Copperfield attempted to steer a cardboard carton through the first, wet snow. The carton had once contained four hundred sterile vulval pads; Copperfield knew this because he had unpacked the carton—and he had placed young Steerforth in the carton, at the bottom of the hill. Near the top, he was beginning to realize his mistake. Not only had dragging Steerforth uphill been difficult, but also the boy’s weight—in addition to the wetness of the snow—had turned the bottom of the carton soggy. Copperfield wondered if his make-do sled would even slide—if he ever managed to get the mess to the top.
“Good night, Smoky!” Steerforth was singing.
“Thut up, thupid,” David Copperfield said.
Dr. Larch was very tired. He was resting in the dispensary. The gray, winter light turned the white walls gray and for a moment Larch wondered what time of day it was—and what time of year. From now on, he was thinking, let everything I do be for a reason. Let me make no wasted moves.
In his mind’s eye he saw the correct angle at which the vaginal speculum allowed him a perfect view of the cervix. Whose cervix? he wondered. Even in his ether sleep the thumb and index finger of his right hand tightened the screw that held the jaws of the speculum in place, and he saw the astonishing blondness of the little clump of pubic hair caught in the hairs of his own wrist. It was so blond he had nearly missed seeing it against his own pale skin. When he shook his wrist, the little clump was so light that it floated in the air. In his ether swoon his left hand reached for it, just missing it. Oh yes—her cervix, thought Wilbur Larch. What was her name?
“She has a toy name,” Larch said aloud. “Candy!” he remembered. Then he laughed. Nurse Edna, passing the dispensary, held her breath and listened to the laughter. But even when she didn’t breathe, the fumes made her old eyes water. That and the sawdust. That and the orphans—some of them made her eyes water, too.
She opened the door at the hospital entrance to let some fresh air into the hall. On the hill she watched a cardboard carton make an unsteady descent; she knew that sterile vulval pads had been in the carton, but she wasn’t sure what was in the carton now. Something heavy, because the carton’s descent was clumsy and irregular. At times it picked up speed, sliding almost smoothly, but always some rock or bare patch in the slushy snow would jar it off-course and slow it down. The first small body to roll out of the carton and make its way downhill was Steerforth’s; she recognized his overlarge mittens and the ski hat that always covered his eyes. For a while he tumbled almost as fast as the carton, but a large patch of bare, frozen ground finally stopped him. Nurse Edna watched him climb back uphill for one of his mittens.
The second, larger body to be propelled from the carton was obviously David Copperfield’s; he rolled free with a large, soggy piece of the carton in both his hands. The carton appeared to disintegrate in flight.
“Thit!” Copperfield cried. At least, Nurse Edna thought, young Copperfield’s profanities were improved by his lisp.
“Close that door,” said Dr. Larch, in the hall behind Nurse Edna.
“I was just trying to get some fresh air,” Nurse Edna said pointedly.
“You could have fooled me,” said Wilbur Larch. “I thought you were trying to freeze the unborn.”
Maybe that will be the way of the future, Nurse Edna thought—wondering what future ways there would be.
In the December swimming pool the raft that Senior Worthington used to ride still floated, windblown from one end of the pool to the other, breaking up the lacy fringes of ice that formed and reformed around the edges. Olive and Homer had drained out a third of the pool’s water, to leave room for rainfall and snow melt.
Senior’s cold raft, only partially deflated by the falling temperature, still charged around the swimming pool like a riderless horse; it galloped wherever the wind urged it. Ever
y day Olive watched the raft out the kitchen window, and Homer wondered when she would suggest getting rid of it.
One weekend Candy came home from Camden, and Homer’s confusion regarding what he should do about her mounted. Friday was a bad, indecisive day. He went early to Senior Biology, hoping to persuade Mr. Hood either to let him have his own rabbit for dissection or to assign him a lab partner other than that boy Bucky. Bucky managed to mangle the rabbit’s innards whenever he handled them, and Homer found the oaf’s constant fixation with everything’s reproductive system both silly and maddening. Bucky had lately seized on the fact that marsupials have paired vaginas.
“Twin twats! Can you believe it?” Bucky asked Homer.
“Right,” said Homer Wells.
“Is that all you can say?” Bucky asked. “Don’t you get it? If you was a hamster, you could fuck another hamster with your buddy!”
“Why would I want to do that?” Homer asked.
“Two cunts!” Bucky said enthusiastically. “You got no imagination.”
“I doubt that even the hamsters are interested in what you suggest,” said Homer Wells.
“That’s what I mean, stupid,” Bucky said. “What a waste—to give two twats to a hamster! You ever seen ’em run on them little wheels? They’re crazy! Wouldn’t you be crazy if you knew the girl of your dreams had two twats and she still wasn’t interested?”
“The girl of my dreams,” said Homer Wells.
It was crazy enough, in Homer’s opinion, that the girl of his dreams had two people who loved her.
And so he went early to Senior Biology to request either a fresh rabbit or a replacement for the obsessed boy named Bucky.
There was a geography class in progress when he got there; and when the class was released, Homer saw that the large maps of the world were still pulled down, covering the blackboard. “May I just look at the maps for a moment, before my next class?” Homer asked the geography teacher. “I’ll roll them back up for you.”
