by John Irving
“Ah, Doctor Stone,” he said, extending his hand to Homer with a self-congratulatory formality famous among colleagues in the medical profession.
“Doctor Who?” said Homer Wells.
“Doctor Stone,” said Wilbur Larch, withdrawing his hand, his hangover settling on him—a dust so thick on the roof of his mouth that he could only repeat himself. “Fuzzy Stone, Fuzzy Stone, Fuzzy Stone.”
“Homer?” Candy asked, when they lay together in one of the twin beds given them in their room in the girls’ division. “Why would Doctor Larch say that you don’t need to go to medical school to be a doctor here?”
“Maybe he means that half the work here is illegal, anyway,” said Homer Wells. “So what’s the point of being a legitimate doctor?”
“But no one would hire you if you weren’t a legitimate doctor, would they?” Candy asked.
“Maybe Doctor Larch would,” said Homer Wells. “I know some things.”
“You don’t want to be a doctor here, anyway—do you?” Candy asked.
“That’s right, I don’t want to,” he said. What is all this about Fuzzy Stone? he was wondering as he fell asleep.
Homer was still asleep when Dr. Larch bent over the Thanksgiving woman and examined the episiotomy. Nurse Angela was telling him about it, stitch by stitch, but although Larch appreciated the description, it wasn’t really necessary; the look and feel of the woman’s healthy tissue told him everything he wanted to know. Homer Wells had not lost his confidence; he still had the correct touch.
He also possessed the self-righteousness of the young and wounded; Homer Wells had no doubts to soften his contempt for people who’d bungled their lives so badly that they didn’t want the children they’d conceived. Wilbur Larch would have told him that he was simply an arrogant, young doctor who’d never been sick—that he was guilty of a young doctor’s disease, manifesting a sick superiority toward all patients. But Homer was wielding an ideal of marriage and family like a club; he was more sure of the rightness of his goal than a couple celebrating their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary.
He must have imagined that the sacredness with which he viewed his union with Candy would hover like a halo above the young couple and shed a conspicuously forgiving light upon them and their child when they returned to Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock. He must have thought that the goodness of his and Candy’s intentions would glow with such a powerful radiance that Olive and Ray and the rest of that all-knowing, say-nothing community would be blinded. Homer and Candy must have envisioned that their child—conceived in a moment of love that overshadowed Wally’s being lost or dead or “just missing”—would be greeted as a descending angel.
And so they enjoyed the life of a young married couple that winter in St. Cloud’s. Never had being of use been such good fun. There was no chore the lovely and growingly pregnant young woman thought herself to be above; her beauty and her physical energy were inspiring to the girls in the girls’ division. Dr. Larch devoted himself to teaching Homer more about pediatrics—since he could find no fault with Homer’s obstetrical procedure and since Homer was emphatic about his refusal to participate in the abortions. The rigidity of this latter position perplexed even Candy, who was fond of saying to Homer, “Just explain it to me again—how you’re not disapproving of the procedure, but that you will not yourself be party to what you feel is wrong.”
“Right,” said Homer Wells; he had no doubts. “You’ve got it. There’s nothing else to explain. I think an abortion should be available to anyone who wants one, but I never want to perform one. What’s hard to understand about that?”
“Nothing,” Candy said, but she would keep asking him about it. “You think it’s wrong, yet you think it should be legal—right?”
“Right,” said Homer Wells. “I think it’s wrong, but I also think it should be everyone’s personal choice. What could be more personal than deciding whether you want a child or not?”
“I don’t know,” Candy said, although it occurred to her that she and Homer Wells had “decided” that Wally was dead—which seemed especially personal to her.
In her fifth month, they began sleeping in separate beds, but they drew the beds together and attempted to make them up as if they were one big bed—a problem, since there were no double-bed sheets at St. Cloud’s.
Mrs. Grogan wanted to make a present of double-bed sheets to Homer and Candy, but she had no money of her own to buy them and she wondered if purchasing them for the orphanage would seem strange. “Very strange,” Larch said, vetoing the idea.
“In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets,” wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “Here in St. Cloud’s we do without—we just do without.”
Yet it was the best Christmas ever in St. Cloud’s. Olive sent so many presents, and Candy’s example—as the first happily pregnant woman in any of their memories—was a present to them all. They had a turkey and a ham, and Dr. Larch and Homer Wells had a carving contest, which everyone said Homer won. He finished carving the turkey before Larch finished carving the ham.
“Well, turkeys are easier to cut than pigs,” Larch said. Secretly, he was very pleased with Homer’s knife work. That Homer had learned his touch for cutting under circumstances different from Mr. Rose’s was often on Homer’s mind. Given certain advantages of education, Homer thought, Mr. Rose might have made an excellent surgeon.
“Might have made,” Homer mumbled to himself. He had never been happier.
He was of use, he was in love—and was loved—and he was expecting a child. What more is there? he thought, making the daily rounds. Other people may look for a break from routine, but an orphan craves daily life.
In midwinter, in a blizzard, when the women were having tea in the girls’ division with Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch was at the railroad station, personally accusing the stationmaster of losing an expected delivery of sulfa, a woman arrived at the hospital entrance, bent double with cramps and bleeding. She’d had the D without the C, as Nurse Caroline would have observed; whoever had managed the dilatation appeared to have managed it safely. What was required now was a completion curettage, which Homer performed alone. One very small piece of the products of conception was recognizable in the scraping, which caused Homer Wells a single, small thought. About four months, was what he estimated—looking quickly at the piece, and quickly throwing it away.
At night, when he touched Candy without waking her up, he marveled at how peacefully she slept; and he observed how life in St. Cloud’s seemed timeless, placeless and constant, how it seemed grim but caring, how it seemed somehow safer than life in Heart’s Rock or in Heart’s Haven—certainly safer than life over Burma. That was the night he got up and went to the boys’ division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he’d been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells.
That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside—glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx—a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to smell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap’s distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn’t grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela’s office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx’s helplessness on the ice had r
endered its expression both terrified and resigned; both madness and fatalism were caught in the cat’s fierce, yellow eyes and in its involuntary, spitting cough as it slid on, actually bumping against the hospital before its claws could find a purchase on the crusted snow. It spit its rage at Homer Wells, as if Homer had caused its unwilling descent.
Its breath had frozen on its chin whiskers and its tufted ears were beaded with ice. The panicked animal tried to dash up the hill; it was less than halfway up when it began to slide down again, drawn toward the orphanage against its will. When it set out from the bottom of the hill a second time, the lynx was panting; it ran diagonally uphill, slipping but catching itself, and slipping again, finally escaping into the softer snow in the woods—nowhere near where it had meant to go; yet the lynx would accept any route of escape from the dark hospital.
Homer Wells, staring into the woods after the departed lynx, did not imagine that he would ever leave St. Cloud’s more easily.
There was a false spring very early that March; all over Maine the river ice buckled under the wet snow, the ponds split apart with gunshots sharp enough to put birds to wing, and the bigger, inland lakes groaned and sang and cracked like boxcars colliding in the station yards.
In the apartment she shared with Lorna in Bath, Melony was awakened by the Kennebec—its ice bending under a foot of slush and giving way with a deep, gonging alarm that caused one of the older women in the boardinghouse to sit up in her bed and howl. Melony was reminded of the nights in her bed in the girls’ division in St. Cloud’s when the March ice was grinding downriver from Three Mile Falls. She got out of bed and went into Lorna’s room to talk, but Lorna was so sleepy that she wouldn’t get up; Melony got in bed beside her friend. “It’s just the ice,” Lorna whispered. That was how she and Melony became lovers, listening to the false spring.
“There’s just one thing,” Lorna said to Melony. “If we’re gonna be together, you gotta stop lookin’ for this Homer character. Either you want me or you want him.”
“I want you,” Melony told Lorna. “Just don’t ever leave me.”
A permanent couple, an orphan’s ideal; but Melony wondered where her rage would go. If she stopped looking for Homer Wells, would she stop thinking about him, too?
There was too much snow; the brief thaw never penetrated the frozen ground, and when the temperature dropped and it snowed again, the rivers hardened up fast. An old mill pond, behind the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, became a trap for geese. Confused by the thaw, the geese landed on the slush that they mistook for open water; the slush refroze at night and the geese’s paddle feet were caught in it. When Homer Wells found the geese, they were frozen statues of their former selves—dusted with the new snow, they were stony guardians of the pond. There was nothing to do but chip them out of the ice and scald them; they were easier to pluck because they were partially frozen. When Mrs. Grogan roasted them—pricking them constantly, to bleed their fat—she retained the sense that she was only warming them up before sending them on their dangerous way.
It was already April by the time the ice broke free in Three Mile Falls and the river overran its banks in St. Cloud’s; water filled the basement of the former whore hotel and exerted such a force against the underbeams that the saloon bar with its brass footrail fell through the floor and floated out and away through a bulkhead. The stationmaster saw it go; as obsessed with omens as he was, he slept two nights in a row in his office for fear that the station house was in danger.
Candy was so huge she hardly slept at all. The morning that the hill was bare, Homer Wells tested the ground; he could work a spade almost a foot down before he hit frozen earth—he needed another six inches of thawing before he could plant apple trees, but he dared not wait any longer before making the trip to Heart’s Rock to get the trees. He didn’t want to be away when Candy delivered.
Olive was surprised to see him, and by his request to trade the Cadillac for one of the pickup trucks to transport the baby trees.
“I want to plant a standard forty-by-forty,” Homer told Olive. “Half Macs, about ten percent Red Delicious, another ten or fifteen percent Cortlands and Baldwins.”
Olive reminded him to throw in a few Northern Spies, and some Gravensteins—for apple pie. She asked him how Candy was and why she hadn’t come with him; he told her Candy was too busy. (Everyone liked her, and the kids just hung on her.) It would be hard to leave, when the time came, Homer confided to Olive; they were of so much use—they were so needed. And the constancy of the demands—“Well, even a day off, like this, is hard to squeeze in,” Homer said.
“You mean you won’t spend the night?” Olive asked.
“Too busy,” Homer said, “but we’ll both be back in time to put out the bees.”
“That’ll be about Mother’s Day,” Olive observed.
“Right,” said Homer Wells; he kissed Olive, whose skin was cool and smelled like ash.
Meany Hyde and Herb Fowler helped him load the pickup.
“You gonna plant a whole forty-by-forty by yourself?” Meany asked him. “You better hope the ground unfreezes.”
“You better hope your back holds out,” Herb Fowler said. “You better hope your pecker don’t fall off.”
“How’s Candy?” Big Dot Taft asked Homer. Almost as big as you are, Homer thought.
“Just fine,” he said. “But busy.”
“I’ll bet,” said Debra Pettigrew.
In the furnace room, under the lobster tank, Ray Kendall was building his own torpedo.
“What for?” Homer asked.
“Just to see if I can do it,” Ray said.
“But what will you fire it at?” Homer asked. “And what will you fire it from?”
“The hard part is the gyroscope,” Ray said. “It ain’t hard to fire it—what’s hard is guidin’ it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Homer Wells.
“Well, look at you,” Ray said. “You’re plantin’ an apple orchard at an orphanage. You been there five months, but my daughter’s too busy to visit me for a day. I don’t understand everythin’, either.”
“We’ll be back about blossom time,” Homer said guiltily.
“That’s a nice time of year,” said Ray.
On the drive back to St. Cloud’s, Homer wondered if Ray’s coolness, or evasiveness, was intentional. He decided that Ray’s message was clear: if you keep things from me, I won’t explain myself to you.
“A torpedo!” Candy said to Homer, when he arrived with the baby trees. “What for?”
“Wait and see,” said Homer Wells.
Dr. Larch helped him unload the trees.
“They’re kind of scrawny, aren’t they?” Larch asked.
“They won’t give much fruit for eight or ten years,” Homer said.
“Then I doubt I’ll get to eat any of it,” said Wilbur Larch.
“Well,” Homer said, “even before there are apples on the trees, think how the trees will look on the hill.”
“They’ll look scrawny,” said Wilbur Larch.
Near the top of the hill the ground was still frozen; Homer couldn’t work his spade down far enough. And at the bottom, the holes he dug filled with water—the runoff from the snow that was still melting in the woods. Because he would have to wait to plant the trees, he worried about the roots mildewing, or getting savaged by mice—but mainly he was peeved that he could not control, exactly, the calendar of his life. He’d wanted to plant the trees before Candy delivered. He wanted the hillside entirely planted when the baby was born.
“What did I do to you to make you so compulsively neat?” asked Wilbur Larch.
“Surgery is neat,” said Homer Wells.
It was the middle of April before Homer could dig the holes and plant the forty-by-forty orchard—which he did in three days, his back so stiff at night that he slept as restlessly and uncomfortably as Candy, tossing and turning with her. It was the first warm night of the spring; they were much too hot under the winter-weig
ht blanket; when Candy broke water, they both, for a second, confused the puddle with their sweat.
Homer helped her to the hospital entrance of the boys’ division. Nurse Edna prepared Candy while Homer went to talk to Dr. Larch, who was waiting in Nurse Angela’s office.
“I deliver this one,” Larch said. “There are certain advantages to detachment. Fathers are a bother in the delivery room. If you want to be there, just mind your own business.”
“Right,” said Homer Wells. He was fidgeting, uncharacteristically, and Dr. Larch smiled at him.
Nurse Edna was with Candy, while Nurse Angela scrubbed for Dr. Larch. Homer had already put his mask on when he heard a commotion from the boys’ sleeping room. He left the mask on when he went to investigate. One of the John Larches or the Wilbur Walshes had got up and gone outside to pee against a trash barrel—with considerable noise. This in turn had disturbed a large raccoon, busy at the trash, and the coon had startled the peeing orphan into wetting his pajamas. Homer tried to sort this out, calmly; he wanted to get back to the delivery room.
“Peeing indoors is better, at night,” he observed to the room at large. “Candy’s having her baby, now.”
“What’s she havin’?” one of the boys asked.
“Either a boy or a girl,” said Homer Wells.
“What will you name it?” another one asked.
“Nurse Angela named me,” Homer said.
“Me, too!” several of them said.
“If it’s a girl, I’m naming her Angela,” said Homer Wells.
“And if it’s a boy?”
“If it’s a boy, I’ll name him Angel,” Homer said. “That’s really just Angela without the last A.”
“Angel?” someone asked.
“Right,” said Homer Wells and kissed them all good night.
As he was leaving, someone asked him, “And will you leave it here?”
“No,” mumbled Homer Wells, having pulled his mask back up.
“What?” the orphans shouted.
“No,” Homer said more clearly, pulling down the mask.
