by John Irving
When the monsoon season ended, in October, they either traveled on the river at nights or they protected him from the sun with an umbrella—and with more curry paste. He got very tired of curried fish balls, but he kept asking for them—or so the Burmese thought; that was all they gave him. And when he was delirious, he said Candy’s name. One of the boatmen asked him about it.
“Candy?” the boatman inquired politely. That day they were in a sampan; Wally lay under a roof of mats and watched the boatman sculling.
“Aingyis,” Wally said. He meant, like her—a good woman, a wife.
The boatman nodded. At the next port on the river—Wally didn’t know where: it might have been Yandoon—they gave him another sheer white blouse.
“Candy!” the boatman said. Wally thought he meant, give it to Candy. He smiled; he just kept drifting. The sampan’s sharp nose seemed to smell the way. It was a country of smells to Wally—it was a fragrant dream.
Wilbur Larch could imagine Wally’s journey. It was an ether journey, of course. Elephants and oil fields, rice paddies and bombs falling, dressed up as a woman and paralyzed from the waist down—Larch had been there; he had been everywhere. He had no trouble imagining Rangoon and water buffaloes. Every ether dream has its equivalent of British underground agents smuggling American pilots across the Bay of Bengal. Wally’s trip through Burma was a voyage Wilbur Larch had often undertaken. The black-currant door of petunias was at war with the odor of dung, all the way.
They flew Wally across the Bay of Bengal in a small plane with a British pilot and a Sinhalese crew. Wilbur Larch had taken many such flights.
“Do you speak Sinhala?” the Englishman asked Wally, who sat in the co-pilot’s seat. The pilot smelled of garlic and turmeric.
“I don’t even know what Sinhala is,” Wally said. When he shut his eyes, he could still see the white, waxy flowers of the wild lime bushes; he could still see the jungle.
“Principal language of Ceylon, my boy,” the pilot said. The pilot also smelled like tea.
“We’re going to Ceylon?” Wally asked.
“Can’t keep a blond in Burma, lad,” the Englishman said. “Don’t you know Burma’s full of Nips?” But Wally preferred to remember his native friends. They had taught him to salaam—a low bow with the right hand on the forehead (always the right hand, they’d explained); it was a bow of salutation. And when he was sick, someone had always stirred the punkah for him—a punkah is a large, screen-shaped fan that is moved by a rope (pulled by a servant).
“Punkah,” Wally said to the English pilot.
“What’s that, lad?” the pilot asked.
“It’s so hot,” said Wally, who felt drowsy; they were flying at a very low altitude, and the little plane was an oven. A brief scent of sandalwood came through the stronger garlic in the pilot’s sweat.
“Ninety-two degrees, American, when we left Rangoon,” the pilot said. The pilot got a kick out of saying “American” instead of “Fahrenheit,” but Wally didn’t notice.
“Ninety-two degrees!” Wally said. It felt like the first fact he could hang his hat on, as they say in Maine.
“What happened to the legs?” the Englishman asked casually.
“Japanese B mosquito,” Wally explained. The British pilot looked very grave; he thought that Wally meant a plane—that the Japanese B mosquito was the name of the fighter plane that shot Wally’s plane down.
“I don’t know that one, lad,” the pilot admitted to Wally. “Thought I’d seen them all, but you can’t trust the Nips.”
The Sinhalese crew had slathered themselves with coconut oil and were wearing sarongs and long, collarless shirts. Two of them were eat-ing something and one of them was screeching into the radio; the pilot said something sharply to the radioman, who instantly lowered his voice.
“Sinhala is an awful language,” the pilot confided to Wally. “Sounds like cats fucking.”
When Wally didn’t respond to his humor, the Englishman asked him if he’d ever been to Ceylon. When Wally didn’t answer him—Wally seemed to be daydreaming—the Englishman said, “We not only planted the first rubber trees and developed their bloody rubber plantations—we taught them how to brew tea. They knew how to grow it, all right, but you couldn’t get a decent cup of tea on the whole bloody island. And now they want to be independent,” the Englishman said.
“Ninety-two degrees,” Wally said, smiling.
“Yes, just try to relax, lad,” the pilot said. When Wally burped, he tasted cinnamon; when he shut his eyes, he saw African marigolds come out like stars.
Suddenly the three Sinhalese began to speak at once. First the radio would say something, then the three of them would speak in unison.
“Bloody Buddhists, all of them,” the pilot explained. “They even pray on the bloody radio. That’s Ceylon,” the Englishman said. “Two thirds tea and one third rubber and prayer.” He yelled something at the Sinhalese, who lowered their voices.
Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, shortly before sighting Ceylon, the pilot was worried about an aircraft in his vicinity. “Pray now, damn you,” he said to the Sinhalese, who were all asleep. “That Japanese B mosquito,” the Englishman said to Wally. “What does it look like?” he asked. “Or did it get you from behind?”
But all Wally would say was, “Ninety-two degrees.”
After the war, Ceylon would become an independent nation; twenty-four years after that, the country would change its name to Sri Lanka. But all Wally would remember was how hot it had been. In a way, his parachute had never touched down; in a way, he had remained over Burma for ten months—just floating there. All Wally would remember of his own story would never make as much sense as an either frolic. And how he would survive the war—sterile, paralyzed, both legs flaccid—had already been dreamed by Big Dot Taft.
It was thirty-four degrees in St. Cloud’s when Homer Wells went to the railroad station and dictated a telegram to Olive to the stationmaster. Homer could not have phoned her, and lied to her that directly. And hadn’t Olive telegramed them? She must have had her reasons for not wanting to talk on the phone. It was with the almost certain feeling that Ray and Olive knew everything that Homer and Candy were doing that Homer dictated his telegram to Olive—respecting a polite formality as faint as a suspicion. It was a suspicion that could be proven only impolitely, and Homer Wells was polite.
GOD BLESS YOU AND WALLY/STOP
WHEN WILL WE SEE HIM/STOP
CANDY AND I HOME SOON/STOP
I HAVE ADOPTED A BABY BOY/STOP
LOVE HOMER
“You’re kind of young to adopt somebody, ain’t you?” the stationmaster asked.
“Right,” said Homer Wells.
Candy telephoned her father.
“It’s gonna be weeks, or maybe months before they can move him,” Ray told her. “He’s gotta gain some weight before he can travel so far, and there’s probably tests they’ve gotta do—and there’s still a war on, don’t forget.”
At her end of the phone, Candy just cried and cried.
“Tell me how you are, darlin’,” Ray Kendall said. That was when she could have told him that she’d just had Homer’s baby, but what she said was, “Homer’s adopted one of the orphans.”
After a pause, Raymond Kendall said, “Just one of them?”
“He’s adopted a baby boy,” Candy said. “Of course, I’ll help, too. We’ve kind of adopted a baby together.”
“You have?” Ray said.
“His name is Angel,” Candy said.
“Bless his heart,” Ray said. “Bless you both, too.”
Candy cried some more.
“Adopted, huh?” Ray asked his daughter.
“Yes,” said Candy Kendall. “One of the orphans.”
She quit the breast-feeding, and Nurse Edna introduced her to the device for pumping her breasts. Angel disliked his conversion to formula milk, and for a few days he displayed a cranky temperament. Candy displayed a cranky temperament, too. When Homer ob
served that her pubic hair would be very nearly grown back by the time she returned to Heart’s Haven, she snapped at him.
“For God’s sake, who’s going to see whether I have pubic hair or not—except you?” Candy asked.
Homer showed signs of strain, too.
He was impatient with Dr. Larch’s suggestion that Homer’s future lay in the medical profession. Larch insisted on giving Homer a brand-new copy of Gray’s Anatomy; he also gave him the standard Greenhill’s Office Gynecology and the British masterpiece Diseases of Women.
“Jesus Christ,” said Homer Wells. “I’m a father, and I’m going to be an apple farmer.”
“You have near-perfect obstetrical procedure,” Larch told him. “You just need a little more of the gynecological—and the pediatric, of course.”
“Maybe I’ll end up a lobsterman,” Homer said.
“And I’ll send you a subscription to The New England Journal of Medicine,” Dr. Larch said. “And JAMA, and S, G and O . . .”
“You’re the doctor,” said Homer Wells tiredly.
“How do you feel?” Candy asked Homer.
“Like an orphan,” Homer said. They held each other tightly, but they did not make love. “How do you feel?” Homer asked.
“I won’t know until I see him,” Candy said honestly.
“What will you know then?” Homer asked.
“If I love him, or you, or both of you,” she said. “Or else I won’t know any more than I know now.”
“It’s always wait and see, isn’t it?” Homer asked.
“You don’t expect me to tell him anything when he’s still over there, do you?” Candy asked.
“No, of course I don’t expect that,” he said softly. She held him tighter; she began to cry again.
“Oh, Homer,” she said. “How can he weigh only a hundred and five pounds?”
“I’m sure he’ll gain some weight,” Homer said, but his entire body shivered suddenly; Wally’s body had been so strong. Homer remembered the first time Wally had taken him to the ocean; the surf had been unusually rough, and Wally had warned him about the undertow. Wally had taken him by the hand and shown him how to duck under the waves, and how to ride them. They had walked along the beach for an hour, undistracted by Candy; she had been tanning.
“I don’t understand all this stupid lying down in the sun,” Wally had told Homer, who agreed. “You’re either doing something in the sun and you pick up a little color, or you’re doing something else—but you’re doing something. That’s the main thing.”
They were picking up shells and stones—the beachcombers’ search for specimens. Homer was immediately impressed with the smoothness of the stones and the broken pieces of shell—how the water and the sand had softened them.
“This is a very experienced piece,” Wally had said, handing Homer an especially worn bit of shell; it had no edges.
“Experienced,” Homer had said.
And after that, Wally had said, “And this is a worldly stone,” exhibiting an old, smooth one.
Homer thought that his desire for Candy had changed everything, even the natural process of the grinding smooth of stones and shells. If he and Wally went back to the beach, would they still be beachcombers, or was it inevitable that the love of a woman would alter even their most commonplace experiences together? Was he my friend for five minutes? wondered Homer Wells—and my rival for the rest of my life?
Homer entrusted Nurse Edna with the care of the hillside orchard. He explained that the wire-mesh sleeves around the trees could not be wrapped so tightly that they didn’t permit the trees to grow—but also not so loosely that the mice could girdle the trees. He showed her how to spot the tunnels of the pine mice who ate the roots.
Everyone kissed Candy good-bye, even Wilbur Larch—who, when he reached to shake Homer’s hand, appeared embarrassed that Homer brushed past his hand and hugged him, and kissed him on his leathery neck. Nurse Edna sobbed the most freely. As soon as the pickup truck rolled past the girls’ division, Wilbur Larch closed himself in the dispensary.
It was a Sunday, so Raymond Kendall was at work on his homemade torpedo when Homer brought Candy home. Candy told Homer that she could not face seeing Olive until the next morning, but she was gripped by an unforeseen panic when Homer drove off with Angel. Although her milk was gone, she knew she would still wake up to her baby’s clock—even though it would be Homer, alone, who was hearing the actual cries. And how many nights had it been since she had slept alone?
She would tell Homer the next day: “We’ve got to find a way to share him. I mean, even before we tell Olive—not to mention, Wally—we have to both take care of him, we have to both be with him. I just miss him too much.”
“I miss you,” Homer Wells told her.
He was an orphan who’d had a family for less than a month of his life, and he was not prepared to not have a family again.
When he and Angel arrived at Ocean View, Olive greeted Homer as if she were his mother; she threw her arms around him, and kissed him, and wept. “Show me that baby—oh, he’s darling!” she cried. “Whatever possessed you? You’re so young, and you’re all alone.”
“Well, the baby was all alone, too,” Homer mumbled. “And Candy will help me with him.”
“Of course,” Olive said. “I’ll help you, too.” She carried Angel to Wally’s room, where Homer was surprised to see a crib—and more baby things, for just one baby, than could have been collected in a thorough search of both the boys’ and girls’ divisions in St. Cloud’s.
An army of bottles, for the formula, awaited Homer in the kitchen. Olive had even bought a special pot for sterilizing the nipples. In the linen closet, there were more diapers than there were pillowcases and sheets and towels. For the first time in his life, Homer felt that he’d been adopted. To his horror, he saw that Olive loved him.
“I think that you and Angel should have Wally’s room,” Olive said; she had obviously been busy, planning. “Wally won’t be able to climb stairs, so I’m having the dining room made into a bedroom—we can always eat in the kitchen, and the dining room has that terrace for when the weather’s nice. I’m having a ramp built from the terrace to the patio around the pool, for the wheelchair.”
As Homer held her while she cried, a new guilt surrounded him, like the nightfall, that ever-old, ever-new remorse that Mr. Rochester had told Jane Eyre to dread, that “poison of life.”
In the second week of May, Ira Titcomb and Homer worked alongside each other, putting the bees out in the orchards. It was the start of blossom time, the night before Mother’s Day, when they put out the hives. Everyone remembered Mother’s Day that year; no one forgot Olive. The house was full of little presents and lots of apple blossoms, and some of the work crew even gave Homer a Mother’s Day present—they thought it was so funny that he’d adopted a baby.
“Just imagine you with your very own baby!” was the way Big Dot Taft put it.
In the apple mart, where they were giving the display tables a fresh coat of paint, there were two babies on display—Angel Wells and Florence and Meany Hyde’s boy, Pete. Pete Hyde looked like a potato compared to Angel Wells—which is to say that his disposition was entirely bland and he had no apparent bones in his face.
“Well, Homer, your Angel is an Angel,” Florence Hyde would say, “and my Pete’s a Pete.”
The apple-mart women teased him endlessly; Homer just smiled. Debra Pettigrew was especially interested in handling Angel Wells; she would look intently into the baby’s face for the longest time before announcing that she was sure the baby was going to look just like Homer. “Only more aristocratic,” she guessed. Squeeze Louise said the baby was “too precious for words.” When Homer was out in the field, either Olive or one of the apple-mart women looked after Angel, but most of the time Candy looked after her baby.
“We kind of adopted him together,” she would explain. She said it so often that Olive said Candy was as much of a mother to that child as Homer was,
and Olive therefore—as a kind of joke—gave Candy a Mother’s Day present, too. All the while, the bees did their work, carrying pollen from the Frying Pan to Cock Hill, and the honey leaked between the clapboards that housed the hives.
One morning, on a corner of the newspaper, Homer Wells saw Olive’s handwriting—a penciled remark above the day’s headlines, any one of which might have prompted Olive to respond. But somehow Homer thought the remark was written to him.
INTOLERABLE DISHONESTY
Olive had written.
And one night Candy overheard Ray. Her bedroom light was out; in the pitch dark she heard her father say, “It’s not wrong, but it’s not right.” At first she thought he was on the telephone. After she drifted back to sleep, the sound of her door opening and closing woke her up again, and she realized Ray had been sitting in her room with her—addressing her in her sleep, in the darkness.
And some of the nights in blossom time, Candy would say to Homer, “You’re an overworked father.”
“Isn’t he?” Olive would say admiringly.
“I’m going to take this kid off your hands for the night,” Candy would say, and Homer would smile through the tension of these exchanges. He would wake up alone in Wally’s room in anticipation of Angel needing his bottle. He could imagine Raymond Kendall getting up to heat the formula and Candy being in her bed with the bottle of formula in as near an approximation of the correct angle of her breast as she could arrange it.
Ray’s torpedo parts were stolen from Kittery Navy Yard; both Homer and Candy knew that’s how he got them, but only Candy criticized Ray for it.
“I’ve caught more mistakes in the way they do things than they know things to do,” Ray said. “Not likely they could catch me.”
“But what’s it for, anyway?” Candy asked her father. “I don’t like there being a bomb here—especially when there’s a baby in the house.”
“Well, when I got the torpedo,” Ray explained, “I didn’t know about the baby.”
