by John Irving
“Well, you know now,” Candy said. “Why don’t you fire it at something—at something far away.”
“When it’s ready, I’ll fire it,” Ray said.
“What are you going to fire it at?” Homer asked Raymond Kendall.
“I don’t know,” Ray said. “Maybe the Haven Club—the next time they tell me I spoil their view.”
“I don’t like not knowing what you’re doing something for,” Candy told her father when they were alone.
“It’s like this,” Ray said slowly. “I’ll tell you what it’s like—a torpedo. It’s like Wally, comin’ home. You know he’s comin’, you can’t calculate the damage.”
Candy asked Homer for an interpretation of Ray’s meaning.
“He’s not telling you anything,” Homer said. “He’s fishing—he wants you to tell him.”
“Suppose it all just goes on, the way it is?” Candy asked Homer, after they had made love in the cider house—which had not yet been cleaned for use in the harvest.
“The way it is,” said Homer Wells.
“Yes,” she said. “Just suppose that we wait, and we wait. How long could we wait?” she asked. “I mean, after a while, suppose it gets easier to wait than to tell?”
“We’ll have to tell, sometime,” said Homer Wells.
“When?” Candy asked.
“When Wally comes home,” Homer said.
“When he comes home paralyzed and weighing less than I weigh,” Candy said. “Is that when we spring it on him?” she asked.
Are there things you can’t ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it—it seems to cut on its own—but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.
“We have to know where we’re going,” said Homer Wells.
“But what if we don’t know?” Candy asked. “What if we know only how we want to stay? What if we wait and wait?”
“Do you mean that you won’t ever know if you love him or me?” Homer asked her.
“It may be all confused by how much he’s going to need me,” Candy said. Homer put his hand on her—where her pubic hair had grown back, almost exactly as it was.
“You don’t think I’ll need you, too?” he asked her. She rolled to her other hip, turning her back to him—but at the same time taking his hand from where he’d touched her and clamping his hand to her breast.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” she said.
“Past a certain point, I won’t wait,” said Homer Wells.
“What point is that?” Candy asked. Because his hand was on her breast, he could feel her holding her breath.
“When Angel is old enough to either know he’s an orphan or know who his parents are,” Homer said. “That’s the point. I won’t have Angel thinking he’s adopted. I won’t have him not knowing who his mother and father are.”
“I’m not worried about Angel,” Candy said. “Angel will get lots of love. I’m worried about you and me.”
“And Wally,” Homer said.
“We’ll go crazy,” Candy said.
“We won’t go crazy,” Homer said. “We’ve got to take care of Angel and make him feel loved.”
“But what if I don’t feel loved, or you don’t—what then?” Candy asked him.
“We’ll wait until then,” said Homer Wells. “We’ll just wait and see,” he said, almost with a vengeance. A spring breeze blew over them, bearing with it the sickly-sweet stench of rotten apples. The smell had an almost-ammonia power that so overwhelmed Homer Wells that he released Candy’s breast and covered his mouth and nose with his hand.
It was not until the summer when Candy first heard directly from Wally. She got an actual letter—her first communication from him since he’d been shot down a year ago.
Wally had spent six weeks in Mr. Lavinia Hospital in Ceylon. They had not wanted to move him from there until he’d gained fifteen pounds, until his muscle tremors had ceased and his speech had lost the daydreaming vacantness of malnutrition. He wrote the letter from another hospital, in New Delhi; after a month in India, he had gained an additional ten pounds. He said that he’d learned to put cinnamon in his tea, and that the slap of sandals was nearly constant in the hospital.
They were promising him that they would allow him to commence the long trip home when he weighed one hundred forty pounds and when he had mastered a few basic exercises that were essential to his rehabilitation. He couldn’t describe the route of his proposed voyage home because of the censors. Wally hoped that the censors would understand—in the light of his paralysis—that it was necessary for him to say something about his “perfectly normal” sexual function. The censors had allowed this to pass. Wally still didn’t know he was sterile; he knew he’d had a urinary tract infection, and that the infection was gone.
“And how is Homer? How I miss him!” Wally wrote.
But that was not the part of the letter that devastated Candy. Candy was so devastated by the beginning of the letter that the rest of the letter was simply a continuing devastation to her.
“I’m so afraid that you won’t want to marry a cripple,” Wally began.
In her single bed, tugged into sleep and into wakefulness by the tide, Candy stared at the picture of her mother on the night table. She would have liked a mother to talk to at the moment, and perhaps because she had no memory of her mother she remembered the first night she had arrived at the orphanage. Dr. Larch had been reading to the boys from Great Expectations. Candy would never forget the line that she and Homer had walked in on.
“ ‘I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness,’ ” Wilbur Larch had read aloud. Either Dr. Larch had predetermined that he would end the evening’s reading with that line, or else he had only then noticed Candy and Homer Wells in the open doorway—the harsh hall light, a naked bulb, formed a kind of institutional halo above their heads—and had lost his place in the book, causing him, spur-of-the-moment, to stop reading. For whatever reason, that perception of wretchedness had been Candy’s introduction to St. Cloud’s, and the beginning and the end of her bedtime story.
10
Fifteen Years
For fifteen years they were a couple: Lorna and Melony. They were set in their ways. Once the young rebels of the women-only boardinghouse, they now occupied the choicest rooms—with the river view—and they served as superintendents to the building for a consideration regarding their rent. Melony was handy. She had learned plumbing and electricity at the shipyard where she was one of a staff of three electricians. (The other two were men, but they never messed with Melony; no one ever would.)
Lorna became more domestic. She lacked the concentration for advanced training at the shipyard, but she remained an employee—“Stay on for the pension plan,” Melony had advised her. Lorna actually liked the assembly-line monotony, and she was smart about signing up for the overtime pay shifts—she was willing to work at odd hours if she could work less. Her being out late bothered Melony.
Lorna became increasingly feminine. She not only wore dresses (even to work) and used more makeup and perfume (and watched her weight); her voice, which had once been harsh, actually softened and she developed a smile (especially when she was being criticized). Melony found her increasingly passive.
As a couple, they rarely fought because Lorna would not fight back. In fifteen years, she had discovered that Melony relented if there wasn’t a struggle; given any resistance, Melony would never quit.
“You don’t fight fair,” Melony would occasionally complain.
“You’re much bigger than I am,” Lorna would say coyly.
An understatement. By 195_, when Melony was forty-something (no one knew exactly how old she was), she weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds. She was five feet eight inches tall; she was almost fifty inches aro
und at her chest, which meant that she wore men’s shirts (large; anything smaller than a seventeen-inch neck wouldn’t fit her; because her arms were short, she always had to roll up the sleeves). She had a thirty-six-inch waist, but only a twenty-eight-inch inseam (which meant that she had to roll up the cuffs of her trousers or have Lorna shorten them). Melony’s pants were always so tight across her thighs that they quickly lost their crease there, but they were very baggy in the seat—Melony was not fat-assed, and she had the nondescript hips of most men. She had small feet, which always hurt her.
In fifteen years she’d been arrested only once—for fighting. Actually, the charge was assault, but in the end she was stuck with nothing more damaging than a disturbance of the peace. She’d been in the ladies’ room of a pizza bar in Bath when some college boy had tried to engage Lorna in conversation. When he saw Melony take her place beside Lorna at the bar, he whispered to Lorna, “I don’t think I could find anyone for your friend.” He was imagining a possible double-date situation.
“Speak up!” Melony said. “Whispering is impolite.”
“I said, I don’t think I could find a date for you,” the boy said boldly.
Melony put her arm around Lorna and cupped her breast.
“I couldn’t find a sheep dog that would hold still for you,” Melony told the college boy.
“Fucking dyke,” he said as he was leaving. He thought he’d spoken quietly enough—and strictly to impress the shipyard workers at the far end of the bar; he couldn’t have known that the men were Melony’s coworkers. They held the college boy while Melony broke his nose with a metal napkin container.
The way that Melony liked to fall asleep was with her big face on Lorna’s tight bare belly; Lorna could always tell when Melony had fallen asleep because of the change in Melony’s breathing, which Lorna could feel against her pubic hair. In fifteen years, there was only one night when Lorna had to ask her friend to move her heavy head before she had soundly fallen asleep.
“What is it? You got cramps?” Melony asked.
“No, I’m pregnant,” Lorna said. Melony thought it was a joke until Lorna went into the bathroom to be sick.
When Lorna came back to bed, Melony said, “I want to try to understand this, calmly. We’ve been like a married couple for fifteen years, and now you’re pregnant.” Lorna curled herself into a ball around one of the pillows; she covered her head with the other pillow. Her face and her stomach and her private parts were protected, but still she trembled; she began to cry. “I guess what you’re telling me,” Melony went on, “is that when women are fucking each other, it takes a lot longer for one of them to get pregnant than when a woman is fucking some guy. Right?” Lorna didn’t answer her; she just went on sniveling. “Like about fifteen years—like that long. It takes fifteen years for women to get pregnant when they’re just fucking other women. Boy, that’s some effort,” Melony said.
She went to the window and looked at the view of the Kennebec; in the summer, the trees were so leafy that the river was hard to see. She let a summer breeze dry the sweat on her neck and chest before she started packing.
“Please don’t go—don’t leave me,” Lorna said; she was still all balled up on the bed.
“I’m packing up your things,” Melony said. “I’m not the one who’s pregnant. I don’t have to go nowhere.”
“Don’t throw me out,” Lorna said miserably. “Beat me, but don’t throw me out.”
“You take the train to Saint Cloud’s. When you get there, you ask for the orphanage,” Melony told her friend.
“It was just a guy—just one guy, and it was just once!” Lorna cried.
“No, it wasn’t,” Melony said. “A guy gets you pregnant fast. With women, it takes fifteen years.”
When she had packed up Lorna’s things, Melony stood over the bed and shook her friend, who tried to hide under the bedcovers. “Fifteen years!” Melony cried. She shook Lorna, and shook her, but that was all she did to her. She even walked Lorna to the train. Lorna looked very disheveled, and it was only the early morning of what would be a wilting summer day.
“I ask for the orphanage?” Lorna asked numbly. In addition to her suitcase, Melony handed Lorna a large carton.
“And you give this to an old woman named Grogan—if she’s still alive,” Melony said. “Don’t say nothing to her, just give it to her. And if she’s dead, or not there anymore,” Melony started to say; then she stopped. “Forget that,” she said. “She’s either there or she’s dead, and if she’s dead, bring the carton back. You can give it back to me when you pick up the rest of your stuff.”
“The rest of my stuff?” Lorna said.
“I was faithful to you. I was loyal as a dog,” Melony said, more loudly than she’d meant to speak, because a conductor looked at her strangely—as if she were a dog. “You see somethin’ you want, shitface?” Melony asked the conductor.
“The train is about to leave,” he mumbled.
“Please don’t throw me out,” Lorna whispered to Melony.
“I hope you have a real monster inside you,” Melony told her friend. “I hope it tears you to pieces when they drag it out your door.”
Lorna fell down in the aisle of the train, as if she’d been punched, and Melony left her in a heap. The conductor helped Lorna to her feet and into her seat; out the window of the moving train, he watched Melony walking away. That was when the conductor noticed that he was shaking almost as violently as Lorna.
Melony thought about Lorna arriving in St. Cloud’s—that turd of a stationmaster (would he still be there?), that long walk uphill with her suitcase and the large carton for Mrs. Grogan (could Lorna make it?), and would the old man still be in the business? She’d not been angry for fifteen years, but now here was another betrayal and Melony pondered how readily her anger had returned; it made all her senses keener. She felt the itch to pick apples again.
She was surprised that it was not with vengeance that she thought of Homer Wells. She remembered how she’d first loved having Lorna as a pal—in part, because she could complain to Lorna about what Homer had done to her. Now Melony imagined she’d like to complain about Lorna to Homer Wells.
“That little bitch,” she’d tell Homer. “If there was anybody with a bulge in his pants, she couldn’t keep her eyes off it.”
“Right,” Homer would say, and together they would demolish a building—just shove it into time. When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?
Melony discovered that she could think like this for one minute; but in the next minute, when she thought of Homer Wells, she thought she’d like to kill him.
When Lorna came back from St. Cloud’s and went to the boardinghouse to retrieve her things, she found that everything had been neatly packed and boxed and gathered in one corner of the room; Melony was at work, so Lorna took her things and left.
After that, they would see each other perhaps once a week at the shipyard, or at the pizza bar in Bath where everyone from the yard went; on these occasions, they were polite but silent. Only once did Melony speak to her.
“The old woman, Grogan—she was alive?” Melony asked.
“I didn’t bring the box back, did I?” Lorna asked.
“So you gave it to her?” Melony asked. “And you didn’t say nothing?”
“I just asked if she was alive, and one of the nurses said she was, so I gave the carton to one of the nurses—as I was leavin’,” Lorna said.
“And the doctor?” Melony asked. “Old Larch—is he alive?”
“Barely,” Lorna said.
“I’ll be damned,” said Melony. “Did it hurt?”
“Not much,” Lorna said cautiously.
“Too bad,” Melony said. “It shoulda hurt a lot.”
In her boardinghouse, where she was now the sole superintendent, she took from a very old electrician’s catalogue a yellowed article
and photograph from the local newspaper. She went to the antiques shop that was run by her old, dim-witted devotee, Mary Agnes Cork, whose adoptive parents had treated her well; they’d even put her in charge of the family store. Melony asked Mary Agnes for a suitable frame for the newspaper article and the photograph, and Mary Agnes was delighted to come up with something perfect. It was a genuine Victorian frame taken from a ship that had been overhauled in the Bath yards. Mary Agnes sold Melony the frame for much less than it was worth, even though Melony was rich. Electricians are well paid, and Melony had been working full-time for the shipyard for fifteen years; because she was the superintendent of the boardinghouse, she lived almost rent-free. She didn’t own a car and she bought all her clothes at Sam’s Army-Navy Men’s Store.
It was fitting that the frame was teak—the wood of the tree that had held Wally Worthington in the air over Burma for one whole night—because the newspaper article was about Captain Worthington, and the picture—which Melony had recognized, fifteen years ago—was also of Wally. The article was all about the miraculous rescue of the downed (and paralyzed) pilot, who had been awarded the Purple Heart. As far as Melony was concerned, the whole story resembled the plot of a cheap and unlikely adventure movie, but she liked the picture—and the part of the article that said Wally was a local hero, a Worthington from those Worthingtons who for years had owned and managed the Ocean View Orchards in Heart’s Rock.
In her bedroom, in her boardinghouse in Bath, Melony hung the antique frame containing the article and photograph over her bed. In the darkness she liked knowing it was there—over her head, like history. She liked that as much as looking at the photograph in the daylight hours. And in the darkness, she would linger over the syllables of that hero’s name.
“Worthington,” she liked to say aloud. “Ocean View,” she said, at other times; she was more familiar with saying this. “Heart’s Rock,” she would say, quickly spitting the short words out.
In those predawn hours, which are the toughest for insomniacs, Melony would whisper, “Fifteen years.” And just before she would fall asleep, she would ask of the first, flat light that crept into her bedroom, “Are you still there, Sunshine?” What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.
