by John Irving
“I’m NOT going into the business!” Homer wrote to Dr. Larch, but Larch remained encouraged by the simple fact of Homer’s possessing the necessary equipment.
Homer wrapped the instruments in a whole bale of cotton and gauze; he then put the bundle in a waterproof bag that had once contained Angel’s diapers. He stored the instruments, along with the Merthiolate, the Dakin’s solution and all the vulval pads, in the very back of the upstairs linen closet. Homer kept the ether in the shed with the lawn and garden tools. Ether was flammable; he didn’t want it in the house.
However, in the one and a half times a month that he could be with Candy, it jolted him to realize that in their union there was (even after fifteen years) a frenzy with which they clung to each other that would not have appeared pale in comparison to their first such meeting in the cider house. But since Melony had first introduced Homer Wells to sex—and it had been only during that brief period of what seemed to him to be his “married life” with Candy in St. Cloud’s that he had experienced anything of what sex ideally is—it was Homer’s opinion that sex had little to do with love; that love was much more focused and felt in moments of tenderness and of concern. It had been years (for example) since he had seen Candy asleep, or had been the one to waken her; years since he had watched her fall asleep, and had stayed awake to watch her.
This tenderness he reserved for Angel. When Angel had been smaller, Homer had occasionally encountered Candy in the darkness of Angel’s room, and they had even shared a few evenings of that silent wondering parents engage in while watching their children sleep. But Homer had fallen asleep, many nights, in the empty twin bed beside Angel’s bed, just listening to the breathing of his son; after all, Homer had spent his childhood trying to sleep in a room where an entire population lay breathing.
And was there a feeling more full of love, he wondered, than to wake up a child in the morning? Full of love and apology, both, Homer Wells concluded. It was with Angel that he felt love like that; if Candy had such moments, Homer imagined, she had to have them with Wally. An orphan’s pleasures are compartmental. In St. Cloud’s, it was best to be hungry in the morning; they didn’t run out of pancakes. There was sex, which called for good weather (and, of course, Melony); there were acts of wandering and destruction (Melony again, in any weather); there were solitary acts and moments of reflection, which could occur only when it rained (and only without Melony). As much as he desired a family, Homer Wells was not trained to appreciate a family’s flexible nature.
That July—it was one hot and lazy Saturday afternoon—Homer was floating in the pool; he had been in the orchards all morning, mulching the young trees. Angel had been working with him, and now Angel was out of the pool, but still dripping wet; he was tossing a baseball back and forth with Wally. Wally sat on the lawn, on a slight knoll above the pool, and Angel stood on the deck. They would throw the hardball back and forth, not talking but concentrating on their throws; Wally would fire the ball with considerable sting for someone in a sitting position but Angel had more zip on the ball. The ball popped pleasantly in their big gloves.
Candy came down to the pool from the apple-mart office. She was wearing her work clothes—jeans; a khaki field shirt, with oversized pockets and epaulettes; work boots; a Boston Red Sox baseball cap with the visor turned backward. (She cared more about protecting her hair from the sun than her face, because in the summer her blondness could turn whiter, which she knew showed more of the gray.)
“I know the men are out of the fields at noon on Saturday,” she said, her hands on her hips, “but the women are working in the mart until three.”
Homer stopped floating; he let his feet touch the bottom and he stood chest deep in the pool, looking at Candy. Wally looked over his shoulder at her, then fired the ball to Angel, who fired it back.
“Please hold the ball, while I’m trying to say something,” Candy said.
Wally held the ball. “What are you trying to say?” he asked.
“I think that on Saturdays, as long as there are people working at the mart, you should refrain from playing at the pool—everyone can hear you, and I think it kind of rubs it in.”
“Rubs what in?” Angel asked.
“That you get to play and live in the fancy house, as they call it, and they get to work,” Candy said.
“Pete’s not working,” Angel said. “Pete got a ride to the beach.”
“Pete Hyde is a kid,” Candy said. “His mother is still working.”
“Well, I’m a kid, aren’t I?” Angel asked playfully.
“Well, I don’t mean you, especially,” Candy said. “What about you two?” she asked Homer and Wally.
“Well, I’m a kid, too,” Wally said, throwing the ball back to Angel. “I just play all day long, anyway.” Angel laughed and threw the ball back, but Homer Wells glowered at Candy from his chest-deep position in the pool.
“Do you see what I mean, Homer?” Candy asked him. Homer allowed himself to sink; he held his breath for a while, and when he came up for air, Candy was going through the kitchen door. The screen door banged.
“Oh, come on!” Wally called after her. “Of course we see what you mean!”
And that was when Homer said it. Homer spat out some water and said to Angel, “Go tell your mother that if she changes her clothes, we’ll take her to the beach.”
Angel was halfway to the house before it registered with Homer what he’d said, and Wally said to Angel, “Tell her to change her mood, too.”
When Angel went in the kitchen, Wally said, “I don’t think he even noticed what you said, old boy.”
“It’s just that she is such a mother to him—I can’t help thinking of her that way,” Homer said.
“I’m sure it’s hard,” Wally said, “not to think of her any way that you want.”
“What?” Homer asked.
“She certainly is manipulative, isn’t she?” Wally asked him. Homer ducked his head underwater again—it was a cool place to think.
“Manipulative?” he said, when he surfaced.
“Well, someone has to know what to do,” Wally said. “Someone’s got to make the decisions.”
Homer Wells, who felt the word “Right!” rising in him, like an unstoppable bubble surfacing from the swimming pool, put his hand over his mouth and looked at Wally, who was sitting on the knoll on the lawn, his back very straight, the baseball mitt in his lap, the baseball held in his hand (his throwing arm cocked). Homer Wells knew that if the word had escaped him, the ball would have been on its fast way to him as soon as the word was in the air—and quite probably before Homer could have ducked underwater again.
“She has a point,” said Homer Wells.
“She always does,” Wally said. “And she’s aging well, don’t you think?”
“Very well,” Homer said, climbing out of the pool. He buried his wet face in a towel; with his eyes closed, he could see the delicate latticework of wrinkles at the corners of Candy’s eyes and the freckles on her chest, where, over the years, she’d allowed herself too much sun. There were also the very few but deeper wrinkles that ran across her otherwise taut abdomen; they were stretch marks, Homer knew; he wondered if Wally knew what they were from. And there were the veins that had gained more prominence in the backs of Candy’s long hands, but she was still a beautiful woman.
When Angel and Candy came out of the house—they were ready to go to the beach—Homer watched his son closely, to see if Angel had noticed that Homer had referred to Candy as “your mother,” but Angel was the way he always was, and Homer couldn’t tell if Angel had caught the slip. Homer wondered if he should tell Candy that Wally had caught it.
They took Candy’s lemon-yellow Jeep. Candy drove; Wally sat up front, in the comfortable seat, and Homer and Angel shared the back. All the way to the beach, Wally just looked out the window intently, as if he were seeing the road between Heart’s Rock and Heart’s Haven for the first time. As if, thought Homer Wells, Wally had just abandon
ed the plane—over Burma—and his chute had just opened, and he was searching for a spot to land.
That was the first time that Homer knew for certain that Candy was right.
He knows, Homer thought. Wally knows.
The apple mart never changed. It was also a family. Only Debra Pettigrew was gone; Big Dot Taft’s kid sister had married a man from New Hampshire, and she came back to Heart’s Rock only at Christmas. Every Christmas, Homer Wells took Angel to St. Cloud’s. They had an early Christmas breakfast with Candy and Wally, and a lot of opening presents; then they took a lot more presents to St. Cloud’s. They would arrive late in the day, or in the early evening, and have Christmas dinner with everyone. How Nurse Angela cried! Nurse Edna cried when they left. Dr. Larch was friendly but reserved.
The apple mart was nearly as constant as St. Cloud’s—in some ways, the apple mart was more constant, because the people didn’t change, and at St. Cloud’s the orphans were always changing.
Herb Fowler still went out with Louise Tobey, who was still called Squeeze Louise; she was almost fifty, now; she’d never married Herb (she’d never been asked), yet she had acquired a wife’s matronly charms and postures. Herb Fowler was still a very coarse, very worn-out joke (about the rubbers); he was one of those thin, gray men in his sixties, with an outrageous pot belly (for such a skinny fellow); he carried his paunch like something stolen and badly hidden beneath his shirt. And Meany Hyde was uniformly fat and bald, and as nice as ever; his wife, Florence, and Big Dot Taft still ruled the roost in the apple mart. Only momentarily sobered by Grace Lynch’s death, these two women (with their thigh-sized upper arms) still kept Irene Titcomb giggling (and she still turned the side of her face with the burn scar away). Everett Taft, who was the mellowest foreman, seemed relieved that Homer did the hiring, now, and that the burden of hiring the extra help at harvest had been lifted off him. And Vernon Lynch’s resentment was so monumental that it didn’t confine itself to mere particulars—either to Homer’s being in charge, or to Grace’s death. It was just anger that possessed him—seething and constant and unrestrained by the ravages of Vernon’s sixty-something years.
Homer Wells said that Vernon Lynch had a constant brain tumor; it never grew, it always exerted the same pressure and the same interference. “It’s just there, like the weather, huh?” Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper, kidded with Homer. Ira was sixty-five, but he had another number marked on the trailer he used to carry his hives: the number of times he’d been stung by his bees.
“Only two hundred and forty-one times,” Ira said. “I been keepin’ bees since I was nineteen,” he said, “so that amounts to only five point two stings a year. Pretty good, huh?” Ira asked Homer.
“Right,” mumbled Homer Wells, ducking the expected punch, cringing in anticipation of the baseball whistling toward his face at the speed of Mr. Rose’s knife work.
Homer kept his own accounts, of course. The number of times he’d made love with Candy since Wally came home from the war was written in pencil (and then erased, and then rewritten) on the back of the photograph of Wally with the crew of Opportunity Knocks. Two hundred seventy—only a few more times than Ira Titcomb had been stung by bees. What Homer didn’t know was that Candy also kept a record—also written in pencil, she wrote “270” on the back of another print of the photograph of her teaching Homer how to swim. She kept the photograph, almost casually, in the bathroom she shared with Wally, where the photograph was always partially concealed by a box of tissues, or a bottle of shampoo. It was a cluttered bathroom, which Olive had outfitted properly before she died, and before Wally came home; it had the convenient handrails Wally needed to help himself on and off the toilet and in and out of the tub.
“It’s your standard cripple’s bathroom,” Wally would say. “An ape would have a good time in there. There’s all that stuff to swing from.”
And once, that summer, returning from the beach, they had stopped the car at the playground of the elementary school in Heart’s Haven. Wally and Angel wanted to play on the jungle gym. Angel was very agile on the thing, and Wally’s arms were so developed that he could move through it with an alarmingly apelike strength and grace—the two of them hooting like monkeys at Homer and Candy, who waited in the car.
“Our two children,” Homer had said to the love of his life.
“Yes, our family,” Candy had said, smiling—watching Wally and Angel climb and swing, climb and swing.
“It’s better for them than watching television,” said Homer Wells, who would always think of Wally and Angel as children. Homer and Candy shared the opinion that Wally watched too much television, which was a bad influence on Angel, who liked to watch it with him.
Wally was so fond of television that he had even given a TV to Homer to take to St. Cloud’s. Of course the reception was very poor up there, which had perhaps improved the McCarthy hearings, which had been Wilbur Larch’s first, sustained experience with television.
“Thank God it didn’t come in clearly,” he wrote to Homer.
Nurse Caroline had been in a bad mood all that year. If the U.S. Army really was “coddling Communists,” as Senator McCarthy claimed, Nurse Caroline said that she’d consider joining up.
Wilbur Larch, straining to see Senator McCarthy through the television’s snow and zigzagging lines, said, “He looks like a drunk to me. I’ll bet he dies young.”
“Not young enough to suit me,” Nurse Caroline said.
Finally, they gave the television away. Nurse Edna and Mrs. Grogan were becoming addicted to it, and Larch considered that it was worse for the orphans than organized religion. “It’s better for anyone than ether, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna complained, but Larch was firm. He gave the thing to the stationmaster, who (in Larch’s opinion) was the perfect sort of moron for the invention; it was just the right thing to occupy the mind of someone who waited all day for trains. It was Wilbur Larch who was the first man in Maine to call a television what it was: “an idiot box.” Maine, of course—and St. Cloud’s, especially—seemed to get everything more slowly than the rest of the country.
But Wally loved to watch it, and Angel watched it with him whenever Candy and Homer didn’t object. Wally argued, for example, that such televised events as the McCarthy hearings were educational for Angel. “He ought to know,” Wally said, “that the country is always in danger from right-wing nut cases.”
Although Senator McCarthy lost the support of millions of people as a result of the hearings—and although the Senate condemned him for his “contemptuous” conduct toward a subcommittee that had investigated his finances and for his abuse of a committee that recommended he be censured, the board of trustees of St. Cloud’s had been favorably impressed by Senator McCarthy. Mrs. Goodhall and Dr. Gingrich, especially, were encouraged to complain about Nurse Caroline’s socialist views and involvements, which they considered tinged the orphanage a shade of pink.
Nurse Caroline’s arrival had stolen a bit of the board’s fire. If Mrs. Goodhall was at first relieved to learn that someone “new” had invaded St. Cloud’s, she was later irritated to discover that Nurse Caroline approved of Dr. Larch. This led Mrs. Goodhall to investigate Nurse Caroline, whose nursing credentials were perfect but whose political activities gave Mrs. Goodhall a glow of hope.
Many times had Mrs. Goodhall advanced her thesis to the board that Dr. Larch was not only ninety-something, he was also a nonpracticing homosexual. Now she warned the board that Dr. Larch had hired a young Red.
“They’re all so old, they’ll be easily brainwashed,” Mrs. Goodhall said.
Dr. Gingrich, who was increasingly fascinated with the leaps of Mrs. Goodhall’s mind, was still marveling over the confusing image of a nonpracticing homosexual; it struck him as a brilliant accusation to make of anyone who was slightly (or hugely) different. It was the best rumor to start about anyone because it could never be proved or disproved. Dr. Gingrich wished he’d considered the accusation—just as a means of provocation—when he’d still
been practicing psychiatry.
And now, not only was Dr. Larch old and homosexual and nonpracticing—he was also in danger of being brainwashed by a young Red.
Dr. Gingrich was dying to find out what Dr. Larch’s responses might be to the accusation that he was a nonpracticing homosexual, because Dr. Larch was so outspoken on the issue of Nurse Caroline’s politics.
“She’s a socialist, not a Communist!” Dr. Larch protested to the board.
“Same difference,” as they say in Maine—about so many things.
“The next thing you know,” Larch complained to his nurses, “they’ll be asking us to denounce things.”
“What would we denounce?” Nurse Edna asked worriedly.
“Let’s make a list,” Larch said.
“The abortion laws,” Nurse Angela said.
“At the top of the list!” Larch agreed.
“Oh my!” Nurse Edna said.
“Republicans,” said Wilbur Larch. “And the board of trustees,” he added.
“Oh dear,” Nurse Edna said.
“Capitalism,” Nurse Caroline said.
“There’s never been any capital around here,” Dr. Larch said.
“Insects and scab!” Nurse Edna said. They all stared at her. “And maggots,” Nurse Edna added. “They’re what I have to spray the apple trees for. Insects and scab and maggots.”
As a result, Wilbur Larch dug out of a closet the old black leather bag he’d had at the Boston Lying-In; he took the bag to a cobbler in Three Mile Falls who also repaired ladies’ handbags and put gold initials on saddles, and he had the cobbler engrave on his old black bag the gold initials F.S.—for Fuzzy Stone.
