by John Irving
That August of 195_, just a few days before the picking crew was expected at Ocean View, Wilbur Larch sent the doctor’s bag to Homer Wells. It was the time of year, every year, when Melony took her vacation.
Most of the shipyard workers, even the electricians, took a couple of weeks in the summer and a couple of weeks around Christmas, but Melony took a whole month during harvest time; it made her feel good—or, maybe, young again—to pick apples. This year, she had decided, she’d try working at Ocean View.
She still hitchhiked whenever and wherever she traveled, and because she wore only men’s work clothes, she still looked like a tramp; no one would ever know that she was a shipyard’s skilled electrician, with enough money in a savings account to buy a nice house and a couple of cars.
When Melony arrived at the apple mart, Big Dot Taft was the first to see her. Big Dot and Florence Hyde were arranging some of the display tables, although the only new apples they had available were the Gravensteins. They had mostly jellies and jams and honey. Irene Titcomb was working the pie ovens. Wally was in the office; he was on the telephone and didn’t see Melony—and she didn’t see him.
Candy was in the kitchen of the fancy house, talking real estate to Olive’s vulgar brother, Bucky Bean. Bucky had bought what was left of the point of land Ray Kendall had owned on Heart’s Haven Harbor. Bucky had put a very cheap and shabby seafood restaurant there—one of Maine’s first carhop restaurants, one of those places where young girls dressed like cheerleaders bring you mostly fried and mostly tepid food, which you consume in your car. The food attaches itself to the cars by means of wobbly little trays that cling to the doors of the cars when the windows are rolled down. Homer always wanted to take Wilbur Larch to such a place—only to hear what the old man would say. Larch’s response, Homer was sure, would be related to his response to television and to Senator Joe McCarthy.
Bucky Bean’s new idea was to buy the part of the orchard called Cock Hill and sell it in one-acre lots as “summer property” with a view of the ocean.
Candy was in the process of rejecting the offer when Melony arrived at the apple mart. Candy’s opinion was that one-acre lots were too small and that the unsuspecting new owners would be unprepared for the chemical spray used on the apples that would regularly float over and descend upon their property every summer. Also, the families who bought property and built houses would doubtlessly believe it was their right to climb the fences and pick all the apples they wanted.
“You’re just like Olive,” Bucky Bean complained. “You’ve got no imagination concerning the future.”
That was when Melony approached Big Dot Taft, not only because Big Dot appeared to be in charge but also because Melony felt comfortable with big, fat women. Big Dot smiled to see how hefty Melony was; the two women appeared predisposed to like each other when Melony spoke—her voice reverberating through the near-empty stalls and surprising Meany Hyde and Vernon Lynch, who were putting water in the John Deere’s radiator. When Melony tried to speak normally, her voice was peculiarly deep; when she tried to raise the pitch of her voice, most people thought she was shouting.
“Does a guy named Homer Wells work here?” Melony asked Big Dot.
“He sure does,” Big Dot said cheerfully. “Are you a pal of Homer’s?”
“I used to be,” Melony said. “I haven’t seen him in a while,” she added coyly—at least coyly for Melony, whose love affair with Lorna had made her occasionally self-conscious and shy with other women; her self-confidence around men was as steadfast as ever.
“Where’s Homer?” Florence Hyde asked Meany. He was staring at Melony.
“He’s puttin’ out crates in the Frying Pan,” said Meany Hyde. Something made him shiver.
“You just come to say hello?” Big Dot asked Melony, whose fingers—Dot noticed—were instinctively opening and closing, making fists and then relaxing.
“I actually come for work,” Melony said. “I done a lot of pickin’.”
“Homer hires the pickers,” Big Dot said. “I guess you’re in luck—you bein’ old friends.”
“It’s too early for hirin’ pickers,” Vernon Lynch said. Something about the way Melony looked at him made him not insist on that point.
“Just go tell Homer there’s someone to see him,” Big Dot told Vernon. “Homer’s the boss.”
“The boss?” Melony said.
Irene Titcomb giggled, and turned her burn scar away. “It’s actually a kind of secret—who’s boss around here,” Irene said.
Vernon Lynch gunned the tractor so hard that an oily, black smoke barked out of the exhaust pipe and washed over the women in the mart.
“If you’re gonna work here,” Big Dot told Melony, “you might as well know it: that guy drivin’ the tractor is the number one asshole.”
Melony shrugged. “There’s just one?” she asked, and Big Dot laughed.
“Oh, my pies!” said Irene Titcomb, who went running off. Florence Hyde sized Melony up, in a friendly way, and Big Dot put her meaty paw on Melony’s shoulder as if they were lifelong pals. Irene Titcomb ran back to them and announced that the pies were saved.
“So tell us how you know Homer Wells,” Florence Hyde said to Melony.
“From where and since when?” asked Big Dot Taft.
“From Saint Cloud’s, since forever,” Melony told them. “He was my guy,” she told the women, her lips parting, showing the damage done to her teeth.
“You don’t say?” said Big Dot Taft.
Homer Wells and his son, Angel, were talking about masturbation—or, rather, Homer was talking. They were taking their lunch break under one of the old trees in the Frying Pan; they’d been putting crates out in the orchards all morning—taking turns driving the tractor and unloading the crates. They’d finished their sandwiches, and Angel had shaken up his soda and squirted his father with it, and Homer had tried to find a casual way to bring up the subject of masturbation. Candy had mentioned to Homer that the evidence on Angel’s bedsheets suggested that this might be the time for a father-and-son conversation regarding Angel’s obviously emerging sexuality.
“Boy, when I was your age—in Saint Cloud’s—it was really tough to beat off with any privacy,” Homer had begun (he thought, casually).
They’d been lying on their backs in the tall grass, under the fullest tree in the Frying Pan—the sun couldn’t filter through the lush, bent branches and all the heavy apples.
“Really,” Angel said indifferently, after a while.
“Yup,” Homer said. “You know, I was the oldest—about your age—and I was supposed to be in charge of all the other kids, more or less. I knew they weren’t even old enough to have pubic hair, or they didn’t even know what to make of their little hard-ons.”
Angel laughed. Homer laughed, too.
“So how’d you manage it?” Angel asked his father, after a while.
“I waited until I thought they were all asleep, and then I tried to keep the bed quiet,” Homer said. “But you’ve got no idea how long it can take twelve or fifteen boys to fall asleep!”
They both laughed some more.
“There was one other kid who was old enough to know about it,” Homer confided. “I think he was just beginning to experiment with playing with himself—I think the first time that he actually did it, he didn’t have any idea what would happen. And when he actually squirted—when he ejaculated, you know—he thought he’d hurt himself. In the dark, he probably thought he was bleeding!”
This story was a complete fiction, but Angel Wells loved it; he laughed in a very worldly way, which encouraged his father to go on.
“Well, he was so worried—he kept asking me to turn on the light, he said something had broken inside him,” Homer said.
“Broken?” Angel said, and they both howled.
“Yes!” Homer said. “And when I turned on the light and he got a look at himself, he said, ‘Oh, God, it went off!’—as if he were talking about a gun, and he’d just shot hi
mself with it!”
Father and son laughed over that for a while.
Then Homer said, more seriously, “Of course I tried to explain it all to him. It was hard to make him understand that he hadn’t done anything wrong—because it’s natural; it’s perfectly healthy and normal, but these things have a way of getting distorted.”
Angel was quiet now; perhaps he saw the reason for the story.
“But just imagine me trying to explain to this kid—he was quite a bit younger than you are—that it was only natural that he would have feelings about girls, and about sex, long before he would have the opportunity to have anything to do with girls. Or to actually have sex,” Homer added. He had truly labored the point into submission, and he paused to see how his son was taking it in; Angel, who had a long stalk of grass in his mouth, lay on his back staring at the sprawling trunk of the huge tree.
They were quiet for a while, and then Homer said: “Is there anything you’d like to ask me—about anything?”
Angel gave a short laugh; then he paused. “Yes,” Angel said to his father. “I wonder why you don’t have a girlfriend—why you don’t even seem interested.”
This was not the question Homer had expected, following his birds-and-bees invitation, but after a few seconds he realized that the question should have been anticipated and that some reasonable answer was doubtlessly pressing more on Angel’s mind than any truths regarding masturbation.
“I had a girlfriend, in Saint Cloud’s,” Homer said. “She was kind of rough on me. She was something of a bully. Older than me, and at the time, she was stronger than me!” he said, laughing.
“No kidding,” Angel said; he wasn’t laughing; he had rolled over on his elbows and was watching his father intently.
“Well, we weren’t very much alike,” Homer said. “It was one of those cases of the sex happening before there was a friendship, or there really being no friendship—and, after a short while, there wasn’t any more sex, either. After that, I’m not sure what the relationship was.”
“It was a sort of bad way to start, you mean?” Angel asked.
“Right,” his father said.
“So what happened after that?” Angel asked.
“I met Wally and Candy,” Homer said carefully. “I guess I would have married Candy—if she hadn’t married Wally. She was almost my girlfriend, for about five minutes. That was when Wally was in the war, when we wondered if he was still alive,” Homer said quickly. “I’ve always been so close to Wally and Candy, and then—once I had you—I started to feel that I already had everything I wanted.”
Angel Wells rolled over on his back, gazing up the trunk of the tree. “So you still kind of like Candy?” he asked. “You’re not interested in anybody else?”
“Kind of,” said Homer Wells. “Have you met anybody you’re interested in?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Nobody who’d be interested in me,” his son said. “I mean, the girls I think about are all too old to even look at me.”
“That will change,” Homer said, poking Angel in the ribs; the boy doubled up his knees and rolled on his side, poking back at his father. “Pretty soon,” Homer said, “the girls are going to stand in line to look at you.” He grabbed Angel in a headlock and they started wrestling. Wrestling with Angel was one way Homer could keep in close physical contact with the boy—long after Angel had grown self-conscious about being hugged and kissed, in public. A fifteen-year-old boy doesn’t want his father draped all over him, but wrestling was perfectly respectable; that was still allowed. They were wrestling so hard, and laughing—and breathing so heavily—that they did not hear Vernon Lynch approach them.
“Hey, Homer!” Vernon said sharply, kicking at them as they rolled on the ground under the big tree—the way he might, tentatively, attempt to break up a dogfight. When they saw him standing over them, they froze in an awkward embrace—as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t. “If you quit dickin’ around,” Vernon said, “I got a message for you.”
“For me?” said Homer Wells.
“There’s a fat woman who says she knows you. She’s at the mart,” Vernon said. Homer smiled. He knew several fat women at the mart; he assumed that Vernon meant Big Dot Taft or Florence Hyde. Even Squeeze Louise had been putting on weight in recent years.
“I mean a new fat woman,” Vernon said. He started walking back to his tractor. “She says she wants to be a picker, and she asked for you. She knows you.”
Homer got slowly to his feet; he’d rolled over a root of the big tree, and the root had hurt him in the ribs. Also, Angel had stuffed grass down the back of his shirt. Angel said to his father, “Oh, a fat woman, huh? I guess you didn’t tell me about the fat woman.” As Homer unbuttoned his shirt to shake out the grass, Angel poked his father’s bare stomach. That was when Angel noticed that his father had aged. He was still a trim man, and strong from all the orchard work he’d done, but just a bit of belly rolled over the belt of his jeans, and his hair, tousled from the wrestling, was more flecked with gray than it was with grass. There was something grim around the corners of Homer’s eyes that Angel had also never noticed before.
“Pop?” Angel asked him softly. “Who’s the woman?” But his father was looking at him in a panic; he started buttoning his shirt askew, and Angel had to help him with it. “It can’t be the bully, can it?” Angel was trying to joke with his father—their manner together was often full of joking; but Homer wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t even smile. Half a trailer of apple crates still needed to be unloaded, but Homer drove too fast, dumping an occasional crate. They had an empty trailer in no time, and on the way back to the apple mart, Homer took the public road instead of winding through the back orchards. The public road was faster, although Homer had told all the drivers to keep off it whenever they could—to avoid any possible accidents with the beach traffic along that road in the summers.
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parent’s own rule.
“Do you think it’s her?” Angel shouted to his father. He stood over his father’s shoulders, his hands on the tractor seat, his feet braced against the trailer hitch. “You’ve got to admit, it’s a little exciting,” the boy added, but Homer looked grim.
Homer parked the tractor and trailer by the storage barns, next to the mart. “You can start putting on another load,” he told Angel, but he was not going to get rid of Angel so easily. The boy dogged his footsteps to the apple mart, where Big Dot and Florence and Irene were surrounding the implacable and massive Melony.
“It is her, isn’t it?” Angel whispered to his father.
“Hello, Melony,” said Homer Wells. There was not a sound in the still, summer air.
“How you doin’, Sunshine?” Melony asked him.
“Sunshine!” said Big Dot Taft.
Even Angel had to say it out loud. Imagine: his father a “Sunshine”!
But although she had waited years to see him, Melony’s gaze was riveted not on Homer Wells but on Angel. Melony could not take her eyes off the boy. Homer Wells, a pleasant-looking man in his forties, did not very precisely remind Melony of the Homer Wells she had known; rather, it was Angel who struck Melony with a force quite unexpected by her. She had not anticipated being swept off her feet by the near-spitting image of the boy she had known. Poor Angel felt a little wilted by the ruffian eye Melony cast over him, but he was a young gentleman and he smiled appealingly at the stranger.
“There’s no doubt about who you are,” Melony said to the boy. “You look more like your father than your father.” Big Dot and the apple-mart ladies were hanging on her every word.
“It’s nice that you see a resemblance,” said Homer Wells, “but my son is adopted.”
Hadn’t Homer Wells learned anything? Through those years of hard knocks, those years of muscle and fat and betrayal and growing decidedly older, could he still not see in Melony’s fierce, sad eyes that she
possessed a quality that could never be bullshitted?
“Adopted?” Melony said, her yellow-gray eyes never once leaving Angel. She was disappointed in her oldest friend: that he should, after all these years, still try to deceive her.
That was when Candy—who had finally gotten rid of Bucky Bean—strolled into the apple mart, removed a Gravenstein from a basket on the first display table, took a sharp bite, noticed that no one seemed to be working and walked over to the small crowd.
Since the most natural space for Candy to enter this gathering was between Homer and Angel, she stepped between them; and since her mouth was quite full of the new apple, she was a little embarrassed to speak to the stranger.
“Hi!” she managed to say to Melony, who recognized instantly—in Candy’s face—those few parts of Angel she had failed to locate in her memory of Homer Wells.
“This is Melony,” Homer said to Candy, who had difficulty swallowing—long ago, on the cider house roof, she had heard all about Melony. “This is Missus Worthington,” Homer mumbled to Melony.
“How do you do?” Candy managed to say.
“Missus Worthington?” Melony said, her lynxlike eyes now darting from Angel to Candy, and from Angel to Homer Wells.
That was when Wally wheeled himself out of the office and into the mart.
“Isn’t anybody working today?” he asked, in his friendly way. When he saw there was a stranger, he was polite. “Oh, hello!” he said.
“Hi,” said Melony.
“This is my husband,” Candy said, through lots of apple.
“Your husband?” Melony said.
“This is Mister Worthington,” mumbled Homer Wells.
“Everybody calls me Wally,” Wally said.
“Melony and I were in the orphanage together,” Homer explained.
“Really?” Wally said enthusiastically. “That’s great,” he said. “Get them to show you around. Show her the house, too,” Wally told Homer. “Maybe you’d like to take a swim?” he asked Melony, who, for once in her life, did not know what to say. “Dot?” Wally said to Big Dot Taft. “Get me a count of the number of bushels of Gravs we have in storage. I got a phone order waiting.” He turned the wheelchair very smoothly and started to roll back to the office.
