by John Irving
“But will it help her—if he gets in trouble?” Homer asked.
“Precisely,” Wally said. “We’re not helping her by going to the police.”
“Or by speaking to him,” Angel said.
“There’s always waiting and seeing,” said Homer Wells. For fifteen years, Candy had learned to ignore this.
“I could ask her to stay with us,” Angel suggested. “That would get her away from him. I mean, she could just stay here, even after the harvest.”
“But what would she do?” Candy asked.
“There aren’t any jobs around,” said Homer Wells. “Not after the harvest.”
“It’s one thing having them pick,” Wally said carefully. “I mean, everyone accepts them, but they’re only migrants—they’re transients. They’re supposed to move on. I don’t think that a colored woman with an illegitimate child is going to be made to feel all that welcome in Maine. Not if she’s staying.”
Candy was cross. She said, “Wally, in all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never heard anyone call them niggers, or say anything bad about them. This isn’t the South,” she added proudly.
“Come on,” Wally said. “It only isn’t the South because they don’t live here. Let one of them actually try to live here and see what they call her.”
“I don’t believe that,” Candy said.
“Then you’re dumb,” Wally said. “Isn’t she, old boy?” Wally asked Homer.
But Homer Wells was watching Angel. “Are you in love with Rose Rose, Angel?” Homer asked his son.
“Yes,” Angel said. “And I think she likes me—at least a little.” He cleared his own dishes and went upstairs to his room.
“He’s in love with the girl,” Homer said to Candy and Wally.
“As plain as the nose on your face, old boy,” Wally said. “Where have you been?” He wheeled himself out on the terrace and took a few turns around the swimming pool.
“What do you think of that?” Homer asked Candy. “Angel’s in love!”
“I hope it makes him more sympathetic to us,” Candy told him. “That’s what I think about it.”
But Homer Wells was thinking about Mr. Rose. How far would he go? What were his rules?
When Wally wheeled himself back into the house, he told Homer that there was some mail for him in the apple-mart office. “I keep meaning to bring it up to the house,” Wally told him, “but I keep forgetting it.”
“Just keep forgetting it,” Homer advised him. “It’s the harvest. Since I don’t have time to answer any mail, I might as well not read it.”
Nurse Caroline’s letter had also arrived; it was waiting for him with Dr. Larch’s letter, and with a letter from Melony.
Melony had returned the questionnaire to Homer. She hadn’t filled it out; she’d just been curious, and she’d wanted to look it over more closely. After she’d read it a few times, she could tell—by the nature of the questions—that the board of trustees were, in her opinion, a collection of the usual assholes. “The guys in suits,” she called them. “Don’t you hate men in suits?” she’d asked Lorna.
“Come on,” Lorna had told her. “You just hate men, all men.”
“Men in suits, especially,” Melony had said.
Across the questionnaire, which would never be filled out, Melony had written a brief message to Homer Wells.
DEAR SUNSHINE,
I THOUGHT YOU WAS GOING TO BE A HERO. MY MISTAKE. SORRY FOR HARD TIME.
LOVE, MELONY
Homer Wells would read that, much later that same night, when he couldn’t sleep, as usual, and he decided to get up and read his mail. He would read Dr. Larch’s letter, and Nurse Caroline’s, too, and any doubts that were remaining about the doctor’s bag with the initials F.S. engraved in gold had disappeared with the darkness just before dawn.
Homer saw no reason to add irony to their predicament; he decided not to send Melony’s response to the questionnaire to Larch or to Nurse Caroline—how would it help them to know that they had turned themselves in when they might have gone on for another few years? He sent a single, short note, addressed to them both. The note was simple and mathematical.
1. I AM NOT A DOCTOR.
2. I BELIEVE THE FETUS HAS A SOUL.
3. I’M SORRY.
“Sorry?” said Wilbur Larch, when Nurse Caroline read him the note. “He says he’s sorry?”
“Of course, he isn’t a doctor,” Nurse Angela admitted. “There’d always be something he’d think he didn’t know; he’d always be thinking he was going to make an amateur mistake.”
“That’s why he’d be a good doctor,” said Dr. Larch. “Doctors who think they know everything are the ones who make the most amateur mistakes. That’s how a good doctor should be thinking: that there’s always something he doesn’t know, that he can always kill someone.”
“We’re in for it, now,” Nurse Edna said.
“He believes the fetus has a soul, does he?” Larch asked. “Fine. He believes that a creature that lives like a fish has a soul—and what sort of soul does he believe those of us walking around have? He should believe in what he can see! If he’s going to play God and tell us who’s got a soul, he should take care of the souls who can talk back to him!” He was ranting.
Then Nurse Angela said, “So. We wait and see.”
“Not me,” said Wilbur Larch. “Homer can wait and see,” he said, “but not me.”
He sat at the typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office; he wrote this simple, mathematical note to Homer Wells.
1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU’VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU’RE A BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM—AND YOU KNOW IT.
2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD, BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT’S NOT PLAYING GOD?
3. I AM NOT SORRY—NOT FOR ANYTHING I’VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I’M SORRY FOR). I’M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.
Then Dr. Larch walked to the railroad station and waited for the train; he wanted to see the note sent on its way. Later, the stationmaster whom Larch rarely acknowledged admitted he was surprised that Larch spoke to him; but because Larch spoke after the train had gone, the stationmaster thought that Larch might have been addressing the departed train.
“Good-bye,” Dr. Larch said. He walked back up the hill to the orphanage. Mrs. Grogan asked him if he wanted some tea, but Dr. Larch told her that he felt too tired for tea; he wanted to lie down.
Nurse Caroline and Nurse Edna were picking apples, and Larch went a little way up the hill to speak to them. “You’re too old to pick apples, Edna,” Larch told her. “Let Caroline and the children do it.” He then walked a short distance with Nurse Caroline, back toward the orphanage. “If I had to be anything,” he told her, “I’d probably be a socialist, but I don’t want to be anything.”
Then he went into the dispensary and closed the door. Despite the harvest weather, it was still warm enough to have the window open during the day; he closed the window, too. It was a new, full can of ether; perhaps he jabbed the safety pin too roughly into the can, or else he wiggled it around too impatiently. The ether dripped onto the face mask more freely than usual; his hand kept slipping off the cone before he could get enough to satisfy himself. He turned a little toward the wall; that way, the edge of the windowsill maintained contact with the mask over his mouth and nose after his fingers relaxed their grip. There was just enough pressure from the windowsill to hold the cone in place.
This time he traveled to Paris; how lively it was there, at the end of World War I. The young doctor was constantly embraced by the natives. He remembered sitting with an American soldier—an amputee—in a café; all the patrons bought them Cognac. The soldier put out his cigar in a snifter of Cognac that he couldn’t finish—not if he intended to stand on his crutches, with his one leg—and Wilbur Larch breathed deeply of that aroma. That was how Paris smelled—like Cognac and ash.
That, and like perfume. Larch had walked the sold
ier home—he’d been a good doctor, even there, even then. He was a third crutch to the drunken man, he was the man’s missing leg. That was when the woman had accosted them. She was a whore, quite clearly, and she was quite young, and quite pregnant; Larch, who didn’t understand French very well, assumed that she wanted an abortion. He was trying to tell her that she was too late, that she’d have to go through with having this baby, when he suddenly understood that she was asking only what a whore is usually asking.
“Plaisir d’amour?” she asked them. The amputated soldier was passing out in Larch’s arms; it was to Larch alone that the woman was offering the “pleasure of love.”
“Non, merci,” Wilbur Larch mumbled. But the soldier collapsed; Larch needed the pregnant prostitute to help carry him. When they delivered the soldier to his room, the woman renewed her offer to Wilbur Larch. He had to hold her at arm’s length to keep her away from him—and still she would slip through his grasp and push her firm belly into him.
“Plaisir d’amour!” she said.
“Non, non!” he told her; he had to wave his arms to keep her away. One hand, swinging back and forth beside the bed, knocked over the ether can with the loose pin. Slowly, the puddle developed on the linoleum floor; it spread under the bed, and all around him. The strength of the fumes overpowered him—the woman in Paris had smelled very strongly, too. Her perfume was strong, and stronger still was the effluvia of her trade. By the time Larch moved his face away from the windowsill and the cone fell, he was already gagging.
“Princes of Maine!” He tried to call for them, but he didn’t make a sound. “Kings of New England!” He thought he was summoning them, but no one could hear him, and the French woman lay down beside him and snuggled her heavy belly against him. She hugged him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe, and her flavorful, tangy aroma made the tears run down his cheeks. He thought he was vomiting; he was.
“Plaisir d’amour,” she whispered.
“Oui, merci,” he said, giving in to her. “Oui, merci.”
The cause of death would be respiratory failure, due to aspiration of vomit, which would lead to cardiac arrest. The board of trustees—in light of the evidence submitted against him—would privately call it a suicide; the man was about to be disgraced, they told themselves. But those who knew him and understood his ether habit would say that it was the kind of accident a tired man would have. Certainly, Mrs. Grogan knew—and Nurse Angela, and Nurse Edna, and Nurse Caroline knew, too—that he was not a man “about to be disgraced”; rather, he was a man about to be no longer of use. And a man of use, Wilbur Larch had thought, was all that he was born to be.
Nurse Edna, who for some time would remain almost speechless, found his body. The dispensary door was not a perfect seal, and she thought that the odor was especially strong and that Dr. Larch had been in there longer than usual.
Mrs. Grogan, who hoped he’d gone to a better world, read, in the voice of a troubled thrush, a quavering passage of Jane Eyre to the girls’ division.
An orphan loves and needs routine, the women reminded each other.
Nurse Caroline, who was tough as nails and found Dickens a sentimental bore, had a firm grasp of the language; she read aloud an almost hearty passage of David Copperfield to the boys’ division. But she found herself broken by the prospect of the expected benediction.
It was Nurse Angela who said it all, according to the rules.
“Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,” she said to the attentive children. “Doctor Larch has found a family. Good night, Doctor Larch,” Nurse Angela said.
“Good night, Doctor Larch!” the children called.
“Good night, Wilbur!” Nurse Edna managed to say, while Nurse Angela summoned her strength for the usual refrain, and Nurse Caroline, who hoped the evening wind would dry her tears, marched down the hill to the railroad station—once again to inform the frightened stationmaster that there was a body in St. Cloud’s.
That Sunday at Ocean View was an Indian summer day, and Homer Wells was fishing. Not real fishing: Homer was trying to find out more about the relationship between Mr. Rose and his daughter. The two men sat on the cider house roof—for the most part, they weren’t talking. Not talking too much, Homer assumed, was the only way to go fishing with Mr. Rose.
Below them, Angel was trying to teach Rose Rose how to ride a bicycle. Homer had offered to drive Rose Rose and Angel to the beach (and to drive back and pick them up at some designated hour), but it mattered to Angel that he and Rose Rose were independent—to be driven to the beach only emphasized that he was still waiting to be old enough to get his driver’s license. The beach was too far to walk to, and Homer wouldn’t allow Angel to hitchhike; but it was only a four- or five-mile ride on a bike, and the road was mostly flat.
Mr. Rose observed the lesson placidly, but Homer grew anxious for Rose Rose to succeed on the bicycle; he knew how much preparation had gone into the proposed trip—how Angel had fussed over both his own and Candy’s bicycles, and how Angel had discussed (with Candy) which of Candy’s bathing suits would be the most suitable for Rose Rose. Together, they had chosen an emerald-green one—it had one pink, spiraled, barber-pole stripe, and Candy was sure the suit would fit Rose Rose better than it fit her; it had always been too loose in the bust and in the hips for Candy.
“It’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to learn when you’re a little kid, I guess,” Homer Wells observed of the bicycle lesson. Angel would run alongside the wobbly bicycle, which Rose Rose struggled to ride. After the bike was moving at a comfortable speed, Angel would release his hold on it. Rose Rose would either not pedal—hugging the bike until it simply ran out of speed and toppled—or else she would pedal furiously, but without guidance. She seemed unable to balance the bicycle and pedal it at the same time. And her hands appeared frozen on the handlebars; for her to balance, and pedal, and steer simultaneously looked, increasingly, like a distant miracle.
“Can you ride one?” Mr. Rose asked Homer.
“I never tried,” said Homer Wells. “I’d probably have a little trouble,” he admitted; it looked easy enough to him. There were no bicycles at the orphanage; the children might have used them to ride away. The only bicycle in St. Cloud’s was the stationmaster’s, and he rarely rode it.
“I never tried, either,” said Mr. Rose. He watched his daughter careen over a slight hill; she shrieked, the bike jackknifed, she fell—and Angel Wells ran to her, to help her up.
A line of men sat with their backs against the cider house wall; some were drinking coffee, some were drinking beer, but all of them watched the bicycle lesson. Some were encouraging—and as vocal as local fans, rooting at a sporting event—and others watched the procedure as placidly as Mr. Rose.
It had been going on for a while, and the applause—what there’d been of it—grew spottier and more random.
“Don’t give up,” Angel said to Rose Rose.
“I not givin’ up,” Rose Rose said. “Did I say I was givin’ up?”
“You remember what you said to me, once, about the rules?” Homer asked Mr. Rose.
“What rules?” Mr. Rose asked.
“You know, those rules I put up every year in the cider house,” Homer said. “And you mentioned that you had other rules—your own rules for living here.”
“Yeah, those rules,” said Mr. Rose.
“I thought you meant that your rules were about not hurting each other—I thought they were about being careful,” Homer said. “Sort of like my rules, too, I guess.”
“Say what you mean, Homer,” said Mr. Rose.
“Is someone getting hurt?” Homer asked. “I mean, this year—is there some kind of trouble?”
Rose Rose was up on the bicycle; her look was grim; both she and Angel were sweating. It appeared to Homer that Rose Rose was jouncing on the seat too hard, almost intentionally hurting herself; or else she was treating herself so roughly in order to give herself the intensity she needed to master the machine. She wobbled of
f a knoll, out of sight behind some apple trees, and Angel sprinted after her.
“Why don’t they just walk?” the picker named Peaches asked. “They coulda been there by now.”
“Why don’t someone take ’em in some car?” another man asked.
“They wanna do it they own way,” Muddy said. There was a little laughter about that.
“Show some respect,” said Mr. Rose. Homer thought Mr. Rose was speaking to him, but he was speaking to the men, who stopped laughing. “Pretty soon, that bicycle gonna break,” Mr. Rose said to Homer.
Rose Rose was wearing a pair of blue jeans, some heavy work shoes and a white T-shirt; because she was sweating, the outline and the colors of the emerald-green and pink bathing suit were visible through her shirt.
“Imagine her learnin’ to swim,” said Mr. Rose.
Homer Wells felt bad for Angel, but another subject weighed more heavily on his mind.
“About someone being hurt,” Homer said. “About the rules.”
Mr. Rose reached into his pocket, slowly, and Homer half expected to see the knife, but it was not the knife that Mr. Rose removed from his pocket and very gently placed in Homer’s hand—it was the burned-down nub of a candle. It was what was left of the candle Candy had lit for their lovemaking in the cider house. In her panic—when she thought it was Wally who had caught them there—she had forgotten it.
Homer closed his fingers around the candle, and Mr. Rose patted his hand.
“That ’gainst the rules, ain’t it?” Mr. Rose asked Homer.
Black Pan was baking corn bread and the smell rose from the cider house and hung deliciously over the roof, which was warming in the late-morning sun; pretty soon, it would be uncomfortably hot on the roof.
“Ain’t that bread ready to eat yet?” Peaches hollered into the kitchen.
“No it ain’t,” Black Pan said from inside the cider house. “And pipe down, or you wake the baby.”
“Shit,” Peaches said. Black Pan came outside and kicked Peaches—not terribly hard—where he was leaning against the cider house wall.
“When that bread ready, you won’t call it ‘shit,’ will you?” Black Pan asked him.
