'In other parts of the world,' wrote Wilbur Larch, 'there is what the world calls “society.” Here in St. Cloud's we have no society-there are not the choices, the better-than or worse-than comparisons that are nearly constant in any society. It is less complicated here, because the choices and comparisons are either obvious or nonexistent. But having so few options is what makes an orphan so desperate to encounter society-any society, the more complex with intrigue, the more gossip-ridden, the better. Given the chance, an orphan throws himself into society-the way an otter takes to the water.'
What Wilbur Larch was thinking of, regarding 'options,' was that Homer Wells had no choice concerning either his apprenticeship or Melony. He and Melony were doomed to become a kind of couple because there was no one else for them to couple with. In society, it. would have mattered if they were suited for each other; that they were not suited for each other didn't matter in St. Cloud's. And since Homer had exhausted the resources of the dismal tutors employed at St. Cloud's, what else was there for him to learn if he didn't learn surgery? Specifically, obstetrical procedure. And what was far simpler for Dr. Larch to teach him: dilatation and curettage.
Homer Wells kept his notes in one of Dr. Larch's old medical school notebooks; Larch had been a cramped, sparse notetaker-there was plenty of room. In Larch's opinion, there was no need for Homer to have a notebook {150}of his own. Wilbur Larch had only to look around him to see what paper cost. The trees were gone; they had been replaced by orphans-all for paper.
Under the heading 'D &C,' Homer wrote: The woman is most secure in stirrups.' In Dr. Larch's procedure, she was also shaved.
The VAGINAL area is prepared with an ANTISEPTIC SOLUTION,' wrote Homer Wells; he did a lot of CAPITALIZING-it was related to his habit of repeating the ends of sentences, or key words. The UTERUS is examined to estimate its size. One hand is placed on the ABDOMINAL WALL; two or three fingers of the other hand are in the VAGINA. A VAGINAL SPECULUM, which looks like a duck's bill, is inserted in the VAGINA-through which the CERVIX is visible. (The CERVIX,' he wrote parenthetically, as if to remind himself, 'is the necklike part of the lower, constricted end of the UTERUS.) The hole in the middle of the CERVIX is the entrance of the UTERUS. It is like a cherry Life Saver. In PREGNANCY the CERVIX is swollen and shiny.
'With a series of METAL DILATORS, the CERVIX is dilated to admit entrance of the OVUM FORCEPS. These are tongs with which the doctor grabs at what's inside the UTERUS. He pulls what he can out.'
What this was (what Homer meant) was blood and slime. The products of conception,' he called it.
'With a CURETTE,' noted Homer, 'the WALL OF THE UTERUS is scraped clean. One knows when it's clean when one hears a gritty sound.'
And that's all that was entered in the notebook concerning dilatation and the process of curetting. As a footnote to this procedure, Homer added only this: The WOMB one reads about in literature is that portion of the GENITAL TRACT in which the FERTILIZED OVUM implants itself.' A page number was jotted in the margin of this notebook entry-the page in Gray's Anatomy that begins the section 'The Female Organs of {151} Generation,' where the most useful illustrations and descriptions can be found.
By 194-, Homer Wells (not yet twenty) had been a midwife to countless births and the surgical apprentice to about a quarter as many abortions; he had delivered many children himself, with Dr. Larch always present, but Larch had not allowed Homer to perform an abortion. It was understood by both Larch and Homer that Homer was completely able to perform one, but Larch believed that Homer should complete medical school-a real medical school-and serve an internship in ainother hospital before he undertook the operation. It was not that the operation was complicated; it was Larch's opinion that Homer's choice should be involved. What Larch meant was that Homer should know something of society before he made the decision, by himself, whether to perform abortions or not.
What Dr. Larch was looking for was someone to sponsor Homer Wells. Larch wanted someone to send the boy to college, not only in order for Homer to qualify for admission to medical school but also in order to expose Homer to the world outside St. Cloud's.
How to advertise for such a sponsor was a puzzle to Wilbur Larch. Should he ask his colleague and correspondent at The New England Home for Little Wanderers if he could make use of their large mailing list?
ACCOMPLISHED MIDWIFE & QUALIFIED
ABORTIONIST SEEKS SPONSOR FOR COLLEGE
YEARS-PLUS MEDICAL SCHOOL EXPENSES!
Where was the society where Homer Wells could fit in? wondered Wilbur Larch.
Mainly, Larch knew, he had to get his apprentice away from Melony. The two of them together: how they depressed Larch! They struck the doctor as a tired and loveless married couple. What sexual tensions Melony had managed to conduct between them in the earlier years of their angry courtship seemed absent now. If they {152} still practised a sexual exchange, they practised infrequently and without enthusiasm. Over lunch they sat together without speaking, in plain view of the girls' or of the boys' divisions; together they examined the wellworn copy of Gray's Anatomy as if it were the intricate map they had to follow if they were ever to find their way out of St. Cloud's.
Melony didn't even run away anymore. It appeared to Dr. Larch that some wordless, joyless pact bound Homer and Melony together. Their sullenness toward each other reminded Dr. Larch of Mrs. Eames's daughter, who would spend eternity with a pony's penis in her mouth. Melony and Homer never fought; they never argued; Melony seemed to have given up raising her voice. If there was still anything sexual between them, Larch knew that it happened randomly, and only out of the keenest boredom.
Larch even got Melony a job as live-in help for a wellto-do old woman in Three Mile Falls. It may have been that the woman was a cranky invalid who would have complained about anyone; she certainly complained about Melony-she said Melony was 'insensitive,' that she was never 'forthcominG' with conversation, and that, in regard to such physical attentions as helping her in and out of her bath, the girl was 'unbelievably rough.' Dr. Larch could believe it, and Melony herself complained; she said she preferred to live at St. Cloud's; if she had to have a job, she wanted one she could go to and then leave.
I want to come home at night,' she told Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch. Home? Larch thought.
There was another job, in town, but it required that Melony know how to drive. Although Dr. Larch even found a local boy to teach Melony, her driving thoroughly frightened the young man and she needed to take the driver's examination for her license three times in order to pass it once. She then lost the job-delivering parts and tools for a building contractor. She was unable {153} to account for more than two hundred miles that had accumulated in one week on the delivery van's odometer.
'I just drove to places because I was bored,' she told Dr. Larch, shrugging. 'And there was a guy I was seeing, for a couple of days.'
Larch fretted that Melony, who was almost twenty, was now unemployable and unadoptable; she had grown dependent on her proximity to Homer Wells, although whole days passed when there didn't appear to be a word between them-in fact, no intercourse beyond mere presence was observable for weeks in succession (if Melony's presence could ever be called 'mere'). Because of how much Melony depressed Dr. Larch, Dr. Larch assumed that her presence was depressing to Homer Wells.
Wilbur Larch loved Homer Wells-he had never loved anyone as he loved that boy, and he could not imagine enduring a life at St. Cloud's without him- but the doctor knew that Homer Wells had to have an authentic encounter with society if the boy was going to have a chosen life at all. What Larch dreamed of was that Homer would venture out in the world and then choose to come back to St. Cloud's. But who would choose such a thing? Larch wondered.
Maine had many towns; there wasn't one as charmless as St. Cloud's.
Larch lay down in the dispensary and sniffed a little ether. Fie recalled Portland's safe harbor; his mind ticked off the towns, either east or inland from Portland, and his lips tried the towns with the good, Maine names.
(Inhale, exhale.) Wilbur Larch could almost taste those towns, their vapory names. There was Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, there was Vassalborough and Nobleboro and Waldoboro, there was Wiscasset and West Bath, Damariscotta and Friendship, Penobscot Bay and Sagadahoc Bay, Yarmouth and Camden, Rockport and Arundel, Rumford and Biddeford and Livermore Falls. {154} East of Cape Kenneth, the tourist trap, lies Heart's Haven; inland from the small, pretty harbor town that's called a haven squats the town of Heart's Rock. The rock in Heart's Rock is named for the uninhabited rock island that appears to float like a dead whale in the otherwise perfect harbor of Heart's Haven. It is an eyesore island, unloved by the people of Heart's Haven; perhaps they were moved to name the eyesore town of Heart's Rock after their bird-beshitted and fish-belly-white rock. Nearly covered at high tide, and lying fairly flat in the water, it lists slightly-hence its name: Dead Whale Rock. There is no actual 'rock' in Heart's Rock, which is not a town deserving to be looked down upon; it is only five miles inland, and from some of its hills the ocean is visible; in most of the town, the sea breeze is refreshingly felt.
But compared to Heart's Haven, every other town is a mongrel. When condemning Heart's Rock, the people of Heart's Haven do not mention the simple quaintness of the town's only stores-Sanborn's General Store and Titus Hardware and Plumbing. The people of Heart's Haven are more likely to mention Drinkwater Lake, and the summer cottages on its murky shores. A notvery-fresh freshwater lake, more of a pond-because by mid-July the bottom is cloudy and rank with algae- Drinkwater Lake is Heart's Rock's only offering to summer people. People who summer on Drinkwater Lake have not traveled far; they may live elsewhere in Heart's Rock-or, even more rustically, in Kenneth Corners. The summer camps and cottages that dot the lakeshore are also used during the hunting-season weekends in the fall. The cottages and camps have names of a striving wishfulness. Echo's End, and Buck's Last Stand (this one is decked with antlers); there is one called Endless Weekend, with a floating dock; one called Wee Three, suggesting inhabitants of an almost unbearable cuteness; and a frank sort of place called Sherman's Hole in the Ground, which is an accurate description. {155}
In 194- Drinkwater Lake was already cluttered, and by 195- it would become intolerably busy with powerboats and water skis-propellers fouled and oars festooned with the slime-green algae stirred up from the bottom. The lake is too woodsy to let the wind through; sailboats always die on the dead-calm surface, which is perfect for hatching mosquitoes, and over the years the accumulated children's urine and gasoline would give the lake an unwell, glossy sheen. There are wonderfully remote lakes in Maine, but Drinkwater Lake was never one of them. The occasional, bewildered canoeist looking for the wilderness would not find it there. The wildhearted, departed Winkles would not have favored the place. You would not willingly drink the water of Drinkwater Lake, and there are many tiresome jokes on that subject, all conceived in Heart's Haven, where the habit of judging Heart's Rock by its single, sorry body of water is long-standing.
When Homer Wells would first see Drinkwater Lake, he would imagine that if there were ever a summer camp for the luckless orphans of St. Cloud's, it would be situated in the bog that separates Echo's End from Sherman's Hole in the Ground.
Not all of Heart's Rock was so ugly. It was a town of stay-put people on fairly open, neatly farmed land; it was dairy-cow country, and fruit-tree country. In 194-, the Ocean View Orchard on Drinkwater Road, which connected Heart's Rock to Heart's Haven, was pretty and plentiful-even by the standards of the spoiled and hard-to-please of Heart's Haven. Although the Ocean View Orchards were in Heart's Rock, there was a Heart's Haven look to the place; the farmhouse had flagstone patios, the grounds were landscaped with rose bushes -like the Heart's Haven homes on the more elegant coast-and the lawns spreading from the main house to the swimming pool, all the way to the nearest apple orchard, were kept up and fussed over by the same yard {156} gangs who made the Heart's Haven lawns look so much like putting greens.
The owner of Ocean View Orchards, Wallace Worthington, even had a Heart's Haven kind of name- meaning, it was not a local-sounding name. Indeed not, because Wallace Worthington was from New York; he'd fled investments for apple farming just before everyone's investments crashed, and if he didn't know all there was to know about apples-being a gentleman farmer, in soul and in bones (and in clothes)-he knew almost everything about money and had hired the right foremen to run Ocean View (men who did know apples).
Worthington was a perpetual board member at the Haven Club; he was the only member whose position on the board was never voted-and the only Heart's Rock resident who was a Haven Club member. Since his orchard employed half the locals of Heart's Rock,
Wallace Worthington had the rare distinction of being appreciated in both towns. Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion-the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.
You'd have to live in Heart's Rock or in Heart's Haven-and be familiar with the social histories of the towns-to know that Wallace Worthington's wife was not every inch a queen; she certainly looked like a queen and conducted herself, every inch, as such. But the townspeople knew that Olive Worthington-although a Heart's Haven native-had come from the wrong part of town. Society is so complex that even Heart's Haven had a wrong part to it.
Olive Worthington was born Alice Bean; to the knowledgeable, she was Bruce Bean's (the clam-digger's) daughter; she was Bucky Bean's (the well-digger's) clever sister-which falsely implied that Bucky wasn't clever; {157} he was at least cleverer than his father, Bruce. Welldigging (the business of Nurse Angela's father, the business that yielded Homer Wells a name) was good-paying work: well-digging beats clam-digging by dollars and by miles, as they say in Maine.
Olive Worthington grew up selling clams out of the back of a pickup truck that leaked ice. Her mother, Maud, never talked; she kept a cracked makeup mirror on a chopping block at the crowded corner of a kitchen counter-her cosmetics, which fascinated her,.mingled with stray clams. A large clam shell was her only.ashtray. Sometimes the black and gritty skin discarded from the neck of a cleaned clam clung to a bottle of her Blush-Up. She died of lung cancer when Olive was still in high school.
Alice Bean became a Worthington by marrying Wallace Worthington; she became an Olive by altering her own name at the town clerk's office in Heart's Haven. It was; a willful, legal change-of-name form that she filled out-easy to do, in part because it required the changing of only two letters to make an Alice into an Olive. There was no end to the way the locals liked to play with the name Olive, as if they were moving around in their mouths the disagreeable pits of that odd food; and behind her back, there were many who still called her Alice Bean, though only her brother Bucky would call Olive Alice to her face. Everyone else respected her enough to say Olive if that's what she wanted to hear, and it was agreed that although she married a Worthington, and therefore had married into apples and money, she had got no bargain in Wallace.
Cheerful, fun-loving, a good-timer, Wallace Worthington was generous and kind. He adored Olive and everything about her-her gray eyes and her ashblonde hair turning softly to pearl, and her collegelearned New British accent (which was often imitated at the Haven Club). Her brother Bucky's success as a welldigger had paid for Olive's college accent, without which {158} she might not have enticed Wallace Worthington to notice her. It may have been gratitude that caused Olive to tolerate Bucky calling her Alice to her face. She even tolerated his predictable appearances at Ocean View Orchards-his boots always muddy with that claycolored muck from the middle of the earth, the stuff only well-diggers find. Olive tried not to cringe while he tromped about the house in those boots, calling her 'Alice Baby,' and on hot summer days he would dive into the swimming pool in all his clothes, leaving only those middle-earth boots out of the bright water (which he left sloshing in Atlantic turmoil and clay-colored at the edges). Bucky Bean could leave a ring on a swimming pool the way a dirty child could ring a bathtub.
For all that Olive Worthington had been spared, by escaping the Alice Bean in herself, there was something wrong with Wallace Worthington. Despite his being a real gentleman, and excellent at teasing the Republicans at the Haven Club, and fair to his orchardmen (he provided them with health insurance policies at his expense at a time when most farm workers were living below the standard of minimum everything)-despite Wallace Worthington's lovable flamboyance (all the farm and personal vehicles at Ocean View Orchards bore his monogram on a big, red apple!), despite everything that was grand about Wallace, he appeared to be drunk all the time, and he exhibited such a childish quality of hyperactivity and restlessness that everyone in Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock agreed that he must certainly be no prize to live with.
He was drunk at the Haven Club when he lowered the net at center court (which he could not seem to adjust properly) by cutting through it with the saw blade of his jackknife. He was drunk again at the Haven Club when Dr. Darryrimple had his stroke; Wallace tossed the old gentleman into the shallow end of the pool-'to revive him,' he said later. The old fellow nearly drowned in addition to suffering his stroke, and the offended {159} Darryrimples were so outraged that they canceled membership. And Wallace was drunk in his own orchards when he drove his Cadillac headlong into the fivehundred-gallon Hardie sprayer, dousing himself and his oyster-white convertible with chemicals that gave him a rash in his lap and permanently bleached the Cadillac's scarlet upholstery. He was drunk again when he insisted on driving the tractor that towed the flatbed with half of Ira Titcomb's beehives on it, promptly dumping the load-the honey, the hives, and millions of angry bees- at the intersection of Drinkwater Road and Day Lane (getting himself badly stung). Also stung were: Everett Taft and his wife, Dot, and Dot's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who were working in the Day Lane orchard at the time of the accident.
Yet no one doubted that Wallace Worthington was faithful to Olive-the cynics saying that he was too drunk to get it up with anyone else, and possibly too drunk to get it up with Olive. It was clear he had gotten it up with her at least once; he had produced a son, just turning twenty in 194-, as big arid handsome and charming as his father, with his mother's smoky eyes and with not quite her former blondeness (his was tawny, not ash); he even had a bit of her New British accent. Wallace Worthington, Junior, was too good-looking ever to be called Junior (he was called Wally). From the day of Wally's birth, Wallace Worthington was called Senior, even by Olive and eventually by Wally.
And this is only a beginning to an understanding of the societies of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock. If he had known only this much, Dr. Larch might have tried to keep Homer Wells away from the place; he might have guessed that Homer's life would get complicated there. What did an orphan know about gossip, or care about class? But to Wilbur Larch Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock were very pretty names, improved by ether.
If Dr. Larch had spent some time around Senior Worthington, Larch might have figured out that the {160}man was unfairly judged; of course he drank too much-many people who drink at all drink too much. But Senior was not a drunk. He bore the classic, clinical features of Alzheimer's disease, and Wilbur Larch would have spotted it for what it was-a progressive organic brain syndrome. Alzheimer's presenile dementia is marked by deterioration of intellect, failure of memory and a striking appearance of rapid aging in a patient in middle life, symptoms that become progressively more severe over a period of just a few years and terminate in death. Restlessness, hyperactivity, defective judgement are other hallmarks of the disease. But as keen as the wit in Heart's Haven was, the townspeople didn't know the difference between drunkenness and Alzheimer's disease; they were dead-sure they had the Worthingtons figured out.
They misjudged Olive Worthington, too. She had earned her name. She might have been desperate to leave the clam level of life, but she knew what work was; she had seen how quickly the ice in the pickup melted, how short a time the clams could be kept cool. She knew hustle, she knew know-how. She saw, instantly, that Wallace Worthington was good about money and weak on apples, and so she took up apples as her cause. She found out who the knowledgeable foremen were and she gave them raises; she fired the others, and hired a younger, more reliable crew. She baked apple pies for the families of the orchardmen who pleased her, and she taught their wives the recipe, too. She installed a pizza oven in the apple mart and soon could turn out fortyeight pies in one baking, adding greatly to the business over the counter at harvest time-formerly reserved for apple cider and apple jelly. She overpaid for the damages to Ira Titcomb's beehives and soon was selling apple blossom honey over the counter, too. She went to the university and learned everything about cross-pollination and how to plant a new-tree orchard; she learned more about mousing, and suckering, and thinning, and the new {161} chemicals than the foremen knew, and then she taught them.
Olive had a vision of her silent mother, Maud, mesmerized by her own fading image in the makeup mirror -clams everywhere around her. The little cotton balls dabbed with cosmetics (the color of the clay on her brother Bucky's terrible boots) were flecked with the ashes from the cigarettes overstuffing the clam-shell ashtray. These images strengthened Olive. She knew the life she had escaped, and at Ocean View Orchards she more than earned her keep; she took the farm out of Senior's careless hands, and she ran it very intelligently for him.
At night, coming back from the Haven Club (she always drove), Olive would leave Senior passed out in the passenger seat and put a note on her son Wally's pillow, asking him, when he got home, to remember to carry his father up to bed. Wally always did so; he was a golden boy, riot just a picture of one. The one night that young Wally had drunk too much to carry his father to bed, Olive Worthington was quick to point out to her son the error of his ways.
'You may resemble your father, with my pel-mission, in every aspect but in his drunkenness,' she told Wally. 'If you resemble him in that aspect, you will lose this farm-and every penny made by every apple. Do you think your father could prevent me from doing that to you?'
Wally looked at his father, whom he had allowed to sleep all night in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, now mottled by spraying chemicals. It was obvious to the boy that Senior Worthington could prevent nothing.
'No, Mom,' Wally said to his mother respectfully- not just because he was educated and polite (he could have taught tennis and manners at the Haven Club, and taught them well), but also because he knew his mother, Olive Worthington, hadn't 'married into' anything more than a little working cash. The work had been supplied {162} by her; Wilbur Larch would have respected that.
The sadness was that Olive, too, misjudged poor Senior, who was only a tangential victim of alcoholism and a nearly complete victim of Alzheimer's disease.
There are things that the societies of towns know about you, and things that they miss. Senior Worthington was baffled by his own deterioration, which he also believed to be the result of the evils of drink. When he drank less-and still couldn't remember in the morning what he'd said or done the evening before; still saw no relenting of his remarkable speeded-up process of aging; still hopped from one activity to the next, leaving a jacket in one place, a hat in another, his car keys in the lost jacket-when he drank less and still behaved like a fool, this bewildered him to such an extreme that he began to drink more. In the end, he would be a victim of both Alzheimer's disease and alcoholism; a happy drunk, with unexplained plunges of mood. In a better, and betterinformed world, he would have been cared for like the nearly faultless patient that he was.
In this one respect Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock resembled St. Cloud's: there was no saving Senior Worthington from what was wrong with him, as surely as there had been no saving Fuzzy Stone.
In 193-, Homer Wells began Gray's Anatomy-at the beginning. He began with osteology, the skeleton. He began with bones. In 194-, he was making his third journey through Gray's Anatomy, some of which he shared with Melony. Melony showed a wayward concentration, though she confessed interest in the complexity of the nervous system, specifically the description of the twelfth or hypoglossal nerve, which is the motor nerve of the tongue.
'What's a motor nerve?' Melony asked, sticking out her tongue. Homer tried to explain, but he felt tired. He was making his sixth journey through David Copperfield, his seventh through Great Expectations, his fourth through {163} Jane Eyre. Only last night he had come to a part that always made Melony cringe-which made Homer anxious.
It's near the beginning of Chapter Twelve, when Jane shrewdly observes, 'It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.'
'Just remember, Sunshine,' Melony interrupted him. 'As long as I stay, you stay. A promise is a promise.'
But Homer Wells was tired of Melony making him anxious. He repeated the line, this time reading it as if he were personally delivering a threat.
'It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.' Mrs. Grogan looked taken aback at the ominousness in his voice.
He copied the line in a handwriting nearly as orderly and cramped as Dr. Larch's; Homer typed it on Nurse Angela's typewriter, making only a few mistakes. And when Wilbur Larch was 'just resting' in the dispensary, Homer crept up on the tired saint and placed the piece of paper with the quotation from Jane Eyre on Dr. Larch's rising and falling chest. Dr. Larch felt less threatened by the actual text of the quotation than he felt a general unease: that Homer knew Dr. Larch's ether habit so exactly that the boy could approach his bed undetected. Or am I using a little more of this stuff than I used to? Larch wondered.
Was it meant as a message that Homer had used the ether cone to hold the Jane Eyre quotation to Larch's chest?
'History,' wrote Dr. Larch, 'is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes.'
He may have been referring to something as small as the apostrophe that someone added to the original St. Clouds. His point is also illuminated by the case of the heart in both Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock, a case similar in error to how Melody became forever a Melony. 164 The explorer credited with the discovery of the fine, pretty harbor at Heart's Haven-a seafaring man named Reginald Hart-was also the first settler of Heart's Rock to clear land and try to be a farmer. The general illiteracy of the times, and of the times following Reginald Hart's death, prevailed; no one knew of any written difference between one heart and another. The first settlers of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock, probably never knowing that Reginald Hart had been given the name of a deer, quite comfortably named their towns after an organ.
'A hollow muscular organ of conical form,' as Homer Wells could recite, by rote, from Gray's Anatomy, '… enclosed in the cavity of the PERICARDIUM.' By 194-Homer had looked at each of the hearts in the three cadavers Dr. Larch had acquired for him (each cadaver outliving its usefulness for exploratory purposes in about two years' time).
The cadavers were female; it hardly served Dr. Larch's purpose-in the process of educating Homer Wells in obstetrical procedure and procedures of a related kind-to have his student examining male cadavers. There was always a problem getting a body (once one was delivered in water that was supposed to be ice; another had to be disposed of because the embalming fluid had clearly been old or too weak). Homer remembered the three cadavers distinctly. It was not until the third body that he developed enough of a sense of humor to give the body a name; they called her Clara after David Copperfield's wimpish mother-that poor, weak woman who'd allowed herself and young David to be so bullied by the terrible Mr. Murdstone.
'You should call her Jane,' Melony advised Homer; Melony was alternately sick of Jane Eyre and completely identified with her.
'I could have called her Melony,' Homer responded, but humor was not reliably to be found in Melony, who preferred to play her own jokes.
Body number two provided Homer with the essential {165}practice that prepared him for his first Caesarean section; for that one, he had felt Dr. Larch's eyes so riveted to his hands that his hands seemed not his own-they moved with such smooth purpose that Homer was sure that Dr. Larch had discovered a way to make that perfect, no-bigger-than-necessary incision in the uterus with his mind (no need for using hands, at all).
The harangue that developed at the railroad station over the arrival of the body Homer would call Clara gave Homer his first experience with eclamptic convulsions -or puerperal convulsions, as they were called in Wilbur Larch's days at the Boston Lying-in. At the exact moment that Dr. Larch was at the railroad station arguing with the stationm aster about the release Form for the unfortunate Clara, Homer Wells was at St. Cloud's trying to locate, exactly, the inferior thyroid vein on body number two. Although he didn't know it, lie had a good excuse for having, momentarily, lost his way; body number two was wholly shopworn, and many things were hard to locate within it. He would have consulted his Gray's in another minute or two, but just then Nurse Edna burst upon him-shrieking (as she always did when she saw Homer with body number two; it was as if she'd caught him up to something with Melony).
'Oh, Homer!' she cried, but she couldn't speak; she flapped her arms in an agitated, chickenlike fashion before she managed to point Homer in the direction of the dispensary. He ran there as quickly as he could, finding a woman lying on the dispensary floor-her eyes staring so wildly and so steadily unseeing that at first he mistook her for the body he knew Dr. Larch was trying to liberate from the stationmaster. Then the woman began to move, and Homer Wells knew she was quite close to becoming a cadaver; the convulsions began with a twitching in her face, but they spread rapidly through all the muscles of the frame. Her face, which had been flushed, turned a shiny blue-black; her heels struck the floor with such force that both her shoes flew off-{166}Homer saw instantly that her ankles werer'Kugely swollen. Her jaws were set; her mouth and chin were wet with a frothy spittle, laced with blood because she'd bitten her tongue-which was at least preferable to her swallowing it. Her respiration was hardworking; she expelled air with a hiss, and the spray splashed Homer's face with a violence he'd not felt since he stood back from the bank and watched therWinkles being swept away.
'Eclampsia,' Homer Wells said to Nurse Edna. It derives from the Greek; Dr. Larch had told him that the word refers to the flashes of light a patient sees at the onset of the puerperal convulsions. With any sensible prenatal care, Homer knew, eclampsia was usually avoidable. There was an easily detected rise in blood pressure, the presence of albumin in the urine, swelling of the feet and hands, headaches, vomiting, and of course those spots and flashes in the eyes. Bed rest, diet, reduction of fluid intake, and free catharsis usually worked; but if they didn't, the bringing on of premature labor almost always prevented the convulsions and often produced a living baby.
But the patients Dr. Larch saw were not women who sought or even understood prenatal care. This patient was very last-minute-even by the standards of Dr. Larch's practice.
'Doctor Larch is at the railroad station,' Homer told Nurse Edna calmly. 'Someone has to get him. You and Nurse Angela should stay to help me.'
In lifting the woman and carrying her to the delivery room, Homer felt the woman's moist, cold skin and was reminded of body number one and body number two (the latter, he recalled, had been left on the examining table in the room now used for his anatomical studies, near the boys' division kitchen). In the last century, Homer Wells knew, a doctor would have given this patient an ether anesthesia and would have dilated the mouth of the wornb to effect a forcible delivery-a method that usually caused the patient's death.{167}
At the Boston Lying-in Wilbur Larch had learned to fortify the heart muscle with doses of digitalis, which helped prevent the development of fluid in the lungs. Homer listened to the woman's watery breathing and realized he might be too late, even if he correctly remembered the procedure. He knew that one had to be conservative with eclampsia; if he was forced to deliver the woman prematurely, he must allow the labor to develop as naturally as possible. The woman just then moaned; her head and heels whacked the operating table in unison, her pregnant belly seemed to levitate-and one of her arms, without will, without purposeful direction, flew up and hit Homer in the face.
He knew that sometimes a woman had only one puerperal convulsion; it was recorded that a few patients had survived as many as a hundred. What Homer didn't know, of course, was whether he was observing this woman's second convulsion or her ninetieth.
When Nurse Edna returned to the delivery room with Nurse Angela, Homer instructed the nurses to administer morphine to the patient; Homer himself injected some magnesium sulphate into a vein, to lower blood pressure at least temporarily. In the interval between her last and what Homer knew would be her next convulsion, he asked Nurse Edna to take a urine sample from the woman and he asked Nurse Angt:la to examine the specimen for traces of albumin. He asked the woman to tell him how many convulsions she had already suffered but although the woman was coherent and could even answer questions intelligently, she couldn't pinpioint the number of convulsions. Typically, she remembered nothing of the convulsions themselves-only their onset and their draining aftereffects. She estimated she was at least a month away from expecting her baby.
At the onset of her next convulsion, Homer gave the woman a light ether sedation, hoping he might reduce the violence of the fit. This fit was different in character from the last, though Homer doubted it was any less {168}violent; the woman's motion was slower, but-if anything -more powerful. Homer lay across her chest, but her body abruptly jack-knifed-lifting him off the operating table. In the next interval, while the woman was still relaxed under the ether sedation, Homer's investigations showed him that the neck of the patient's womb was not shortened, its mouth was not dilated; labor hadn't begun. He contemplated beginning it, prayed that he wouldn't have to make this decision, wondered why it was taking so long to find Dr. Larch.
An orphan with a bad cold had been assigned to locate Larch at the railroad station; he returned with a thick rivulet of snot in each nostril and strung across one cheek, like a welt from a whiplash. His name (Nurse Angela's, of course) was Curly Day, and he wetly announced that Dr. Larch had boarded the train to Three Mile Falls-in order to chase down and capture the body that the stationmaster (in a pique of perversity prompted by religious outrage) had forwarded to the next stop. The stationmaster had simply refused to accept the cadaver. Larch, in a rage now surpassing the stationmaster's, had taken the next train after it.
'Oh-oh,' Nurse Edna said.
Homer gave his patient her first dose of digitalis; he would repeat this periodically until he could see its effects on the woman's heartbeat. While he waited with the woman for her next seizure, he asked her if she had decided to put her baby up for adoption, or if she had come to St. Cloud's only because it was the nearest hospital -in short, was this a baby she very much wanted, or one she didn't want?
'You mean it's going to die?' the woman asked.
He gave her Dr. Larch's best 'Of course not!' kind of smile; but what he thought was that it was likely the baby would die if he didn't deliver it soon, and likely the woman would die if he rushed the delivery.
The woman said she had hitchhiked to St. Cloud's because there was no one in her life to bring her, and that {169}she didn't want to keep the baby-but that she wanted it, very much, to live.
'Right,' Homer said, as if this decision would have been his own.
'You seem kinda young,' the woman said. I'm not going to die, am I?' she asked.
'That's right, you're not,' said Homer Wells, using Dr. Larch's smile again; it at least made him look older.
But in twelve hours, when Dr. Larch had not returned and when the woman was arching her body on the operating table, suffering what was her seventh seizure, Homer Wells could not remember the exact expression that produced the reassuring smile.
He looked at Nurse Angela, who was trying to help him hold the woman, and he said, 'I'm going to start her labor. I'm going to rupture the bag of waters.'
I'm sure you know what's best, Homer,' Nurse; Angela said, but her own imitation of Dr. Larch's confidenceinspiring smile was very poor.
In twelve more hours the patient's uterine contractions commenced; Homer Wells would never remember the exact number of convulsions the woman experienced in that time. He was beginning to worry more about Dr. Larch than about the woman, and he had to fight down his fear of something happening to Dr. Larch in order to concentrate on his job.
Another ten hours after the onset of the woman's contractions, she delivered herself of a boy-four pounds, eleven ounces, in good condition. The mother's improvement was rapid-as Homer had expected. There were no more convulsions, her blood pressure returned to normal, the traces of albumin in her urine were minimal.
In the evening of the day after the morning when he had gone to the station to retrieve the body that the stationmaster would neither keep nor relinquish, Wilbur Larch-together with the rescued cadaver soon to be called Clara-returned tired and triumphant to St. Cloud's. He had followed the body to Three Mi3le Falls, {170} but the stationmaster there had registered such horror that the body was never unloaded from the train; it had traveled on, and Larch had traveled after it, arriving at the next, and at the next station, always a train behind. No one wanted Clara, except to put her in the ground, and it was thought that this should not be the responsibility of a stationmaster-who would surely not accept, at his station, a body that no one came forward for. Clara was a body clearly not intended for the ground. The unearthly sloshing sound of the embalming fluid, the leathery skin, the outer-space colors of the occasionally exposed arteries and veins-'Whatever that is, I don't want it here,' said the stationmaster in Three Mile Falls.
And so Clara went from Three Mile Falls to Misery Gore, to Moxie Gore, to East Moxie-on and on. Larch got in a terrible row with the stationmaster in Harmony, Maine, where Clara had stopped for a few minutes – giving the railroad personnel the fright of their lives -before she'd been sent on.
That was my body!' Larch screamed. 'It had my name on it, it is intended for the instruction of a student of medicine who is training with me in my hospital in Saint Cloud's. It's mine!' Larch yelled. 'Why are you sending it in the wrong direction? Why are you sending it away from me?'
'It came here, didn't it?' the stationmaster said. 'It didn't get taken at Saint Cloud's, it appears to me.'
'The stationmaster in Saint Cloud's is crazy!' Larch hollered; he gave a little hop-a little jump, which made him appear a little crazy, too.
'Maybe he is, maybe he isn't,' said the stationmaster in Harmony. 'All I know is, the body come here and I sent it on.'
'For Christ's sake, it's not haunted!' Larch said with a wail.
'Didn't say it was,' said the stationmaster. 'Maybe it is, maybe it isn't-wasn't here long enough to tell.' {171}
'Idiots!' Larch shouted, and took the train. In Cornville (where the train didn't stop), Wilbur Larch screamed out the window at a couple of potato farmers who were waving at the train. 'Maine is full of morons!' he yelled, riding on.
In Skowhegan, he asked the stationmaster just where in Hell he thought the damn body was going. 'Bath, I suppose,' the Skowhegan stationmaster said, That's where it came from, and if nobody wants it at the other end, that's where it's going back to.'
'Somebody does want it at the other end!' screamed Wilbur Larch. 'I want it.'
The body had been sent to the hospital in St. Cloud's from the hospital in Bath; a woman who was a willing body-donor had died, and the pathologist at Bath Memorial Hospital knew that Wilbur Larch was looking for a fresh female.
Dr. Larch caught up with Clara in Augusta; Augusta was very sophisticated, for Maine, and the stationmaster simply saw that the body was going the wrong way. 'Of course it's going the wrong way!' Wilbur Larch cried.
'Damndest thing,' the stationmaster said. 'Don't they speak English up in your parts?'
'They don't hear English!' Larch yelled. Td like to send a cadaver to every damn one of those towns-one a day!'
'That sure would rile up a bunch of folks,' the stationmaster said dryly, wondering how 'riled up' Dr. Larch was going to get.
On the long ride back to St. Cloud's with Claira, Dr. Larch didn't calm down. In each of the towns that offended him-in Harmony, especially, but in East Moxie and in Moxie Gore, and in all the rest of them, too-he offered his opinions to the respective stationmasters while the train paused at the stations. 'Moronville,' he told the stationmaster in Harmony. 'Tell me one thing that's harmonious here-one thing!'
It was pretty harmonious before you and your damn {172}body got here,' the stationmaster said.
'Moronville!' Larch shouted out the window as the train pulled away. 'Idiotsburg!'
To his great disappointment, when the train arrived in St. Cloud's, the stationmaster was not there. 'Lunch,' someone told Dr. Larch, but it was early evening.
'Perhaps you mean supper?' Dr. Larch asked. 'Perhaps the stationmaster doesn't know the difference,' he said nastily; he hired the help of two louts to lug Clara up the hill to the boys' division.
He was surprised by the disarray in which Homer Wells had left body number two. In the excitement of the emergency, Homer had forgotten to put body number two away, and Larch ordered the two oafs to carry Clara in there-not preparing the simpletons for the shopworn cadaver exposed on the table. One of the clods ran into a wall. Terrible crying out and jumping around! Larch went shouting through the orphanage, looking for Homer.
'Here I am, running after a new body for you-across half the damn state of Maine-and you leave a mess like that just lying out in the open where any fool can fall upon it! Homer!' Dr. Larch yelled. 'Goddamn it,' he muttered to himself, 'there is no way a teen-ager is going to be an adult ahead of his own, good time-no way you can expect a teen-ager to accept adult responsibilities, to do an adult's Goddamn job\' He went muttering all over the boys' division, looking for Homer Wells, but Homer had collapsed on Larch's white-iron bed in the dispensary and had fallen into the deepest sleep. The aura of ether surrounding that spare bed under that eastern window might have enhanced Homer's drowsiness, but he scarcely needed ether to sleep; he had been up for nearly forty hours with the eclampsia patient-delivering her and her child.
Nurse Angela interrupted Dr. Larch before he could find Homer Wells and wake him up.
'What's happening around here?' Larch demanded to {173}know. 'Is no one the least bit interested in where in Hell I've been? And why has that boy left his body looking like a war casualty? I go away overnight and just look at this place.'
But Nurse Angela straightened him out. She told him it had been the worst case of puerpural convulsions she'd ever seen, and she had seen some-in her time. Wilbur Larch had seen some, too. In his days at the Boston Lying-in, he'd lost a lot of women to eclampsia, and even in 194-, about a quarter of the deaths in childbirth were credited to these convulsions.
'Homer did this?' Larch asked Nurse Angela a;id Nurse Edna; he was reading the report; he had examined the mother, who was fine, and the premature baby boy, who was normal and healthy.
'He was almost as calm as you, Wilbur,' Nurse Edna said admiringly. 'You can be real proud of him.'
'He is an angel, in my opinion,' Nurse Angela said.
'He looked a little grirn when he had to break the water,' Nurse Edna remembered, 'but he did everything just right.'
'He was as sure as snow,' Nurse Angela said.
He did almost everything right, Wilbur Ls.rch was thinking; it really was amazing. Larch thought it was a slight error that Homer had failed to record the exact number of convulsions in the second twelve-hour period (especially after correctly counting them in the first twelve hours), and Homer had not mentioned the number or the severity of the convulsions (or if there were any) in the ten-hour period after the patient's labor contractions began and before she delivered. Minor criticism. Wilbur Larch was a good teacher; he knew that this criticism was better withheld. Homer Wells had performed all the hard parts correctly; his procedure had been perfect.
'He's not even twenty-is he?' Larch asked. But Nurse Edna had gone to bed, she was exhausted; in her dream she would mingle Homer's heroism with her already con-{174} siderable love for Larch; she would sleep very well. Nurse Angela was still up, in her office, and when Dr. Larch asked her why the premature baby had not been named, she told Larch that it was Nurse Edna's turn and Nurse Edna had been too tired.
'Well, it's just a matter of form,' said Wilbur Larch.! 'You name it, then-I want it named. It won't kill you to go out of turn, will it?'
But Nurse Angela had a better idea. It was Homer's baby-he had saved it, and the mother. Homer Wells should name this one, Nurse Angela said.
'Yes, you're right, he should,' Dr. Larch replied, filling with pride in his wonderful creation.
Homer Wells would wake to a day of naming. In the same day he would be faced with naming body number three and his first orphan. He would name the new body Clara, and what else could he have named a baby boy except David Copperfield? He was reading Great Expectations at the time and he preferred Great Expectations to David Copperfield as a book. But he would not name anyone Pip, and he didn't care for the character of Pip as much as he cared for little David. It was an easy decision, and he woke that morning very refreshed and capable of more demanding decisions than that one.
He had slept almost through the night. He woke only once on the dispensary bed, aware that Dr. Larch was back; Larch was in the room probably looking at him, but Homer kept his eyes closed. He somehow knew Larch was there because of the sweet scent of ether, which Larch wore like cologne, and because of the steadiness of Larch's breathing. Then he felt Larch's hand-a doctor's hand, feeling for fever-pass very lightly over his forehead. Homer Wells, not yet twenty-quite accomplished in obstetrical procedure and as knowledgeable as almost any doctor on the care of 'the female organs of generation'-lay very still, pretending to sleep.
Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Larch whisper, 'Good work, {175}Homer.' He felt a second, even lighter kiss. 'Good work, my boy,' the doctor said, and then left him.
Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried-when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch's pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.
Of course Melony had kissed him; she didn't do it much anymore, but she had. And Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had kissed him silly, but they kissed everyone. Dr. Larch had never kissed him before, and now he had kissed him twice.
Homer Wells cried because he'd never known how nice a father's kisses could be, and he cried because he doubted that Wilbur Larch would ever do it again-or would have done it, if he'd thought Homer was awake.
Dr. Larch went to marvel at the good health of the eclampsia patient and at her thriving, tiny child-who, in the morning, would become the orphan David Copperfield ('David Copperfield, Junior,' Dr. Larch would enjoy saying). Then Larch went to the familiar typewriter in Nurse Angela's office, but he couldn't write anything. He couldn't even think, he was so agitated from kissing Homer Wells. If Homer Wells had received his first fatherly kisses, Dr. Larch had given the first kisses he had ever given-fatherly, or otherwise-since the day in the Portland boardinghouse when he caught the clap from Mrs. Eames. And the kisses he gave ':o Mrs. Eaines were more in the nature of explorations than they were gifts of love. Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what will happen to me when Homer has to go?
Where he would go was hardly a place of comparable excitement, of comparable challenge, of comparable sadness, of comparable gloom; but where he would go {176}was nice, and what would Homer Wells, with his background, make of nice? Wouldn't it simply seduce him? Wouldn't anyone rather have nice?
What did Heart's Haven or Heart's Rock know of trouble, and what did anyone do there to be of use?
Yes, Olive Worthington suffered her brother Bucky's intrusions-his well-digging slime in her swimming pool and his trekking across her rugs. Big deal. Yes, Olive worried if young Wally would have gumption, if he would really learn and contribute to the apple-growing business-or would the pretty boy become, like Senior, a good-timer turning pathetic? But what were these worries compared to the business of St. Cloud's? Compared to the Lord's work and the Devil's work, weren't these concerns trivial? Wasn't life in nice places shallow?
But trouble can come to nice places, too; trouble travels, trouble visits. Trouble even takes holidays from the places where it thrives, from places like St. Cloud's. The trouble that visited Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock was a fairly trivial and common form of trouble; it began, as trouble often does, with falling in love.
'Here in St. Cloud's,' wrote Wilbur Larch, 'I don't imagine that anyone falls in love; it would be too evident a luxury, to fall in love here.' Larch didn't know that Nurse Edna had been in love with him from day one, but he was correct in supposing that it hadn't been exactly love that passed between Melony and Homer Wells. And what clung to each of them after the first passion had passed was surety not love. And that picture of Mrs. Eames's daughter with the pony's penis in her mouth: that photograph was the oldest resident of St. Cloud's -and surely it had no love in it. That picture was as far from love as Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock were from St. Cloud's.
'In other parts of the world,' wrote Wilbur Larch, I imagine that people fall in love all the time.'
If not all the time, a lot. Young Wally Worthington, {177}for example, thought he'd been in love twice before he was twenty, and once when he was twenty-one; now, in 194- (he was just three years older than Homer Wells), Wally fell full-force in loveior the fourth time. He didn't know that this time would be for keeps.
The girl young Wally's heart would select for life was a lobsterman's daughter; he was no ordinary lobsterman, and it was no surprise to anyone that he had an extraordinary daughter. Raymond Kendall was so good at lobstering that other lobstermen, through binoculars, watched him pull and bait a pot. When he changed his mooring lines, they changed theirs. When he didn't go to sea but stayed at home, or at his dock mending pots, they stayed home, too, and mended theirs. But they couldn't match him; he had so many pots in the water l:hat his personalized black and orange buoys gave the Heart's Haven harbor the razzle-dazzle of collegiate competition. Once a contingent of Yale men from the Haven Club beseeched Raymond Kendall to change his colors to blue and white, but Kendall only muttered that he didn't have time for games. Other contingents from the Haven Club would beseech him; the subject was rarely the color of his lobster buoys.
The Haven Club faced the far jetty of Heart's Haven Harbor, where Raymond Kendall's lobster pound and dock were long established. Kendall lived above the pound, which might have enticed a more superficial man to comply with the Haven Club's requests that he beautify his immediate environs. His establishment was considered, by summer people's standards, an eyesore on a harborfront of otherwise natural and/or expensively groomed beauty. Even his bedroom window we.s hung with buoys in various stages of repainting. The lobster pots undergoing repairs were piled so high on his dock that it was impossible, from shore, to see if boats were moored on the far side of the dock. The parking lot for the lobster pound was nearly full-and not of customers' cars (there was never enough room for the customers {178}); it was full of the various trucks and cars that Raymond Kendall was 'working on,' and full of the vast and oily inboard engines for his lobster boats.
Everything surrounding the harborfront property of Raymond Kendall was teeming with a messy mechanic's condition of total overhaul; everything was in progress, incomplete, dismantled, still wet, waiting for parts – and, for noise, there were the constant grinding sounds of the generator that ran the water tanks for the lobsters in the pound and the greasy belching of an inboard engine idling at the dock. And then there was the smell: of tarred rope, of that slightly-different-from-fishy fishiness that a lobster has, of the fuel and motor oil that slicked the ocean at his dock (which was matted with seaweed, studded with periwinkles, festooned with yellow oilskin suits hung out to dry). Raymond Kendall lived his work; he liked his work in evidence around him; the jetty end of Heart's Haven Harbor was his artist's studio.
He was not just an artist with lobster, he also was an expert at fixing things-at keeping everything anyone else would throw away running. If asked, Raymond Kendall wouldn't tell you he was a lobsterman; it was not that he was ashamed of it, but he was prouder of his qualities as a mechanic. 'I'm just a tinkerer,' he liked to say.
And if the Haven Club complained about the constant evidence of his tinkering, which they strongly felt tarnished their splendid view, they didn't complain too much; Raymond Kendall fixed what belonged to them, too. For example, he repaired the filter system for their swimming pool-in the days when no one had pools, when no one else would have touched it and Ray Kendall himself had never seen a filter system before. 'I suppose it just does what you'd think it should,' he said, taking ten minutes with the job.
It was rumored that the only thing Ray Kendall threw away was uneaten food, which he threw overboard or off {179}the end of his dock. 'J us t: feeding the lobsters, which feed me,' he would say to anyone who complained. 'Just feeding the sea gulls, who are hungrier than you and me.'
It was rumored he had more money than Senior Worthington; there was almost no evidence of his spending any-except on his daughter. Like the children of the Haven Club members, she went to a private boarding school; and Raymond Kendall paid the considerable annual dues for a Haven Club membership-not for himself (he went to the club only on request: to fix things) but for his daughter, who'd learned to swim in the heated pool there, and who'd taken her tennis lessons on the same courts graced by young Wally Worthington. Kendall's daughter had her own car, too-it looked out of place in the Haven Club parking lot. It was a lobsterpound-parking-lot sort of car, a mishmash of the parts that were still serviceable from other cars; one of its fenders was unpainted and was attached with wires; it had a Ford insignia on its hood and a Chrysler emblem on the trunk, and the passenger-side door was sealed completely shut. However, its battery never went dead in the Haven Club lot; it was never this relic that wouldn't start; when one of the Haven Club members had a car that v/ouldn't start, he went looking for Raymond Kendall's daughter, who kept jumper cables in her sturdy wreck and had been taught by her father how to use them.
Some of the fabulous money Raymond Kendall was rumored to have, and to hoard, was paid him as salary by Olive Worthington; in addition to his lobstering, Ray Kendall kept the vehicles and machinery of the Ocean View Orchards running. Olive Worthington paid him a full foreman's salary because he knew almost as much about apples as he knew about lobsters (and he was indispensable as the farm's mechanic), but Ray refused to work more than two hours a day. He picked his own two hours, too-sometimes coming first thing, saying it was a bad time to go to sea, and sometimes showing up at the {180} end of the workday, just in time to hear the orchardmen's complaints about what was wrong with the nozzle of the Hardie or with the pump of the Bean sprayer, or what was plugged in the carburetor of the Deere tractor, or out of tune with the International Harvester. He saw instantly what was crooked in the mower blades, fucked up in the forklift, jammed in the conveyor, dead in the pickup, or out of alignment in the cider mill. Raymond Kendall did in two hours what another mechanic would have spent a day doing a half-assed job of, and he almost never came to Olive and told her that she had to get a new this or a new that.
It was always Olive who made the first suggestion: that something should be replaced.
'Isn't the clutch on the Deere always in need of adjustment, Ray?' she would politely ask him. 'Would you recommend its replacement?'
But Raymond Kendall was a surgeon among tinkerers -he had a doctor's hearty denial of death-and he found replacing something an admission of weakness, of failure. He would almost always say, 'Well, now, Olive -if I fixed it before, I can fix it again. I can always just goon fixing it.'
Olive respected Raymond Kendall's contempt for people who didn't know their own work and had 'no capacity for work of any kind, anyhow.' She agreed with him completely, and she also appreciated that he never included in his contempt either Senior or her father, Bruce Bean. Besides, Senior Worthington knew enough about managing money with his left hand that he'd been very successful without working more than an hour a day-usually on the telephone.
'The crop,' Olive would say, of her beloved apples, 'can survive bad weather even at blossom time.' By which she meant wind; a stiff offshore breeze would keep Ira Titcomb's bees in their hives, and the wild bees would be blown back into the woods, where they pollinated everything but apple trees. 'The crop can even survive a {181} bad harvest,' Olive said. She might have meant rain, when the fruit is slippery, gets dropped, gets bruised, is then good only for cider; or even a hurricane, which is a real danger for a coastal orchard, 'The crop couid even survive something happening to me,' Olive claimed-at which modesty both Senior Worthington and young Wally would voice protest. 'But what the crop could never survive,' Olive would say, 'is losing Ray Kendall.' She meant that without Raymond nothing would work, or that they'd have to buy new everything, which soon wouldn't work any better than the old stuff that only Ray could keep running.
'I doubt very much, Mother,' said young Wally, 'if either Heart's Haven or Heart's Rock could survive without Raymond Kendall.'
'I'll drink to that,' Senior Worthington said, and promptly did so, causing Olive to look tragic and inspiring young Wally to change the subject.
Despite the fact that Ray Kendall worked two hours every day at Ocean View, he was never seen to eat an apple; only rarely did he eat lobster (he preferred chicken or pork chops, or even hamburger). During a Haven Club regatta, several sailors claimed that they could smell Ray Kendall frying hamburger aboard his lobster boat while he was pulling in his pots.
But whatever legend of the work ethic Ray represented, and whatever griping was done on account of the evidence of his work with which Raymond Kendall preferred to surround himself, no fault could be found with his beautiful daughter-except the fault of her name, which was not her fault (who would ever have named herself a Candice, and therefore been a Candy to all?) and which everyone knew had been the name of her dead mother, and therefore was not the mother's fault, either. Candice 'Candy' Kendall was named after her mother, who had died in childbirth. Raymond had named his daughter in memory of his departed wife, whom everyone had liked and who, in her day, had kept the environs {182} of the lobster pound and the dock slightly better picked up. Who could find fault with any name that was given out of love?
You had only to know her to know that she was not a Candy; she was lovely, but never falsely sweet; she was a great and natural beauty, but no crowd-pleaser. She had daily reliability written all over her, she was at once friendly and practical-she was courteous, energetic, and substantial in an argument without ever being shrill. She complained only about her name, and she was always good-humored about it (she would never hurt her father's feelings-or anyone else's feelings, willingly). She appeared to combine her father's enraptured embrace of the work ethic with the education and the refinements he had allowed her-she took to both labor and sophistication with ease. If other girls at the Haven Club (or in the rest of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock) were jealous of the attention young Wally Worthington gave to her, there was still no one who disliked her. If she'd been born an orphan, even at St. Cloud's, half the population there would have fallen in love with her.
Even Olive Worthington liked her, and Olive was suspicious of the girls who dated Wally; she questioned what they wanted from him. She could never forget how much she had wanted to get out of her life and into a Worthington's green and apple-bright existence at Ocean View, and this memory of her younger self gave Olive an eye for girls who might be more interested in the Ocean View life than they were interested in Wally. Olive knew this wasn't the case with Candy, who seemed to think that her own life above Ray Kendall's crawling, live-lobster pound was perfect; she was as fond of her father's orneriness as she was deservedly proud of his industry. She was well cared for by the latter. She wasn't looking for money, and she preferred taking Wally for an ocean swim-off her father's treacherous and crowded dock-to swimming in the Haven Club pool or in the Worthingtons' private swimming pool, where she knew {183} she was welcome. In truth, Olive Worthington thought that Candy Kendall might be too good for her son, whom she knew to be rather unsettled, or at least not industrious-she would grant you he was charming and genuinely good-natured.
And then there was the uncertain pain that Candy caused in Olive's memory of her mother, Maucl (frozen among her cosmetics and clams): Olive envied Candy her perfect love of her mother (whom she'd never seen); the girl's absolute goodness made Olive feel guilty for how much she despised her own origins (her mother's; silence, her father's failure, her brother's vulgarity).
Candy worshiped at the little shrines to her mother that Raymond Kendall constructed-there were actual altarpieces assembled-all over the upstairs rooms of the lobster pound, where they lived above the gurgle of the lobster tank. And everywhere were gathered the photographs of Candy's young mother, many taken with Candy's young father (who was so unrecognizably youthful, whose smile was so unrecognizably constant in the pictures that Candy looked at Ray, at times, as if he were as much a stranger to her as her mother). Candy's mother was said to have smoothed out Ray's rough edges. She'd had a sunny spirit, she'd kept on top of everything, she'd had the boundless energy that Raymond Kendall possessed for his work and Candy had in abundance for everything. On the coffee table, in the kitchen, alongside a disassembled magneto case and ignition system (for the Evinrude), was a triptych of pictures of Ray and Candice at their wedding, which had been the only time Ray Kendall had attended an event at the Haven Club when he was not dressed to repa ir something.
In Ray's bedroom, on the night table, next to the broken toggles witch to the Johnson (the inboard Johnson; there was an outboard, too), was a picture of Candice and Ray-both in their oilskin slickers, both pulling pots, on a rough sea (and it was clear to anyone, espe-{184}cially to Candy, that Candice was pregnant and hard at work).
In her own bedroom, Candy kept the picture of her mother when her mother had been Candy's age (which was Homer Wells's age, exactly): young Candice Talbot, of the Heart's Haven Talbots-the long-standing Haven Club Talbots. £he was in a long white dress (for tennis, of all things!), and she looked just like Candy. The picture was taken the summer she met Ray (an older boy, strong and dark and determined to fix everything, to make everything work); if he had seemed a hick, or a little too serious, he was at least not grim about his ambitions, and alongside him the boys at the Haven Club had appeared as court dandies, as spoiled, upper-class fops.
Candy had her mother's blondness; it was darker than Wally's blondness-and much darker than her mother's and than Olive Worthington's former blondness. She had her father's dark skin and dark brown eyes, and her father's height. Ray Kendall was a tall man (a disadvantage for a lobsterman, and for a mechanic, he used to say good-naturedly, because of the strain on the lower back when pulling lobster pots-there is nearly constant lifting in that work-and because of a mechanic's need to crawl under and bend over things). Candy was extremely tall for a woman, which intimidated Olive Worthington -just a bit-but was felt by Olive as only a mild flaw in Olive's near-perfect satisfaction with Candy Kendall as the correct match for Wally.
Olive Worthington was fairly tall herself (taller than Senior, especially when Senior was staggering), and she looked in a somewhat unfriendly fashion upon everyone who was taller than she. Her son, Wally, was taller than she, too, which Olive still found difficult at times- especially when she desired to reprimand him.
'Is Candy taller than you, Wally?' she asked him once, a sudden alarm in her voice.
'No, Mom, we're exactly the same height,' Wally told his mother. That was another thing that slightly bothered {185}her about the two of them being together: they sfiemed so alike physically. Was their attraction to each other a form of narcissism? Olive worried. And since each of them was an only child, were they seeing in each other the brother or sister they always wanted? Wilbur Larch would have got along with Olive Worthington; she was a born worrier. Together they could have outworried the rest of the world.
They shared the concept that there was a 'rest of the world,' by which they meant the whole rest of the world-world outside their making. They were both smart enough to know why they feared this other world so much: they fully understood that, despite their considerable efforts, they were only marginally in control of the worlds of their own delicate making.
When Candy Kendall and Wally Worthington fell in love with each other, in the summer of 194-, everyone in Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock always knew they would-it was a wonder only that it had taken them this long to discover it themselves. For years, both towns had thought them perfect for each other. Even crusty Raymond Kendall approved. Ray thought Wally was unfocused, but that was not the same as lazy, and anyone could see the boy was good-hearted. Ray also approved of Wally's mother; he had a thorough liking for the way Olive Worthington respected -work.
Everyone felt sorry for how out of it poor Senior seemed, how his drinking (they thought) had aged him overnight. 'It won't be long, Alice, before the guy's pissing his pants in public,' the charmless Bucky Bean said to Olive.
And Candy thought that Olive Worthington would be a perfect mother-in-law. When Candy dreamed of her own mother-grown older than she'd been allowed to grow in this life; grown naturally older in a better world -she always thought her mother would have aged to resemble Olive Worthington. Candy hoped, at least, {186}that her mother would have managed Olive's refinement, if not perhaps her college-learned New British. Candy would be going to college in a year, she assumed, and she had no intentions of learning an accent there. But except for the accent, Candy thought Olive Worthington was wonderful; it was sad about Senior, but the man was certainly sweet.
So everyone was happy with this love affair that was as certain to become a marriage made in heaven as any love affair Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock had seen. It was understood that Wally would finish college first, and that Candy would be allowed to finish college-if she wanted to-before they got married. But with Olive Worthington's instincts for worry, one might have assumed that Olive would have foreseen the possible causes for a change of plans. After all, it was 194-; there was a war in Europe; there were many people who thought that more than Europe would be involved before long. But Olive had a mother's wish to keep war out of her mind.
Wilbur Larch had the war in Europe very much in his mind; he had been in the last war, and he foresaw that if there was another war, it might coincide with Homer Wellg's being the right age to go. Since that would be the wrong age to be, the good doctor had already taken somepains to see that Homer Wells wouldn't have to go to a war, if there was one.
Larch was, after all, the historian of St. Cloud's; he wrote the only records that were kept there; he usually wrote the not-so-simple history of the place but he had tried his hand at fiction, too. In the case of Fuzzy Stone, for example-and in the other, very few cases of orphans who had died in his care-Wilbur Larch hadn't liked the actual endings, hadn't wanted to record the actual outcomes to those small, foreshortened lives. Wasn't it fair if Larch took liberties-if he occasionally indulged himself with happy endings? In the case of the few who had died, Wilbur Larch {187} made up a longer life for them. For example, the history of F. Stone read like a case study of what Wilbur Larch wished for Homer Wells. Following Fuzzy's most successful adoption (every member of the adoptive family was scrupulously described) and the most successful treatment and cure imaginable of Fuzzy's respiratory difficulties, the young man would pursue an education at none other than Bowdoin College (Wilbur Larch's own alma mater) and study medicine at Harvard Medical School-he would even follow Larch's footsteps to internships at Mass General and at the Boston Lying-in. Larch intended to make a devoted and skilled obstetrician out of Fuzzy Stone; the orphan's fictional history was as carefully done as everything Wilbur Larch did-allowing a possible exception for his use of ether, and Larch was especially pleased to note that some of his fictional history was more convincing than what had actually happened to some of the others.
Snowy Meadows, for example, would be adopted by a family in Bangor by the name of Marsh. Who would believe that a Meadows became a Marsh? Wilbur Larch was pleased with himself for making up better stories than that. The Marshes were in the furniture business, and Snowy (who had been unimaginatively named Robert) would attend the University of Maine only briefly before marrying some local flower and going into the Marsh family furniture business as a salesman.
'It's for keeps,' Snowy would write Dr. Larch, about the girl who caused him to drop out of school. 'And I really love the furniture business!'
Whenever he wrote to Dr. Larch, Snowy Meadows, alias Robert Marsh, would always ask, 'Say, what's happened to Homer Wells?' The next thing you know, Larch thought, Snowy Meadows will suggest a reunion! Larch grumbled to himself for days, trying to think of what to say to Snowy Meadows about Homer; he would have liked to brag about Homer's perfect procedure with the eclampsia patient, but Larch was aware that his training {188} of Homer Wells-and the business of the Lord's work arid the Devil's work in St. Cloud's-would not meet with everyone's approval.
'Homer is still with us,' Larch would write to Snowy, ambiguously. Snowy is a sneaky one, Larch concluded -Snowy Meadows also never failed to ask, in each of his letters, about Fuzzy Stone.
'What's happening with Fuzzy, these days?' Snowy always asked, and Wilbur Larch would carefully check the history he had written for Fuzzy-just to keep Snowy up to date.
Larch ignored Snowy's requests for Fuzzy Stone's address. Dr. Larch was convinced that the young furniture salesman, Robert Marsh, was a dogged sort of fool, who-if he had any of the other orphans' addresses- would bother everyone about starting an Orphan Club or an Orphan Society. Larch even complained to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela about Snowy Meadows, saying, 'I wish someone out of Maine had adopted that one, someone far away. That Snowy Meadows is so stupid, he writes to me as if I ran a boarding school! The next thing you know, he'll expect me to publish an alumni magazine!'
This was a somewhat unfeeling remark to make to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela, Larch realized later. These two dear but sentimental ladies would have jumped at the idea of an alumni magazine; they missed every orphan they ever gave away. If things were up to them, there would be reunions planned every year. Every month! Larch thought, and groaned.
He lay down in the dispensary. He thought about a slight modification he had been shrewd enough to make in the history of Homer Wells; he would tell Homer about it one day, if the situation demanded it. He was very pleased with himself for this slight fiction that he had so skillfully blended with the actual history of Homer Wells. Of course, he'd included nothing of the medical training; he had incriminated himself by what {189} he'd written about the abortions, many times, but Larch knew well enough that Homer Wells should be left out of that written history. What Wilbur Larch had written about Homer Wells was that the boy had a heart defect, a heart that was damaged and weakened from birth. Larch had even taken the trouble to make this the first entry about Homer, which necessitated his locating some older-looking paper and painstakingly revising, and retyping, all the earlier-and actual-history. But he managed to work in the heart defect in the correctly casual places. The reference was always vague and uncharacteristically lacking in medical precision; the words 'defect' and 'damaged' and 'weakened' would not have convinced a good detective, or even a good doctor, whom Wilbur Larch imagined he might one da}' need to convince. In fact, he worried a little if he could convince Homer of it-given what the boy had learned. But Larch would face that if and when the situation arose.
The situation Larch was thinking of was war, the socalled war in Europe; Larch, and many others, feared that the war wouldn't stay there. (I'm sorry, Homer,' Larch imagined having to tell the boy. 'I don't want you to worry, but you have a bad heart; it just wouldn't stand up to a war.') What Larch meant was that his own heart would never stand up to Homer Wells's going to war.
The love of Wilbur Larch for Homer Wells extended even to his tampering with history, a field wherein he was an admitted amateur, but it was nonetheless a field that he respected and also loved. (In an earlier entry in the file on Homer Wells-an entry that Dr. Larch removed, for it lent an incorrect tone of voice, or at least a tone of voice unusual for history-Dr. Larch had written: 'I love nothing or no one as much as I love Homer Wells. Period.')
Thus Wilbur Larch was more prepared for how a war could change important plans than Olive Worthington was prepared for it. The other and more probable cause for a change in the wedding plans of her son and Candy {190} Kendall-another way in which the young lovers' plans could be changed-had been foreseen by Olive. It was an unwanted pregnancy. A pity that it was not foreseen by either Candy or Wally.
Thus, when Candy got pregnant (she'd been a virgin, naturally), she and Wally were much distressed, but they were also surprised. Olive would have been distressed (had she known), but she wouldn't have been surprised. Getting pregnant would never have surprised Wilbur Larch, who knew that it happened, and happened by accident, all the time. But Candy Kendall and Wally Worthington, so full of beauty and of the moment and of their own Tightness for each other, simply couldn't believe it. They were not the sort of people who would have been ashamed or unable to tell their parents; they were simply stunned at the prospect of having to derail their perfect plans-of having to get married ahead of schedule.
Did Wally Worthington need a college degree to inherit his parents' apple orchard? Of course not. Did Candy Kendall need to go to college at all? She didn't. Wouldn't she refine herself, and educate herself, if left to her own means? Of course she would! And Wally wasn't much of a student, anyway, was he? Of course he wasn't. He was a botany major, but only at the insistence of his mother-Olive thought that the study of plants might stimulate her son to become more excited and more knowledgeable about apple-growing.
'It's just that we're not ready,' Candy said to Wally. 'I mean, we aren't, are we? Do you feel ready?'
'I love you,' Wally said. He was a brave boy, and true, and Candy-who had not cried a single tear at the surprising discovery that she was with child-loved him, too.
'But it's just not the right time for us, is it, Wally?' Candy asked him.
'I want to marry you, anytime,' he said truthfully, but he added something that she hadn't thought of. He had {191} thought of the war in Europe, even if his mother had missed it. He said, 'What if there's a war-I mean, what if we get involved in it?'
'What if what?' said Candy, truly shocked.
'I mean, if we were at war, I'd go-I'd have to, I'd want to,' Wally said. 'Only, if there was a child, it wouldn't feel right-going to a war.'
'When would it feel right to go to a. war, Wally?' Candy asked him.
'Well, I mean, I'd just have to, that's all-if we had one,' he said. 'I mean, it's our country, and bes:ides, for the experience-I couldn't miss it.'
She slapped his face, she started to cry-in a ra.ge. 'For the experience! You'd want to go to war for the experience!'
'Well, not if we had a child-that's when it wouldn't feel right,' Wally said. 'Would it?' He was about as innocent as rain, and about as thoughtless.
'What about me?' Candy asked, still shocked-and shocked, further, that she had slapped him. She put her hand very softly where his cheek was so red. 'With or without a child, what would it be like for me if you went to a war?'
'Well, it's all “What if,” isn't it?' Wally asked. 'It's just something to think about,' he added. 'About the business of the child, especially-I think. If you see what i mean,' he said.
'I think we should try not to have the baby, Candy told him.
'I won't have you going to one of those places where there's no real doctor,' Wally said.
'Of course not,' she agreed. 'But aren't there any real doctors who do it?'
'It's not what I've heard,' Wally admitted. He was too much of a gentleman to tell her what he'd heard: that there was a butcher in Cape Kenneth who did you for five hundred dollars. You went to a parking lot and put a blindfold around yourself and waited; you went alone. {192} Someone picked you up and took you to the butcher; you were brought back when the butcher was through- you were blindfolded throughout. And what was worse, you had to appear absolutely hysterical in front of some fairly dignified and local doctor before the doctor would even tell you where the parking lot was and how you got in contact with the butcher. If you didn't act upset enough, if you weren't completely crazy, the doctor wouldn't put you in touch with the butcher.
That was the story Wally had heard, and he wanted no part of any of it for Candy. He doubted if Candy could act upset enough, anyway. Wally would have the baby instead of any of that; he'd marry Candy and be happy about it, too; it was what he wanted, one day, anyway.
The story Wally had heard was partially true. You did have to go to the fairly dignified and local doctor, and you did have to work yourself up into a frenzy, and if the doctor thought you were ready to drown yourself, only then would he tell you the location of the parking lot and how to approach the butcher. What Wally didn't know was the more human part of the story. If you were calm and collected and well-spoken and obviously sane, the doctor would skip the whole story about the parking lot and the butcher; if you looked like a reasonable woman -someone who wouldn't turn him in, later-the doctor would simply give you an abortion, right there in his office, for five hundred dollars. And if you acted like a nut, he also gave you an abortion-right there in his office-for five hundred dollars. The only difference was that you had to stand around blindfolded in a parking lot and think that you were being operated on by a butcher; that's what acting crazy got you. What was decidedly unjust, in either case, was that the doctor charged five hundred dollars.
But Wally Worthington was not seeking the correct information about that doctor, or that so-called butcher. He hoped to get advice about another abortionist, somewhere, and he had a vague plan concerning the people {193} he'd ask. There was little point in seeking the advice of the members of the Haven Club; he'd been told t hat one member had actually taken a cruise to Sweden for an abortion, but that was out of the question for Candy.
Wally knew the orchardmen at Ocean View were the sort of men who might have need of a less extravagant remedy; he also knew that they liked him and that, with few exceptions, they could be trusted to keep what Wally thought was a reliable, manly confidence about the matter. He went first to the only bachelor on the orchard crew, supposing that bachelors (and this one was also a notorious ladies' man) might have more use for abortionists than married men. Wally approached a member of the apple crew named Herb Fowler, a man only a few years older than Wally-he was good-looking in a toothin, top-cruel kind of way, with a too-thin moustache on his dark lip.
Herb Fowler's present girlfriend worked in the packinghouse during harvest; during the times of the year when the apple mart was open, she worked with the other mart women. She was younger than Herb, just a local girl, about Candy's age-her name was Louise Tobey, and the men called her Squeeze Louise, which was apparently okay with Herb. He was rumored to have other girlfriends, and he had the appalling habit of carrying lots of prophylactics on him-at all times of the day and night-and when anyone said anything at all about sex, Herb Fowler would reach into his pocket for a rubber and flip it at the speaker (all rolled up in its wrapper, of course). He'd just flip a prophylactic and say, 'See these? They keep a fella free.'
Wally had already had several rubbers flipped at him, and he was tired of the joke, and he was not in the best humor to have the joke played on him again in his present situation-but he imagined that Herb Fowler was the right sort of man to ask, that, despite the rubbers, Herb Fowler was always getting girls in trouble. One way or another, Herb looked like trouble for every girl alive. {194}
'Hey, Herb,' Wally said to him. It was a rainy, latespring day; college was out, and Wally was working alongside Herb in the storage cellar, which was empty in the spring. They were varnishing ladders, and when they finished the ladders, they would start painting the tracks for the conveyors that ran nonstop when the packinghouse was in full operation. Every year, everything was repainted.
'Yup, that's my name,' Herb said. He kept a cigarette so fixedly drooped from his lips that his eyes were always squinted half shut, and he kept his long face tipped up and back so that he could inhale the trail of smoke through his nose.
'Herb, I was wondering,' Wally said. 'If you got a girl pregnant, what would you do about it. Knowing your view,' Wally smartly added, 'about keeping yourself free.' That stole Herb's punch line and probably made Herb cross; he had a rubber half out of his pocket, ready to flip at Wally while delivering his usual remark on the subject, but Wally's saying it for him forced him to arrest the motion of his flipping hand. He never brought the rubber out.
'Who'd you knock up?' Herb asked, instead.
Wally corrected him. 'I didn't say I'd knocked up anybody. I asked you what you'd do-if.'
Herb Fowler disappointed Wally. All he knew about was the same mysterious parking lot in Cape Kenneth- something about a blindfold, a butcher, and five hundred dollars.
'Maybe Meany Hyde would know about it,' Herb added. 'Why don'tcha ask Meany what he'd do if he knocked anybody up?' Herb Fowler smiled at Wally – he was not a nice character-but Wally wouldn't satisfy him; Wally just smiled back.
Meany Hyde was a nice man. He'd grown up with a bunch of older brothers who beat him up and otherwise abused him steadily. His brothers had nicknamed him Meany-probably just to confuse him. Meany was {195} ever-friendly; he had a friendly wife, Florence, who was one of the packinghouse and apple mart women; there had been so many children that Wally couldn't remember all their names, or tell one from the other, and therefore he found it hard to imagine that Meany Hyde even knew what an abortion was.
'Meany listens to everything,' Herb Fowler told Wally. 'Don'tcha ever watch Meany? What's he do, except listen.'
So Wally went to find Meany Hyde. Meany was waxing the press boards for the cider press; he was generally in charge of the cider mill, and because of his nice disposition, he was often in charge of overseeing all the cider house activities-including the dealings with the migrant workers who lived in the cider house during the harvest. Olive made a point of keeping Herb Fowler at a considerable distance from those poor migrant workers: Herb's disposition was not so agreeable.
Wally watched Meany Hyde waxing for a whi le. The sharp but clean odor of the fermented cider and the old cider apples was strongest on a wet day, but Meany seemed to like it; Wally didn't mind it, either.
'Say, Meany,' Wally said, after a while.
'I thought you forgot my name,' Meany said cheerfully.
'Meany, what do you know about abortion?' Wally asked.
'I know it's a sin,' Meany Hyde said, 'and I know Grace Lynch has had one-and in her case, I sympathize with her-if you know what I mean.' Grace Lynch was Vernon Lynch's wife; Wally-and everyone else-knew that Vernori beat her. They had no children; it was rumored that this was the result of Vernon's beating Grace so much that Grace's organs of generation (as Homer Wells knew them) were damaged. Grace was one of the pie women during the harvest and when the apple mart was humming; Wally wondered if she'd be working today. There was lots to do in the {196} orchards on a good day in late spring; but when it was raining, there was just painting and washing, or fixing up the cider house to get it ready for the harvest.
It was just like Meany Hyde to be waxing the press boards too early. Someone would probably tell him to wax them again, just before it was time for the first press. But Meany didn't like painting or washing up, and when it rained, he could kill whole days fussing over his beloved cider press.
'Who do you know needs an abortion, Wally?' Meany Hyde asked.
'A friend of a friend,' Wally said, which would have prompted a rubber from Herb Fowler's pocket, but Meany was nice-he took no pleasure in anyone else's bad luck.
That's a shame, Wally,' Meany said. 'I think you should speak to Grace about it-just don't speak to her when Vernon's around.'
Wally didn't have to be told that. He had often seen the bruises on the backs of Grace Lynch's arms where Vernon had grabbed her and shook her. Once he had seized her by the arms and yanked her toward him, lowering his head in order to butt her in the face. This had happened, Wally knew, because Senior had paid for Grace's dental work (she'd told Senior and Olive that she'd fallen downstairs). Vernon had also beaten up a black man, one of the migrants, in the orchard called Old Trees, several harvests ago. The men had been telling jokes, and the black man had offered a joke of his own. Vernon hadn't liked a black man telling jokes that had anything to do with sex-he'd told Wally, in fact, that black people should be prevented from having sex.
'Or pretty soon,' Vernon had said, 'there'll be too many of them.'
In the Old Trees orchard, Vernon had snapped the man off his ladder, and when the man picked himself off the ground, Vernon held both his arms and butted him in the face over and over again, until Everett Taft, who was {197} one of the foremen, and Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper, had to pull Vernon off. The black man had taken over twenty stitches in his mouth, in his lips, and in his tongue; everyone knew Grace Lynch hadn't lost her teeth falling down any stairs.
It was Vernon who should have had Meany's name, or something worse.
'Wally?' Meany asked him, as he was leaving the cider house. 'Don't tell Grace I told you to ask her.'
So Wally went looking for Grace Lynch. He drove the pickup through the muddy lane that divided the orchard called Frying Pan, because it was in a valley, anc was the hottest to work in, from the orchard called Doris, after someone's wife. He drove to the building called Number Two (it was simply the second building for keeping the larger vehicles; the sprayers were sheltered in Number Two because the building was more isolated, and the sprayers-and the chemicals that went inside them- stank). Vernon Lynch was painting in there; he had a spray gun with a long, needlelike nozzle and he was hosing down the Hardie five-hundred-gallon sprayer with a fresh coat of apple red. Vernon wore a respirator to protect himself from the paint fumes (it was the same mask the men wore when they sprayed the trees), and he wore his foul-weather gear-the complete oilskin suit. Wally somehow knew it was Vernon, although not a single feature of Vernon was visible. Vernon had a way of attacking his work that made his actions unmistakably his, and Wally noticed that Vernon was painting the Hardie as if he were wielding a flamethrower. Wally drove on; he didn't want to ask Vernon where his wife was today. Wally shuddered as he imagined several of Vernon's leering responses.
In the empty, off-season apple mart, three of t he mart women were smoking cigarettes and talking. They didn't have much to do; and when they saw the boss's son coming, they didn't throw down their coffee cups, stamp out their cigarettes and disperse in different directions. They {198} just stepped a little away from one another and smiled at Wally sheepishly.
Florence Hyde, Meany's wife, didn't even pretend to be busy at anything; she dragged on her cigarette, and called out to Wally. 'Hi, honey!'
'Hi, Florence,' Wally said, smiling.
Big Dot Taft, who'd miraculously run a mile, getting stung all the while, the night Senior had dumped Ira Titcomb's bees, put out her cigarette and picked up an empty crate; then she put the crate down and wondered where she'd left her broom. 'Hi, cutey,' Dot said to Wally cheerfully.
'What's new?' Wally asked the women.
'Nothing new here,' said Irene Titcomb, Ira's wife. She laughed and turned her face away. She was always laughing-and turning away the side of her face with the burn scar, as if she were meeting you for the first time and could keep the scar a secret. The accident had happened years ago, and there couldn't have been anyone in Heart's Haven or Heart's Rock who hadn't seen Irene Titcomb's scar and didn't know the exact details of how she got it.
One night Ira Titcomb had sat out in his yard all night with an oil torch and a shotgun; something had been getting into his hives-probably a bear or a raccoon. Irene had known this was Ira's plan, yet she was surprised when she woke up, hearing him calling her. He was on the lawn and waving the lit torch under her window; all she saw was the torchlight. He asked her to make him some bacon and eggs, if she wouldn't mind, because he was so bored waiting for whatever it was he intended to shoot that he'd gotten hungry.
Irene was humming to herself, watching the bacon fry, when Ira came to the kitchen window and tapped on the pane to find out if the food was ready. Irene was unprepared for the vision of Ira in his beekeeper suit, moving out of the darkness and into the faint light from the kitchen window with fire in his hands. She had seen {199} her husband in his beekeeper suit many times, but she hadn't imagined that he'd be wearing it while he waited to shoot a bear or a coon. She'd never seen the way the suit glowed in firelight, or at night, either.
Ira had worn the suit because he'd imagined that his shotgun blast might rip into one of the hives and loose a few bees. He had no intention of scaring his wife, but poor Irene looked out the window and saw what she thought was a flaming white apparition! No doubt this was what had been molesting the hives! The ghost of a beekeeper of bygone days! It had probably killed poor Ira and was now coming for her! The frying pan flew up in her hands, splashing the hot bacon grease on her face. Irene was lucky she didn't blind herself. Oh, those athome accidents! How they surprise you.
'Whatcha want, big boy?' Big Dot Taft asked Wally. The apple mart women teased and flirted with Wally endlessly; they thought he was gorgeous and a lot of fun, and these three had known him since he was a little boy.
'He wants to take us for a ride!' cried Irene Titcomb, still laughing-her face still turned away.
'Why don't you take us to a movie, Wally?' Florence Hyde asked him.
'Oh, God, what I wouldn't do for you, Wally,' Dot Taft said, 'if you took me to a movie!'
'Don't you want to make us happy, Wally?' Florence asked him, whining a little.
'Maybe Wally's going to fire us!' Irene Titcomb shrieked, and that broke up the three of them. Dot Taft roared so loud that Florence Hyde inhaled her cigarette the wrong way and began to cough, which made Dot roar some more.
'Is Grace here today?' Wally asked casually, when the women calmed down.
'Oh, God, he wants Grace!' Dot Taft said. 'What's she got that we haven't got?'
Bruises, Wally thought. Broken bones, false teeth- certainly genuine aches and pains. {200}
'I just want to ask her something,' Wally said, smiling shyly-his shyness was deliberate; he handled himself, very smoothly around the mart women.
'I'll bet she'll say “No!” ' Irene Titcomb said, giggling.
'No, everyone says “Yes!” to Wally,' Florence Hyde teased.
Wally allowed the laughter to subside.
Then Dot Taft said, 'Grace is cleaning the pie oven.'
Thank you, ladies,' Wally said, blowing them kisses, backing away.
'You're bad, Wally,' Florence Hyde told him. 'You just came here to make us jealous.'
That Grace must have a hot oven,' Dot Taft said, and this started more laughter and coughing.
'Don't get burned, Wally,' Irene Titcomb called after him, and he left the mart women chattering and smoking at a higher pitch than when he'd found them.
He was not surprised that Grace Lynch had drawn the worst job for a rainy day. The other women sympathized with her, but she was not one of them. She stood apart, as if she were afraid everyone might suddenly turn on her and beat her as badly as Vernon did, as if the beatings she'd already survived had cost her the necessary humor for trading stories equally with Florence and Irene and Dot.
Grace Lynch was much thinner and a little younger than these women; her thinness was unusual among the regular mart women. Even Herb Fowler's girlfriend (Squeeze Louise) was heftier than Grace, and Dot Taft's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew-who was fairly regular in pie season, and when the assembly line to the packinghouse was running-even Debra had more flesh on her than Grace had.
And since she had needed new teeth, Grace was even tighter-lipped than usual; there was a grim concentration to the narrow line of her mouth. Wally couldn't remember ever seeing Grace Lynch laugh-and some form of yucking it up was essential to relieve the boredom 201 of the life of the apple mart women. Grace was simply the cowed dog among them. She didn't look as if she took any pleasure from eating pie-or from eating anything at all. She didn't smoke, and in 194- everyone smoked- even Wally. She was noise-shy and flinched around the machinery.
Wally hoped she was wearing long sleeves so that he wouldn't have to look at the bruises on her arms, but she was half in one of the deep shelves of the pie oven when Wally found her; she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but both sleeves were rolled up above her elbows to spare the shirt some of the oven-black. Wally startled her with her head in the oven, and half her body, too, ami Grace made a little cry and banged one of her elbows against the door hinge as she withdrew in too much of a hurry.
'Sorry I scared you, Grace,' Wally said quickly-it was hard to walk up on Grace without making her bump into something. She said nothing; she rubbed one elbow; she folded and unfolded her thin arms, hiding her very slight breasts or, by keeping her arms in constant motion, concealing her bruises. She wouldn't look Wally in the eye; as poised as Wally was, he always felt a terrific tension when he tried to talk with her; he felt she might suddenly run away from him or throw herself ai: him- either with her claws out, or kissing him with her tongue stabbing.
He wondered if she mistook his inescapable search for the new bruises on her body for a sexual interest; maybe that was part of the problem between them.
'That poor woman is just crazy,' Ray Kendall had told Wally once; maybe that was all.
'Grace?' Wally asked, and Grace trembled. She was squeezing a wad of steel wool so tightly that the di rty suds streaked down one arm and wet the waist of her shirt and the bony hip of her denim work: jeans. A single tooth, probably false, appeared out of her mouth and clenched a tiny piece of her lower lip. 'Uh, Grace,' Wally said. 'I've got a problem.' {202}
She stared at him as if this news frightened her more than anything anyone had ever told her. She looked quickly away and said, 'I'm cleaning the oven.' Wally thought he might have to grab her to keep her from crawling back in the oven. He suddenly realized that all his secrets-that anyone's secrets-were entirely safe with Grace Lynch. There was absolutely nothing she dared to say, and no one in her life to tell it to-if she ever got up the courage.
'Candy is pregnant,' Wally said to Grace, who wobbled as if a wind had come up-or the strong ammonia fumes of the oven cleaner had overpowered her. She looked at Wally again with her eyes as round as a rabbit's.
'I need advice,' Wally said to her. It occurred to him that if Vernon Lynch saw him talking to Grace, Vernon would probably find that just cause for giving Grace another beating. 'Please just tell me what you know, Grace,' Wally said.
Grace Lynch spat it out from between her very tight lips. 'Saint Cloud's,' she hissed; it was a loud whisper. Wally thought it was someone's name-the name of a saint? Or else a kind of nickname for an exceptionally evil abortionist-St. Cloud's! Grace Lynch, it was clear, had no luck. If she'd been to an abortionist, wouldn't it have to be the worst abortionist one could imagine?
I don't know the doctor's name,' Grace confided, still whispering and not looking up at Wally anymore-she would never again look up at him. 'The place is called Saint Cloud's, and the doctor's good-he's kinda gentle, he makes it okay.' For her, this was virtually a sermon-at least a speech. 'But don't make her go alone -okay, Wally?' Grace said, actually reaching out and touching him-but recoiling the instant she made contact, as if Wally's skin were hotter than the pie oven when it was fired up.
'No, I won't make her go alone, of course,' Wally promised her. {203}
'You ask for the orphanage when you get off the train,' Grace said. She climbed back in the oven before he could thank her.
Grace Lynch had gone to St. Cloud's alone. Vernon hadn't even known she was going, or he would probably have beaten her for it. Since she'd been gone overnight, he'd beaten her for that, but perhaps it was a lesser beating by his standards.
Grace had arrived in the early evening, just after dark; as was customary, she'd not been housed with the expectant mothers; she'd been so jittery that Dr. Larch's sedation had not affected her very much and she'd been awake through the night, listening to everything. It had been before Homer's days as an apprentice, so if Homer had seen her, he would never remember her, and when -one day-Grace Lynch would see Homer Wells, she wouldn't recognize him.
She'd had the standard D and C at a proper and safe time in her pregnancy, arid there'd been no complications -except in her dreams. There had never been any serious complications following any abortion Dr. Larch had ever performed, and no permanent damage from any of the operations-unless it was something so interior, so very much in the mind, that Dr. Larch couldn't have been responsible for it.
Still-though Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had made her feel welcome, and Larch had been, as Grace had told Wally, gentle-Grace Lynch hated to think of St. Cloud's. It was not so much for her own experience, or because of her own trouble, but because of the atmosphere of the place in the long night she'd stayed awake. The dense air hung like a great weight, the disturbed river smelled like death, the cries of the babies were weirder than the cries of loons-and there were owls, and someone peeing, and someone walking around. There was a far-off machine (the typewriter), and a shout from another building-just one long wail (possibly, that had been Melony). {204}
After Wally had visited with her, Grace balked at finishing the pie oven job. She felt sick to her stomach-it was like the cramps she'd had that time-and she went out to the apple mart and asked the women there if they'd finish the oven for her; she just didn't feel well, she said. Nobody teased Grace. Big Dot Taft asked her if she'd like a ride home, and Irene Titcomb and Florence Hyde (who had nothing to do, anyway) said they'd tackle the oven 'in two shakes,' as they say in Maine. Grace Lynch went to find Olive Worthington; she told Olive she wasn't feeling well and was going home early.
Olive was her usual kind self regarding the matter; when she saw Vernon Lynch later, she gave Vernon a glare-hard enough for Vernon to feel discomforted by it. He was cleaning the nozzle for the spray gun down at Number Two when Olive cruised past him in the faded pickup. Olive's look was such that Vernon wondered for a moment if he'd been fired, if that look was all the notice he was going to get. But the thought quickly passed, the way thoughts tended to pass through Vernon Lynch. He looked at the muddy tracks left by Olive's pickup and said something typical.
'Suck my dick, you rich bitch,' Vernon Lynch said. Then he continued to clean out the spray-gun nozzle.
That night Wally sat on Ray Kendall's dock with Candy and told her what little he knew about St. Clouds. He didn't know, for example, that there was an apostrophe. He'd not bothered to apply to Harvard; his grades weren't good enough to get him into Bowdoin; the University of Maine, where he was halfheartedly majoring in botany, hadn't taught him a thing about grammar.
'I knew it was an orphanage,' Candy said. That's all I knew.'
It was clear to them both that no good excuse could be invented for their being gone overnight, so Wally arranged to borrow Senior's Cadillac; they would have to leave very early in the morning and return in the {205} evening of the same day. Wally told Senior it was: the best time of year to explore the coast, and maybe drive a little inland; the coast would have more tourists as the summer progressed, and inland it would get too hot for a comfortable drive.
'I know it's a workday,' Wally told Olive. 'What's one day matter, Mom? It's just to have a little adventure with Candy-just a day off.'
Olive wondered if Wally would ever amount to anything.
Ray Kendall had his own work to worry about. He knew Candy would be happy to take a drive with Wally. Wally was a good driver-if a trifle fast-and the Cadillac, Ray knew better than anyone, was a safe ear. Ray did all the work on it.
The night before their trip, Candy and Wally went to bed early, but each of them was awake through the night. Like most truly loving young couples, they found themselves worrying about what effect this experience would have on the other. Wally worried that an abortion would make Candy unhappy, or even uncomfortable with sex. Candy wondered if Wally would feel the same way about her after all this was over.
That same night Wilbur Larch and Hornet Wells weren't sleeping either. Larch sat at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; through the window, he saw Homer Wells walking around outside, with an oil lamp in the darkness. What is the matter now? Larch wondered, and went to see what Homer was doing.
'I couldn't sleep,' Homer told Larch.
'What is it this time?' Dr. Larch asked Homer.
'Maybe it's just an owl,' said Homer Wells. The oil lamp didn't project very far into the darkness, and the wind was strong, which was unusual for St. Cloud's. When the wind blew out the lamp, the doctor and his assistant saw that they were backlit by the light shining from the window of Nurse Angela's office. It was the only light for miles around, and it made their shadows gigan-{206} tic. Larch's shadow reached across the stripped, implanted plot of ground, up the barren hillside, all the way into the black woods. Homer Wells's shadow touched the dark sky. It was only then that both men noticed: Homer had grown taller than Dr. Larch.
'I'll be damned,' Larch muttered, spreading his arms, so that his shadow looked like a magician about to reveal something. Larch flapped his arms like a big bat. ''Look!' he said to Homer. I'm a sorcerer!'
Homer Wells, the sorcerer's apprentice, flapped his arms, too.
The wind was very strong and fresh. The usual density in the air above St. Cloud's had lifted; the stars shone bright and cold; the memory of cigar smoke and sawdust was missing from this new air.
'Feel that wind,' said Homer Wells; maybe the wind was keeping him up.
'It's a wind coming from the coast,' Wilbur Larch said; he sniffed, deeply, for traces of salt. It was a rare sea breeze, Larch was sure.
Wherever it's from, it's nice, Homer Wells decided.
Both men stood sniffing the wind. Each man thought: What is going to happen to me? {207}