Homer Wells, not yet sixteen--an apprentice surgeon, a veteran insomniac--walked down to the river that had carried away so many pieces of the history of St. Cloud's. The loudness of the river was a comfort to Homer, more comforting than the silence in the sleeping room that night. He stood on the riverbank where the porch to the sawyers' lodge had been, where he'd seen the hawk come from the sky more quickly than the snake could swim to shore--and the snake had been very fast.
If Wilbur Larch had seen Homer there, he would have worried that the boy was saying good-bye to his own childhood--too soon. But Dr. Larch had ether to help him sleep, and Homer Wells had no cure for his insomnia.
"Good night, Fuzzy," Homer said over the river. The Maine woods, typically, let the remark pass, but Homer insisted that he be heard. "Good night, Fuzzy!" he cried as loud as he could. And then louder, "Good night, Fuzzy!" He yelled it and yelled it--the grown-up boy whose crying had once been a legend upriver in Three Mile Falls.
"Good night, Fuzzy Stone!"
4
Young Dr. Wells
"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 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 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 another 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 still practiced a sexual exchange, they practiced 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 well-worn 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 well-to-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 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.