Is it the ether? Dr. Larch wondered. He meant, was it the ether that gave him the sense, increasingly, that he knew everything that was going to happen? For example, he had anticipated the letter that arrived for F. Stone--forwarded from Fuzzy's P.O. box address. "Is this some sick joke?" Nurse Angela asked, turning the envelope around and around.
"I'll take that, please," Dr. Larch said. It was from the board of trustees, as he had expected. That was why they'd wanted those follow-up reports from him and why they'd requested the addresses of the orphans. They were checking up on him, Larch knew.
The letter to Fuzzy began with cordial good wishes; it said that the board knew a great deal about Fuzzy from Dr. Larch, but they wished to know anything further about Fuzzy's "St. Cloud's experience"--anything, naturally, that he wanted to "share" with them.
The "St. Cloud's experience" sounded to Wilbur Larch like a mystical happening. The attached questionnaire made him furious, although he did amuse himself by trying to imagine which of the questions had been conceived by the tedious Dr. Gingrich and which of them had flowed from the chilling mind of Mrs. Goodhall. Dr. Larch also had fun imagining how Homer Wells and Snowy Meadows and Curly Day--and all the others--would answer the silly questionnaire, but he took the immediate business very seriously. He wanted Fuzzy Stone's answers to the questionnaire to be perfect. He wanted to be sure that the board of trustees would never forget Fuzzy Stone.
There were five questions. Every single one of them was based upon the incorrect assumption that every child must have been at least five or six years old before he--or she--was adopted. This and other stupidities convinced Wilbur Larch that Dr. Gingrich and Mrs. Goodhall were going to be easy adversaries.
1. Was your life at St. Cloud's properly supervised? (Please include in your answer if you ever felt that your treatment was especially affectionate, or especially instructive; we would certainly want to hear if you felt your treatment was ever abusive.)
2. Did you receive adequate medical attention at St. Cloud's?
3. Were you adequately prepared for your new life in a foster home, and do you feel your foster home was carefully and correctly chosen?
4. Would you suggest any possible improvements in the methods and management of St. Cloud's? (Specifically, would you feel things might have gone more smoothly for you if there had been a more youthful, energetic staff in residence--or perhaps, simply a larger staff?)
5. Was any attempt made to integrate the daily life of the orphanage with the life of the surrounding community?
"What community?" screamed Wilbur Larch. He stood at the window in Nurse Angela's office and stared at the bleak hillside where Wally had wanted to plant apple trees. Why hadn't they come back and planted the stupid trees, even if all that business was just to please me? Larch wondered.
/> "What community?" he howled.
Oh yes, he thought, I could have asked the stationmaster to offer them religious instruction--to speak to them about the terrifying chaos of homeless souls hovering in every niche of the sky. I could have asked that worthy gentleman to display his underwear catalogues, too.
I could have asked the family of child beaters from Three Mile Falls to come once a week and give lessons. I could have detained a few of the women having abortions and asked them to reveal, to all of us, why they didn't want to have children at that particular moment in their lives; or I could have invited a few of the mothers back--they could have explained to the children why they were left here! That would have been instructive! Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what a community we could have been--if only I'd been more youthful, more energetic!
Oh yes, I have made some mistakes, he thought; and for a black hour or two, he remembered some of them. If only I knew how to build a breathing machine, he thought--if only I could have come up with a different set of lungs for Fuzzy.
And maybe Homer Wells will tell them that he was not "adequately prepared" for his first view of the fetus on the hill. And had there been a way to prepare Homer for Three Mile Falls, for the Drapers of Waterville, or for the Winkles being swept away? What was my choice? wondered Wilbur Larch. I suppose that I could have not apprenticed him.
"We are put on this earth to be of use," Wilbur Larch (as Fuzzy Stone) wrote to the board of trustees. "It is better to do than to criticize," wrote that young idealist, Fuzzy Stone. "It is better to do anything than to stand idly by." You tell 'em, Fuzzy! thought Dr. Larch.
And so Fuzzy Stone told the board of trustees that the hospital at St. Cloud's was a model of the form. "It was Larch who made me want to be a doctor," Fuzzy wrote. "That old guy, Larch--he's an inspiration. You talk about energy: the guy is as full of pep as a teen-ager.
"You better be careful about sending any young people to St. Cloud's--old Larch will work them so hard, they'll get sick. They'll get so tired out, they'll retire in a month!
"And you think those old nurses don't do a day's work? Let me tell you, when Nurse Angela is pitching for stickball, you'd think you were competing in an Olympic event. You talk about affectionate--that's them, all right. They're always hugging and kissing you, but they know how to shake some sense into you, too.
"You talk about supervised," Fuzzy Stone wrote. "Did you ever find out that you were being watched by owls? That's Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela--they're owls, they don't miss a thing. And some of the girls used to say that Mrs. Grogan knew what they did before they did it--before they even knew they were going to do it!
"And you talk about community," wrote Fuzzy Stone. "St. Cloud's was something special. Why, I remember people would get off the train and walk up the hill just to look the place over--it must have been because we were such a model community, for that area. I just remember these people, coming and going, coming and going--they were just there to look us over, as if we were one of the marvels of Maine."
One of the marvels of Maine? thought Wilbur Larch, struggling to get control of himself. A stray puff of wind blew in the open window in Nurse Angela's office, carrying some of the black smoke from the incinerator with it; the smoke brought Larch nearer to his senses. I'd better stop, he thought. I don't want to get carried away.
He rested in the dispensary after his historical effort. Nurse Edna looked in on him once; Wilbur Larch was one of the marvels of Maine to her, and she was worried about him.
Larch was a little worried himself, when he woke. Where had the time gone? The problem is that I have to last, he thought. He could rewrite history but he couldn't touch time; dates were fixed; time marched at its own pace. Even if he could convince Homer Wells to go to a real medical school, it would take time. It would take a few years for Fuzzy Stone to complete his training. I have to last until Fuzzy is qualified to replace me, thought Wilbur Larch.
He felt like hearing Mrs. Grogan's prayer again, and so he went to the girls' division a little early for his usual delivery of Jane Eyre. He eavesdropped in the hall on Mrs. Grogan's prayer; I must ask her if she'd mind saying it to the boys, he thought, then wondered if it would confuse the boys, coming so quickly on the heels of, or just before, the Princes of Maine, Kings of New England benediction. I get confused myself sometimes, Dr. Larch knew.
"Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest," Mrs. Grogan was saying, "and peace at the last."
Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud's, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he'd come a long way and still had a long way to go.
When Homer Wells read the questionnaire sent him by the St. Cloud's board of trustees, he did not know exactly what made him anxious. Of course Dr. Larch and the others were getting older, but they were always "older" to him. It did occur to him to wonder what might happen to St. Cloud's when Dr. Larch was too old, but this thought was so troubling that he tucked the questionnaire and the return envelope to the board into his copy of Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit. Besides, it was the day the migrants arrived; it was harvest time at Ocean View, and Homer Wells was busy.
He and Mrs. Worthington met the picking crew at the apple mart, and led them to their quarters in the cider house--more than half the crew had picked at Ocean View before and knew the way, and the crew boss was what Mrs. Worthington called "an old hand." He looked very young to Homer. It was the first year that Mrs. Worthington dealt directly with the picking crew and their boss; the hiring relationship, by mail, had been one of Senior Worthington's responsibilities, and Senior had always maintained that if you kept a good crew boss, year after year, all the hiring--and the necessary taking-charge of the crew during the harvest--would be conducted by the boss.