The third foster family to fail with Homer Wells was a family of such rare and championship qualities that to judge humanity by this family's example would be foolish. They were that good a family. They were that perfect, or Dr. Larch would not have let Homer go to them. After the family from Three Mile Falls, Dr. Larch was being especially careful with Homer.
Professor Draper and his wife of nearly forty years lived in Waterville, Maine. Waterville was not much of a college town in 193_, when Homer Wells went there; but if you compared Waterville to St. Cloud's, or to Three Mile Falls, you would have to say that Waterville was a community of moral and social giants. Though still inland, it was of considerably higher elevation--there were nearby mountains, and from these there were actual vistas; mountain life (like the life on an ocean, or on the plains, or on open farmland) affords the inhabitant the luxury of a view. Living on land where you can occasionally see a long way provides the soul with a perspective of a beneficially expansive nature--or so believed Professor Draper; he was a born teacher.
"Unfarmed valley land," he would intone, "which I associate with forests too low and too dense to provide a view, tends to cramp the uplifting qualities of human nature and enhance those instincts which are mean-spirited and small."
"Now, Homer," Mrs. Draper would say. "The professor is a bor
n teacher. You have to take him with a grain of salt."
Everyone called her Mom. No one (including his grown children and his grandchildren) called him anything but Professor. Even Dr. Larch didn't know what his first name was. If his tone was professorial, at times even officious, he was a man of very regular habits and temperament, and his manner was jocular.
"Wet shoes," the professor once said to Homer, "are a fact of Maine. They are a given. Your method, Homer, of putting wet shoes on a windowsill where they might be dried by the faint appearance, albeit rare, of the Maine sun, is admirable for its positivism, its determined optimism. However," the professor would go on, "a method I would recommend for wet shoes--a method, I must add, that is independent of the weather--involves a more reliable source of heat in Maine: namely, the furnace. When you consider that the days when shoes get wet are days, as a rule, when we don't see the sun, you'll recognize the furnace-room method as having certain advantages."
"With a grain of salt, Homer," Mrs. Draper would tell the boy. Even the professor called her Mom; even Mom called him Professor.
If Homer Wells found the professor's conversation abounding in pithy maxims, he didn't complain. If Professor Draper's students at the college and his colleagues in the history department thought that the professor was a sententious bore--and tended to flee his path like rabbits escaping the slow but nose-to-the-ground hound--they could not influence Homer's opinion of the first father figure in his life to rival Dr. Larch.
Homer's arrival in Waterville was greeted by the kind of attention the boy had never known. Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna were emergency providers, and Dr. Larch an affectionate, if stern and distracted, overseer. But Mrs. Draper was a mom's mom; she was a hoverer. She was up before Homer was awake; the cookies she baked while he ate his breakfast were miraculously still warm in his lunch bag at noon. Mom Draper hiked to school with Homer--they went overland, disdaining the road; it was her "constitutional," she said.
In the afternoons, Professor Draper met Homer in the school's playground--school's end seemed magically timed to coincide with the professor's last class of the day at the college--and they would tramp home together. In the winter, which in Waterville came early, this was a literal tramping--on snowshoes, the mastery of which the professor placed on a level of learning to read and write.
"Use the body, use the mind, Homer," the professor said.
It's easy to see why Wilbur Larch was impressed with the man. He vigorously represented usefulness.
In truth, Homer liked the routine of it, the tramp, tramp of it, the utter predictability of it. An orphan is simply more of a child than other children in that essential appreciation of the things that happen daily, on schedule. For everything that promises to last, to stay the same, the orphan is a sucker.
Dr. Larch ran the boys' division with as many of the simulated manifestations of daily life as are possible to cultivate at an orphanage. Meals were promptly served at the same time, every day. Dr. Larch would read aloud at the same evening hour for the same length of time, even if it meant leaving a chapter in midadventure, with the boys shouting, "More, more, just read the next thing that happens!"
And St. Larch would say, "Tomorrow, same time, same place." There would be groans of disappointment, but Larch knew that he had made a promise; he had established a routine. "Here in St. Cloud's," he wrote in his journal, "security is measured by the number of promises kept. Every child understands a promise--if it is kept--and looks forward to the next promise. Among orphans, you build security slowly but regularly."
Slow but regular would describe the life that Homer Wells led with the Drapers in Waterville. Every activity was a lesson; each corner of the comfortable old house held something to be learned and then counted upon.
"This is Rufus. He's very old," the professor would say, introducing Homer to the dog. "This is Rufus's rug, this is his kingdom. When Rufus is sleeping on his kingdom, do not wake him--unless you are prepared for him to snap." Whereupon the professor would rouse the ancient dog, who would snap awake--and then appear to puzzle over the air he had bitten, tasting in it the Drapers' grown-up children, now married and with children of their own.
Homer met them all for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving with the Drapers was an experience in family guaranteed to make other families feel inferior. Mom would outdo herself at momness. The professor had a lecture ready on every conceivable subject: the qualities of white meat, and of dark; the last election; the pretension of salad forks; the superiority of the nineteenth-century novel (not to mention other aspects of that century's superiority); the proper texture of cranberry sauce; the meaning of "repentance"; the wholesomeness of exercise (including a comparison between splitting wood and ice skating); the evil inherent in naps. To each laboriously expressed opinion of the professor's, his grown children (two married women, one married man) would respond with a fairly balanced mixture of:
"Just so!"
"Isn't that always the way?"
"Right again, Professor!"
These robotlike responses were punctuated, with equal precision, by Mom's oft-repeated, "Grain of salt, grain of salt."
Homer Wells listened to these steady rhythms like a visitor from another world trying to decipher a strange tribe's drums. He couldn't quite catch on. The seeming constancy of everyone was overwhelming. He wouldn't know until he was much older just which it was that didn't set well with him--the implicit (and explicit) and self-congratulatory do-gooderism, or the heartiness with which life was tediously oversimplified.
Whichever it was, he stopped liking it; it became an obstacle in the path he was looking for that led to himself--to who he was, or should be. He remembered various Thanksgivings at St. Cloud's. They were not so cheery as the Waterville Thanksgiving with the Draper family, but they seemed a lot more real. He remembered how he had felt of use. There were always babies who couldn't feed themselves. There was the likelihood of a snowstorm that would knock out the electricity; Homer was put in charge of the candles and the kerosene lamps. He was also in charge of helping the kitchen staff clear, of helping Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna comfort the crying--of being Dr. Larch's messenger: the most prized responsibility that was conferred in the boys' division. Before he was ten, and long before he would be given such explicit instruction from Dr. Larch, Homer felt full of usefulness at St. Cloud's.
What was it about Thanksgiving at the Drapers' that contrasted so severely with the same event at St. Cloud's? Mom had no match as a cook; it couldn't have been the food--which, at St. Cloud's, suffered from a visible and seemingly terminal grayness. Was it the saying of grace? At St. Cloud's, grace was a rather blunt instrument--Dr. Larch not being a religious man.
"Let us be thankful," he would say, and then pause--as if he were truly wondering, What for? "Let us be thankful for what kindness we have received," Larch would say, cautiously looking at the unwanted and abandoned around him. "Let us be thankful for Nurse Angela and for Nurse Edna," he would add, with more assurance in his voice. "Let us be thankful that we've got options, that we've got second chances," he added once, looking at Homer Wells.
The event of grace--at Thanksgiving, at St. Cloud's--was shrouded with chance, with understandable caution, with typically Larchlike reserve.
Grace at the Drapers' was effusive and strange. It seemed somehow connected with the professor's definition of the meaning of "repentance." Professor Draper said that the start of real repentance was to accept yourself as vile. For grace, the professor cried out, "Say after me: I am vile, I abhor myself, but I am thankful for everyone in my family!" They all said so--even Homer, even Mom (who for once withheld her recommended grain of salt).
St. Cloud's was a sober place, but its manner of giving what little thanks it could seemed frank, sincere. Some contradiction in the Draper family occurred to Homer Wells for the first time at Thanksgiving. Unlike St. Cloud's, life in Waterville seemed good--babies, for example, were wanted. Where did "repentance" come from, then? Was there guilt attac