The Lord's Work 9 page

'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-\'7b174\'7d 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, \'7b175\'7dHomer.' 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 \'7b176\'7dwas 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 welldigging 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, \'7b177\'7dfor 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 \'7b178\'7d); 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 \'7b179\'7dthe 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 \'7b180\'7d 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 \'7b181\'7d 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 \'7b182\'7d 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 \'7b183\'7d 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-\'7b184\'7dcially 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 \'7b185\'7dher 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, \'7b186\'7dthat her mother would have managed Olive's refinement, if not perhaps her collegelearned 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 \'7b187\'7d 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 \'7b188\'7d 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!'

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 657