INTOLERABLE DISHONESTY

Olive had written.

And one night Candy overheard Ray. Her bedroom light was out; in the pitch dark she heard her father say, 'It's not wrong, but it's not right.' At first she thought he was on the telephone. After she drifted back to sleep, the sound of her door opening and closing woke her up again, and she realized Ray had been sitting in her room with her—addressing her in her sleep, in the darkness.

And some of the nights in blossom time, Candy would say to Homer, 'You're an overworked father.'

'Isn't he?' Olive would say admiringly.

'I'm going to take this kid off your hands for the night,' Candy would say, and Homer would smile through the tension of these exchanges. He would wake up alone in Wally's room in anticipation of Angel needing his bottle. He could imagine Raymond Kendall getting up to heat the formula and Candy being in her bed with the bottle of formula in as near an approximation of the correct angle of her breast as she could arrange it.

Ray's torpedo parts were stolen from Kittery Navy Yard; both Homer and Candy knew that's how he got them, but only Candy criticized Ray for it.

'I've caught more mistakes in the way they do things than they know things to do,' Ray said. 'Not likely they could catch me.'

'But what's it for, anyway?' Candy asked her father. 'I don't like there being a bomb here—especially when there's a baby in the house.'

'Well, when I got the torpedo,' Ray explained, 'I didn't know about the baby.'

'Well, you know now,' Candy said. 'Why don't you fire it at something—at something far away.'

'When it's ready, I'll fire it,' Ray said.

'What are you going to fire it at?' Homer asked Raymond Kendall.\'7b547\'7d

'I don't know,' Ray said. 'Maybe the Haven Club—the next time they tell me I spoil their view.'

'I don't like not knowing what you're doing something for,' Candy told her father when they were alone.

'It's like this,' Ray said slowly. Til tell you what it's like—a torpedo. It's like Wally, comin' home. You know he's comin', you can't calculate the damage.'

Candy asked Homer for an interpretation of Ray's meaning.

'He's not telling you anything,' Homer said. 'He's fishing—he wants you to tell him.'

'Suppose it all just goes on, the way it is?' Candy asked Homer, after they had made love in the cider house— which had not yet been cleaned for use in the harvest.

'The way it is,' said Homer Wells.

'Yes,' she said. 'Just suppose that we wait, and we wait. How long could we wait?' she asked. 'I mean, after a while, suppose it gets easier to wait than to tell?'

'We'll have to tell, sometime,' said Homer Wells.

'When?' Candy asked.

'When Wally comes home,' Homer said.

'When he comes home paralyzed and weighing less than I weigh,' Candy said. 'Is that when we spring it on him?'she asked.

Are there things you can't ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it—it seems to cut on its own—but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.

'We have to know where we're going,' said Homer Wells.

'But what if we don't know?' Candy asked. 'What if we know only how we want to stay? What if we? wait and wait?'

'Do you mean that you won't ever know if you love him or me?' Homer asked her.\'7b548\'7d

'It may be all confused by how much he's going to need me,' Candy said. Homer put his hand on her—where her pubic hair had grown back, almost exactly as it was.

'You don't think I'll need you, too?' he asked her. She rolled to her other hip, turning her back to him—but at the same time taking his hand from where he'd touched her and clamping his hand to her breast.

'We'll have to wait and see,' she said.

'Past a certain point, I won't wait,' said Homer Wells.

'What point is that?' Candy asked. Because his hand was on her breast, he could feel her holding her breath.

'When Angel is old enough to either know he's an orphan or know who his parents are,' Homer said. 'That's the point. I won't have Angel thinking he's adopted. I won't have him not knowing who his mother and father are.'

'I'm not worried about Angel,' Candy said. 'Angel will get lots of love. I'm worried about you and me.'

'And Wally,' Homer said.

'We'll go crazy,' Candy said.

'We won't go crazy,' Homer said. 'We've got to take care of Angel and make him feel loved.'

'But what if I don't feel loved, or you don't—what then?' Candy asked him.

'We'll wait until then,' said Homer Wells. 'We'll just wait and see,' he said, almost with a vengeance. A spring breeze blew over them, bearing with it the sickly-sweet stench of rotten apples. The smell had an almost ammonia power that so overwhelmed Homer Wells that he released Candy's breast and covered his mouth and nose with his hand.

It was not until the summer when Candy first heard directly from Wally. She got an actual letter—her first communication from him since he'd been shot down a year ago.

Wally had spent six weeks in Mt. Lavinia Hospital in Ceylon. They had not wanted to move him from there until he'd gained fifteen pounds, until his muscle tremors \'7b549\'7d -is had ceased and his speech had lost the daydreaming vacantness of malnutrition. He wrote the letter from another hospital, in New Delhi; after a month in India, he had gained an additional ten pounds. He said that he'd learned to put cinnamon in his tea, and that the slap of sandals was nearly constant in the hospital.

They were promising him that they would allow him to commence the long trip home when he weighed one hundred forty pounds and when he had mastered a few basic exercises that were essential to his rehabilitation. He couldn't describe the route of his proposed voyage home because of the censors. Wally hoped that the censors would understand—in the light of his paralysis— that it was necessary for him to say something about his 'perfectly normal' sexual function. The censors had allowed this to pass. Wally still didn't know he was sterile; he knew he'd had a urinary tract infection, and that the infection was gone.

'And how is Homer? How I miss him!' Wally wrote.

But that was not the part of the letter that devastated Candy. Candy was so devastated by the beginning of the letter that the rest of the letter was simply a continuing devastation to her.

'I'm so afraid that you won't want to marry a cripple,' Wally began.

In her single bed, tugged into sleep and into wakefulness by the tide, Candy stared at the picture of her mother on the night table. She would have liked a mother to talk to at the moment, and perhaps because she had no memory of her mother she remembered the first night she had arrived at the orphanage. Dr. Larch had been reading to the boys from Great Expectations. Candy would never forget the line that she and Homer had walked in on.

' “I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness,” ' Wilbur Larch had read aloud. Either Dr. Larch had predetermined that he would end the evening's reading with that line, or else he \'7b550\'7d had only then noticed Candy and Homer Wells in the open doorway—the harsh hall light, a naked bulb, formed a kind of institutional halo above their heads— and had lost his place in the book, causing him, spur-ofthe- moment, to stop reading. For whatever reason, that perception of wretchedness had been Candy's introduction to St. Cloud's, and the beginning and the end of her bedtime story. \'7b551\'7d

10 Fifteen Years

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For fifteen years they were a couple: Lorna and Melony. They were set in their ways. Once the young rebels of the women-only boardinghouse, they now occupied the choicest rooms—with the river view—and they served as superintendents to the building for a consideration regarding their rent. Melony was handy. She had learned plumbing and electricity at the shipyard where she was one of a staff of three electricians. (The other two were men, but they never messed with Melony; no one ever would.)

Lorna became more domestic. She lacked the concentration for advanced training at the shipyard, but she remained an employee—'Stay on for the pension plan,' Melony had advised her. Lorna actually liked the assembly-line monotony, and she was smart about signing up for the overtime pay shifts—she was willing to work at odd hours if she could work less. Her being out late bothered Melony.

Lorna became increasingly feminine. She not only wore dresses (even to work) and used more makeup and perfume (and watched her weight); her voice, which had once been harsh, actually softened and she developed a smile (especially when she was being criticized). Melony found her increasingly passive.

As a couple, they rarely fought because Lorna would not fight back. In fifteen years, she had discovered that Melony relented if there wasn't a struggle; given any resistance, Melony would never quit. \'7b552\'7d

'You don't fight fair,' Melony would occasionally complain.

'You're much bigger than I am,' Lorna would say coyly.

An understatement. By 195-, when Melony was forty-something (no one knew exactly how old she was), she weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds. She was five feet eight inches tall; she was almost fifty inches around at her chest, which meant that she wore men's shirts (large; anything smaller than a seventeen-inch neck wouldn't fit her; because her arms were short, she always had to roll up the sleeves). She had a thirty-six-inch waist, but only a twenty-eight-inch inseam (which meant that she had to roll up the cuffs of her trousers or have Lorna shorten them). Melony's pants were always so tight across her thighs that they quickly lost their crease there, but they were very baggy in the seat— Melony was not fat-assed, and she had the nondescript hips of most men. She had small feet, which always hurt her.

In fifteen years she'd been arrested only once—for fighting. Actually, the charge was assault, but in the end she was stuck with nothing more damaging than a disturbance of the peace. She'd been in the ladies' room of a pizza bar in Bath when some college boy had tried to engage Lorna in conversation. When he saw Melony take her place beside Lorna at the bar, he whispered to Lorna, 'I don't think I could find anyone for your friend.' He was imagining a possible double-date situation.

'Speak up!' Melony said. 'Whispering is impolite.'

'I said, I don't think I could find a date for you,'the boy said boldly.

Melony put her arm around Lorna and cupped her breast.

'I couldn't find a sheep dog that would hold still for you,' Melony told the college boy.

'Fucking dyke,' he said as he was leaving. He thought he'd spoken quietly enough—and strictly to impress the \'7b553\'7d shipyard workers at the far end of the bar; he couldn't have known that the men were Melony's co-workers. They held the college boy while Melony broke his nose with a metal napkin container.

The way that Melony liked to fall asleep was with her big face on Lorna's tight bare belly; Lorna could always tell when Melony had fallen asleep because of the change in Melony's breathing, which Lorna could feel against her pubic hair. In fifteen years, there was only one night when Lorna had to ask her friend to move her heavy head before she had soundly fallen asleep.

'What is it? You got cramps?' Melony asked.

'No, I'm pregnant,'Lorna said. Melony thought it was a joke until Lorna went into the bathroom to be sick.

When Lorna came back to bed, Melony said, 'I want to try to understand this, calmly. We've been like a married couple for fifteen years, and now you're pregnant.' Lorna curled herself into a ball around one of the pillows; she covered her head with the other pillow. Her face and her stomach and her private parts were protected, but still she trembled; she began to cry. 'I guess what you're telling me,' Melony went on, 'is that when women are fucking each other, it takes a lot longer for one of them to get pregnant than when a woman is fucking some guy. Right?' Lorna didn't answer her; she just went on sniveling. 'Like about fifteen years—like that long. It takes fifteen years for women to get pregnant when they're just fucking other women. Boy, that's some effort,' Melony said.

She went to the window and looked at the view of the Kennebec; in the summer, the trees were so leafy that the river was hard to see. She let a summer breeze dry the sweat on her neck and chest before she started packing.

'Please don't go—don't leave me,' Lorna said; she was still all balled up on the bed.

'I'm packing up your things,' Melony said. 'I'm not the one who's pregnant. I don't have to go nowhere.'

'Don't throw me out,' Lorna said miserably. 'Beat me, but don't throw me out.' \'7b554\'7d

'You take the train to Saint Cloud's. When you get there, you ask for the orphanage,' Melony told her friend.

'It was just a guy—just one guy, and it was just once!' Lorna cried.

'No, it wasn't,' Melony said. 'A guy gets you pregnant fast. With women, it takes fifteen years.'

When she had packed up Lorna's things, Melony stood over the bed and shook her friend, who tried to hide under the bedcovers. 'Fifteen years!' Melony cried. She shook Lorna, and shook her, but that was all she did to her. She even walked Lorna to the train. Lorna looked very disheveled, and it was only the early morning of what would be a wilting summer day.

'I ask for the orphanage?' Lorna asked numbly. In addition to her suitcase, Melony handed Lorna a large carton.

'And you give this to an old woman named Grogan— if she's still alive,' Melony said. 'Don't say nothing to her, just give it to her. And if she's dead, or not there anymore,' Melony started to say; then she stopped. 'Forget that,' she said. 'She's either there or she's dead, and if she's dead, bring the carton back. You can give it back to me when you pick up the rest of your stuff.'

'The rest of my stuff?' Lorna said.

'I was faithful to you. I was loyal as a dog,' Melony said, more loudly than she'd meant to speak, because a conductor looked at her strangely—as if she were a dog. 'You see somethin' you want, shit-face?' Melony asked the conductor.

'The train is about to leave,' he mumbled.

'Please don't throw me out,' Lorna whispered to Melony.

'I hope you have a real monster inside you,' Melony told her friend. 'I hope it tears you to pieces when they drag it out your door.'

Lorna fell down in the aisle of the train, as if she'd been punched, and Melony left her in a heap. The conductor \'7b555\'7d helped Lorna to her feet and into her seat; out the window of the moving train, he watched Melony walking away. That was when the conductor noticed that he was shaking almost as violently as Lorna.

Melony thought about Lorna arriving in St. Cloud's —that turd of a stationmaster (would he still be there?), that long walk uphill with her suitcase and the large carton for Mrs. Grogan (could Lorna make it?), and would the old man still be in the business? She'd not been angry for fifteen years, but now here was another betrayal and Melony pondered how readily her anger had returned; it made all her senses keener. She felt the itch to pick apples again.

She was surprised that it was not with vengeance that she thought of Homer Wells. She remembered how she'd first loved having Lorna as a pal—in part, because she could complain to Lorna about what Homer had done to her. Now Melony imagined she'd like to complain about Lorna to Homer Wells.

'That little bitch,' she'd tell Homer. 'If there was anybody with a bulge in his pants, she couldn't keep her eyes off it.'

'Right,' Homer would say, and together they would demolish a building—just shove it into time. When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

Melony discovered that she could think like this for one minute; but in the next minute, when she thought of Homer Wells, she thought she'd like to kill him.

When Lorna came back from St. Cloud's and went to the boarding house to retrieve her things, she found that everything had been neatly packed and boxed and gathered in one corner of the room; Melony was at work, so Lorna took her things and left.

After that, they would see each other perhaps once a week at the shipyard, or at the pizza bar in Bath where \'7b556\'7d everyone from the yard went; on these occasions, they were polite but silent. Only once did Melony speak to her.

'The old woman, Grogan—she was alive?' Melony asked.

'I didn't bring the box back, did I?' Lorna asked.

'So you gave it to her?' Melony asked. 'And you didn't say nothing?'

'I just asked if she was alive, and one of the nurses said she was, so I gave the carton to one of the nurses—as I was leavin',' Lorna said.

'And the doctor?' Melony asked. 'Old Larch—is he alive?'

'Barely,' Lorna said.

'I'll be damned,' said Melony. 'Did it hurt?'

'Not much,' Lorna said cautiously.

'Too bad,' Melony said. 'It shoulda hurt a lot.'

In her boardinghouse, where she was now the sole superintendent, she took from a very old electrician's catalogue a yellowed article and photograph from the local newspaper. She went to the antiques shop that was run by her old, dim-witted devotee, Mary Agnes Cork, whose adoptive parents had treated her well; they'd even put her in charge of the family store. Melony asked Mary Agnes for a suitable frame for the newspaper article and the photograph, and Mary Agnes was delighted to come up with something perfect. It was a genuine Victorian frame taken from a ship that had been overhauled in the Bath yards. Mary Agnes sold Melony the frame for much less than it was worth, even though Melony was rich. Electricians are well paid, and Melony had been working full-time for the shipyard for fifteen years; because she was the superintendent of the boardinghouse, she lived almost rent-free. She didn't own a car and she bought all her clothes at Sam's Army-Navy Men's Store.

It was fitting that the frame was teak—the wood of the tree that had held Wally Worthington in the air over Burma for one whole night—because the newspaper \'7b557\'7d article was about Captain Worthington, and the picture—which Melony had recognized, fifteen years ago—was also of Wally. The article was all about the miraculous rescue of the downed (and paralyzed) pilot, who had been awarded the Purple Heart. As far as Melony was concerned, the whole story resembled the plot of a cheap and unlikely adventure movie, but she liked the picture—and the part of the article that said Wally was a local hero, a Worthington from those Worthingtons who for years had owned and managed the Ocean View Orchards in Heart's Rock.

In her bedroom, in her boardinghouse in Bath, Melony hung the antique frame containing the article and photograph over her bed. In the darkness she liked knowing it was there—over her head, like history. She liked that as much as looking at the photograph in the daylight hours. And in the darkness, she would linger over the syllables of that hero's name.

'Worthington,' she liked to say aloud. 'Ocean View,' she said, at other times; she was more familiar with saying this. 'Heart's Rock,' she would say, quickly spitting the short words out.

In those predawn hours, which are the toughest for insomniacs, Melony would whisper, 'Fifteen years.' And just before she would fall asleep, she would ask of the first, flat light that crept into her bedroom, 'Are you still there, Sunshine?' What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

For fifteen years, Homer Wells had taken responsibility for the writing and the posting of the cider house rules. Every year, it was the last thing he attached to the wall after the fresh coat of paint had dried. Some years he tried being jolly with the rules; other years he tried sounding nonchalant; perhaps it had been Olive's tone and not the rules themselves that had caused some offense, and thereby made it a matter of pride with the \'7b558\'7d migrants that the rules should never be obeyed.

The rules themselves did not change much. The rotary screen had to be cleaned out. A word of warning about the drinking and the falling asleep in the cold-storage room was mandatory. And long after the Ferris wheel at Cape Kenneth was torn down and there were so many lights on the coast that the view from the cider house roof resembled a glimpse of some distant city, the migrants still sat on the roof and drank too much and fell off, and Homer Wells would ask (or tell) them not to. Rules, he guessed, never asked; rules told.

But he tried to make the cider house rules seem friendly. He phrased the rules in a confiding voice.'There have been some accidents on the roof, over the years—especially at night, and especially in combination with having a great deal to drink while sitting on the roof. We recommend that you do your drinking with both feet on the ground,' Homer would write.

But every year, the piece of paper itself would become worn and tattered and used for other things—a kind of desperation grocery list, for example, always by someone who couldn't spell.

CORN MEEL

REGULAR FLOWER

was written across Homer's rules one year.

At times, the solitary sheet of paper gathered little insults and mockeries of a semi-literate nature.

'No fucking on the roof!' or 'Beat-off only in cold storage!'

Wally told Homer that only Mr. Rose knew how to write; that the pranks, and insults, and shopping lists were all composed by Mr. Rose, but Homer could never be sure.

Every summer Mr. Rose would write to Wally and Wally would tell Mr. Rose how many pickers he needed—and Mr. Rose would say how many he was bringing and the day they would arrive (give or take). No \'7b559\'7d contract ever existed—just the short, reliable assurances from Mr. Rose.

Some summers he came with a woman—large and soft and quiet, with a baby girl riding her hip. By the time the little girl could run around and get into trouble (s;he was about the age of Angel Wells), Mr Rose stopped bringing her or the woman.

For fifteen years the only migrant who was as constant as Mr. Rose was Black Pan, the cook.

'How's your little girl?' Homer Wells v/ould ask Mr. Rose—every year that the woman and the daughter didn't show up again.

'She growin', like your boy,' Mr. Rose would say.

'And how's your lady?' Homer would ask.

'She lookin' after the little girl,' Mr. Rose would say.

Only once in fifteen years did Homer Wells approach Mr. Rose on the subject of the cider house rules. 'I hope they don't offend anyone,' Homer began, 'I'm responsible—I write them, every year—and if anyone takes offense, I hope you'll tell me.' 'No offense,' said Mr. Rose, smiling.

'They're just little rules,' Homer said.

'Yes,' said Mr. Rose. 'They are.'

'But it does concern me that no one seems to pay attention to them,' Homer finally said.

Mr. Rose, whose bland face was unchanged by the years and whose body had remained thin and lithe, looked at Homer mildly. 'We got our own rules, too, Homer,' he said.

'Your own rules,' said Homer Wells.

''Bout lots of things,' said Mr. Rose. ''Bout how much we can have to do with you, for one thing.'

'With me?' Homer said.

'With white people,' said Mr. Rose. 'We got our rules about that.'

'I see,' Homer said, but he didn't really see.

'And about fightin',' said Mr. Rose.

'Fighting,' said Homer Wells.\'7b560\'7d

'With each other,' said Mr. Rose. 'One rule is, we can't cut each other bad. Not bad enough for no hospital, not bad enough for no police. We can cut each other, but not bad.'

'I see,' Homer said.

'No, you don't,' said Mr. Rose. 'You don't see—that's the point. We can cut each other only so bad that you never see—you never know we was cut. You see?'

'Right,'said Homer Wells.

'When you gonna say somethin' else?' Mr. Rose asked, smiling.

'Just be careful on the roof,' Homer advised him.

'Nothin' too bad can happen up there,' Mr. Rose told him. 'Worse things can happen on the ground.'

Homer Wells was on the verge of saying 'Right,' again, when he discovered that he couldn't talk; Mr. Rose had seized his tongue between his blunt, square-ended index finger and his thumb. A vague taste, like dust, was in Homer's mouth; Mr. Rose's hand had been so fast, Homer had never seen it—he never knew before that someone could actually catch hold of someone's tongue.

'Caught ya,' said Mr. Rose, smiling; he let Homer's tongue go.

Homer managed to say, 'You're very fast.'

'Right,' said Mr. Rose alertly. 'Ain't no one faster.'

Wally complained to Homer about the yearly wear and tear on the cider house roof. Every two or three years, they had to re-tin the roof, or fix the flashing, or put up new gutters.

'What's having his own rules got to do with not paying attention to ours?' Wally asked Homer.

'I don't know,' Homer said. 'Write him a letter and ask him.'

But no one wanted to offend Mr. Rose; he was a reliable crew boss. He made the picking and the pressing go smoothly every harvest.

Candy, who managed the money at Ocean View, claimed that whatever costs they absorbed in repairs to \'7b561\'7d the cider house roof were more than compensated for by Mr. Rose's reliability.

There's something a little gangland style about the guy,' Wally said—not exactly complaining. 'I mean, I don't really want to know how he gets all those pickers to behave themselves.'

'But they do behave themselves,' Homer said.

'He does a good job,' Candy said. 'Let him have his own rules.'

Homer Wells looked away; he knew that rules, for Candy, were all private contracts.

Fifteen years ago, they had made their own rules—or, really, Candy had made them (before Wally came home). They stood in the cider house (after Angel was born, on a night when Olive was looking after Angel). They had just made love, but not happily; something was wrong. It would be wrong for fifteen years, but that night Candy had said, 'Let's agree to something.'

'Okay,' Homer said.

'Whatever happens, we share Angel.'

'Of course,' Homer said.

'I mean, you get to be his father—you get all the father time you want to have—and I get to have all the mother time I need,' Candy said.

'Always,' said Homer Wells, but something was wrong.

'I mean, regardless of what happens—whether I'm with you, or with Wally,' Candy said.

Homer was quiet for a while. 'So you're leaning toward Wally?' he asked.

I'm not leaning anywhere,' Candy said. I'm standing right here, and we're agreeing to certain rules.'

'I didn't know they were rules,' said Homer Wells.

'We share Angel,' Candy said. 'We both get to live with him. We get to be his family. Nobody ever moves out.'

'Even if you're with Wally?' Homer said, after a while.

'Remember what you told me when you wanted me to have Angel?' Candy asked him.\'7b562\'7d

Homer Wells was cautious, now. 'Remind me,' he said.

'You said that he was your baby, too—that he was ours. That I couldn't decide, all by myself, not to have him—that was the point,' Candy said.

'Yes,' Homer said. 'I remember.'

'Well, if he was ours then, he's ours now—whatever happens,' Candy repeated.

'In the same house?' asked Homer Wells. 'Even if you go with Wally?'

'Like a family,' Candy said.

'Like a family,' said Homer Wells. It was a word that took a strong grip of him. An orphan is a child, forever; an orphan detests change; an orphan hates to move; an orphan loves routine.

For fifteen years, Homer Wells knew that there were possibly as many cider house rules as there were people who had passed through the cider house. Even so, every year, he posted a fresh list.

For fifteen years, the board of trustees had tried and failed to replace Dr. Larch; they couldn't find anyone who wanted the job. There were people dying to throw themselves into unrewarded service of their fellow man, but there were more exotic places than St. Cloud's where their services were needed—and where they could also suffer. The board of trustees couldn't manage to entice a new nurse into service there, either; they couldn't hire even an administrative assistant.

When Dr. Gingrich retired—not from the board; he would never retire from the board—he mused about accepting the position in St. Cloud's, but Mrs. Goodhall pointed out to him that he wasn't an obstetrician. His psychiatric practice had never flourished in Maine, yet Dr. Gingrich was surprised and a little hurt to learn that Mrs. Goodhall enjoyed pointing this out to him. Mrs. Goodhall had reached retirement age herself, but nothing could have been farther from that woman's \'7b563\'7d zealous mind. Wilbur Larch was ninetysomething, and Mrs. Goodhall was obsessed with retiring him before he died; she realized that to have Larch die, while still in service, would register as a kind of defeat for her.

Not long ago—perhaps in an effort to invigorate the board—Dr. Gingrich had proposed they hold a meeting in an off-season hotel in Ogunquit, simply to break the routine of meeting in their usual offices in Portland. 'Make it a kind of outing,' he proposed, 'The ocean air and all.'

But it rained. In the colder weather, the wood shrank; the sand got in the windows and doors and crunched underfoot; the drapes and the towels and the bedsheets were gritty. The wind was off the ocean; no one could sit on the veranda because the wind blew the rain under the roof. The hotel provided them with a long, dark, empty dining room; they held their meeting under a chandelier that no one could turn on—no one could find the right switch.

It was appropriate to their discussion of St. Cloud's that they attempted to conduct their business in a former ballroom that had seen better days, in a hotel so deeply in the off-season that anyone seeing them there would have suspected they'd been quarantined. In fact, when he got a glimpse of them, that is what Homer Wells thought; he and Candy were the hotel's only other off-season guests. They had taken a room for half the day; they were a long way from Ocean View, but they'd come this far to be sure that no one would recognize them.

It was time for them to leave. They stood outside on the veranda, Candy with her back against Homer's chest, his arms wrapped around her; they both faced out to sea. He appeared to like the way the wind whipped her hair in his face, and neither of them seemed to mind the rain.

Inside the hotel, Mrs. Goodhall looked through the streaked window, frowning at the weather and at the young couple braving the elements. In her opinion, noth- \'7b564\'7d ing could ever be normal enough. That was what was wrong with Larch; not everyone who is ninetysomething is senile, she would grant you, but Larch wasn't normal. And even if they were a young married couple, public displays of affection were not acceptable to Mrs. Goodhall—and they were calling all the more attention to themselves by their defiance of the rain.

'What's more,' she remarked to Dr. Gingrich, who was given no warning and had no map with which he could have followed her thoughts, Til bet they're not married.'

The young couple, he thought, looked a little sad. Perhaps they needed a psychiatrist; perhaps it was the weather—they'd been planning to sail.

'I've figured out what he is,' Mrs. Goodhall told Dr. Gingrich, who thought she was referring to the young man, Homer Wells. 'He's a nonpractising homosexual,' Mrs. Goodhall announced. She meant Dr. Larch, who was on her mind night and day.

Dr. Gingrich was rather amazed at what struck him as Mrs. Goodhall's wild guess, but he looked at the young man with renewed interest. True, he was not actually fondling the young woman; he seemed a trifle distant.

'If we could catch him at it, we'd have him out in a minute,' Mrs. Goodhall observed. 'Of course we'd still have to find someone willing to replace him.'

Dr Gingrich was lost. He realized that Mrs. Goodhall couldn't be interested in replacing the young man on the veranda, and that therefore she was still thinking about Dr. Larch. But if Dr. Larch were a 'nonpractising homosexual,' what could they ever catch him at?

'We would catch him at being a homosexual, just not practising as such?' Dr. Gingrich asked cautiously; it was not hard to rile Mrs. Goodhall.

'He's obviously queer,' she snapped.

Dr. Gingrich, in all his years of psychiatric service to Maine, had never been moved to apply the label of 'nonpractising homosexual' to anyone, although he had \'7b565\'7d often heard of such a thing; usually, someone was complaining about someone else's peculiarity. In Mrs. Goodhall's case, she despised men who lived alone. It wasn't normal. And she despised young couples who displayed their affection, or weren't married, or both; too much of what was normal also enraged her. Although he shared with Mrs. Goodhall the desire to replace Dr. Larch and his staff at St. Cloud's, it occurred to Dr. Gingrich that he should have had Mrs. Goodhall as a patient—she might have kept him out of retirement for a few more years.

When the young couple came inside the hotel, Mrs. Goodhall gave them such a look that the young woman turned away.

'Did you see her turn away in shame?' Mrs. Goodhall would ask Dr. Gingrich, later.

But the young man stared her down. He looked right through her! Dr. Gingrich marveled. It was one of the best looks, in the tradition of 'withering,' that Dr. Gingrich had ever seen and he found himself smiling at the young couple.

'Did you see that couple?' Candy asked him later, in the long drive back to Ocean View.

'I don't think they were married,' said Homer Wells. 'Or if they're married, they hate each other.'

'Maybe that's why I thought they were married,' Candy said.

'He looked a little stupid, and she looked completely crazy,' Homer said.

'I know they were married,' Candy said.

In the sad, dingy dining room in Ogunquit, while the rain pelted down, Mrs. Goodhall said, 'It's just not normal. Doctor Larch, those old nurse—the whole bit. If someone new, in some capacity, isn't hired soon, I say we send a janitor up there—just anyone who can look the place over and tell us how bad it is.'

'Maybe it's not as bad as we think,' Dr. Gingrich said \'7b566\'7d tiredly. He had seen the young couple leave the hotel, and they had filled him with melancholy.

'Let somebody go there and see,' Mrs. Goodhall said, the dark chandelier above her small gray head.

Then, in the nick of time—in everyone's opinion— a new nurse came to St. Cloud's. Remarkably, she appeared to have found out about the place all by herself. Nurse Caroline, they called her; she was constantly of use, and a great help when Melony's present for Mrs. Grogan arrived.

'What is it?' Mrs. Grogan asked. The carton was almost too heavy for her to lift; Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had brought it over to the girls' division together. It was a sweltering summer afternoon; still, because it had been a perfectly windless day, Nurse Edna had sprayed the apple trees.

Dr. Larch came to the girls' division to see what was in the package.

'Well, go on, open it,' he said to Mrs. Grogan. 'I haven't got all day.'

Mrs. Grogan was not sure how to attack the carton, which was sealed with wire and twine and tape—as if a savage had attempted to contain a wild animal. Nurse Caroline was called for her help.

What would they do without Nurse Caroline? Larch wondered. Before the package for Mrs. Grogan, Nurse Caroline had been the only large gift that anyone sent to St. Cloud's; Homer Wells had sent her from the hospital in Cape Kenneth. Homer Wells knew that Nurse Caroline believed in the Lord's work, and he had persuaded her to go where her devotion would be welcome. But Nurse Caroline had trouble opening Melony's present.

'Who left it?' Mrs. Grogan asked.

'Someone named Lorna,' Nurse Angela said. 'I never saw her before.'

'I never saw her before, either,' said Wilbur Larch.\'7b567\'7d

When the package was opened, there was still a mystery. Inside was a huge coat, much too large for Mrs. Grogan. An Army surplus coat, made for the Alaskan service, it had a hood and a fur collar and was so heavy that when Mrs. Grogan tried it on, it almost dragged her to the floor—she lost her balance a little and wobbled around like a top losing its spin. The coat had all sorts of secret pockets, which were probably for weapons or mess kits—'Or the severed arms and legs of enemies,' said Dr. Larch.

Mrs. Grogan, lost in the coat and perspiring, said, 'I don't get it,' Then she felt the money in one of the pockets. She took out several loose bills and counted them, which was when she remembered that it was the exact amount of money that Melony had stolen from her when Melony had left St. Cloud's—and taken Mrs. Grogan's coat with her—more than fifteen years ago.

'Oh, my God!' Mrs. Grogan cried, fainting.

Nurse Caroline ran to the train station, but Lorna's train had already left. When Mrs. Grogan was revived, she cried and cried.

'Oh, that dear girl!' she cried, while everyone soothed her and no one spoke; Larch and Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna remembered Melony as anything but 'dear.' Larch tried on the coat, which was also too big and heavy for him; he staggered around in it for a while, frightening one of the smaller girls in the girls' division who'd come into the lobby to investigate Mrs. Grogan's cries.

Larch found something in another pocket: the snipped, twisted ends of some copper wire and a pair of rubber-handled, insulated wire-cutters.

On his way back to the boys' division, Larch whispered to Nurse Angela: 'I'll bet she robbed some electrician.'

'A big electrician,' Nurse Angela said.

'You two,' Nurse Edna scolded them. 'It's a warm coat, anyway—at least it will keep her warm.'

'It'll give her a heart attack, lugging it around,' Dr. Larch said. \'7b568\'7d

'I can wear it,' Nurse Caroline commented. It was the first time that Larch and his old nurses realized that Nurse Caroline was not only young and energetic, she was also big and strong—and, in a much less crude and vulgar way, a little reminiscent of Melony (if Melony had been a Marxist, thought Wilbur Larch—and an angel).

Larch had trouble with the word 'angel' since Homer Wells and Candy had taken their son away from St. Cloud's. Larch had trouble with the whole idea of how Homer was living. For fifteen years, Wilbur Larch had been amazed that the three of them—Homer and Candy and Wally—had managed it; he wasn't at all sure what they had managed, or at what cost. He knew, of course, that Angel was a wanted child, and well loved, and well looked after—or else Larch couldn't have remained silent. It was difficult for him to remain silent about the rest of it. How had they arranged it?

But who am I to advocate honesty in all relationships? he wondered. Me with my fictional histories, me with my fictional heart defects—me with my Fuzzy Stone.

And who was he to ask exactly what the sexual relationship was? Did he need to remind himself that he had slept with someone else's mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter's cigar? That he had allowed to die a woman who had put a pony's penis in her mouth for money?

Larch looked out the window at the apple orchard on the hill. That summer of 195-, the trees were thriving; the apples were mostly pale green and pink, the leaves were a vibrant dark green. The trees were almost too tall for Nurse Edna to spray with the Indian pump. I should ask Nurse Caroline to take over the tending of them. Dr.

Larch thought. He wrote a note to himself and left it in the typewriter. The heat made him drowsy. He went to the dispensary and stretched himself out on the bed.

In the summer, with the windows open, he could risk a slightly heavier dose, he thought. \'7b569\'7d

*

The last summer that Mr. Rose was in charge of the picking crew at Ocean View was the summer of 195-, when Angel Wells was fifteen. All that summer, Angel had been looking forward to the next summer—when he would be sixteen, old enough to have his driver's license. By that time, he imagined, he would have saved enough money—from his summer jobs in the orchards and from his contribution to the harvests—to buy his first car.

His father, Homer Wells, didn't own a car. When Homer went shopping in town or when he volunteered at the hospital in Cape Kenneth, he used one of the farm vehicles. The old Cadillac, which had been equipped with a hand-operated brake and accelerator so Wally could drive it, was often available, and Candy had her own car—a lemon-yellow Jeep, in which she had taught Angel to drive and which was as reliable in the orchards as it was sturdy on the public roads.

'I taught your father how to swim,' Candy always told Angel. 'I guess I can teach you how to drive.'

Of course Angel knew how to drive all the farm vehicles, too. He knew how to mow, and how to spray, and how to operate the forklift. The driver's license was simply necessary, official approval of something Angel already did very well on the farm.

And, for a fifteen-year-old, he looked much older. He could have driven all over Maine and no one would have questioned him. He would be taller than his boyish, round-faced father (they were dead-even as the summer began), and there was a defined angularity in the bones of his face that made him seem already grown up; even the trace of a beard was there. The shadows under his eyes were not unhealthy-looking; they served only to accent the vivid darkness of his eyes. It was a joke between father and son: that the shadows under Angel's eyes were 'inherited.' 'You get your insomnia from me,' Homer Wells would tell his son, who still thought he was adopted. 'You've got no reason to feel adopted,' his father \'7b570\'7d had told him. 'You've got three parents, really. The best that most people get is two.'

Candy had been like a mother to him, and Wally was a second father—or the favorite, eccentric uncle. The only life Angel had known was a life with all of them. At fifteen, he'd never suffered so much as a change of rooms; everything had been the same since he could remember it.

He had what had been Wally's room, the one Wally had shared with Homer. Angel had been born into a real boy's room: he'd grown up surrounded by Wally's tennis and swimming trophies, and the pictures of Candy with Wally (when Wally's legs worked), and even the picture of Candy teaching Homer how to swim. Wally's Purple Heart (which Wally had given to Angel) was hung on the wall over the boy's bed; it concealed an oddly smeared fingerprint—Olive's fingerprint, from the night when she'd crushed a mosquito against that wall, which was the same night Angel Wells had been conceived in the cider house. After fifteen years, the wall needed a fresh coat of paint.

Homer's room down the hall had been the master bedroom; it had been Olive's room and the room where Senior had died. Olive herself had died in Cape Kenneth Hospital before the war was over, even before they'd sent Wally home. It was an inoperable cancer, which spread very quickly after they'd done the exploratory.

Homer and Candy and Ray had taken turns visiting her; one of them was always with Angel but Olive was never alone. Homer and Candy had said—privately, only to each other—that things might have worked out differently if Wally had made it back to the States before Olive died. Because of Wally's precariousness and the added difficulty of moving him in wartime, it was thought best not to tell Wally of Olive's cancer; that was how Olive had wanted it, too.

In the end, Olive thought Wally had come home. She was pumped so full of pain-killers that she mistook \'7b571\'7d Homer for Wally in their last few meetings. Homer had been in the habit of reading to her—from Jane Eyre, from David Copperfield, and from Great Expectations —but he gave that up when Olive's attention began to wander. The first few times Olive confused Homer with Wally, Homer couldn't be sure whom she thought she was addressing.

'You must forgive him,' Olive said. Her speech was slurred. She took Homer's hand, which she did not really hold so much as contain in her lap.

'Forgive him?' said Homer Wells.

'Yes,' Olive said. 'He can't help how much he loves her, or how much he needs her.'

To Candy, Olive was clearer. 'He's going to be crippled. And he's going to lose me. If he loses you, too, who's going to look after him?'

'I'll always look after him,' Candy said. 'Homer and I will look after him.'

But Olive was not so drugged that she failed to detect and dislike the ambiguity of Candy's answer. 'It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived, Candy,' she said. With the drugs she was taking. Olive felt a perfect freedom. It was not for her to tell them that she knew what she knew; it was for them to tell her what they were keeping from her. Until they told her, she could keep them guessing about what she knew.

To Homer, Olive said: 'He's an orphan.'

'Who is?' Homer asked.

'He is,' she said. 'Don't you forget how needy an orphan is. He'll take everything. He's come from having nothing—when he sees what he can have, he'll take everything he sees. My son,' Olive said, 'don't blame anyone. Blame will kill you.'

'Yes,' said Homer Wells, who held Olive's hand. When he bent over her, to hear how she was breathing, she kissed him as if he were Wally.

'Blame will kill you,' he repeated to Candy, after Olive \'7b572\'7d had died. ' “Dread remorse,” ' said Homer Wells, forever recalling Mr. Rochester's advice.

'Don't quote to me,' Candy told him. 'The thing is, he's coming home. And he doesn't even know his mother's dead. Not to mention,' Candy said; then she stopped talking.

'Not to mention,' said Homer Wells.

Candy and Wally were married less than a month after Wally returned to Ocean View; Wally weighed one hundred forty-seven pounds, and Homer Wells pushed the wheelchair down the church aisle. Candy and Wally occupied the converted bedroom on the ground floor of the big house.

Homer Wells had written to Wilbur Larch, shortly after Wally had come home. Olive's death (Homer wrote to Larch) had 'fixed' things for Candy and Wally more securely than Wally's paralysis, or than whatever sense of betrayal and guilt might have plagued Candy.

'Candy's right: don't worry about Angel,' Wilbur Larch had written to Homer Wells. 'Angel will get enough love. Why would he feel like an orphan if he never is one? If you're a good father to him, and Candy's a good mother to him—and if he's got Wally loving him, too—do you think he's going to start missing some idea of who his so-called real father is? The problem is not going to be Angel's problem. It's going to be yours. You're going to want him to know you're his real father, because of you—not because he's going to need to know. The problem is, you're going to need to tell. You and Candy. You're going to be proud. It will be for you, and not for Angel, that you're going to want to tell him he's no orphan.'

And to himself, or as an entry in A Brief History of St. Cloud's, Wilbur Larch wrote: 'Here in St. Cloud's we have just one problem. His name is Homer Wells. He's a problem, wherever he goes.'

Aside from the darkness in his eyes and an ability to \'7b573\'7d sustain a pensive, faraway look that was both alert and dreaming, Angel Wells resembled his father very little. He never thought of himself as an orphan, he knew he had been adopted, and he knew he came from where his father came from. And he knew he was loved; he had always felt it. What did it matter that he called Candy 'Candy' and Homer 'Dad'— and Wally 'Wally'?

This was the second summer that Angel Wells had been strong enough to carry Wally—up some steps, or into the surf, or out of the shallow end of the pool and back into the wheelchair. Homer had taught Angel how to carry Wally into the surf, when they went to the beach. Wally was a better swimmer than any of them, but he needed to get into deep enough water so that he could either float over a wave or duck under one.

'You just can't let him get dragged around in the shallow water,' Homer had explained to his son.

There were some rules regarding Wally (there were always rules;, Angel had observed). As good a swimmer as he was, Wally was never allowed to swim alone, and for many summers now, Angel Wells had been Wally's lifeguard whenever Wally swam his laps or just floated in the pool. Almost half the physical contact between Wally and Angel occurred in the water, where they resembled otters or seals. They wrestled and dunked each other so ferociously that Candy couldn't help being anxious at times for both of them.

And Wally was not allowed to drive alone; even though the Cadillac had hand-operated controls, someone else had to collapse the wheelchair and put it in or take it out of the back of the car. The first collapsible wheelchairs were quite heavy. Although Wally would occasionally drag himself through the ground floor of the house using one of those metal walkers, his legs were mere props; in unfamiliar terrain, he needed his wheelchair—and in rough terrain, he needed a pusher.

So many times the pusher had been Angel; and so many times Angel had been the passenger in the \'7b574\'7d Cadillac. Although Homer and Candy might have complained if they had known, Wally had long ago taught Angel to drive the Cadillac.

'The hand controls make it easy, kiddo,' Wally would say. 'Your legs don't have to be long enough to reach the pedals.' That was not what Candy had told Angel about teaching him to drive in the Jeep. 'Just as soon as your legs are long enough to reach the pedals,' she had told him, kissing him (which she did whenever she had the excuse), Til teach you how to drive.'

When the time came, it never occurred to Candy that Angel had been so easy to teach because he'd been driving the Cadillac for years.

'Some rules are good rules, kiddo,' Wally would tell the boy, kissing him (which Wally did a lot, especially in the water). 'But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully.'

'It's dumb that I have to be sixteen before I get a driver's license,' Angel told his father.

'Right,' said Homer Wells. 'They should make an exception for kids who grow up on farms.'

Sometimes Angel played tennis with Candy, but more often he hit balls back to Wally, who maintained his good strokes even sitting down. The club members had complained a little about the wheelchair tracks on the clay—but what would the Haven Club have been without tolerating one or another Worthington eccentricity? Wally would set the wheelchair in a fixed position and hit only forehands for fifteen or twenty minutes; Angel's responsibility was to get the ball exactly to him. Then Wally would move the chair and hit only backhands.

'It's actually better practice for you than for me, kiddo,' Wally would tell Angel. 'At least, I'm not getting any better.' Angel got a lot better; he was so much better than Candy that it sometimes hurt his mother's feelings when she detected how boring it was for Angel to play with her.

Homer Wells didn't play tennis. He had never been a \'7b575\'7d games man, he had resisted even the indoor football at St. Cloud's—although he occasionally dreamed of stickball, usually with Nurse Angela pitching; she was always the hardest to hit. And Homer Wells had no hobbies— nothing beyond following Angel around, as if Homer were his son's pet, a dog waiting to be played with. Pillow fights in the dark; they'd been popular for a few years. Kissing each other good night, and then finding excuses to repeat the ritual—and finding novel ways to wake each other in the mornings. If Homer was bored, he was also busy. He had continued his volunteer work for Cape Kenneth Hospital; in a sense, he had never stopped his; war effort, his service as a nurses' aide. And he was a veteran reader of medical literature. The Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine were very acceptably piled up on the tables and in the bookcases of the Ocean View house. Candy objected to the illustrations in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

'I need a little intellectual stimulation around here,' Homer Wells would say whenever Candy complained about the graphic nature of this material.

'I just don't think that Angel has to see it,' Candy said.

'He knows I have a little background in the subject,' Homer said.

'I don't object to what he knows, I object to the pictures,' Candy said.

'There's no reason to mystify the subject for the child,' Wally said, taking Homer's side.

'There's no need to make the subject grotesque, either,' Candy argued.

'I don't think it's either a mystery or grotesque,' Angel said, that summer he was fifteen. 'It's just interesting.'

'You're not even going out with girls, yet,' Candy said, laughing, and taking the opportunity to kiss him. But when she bent over him to kiss him, she saw in her son's lap the illustration that was featured in an article on vaginal operations. The illustration indicated the lines of \'7b576\'7d incision for the removal of the vulva and a primary tumor in an extended radical vulvectomy.

'Homer!' Candy shouted. Homer was upstairs in his very spare bedroom. His life was so spare, he'd tacked only two things on his walls—and one of those was in his bathroom. By his bed he had a picture of Wally in his flier's scarf and sheepskin. Wally was posing with the crew of Opportunity Knocks; the shadow from the wing of the dark plane completely obscured the face of the radioman, and the glare of the Indian sun completely whited out the face of the crew chief (who had eventually died of his colon complication); only Wally and the copilot were correctly illuminated, although Homer had seen better pictures of them both. The copilot sent Wally a picture of himself and his growing family every Christmas; he had five or six children and a plump wife; but every year the copilot looked thinner (the amoeba he'd contracted in Burma had never entirely left him).

And in the bathroom Homer had tacked up the blank questionnaire, the extra copy—the one he'd never sent to the board of trustees of St. Cloud's. The exposure to the steam from the shower had given to the paper of the questionnaire the texture of a parchment lampshade, but each question had remained readable and idiotic.

The master bed was higher than most (because, in his day, Senior Worthington had enjoyed looking out the window while lying down); it was a feature Homer also appreciated about the bed. He could oversee the pool from up there, and he could see the cider house roof; he liked to lie on that bed for hours, just looking out the window. 'Homer!' Candy called to him. 'Please come see what your son is reading!'

That was the way they all talked. Candy said 'your son' to Homer, and that's how Wally spoke, too, and Angel always said 'Dad' or 'Pop' when he addressed his father. It had been an uninterrupted, fifteen-year relationship —Homer and Angel upstairs, Wally and Candy \'7b577\'7d in the former dining room downstairs. The four of them ate their meals together.

Some nights—especially in winter, wh«!n the bare trees permitted more of a view of the lit dining room and kitchen windows of strangers' houses—Homer Wells liked to take a short car ride before dinner. He wondered about the families who were eating dinner together— what were their real lives like? St. Cloud's had been more predictable. What did anyone really know about all those families sitting down to have a meal?

'We are a family. Isn't that the main thing?' Candy asked Homer Wells, whenever Homer appeared to her to be taking longer and longer drives before dinner.

'Angel has a family, a really wonderful family. Yes, that's the main thing,' Homer agreed.

And when Wally would tell her how happy he was, how he felt: he was the luckiest man alive—how anyone would give up his legs to be as happy as Wally was—those were the nights that Candy couldn't sleep; those were the nights when she'd be aware of Homer Wells, who was wide awake, too. Some nights they would meet in the kitchen—they'd have some rnilk and apple pie. Some nights, when it was warm, they'd sit by the swimming pool not touching each other; to any observer, the space between them would have indicated a quarrel (although they rarely quarreled), or else indifference (but they were never indifferent to each other). The way they sat by the pool reminded them both of how they used to sit on Ray Kendall's dock, before they'd sat closer together. If ever they were too conscious of this memory—and of missing that dock, or of missing Ray (who'd died before Angel was old enough to have any memory of him)—this would spoil their evening by the swimming pool and they would be forced back to their separate bedrooms, where they would lie awake a little longer.

As he grew older (and almost as insomniac as his father), Angel Wells would often watch Homer and \'7b578\'7d Candy sitting by the pool, which he could also see out the window of his room. If Angel ever thought anything about the two of them sitting out there, it was why such old friends sat so far apart.

Raymond Kendall had died shortly after Wally and Candy were married. He was killed when the lobster pound blew up; his whole dock was blown apart, and his lobster boat sank, and two old heaps of automobiles he was working on were jolted across his parking lot a good twenty-five yards down the coastal highway by the explosion—as if they

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 626