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It was so like Nurse Angela, of course, to call Homer Wells "angelic," and so like Nurse Edna to speak of the boy's "perfection" and of his "innocence," but Dr. Larch worried about Homer's contact with the damaged women who sought the services of St. Cloud's--those departing mothers in whose characters and histories the boy must be seeking some definition of his own mother. And the troubled women who were scraped clean and went away leaving no one behind (just the products of conception)--what impression did they make on the boy?
Homer Wells had a good, open face; it was not a face that could hide things--every feeling and thought was visible upon it, the way a lake in the open reflects every weather. He had a good hand for holding and eyes you could confess to; Dr. Larch was worried about the specific details of the life stories Homer would be exposed to--not simply the sordidness but also the abundant rationalizations he would hear.
And now Melony, the undisputed heavyweight of the girls' division, had disturbed the boy with her anger--with what Dr. Larch suspected was only the tip of the iceberg of her power; her potential for educating Homer Wells seemed to be both terrible and vast.
Melony began her contribution to Homer's education the very next evening when he read to the girls' division. Homer had arrived early (hoping to leave early), but he found the girls' dormitory quarters in disarray. Many of the girls were out of their beds--some of them shrieking when they saw him; their legs were bare. Homer was embarrassed; he stood under the hanging bulb in the communal bedroom, searching the room without success for Mrs. Grogan, who was always nice to him, and clutching his copy of Jane Eyre in both hands--as if the wild girls were likely to tear it away from him.
He did notice that Melony was already in her usual position, in her expected, brief attire. He met her eyes, which were piercing but withholding opinion; then he looked down, or away, or at his hands holding Jane Eyre.
"Hey, you," he heard Melony say to him--and he heard a subsequent hush fall among the other girls. "Hey, you," Melony repeated. When he looked up at her, she was kneeling on her bed and shoving toward him the biggest bare ass he'd ever seen. A blue shadow (perhaps a bruise) discolored one of Melony's straining thighs; between the bulging, flexed cheeks of her intimidating buttocks, a single dark eye stared at Homer Wells. "Hey, Sunshine," Melony said to Homer, who blushed the color of the sun at sunrise or sunset. "Hey, Sunshine," Melony crooned sweetly to him--thus giving to the orphan Homer Wells her own name for him: Sunshine.
When Homer told Dr. Larch what Melony had done to him, Dr. Larch reconsidered the wisdom of allowing Homer to read to the girls' division. But to remove this chore from the boy's duties would constitute, Larch felt, a kind of demotion; Homer might suffer a sense of failure. The work at an orphanage is fairly decisive; when Wilbur Larch felt indecisive, regarding Homer Wells, he knew he was suffering from the natural feelings of a father. The thought that he had allowed himself to become a father and a sufferer of a father's indecision so depressed Dr. Larch that he sought the good peace of ether--to which he was becoming, steadily, more accustomed.
There were no curtains at St. Cloud's. The hospital dispensary was a corner room; it had a south window and an east window, and it was the east window, in Nurse Edna's opinion, that made Dr. Larch such an early riser. The slim, white-iron hospital bed never looked slept in; Dr. Larch was the last to bed and the first to rise--enhancing the rumor that he never slept at all. If he slept, it was generally agreed that he slept in the dispensary. He did his writing at night, at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office. The nurses had long ago forgotten why this room was called Nurse Angela's office; it was St. Cloud's only office room, and Dr. Larch had always used it for his writing. Since the dispensary was where he slept, perhaps Dr. Larch felt the need to say that the office belonged to someone else.
The dispensary had two doors (one leading to a toilet and shower), which in such a small room created a problem with furniture. With a window on the south end and on the east wall, and a door on the north and on the west, there was no wall one could put anything against; the stark bed fit under the east window. The closed and locked cupboards with their frail glass doors formed an awkward maze around the dispensary counter in the middle of the room; it seemed fitting, for a dispensary, that the medicines and the ether cans and the hardware of small surgery should occupy the most central space, but Larch had other reasons for arranging the room this way. The labyrinth of cabinets in the middle of the room not only left access to the hall and bathroom doors; it also blocked the bed from view of the hall door, which, like all the doors in the orphanage, had no lock.
The cluttered dispensary afforded him some privacy for his ether frolics. How Larch liked the heft of that quarter-pound can. Ether is a matter of experience and technique. Imbibing ether is pungent but light, even though ether is twice as heavy as air; inducing ether anesthesia--bringing one's patients through the panic of that suffocating odor--is different. With his more delicate patients, Larch often preceded his ether administration with five or six drops of oil of orange. For himself, he required no aromatic preparation, no fruity disguise. He was always conscious of the bump the ether can made when he set it on the floor by the bed; he was not always conscious of the moment when his fingers lost their grip on the mask; the cone--by the force of his own exhalations--fell from his face. He was usually conscious of the limp hand that had released the cone; oddly, that hand was the first part of him to wake up, often reaching for the mask that was no longer there. He could usually hear voices outside the dispensary--if they were calling him. He was confident that he would always have time to recover.
"Doctor Larch?" Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or Homer Wells, would ask, which was all Larch needed to be brought back from his ether voy-age.
"Right here!" Larch would answer. "Just resting."
It was the dispensary, after all; don't the dispensaries of surgeons always smell of ether? And for a man who worked so hard and slept so little (if he slept at all), wasn't it natural that he would need an occasional nap?
It was Melony who first suggested to Homer Wells that Dr. Larch possessed certain remote habits and singular powers.
"Listen, Sunshine," Melony told Homer, "how come your favorite doctor doesn't look at women? He doesn't--believe me. He won't even look at me, and every male everywhere, every time, looks at me--men and boys look at me. Even you, Sunshine. You look at me." But Homer Wells looked away.
"And what's the smell he carries around?" Melony asked.
"Ether," said Homer Wells. "He's a doctor. He smells like ether."
"You're saying this is normal?" Melony asked him.
"Right," said Homer Wells.
"Like a dairy farmer?" Melony asked slyly. "He's supposed to smell like milk and cowshit, right?"
"Right," said Homer Wells, cautiously.
"Wrong, Sunshine," Melony said. "Your favorite doctor smells like he's got ether inside him--like he's got ether instead of blood."
Homer let this pass. The top of his dark head measured up to Melony's shoulder. They were walking on the tree-stripped and eroded riverbank in the part of St. Cloud's where the abandoned buildings had remained abandoned; the river there had eroded not only the bank but also the foundations of these buildings, which in several cases did not have proper foundations or even cellar holes--some of these buildings were set on posts, which were visible and rotting in the gnawing water at the river's edge.
The building Homer and Melony preferred had a porch that had not been designed to overhang the river, though it hung over the river now; through the porch's broken floorboards, Homer and Melony could watch the bruise-colored water rush by.
The building had been a kind of dormitory for the rough men who worked in the saw mills and lumberyards of the old St. Cloud's; it was not a building of sufficient style for the bosses or even the foremen--the Ramses Paper Company people had kept rooms in the whore hotel. It was a building for the sawyers, the stackers, the yardmen--the men who broke up the logjams, who drove the logs downstream, who hauled the logs and cut lumber overland; the men who worked the mills.
Usually, Homer and Melony stayed outside the building, on the porch. Inside, there were only an empty communal kitchen and the countless, sordid bunkrooms--the ruptured mattresses infested with mice. Because of the railroad, hoboes had come and gone, staking out their territory in the manner of dogs, by peeing around it, thus isolating the mattresses least overrun by the mice. Even with the window glass gone and the rooms half filling with snow in the winters, there was no ridding the inside of that building from the smell of urine.
One day, when the weak spring sun had lured a black snake, sluggish with cold, to warm itself on the floorboards of the porch, Melony said to Homer Wells, "Watch this, Sunshine." With surprising quickness of hand for such a big girl, she seized the napping snake behind its head. It was a milk shake--almost three feet long, and it twined around Melony's arm, but Melony held it the proper way, tightly, behind the head, not choking it. Once she had caught it, she seemed to pay no attention to it; she watched the sky as if for a sign and went on talking to Homer Wells.
"Your favorite doctor, Sunshine," Melony said. "He knows more about you than you know. And more about me than I know, maybe."
Homer let this pass. He was wary of Melody, especially now that she had a snake. She could grab hold of me just as quickly, he was thinking. She could do something to me with the snake.
"You ever think about your mother?" Melody asked, still searching the sky. "You ever wish you knew who she was, why she didn't keep you, who your father was--you know, those things?"
