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"Doctor Larch!"
"Rhymes with screams," Wilbur Larch murmured. He took the deepest possible breath. His hand lost touch with the cone, which rolled off his face and under the bed.
"Doctor Larch?" Homer Wells said again. The smell of ether in the dispensary seemed unusually strong to Homer, who passed through the labyrinth of medicine chests to see if Dr. Larch was on his bed.
"Shit or get off the pot!" he heard Dr. Larch say. (Inhale, exhale.) "I'm sorry," Dr. Larch said when he saw Homer beside his bed. He sat up too fast; he felt very light-headed; the room was swimming. "I'm sorry," he repeated.
"That's okay," said Homer Wells. "I'm sorry I woke you up."
"Rhymes with screams," said Wilbur Larch.
"Pardon me?" said Homer Wells.
In the closed dispensary, a fragrant mothball sent its vapory messages everywhere.
"Sit down, Homer," said Dr. Larch, who realized that Homer was already sitting beside him on the bed. Larch wished his head was clearer; he knew this was an important confrontation for the boy. Homer expected to be reprimanded, and not in uncertain terms, but Larch feared he might not be in the best shape for sounding certain.
"Vandalism!" Larch launched in. "Pornography!" Now there's a start, he thought, but the boy sitting beside him just waited patiently. Larch took a gulp of what he hoped was clearer air; the fragrance of ether was still heavily present in the dispensary; the air in the immediate vicinity was alternately drowsy and sparkling with little stars.
"Vandalism is one thing, Homer," Larch said. "And pornography--quite another."
"Right," said Homer Wells--growing older, learning something new every day.
"More central to our relationship, Homer, is the issue of you deceiving me. Right?"
"Right," Homer said.
"Fine," Larch said.
The stars sparkled so brightly on the ceiling of the dispensary that for a moment Dr. Larch thought that their dialogue was taking place under the nighttime firmament. He tipped his head back, to escape the fumes, but he lost his balance and fell back on the bed.
"Are you okay?" Homer asked him.
"Fine!" Larch boomed heartily. Then he started to laugh.
It was the first time Homer Wells had heard Dr. Larch laugh.
"Listen, Homer," Dr. Larch said, but he giggled. "If you're old enough to vandalize whole buildings and masturbate to pictures of women giving blow jobs to ponies, then you're old enough to be my assistant!" This struck Larch as so funny that he doubled up on the bed. Homer thought it was a funny thing to say, too, and he began to smile. "You don't get it, do you?" Larch asked, still giggling. "You don't get what I mean." He lay on his back and waved his feet in the air while the firmament of stars circled above them. "I'm going to teach you surgery!" Larch shouted at Homer, which dissolved both of them into tears of laughter. "Obstetrical procedure, Homer," Larch said; Homer, now, fell back on the bed, too. "The Lord's work and the Devil's, Homer!" Larch said, hooting. "The works!" he screamed. Homer started to cough, he was laughing so hard. He was surprised when Larch--like a magician--produced the photograph of the woman and the pony and waved it in front of him. "If you're old enough even to contemplate this," Larch said, "you're old enough to have a grown-up's job!" This cracked up Larch so completely that he had to hand the photograph to Homer Wells--or else he would have dropped it.
"Listen, Homer," Larch said. "You're going to finish medical school before you start high school!" This was especially funny to Homer, but Dr. Larch suddenly grew serious. He snatched the photograph back from Homer. "Look at this," he commanded. They sat on the edge of the bed and Larch held the photograph steady on his knee. "I'll show you what you don't know. Look at that!" he said, pointing to the pigtail, obscured in the shadow of the pony's leg. "What is it?" he asked Homer Wells. "Teenagers: you think you know everything," Larch said threateningly. Homer caught the new tone of voice; he paid close attention to this part of the picture he'd never looked at before--a stain on the rug, maybe, or was it a pool of blood from the woman's ear?
"Well?" Larch asked. "It's not in David Copperfield. It's not in Jane Eyre, either--what you need to know," he added almost nastily.
The medical slant of the conversation convinced Homer Wells that it was a pool of blood in the photograph--that only a doctor could recognize it so positively. "Blood," Homer said. "The woman's bleeding." Larch ran with the photograph to the lamp at the dispensary counter.
"Blood?" Larch said. "Blood!" He looked the photograph all over. "That's not blood, you idiot! That's a pigtail!" He showed the photograph once more to Homer Wells; it would be Homer's last look at the photograph, though Dr. Larch would look at it often. He would keep it attached to the pages of A Brief History of St. Cloud's; he did not keep it for pornographic interest but because it reminded him of a woman he had abused twice. He had slept with her mother in front of her, and he had not provided her with a service that she had every right to request. He had not been a proper doctor to her, and he wanted to remember her. That he was forced to remember her with a pony's penis in her mouth made Dr. Larch's mistakes all the more forcefully mistakes to him; Larch liked it that way.
He was a hard man--on himself, too.
He took a harder line toward Homer Wells than the hilarity of his promises to the boy at first suggested--to teach him "the works," as Larch called it, was not so funny. Surgery, obstetrical procedure--even a normal birth, even the standard D and C--required considerable background and preparation.
"You think it's tough to look at a woman with a pony's penis in her mouth, Homer?" Larch asked him the next day--when he was not under the influence of ether. "You ought to look at something that's harder to understand than that. Here," Larch said, handing Homer the well-worn copy of Gray's Anatomy, "look at this. Look at it three or four times a day, and every night. Forget pony penises, and learn this."
"Here in St. Cloud's," wrote Dr. Wilbur Larch, "I have had little use for my Gray's Anatomy; but in France, in World War I, I used it every day. It was the only road map I had over there."
Larch also gave Homer his personal handbook of obstetrical procedure, his notebooks from medical school and from his internships; he began with the chemistry lectures and the standard textbook. He set aside a corner of the dispensary for a few easy experiments in bacteriology, although the sight of Petri dishes caused Larch flashes of no uncertain pain; he was not fond of the world there was to be seen under the microscope. Larch was also not fond of Melony--specifically, he was not fond of her apparent hold on Homer Wells. Larch assumed that they slept together; he assumed that Melony had initiated him, which was true, and now forced him to continue, which was not the case. In time, they would sleep together, albeit routinely, and that hold that Dr. Larch imagined Melony had on Homer was balanced by a hold Homer had on Melony (Homer's promise to her, which Larch couldn't see). He saw Melony as Mrs. Grogan's responsibility, and he was unaware how his responsibility for Homer Wells might cloud his other responsibilities.
He sent Homer to the river to catch a frog; then he made Homer dissect it, although not everything in the frog could be properly accounted for in Gray's Anatomy. It was Homer's first visit to the river since he had fled from Melony's destruction of the so-called sawyers' lodge, and Homer was impressed to see that truly half the building was gone.
