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"Well, look who survived the drive-in!" Ray said. "You better sit a while and have some tea with me." Homer could see that Candy and Wally were out on the dock, huddled together. "Lovebirds don't feel the cold, I guess," Ray said to Homer. "It don't look like they're finished saying good-bye."
Homer was happy to have the tea and to sit with Ray; he liked Ray and he knew Ray liked him.
"What'd you learn today?" Ray asked him. Homer was going to say something about the drive-in rules but he guessed that wasn't what Ray meant.
"Nothing," said Homer Wells.
"No, I'll bet you learned somethin'," Ray said. "You're a learner. I know, because I was one. Once you see how somethin' is done, you know how to do it yourself; that's all I mean." Ray had taught Homer oil changes and lubrications, plugs and points and engine timing, fuel-line maintenance and front-end alignment; he'd shown the boy how to tighten a clutch, and--to Ray's astonishment--Homer had remembered. He'd also shown him a valve job and how to replace the universal. In one summer Homer Wells had learned more about mechanics than Wally knew. But it wasn't just Homer's manual dexterity that Ray was fond of; Ray respected loneliness, and an orphan, he imagined, had a fair share of that.
"Shoot," said Ray, "I'll bet there's nothing' you couldn't learn--nothin' your hands wouldn't remember, if your hands ever got to hold it, whatever it was."
"R
ight," said Homer Wells, smiling. He remembered the perfect balance in the set of dilators with the Douglass points; how you could hold one steadily between your thumb and index finger just by resting the shaft against the pad of your middle finger. It would move only and exactly when and where you moved it. And how wonderfully precise it was, Homer thought: that the vaginal speculum comes in more than one size; that there was always a size that was just right. And how sensitive an adjustment could be accomplished by just a half turn of the little thumbscrew, how the duck-billed speculum could hold the lips of the vagina open exactly wide enough.
Homer Wells, twenty-one, breathing in the steam from the hot tea, sat waiting for his life to begin.
In the Cadillac with Wally, driving back to Ocean View--the rock-and-water prettiness of Heart's Haven giving way to the scruffier, more tangled land of Heart's Rock--Homer said, "I was wondering--but don't tell me if you'd rather not talk about it--I was just wondering how it happened that Candy got pregnant. I mean, weren't you using anything?"
"Sure I was," Wally said. "I was using one of Herb Fowler's rubbers, but it had a hole in it."
"It had a hole in it?" said Homer Wells.
"Not a big one," Wally said, "but I could tell it had a hole--you know, it leaked."
"Any hole is big enough," Homer said.
"Sure is," Wally said. "The way he carries the things around with him, it probably got poked by something in his pocket."
"I guess you don't use the rubbers Herb throws at you anymore," said Homer Wells.
"That's right," Wally said.
When Wally was asleep--as peacefully as a prince, as out-to-the-world as a king--Homer Wells slipped out of bed, found his pants, found the rubbers in the pocket, and took one to the bathroom where he filled it up with water from the cold water tap. The hole was tiny but precise--a fine but uninterrupted needle of water streamed out of the end of the rubber. The hole was bigger than a pinprick but not nearly so large as a nail would make; maybe Herb Fowler used a thumbtack, or the point of a compass, thought Homer Wells.
It was a deliberate sort of hole, perfectly placed, dead center. The thought of Herb Fowler making the holes made Homer Wells shiver. He remembered the first fetus he'd seen, on his way back from the incinerator--how it appeared to have fallen from the sky. He recalled the extended arms of the murdered fetus from Three Mile Falls. And the bruise that was green-going-to-yellow on Grace Lynch's breast. Had Grace's journey to St. Cloud's originated with one of Herb Fowler's prophylactics?
In St. Cloud's he had seen anguish and the plainer forms of unhappiness--and depression, and destructiveness. He was familiar with mean-spiritedness and with injustice, too. But this is evil, isn't it? wondered Homer Wells. Have I seen evil before? He thought of the woman with the pony's penis in her mouth. What do you do when you recognize evil? he wondered.
He looked out Wally's window--but in the darkness, in his mind's eye, he saw the eroded, still unplanted hillside behind the hospital and the boys' division at St. Cloud's; he saw the thick but damaged, sound-absorbing forest beyond the river that carried away his grief for Fuzzy Stone. If he had known Mrs. Grogan's prayer, he would have tried it, but the prayer that Homer used to calm himself was the end of Chapter 43 of David Copperfield. There being twenty more chapters to go, these words were perhaps too uncertain for a prayer, and Homer spoke them to himself uncertainly--not as if he believed the words were true, but as if he were trying to force them to be true; by repeating and repeating the words he might make the words true for him, for Homer Wells:
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.
But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect--and their meaning was unknown--but they were there.
In the morning Wally left, halfheartedly, for the university in Orono. The next day, Candy left for Camden Academy. The day before the picking crew arrived at Ocean View, Homer Wells--the tallest and oldest boy at Cape Kenneth High School--attended the first class meeting of Senior Biology. His friend Debra Pettigrew had to lead him to the laboratory; Homer got lost en route and wandered into a class called Wood Shop.
The textbook for Senior Biology was B. A. Bensley's Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit; the text and illustrations were intimidating to the other students, but the book filled Homer Wells with longing. It was a shock for him to realize how much he missed Dr. Larch's well-worn copy of Gray's. Homer, at first glance, was critical of Bensley; whereas Gray's began with the skeleton, Bensley began with the tissues. But the teacher of the class was no fool; a cadaverous man was Mr. Hood, but he pleased Homer Wells by announcing that he did not intend to follow the text exactly--the class, like Gray's, would begin with the bones. Comforted by what, for him, was routine, Homer relished his first look at the ancient yellowed skeleton of a rabbit. The class was hushed; some students were repulsed. Wait till they get to the urogenital system, thought Homer Wells, his eyes skimming over the perfect bones; but this thought shocked him, too. He realized he was looking forward to getting to the poor rabbit's urogenital system.
He had a lateral view of the rabbit's skull; he tested himself with the naming of parts--it was so easy for him: cranial, orbital, nasal, frontal, mandible, maxilla, premaxilla. How well he remembered Clara and the others who had taught him so much!
As for Clara, she was finally put to rest in a place she might not have chosen for herself--the cemetery in St. Cloud's was in the abandoned part of town. Perhaps this was appropriate, thought Dr. Larch, who supervised Clara's burial, because Clara herself had been abandoned--and surely she had been more explored and examined than she had ever been loved.
Nurse Edna was shocked to see the departing coffin, but Nurse Angela assured her that none of the orphans had passed away in the night. Mrs. Grogan accompanied Dr. Larch to the cemetery; Larch had asked her to come with him because he knew that Mrs. Grogan enjoyed every opportunity to say her prayer. (There was no minister or priest or rabbi in St. Cloud's; if holy words were in order, someone from Three Mile Falls came and said them. It was a testimony to Wilbur Larch's increasing isolationism that he refused to send to Three Mile Falls for anything, and that he preferred Mrs. Grogan--if he was forced to listen to holy words at all.)
It was the first burial that Wilbur Larch had wept over; Mrs. Grogan knew that his tears were not for Clara. Larch wouldn't have buried Clara if he'd thought that Homer Wells would ever be coming back.
"Well, he's wrong," Nurse Angela said. "Even a saint can make a mistake. Homer Wells will be back. He belongs here, like it or not."
