3. Princes of Maine, Kings of New England

“Here in St. Cloud's,” Dr Larch wrote, “we treat orphans like children from royal families.”

In the boys' division, after the bedtime reading Dr Larch shouted his nightly blessing over the beds standing in rows in the darkness.

In 193—, soon after Homer Wells saw his first fetus, he began reading David Copperfield, as a bedtime story, to the boys, just twenty minutes every night, no more, no less.

Then the lights were switched off and Dr Larch opened the door from the hall.

“Good night!” he said in a loud voice. “Good night, Princes of Maine, Kings of New England!”

Then the door closed, and the orphans were left in a new blackness. They were dreaming of their future. They imagined royal foster families and princesses who loved them.

For Homer Wells, it was different. The Princes of Maine that Homer saw, the Kings of New England that he imagined were at the court of St. Cloud's, they traveled nowhere. But even to Homer Wells Dr Larch's benediction was full of hope. These Princes of Maine, these Kings of New England, these orphans of St. Cloud's – they were the heroes of their own lives. Homer understood it clearly; Dr Larch, like a father, gave him that idea.

You can behave like a prince or like a king even at St. Cloud's, Dr Larch meant.

Homer Wells dreamed that he was a prince. He lifted up his eyes to his king: he watched St. Larch's every move. Homer couldn't forget the coolness of the fetus.

“Because it was dead, right?” he asked Dr Larch. “That's why it was cool, right?”

“Yes,” said Dr Larch. “I can tell you, Homer, it was never alive.”

“Never alive,” said Homer Wells.

“Sometimes,” Dr Larch said, “a woman just can't force herself to stop a pregnancy, she feels the baby is already a baby – and she has to have it – although she doesn't want it and she can't take care of it – and so she comes to us and has her baby here. She leaves it here, with us. She trusts us to find it a home.”

“She makes an orphan,” said Homer Wells. “Someone has to adopt it.”

“Someone usually adopts it,” Dr Larch said.

“Usually,” said Homer Wells. “Maybe.”

“Eventually,” Dr Larch said.

“And sometimes,” said Homer Wells, “the woman doesn't want to have a baby, right?”

“Sometimes,” said Dr Larch, “the woman knows very early in her pregnancy that this child is unwanted.”

“An orphan, from the start,” said Homer Wells.

“You can say so,” said Wilbur Larch.

“So she kills it,” said Homer Wells.

“You can say so,” said Wilbur Larch. “You can also say that she stops it before it becomes a child – she just stops it. In the first three or four months, the fetus – or the embryo (I don't say, then, “the child”) – it does not have a life of its own. It hasn't developed.”

“It has developed only a little,” said Homer Wells.

“It can't move,” said Dr Larch.

“It doesn't have a proper nose,” said Homer Wells, remembering it. On the thing which he found there was no nose; it had the nostrils of a pig.

“Sometimes,” said Dr Larch, “when a woman is very strong and knows that no one will care for this baby, and she doesn't want to bring a child into the world and try to find it a home – she comes to me and I stop it.”

Tell me again, what's stopping it called?” asked Homer Wells.

“An abortion,” Dr Larch said.

“Right,” said Homer Wells. “An abortion.”

“And what you held in your hand, Homer, was an aborted fetus,” Dr Larch said. “An embryo, about three to four months.”

“An aborted fetus, an embryo, about three to four months,” said Homer Wells, who usually repeated the last words of sentences.

“And that's why,” Dr Larch said patiently, “some of the women who come here don't look pregnant… the embryo, the fetus, is very small.”

“But they all are pregnant,” said Homer Wells. “All the women who come here either going to have an orphan, or they're going to stop it, right?”

“That's right,” Dr Larch said. “I'm just the doctor. I help them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion.”

“An orphan or an abortion,” said Homer Wells.

Nurse Edna teased Dr Larch about Homer Wells. “You have a new shadow, Wilbur,” she said.

“God, forgive me,” wrote Dr Larch. “I have created a disciple, I have a thirteen-year-old disciple.”

By the time Homer was fifteen, his reading of David Copperfield was so successful that some of the older girls in the girls' division asked Dr Larch to tell Homer to read to them.

“Shall I read just to the older girls?” Homer asked Dr Larch.

“Certainly not,” said Dr Larch. “You'll read to all of them.”

“In the girls' division?” Homer asked.

“Well, yes,” Dr Larch said. “All the girls can't come to the boys' division.”

“Right,” said Homer Wells. “But should I read to the girls first or to the boys first?”

“The girls,” Larch said. “The girls go to bed earlier than the boys.”

“Do they?” Homer asked.

“They do here,” Dr Larch said.

“And should I read them the same book?” Homer asked.

But Dr Larch decided that girl orphans should hear about girl orphans (he also believed that boy orphans should hear about boy orphans), and so he told Homer to read aloud Jane Eyre^[7] to the girls.

It struck Homer that the girls were more attentive than the boys. It surprised Homer, because he found Jane Eyre not as interesting as David Copperfield. He was sure that Charles Dickens was a better writer than Charlotte Bronte.

“The girls' division,” Homer thought, “had a different smell from the boys'.” On the one hand, it smelled sweeter; on the other hand, it smelled sicker – it was difficult for Homer to decide.

When children went to bed, the boys and girls dressed alike – undershirts and underpants. Every time when Homer arrived at the girls' division, the girls were already in their beds, with their legs covered, some of them were sitting, some of them were lying. One of the girls was both bigger and older than Homer Wells. Her name was Melony.

Melony always looked at Homer Wells when he was reading. She was bigger than Mrs Grogan; she was too big for the girls' division. She was too big to be adopted. “She's too big to be a girl,” thought Homer Wells. Bigger than Nurse Edna, bigger than Nurse Angela – almost as big as Dr Larch – she was fat, but her fat looked solid. Homer Wells also knew that Melony was strong.

While reading aloud from Jane Eyre, Homer needed to keep his eyes off Melony. He was afraid that she could feel how he liked her heaviness.

After reading to the girls Homer hurried to the boys' division: the boys were waiting for him. Some of the smaller ones had fallen asleep. The others were lying with open eyes and open mouths, like baby birds. Homer felt he was rushing from nest to nest; his voice was feeding them and they always cried for more. His reading, like food, made them sleepy, but it often woke Homer up. He usually lay awake after the nightly benediction. There were different irritating noises.

Little Fuzzy Stone had a constant dry cough. He had wet, red eyes. He slept inside a humidified tent; there was a special waterwheel with a battery and a fan to distribute the vapor. It worked all night. Fuzzy Stone's chest sounded like a tiny, bad motor. The waterwheel, the fan, Fuzzy Stone's dramatic gasps combined in Homer's mind.

Dr Larch told Homer that Fuzzy Stone was allergic to dust. A child with chronic bronchitis was not easily adoptable. Who wants to take home a cough?

When Fuzzy Stone's coughing was too much for Homer Wells, he quietly went to the baby room. Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna was always there, usually awake. Sometimes, when the babies were quiet, even the nurse on duty was sleeping, and Homer Wells tiptoed past them all.

One night he saw one of the mothers standing in the baby room. She was standing in her hospital gown in the middle of the baby room, her eyes were closed. She was absorbing the smells and sounds of the baby room. Homer was afraid that the woman would wake up Nurse Angela, who was sleeping on the duty bed. Slowly, he led the woman back to the mothers' room.

The mothers were often awake when he came to have a look at them. Sometimes he brought someone a glass of water.

The women who came to St. Cloud's for the abortions rarely stayed for the night. They needed less time to recover than the women who had delivered. So Dr Larch discovered that they were very comfortable if they arrived in the morning and left in the early evening, just after dark. In the daytime, the sound of the babies was not so clear because the noise that the older orphans made, and the talk among the mothers and the nurses, confused everything. Dr Larch noticed that the sound of the newborn babies upset the women who had the abortions. At night only the crying babies and the owls made sounds at St. Cloud's.

If one of those women spent the night, it was never in the room with the mothers. Homer Wells saw that the expressions on their faces were troubled when they were sleeping. Homer Wells tried to imagine his own mother among the women. Where did she go after the childbirth? Or was there no place she wanted to go? And what, when she was lying there, was his father thinking – if he even knew he was a father? If she even knew who he was.

These are the things the women usually asked him:

“Are you a medical student?”

“Are you going to be a doctor when you grow up?”

“Are you one of the orphans?”

“How old are you? Hasn't anyone adopted you yet?”

“Do you like it here?”

And he usually answered:

“Maybe I will become a doctor.”

“Of course Doctor Larch is a good teacher.”

“That's right: I am one of the orphans.”

“I am almost sixteen.”

“Adoption wasn't for me. I wanted to come back.”

“Of course I like it here!”

One of the women with a huge belly asked him, “Do you mean if someone wanted to adopt you, you wouldn't go?”

“I wouldn't go,” said Homer Wells. “Right.”

“You wouldn't even think about it?” the woman asked.

“Well, I guess I'd think about it,” Homer Wells said. “But I'd probably decide to stay, as long as I can be of use here.”

The pregnant woman began to cry. “Be of use,” she said. She put her hands on her great belly. “Look at that,” she whispered, “Do you want to be of use?”

“Right,” said Homer Wells, who held his breath.

“No one wanted to put his ear against my belly and listen,” the woman said. “You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel the baby, or listen to it.”

“I don't know,” said Homer Wells.

“Don't you want to touch it or put your ear down to it?” the woman asked him.

“Okay,” said Homer Wells, putting his hand on the woman's hot, hard belly.

“Put your ear down against it, too,” the woman advised him.

“Right,” Homer said. He touched his ear very lightly to her stomach but she strongly pressed his face against her; she was like a drum. She was a warm engine.

“No one should have a baby if there's no one who wants to sleep with his head right there,” the woman whispered, patting the place where she held Homer's face. Right where? Homer wondered, because there was no comfortable place to put his head. He found it hard to imagine that the woman was carrying only one baby.

“Do you want to be of use?” the woman asked him, crying gently now.

“Yes. Be of use,” he said.

“Sleep right here,” the woman told him. He pretended to sleep with his face against the noisy belly, where she held him.

Nurse Angela called Homer Wells “angelic,” and Nurse Edna spoke of the boy's “perfection” and of his “innocence,” but Dr Larch worried about Homer's contact with the damaged women who needed the services of St. Cloud's. What impression did they make on the boy?

Homer Wells had a good, open face; it was not a face that could hide feelings and thoughts. He had strong hands and kind eyes; Dr Larch was worried about the life stories Homer had to hear. He was worried not about the dirty details, but about the dirty philosophy.

There were no curtains at St. Cloud's. The hospital dispensary was a corner room; it had a south window and an east window. Nurse Edna thought that the east window made Dr Larch such an early riser. The white hospital bed always looked untouched; Dr Larch was the last one who went to bed and the first one who rose, so there was a rumor that he never slept at all. If he slept, 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; 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). 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 bed was under the east window. The closed and locked cupboards with their glass doors formed a strange labyrinth in the middle of the room. The labyrinth of cabinets blocked the bed from view of the hall door, which, like all the doors in the orphanage, had no lock.

The dispensary afforded Larch some privacy for his ether tricks. He was not always conscious of the moment when his fingers lost their grip on the mask and the cone fell from his face. He could usually hear voices outside the dispensary, calling him. He was sure that he always had time to recover.

“Doctor Larch?” Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or Homer Wells, called, which was all Larch needed to return from his ether voyage.

“I'm coming!” Larch answered. “I was just resting.”