4. Young Dr Wells

“In other parts of the world,” wrote Wilbur Larch, “there is society. Here in St. Cloud's we have no society – and there are no options. That's why an orphan is eager to become a member of any society.”

Wilbur Larch was thinking of Homer Wells when he wrote about “options.” Homer had no choice concerning his apprenticeship. What else could he learn if he didn't learn obstetrical procedure?

By 194—, Homer Wells (who was not yet twenty years old) had delivered many children himself, with Dr Larch always present, but Larch had not allowed Homer to perform an abortion. It was understood by both Larch and Homer that Homer was able to perform one, but Larch believed that Homer should complete medical school – a real medical school – and serve an internship in another hospital before he performed the abortion. The operation was not complicated, but Larch believed that it should be Homer's choice. Larch thought that Homer should know something of society before he made the decision, by himself, whether to perform abortions or not.

Wilbur Larch loved Homer Wells – he had never loved anyone as he loved that boy, and he could not imagine his own life at St. Cloud's without Homer. But the doctor knew that Homer Wells had to encounter with society if the boy was going to choose his life. Larch dreamed that Homer would go out in the world and then choose to come back to St. Cloud's. But who would choose such a thing? Maine had many towns, but there wasn't a place as charmless as St. Cloud's.

East of Cape Kenneth, the tourist trap, there was a pretty harbor town – the town of Heart's Haven; to the west of Heart's Haven there was another small town – the town of Heart's Rock.

The people of Heart's Haven didn't like Heart's Rock, nearby Drinkwater Lake, and the summer cottages on its muddy shores. The lake was the only place where people from Heart's Rock could spend the summer. The summer camps and cottages on the lakeshore were also used during the hunting-season weekends in the fall. The lake was dirty. People didn't drink the water of Drinkwater Lake, and there were many jokes on that subject in Heart's Haven.

Not all of Heart's Rock was so ugly. It was a town on quite open, neatly farmed land; it was fruit-tree country. There were beautiful orchards. In 194—, Ocean View Orchards, a big apple farm, on Drinkwater Road, which connected Heart's Rock to Heart's Haven, was pretty and plentiful. The farmhouse had patios, there were rose bushes; the lawns spreading from the main house to the swimming pool were beautiful.

The owner of Ocean View Orchards, Wallace Worthington, was from New York. He was not good at farming, but he knew almost everything about money and had hired the right people to run Ocean View (they were the men who really knew apples).

Worthington was a constant board member at the Haven Club; he was the only Heart's Rock resident who was a Haven Club member. Wallace Worthington employed half of the local people of Heart's Rock to work in his orchard, so he was loved in both towns. Wallace would remind Wilbur Larch of someone who he met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. To Homer Wells, Wallace Worthington would look like a real King of New England.

Wallace Worthington's wife, Olive, looked like a queen but she had come from a miserable part of town.

Olive Worthington grew up selling clams out of the back of a pickup truck. Her mother smoked a lot and died of lung cancer when Olive was still in high school.

Cheerful Wallace Worthington was generous and kind. He adored Olive and everything about her – her gray eyes and her ash-blonde hair, and her New British accent which she had learnt at college. (Her brother, who was very successful as a well-digger, had paid for Olive's education, and that was the reason why she tolerated his visits at Ocean View Orchards, when he walked around the house in his muddy boots.)

Wallace Worthington was a real gentleman; he was very kind to his workers (he provided them with health insurance policies at his expense). But there was one problem – he seemed drunk all the time, so everyone in Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock agreed that it was not easy to live with him.

Yet no one doubted that Wallace Worthington was faithful to Olive. They had a son, who was twenty in 194—. The young man was as big and handsome and charming as his father, with his mother's gray eyes; he even had a bit of her New British accent. Wallace Worthington, Junior, was called Wally. From the day of Wally's birth, Wallace Worthington was called Senior by everyone.

If Dr Larch spent some time around Senior Worthington, Larch might understand that the man was unfairly judged; of course he drank too much. But Senior was not a drunk. He had the classic, clinical symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, which were failure of memory, restlessness, hyperactivity and defective judgment. But the townspeople didn't know the difference between drunkenness and Alzheimer's disease.

They misjudged Olive Worthington, too. She knew how to work. She saw, instantly, that Wallace Worthington was good about money but wasn't an expert in apples, and so she decided to help him. She found out who the knowledgeable foremen were and she paid them more money; she fired the others, and hired a younger, more reliable crew. She baked apple pies for the families of the workers who pleased her, and she taught their wives the recipe, too. She went to the university and learned how to plant a new-tree orchard; she learned more about the new chemicals than the foremen knew, and then she taught them. She took the farm out of Senior's careless hands, and she ran it very intelligently for him.

There are things that the societies of towns know about you, and things that they don't see. Senior Worthington was puzzled by his own state; he also thought that it was the result of the evils of drink. When he drank less – and still couldn't remember in the morning what he'd said or done the evening before; still hopped from one activity to the next, leaving a jacket in one place, a hat in another, his car keys in the lost jacket – when he drank less and still behaved like a fool, this confused him so much that he began to drink more. He was a victim of both Alzheimer's disease and alcoholism.

In this one respect Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock were like St. Cloud's: nothing could save Senior Worthington from what was wrong with him, and nothing could save Fuzzy Stone.

In 193—, Homer Wells began Gray's Anatomy — at the beginning. He began with the skeleton. He began with bones. In 194—, he was making his third journey through Gray's Anatomy.

“Heart is a hollow muscular organ of conical form, enclosed in the cavity of the PERICARDIUM”, Homer Wells could recite from Gray's Anatomy. By 194— Homer had looked at each of the hearts in the three dead bodies, or cadavers, that Dr Larch had gotten for him.

The cadavers were female, which was necessary in the process of educating Homer Wells in obstetrical procedure. There was always a problem getting a body. Homer remembered the three cadavers very well. By the time he got the third body he had developed enough of a sense of humor to give the body a name. He called her Clara after David Copperfield's mother – that poor, weak woman who was tyrannized by the terrible Mr Murdstone.

Body number two gave Homer the essential practice that prepared him for his first Caesarean section.

When Dr Larch was at the railroad station arguing with the stationmaster about the documents for the unfortunate Clara, Homer Wells was at St. Cloud's studying body number two. He was going to consult his Gray's, but just then Nurse Edna rushed into the room with a scream.

“Oh, Homer!” she cried, but she couldn't speak; finally, she pointed Homer in the direction of the dispensary. He ran there as quickly as he could, and found a woman lying on the dispensary floor. Her eyes were staring wildly. Then the woman began to move; her face, which had been flushed, turned a shiny blueblack; her heels struck the floor with such force that both her shoes flew off. Her mouth and chin were wet with froth.

“Eclampsia,” Homer Wells said to Nurse Edna.

“Doctor Larch is at the railroad station,” Homer told Nurse Edna calmly. “Someone has to call him. You and Nurse Angela should stay to help me.”

When Nurse Edna returned to the delivery room with Nurse Angela, Homer instructed the nurses to give morphine to the patient. Homer himself injected some magnesium sulphate into a vein, to lower blood pressure at least temporarily. In the interval between her last and her next convulsion, he told Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela to take the necessary tests. He asked the woman how many convulsions she had already suffered but she couldn't remember the number of convulsions. She only remembered their beginnings and their aftereffects. She also said she was expecting her baby in a month. The woman's state was very dangerous.

At the start of her next convulsion, Homer gave the woman a little ether, hoping to help her. But it didn't work though the woman's motion was slower. In the next interval, while the woman was still relaxed under the ether sedation, Homer examined the woman; labor hadn't begun. He was afraid to make the decision to start the operation; he wondered why Dr Larch didn't come.

An orphan had been told to find Larch at the railroad station; the boy returned and announced that Dr Larch had boarded the train to Three Mile Falls – in order to follow the dead body that the stationmaster had forwarded to the next stop. The stationmaster had simply refused to accept the cadaver. Larch, in a rage, had taken the next train after it.

“Oh-oh,” Nurse Edna said.

Homer gave his patient her first dose of digitalis which helped prevent the development of fluid in the lungs. While he waited with the woman for her next fit, he asked her if this was a baby that she wanted very much, or one that she didn't want.

“Do you mean it's going to die?” the woman asked.

“Of course not!” Homer said and smiled like Dr Larch; but he thought that the baby would die if he didn't deliver it soon, and the woman would die if he rushed the delivery.

The woman said that she didn't want to keep the baby – but that she wanted the baby to live.

“Right,” Homer said.

“You look very young,” the woman said. “I'm not going to die, am I?” she asked.

“No, you're not,” said Homer Wells, using Dr Larch's smile again.

But in twelve hours, when the woman was suffering her seventh fit on the operating table, Homer Wells did not smile.

He looked at Nurse Angela, who was trying to help him hold the woman, and he said, “I'm going to start her labor.“

“I'm sure you know what's best, Homer,” Nurse Angela said.

Twelve more hours passed; the contractions started. Homer Wells could never remember the exact number of convulsions the woman had in that time. He was beginning to worry more about Dr Larch than about the woman, and he had to fight with his fear in order to concentrate on his job.

Ten hours later a boy was born, in good condition. The mother felt better very soon. There were no more fits, and her blood pressure returned to normal.

In the evening Wilbur Larch – together with the rescued cadaver, soon called Clara – returned tired and triumphant to St. Cloud's. He had followed the body to Three Mile Falls, but the stationmaster there had been so frightened that the body was not unloaded from the train; it had traveled further, and Larch had traveled after it, arriving at the next, and at the next station. No one wanted Clara.

And so Clara went from Three Mile Falls to Misery Gore, to Moxie Gore, to East Moxie and so on. Larch had a terrible row with the stationmaster in Harmony, Maine, where Clara had scared everyone before she had been sent further.

“That was my body!” Larch screamed. “It is for a student of medicine who is training with me in my hospital in Saint Cloud's. It's mine!” Larch yelled. “Why are you sending it in the wrong direction? Why are you sending it away from me?”

“It came here, didn't it?” the stationmaster said. “It wasn't taken at Saint Cloud's.”

“The stationmaster in Saint Cloud's is crazy!” Larch shouted.

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn't,” said the stationmaster in Harmony. “All I know is, the body came here and I sent it on.”

“Idiots!” Larch shouted, and took the train. In Cornville (where the train didn't stop), Wilbur Larch screamed out the window at a couple of potato farmers who were waving at the train, “Maine is full of morons!”

In Skowhegan, he asked the stationmaster where the body was going. “Bath, I suppose,” the Skowhegan stationmaster said. “It came from Bath, and if nobody wants it at the other end, it's going back to Bath.”

“I want it!” screamed Wilbur Larch.

The body had been sent to the hospital in St. Cloud's from the hospital in Bath; a woman had died there, and the pathologist at Bath Memorial Hospital knew that Wilbur Larch was looking for a fresh female.

Dr Larch caught Clara in Augusta, where the stationmaster simply saw that the body was going the wrong way. “Of course it's going the wrong way!” Wilbur Larch cried.

The stationmaster was surprised. “Don't they speak English there?”

“They don't hear English!” Larch yelled.

On the long ride back to St. Cloud's with Clara, Dr Larch didn't calm down. In each of the towns that offended him he offered his opinions to the stationmasters while the train paused at the stations. “Moronville,” he told the stationmaster in Harmony. “Tell me one thing which is harmonious here – one thing!”

“Moronville!” Larch shouted out the window as the train pulled away. “Idiotsburg!”

To his great disappointment, when the train arrived in St. Cloud's, the stationmaster was not there. “He's having lunch,” someone told Dr Larch, but it was early evening.

“Do you mean supper?” Dr Larch asked. “Perhaps the stationmaster doesn't know the difference,” he said unkindly. He hired two men to bring Clara to the boys' division.

He was surprised by the disorder in which Homer Wells had left body number two. Larch went shouting through the orphanage, looking for Homer.

“Here I am, running after a new body for you – and you leave a mess like that! Homer! ” Dr Larch yelled. “Goddamn it,” he muttered to himself, “a teen-ager can't become an adult soon, a teen-ager can't accept adult responsibilities, he can't do an adult's job.” He went muttering all over the boys' division, looking for Homer Wells, but Homer had been on Larch's bed in the dispensary and had fallen into the deepest sleep. He had been awake for nearly forty hours with the patient – delivering her and her child.

Nurse Angela stopped Dr Larch before he could find Homer Wells and wake him up.

“What's happening around here?” Larch wanted to know. “Is no one interested in where I've been? And why has that boy left the body looking like a war casualty?”

And Nurse Angela told him everything.

“Homer did this?” Larch asked Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna; he was reading the report; he had examined the mother, who was fine, and the baby boy, who was normal and healthy.

“He was almost as calm as you, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said. “You can be proud of him.”

“He is an angel, in my opinion,” Nurse Angela said.

“He did everything just right,” Nurse Edna added.

“He was as sure as snow,” Nurse Angela said.

He did almost everything right, Wilbur Larch was thinking; it was amazing. Larch thought that it was a small error that Homer hadn't recorded the exact number of convulsions during the childbirth. It was minor criticism. But Wilbur Larch was a good teacher; Homer Wells had performed all the hard parts correctly; his procedure had been perfect.

“He's not even twenty, is he?” Larch asked. But Nurse Edna had gone to bed, she was exhausted. Nurse Angela was still awake, in her office, and when Dr Larch asked her why the baby had not been named, she told Larch that it was Nurse Edna's turn and Nurse Edna had been too tired.

“Well, it doesn't matter,” said Wilbur Larch. “You name it, then.”

But Nurse Angela had a better idea. It was Homer's baby – he had saved it, and the mother. Homer Wells should name this one, Nurse Angela said.

“Yes, you're right, he should,” Dr Larch replied, filling with pride in his wonderful creation.