"The kid's got fiction in his blood," Wally would tell Homer Wells.
To Candy, a novelist was also what Homer Wells had become--for a novelist, in Candy's opinion, was also a kind of impostor doctor, but a good doctor nonetheless.
Homer never minded giving up his name--it wasn't his actual name, to begin with--and it was as easy to be a Fuzzy as it was to be a Homer--as easy (or as hard) to be a Stone as it was to be anything else.
When he was tired or plagued with insomnia (or both), he would miss Angel, or he would think of Candy. Sometimes he longed to carry Wally into the surf, or to fly with him. Some nights Homer imagined he would be caught, or he worried about what he would do when Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna were too old for the Lord's work, and for all the other work in St. Cloud's. And how would he ever replace Mrs. Grogan? Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal--that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)--but he was rarely that tired.
And, after a while, he would write to Candy and say that he had become a socialist; or, at least, that he'd become sympathetic to socialist views. Candy understood by this confession that Homer was sleeping with Nurse Caroline, which she also understood would be good for them--that is, this new development was good for Homer and for Nurse Caroline, and it was good for Candy, too.
Homer Wells saw no end to the insights he perceived nightly, in his continuous reading from Jane Eyre, and from David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He would smile to remember how he had once thought Dickens was "better than" Bronte. When they both gave such huge entertainment and instruction, what did it matter? he thought--and from where comes this childish business of "better"? If not entertainment, he took continued instruction from Gray's Anatomy.
For a while, he lacked one thing--and he was about to order it when one came unordered to him. "As if from God," Mrs. Grogan would say.
The stationmaster sent him the message: there was a body at the railroad station, addressed to Dr. Stone. It was from the hospital in Bath--which had been Dr. Larch's long-standing source for bodies, in the days when he'd ordered them. It was some mistake, Homer Wells was sure, but he went to the railroad station to view the body anyway--and to spare the stationmaster any unnecessary agitation.
Homer stood staring at the cadaver (which had been correctly prepared) for such a long time that the stationmaster grew even more anxious. "I'd just as soon you either take it up the hill, or send it back," the stationmaster said, but Homer Wells waved the fool off; he wanted peace to look at Melony.
She had requested this use of her body, Lorna had told the pathologist at the Bath hospital. Melony had seen a photograph in the Bath paper, together with an article revealing Dr. Stone's appointment in St. Cloud's. In the event of her death (which was caused by an electrical accident), Melony had instructed Lorna to send her body to Dr. Stone in St. Cloud's. "I might be of some use to him, finally," she had told her friend. Of course Homer remembered how Melony had been jealous of Clara.
He would write to Lorna; they would correspond for a while. Lorna would inform him that Melony was "a relatively happy woman at the time of her accident"; in Lorna's opinion, something to do with how relaxed Melony had become was responsible for her electrocuting herself. "She was a daydreamer," Lorna would write. Homer knew that all orphans were daydreamers. "You was her hero, finally," Lorna would tell him.
When he viewed her body, he knew he could never use it for a refresher course; he would send to Bath for another cadaver. Melony had been used enough.
"Should I send it back, Doctor?" the stationmaster whispered.
"No, she belongs here," Homer Wells told him, and so he had Melony brought uphill. It would be essential to keep the sight of her in her present form a secret from Mrs. Grogan. What Homer told them all was that Melony had requested she be buried in St. Cloud's, and so she was--on the hill, under the apple trees, where it was torturously hard to dig a correct hole (the root systems of the trees were everywhere). Finally, a large and deep enough hole was managed, although it was back-breaking labor, and Nurse Caroline said, "I don't know who she is, but she sure is difficult."
"She was always that," said Homer Wells.
("Here in St. Cloud's," Wilbur Larch had written, "we learn to love the difficult.")
Mrs. Grogan said her Cardinal Newman over Melony's grave, and Homer said his own prayer (to himself) about her. He had always expected much from Melony, but she had provided him with more than he'd ever expected--she had truly educated him, she had shown him the light. She was more Sunshine than he ever was, he thought. ("Let us be happy for Melony," he said to himself. "Melony has found a family.")
But chiefly, for his education, he would peruse (and linger over every word of) A Brief History of St. Cloud's. In this pursuit, he would have Nurse Angela's and Nurse Edna's and Mrs. Grogan's and Nurse Caroline's tireless company, for by this pursuit they would keep Wilbur Larch alive.
Not that everything was clear to Homer: the later entries in A Brief History of St. Cloud's were marred by shorthand inspirations and the whimsy conveyed to Larch through ether. For example, what did Larch mean by "rhymes with screams!"? And it seemed uncharacteristically harsh of Larch to have written: "I put the pony's penis in her mouth! I contributed to that!" How could he have thought that? Homer wondered, because Homer never knew how well Dr. Larch had known Mrs. Eames's daughter.
And as he grew older, Homer Wells (alias Fuzzy Stone) would take special comfort in an unexplained revelation he found in the writings of Wilbur Larch.
"Tell Dr. Stone," Dr. Larch wrote--and this was his very last entry; these were Wilbur Larch's last words: "There is absolutely nothing wrong with Homer's heart." Except for the ether, Homer Wells knew there had been very little that was wrong with the heart of Wilbur Larch.
To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn't (but who had in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were--if there ever were--Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.
Author's Notes
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader's search tools.
(pp. 37-38) Anthony Trollope, who visited Portland, Maine, in 1861, and wrote about it in his North America, was mistaken--in the manner of Wilbur Larch's father--about the intended future of the Great Eastern.
(p. 41) I am indebted to my grandfather Dr. Frederick C. Irving for this information regarding Dr. Ernst, the curve-ball pitcher--and for the particularly medical language in this chapter. My grandfather's books include The Expectant Mother's Handbook, A Textbook of Obstetrics, and Safe Deliverance. Dr. Ernst's studies of bacterial in
fections drew the attention of a Dr. Richardson of the Boston Lying-In Hospital, the maternity hospital where Wilbur Larch served an internship and later joined the staff. Dr. Richardson's article "The Use of Antiseptics in Obstetric Practice" would surely have caught the attention of that eager student of bacteriology, clap-sufferer Wilbur Larch.
The interest in antiseptics among obstetricians was due to their effect in preventing the most deadly puerperal infection of that day, childbed fever. In 188_, in some maternity hospitals, the death rate among the mothers was about one in eight. In 189_, when Wilbur Larch was still at the Boston Lying-In, a mother's odds were better; the doctors and their patients were washed with a solution of bichloride of mercury. Before Larch would leave the Boston Lying-In, he would see the antiseptic technique advance to the aseptic--the latter meaning "free from bacteria," which meant that everything was sterilized (the sheets, the towels, the gowns, the gauze sponges); the instruments were boiled.
(p. 42) On the use of ether: most historians of anesthesia agree with Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland that surgical anesthesia began at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846, when William Morton demonstrated the effectiveness of ether. Dr. Nuland writes: "Everything that led up to it was prologue, everything that was tangential to it was byplay, and everything that followed it was amplification."
According to Dr. Nuland, ether in proper hands remains one of the safest inhalation agents known. At a concentration of only 1 to 2 percent it is a light, tasty vapor; in light concentration, even thirty years ago, hundreds of cases of cardiac surgery were done with light ether and partially awake (even talking) patients.