Chapter 6 The Jewish One
The train to St. Cloud’s left as early as a milk train, and it made as many stops.
The train stopped at stations where no one got off or on the train, but the Winslows scarcely noticed their fellow passengers.
More people disembarked and boarded the train in Portland, and again in Lewiston, where the Winslows were vaguely aware of the Androscoggin River.
As the crow flies, you could follow the Androscoggin north-northwest to Berlin, New Hampshire, but the train to St. Cloud’s went its own way—due north.
It wouldn’t keep company with the Androscoggin for long.
North of Lewiston, where the Winslows parted company with the big river, looked foreign to them, though there were other rivers around.
Maybe the Winslows were wondering about their closeness to Quebec, or Thomas had his own reasons to say, “Another French Canadian would be okay with me, Connie.”
“I just want a good one, Tommy,” Constance said.
A new conductor passed through their car, where the Winslows were almost the only passengers.
A younger couple sat across the aisle, and two elderly, quarrelsome men were seated on the same side of the train as the Winslows, a little ahead of them.
There were no words with the old codgers when the conductor checked their tickets.
The young couple and the conductor also refrained from conversation.
In Maine, Thomas Winslow was thinking, there must be a strict observance of silence in the presence of men in uniform.
Constance had the tickets in her purse; she handed them to the conductor, a squat man with a gray mustache, his eyes concealed under the visor of his conductor’s cap.
“We’re going to St. Cloud’s!” Thomas Winslow announced to the entire passenger car, causing the two codgers to cry out in consternation.
There was a sharp intake of breath from the young woman across the aisle, and the conductor’s cap was knocked askew when he suddenly stiffened.
That was when the Winslows saw the conductor’s one glass eye, and his one good one.
“You have the right tickets—St. Cloud’s is where you’re going,” the conductor with the glass eye told Thomas, handing the tickets back to Constance.
The two codgers had been whispering to each other, like a couple of hissing snakes, when one of them turned around and shouted over the back of his seat. “You don’t have to raise a ruckus about where you’re goin’!” he cried.
Constance held her Tommy’s hand. She knew he would have been disappointed if he couldn’t incite their fellow passengers on the subject of St. Cloud’s.
For the same reason, the Winslows were disappointed not to encounter the Judgment Day stationmaster on the platform when they got off the train.
There was no one in or around the forlorn-looking railroad station; no other passengers had disembarked or boarded the train in St. Cloud’s, where the dirt road to the orphanage was not as muddy as the Winslows were expecting.
They’d worn their mud boots, but they needed only to avoid the wheel ruts.
Spring had come to Pennacook—not yet to this part of Maine.
There were mounds of unmelted snow in the woods as the Winslows trudged on.
Dusk was falling; in the darker stage of twilight, the orphanage buildings were unclear.
The Winslows faintly discerned what looked like three structures—two separate bunkhouses with a building between them, probably a dining hall with a kitchen.
Where was the hospital? There had to be somewhere for the babies to be born, and for the infants, Thomas Winslow was thinking.
There were no children’s voices. It was the time of the evening for kids to have supper, Constance thought.
At the first building they came to, they saw steps leading to a porch and (perhaps) an entrance.
Nurse Edna heard the Winslows knocking and let them in; she said she’d been expecting them.
As she led them along a corridor, through the glass panels on a pair of double doors, they got a glimpse of cribs for infants and a nurse holding a baby.
“Nurse Angela will be joining us, as will Dr. Larch when he finishes his supper—he’s in the dining hall with the children,” Nurse Edna told them.
She explained the layout of the orphanage as patiently as she might have spoken to a newly abandoned orphan.
The building they were in was the boys’ division; the boys bunked upstairs, where their washrooms were.
The ground floor, where the infants were, had two delivery rooms equipped for surgical operations.
Dr. Larch slept in the boys’ division, where he also had an office.
The building on the far side of the dining hall was the girls’ division.
The boys and girls did everything together, but they slept and washed and dressed in separate buildings.
Nurse Edna left the Winslows in Dr. Larch’s office while she went to get the doctor.
Constance quickly looked away when she saw the stirrups on the gynecological examination table.
The Winslows whispered about the smell in the doctor’s office.
It was an antiseptic smell, or something medicinal.
Constance thought she recognized the smell, but she couldn’t name it. It made her queasy.
The office was a maze of books and instruments, but the doctor’s desk drew the schoolteacher’s attention.
The typewriter was the centerpiece; the surrounding stacks of pages had a writerly symmetry, an orderliness that reminded Thomas Winslow of Dr. Larch’s letters.
Just then, the nurse they’d seen with the infants breezed into the office—automatically opening a window.
“Some fresh air might be nice—you must be the Winslows,” Nurse Angela said.
Thomas introduced himself and Constance, who inquired about the smell.
“Oh, that’s just ether,” Angela answered, as breezily as she’d walked in.
Nurse Angela saw no reason to tell the Winslows that Dr. Larch was addicted to ether.
Besides, the Winslows were looking with approval at the doctor’s framed diplomas—the ones from Bowdoin College and Harvard Medical School.
Angela didn’t know the sordid story of what had happened to Dr. Larch between those two degrees.
Not even his nurses knew why Larch was disenchanted with the Portland of his youth—only that he was definitely disenchanted with it.
In his first year of medical school, Wilbur Larch had had a bacterial infection that pained and ashamed him.
It was gonorrhea—a gift, indirectly, from his alcoholic father.
His old man had been so proud of Wilbur, he sent him to medical school with a present.
He bought the boy a Portland whore, setting up his son with a sexual experience in one of the wharf-side boardinghouses.
It was a present the boy had been too embarrassed to refuse.
Young Larch was touched that his father had given him anything.
The whore’s name was Mrs. Eames. “She rhymes with screams!” Wilbur’s father had told him.
It was no small feat that his father managed to be a drunk in the Portland of Mayor Neal Dow’s time.
Dow was responsible for the Maine law that introduced Prohibition to the state.
In those days, all Larch’s father could find to drink was a Scotch ale or a bitter beer—he had to drink these weak brews by the bucketful to get buzzed enough to think it was a good idea to buy his son a whore.
These were pre-penicillin days. The gonorrhea lived on for months in young Larch, giving him a passionate interest in bacteriology before burning itself out.
It left his urethra scarred. It left him fond of ether, too—because the ether sleeps Larch administered to himself relieved him of the burning.
This singular encounter with sexual pleasure—in combination with Wilbur’s memory of his parents’ loveless marriage—convinced the med student that a life of sexual abstinence was medically and philosophically sound.
The road that led young Larch to obstetrics was strewn with bacteria—his own.
Every morning, he would milk a drop of pus from his penis onto a stained slide.
Magnified more than a thousand times, the gonococci he saw under the microscope were still smaller than common red ants.
By the time the gonococci were gone, Larch was an ether addict.
While they waited for Dr. Larch in his office, the Winslows were now looking at a framed photograph on a corner of the doctor’s desk.
Among the soldiers on cots and the doctors attending to the wounded, the Winslows would not have recognized Dr. Larch—they hadn’t met him yet.
Besides, Dr. Larch wasn’t pictured with the doctors—as Nurse Angela knew, Larch had taken the photograph.
“Is this a field hospital—was Dr. Larch in the war?” Thomas Winslow asked Angela.
In the grainy black-and-white photo, the soldiers’ bandages were a brighter white.
Angela knew what Dr. Larch was dealing with there—the shell and grenade fragments, the shrapnel, the dirty bits of a soldier’s uniform that were carried with a missile into a wound.
There was a recurring bacillus infection, but why did the Winslows need to know?
“It was an Advanced Dressing Station in France—we missed Dr. Larch here when he was over there,” was all Nurse Angela said.
That was when Dr. Larch and Nurse Edna got to the doctor’s office.
There was no folderol about the seating arrangements.
From the two chairs in front of the doctor’s desk, the Winslows’ view of Dr. Larch was partially blocked by the big typewriter.
The two nurses sat together on the examination table; the stirrups didn’t bother them.