INTOLERABLE DISHONESTY

Olive had written.

And one night Candy overheard Ray. Her bedroom light was out; in the pitch dark she heard her father say, 'It's not wrong, but it's not right.' At first she thought he was on the telephone. After she drifted back to sleep, the sound of her door opening and closing woke her up again, and she realized Ray had been sitting in her room with her-addressing her in her sleep, in the darkness.

And some of the nights in blossom time, Candy would say to Homer, 'You're an overworked father.'

'Isn't he?' Olive would say admiringly.

'I'm going to take this kid off your hands for the night,' Candy would say, and Homer would smile through the tension of these exchanges. He would wake up alone in Wally's room in anticipation of Angel needing his bottle. He could imagine Raymond Kendall getting up to heat the formula and Candy being in her bed with the bottle of formula in as near an approximation of the correct angle of her breast as she could arrange it.

Ray's torpedo parts were stolen from Kittery Navy Yard; both Homer and Candy knew that's how he got them, but only Candy criticized Ray for it.

'I've caught more mistakes in the way they do things than they know things to do,' Ray said. 'Not likely they could catch me.'

'But what's it for, anyway?' Candy asked her father. 'I don't like there being a bomb here-especially when there's a baby in the house.'

'Well, when I got the torpedo,' Ray explained, 'I didn't know about the baby.'

'Well, you know now,' Candy said. 'Why don't you fire it at something-at something far away.'

'When it's ready, I'll fire it,' Ray said.

'What are you going to fire it at?' Homer asked Raymond Kendall.{547}

'I don't know,' Ray said. 'Maybe the Haven Club-the next time they tell me I spoil their view.'

'I don't like not knowing what you're doing something for,' Candy told her father when they were alone.

'It's like this,' Ray said slowly. Til tell you what it's like-a torpedo. It's like Wally, comin' home. You know he's comin', you can't calculate the damage.'

Candy asked Homer for an interpretation of Ray's meaning.

'He's not telling you anything,' Homer said. 'He's fishing-he wants you to tell him.'

'Suppose it all just goes on, the way it is?' Candy asked Homer, after they had made love in the cider house- which had not yet been cleaned for use in the harvest.

'The way it is,' said Homer Wells.

'Yes,' she said. 'Just suppose that we wait, and we wait. How long could we wait?' she asked. 'I mean, after a while, suppose it gets easier to wait than to tell?'

'We'll have to tell, sometime,' said Homer Wells.

'When?' Candy asked.

'When Wally comes home,' Homer said.

'When he comes home paralyzed and weighing less than I weigh,' Candy said. 'Is that when we spring it on him?'she asked.

Are there things you can't ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it-it seems to cut on its own-but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.

'We have to know where we're going,' said Homer Wells.

'But what if we don't know?' Candy asked. 'What if we know only how we want to stay? What if we? wait and wait?'

'Do you mean that you won't ever know if you love him or me?' Homer asked her.{548}

'It may be all confused by how much he's going to need me,' Candy said. Homer put his hand on her-where her pubic hair had grown back, almost exactly as it was.

'You don't think I'll need you, too?' he asked her. She rolled to her other hip, turning her back to him-but at the same time taking his hand from where he'd touched her and clamping his hand to her breast.

'We'll have to wait and see,' she said.

'Past a certain point, I won't wait,' said Homer Wells.

'What point is that?' Candy asked. Because his hand was on her breast, he could feel her holding her breath.

'When Angel is old enough to either know he's an orphan or know who his parents are,' Homer said. 'That's the point. I won't have Angel thinking he's adopted. I won't have him not knowing who his mother and father are.'

'I'm not worried about Angel,' Candy said. 'Angel will get lots of love. I'm worried about you and me.'

'And Wally,' Homer said.

'We'll go crazy,' Candy said.

'We won't go crazy,' Homer said. 'We've got to take care of Angel and make him feel loved.'

'But what if I don't feel loved, or you don't-what then?' Candy asked him.

'We'll wait until then,' said Homer Wells. 'We'll just wait and see,' he said, almost with a vengeance. A spring breeze blew over them, bearing with it the sickly-sweet stench of rotten apples. The smell had an almost ammonia power that so overwhelmed Homer Wells that he released Candy's breast and covered his mouth and nose with his hand.

It was not until the summer when Candy first heard directly from Wally. She got an actual letter-her first communication from him since he'd been shot down a year ago.

Wally had spent six weeks in Mt. Lavinia Hospital in Ceylon. They had not wanted to move him from there until he'd gained fifteen pounds, until his muscle tremors {549} -is had ceased and his speech had lost the daydreaming vacantness of malnutrition. He wrote the letter from another hospital, in New Delhi; after a month in India, he had gained an additional ten pounds. He said that he'd learned to put cinnamon in his tea, and that the slap of sandals was nearly constant in the hospital.

They were promising him that they would allow him to commence the long trip home when he weighed one hundred forty pounds and when he had mastered a few basic exercises that were essential to his rehabilitation. He couldn't describe the route of his proposed voyage home because of the censors. Wally hoped that the censors would understand-in the light of his paralysis- that it was necessary for him to say something about his 'perfectly normal' sexual function. The censors had allowed this to pass. Wally still didn't know he was sterile; he knew he'd had a urinary tract infection, and that the infection was gone.

'And how is Homer? How I miss him!' Wally wrote.

But that was not the part of the letter that devastated Candy. Candy was so devastated by the beginning of the letter that the rest of the letter was simply a continuing devastation to her.

'I'm so afraid that you won't want to marry a cripple,' Wally began.

In her single bed, tugged into sleep and into wakefulness by the tide, Candy stared at the picture of her mother on the night table. She would have liked a mother to talk to at the moment, and perhaps because she had no memory of her mother she remembered the first night she had arrived at the orphanage. Dr. Larch had been reading to the boys from Great Expectations. Candy would never forget the line that she and Homer had walked in on.

' “I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness,” ' Wilbur Larch had read aloud. Either Dr. Larch had predetermined that he would end the evening's reading with that line, or else he {550} had only then noticed Candy and Homer Wells in the open doorway-the harsh hall light, a naked bulb, formed a kind of institutional halo above their heads- and had lost his place in the book, causing him, spur-ofthe- moment, to stop reading. For whatever reason, that perception of wretchedness had been Candy's introduction to St. Cloud's, and the beginning and the end of her bedtime story. {551}