The Haven Club's lifeguard, whose chest had received the full force of the grasshopper pie, turned out to be not completely mollified. He objected to Candy giving Homer swimming lessons in the shallow end of the pool in the late afternoon. The pool was crowded then, he complained; swimming lessons were regularly scheduled {302} in the early morning-and he-the lifeguard-regularly administered them-for a fee. He was not convinced that he should be flexible about the matter. Homer worked at Ocean View all day, Candy argued. In the late afternoon, when Wally played tennis after work, was the ideal time for Candy to give Homer instructions.

'Ideal for you,' the lifeguard argued with Candy; he had a crush on her, it was plain. It was one thing to be jealous of Wally Worthington-everyone was-but quite another to have to suffer the attentions Candy Kendall gave to the hard-luck case from St. Cloud's. At the Haven Club-never in Candy's presence, or in the presence of any of the Worthingtons-Homer was referred to not as the foundling or as the orphan, but as 'the hard-luck case from St. Cloud's'-sometimes 'the Worthingtons' hard-luck case' was the way it was put.

Homer said he wouldn't mind practising in the Worthingtons' private pool at Ocean View, but it was nice that he and Candy could be at the Haven Club when Wally finished playing tennis; they could then go off together, to the beach, to Ray Kendall's dock, to wherever. Also, at the Worthingtons' pool there would be Senior to deal with; more and more Olive tried to keep Senior home, away from the Haven Club. She found she could pacify him best by feeding him gin and tonics and keeping him in the pool-floating on a rubber raft. But the real reason it was a bad idea (everyone felt) for Homer to learn to swim in the Worthingtons' wnheated pool was that the cool water might be a shock to his heart.

Olive decided that she would take over Homer's lessons from Candy; she knew that the lifeguard at the Haven Club wouldn't dare to complain to her; she and Candy and Wally agreed that the unheated experience might be too severe for Homer.

'I don't want to be any trouble for you,' Homer said, puzzled and, doubtlessly, disappointed that the hands {303} under his stomach as he paddled back and forth were Olive's and not Candy's. 'It's not too cold for me in your pool, Wally,' Homer said.

'It's harder to learn when it's cold,' Candy said.

'Yes, that's right,' Olive said.

'Well, I want to swim in the ocean, as soon as I learn how,' Homer told them. 'It's a lot colder in the ocean than it is in your pool.'

Oh my, Olive worried. She wrote Dr. Larch about 'the heart problem,' which made Larch feel guilty and slightly trapped. Actually, he wrote to her, cold water doesn't provide the kind of shock he was anxious about; the kind of shock associated with an accident-'for example, a near-drowninG'-was more the kind of shock he felt that Homer must try to avoid.

What lies! Larch thought, but he mailed the letter to Mrs. Worthington anyway, and Olive found that Homer learned to swim very rapidly. 'He must have been right on the verge of picking it up when I took over from you,' she told Candy; but in truth, Homer learned more quickly from Olive because the lessons themselves were not as pleasurable.

With Candy, he might have never learned to swim; at least he could have prolonged it and made the lessons last the rest of the summer.

Homer Wells would have made that summer last the rest of his life if he could have. There was so much about his life at Ocean View that made him happy.

He was not ashamed that he loved the Worthingtons' wall-to-wall carpeting; he'd come from bare wood walls and many layers of linoleum, between which one could feel the sawdust shift underfoot. One couldn't claim that the Worthingtons' walls were hung with art, but Homer had not seen pictures on walls before (except the portrait of the pony woman); even the crowning cuteness of the oil painting of the cat in the flower bed (in W ally's bathroom) appealed to Homer-and the flower-bed wallpaper behind the painting appealed to him, too. What {304} did he know about wallpaper or art? He thought all wallpaper was wonderful.

He felt he would never stop loving Wally's room. What did he know about varsity letters and footballs dipped in liquid gold and inscribed with the score of an important game? And tennis trophies, and old yearbooks and the ticket stubs tucked into the molding of the mirror (from the first movie Wally took Candy to)? What did he know about movies? Wally and Candy took him to one of Maine's first drive-in movies. How could he ever have imagined that? And what did he know about people who came together every day, and worked together, by apparent choice? His fellow workers at Ocean View were a marvel to Homer Wells; at first, he loved them all. He loved Meany Hyde the most, because Meany was so friendly and had such a fondness for explaining how everything was done-even things that Homer-or anyone else-could have seen how to do without being told. Homer especially loved listening to Meany explain the obvious.

He loved Meany Hyde's wife, Florence-and the other women who spent the summer making the apple mart and the cider house ready for the harvest. He loved Big Dot Taft, although the jiggle in the backs of her arms reminded him of Melony (whom he never thought about, not even when he heard that she had left St. Cloud's). He liked Big Dot Taft's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who was his own age, and pretty, although there was something determined about her chubbiness that suggested she had the capacity for one day becoming as big as Big Dot.

Big Dot's husband, Everett Taft, showed Homer all about mowing. You mowed the rows between the trees twice a summer; then you raked and hayed the rows; then you baled the hay and sold it to the dairy farm in Kenneth Corners. You used the loose hay for mulch around the younger trees. At Ocean View, everything was used.

Homer liked Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper and the {305} husband of Irene of the wondrous burn scar: it was Ira who explained to Homer about the bees. They like at least sixty-five degrees, no wind, no hail, no frost,' Ira said. 'A bee lives about thirty days and does more work than some men do all their lives-1 ain't sayin' who. All honey is,' said Ira Titcomb, 'is fuel for bees.'

Homer learned that bees prefer dandelions to apple blossoms, which was why you mowed the dandelions down just before you brought the bees into the orchard. He learned why there had to be more than one kind of tree in an orchard, for cross-pollinating-the bees had to carry the pollen from one kind of tree to another. He learned it should be nighttime when you put the hives out in the orchard; at night the bees were asleep and you could close the little screen door at the slat at the bottom of the box that contained the hive; when you carried the hives, the bees woke up but they couldn't get out. The hives were light when they were carried off the flatbed trailer and distributed through the orchards, but they were heavy with honey when they had to be picked up and loaded back on the trailer a week later. Sometimes a hive could be too heavy to lift alone. If the hives were jostled, the bees inside began to hum; you could feel them stirring through the wood. If honey had leaked through the slats, a lone bee might get gobbed up in the leaking honey, and that was the only way you could get stung.

Once when Homer hugged a hive to his chest, and carefully walked it to the flatbed's edge, he felt a vibration against the taut boards containing the hive; even in the cool night air, the boards were warm; the activity of the hive generated heat-like an infection, Homer thought suddenly. He recalled the taut belly of the woman he had saved from convulsions. He thought of the activity in the uterus as producing both a heat and a hardness to the abdomen. How many abdomens had Homer Wells put his hand on before he was twenty? I prefer apple farming, he thought.