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inks—resembled 41 a much-revised treaty between two serniliterate countries at war. The text itself was always strange to Homer Wells, even when it was finally correct. This was because the woman borrowed heavily from a family hymnal, and Homer Wells had never seen a church or heard a hymn (unless one counted Christmas carols, or the songs Mrs. Grogan sang—and the plumber's widow was not such a fool that she used Christmas carols). Homer Wells used to have nightmares about deciphering the passages that the plumber's widow concocted.
    o lorde mi got wen i en ausum wundor
    konsider al the wurlds thi hends hav mad…
    Or there was this one:
    o ruck of eges clift fur me let mi hid misulf en
    theee…
    And so forth.
    The third tutor, a retired schoolteacher from Camden, was an old, unhappy man who lived with his daughter's family because he couldn't take care of himself. He taught history, but he had no books. He taught the world from memory; he said the dates weren't important. He was capable of sustaining a rant about Mesopotamia for a full half hour, but when he paused for breath, or for a sip of water, he would find himself in Rome, or in Troy; he would recite long, uninterrupted passages from Thucydides, but a mere swallow would transport him to Elba, with Napoleon.
    I think,' Nurse Edna once remarked to Dr. Larch, 'that he manages to give a sense of the scope of history.'
    Nurse Angela rolled her eyes. 'Whenever I try to listen to him,' she said, 'I can think of a hundred good reasons for war.'
    She meant, Homer Wells understood, that no one should live so long.
    It is easy to understand why Homer was more fond of doing chores than he was fond of education. {42}
    Homer's favorite chore was selecting, for Dr. Larch, the evening reading. He was supposed to estimate a passage that would take Dr. Larch exactly twenty minutes to read; this was difficult because when Homer read aloud to himself, he read more slowly than Dr. Larch, but when he simply read to himself, he read more quickly than Dr. Larch could read aloud. At twenty minutes an evening, it took Dr. Larch several months to read Great Expectations, and more than a year to read David Copperfield —at the end of which time, St. Larch announced to Homer that he would start at the beginning of Great Expectations again. Except for Homer, the orphans who'd first heard Great Expectations had moved on.
    Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickerisian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud's. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud—it was a successful soporific for the children who didn't know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, the evening reading provided them with a way to leave St. Cloud's in their dreams, in their imaginations.
    Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. ('What in hell else would you read to an orphan?' Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)
    And so Homer Wells was familiar with the vision of that gibbet in the marshland—'with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate'—and Homer's imagination of the orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch…the beautiful Estella, the vengeful Miss Havisham…provided him with sharper details when, falling asleep, he would follow the ghostly mothers who left St. Cloud's in the cover of darkness, and boarded the horse-drawn coach cair, or, later, the bus which replaced {43} the coach, and gave Homer Wells his first sensation of the passage of time, of progress. Soon after the bus replaced the coach, all bus service in St. Cloud's was discontinued. Thereafter, the mothers walked; this gave Homer further understanding of progress.
    The mothers he saw in his sleep never changed. But the men who had not bothered