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Falls. There was a woman who taught math; she was a bookkeeper for a textile mill—“a real-life accountant,” Nurse Edna claimed—but she refused to have anything to do with algebra or geometry, and she firmly preferred addition and subtraction to multiplication and division (Homer Wells would be a grown man before Dr. Larch would discover that the boy had never learned the multiplication table).
    Another woman, a well-to-do plumber’s widow, taught grammar and spelling. Her method was rigorous and messy. She presented great clumps of uncapitalized, misspelled, and unpunctuated words, and demanded that the clumps be put into proper sentences, meticulously punctuated and correctly spelled. She then corrected the corrections; the final document—she employed a system of different-colored inks—resembled a much-revised treaty between two semiliterate 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.
    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 Dickensian 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