Word: clouding
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...that he can do very nicely without any more sex in the future. During his years at Harvard Medical School, Larch develops a fondness for sniffing ether and a knowledge of the appalling problems that unwanted pregnancies bring to the poor women of Boston. The doctor settles in St. Cloud's, Maine's most "charmless" town, where he founds an orphanage. Over the years, he puts the treatment of women in trouble above the law. As he explains, "I help them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion...
...Larch says this to Homer Wells, a young man born at the orphanage whose various sojourns with foster families have all ended in failure. Since Homer seems destined to stay in St. Cloud's, Larch urges him to "be of use," and the lad complies. He begins by taking over the nightly readings to the younger children; those in the boys' wing hear David Copperfield or Great Expectations, and the girls get Jane Eyre. The idea of featuring great novels about orphans is Dr. Larch's: "What in hell else would you read to an orphan?" Homer's duties gradually...
...rest of the novel is an intricate elaboration designed to show Homer the error of this decision. Irving gives the orphan an escape from St. Cloud's in the persons of Wally Worthington and Candy Kendall, a glittering couple who come to St. Cloud's for a familiar reason. Wally will someday inherit Ocean View Orchards, a thriving apple farm just off the Maine seacoast, and Candy will someday marry him, once Dr. Larch terminates the symptom of their careless passion...
When they leave, Homer goes with them, an unofficial adoptee of the Worthington family. Growing apples strikes Homer as better than the business of St. Cloud's: "What he loved about the life at Ocean View was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted." This Edenic state does not last for long. Wally, still a bachelor, goes off to fly a B-24 in World War II and is reported missing over Burma. Homer and Candy have come to love each other, as well as Wally. The result of their mutual grief and consolation is predictable...
...citizens signed petitions urging Governor James Thompson to free Dotson, and he extended executive clemency early last week after a three-day hearing. But Thompson announced that he still believed Webb had been raped and Dotson properly convicted. He was commuting the sentence, said Thompson, because it left a "cloud over the Illinois justice system," and because Dotson had served enough time for the crime. The Governor's failure to give Dotson a pardon, which would have cleared his record of the charges, means that in the law's eyes he is still guilty. Dotson, therefore, is appealing...