The Cider House Rules (20 page)

Olive Worthington was born Alice Bean; to the knowledgeable, she was Bruce Bean’s (the clam-digger’s) daughter; she was Bucky Bean’s (the well-digger’s) clever sister—which falsely implied that Bucky wasn’t clever; he was at least cleverer than his father, Bruce. Well-digging (the business of Nurse Angela’s father, the business that yielded Homer Wells a name) was good-paying work: well-digging beats clam-digging by dollars and by miles, as they say in Maine.

Olive Worthington grew up selling clams out of the back of a pickup truck that leaked ice. Her mother, Maud, never talked; she kept a cracked makeup mirror on a chopping block at the crowded corner of a kitchen counter—her cosmetics, which fascinated her, mingled with stray clams. A large clam shell was her only ashtray. Sometimes the black and gritty skin discarded from the neck of a cleaned clam clung to a bottle of her Blush-Up. She died of lung cancer when Olive was still in high school.

Alice Bean became a Worthington by marrying Wallace Worthington; she became an Olive by altering her own name at the town clerk’s office in Heart’s Haven. It was a willful, legal change-of-name form that she filled out—easy to do, in part because it required the changing of only two letters to make an Alice into an Olive. There was no end to the way the locals liked to play with the name
Olive,
as if they were moving around in their mouths the disagreeable pits of that odd food; and behind her back, there were many who still called her Alice Bean, though only her brother Bucky would call Olive Alice to her face. Everyone else respected her enough to say Olive if that’s what she wanted to hear, and it was agreed that although she married a Worthington, and therefore had married into apples and money, she had got no bargain in Wallace.

Cheerful, fun-loving, a good-timer, Wallace Worthington was generous and kind. He adored Olive and everything about her—her gray eyes and her ash-blond hair turning softly to pearl, and her college-learned New British accent (which was often imitated at the Haven Club). Her brother Bucky’s success as a well-digger had paid for Olive’s college accent, without which she might not have enticed Wallace Worthington to notice her. It may have been gratitude that caused Olive to tolerate Bucky calling her Alice to her face. She even tolerated his predictable appearances at Ocean View Orchards—his boots always muddy with that clay-colored muck from the middle of the earth, the stuff only well-diggers find. Olive tried not to cringe while he tromped about the house in those boots, calling her “Alice Baby,” and on hot summer days he would dive into the swimming pool in all his clothes, leaving only those middle-earth boots out of the bright water (which he left sloshing in Atlantic turmoil and clay-colored at the edges). Bucky Bean could leave a ring on a swimming pool the way a dirty child could ring a bathtub.

For all that Olive Worthington had been spared, by escaping the Alice Bean in herself, there was something wrong with Wallace Worthington. Despite his being a real gentleman, and excellent at teasing the Republicans at the Haven Club, and fair to his orchardmen (he provided them with health insurance policies at his expense at a time when most farm workers were living below the standard of minimum
everything
)—despite Wallace Worthington’s lovable flamboyance (all the farm and personal vehicles at Ocean View Orchards bore his monogram on a big, red apple!), despite
everything
that was grand about Wallace, he appeared to be drunk all the time, and he exhibited such a childish quality of hyperactivity and restlessness that everyone in Heart’s Haven and in Heart’s Rock agreed that he must certainly be no prize to live with.

He was drunk at the Haven Club when he lowered the net at center court (which he could not seem to adjust properly) by cutting through it with the saw blade of his jackknife. He was drunk again at the Haven Club when Dr. Darryrimple had his stroke; Wallace tossed the old gentleman into the shallow end of the pool—“to revive him,” he said later. The old fellow nearly drowned in addition to suffering his stroke, and the offended Darryrimples were so outraged that they canceled membership. And Wallace was drunk in his own orchards when he drove his Cadillac headlong into the five-hundred-gallon Hardie sprayer, dousing himself and his oyster-white convertible with chemicals that gave him a rash in his lap and permanently bleached the Cadillac’s scarlet upholstery. He was drunk again when he insisted on driving the tractor that towed the flatbed with half of Ira Titcomb’s beehives on it, promptly dumping the load—the honey, the hives, and millions of angry bees—at the intersection of Drinkwater Road and Day Lane (getting himself badly stung). Also stung were Everett Taft and his wife, Dot, and Dot’s kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who were working in the Day Lane orchard at the time of the accident.

Yet no one doubted that Wallace Worthington was faithful to Olive—the cynics saying that he was too drunk to get it up with anyone else, and possibly too drunk to get it up with Olive. It was clear he had gotten it up with her at least once; he had produced a son, just turning twenty in 194_, as big and handsome and charming as his father, with his mother’s smoky eyes and with not quite her former blondness (his was tawny, not ash); he even had a bit of her New British accent. Wallace Worthington, Junior, was too good-looking ever to be called Junior (he was called Wally). From the day of Wally’s birth, Wallace Worthington was called Senior, even by Olive and eventually by Wally.

And this is only a beginning to an understanding of the societies of Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock. If he had known only this much, Dr. Larch might have tried to keep Homer Wells away from the place; he might have guessed that Homer’s life would get complicated there. What did an orphan know about gossip, or care about class? But to Wilbur Larch Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock were very pretty names, improved by ether.

If Dr. Larch had spent some time around Senior Worthington, Larch might have figured out that the man was unfairly judged; of course he drank too much—many people who drink at all drink too much. But Senior was not a drunk. He bore the classic, clinical features of Alzheimer’s disease, and Wilbur Larch would have spotted it for what it was—a progressive organic brain syndrome. Alzheimer’s presenile dementia is marked by deterioration of intellect, failure of memory and a striking appearance of rapid aging in a patient in middle life, symptoms that become progressively more severe over a period of just a few years and terminate in death. Restlessness, hyperactivity, defective judgment are other hallmarks of the disease. But as keen as the wit in Heart’s Haven was, the townspeople didn’t know the difference between drunkenness and Alzheimer’s disease; they were dead-sure they had the Worthingtons figured out.

They misjudged Olive Worthington, too. She had earned her name. She might have been desperate to leave the clam level of life, but she knew what work was; she had seen how quickly the ice in the pickup melted, how short a time the clams could be kept cool. She knew hustle, she knew know-how. She saw, instantly, that Wallace Worthington was good about money and weak on apples, and so she took up apples as her cause. She found out who the knowledgeable foremen were and she gave them raises; she fired the others, and hired a younger, more reliable crew. She baked apple pies for the families of the orchardmen who pleased her, and she taught their wives the recipe, too. She installed a pizza oven in the apple mart and soon could turn out forty-eight pies in one baking, adding greatly to the business over the counter at harvest time—formerly reserved for apple cider and apple jelly. She overpaid for the damages to Ira Titcomb’s beehives and soon was selling apple blossom honey over the counter, too. She went to the university and learned everything about cross-pollination and how to plant a new-tree orchard; she learned more about mousing, and suckering, and thinning, and the new chemicals than the foremen knew, and then she taught them.

Olive had a vision of her silent mother, Maud, mesmerized by her own fading image in the makeup mirror—clams everywhere around her. The little cotton balls dabbed with cosmetics (the color of the clay on her brother Bucky’s terrible boots) were flecked with the ashes from the cigarettes overstuffing the clam-shell ashtray. These images strengthened Olive. She knew the life she had escaped, and at Ocean View Orchards she more than earned her keep; she took the farm out of Senior’s careless hands, and she ran it very intelligently for him.

At night, coming back from the Haven Club (she always drove), Olive would leave Senior passed out in the passenger seat and put a note on her son Wally’s pillow, asking him, when he got home, to remember to carry his father up to bed. Wally always did so; he was a golden boy, not just a picture of one. The one night that young Wally had drunk too much to carry his father to bed, Olive Worthington was quick to point out to her son the error of his ways.

“You may resemble your father, with my permission, in every aspect but in his drunkenness,” she told Wally. “
If
you resemble him in that aspect, you will lose this farm—and every penny made by every apple. Do you think your father could prevent me from doing that to you?”

Wally looked at his father, whom he had allowed to sleep all night in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, now mottled by spraying chemicals. It was obvious to the boy that Senior Worthington could prevent nothing.

“No, Mom,” Wally said to his mother respectfully—not just because he was educated and polite (he could have taught tennis
and
manners at the Haven Club, and taught them well), but also because he knew his mother, Olive Worthington, hadn’t “married into” anything more than a little working cash. The
work
had been supplied by her; Wilbur Larch would have respected that.

The sadness was that Olive, too, misjudged poor Senior, who was only a tangential victim of alcoholism and a nearly complete victim of Alzheimer’s disease.

There are things that the societies of towns know about you, and things that they miss. Senior Worthington was baffled by his own deterioration, which he also believed to be the result of the evils of drink. When he drank less—and still couldn’t remember in the morning what he’d said or done the evening before; still saw no relenting of his remarkably speeded-up process of aging; still hopped from one activity to the next, leaving a jacket in one place, a hat in another, his car keys in the lost jacket—when he drank less and
still
behaved like a fool, this bewildered him to such an extreme that he began to drink more. In the end, he would be a victim of both Alzheimer’s disease
and
alcoholism; a happy drunk, with unexplained plunges of mood. In a better, and better-informed world, he would have been cared for like the nearly faultless patient that he was.

In this one respect Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock resembled St. Cloud’s: there was no saving Senior Worthington from what was wrong with him, as surely as there had been no saving Fuzzy Stone.

In 193_, Homer Wells began
Gray’s Anatomy—
at the beginning. He began with osteology, the skeleton. He began with bones. In 194_, he was making his third journey through
Gray’s Anatomy,
some of which he shared with Melony. Melony showed a wayward concentration, though she confessed interest in the complexity of the nervous system, specifically the description of the twelfth or hypoglossal nerve, which is the motor nerve of the tongue.

“What’s a motor nerve?” Melony asked, sticking out her tongue. Homer tried to explain, but he felt tired. He was making his sixth journey through
David Copperfield,
his seventh through
Great Expectations,
his fourth through
Jane Eyre.
Only last night he had come to a part that always made Melony cringe—which made Homer anxious.

It’s near the beginning of Chapter Twelve, when Jane shrewdly observes, “It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”

“Just remember, Sunshine,” Melony interrupted him. “As long as I stay, you stay. A promise is a promise.”

But Homer Wells was tired of Melony making him anxious. He repeated the line, this time reading it as if he were personally delivering a threat.

“It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.” Mrs. Grogan looked taken aback at the ominousness in his voice.

He copied the line in a handwriting nearly as orderly and cramped as Dr. Larch’s; Homer typed it on Nurse Angela’s typewriter, making only a few mistakes. And when Wilbur Larch was “just resting” in the dispensary, Homer crept up on the tired saint and placed the piece of paper with the quotation from
Jane Eyre
on Dr. Larch’s rising and falling chest. Dr. Larch felt less threatened by the actual text of the quotation than he felt a general unease: that Homer knew Dr. Larch’s ether habit so exactly that the boy could approach his bed undetected. Or am I using a little more of this stuff than I used to? Larch wondered.

Was it meant as a message that Homer had used the ether cone to hold the
Jane Eyre
quotation to Larch’s chest?

“History,” wrote Dr. Larch, “is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes.”

He may have been referring to something as small as the apostrophe that someone added to the original St. Clouds. His point is also illuminated by the case of the heart in both Heart’s Haven and in Heart’s Rock, a case similar in error to how Melody became forever a Melony. The explorer credited with the discovery of the fine, pretty harbor at Heart’s Haven—a seafaring man named Reginald Hart—was also the first settler of Heart’s Rock to clear land and try to be a farmer. The general illiteracy of the times, and of the times following Reginald Hart’s death, prevailed; no one knew of any written difference between one heart and another. The first settlers of Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock, probably never knowing that Reginald
Hart
had been given the name of a
deer,
quite comfortably named their towns after an organ.