The Cider House Rules (29 page)

Candy closed her book and returned it to her lap again, and Wally felt he had to say something.

“How’s the book?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Candy said, and laughed.

He pinched her thigh; something caught in his throat when he tried to laugh with her. She pinched his thigh in return—a pinch of the exact same passion and pressure as the one he’d given her. Oh, how relieved he was that they were so alike!

Through the ever-poorer, gawking towns, as the sun rose and rose, they drove like lost royalty—the oyster-white Cadillac with its dazzling passengers was a head-turner. That scarlet upholstery, so curiously mottled by Senior’s accident with the chemicals, was unique. Everyone who saw them pass would not forget them.

“Not much farther,” Wally said. This time he knew better than to pinch her thigh; he simply let his hand rest in her lap, near
Little Dorrit.
Candy put her hand on top of his, while Melony—stalking through the girls’ division lobby with more than usual purpose—caught Mrs. Grogan’s generous and watchful eye.

“What’s going on, dear?” Mrs. Grogan asked Melony.

“I don’t know,” Melony said, shrugging. “You can bet it ain’t a new boy in town, or nothing,” which was a mild remark for Melony; Mrs. Grogan thought, How the girl has mellowed. She
had
mellowed—a little. A
very
little.

Something about the big young woman’s determination made Mrs. Grogan follow her outside. “My, what a wind!” Mrs. Grogan exclaimed. Where have
you
been? Melony thought, but she didn’t utter a word; the degree that she had mellowed could be confused with not caring much anymore.

“It’s the stationmaster,” said Homer Wells, who was the first to find the body.

“That moron!” Wilbur Larch muttered.

“Well, he’s dead, anyway,” Homer informed Dr. Larch, who was still struggling through the weeds, en route to the body. Dr. Larch refrained from saying that by dying in this manner the stationmaster was intending a further inconvenience to the orphanage. If Wilbur Larch was mellowing, he was also mellowing very little.

St. Cloud’s was not a place that mellowed you.

Homer Wells looked over the weeds that concealed the dead stationmaster and saw Melony striding toward him.

Oh, please! he felt his heart say to him. Oh, please, let me
leave
! The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

Wilbur Larch was thinking about the weak heart he had invented for Homer Wells. Larch was wondering how he should tell Homer about having a weak heart without frightening the young man or reminding him of the vision frozen upon the face of the stationmaster. What in Hell had that fool imagined he’d seen? Dr. Larch wondered, as he helped the others lug the stationmaster’s stiffened body to the hospital entrance.

Curly Day, who enjoyed being kept busy, had already been sent to the railroad station; young Copperfield had gone with him, which slowed Curly down considerably—yet Curly was grateful for the company. Curly was slightly confused about the message he was sent to deliver, and Copperfield at least presented Curly with a model listener. Curly practiced the message he thought he was supposed to deliver by saying it aloud to David Copperfield; the message had no visible effect on Copperfield, but Curly found the repetition of the message soothing and the practice helped him to understand it, or so he thought.

“The stationmaster is dead!” Curly announced, dragging Copperfield down the hill—Copperfield’s head either nodding agreement or just bouncing loosely between the boy’s jerking shoulders. The downhill pace was hard for Copperfield, whose balance wasn’t the best, and his left hand (grasped in Curly Day’s hand) was pulled high above his left ear.

“Doctor Larch says he had a heart attack for several hours!” Curly Day added, which didn’t sound quite right to him, but after he repeated it a few times it sounded more reasonable. What Larch had said was that the stationmaster appeared to have had a heart attack several hours ago, but Curly’s version felt more or less correct to Curly—the more he said it.

“Tell the relatives and friends that there’s soon gonna be an automobile!” said Curly Day, and David Copperfield bobbed in agreement. This didn’t sound right to Curly, either, no matter how many times he repeated it, but he was sure he’d been told to say something like that. The word was “autopsy,” not “automobile”; Curly had part of the word right. Perhaps, he thought, there was some special car coming to carry the dead. It made a little sense, and a little sense was sense enough for Curly Day—and more sense than Curly saw in most things.

“Dead!” David Copperfield cried happily as they approached the train station. Two of the usual oafs were lounging on the bench that faced away from the tracks; they were the sort of louts who hung around the station all day, as if the station were a house of beautiful women and the women were known to grant favors to all the town’s untidy and unemployed. They paid no attention to Curly Day and David Copperfield. (“Dead!” David Copperfield called out to them, with no effect.)

The assistant to the stationmaster was a young man who had modeled his particularly unlikable officiousness upon the officiousness of the stationmaster, so that he had a completely inappropriate old-fart, complaining, curmudgeonly aspect to his youthfulness—this in combination with the mean-spiritedness of a dogcatcher who enjoys his work. He was a stupid young man, who shared with the stationmaster an aspect of the bully: he would holler at children to keep their feet off the benches, but he would simper before anyone better dressed than himself and he tolerated any rudeness from anyone who had any advantage over him. He was without exception cold and superior to the women who got off the train and asked for directions to the orphanage, and he had not once taken the arm of even one of those women and offered his assistance when they mounted the stairs to the return train; and that first step was a high one—many of the women who’d been scraped clean had obvious trouble with that first step.

This morning the stationmaster’s assistant was feeling especially virtuous and disagreeable. He had given fifteen cents to one of the louts to go to the stationmaster’s house and find him, but the clod had returned with no more information than that the stationmaster’s bicycle had fallen over and been left where it had fallen. Ominous, thought the assistant, but frustrating. He was half irritated at having to do the stationmaster’s chores, which he’d done poorly, and half thrilled at the prospect of being in charge. When he saw those two dirty urchins from the orphanage crossing the main road in front of the station and coming his way, the stationmaster’s assistant felt his authority swell. Curly Day, wiping his nose on one arm, dragging David Copperfield with the other, seemed on the verge of speaking, but the stationmaster’s assistant spoke first.

“Beat it,” he said. “You don’t belong here.”

Curly halted; young Copperfield collided with him and staggered from the suddenness of the collision. Curly fully believed he “belonged” nowhere, but he gathered his confidence and delivered, quite loudly, his rehearsed message: “The stationmaster is dead! Doctor Larch says he had a heart attack for several hours! Tell the relatives and friends that there’s soon gonna be an automobile!”

Even the oafs took notice. The assistant was stricken by a flood of sudden and conflicting feelings: that the stationmaster was dead might mean that he, the assistant, would be the next stationmaster; that it was possible for someone to suffer a heart attack lasting several hours was unimaginably painful; and what was this promise—or threat—about an automobile?

What relatives, what friends? the two louts wondered.

“What’s that about an automobile?” the assistant asked Curly Day. Curly suspected that he’d made a mistake but decided to bluff it out. It was not advisable to display weakness or indecision before a bully, and Curly’s crafty instincts for survival led him to choose confidence over the truth.

“It means there’s a car coming for him,” said Curly Day. The two clods looked mildly impressed; they had not thought the stationmaster was important enough to warrant a car to carry him away.

“You mean a hearse?” asked the assistant. There was a hearse in Three Mile Falls—he had seen it once: a long, black car that moved slowly enough to have been pulled by mules.

“I mean a car,” said Curly Day, for whom the word “hearse” meant nothing at all. “I mean an
automobile.
”

No one moved, no one spoke; perhaps the symptoms of the special heart attack, reputed to last for several hours, were slowly beginning in all of them. They were all just waiting for the next event of the day, when Senior Worthington’s oyster-white Cadillac crept into view.

In the many poor and isolated towns they had driven through, Wally and Candy had drawn more than their share of stares, but they were still unprepared for the stunned gaping of the stationmaster’s assistant and the extremes of gawking they provoked from the two louts who sat on the bench in front of the station house as if they’d been nailed there.

“Here we are: Saint Cloud’s,” Wally said to Candy with a clearly false enthusiasm. Candy could not help herself; she reached for his leg and gripped him at midthigh
—Little Dorrit
plunged from her lap, grazing her locked-together ankles on its way to the Cadillac’s floor. The faces of Curly Day and David Copperfield were what struck Candy with the most force. In spite of his grime and dishevelment, Curly Day’s face was shining—his smile was a lucky beam of sunlight; it pierced the garbage and revealed the hidden glitter. It was the hugeness of the expectation in Curly’s dirty face that took Candy’s breath away; her eyes swam, her vision blurred—but not before the wide-openness of David Copperfield’s mouth astonished her. From the teardrop shape of his fat lower lip there hung a clear, healthy string of drool, suspended nearly to his tight little fists, which he clenched against his stomach as if the blinding white Cadillac had knocked the wind out of him, as solidly as a punch.

Wally wasn’t sure, but he thought that the stationmaster’s assistant appeared to be in charge of this strange assemblage of people. “Excuse me,” Wally said to the assistant, whose mouth didn’t move, whose eyes didn’t blink. “Could you tell me the way to the orphanage?”

“You sure got here in a hurry,” said the assistant lifelessly. A
white
hearse! he was thinking. Not to mention the beauty of the body-snatchers; the assistant found he was unable to look at the girl; his mind’s eye would never forget its actual brief glimpse of her.

“Pardon me?” Wally said. The man is deranged, Wally was thinking; I should be talking to someone else. A passing look at the oafs upon the bench was enough to tell Wally that he should not ask them anything. And the littlest child, with the crystal string of slobber now winking like an icicle in the sunlight and reaching nearly to the grass-stained dimples on the child’s knees, appeared to be too young for speech. “Hello,” Wally ventured pleasantly.

“Dead!” said David Copperfield, the drool dancing like tinsel on a Christmas tree.

Not him, Wally thought, and sought the eyes of Curly Day; Curly’s eyes were easy to find—they were riveted on Candy. “Hello,” Candy said to him, and Curly Day swallowed visibly—and with apparent pain. The wet end of his nose looked raw, but he rubbed it vigorously anyway.

“Could
you
tell us the way to the orphanage?” Wally asked Curly Day, who, unlike the louts and the assistant, knew that this Cadillac and these angelic specimens of the living had not been sent to retrieve the unwanted body of the dead stationmaster. They want the
orphanage,
thought Curly Day. They’ve come here to
adopt
someone! his pounding heart told him. Oh, God, thought Curly Day—let it be me!

David Copperfield, in his typical trance, reached his hand out to touch the perfect monogram on the Cadillac’s door: Senior Worthington’s gold monogram on the face of a gleaming Red Delicious apple—with a leaf of spring-green brightness, the artless shape of a tear. Curly batted young Copperfield’s hand away.

I got to take charge of things, Curly was thinking, if I want them to pick me.

“
I’ll
show you the orphanage,” said Curly Day. “Give us a ride.”

Candy smiled and opened the rear door for them. She was a little surprised when Curly picked up young Copperfield and shoved him in the car—not on the seat but on the floor. Copperfield seemed content on the floor; in fact, when he touched the strangely mottled scarlet upholstery of the seat, he pulled back his hand with alarm—he’d never touched leather before—and he jumped as if he feared the seat might be alive. It had been a startling day for young Copperfield: most of the morning confined in an enema-bag carton; his first attempt at flight; his long fall through the weeds; and then sitting on that dead man’s face. What next? young Copperfield wondered. When the Cadillac began to move, he screamed. He’d never been inside a car before.

“He don’t know about cars,” Curly Day explained to Candy. Curly himself had never felt leather before either, but he tried to sit on the luxurious seat as if he were born to ride forever in this fashion. He didn’t realize that the bleached-out stains that striped the scarlet were the result of an accident with chemicals—it would often be Curly Day’s misfortune to mistake an accident for something artistically intended.

“Slow down, Wally,” Candy said. “The little one is frightened.” She leaned over the front seat and extended her arms to young Copperfield, whose howling abruptly ceased. He recognized the way her hair fell forward to either side of her face—this together with her outstretched arms and a certain comfort in her smile were familiar to Copperfield from Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. Men, Copperfield thought, picked you up in one arm and carried you over a hip; by “men” he meant Homer Wells and Dr. Larch. Curly Day sometimes lugged Copperfield around in this fashion, but Curly wasn’t quite strong enough and often dropped him.