The Cider House Rules (72 page)

“I didn’t know they were rules,” said Homer Wells.

“We share Angel,” Candy said. “We both get to live with him. We get to be his family. Nobody ever moves out.”

“Even if you’re with Wally?” Homer said, after a while.

“Remember what you told me when you wanted me to have Angel?” Candy asked him.

Homer Wells was cautious, now. “Remind me,” he said.

“You said that he was your baby, too—that he was
ours.
That I couldn’t decide, all by myself, not to have him—that was the point,” Candy said.

“Yes,” Homer said. “I remember.”

“Well, if he was ours then, he’s ours now—whatever happens,” Candy repeated.

“In the same house?” asked Homer Wells. “Even if you go with Wally?”

“Like a family,” Candy said.

“Like a family,” said Homer Wells. It was a word that took a strong grip of him. An orphan is a child, forever; an orphan detests change; an orphan hates to move; an orphan loves routine.

For fifteen years, Homer Wells knew that there were possibly as many cider house rules as there were people who had passed through the cider house. Even so, every year, he posted a fresh list.

For fifteen years, the board of trustees had tried and failed to replace Dr. Larch; they couldn’t find anyone who wanted the job. There were people dying to throw themselves into unrewarded service of their fellow man, but there were more exotic places than St. Cloud’s where their services were needed—and where they could also suffer. The board of trustees couldn’t manage to entice a new nurse into service there, either; they couldn’t hire even an administrative assistant.

When Dr. Gingrich retired—not from the board; he would never retire from the board—he mused about accepting the position in St. Cloud’s, but Mrs. Goodhall pointed out to him that he wasn’t an obstetrician. His psychiatric practice had never flourished in Maine, yet Dr. Gingrich was surprised and a little hurt to learn that Mrs. Goodhall enjoyed pointing this out to him. Mrs. Goodhall had reached retirement age herself, but nothing could have been farther from that woman’s zealous mind. Wilbur Larch was ninety-something, and Mrs. Goodhall was obsessed with retiring him before he died; she realized that to have Larch die, while still in service, would register as a kind of defeat for her.

Not long ago—perhaps in an effort to invigorate the board—Dr. Gingrich had proposed they hold a meeting in an off-season hotel in Ogunquit, simply to break the routine of meeting in their usual offices in Portland. “Make it a kind of outing,” he proposed. “The ocean air and all.”

But it rained. In the colder weather, the wood shrank; the sand got in the windows and doors and crunched underfoot; the drapes and the towels and the bedsheets were gritty. The wind was off the ocean; no one could sit on the veranda because the wind blew the rain under the roof. The hotel provided them with a long, dark, empty dining room; they held their meeting under a chandelier that no one could turn on—no one could find the right switch.

It was appropriate to their discussion of St. Cloud’s that they attempted to conduct their business in a former ballroom that had seen better days, in a hotel so deeply in the off-season that anyone seeing them there would have suspected they’d been quarantined. In fact, when he got a glimpse of them, that is what Homer Wells thought; he and Candy were the hotel’s only other off-season guests. They had taken a room for half the day; they were a long way from Ocean View, but they’d come this far to be sure that no one would recognize them.

It was time for them to leave. They stood outside on the veranda, Candy with her back against Homer’s chest, his arms wrapped around her; they both faced out to sea. He appeared to like the way the wind whipped her hair back in his face, and neither of them seemed to mind the rain.

Inside the hotel, Mrs. Goodhall looked through the streaked window, frowning at the weather and at the young couple braving the elements. In her opinion, nothing could ever be normal enough. That was what was wrong with Larch; not everyone who is ninety-something is senile, she would grant you, but Larch wasn’t normal. And even if they were a young married couple, public displays of affection were not acceptable to Mrs. Goodhall—and they were calling all the more attention to themselves by their defiance of the rain.

“What’s more,” she remarked to Dr. Gingrich, who was given no warning and had no map with which he could have followed her thoughts, “I’ll bet they’re not married.”

The young couple, he thought, looked a little sad. Perhaps they needed a psychiatrist; perhaps it was the weather—they’d been planning to sail.

“I’ve figured out what he is,” Mrs. Goodhall told Dr. Gingrich, who thought she was referring to the young man, Homer Wells. “He’s a nonpracticing homosexual,” Mrs. Goodhall announced. She meant Dr. Larch, who was on her mind night and day.

Dr. Gingrich was rather amazed at what struck him as Mrs. Goodhall’s wild guess, but he looked at the young man with renewed interest. True, he was not actually fondling the young woman; he seemed a trifle distant.

“If we could catch him at it, we’d have him out in a minute,” Mrs. Goodhall observed. “Of course we’d still have to find someone willing to replace him.”

Dr. Gingrich was lost. He realized that Mrs. Goodhall couldn’t be interested in replacing the young man on the veranda, and that therefore she was still thinking about Dr. Larch. But if Dr. Larch were a “nonpracticing homosexual,” what could they ever catch him at?

“We would catch him at
being
a homosexual, just not practicing as such?” Dr. Gingrich asked cautiously; it was not hard to rile Mrs. Goodhall.

“He’s obviously queer,” she snapped.

Dr. Gingrich, in all his years of psychiatric service to Maine, had never been moved to apply the label of “nonpracticing homosexual” to anyone, although he had often heard of such a thing; usually, someone was complaining about someone else’s peculiarity. In Mrs. Goodhall’s case, she despised men who lived alone. It wasn’t normal. And she despised young couples who displayed their affection, or weren’t married, or both; too much of what was normal also enraged her. Although he shared with Mrs. Goodhall the desire to replace Dr. Larch and his staff at St. Cloud’s, it occurred to Dr. Gingrich that he should have had Mrs. Goodhall as a patient—she might have kept him out of retirement for a few more years.

When the young couple came inside the hotel, Mrs. Goodhall gave them such a look that the young woman turned away.

“Did you see her turn away in shame?” Mrs. Goodhall would ask Dr. Gingrich, later.

But the young man stared her down. He looked right through her! Dr. Gingrich marveled. It was one of the best looks, in the tradition of “withering,” that Dr. Gingrich had ever seen and he found himself smiling at the young couple.

“Did you see that couple?” Candy asked him later, in the long drive back to Ocean View.

“I don’t think they were married,” said Homer Wells. “Or if they’re married, they hate each other.”

“Maybe that’s why I thought they were married,” Candy said.

“He looked a little stupid, and she looked completely crazy,” Homer said.

“I know they were married,” Candy said.

In the sad, dingy dining room in Ogunquit, while the rain pelted down, Mrs. Goodhall said, “It’s just not normal. Doctor Larch, those old nurses—the whole bit. If someone new, in some capacity, isn’t hired soon, I say we send a janitor up there—just anyone who can look the place over and tell us how bad it is.”

“Maybe it’s not as bad as we think,” Dr. Gingrich said tiredly. He had seen the young couple leave the hotel, and they had filled him with melancholy.

“Let somebody go there and see,” Mrs. Goodhall said, the dark chandelier above her small gray head.

Then, in the nick of time—in everyone’s opinion—a new nurse came to St. Cloud’s. Remarkably, she appeared to have found out about the place all by herself. Nurse Caroline, they called her; she was constantly of use, and a great help when Melony’s present for Mrs. Grogan arrived.

“What is it?” Mrs. Grogan asked. The carton was almost too heavy for her to lift; Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had brought it over to the girls’ division together. It was a sweltering summer afternoon; still, because it had been a perfectly windless day, Nurse Edna had sprayed the apple trees.

Dr. Larch came to the girls’ division to see what was in the package.

“Well, go on, open it,” he said to Mrs. Grogan. “I haven’t got all day.”

Mrs. Grogan was not sure how to attack the carton, which was sealed with wire and twine and tape—as if a savage had attempted to contain a wild animal. Nurse Caroline was called for her help.

What would they do without Nurse Caroline? Larch wondered. Before the package for Mrs. Grogan, Nurse Caroline had been the only large gift that anyone sent to St. Cloud’s; Homer Wells had sent her from the hospital in Cape Kenneth. Homer Wells knew that Nurse Caroline believed in the Lord’s work, and he had persuaded her to go where her devotion would be welcome. But Nurse Caroline had trouble opening Melony’s present.

“Who left it?” Mrs. Grogan asked.

“Someone named Lorna,” Nurse Angela said. “I never saw her before.”

“I never saw her before, either,” said Wilbur Larch.

When the package was opened, there was still a mystery. Inside was a huge coat, much too large for Mrs. Grogan. An Army surplus coat, made for the Alaskan service, it had a hood and a fur collar and was so heavy that when Mrs. Grogan tried it on, it almost dragged her to the floor—she lost her balance a little and wobbled around like a top losing its spin. The coat had all sorts of secret pockets, which were probably for weapons or mess kits—“Or the severed arms and legs of enemies,” said Dr. Larch.

Mrs. Grogan, lost in the coat and perspiring, said, “I don’t get it.” Then she felt the money in one of the pockets. She took out several loose bills and counted them, which was when she remembered that it was the exact amount of money that Melony had stolen from her when Melony had left St. Cloud’s—and taken Mrs. Grogan’s coat with her—more than fifteen years ago.

“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Grogan cried, fainting.

Nurse Caroline ran to the train station, but Lorna’s train had already left. When Mrs. Grogan was revived, she cried and cried.

“Oh, that dear girl!” she cried, while everyone soothed her and no one spoke; Larch and Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna remembered Melony as anything but “dear.” Larch tried on the coat, which was also too big and heavy for him; he staggered around in it for a while, frightening one of the smaller girls in the girls’ division who’d come into the lobby to investigate Mrs. Grogan’s cries.

Larch found something in another pocket: the snipped, twisted ends of some copper wire and a pair of rubber-handled, insulated wirecutters.

On his way back to the boys’ division, Larch whispered to Nurse Angela: “I’ll bet she robbed some electrician.”

“A
big
electrician,” Nurse Angela said.

“You two,” Nurse Edna scolded them. “It’s a warm coat, anyway—at least it will keep her warm.”

“It’ll give her a heart attack, lugging it around,” Dr. Larch said.

“I can wear it,” Nurse Caroline commented. It was the first time that Larch and his old nurses realized that Nurse Caroline was not only young and energetic, she was also big and strong—and, in a much less crude and vulgar way, a little reminiscent of Melony (if Melony had been a Marxist, thought Wilbur Larch—and an angel).

Larch had trouble with the word “angel” since Homer Wells and Candy had taken their son away from St. Cloud’s. Larch had trouble with the whole idea of how Homer was living. For fifteen years, Wilbur Larch had been amazed that the three of them—Homer and Candy and Wally—had managed it; he wasn’t at all sure what they had managed, or at what cost. He knew, of course, that Angel was a wanted child, and well loved, and well looked after—or else Larch couldn’t have remained silent. It was difficult for him to remain silent about the rest of it. How had they arranged it?

But who am I to advocate honesty in all relationships? he wondered. Me with my fictional histories, me with my fictional heart defects—me with my Fuzzy Stone.

And who was he to ask exactly what the sexual relationship was? Did he need to remind himself that he had slept with someone else’s mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter’s cigar? That he had allowed to die a woman who had put a pony’s penis in her mouth for money?

Larch looked out the window at the apple orchard on the hill. That summer of 195_, the trees were thriving; the apples were mostly pale green and pink, the leaves were a vibrant dark green. The trees were almost too tall for Nurse Edna to spray with the Indian pump. I should ask Nurse Caroline to take over the tending of them, Dr. Larch thought. He wrote a note to himself and left it in the typewriter. The heat made him drowsy. He went to the dispensary and stretched himself out on the bed. In the summer, with the windows open, he could risk a slightly heavier dose, he thought.

The last summer that Mr. Rose was in charge of the picking crew at Ocean View was the summer of 195_, when Angel Wells was fifteen. All that summer, Angel had been looking forward to the next summer—when he would be sixteen, old enough to have his driver’s license. By that time, he imagined, he would have saved enough money—from his summer jobs in the orchards and from his contribution to the harvests—to buy his first car.

His father, Homer Wells, didn’t own a car. When Homer went shopping in town or when he volunteered at the hospital in Cape Kenneth, he used one of the farm vehicles. The old Cadillac, which had been equipped with a hand-operated brake and accelerator so Wally could drive it, was often available, and Candy had her own car—a lemon-yellow Jeep, in which she had taught Angel to drive and which was as reliable in the orchards as it was sturdy on the public roads.

“I taught your father how to swim,” Candy always told Angel. “I guess I can teach you how to drive.”

Of course Angel knew how to drive all the farm vehicles, too. He knew how to mow, and how to spray, and how to operate the forklift. The driver’s license was simply necessary, official approval of something Angel already did very well on the farm.