The Cider House Rules (85 page)

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she told them, and they were quiet; they both knew better than to try to tell Candy what to do.

“Are you sure it’s true, Angel?” Candy asked.

“Almost sure,” the boy said. “Ninety-nine percent.”

“Make it a hundred percent, Angel, before you say it’s true,” his father told him.

“Right,” Angel said as he got up from the table and cleared his dishes.

“Good thing we got all that straightened out,” Wally said when Angel was in the kitchen. “Good thing we’re all such experts at the truth,” he said as Candy got up from the table to clear her dishes. Homer Wells kept sitting where he was.

The next morning Angel learned that Rose Rose had never been in the ocean—that she’d picked citrus in Florida and peaches in Georgia, and she’d driven up the East Coast all the way to Maine, but she’d never stuck so much as her toe in the Atlantic. She’d never even felt the sand.

“That’s crazy!” said Angel Wells. “We’ll go to the beach some Sunday.”

“What for?” she said. “You think I gonna look better with a tan? What would I go to a beach for?”

“To swim!” Angel said. “The ocean! The salt water!”

“I don’t know how to swim,” Rose Rose informed him.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you don’t have to swim to enjoy the ocean. You don’t have to go in over your head.”

“I don’t have no bathin’ suit,” she said.

“Oh,” Angel said. “Well, I can get you one. I’ll bet one of Candy’s would fit you.” Rose Rose looked only mildly surprised. Any bathing suit of Candy’s would be a tight fit.

For their lunch break, after Rose Rose had seen how Baby Rose was getting along with Black Pan, Angel drove her to the baby-tree orchard near Cock Hill; they were not picking the baby trees, so there was no one there. You could barely see the ocean. You could see the unnatural end of the horizon, how the sky inexplicably flattened out—and by standing on the tractor, they could distinguish the different tones of blue and gray where the sky bled into the sea. Rose Rose remained unimpressed.

“Come on,” Angel said to her. “You got to let me take you to see it!” He tugged her by one arm—just fooling around, just an affectionate gesture—but she suddenly cried out; his hand grazed the small of her back as she turned away from him, and when he looked at his hand, he saw her blood.

“It’s my period,” she lied. Even a fifteen-year-old boy knows that the blood from anyone’s period isn’t usually found on the
back.

After they kissed for a while, she showed him some of the wounds—not the ones on the backs of her legs, and not the ones on her rump; he had to take her word for those. She showed him only the cuts on her back—they were fine, thread-thin, razorlike cuts; they were extremely deliberate, very careful cuts that would heal completely in a day or two. They were slightly deeper than scratches; they were not intended to leave scars.

“I told you,” she said to Angel, but she still kissed him, hard. “You shouldn’t have no business with me. I ain’t really available.”

Angel agreed not to bring up the matter of the cuts with Mr. Rose; that would only make things worse—Rose Rose convinced him of that. And if Angel wanted to take her to the beach—somehow, some Sunday, they should both be as nice to Mr. Rose as they could manage.

The man named Muddy, who’d been reassembled with one hundred twenty-three stitches, had said it the best. What he said once was, “If old Rose had cut me, I wouldn’t of needed
one
stitch. I would of bled a pint an hour, or even slower, and when it was finally all over it would have looked like someone hadn’t used anythin’ on me except a stiff toothbrush.”

When Angel was putting the tractor away on Saturday, it was Muddy instead of Peaches who spoke to him. “You don’t wanna get involved with Rose Rose, you know. The knife business ain’t your business, Angel,” Muddy said, putting his arm around the boy and giving him a squeeze. Muddy liked Angel; he remembered, fondly, how Angel’s father had gotten him to Cape Kenneth Hospital in time.

When there was another night pressing, Angel sat with Rose Rose on the cider house roof and told her all about the ocean: the strange tiredness one feels at the edge of the sea, the weight in the air, the haze in the middle of a summer day, the way the surf softens sharp things. He told her the whole, familiar story. How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

But Angel could not keep secret what he imagined was the enormity of Mr. Rose’s wrongdoing. He told the whole story to his father, and to Candy and Wally.

“He cut her? He deliberately cut her?” Wally asked Angel.

“No doubt about it,” Angel said. “I’m a hundred percent sure.”

“I can’t imagine how he could do that to his own daughter,” said Homer Wells.

“I can’t believe how we’re always saying how wonderful it is: that Mister Rose is so
in charge
of everything,” Candy said, shivering. “We have to do something about this.”

“We do?” Wally asked.

“Well, we can’t do nothing!” Candy told him.

“People do,” Wally said.

“If you speak to him, he’ll hurt her more,” Angel told them. “And she’ll know I told you. I want your advice, I don’t want you to
do
anything.”

“I wasn’t thinking of speaking to
him,
” Candy said angrily. “I was thinking of speaking to the police. You can’t carve up your own children!”

“But will it help her—if he gets in trouble?” Homer asked.

“Precisely,” Wally said. “We’re not helping her by going to the police.”

“Or by speaking to him,” Angel said.

“There’s always waiting and seeing,” said Homer Wells. For fifteen years, Candy had learned to ignore this.

“I could ask her to stay with us,” Angel suggested. “That would get her away from him. I mean, she could just stay here, even after the harvest.”

“But what would she do?” Candy asked.

“There aren’t any jobs around,” said Homer Wells. “Not after the harvest.”

“It’s one thing having them pick,” Wally said carefully. “I mean, everyone accepts them, but they’re only migrants—they’re transients. They’re supposed to move on. I don’t think that a colored woman with an illegitimate child is going to be made to feel all that welcome in Maine. Not if she’s
staying.
”

Candy was cross. She said, “Wally, in all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never heard anyone call them niggers, or say anything bad about them. This isn’t the South,” she added proudly.

“Come on,” Wally said. “It only isn’t the South because they don’t live here. Let one of them actually try to live here and see what they call her.”

“I don’t believe that,” Candy said.

“Then you’re dumb,” Wally said. “Isn’t she, old boy?” Wally asked Homer.

But Homer Wells was watching Angel. “Are you in love with Rose Rose, Angel?” Homer asked his son.

“Yes,” Angel said. “And I think she likes me—at least a little.” He cleared his own dishes and went upstairs to his room.

“He’s in love with the girl,” Homer said to Candy and Wally.

“As plain as the nose on your face, old boy,” Wally said. “Where have you been?” He wheeled himself out on the terrace and took a few turns around the swimming pool.

“What do you think of that?” Homer asked Candy. “Angel’s in love!”

“I hope it makes him more sympathetic to us,” Candy told him. “That’s what I think about it.”

But Homer Wells was thinking about Mr. Rose. How far would he go? What were his rules?

When Wally wheeled himself back into the house, he told Homer that there was some mail for him in the apple-mart office. “I keep meaning to bring it up to the house,” Wally told him, “but I keep forgetting it.”

“Just keep forgetting it,” Homer advised him. “It’s the harvest. Since I don’t have time to answer any mail, I might as well not read it.”

Nurse Caroline’s letter had also arrived; it was waiting for him with Dr. Larch’s letter, and with a letter from Melony.

Melony had returned the questionnaire to Homer. She hadn’t filled it out; she’d just been curious, and she’d wanted to look it over more closely. After she’d read it a few times, she could tell—by the nature of the questions—that the board of trustees were, in her opinion, a collection of the usual assholes. “The guys in suits,” she called them. “Don’t you hate men in suits?” she’d asked Lorna.

“Come on,” Lorna had told her. “You just hate men, all men.”

“Men in suits, especially,” Melony had said.

Across the questionnaire, which would never be filled out, Melony had written a brief message to Homer Wells.

DEAR SUNSHINE
,

I THOUGHT YOU WAS GOING TO BE A HERO. MY MISTAKE. SORRY FOR HARD TIME
.

LOVE, MELONY

Homer Wells would read that, much later that same night, when he couldn’t sleep, as usual, and he decided to get up and read his mail. He would read Dr. Larch’s letter, and Nurse Caroline’s, too, and any doubts that were remaining about the doctor’s bag with the initials F.S. engraved in gold had disappeared with the darkness just before dawn.

Homer saw no reason to add irony to their predicament; he decided not to send Melony’s response to the questionnaire to Larch or to Nurse Caroline—how would it help them to know that they had turned themselves in when they might have gone on for another few years? He sent a single, short note, addressed to them both. The note was simple and mathematical.

1. I AM NOT A DOCTOR
.

2. I BELIEVE THE FETUS HAS A SOUL
.

3. I’M SORRY
.

“Sorry?”
said Wilbur Larch, when Nurse Caroline read him the note. “He says he’s
sorry
?”

“Of course, he isn’t a doctor,” Nurse Angela admitted. “There’d always be something he’d think he didn’t know; he’d always be thinking he was going to make an amateur mistake.”

“That’s why he’d be a good doctor,” said Dr. Larch. “Doctors who think they know everything are the ones who make the most amateur mistakes. That’s how a good doctor should be thinking: that there’s always something he doesn’t know, that he can always kill someone.”

“We’re in for it, now,” Nurse Edna said.

“He believes the fetus has a soul, does he?” Larch asked. “Fine. He believes that a creature that lives like a fish has a soul—and what sort of soul does he believe those of us walking around have? He should believe in what he can see! If he’s going to play God and tell us who’s got a soul, he should take care of the souls who can talk back to him!” He was ranting.

Then Nurse Angela said, “So. We wait and see.”

“Not me,” said Wilbur Larch. “Homer can wait and see,” he said, “but not me.”

He sat at the typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office; he wrote this simple, mathematical note to Homer Wells.

1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU’VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU’RE A BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM—AND YOU KNOW IT
.

2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD, BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT’S NOT PLAYING GOD?

3. I AM NOT SORRY—NOT FOR ANYTHING I’VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I’M SORRY FOR). I’M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.

Then Dr. Larch walked to the railroad station and waited for the train; he wanted to see the note sent on its way. Later, the stationmaster whom Larch rarely acknowledged admitted he was surprised that Larch spoke to him; but because Larch spoke after the train had gone, the stationmaster thought that Larch might have been addressing the departed train.

“Good-bye,” Dr. Larch said. He walked back up the hill to the orphanage. Mrs. Grogan asked him if he wanted some tea, but Dr. Larch told her that he felt too tired for tea; he wanted to lie down.

Nurse Caroline and Nurse Edna were picking apples, and Larch went a little way up the hill to speak to them. “You’re too old to pick apples, Edna,” Larch told her. “Let Caroline and the children do it.” He then walked a short distance with Nurse Caroline, back toward the orphanage. “If I had to be anything,” he told her, “I’d probably be a socialist, but I don’t want to be anything.”

Then he went into the dispensary and closed the door. Despite the harvest weather, it was still warm enough to have the window open during the day; he closed the window, too. It was a new, full can of ether; perhaps he jabbed the safety pin too roughly into the can, or else he wiggled it around too impatiently. The ether dripped onto the face mask more freely than usual; his hand kept slipping off the cone before he could get enough to satisfy himself. He turned a little toward the wall; that way, the edge of the windowsill maintained contact with the mask over his mouth and nose after his fingers relaxed their grip. There was just enough pressure from the windowsill to hold the cone in place.

This time he traveled to Paris; how lively it was there, at the end of World War I. The young doctor was constantly embraced by the natives. He remembered sitting with an American soldier—an amputee—in a café; all the patrons bought them Cognac. The soldier put out his cigar in a snifter of Cognac that he couldn’t finish—not if he intended to stand on his crutches, with his one leg—and Wilbur Larch breathed deeply of that aroma. That was how Paris smelled—like Cognac and ash.

That, and like perfume. Larch had walked the soldier home—he’d been a good doctor, even there, even then. He was a third crutch to the drunken man, he was the man’s missing leg. That was when the woman had accosted them. She was a whore, quite clearly, and she was quite young, and quite pregnant; Larch, who didn’t understand French very well, assumed that she wanted an abortion. He was trying to tell her that she was too late, that she’d have to go through with having this baby, when he suddenly understood that she was asking only what a whore is usually asking.

“Plaisir d’amour?”
she asked them. The amputated soldier was passing out in Larch’s arms; it was to Larch alone that the woman was offering the “pleasure of love.”

“Non, merci,”
Wilbur Larch mumbled. But the soldier collapsed; Larch needed the pregnant prostitute to help carry him. When they delivered the soldier to his room, the woman renewed her offer to Wilbur Larch. He had to hold her at arm’s length to keep her away from him—and still she would slip through his grasp and push her firm belly into him.