The Cider House Rules (80 page)

In 195-, girls Angel's age looked forward to dating; boys Angel's age—as in other times—looked forward to doing things.

Mr. Rose's daughter was not only the most exotic young woman Angel had ever seen; if she had a daughter, she must also have done things.

It was cold and damp in the cider house in the mornings; when Angel arrived there, Rose Rose was outside, in the sun, washing Baby Rose in a bucket. The baby was splashing, and Rose Rose was talking to her daughter; she didn't hear Angel walking up to her. Perhaps —since Angel had been brought up more by his father than by his mother—Angel was predisposed to be attracted to a Madonna scene. Rose Rose was only a few years older than Angel—she was so young that her maternity was startling. When she was with her baby, her gestures and her expressions were womanly, and she had a full, womanly figure. She was a little taller than Angel. She had a round, boyish face.

'Good morning,' Angel said, startling Baby Rose in the bucket. Rose Rose wrapped her daughter in a towel and stood up.

'You must be Angel,' she said shyly. She had a fine scar that sliced across the flange of one nostril and her upper lip; it made a nick in her gum, which Angel could see when she parted her lips. Later, he would see that the knife had stopped at the eyetooth and removed it, which {646} accounted for her only partial smile. She would explain to him that the wound had killed the root of the tooth and that the tooth had fallen out later. He was so smitten when he first met her that even the scar was beautiful to him; it was her only apparent flaw.

'I wondered if I could help you get anything for the baby,' Angel said.

'She seem to be teethin',' Rose Rose reported on her daughter. 'She kind of cranky today.'

Mr. Rose came out of the cider house; when he saw Angel, he waved and smiled, and then he walked over and put his arm around the boy. 'How you doin'?' he asked. 'You still growin', I think. I used to carry him on top of my head,' he told Rose Rose. 'He used to grab them apples I couldn't reach,' Mr. Rose explained, punching Angel affectionately on the arm.

'I'm counting on growing a little more,' Angel said—for Rose Rose's benefit. He wouldn't want her to think he had stopped growing; he wanted her to know that he would be taller than she, one day.

He wished he'd worn a shirt; it was not that he wasn't muscular, it was somehow more grown-up to wear a shirt. Then he imagined that she might approve of his summer tan, and so he relaxed about not having a shirt; he put his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans, and he wished he'd worn his baseball cap. It was a Boston Red Sox cap, and he had to get hold of it first thing in the morning if he was going to wear it—otherwise, Candy would wear it. They had been meaning to buy another baseball cap for two summers now; Candy owed him one because she'd admitted to tearing one of the sweat holes in the cap by poking a pencil through it.

Candy worked as a checker during the harvest, and she needed her pencil. This would be the second harvest that Angel would be a checker, and the second summer that he got to drive one of the tractors that hauled the apples out of the orchards.

When Angel told his father that Rose Rose's baby was {647} teething, Homer knew what to do. He sent Angel (with Wally) to town to buy some pacifiers, and then he sent Angel back to the cider house with a package of pacifiers and a fifth of bourbon; Wally drank a very little bourbon from time to time, and the bottle was three-quarters full. Homer showed Angel how to dab whiskey on Baby Rose's gums.

'It numbs the gums,' Angel explained to Rose Rose. He dipped his pinky finger in the whiskey, then he stuck his finger in Baby Rose's tiny mouth. At first, he was afraid he'd gag the baby girl, whose eyes instantly grew large and watery at the bourbon fumes; but then Baby Rose went to work on Angel's finger so ferociously that when he removed his finger to apply more bourbon, the baby cried to have the finger back.

'You gonna make her drunk,' Rose Rose warned.

'No, I won't,' Angel assured her. 'I'm just putting her gums to sleep.'

Rose Rose examined the pacifiers. They were rubber nipples, like the nipple on a baby's bottle, but without the hole and attached to a baby-blue plastic ring that was too big to swallow. The problem with using a regular bottle nipple, Angel Wells explained, was that the baby would keep sucking in air through the hole, and the air would give the baby burping fits or a gassy stomach.

'How come you know so much?' Rose Rose asked Angel, smiling. 'How old are you?'

'I'm almost sixteen,' Angel said. 'How old are
you?'

''Bout your age,' she told him.

In the afternoon, when Angel came back to the cider house to see how the teething was going, Baby Rose was not the only Rose with a pacifier stuck in her mouth. Mr. Rose was sitting on the cider house roof, and Angel could see—from a considerable distance, because of the unreal, baby-blue hue of the plastic ring—that he had a pacifier in his mouth.

'Are you teething, too?' Angel called up to him. Mr. Rose {648} removed the pacifier from his mouth slowly—the way he did everything.

'I'm cuttin' out smokin',' said Mr. Rose. 'You got a nipple in your mouth all day, who needs a cigarette?' He stuck the pacifier back in his mouth and grinned at Angel broadly.

In the cider house, Baby Rose had fallen asleep with a pacifier in her mouth and Angel surprised Rose Rose as she was washing her hair. She was bent over the kitchen sink with her back to him; he couldn't see her breasts, although she was bare from the waist up.

'Is that you?' she asked ambiguously, keeping her back turned to him—but not jumping to cover herself.

'Sorry,' Angel said, stepping back outside. 'I should have knocked.' Then she jumped and covered herself, her hair still soapy; she must have thought it was her father.

'I was checking on how the teething was going,' Angel explained.

'It goin' fine,' Rose Rose said. 'You a good doctor. You my hero, for today.' She was smiling her partial smile.

A stream of bright suds from the shampoo ran around her neck and down her chest, over her arms, which she'd folded, with a towel, across her unseen breasts. Angel Wells, smiling, backed so far away from the cider house door that he bumped into the old car, which was parked close enough against the cider house to appear to be helping hold the building up. He heard a tiny pebble come rolling down the cider house roof, but when it hit him on the head—even though he'd had time to steal the baseball cap away from Candy and now wore it at a casual angle, with the visor shading his forehead—the pebble hurt. He looked up at Mr. Rose, who had rolled the pebble in his direction—a perfect shot.

'Gotcha!' Mr. Rose said, smiling.

But it was Rose Rose who'd really gotten him; Angel staggered back to the apple mart and into the fancy house as if he'd been struck by a boulder.{649}

Who was the baby's father? Angel Wells wondered. And where was he? And where was Mrs. Rose? Were Mr. Rose and his daughter all alone?

Angel went to his room and began to compose a list of names—girls' names. He took some names he liked out of the dictionary, and then he added other names that the dictionary had overlooked. How else do you impress a girl who hasn't been able to think of a name for her baby?

Angel would have been a blessing to St. Cloud's, where the practice of naming the babies was a little worn out. Although Nurse Caroline had contributed her youthful energy to the nearly constant occasion, her rather political choices had. been met with some resistance. She was fond of Karl (for Marx), and Eugene (for Debs), but everyone balked at Friedrich (for Engels), and so she had been reduced to Fred (which she didn't like). Nurse Angela also complained about Norman (for Thomas)— to her it was a name like Wilbur. But it was difficult to know if Angel Wells could have kept his passion for names intact when the task was almost a daily business. Finding a name for Rose Rose's daughter was a devotion quite unexpected—yet it was typical of a boy's first love.

Abby? thought Angel Wells. Alberta? Alexandra? Amanda? Amelia? Antoinette? Audrey? Aurora? 'Aurora Rose,' Angel said aloud. 'God, no,' he said, plunging into the alphabet. The scar on the face of the young woman he loved was so extremely thin, so very fine—Angel imagined that if he could kiss that scar, he could make it disappear; and he began working his way through the B's.

Bathsheba? Beatrice? Bernice? Bianca? Bridget?

Dr. Larch was facing a different problem. The dead patient had come to St. Cloud's without a scrap of identification —she'd brought only her burning infection, her overpowering discharge, her dead but uriexpelled fetus (and several of the instruments she—or someone else— {650} had put into herself in order to expel the fetus), her punctured uterus, her unstoppable fever, her acute peritonitis. She reached Dr. Larch too late for him to save her, yet Larch blamed himself.

'She was alive when she got here,' Larch told Nurse Caroline. 'I'm supposed to be a doctor.' 'Then
be
one,' Nurse Caroline said, 'and stop being maudlin.'

'I'm too old,' Larch said. 'Someone younger, someone quicker, might have saved her.'

'If that's what you think, maybe you
are
too old,' Nurse Caroline told him. 'You're not seeing things as they are.'

'As they are,' said Wilbur Larch, who closed himself off in the dispensary. He'd never been good about losing patients, but this one, Nurse Caroline knew, was quite lost when she'd arrived.

'If he can hold himself responsible for a case like that,' Nurse Caroline told Nurse Angela, 'then I think he ought to be replaced—he
is
too old.'

Nurse Angela agreed. 'It's not that he's incompetent, but once he starts thinking he's incompetent, he's had it.'

Nurse Edna would not contribute to this conversation. She went and stood outside the dispensary door, where she repeated, and repeated, 'You're
not
too old, you're
not
incompetent, you're
not
too old,' but Wilbur Larch could not hear her; he was under ether, and he was traveling. He was far away, in Burma—which he saw almost as clearly as Wally ever saw it, although Larch (even with ether's assistance) could never have imagined such heat. The shade that he saw under the peepul trees was deceiving; it was not really cool there—not at that time of the day that the Burmese refer to as 'when feet are silent.' Larch was observing the missionary Dr. Stone making his rounds. Even the noonday heat would not keep Fuzzy Stone from saving the diarrhetic children.

Wally could have informed Larch's dream with some better detail. How slippery the bamboo leaves were when one was trying to walk uphill—for example. How {651} the sleeping mats were always damp with sweat- how it seemed (to Wally) to be a country of submagistrates, corrupted by the British,—either into being like the British, or into being consumed by their hatred of the British. Wally had once been carried across a plateau shot through with sprouting weeds and befouled with pigshit; on it was a former tennis court, built by someone British. The net was now a magistrate's hammock. The court itself, because of the high fence that enclosed it, was a good place to keep the pigs; the fence, which had once kept tennis balls from being lost in the jungle, now made it more difficult for the leopards to kill the pigs. At that way station, Wally would remember, the magistrate himself had instrumented his urinary tract for him; a kindly round-faced man with patient, steady hands, he had used a long, silver swizzle stick—something else the British had left behind. Although the magistrate's English was poor, Wally had made him understand what the swizzle stick was for.

'British ees crazy,' the Burmese gentleman had said to Wally. 'Yes?'

'Yes, I think so,' Wally had agreed. He hadn't known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to—and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.

The silver swizzle stick was too inflexible for a proper catheter, and the top of the thing was adorned with a kind of heraldic shield, Queen Victoria's stern face presiding (in this one case, she was observing a use of the instrument she adorned that might have shocked her).

'Only British ees crazy enough to make something to stir a drink,' the magistrate said, chuckling. He lubricated the catheter with his own saliva.

Through his tears, Wally tried to laugh.

And in the rounds that Dr. Stone was making, wouldn't many of the diarrhetic children suffer urinary retention, wouldn't Dr. Stone have to relieve their little, {652} distended bladders, and wouldn't his catheter be proper and his method of instrumentation sound? In Wilbur Larch's eyes, which were over Burma, Dr. Stone would be perfect—Fuzzy Stone wouldn't lose a single patient.

Nurse Caroline, understanding that the coincidence of the woman dying without a name would not sit well alongside the recent 'evidence' submitted to the board of trustees, knew it was time for her to write to Homer Wells. While Dr. Larch rested in the dispensary, Nurse Caroline worked with a vengeance over the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office.

'Don't be a hypocrite,' she began. 'I hope you recall how vehemently you were always telling me to leave Cape Kenneth, that my services were more needed here —and you were right. And do you think your services aren't needed here, or that they aren't needed right now? Do you think the apples can't grow without you? Just who do you think the board's going to replace him with if you don't step forward? One of the usual cowards who does what he's told, one of your typically careful, mousy, medical men—a little law-abiding citizen who will be of absolutely NO USE!'

She mailed that letter at the same time she alerted the stationmaster that there was a body at the orphanage; various authorities would have to be sent for. It had been a long time since the stationmaster had seen bodies at the orphanage, but he would never forget the bodies he had seen—not his predecessor, after the sternum shears had opened him up, and certainly never the fetal autopsy from Three Mile Falls.