The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  A beautiful and untouched copy of Jane Eyre arrived from Mrs. Worthington, and Wilbur Larch read more spiritedly to the girls--the newness of the story refreshed him. It even enlivened his weary approach to the sad conclusion to Great Expectations. (He never believed the part about Pip and Estella being happy ever after; he never believed that about anyone.)

  A pattern of correspondence slowly developed between Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells. Homer would sketch the barest facts of his life in Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven; he would give Dr. Larch a glimpse, like the far-off visibility of the ocean from the one orchard at Ocean View where sighting the sea was possible. He would send Dr. Larch a page, maybe two pages once a week or every other week. To this speck on the horizon Dr. Larch would respond with the full orchestration of the written word: questions (which would never be answered) regarding the specificity that was lacking in Homer's last letter ("What precisely is the matter with Mr. Worthington?") and a flood of details concerning the daily grimness of St. Cloud's. As much as Dr. Larch disdained the gossipy instinct of Snowy Meadows for "keeping up" with the orphanage, Dr. Larch provided Homer Wells with a virtual alumni newsletter and with a calendar of hospital and social events. His letters to Homer Wells were longer than his longest entries in A Brief History of St. Cloud's, and they were written and mailed the day following Dr. Larch's receipt of the most minimal scrawl from Homer.

  "You can't expect the boy to keep up with you, Wilbur," Nurse Edna advised Dr. Larch.

  "You can't expect him to compete with you," Nurse Angela said.

  "What the hell is wrong with this Senior Worthington character?" Dr. Larch asked.

  "Homer said it was a drinking problem, Wilbur," Nurse Edna reminded him.

  "What do you want to know--the brand of hooch?" Nurse Angela asked.

  But what Wilbur Larch expected from his young apprentice was only what he thought he had taught him: clinical analysis, the exact definition of characteristics associated with light, medium, or heavy drinking. Are we talking about a guy who makes a fool out of himself at parties? Wilbur Larch wondered. Or is this something severe and chronic?

  Because Homer Wells had never seen a drunk before, he was--at first--even more easily deceived by Senior Worthington's appearance than Senior's immediate family and friends were; and Homer was as ready as they were to accept Senior's deterioration in cognition as the natural result of alcoholism. A man long admired in Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven, especially for the sweetness of his disposition, Senior had become short-tempered, irritable, and even aggressive on occasion. Following the incident with the grasshopper pie, Olive wouldn't allow him to go to the Haven Club without her: Senior had plastered an entire grasshopper pie against the chest of a nice, young lifeguard and needed to be restrained, then, from further smearing the pale-green ingredients on the rump of a nice, young waitress. "He was showing off," Senior said of the lifeguard. "He was just standing there," he explained.

  "And the waitress?" Olive asked. Senior appeared confused and began to cry.

  "I thought she was someone else," he said faintly. Olive had taken him home; Wally had made up to the waitress; it was Candy who had charmed and reassured the lifeguard.

  Senior became lost driving to other than routine places; Olive never allowed him to have the car unless Wally or Homer went with him. Eventually, he became lost trying to get to familiar places; Homer had to lead him back to Ocean View from Ray Kendall's lobster pound--even Homer, who was unfamiliar with the network of small roads to and from the coast, could tell that Senior had made a wrong turn.

  Senior made terrible mistakes in any complex motor task. While cleaning the carburetor for the Cadillac--a simple job, which Ray Kendall had demonstrated for him many times--Senior inhaled the gas and little carbon particles in the tubes (he sucked in instead of blowing out).

  Senior's recent memory was so severely impaired that he wandered for an hour through his own bedroom unable to dress himself; he constantly confused his sock drawer with the drawer for Olive's underwear. One morning he became so enraged at his mistake that he appeared at the breakfast table with each foot tightly tied up in a bra. Normally friendly to Homer and tender to Wally and Olive, he shouted an accusation at Wally--that his own son was wearing his father's socks, which he had taken without his father's permission!--and he ranted at Olive for turning his domicile into a foundling home without asking his permission regarding that.

  "You'd be better off at Saint Cloud's than in this house of thieves," he told Homer.

  Upon saying this, Senior Worthington burst into tears and begged Homer's forgiveness; he put his head on Homer's shoulder and wept. "My brain is sending poison to my heart," he told Homer, who thought it strange that Senior didn't seem to drink before the late afternoon--yet he appeared to be drunk nearly all the time.

  Sometimes it went like this. Senior would not drink for three days--a part of him able to observe that his silliness flourished no less ardently. Yet he would forget to make this point to Olive, or to anyone else, until he'd broken down and had a drink; by the time he remembered to say he had not been drinking, he was drunk. Why do I forget everything? he wondered, and then forgot it.

  Yet his long-range memory was quite intact. He sang college songs to Olive (the lines of which she herself was unable to remember), and he sweetly recalled for her the romantic evenings of their courtship; he told Wally stories of Wally as a baby; he entertained Homer by cheerfully recounting the planting of some of the older-tree orchards, including the lone orchard from which the sea was visible.

  "It was where I wanted to build the house, Homer," Senior said. It was lunchtime. Wally and Homer had been suckering in the orchard: stripping the inner limbs off the tree or any new, sprouting branches (or "suckers") that are turned inward--the ones not reaching out to the sun. Wally had heard the story; he was distracted; he poured some Coca-Cola on an anthill. Suckering exposes as many of the limbs as possible to the light; it lets the light come through the tree.

  "You don't allow an apple tree to grow every which way," Wally had explained to Homer.

  "Like a boy!" Senior had shouted, laughing.

  "Olive thought it was too windy for a house here," Senior told Homer. "Women are disturbed by the wind more than men are disturbed by it," Senior confided. "That's a fact. Anyway . . ." he paused. He gestured to the sea, as if it were a far-off audience and he meant to include it by the sweep of his hand. He turned to the apple trees around them. . . . They were a slightly more intimate audience, paying closer attention. "The wind . . ." he started to say, and paused again, perhaps waiting for the wind to contribute something. "The house . . ." he started to say.

  "You can see this orchard from the second floor of our house. Did you know that?" he asked Homer.

  "Right," Homer said. Wally's room was on the second floor. From Wally's window, he could see the orchard from which the sea was visible, but the sea wasn't visible from Wally's window--or from any other window in the house.

  "I called the whole place Ocean View," Senior explained, "because I thought the house was going to be here. Right here," he repeated. He looked down at the foaming Coca-Cola that Wally was slowly pouring onto the anthill.

  "You use poison oats and poison corn to kill the mice," Senior said. "It stinks." Wally looked up at him; Homer nodded. "You scatter the stuff for the field mice, but you have to find the holes and put it in the tunnels if you want to kill the pine mice," he said.

  "We know, Pop," Wally said softly.

  "Field mice are the same as meadow mice," Senior explained to Homer, who had already been told this.

  "Right," Homer said.

  "Meadow mice girdle a tree, and pine mice eat the roots," Senior recited, from his distant memory.

  Wally stopped pouring the Coke on the anthill. He and Homer didn't know why Senior had joined them for their lunch break; they'd been suckering in the ocean orchard all morning, and Senior had just shown up. He was driving the old jeep that didn't have any license plat
es; it was strictly for driving around the orchards.

  "Pop?" Wally asked him. "What are you doing out here?"

  Senior stared blankly at his son. He looked at Homer; he hoped Homer might tell him the answer. He regarded his audience--the apple trees, the far-off ocean.

  "I wanted to build the house here, right here," he said to Wally. "But your bossy bitch of a have-it-all-her-own-way mother wouldn't let me--she wouldn't let me, the cunt!" he cried. "Clam-digger cunt, well-digger pussy!" he shouted. He stood up, he looked disoriented; Wally stood up with him.

  "Come on, Pop," he said. "I'll drive you home."

  They took Wally's pickup. Homer followed them in the old jeep; it was the vehicle he had learned to drive in after Wally had assured him that he couldn't hurt it.

  Alcohol, thought Homer Wells; it sure can destroy you.

  Senior had all the other symptoms, too. He was fifty-five; he looked seventy. He had periods of paranoia, of grandiosity, of confabulation. His few obnoxious traits--which he'd always had--were exaggerated; in his case, nose-picking, for example. He could explore a nostril for an hour; he put boogers on his pants or on the furniture. Olive's vulgar brother, Bucky Bean, claimed that Senior could have been a well-digger. "The way he roots into his snoot," Bucky said, "I could use him to dig a well."

  The Haven Club's lifeguard, whose chest had received the full force of the grasshopper pie, turned out to be not completely mollified. He objected to Candy giving Homer swimming lessons in the shallow end of the pool in the late afternoon. The pool was crowded then, he complained; swimming lessons were regularly scheduled in the early morning--and he--the lifeguard--regularly administered them--for a fee. He was not convinced that he should be flexible about the matter. Homer worked at Ocean View all day, Candy argued. In the late afternoon, when Wally played tennis after work, was the ideal time for Candy to give Homer instructions.

  "Ideal for you," the lifeguard argued with Candy; he had a crush on her, it was plain. It was one thing to be jealous of Wally Worthington--everyone was--but quite another to have to suffer the attentions Candy Kendall gave to the hard-luck case from St. Cloud's. At the Haven Club--never in Candy's presence, or in the presence of any of the Worthingtons--Homer was referred to not as the foundling or as the orphan, but as "the hard-luck case from St. Cloud's"--sometimes "the Worthingtons' hard-luck case" was the way it was put.

  Homer said he wouldn't mind practicing in the Worthingtons' private pool at Ocean View, but it was nice that he and Candy could be at the Haven Club when Wally finished playing tennis; they could then go off together, to the beach, to Ray Kendall's dock, to wherever. Also, at the Worthingtons' pool there would be Senior to deal with; more and more Olive tried to keep Senior home, away from the Haven Club. She found she could pacify him best by feeding him gin and tonics and keeping him in the pool--floating on a rubber raft. But the real reason it was a bad idea (everyone felt) for Homer to learn to swim in the Worthingtons' unheated pool was that the cold water might be a shock to his heart.

  Olive decided that she would take over Homer's lessons from Candy; she knew that the lifeguard at the Haven Club wouldn't dare to complain to her; she and Candy and Wally agreed that the unheated experience might be too severe for Homer.

  "I don't want to be any trouble for you," Homer said, puzzled and, doubtlessly, disappointed that the hands under his stomach as he paddled back and forth were Olive's and not Candy's. "It's not too cold for me in your pool, Wally," Homer said.

  "It's harder to learn when it's cold," Candy said.

  "Yes, that's right," Olive said.

  "Well, I want to swim in the ocean, as soon as I learn how," Homer told them. "It's a lot colder in the ocean than it is in your pool."

  Oh my, Olive worried. She wrote Dr. Larch about "the heart problem," which made Larch feel guilty and slightly trapped. Actually, he wrote to her, cold water doesn't provide the kind of shock he was anxious about; the kind of shock associated with an accident--"for example, a near-drowning"--was more the kind of shock he felt that Homer must try to avoid.

  What lies! Larch thought, but he mailed the letter to Mrs. Worthington anyway, and Olive found that Homer learned to swim very rapidly. "He must have been right on the verge of picking it up when I took over from you," she told Candy; but in truth, Homer learned more quickly from Olive because the lessons themselves were not as pleasurable.

  With Candy, he might have never learned to swim; at least he could have prolonged it and made the lessons last the rest of the summer.

  Homer Wells would have made that summer last the rest of his life if he could have. There was so much about his life at Ocean View that made him happy.

  He was not ashamed that he loved the Worthingtons' wall-to-wall carpeting; he'd come from bare wood walls and many layers of linoleum, between which one could feel the sawdust shift underfoot. One couldn't claim that the Worthingtons' walls were hung with art, but Homer had not seen pictures on walls before (except the portrait of the pony woman); even the crowning cuteness of the oil painting of the cat in the flower bed (in Wally's bathroom) appealed to Homer--and the flower-bed wallpaper behind the painting appealed to him, too. What did he know about wallpaper or art? He thought all wallpaper was wonderful.

  He felt he would never stop loving Wally's room. What did he know about varsity letters and footballs dipped in liquid gold and inscribed with the score of an important game? And tennis trophies, and old yearbooks and the ticket stubs tucked into the molding of the mirror (from the first movie Wally took Candy to)? What did he know about movies? Wally and Candy took him to one of Maine's first drive-in movies. How could he ever have imagined that? And what did he know about people who came together every day, and worked together, by apparent choice? His fellow workers at Ocean View were a marvel to Homer Wells; at first, he loved them all. He loved Meany Hyde the most, because Meany was so friendly and had such a fondness for explaining how everything was done--even things that Homer--or anyone else--could have seen how to do without being told. Homer especially loved listening to Meany explain the obvious.

  He loved Meany Hyde's wife, Florence--and the other women who spent the summer making the apple mart and the cider house ready for the harvest. He loved Big Dot Taft, although the jiggle in the backs of her arms reminded him of Melony (whom he never thought about, not even when he heard that she had left St. Cloud's). He liked Big Dot Taft's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who was his own age, and pretty, although there was something determined about her chubbiness that suggested she had the capacity for one day becoming as big as Big Dot.

  Big Dot's husband, Everett Taft, showed Homer all about mowing. You mowed the rows between the trees twice a summer; then you raked and hayed the rows; then you baled the hay and sold it to the dairy farm in Kenneth Corners. You used the loose hay for mulch around the younger trees. At Ocean View, everything was used.

  Homer liked Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper and the husband of Irene of the wondrous burn scar: it was Ira who explained to Homer about the bees. "They like at least sixty-five degrees, no wind, no hail, no frost," Ira said. "A bee lives about thirty days and does more work than some men do all their lives--I ain't sayin' who. All honey is," said Ira Titcomb, "is fuel for bees."

  Homer learned that bees prefer dandelions to apple blossoms, which was why you mowed the dandelions down just before you brought the bees into the orchard. He learned why there had to be more than one kind of tree in an orchard, for cross-pollinating--the bees had to carry the pollen to one kind of tree to another. He learned it should be nighttime when you put the hives out in the orchard; at night the bees were asleep and you could close the little screen door at the slat at the bottom of the box that contained the hive; when you carried the hives, the bees woke up but they couldn't get out. The hives were light when they were carried off the flatbed trailer and distributed through the orchards, but they were heavy with honey when they had to be picked up and loaded back on the trailer a week later. Sometimes a hive could be too heav
y to lift alone. If the hives were jostled, the bees inside began to hum; you could feel them stirring through the wood. If honey had leaked through the slats, a lone bee might get gobbed up in the leaking honey, and that was the only way you could get stung.

  Once when Homer hugged a hive to his chest, and carefully walked it to the flatbed's edge, he felt a vibration against the taut boards containing the hive; even in the cool night air, the boards were warm; the activity of the hive generated heat--like an infection, Homer thought suddenly. He recalled the taut belly of the woman he had saved from convulsions. He thought of the activity in the uterus as producing both a heat and a hardness to the abdomen. How many abdomens had Homer Wells put his hand on before he was twenty? I prefer apple farming, he thought.

  At St. Cloud's, growth was unwanted even when it was delivered--and the process of birth was often interrupted. Now he was engaged in the business of growing things. What he loved about the life at Ocean View was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted.

  He even thought he loved Vernon Lynch, although he'd been told how Vernon beat his wife and Grace Lynch had a way of looking at Homer that did alarm him. He could not tell from her look if it was need or suspicion or simply curiosity that he saw--Grace gave out the kind of look you go on feeling after you've stopped looking back.

  Vernon Lynch showed Homer how to spray. It was appropriate that Vernon Lynch was in charge of the pesticides, of extermination.

  "As soon as there's leaves, there's trouble," Vernon told him. "That's in April. You start sprayin' in April and you don't stop till the end of August, when you're ready to start pickin'. You spray every week or ten days. You spray for scab and you spray for insects. We got two sprayers here, one's a Hardie and one's a Bean, and both of them hold five hundred gallons. You wear the respirator because you don't want to breathe the shit, and the respirator don't do you no good if it don't fit tight." Saying this, Vernon Lynch tightened the respirator around Homer's head; Homer could feel his temples pound. "If you don't keep washin' out the cloth in the mask, you could choke," Vernon said. He cupped his hand over Homer's mouth and nose; Homer experienced airlessness. "And keep your hair covered if you don't want to go bald." Vernon's hand remained clamped over Homer's mouth and nose. "And keep the goggles on if you don't want to go blind," he added. Homer considered struggling, decided to conserve his strength, contemplated fainting, wondered if it was true or just an expression that lungs exploded. "If you got what they call an open wound, like a cut, and the shit gets in there, you could get sterile," said Vernon Lynch. "That means no more nasty hard-ons." Homer tapped his shoulder and waved to Vernon, as if he were signaling something too complicated to be communicated by normal means. I can't breathe! Hello! I can't breathe! Hello out there!