The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  To Homer Wells, Mrs. Goodhall and Dr. Gingrich were not special enough to remember; the peevish miseries compounded in their expressions were not unique. And the way that Homer looked when he was with Candy was not the way he looked most of the time.

  On the matter of abortions, Dr. Stone surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, Dr. Stone assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law. He believed in rules, and in obeying them, he told the board. They liked the hardship and self-sacrifice that they imagined they could witness in the wrinkles around his dark eyes--and how the fierce Asian sun had blistered his nose and cheeks while he had toiled to save the diarrhetic children. (Actually, he had deliberately sat for too long in front of Candy's sunlamp.) And--on the religious grounds more comfortable to the board, and to Mrs. Goodhall especially--Dr. Stone said that he himself never would perform abortions, even if they were legalized. "I just couldn't do it," he lied calmly. If it ever was legal, of course, he would simply refer the unfortunate woman "to one of those doctors who could, and would." It was clear that Dr. Stone found "those doctors" not to his liking--that, despite his loyalty to Dr. Larch, Dr. Stone found that particular practice of Larch's to be an act decidedly against nature.

  It was in large measure indicative of Dr. Stone's "Christian tolerance" that despite his long-standing disagreement with Dr. Larch on this delicate subject, the young missionary was forgiving of Larch--far more forgiving than the board, by no small portion. "I always prayed for him," Dr. Stone said of Dr. Larch, his eyes shining. "I still pray for him." It was an emotional moment, perhaps influenced by the aforementioned "touch of something dysenteric"--and the board was predictably moved by it. Mrs. Goodhall's tic went wild.

  On the matter of Nurse Caroline's socialist views, Dr. Stone assured the board that the young woman's fervor to do the right thing had simply been--in her youth--misguided. He would tell her a few things about the Communist guerrilla activity in Burma that would open her eyes. And Dr. Stone convinced the board that the older nurses, and Mrs. Grogan, had a few more years of good service in them. "It's all a matter of guidance," Dr. Stone told the board. Now there was a word that pleased Dr. Gingrich!

  Dr. Stone opened his hands; they were rather roughly callused for the hands of a doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would observe--thinking it charming how this healer of children must have helped with building the huts or planting the gardens or whatever other rough work there'd been to do over there. When he said "guidance," Homer Wells opened his hands the way a minister received a congregation, thought the board; or the way a good doctor received the precious head of a newborn child, they thought.

  And it was thrilling, after they had interviewed him, how he blessed them as he was leaving them. And how he salaamed to them!

  "Nga sak kin," said the missionary doctor.

  Oh, what had he said? they all wanted to know. Wally, of course, had taught Homer the correct pronunciation--it being one of the few Burmese things that Wally had ever heard correctly, although he'd never learned what it meant.

  Homer Wells translated the phrase for them--Wally had always thought it was someone's name. "It means," Homer told the enraptured board: "May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse."

  There were loud murmurs of approval. Mrs. Goodhall said, "All that in such a short phrase!"

  "It's a remarkable language," Dr. Stone told them dreamily. "Nga sak kin," he told them again. He got them all to repeat it after him. He was pleased to imagine them, later, giving this meaningless blessing to each other. It would have pleased him more if he'd ever known what the phrase actually meant. It was the perfect thing for a board of trustees to go around saying to each other: "curried fish balls."

  "I think I got away with it," Homer told Wally and Candy and Angel when they were eating a late supper in the house at Ocean View.

  "It doesn't surprise me," Wally told his friend. "I have every reason to believe that you can get away with anything."

  Upstairs, after supper, Angel watched his father pack the old black doctor's bag--and some other bags, as well.

  "Don't worry, Pop," Angel told his father. "You're going to do just fine."

  "You're going to do just fine, too," Homer told his son. "I'm not worried about that." Downstairs they heard Candy pushing Wally around in the wheelchair. They were playing the game that Wally and Angel often played--the game Wally called "flying."

  "Come on," Wally was saying. "Angel can make it go faster."

  Candy was laughing. "I'm going as fast as I can," Candy said.

  "Please stop thinking about the furniture," Wally told her.

  "Please look after Wally," Homer said to Angel. "And mind your mother," he told his son.

  "Right," said Angel Wells.

  In the constantly changing weather of Maine, especially on cloudy days, the presence of St. Cloud's could be felt in Heart's Rock; with a heavy certainty, the air of St. Cloud's could be distinguished in the trapped stillness that hovered above the water of Drinkwater Lake (like those water bugs, those water walkers, that were nearly constant there). And even in the fog that rolled over those bright, coastal lawns of Heart's Haven's well-to-do, there was sometimes in the storm-coming air that leaden, heart-sinking feeling that was the essence of the air of St. Cloud's.

  Candy and Wally and Angel would go to St. Cloud's for Christmas, and for the longer of Angel's school vacations, too; and after Angel had his driver's license, he was free to visit his father as often as he liked, which was often.

  But when Homer Wells went to St. Cloud's--even though Wally had offered him a car--Homer took the train. Homer knew he wouldn't need a car there, and he wanted to arrive the way most of his patients did; he wanted to get the feel of it.

  In late November, there was already snow as the train moved north and inland, and by the time the train reached St. Cloud's, the blue-cold snow was deeply on the ground and heavily bent the trees. The stationmaster, who hated to leave the television, was shoveling snow off the platform when the train pulled in. The stationmaster thought he recognized Homer Wells, but the stern, black doctor's bag and the new beard fooled him. Homer had started the beard because it had hurt to shave (after he'd burned his face with the sunlamp), and once the beard had grown for a while, he thought the charge would be suitable. Didn't a beard go with his new name?

  "Doctor Stone," Homer said to the stationmaster, introducing himself. "Fuzzy Stone," he said. "I used to be an orphan here. Now I'm the new doctor."

  "Oh, I thought you was familiar!" the stationmaster said, bowing as he shook Homer's hand.

  Only one other passenger had gotten off the train in St. Cloud's, and Homer Wells had no difficulty imagining what she wanted. She was a thin young woman in a long muskrat coat with a scarf, and a ski hat pulled almost over her eyes, and she hung back on the platform, waiting for Homer to move away from the stationmaster. It was the doctor's bag that had caught her attention, and after Homer had arranged for the usual louts to tote his heavier luggage, he started up the hill to the orphanage carrying just the doctor's bag; the young woman followed him.

  They walked uphill in this fashion, with the woman lagging purposefully behind, until they almost reached the girls' division. Then Homer stopped walking and waited for her.

  "Is this the way to the orphanage?" the young woman asked him.

  "Right," said Homer Wells. Since he had grown the beard, he tended to oversmile at people; he imagined that the beard made it hard for people to tell whether he was smiling.

  "Are you the doctor?" the young woman asked him, staring at the snow on both their boots--and, warily, at the doctor's bag.

  "Yes, I'm Doctor Stone," he said, taking the woman's arm and leading her toward the hospital entrance of the boys' division. "May I help you?" he asked her.

  And so he arrived, as Nurse Edna would say, bringing the Lord's work with him
. Nurse Angela threw her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear. "Oh Homer!" she whispered. "I knew you'd be back!"

  "Call me 'Fuzzy,' " he whispered to her, because he knew that Homer Wells (like Rose Rose) was long gone.

  For several days, Nurse Caroline would be shy with him, but he wouldn't need more than a few operations and a few deliveries to convince her that he was the real thing. Dr. Stone, even as a name, would be a fitting successor to Dr. Larch. For wasn't Stone a good, hard, feet-on-the-ground, reliable-sounding sort of name for a physician?

  And Mrs. Grogan would remark that she had not enjoyed being read aloud to so much since those hard-to-remember days of Homer Wells. And it was to everyone's relief that Fuzzy Stone would exhibit as few symptoms of his former respiratory difficulties as Homer Wells had exhibited signs of a weak and damaged heart.

  Candy and Wally Worthington would throw themselves full tilt into apple farming. Wally would serve two terms as president of the Maine Horticultural Society; Candy would serve a term as director of the New York-New England Apple Institute. And Angel Wells, whom Rose Rose had introduced to love and to imagination, would one day be a novelist.

  "The kid's got fiction in his blood," Wally would tell Homer Wells.

  To Candy, a novelist was also what Homer Wells had become--for a novelist, in Candy's opinion, was also a kind of impostor doctor, but a good doctor nonetheless.

  Homer never minded giving up his name--it wasn't his actual name, to begin with--and it was as easy to be a Fuzzy as it was to be a Homer--as easy (or as hard) to be a Stone as it was to be anything else.

  When he was tired or plagued with insomnia (or both), he would miss Angel, or he would think of Candy. Sometimes he longed to carry Wally into the surf, or to fly with him. Some nights Homer imagined he would be caught, or he worried about what he would do when Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna were too old for the Lord's work, and for all the other work in St. Cloud's. And how would he ever replace Mrs. Grogan? Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal--that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)--but he was rarely that tired.

  And, after a while, he would write to Candy and say that he had become a socialist; or, at least, that he'd become sympathetic to socialist views. Candy understood by this confession that Homer was sleeping with Nurse Caroline, which she also understood would be good for them--that is, this new development was good for Homer and for Nurse Caroline, and it was good for Candy, too.

  Homer Wells saw no end to the insights he perceived nightly, in his continuous reading from Jane Eyre, and from David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He would smile to remember how he had once thought Dickens was "better than" Bronte. When they both gave such huge entertainment and instruction, what did it matter? he thought--and from where comes this childish business of "better"? If not entertainment, he took continued instruction from Gray's Anatomy.

  For a while, he lacked one thing--and he was about to order it when one came unordered to him. "As if from God," Mrs. Grogan would say.

  The stationmaster sent him the message: there was a body at the railroad station, addressed to Dr. Stone. It was from the hospital in Bath--which had been Dr. Larch's long-standing source for bodies, in the days when he'd ordered them. It was some mistake, Homer Wells was sure, but he went to the railroad station to view the body anyway--and to spare the stationmaster any unnecessary agitation.

  Homer stood staring at the cadaver (which had been correctly prepared) for such a long time that the stationmaster grew even more anxious. "I'd just as soon you either take it up the hill, or send it back," the stationmaster said, but Homer Wells waved the fool off; he wanted peace to look at Melony.

  She had requested this use of her body, Lorna had told the pathologist at the Bath hospital. Melony had seen a photograph in the Bath paper, together with an article revealing Dr. Stone's appointment in St. Cloud's. In the event of her death (which was caused by an electrical accident), Melony had instructed Lorna to send her body to Dr. Stone in St. Cloud's. "I might be of some use to him, finally," she had told her friend. Of course Homer remembered how Melony had been jealous of Clara.

  He would write to Lorna; they would correspond for a while. Lorna would inform him that Melony was "a relatively happy woman at the time of her accident"; in Lorna's opinion, something to do with how relaxed Melony had become was responsible for her electrocuting herself. "She was a daydreamer," Lorna would write. Homer knew that all orphans were daydreamers. "You was her hero, finally," Lorna would tell him.

  When he viewed her body, he knew he could never use it for a refresher course; he would send to Bath for another cadaver. Melony had been used enough.

  "Should I send it back, Doctor?" the stationmaster whispered.

  "No, she belongs here," Homer Wells told him, and so he had Melony brought uphill. It would be essential to keep the sight of her in her present form a secret from Mrs. Grogan. What Homer told them all was that Melony had requested she be buried in St. Cloud's, and so she was--on the hill, under the apple trees, where it was torturously hard to dig a correct hole (the root systems of the trees were everywhere). Finally, a large and deep enough hole was managed, although it was back-breaking labor, and Nurse Caroline said, "I don't know who she is, but she sure is difficult."

  "She was always that," said Homer Wells.

  ("Here in St. Cloud's," Wilbur Larch had written, "we learn to love the difficult.")

  Mrs. Grogan said her Cardinal Newman over Melony's grave, and Homer said his own prayer (to himself) about her. He had always expected much from Melony, but she had provided him with more than he'd ever expected--she had truly educated him, she had shown him the light. She was more Sunshine than he ever was, he thought. ("Let us be happy for Melony," he said to himself. "Melony has found a family.")

  But chiefly, for his education, he would peruse (and linger over every word of) A Brief History of St. Cloud's. In this pursuit, he would have Nurse Angela's and Nurse Edna's and Mrs. Grogan's and Nurse Caroline's tireless company, for by this pursuit they would keep Wilbur Larch alive.

  Not that everything was clear to Homer: the later entries in A Brief History of St. Cloud's were marred by shorthand inspirations and the whimsy conveyed to Larch through ether. For example, what did Larch mean by "rhymes with screams!"? And it seemed uncharacteristically harsh of Larch to have written: "I put the pony's penis in her mouth! I contributed to that!" How could he have thought that? Homer wondered, because Homer never knew how well Dr. Larch had known Mrs. Eames's daughter.

  And as he grew older, Homer Wells (alias Fuzzy Stone) would take special comfort in an unexplained revelation he found in the writings of Wilbur Larch.

  "Tell Dr. Stone," Dr. Larch wrote--and this was his very last entry; these were Wilbur Larch's last words: "There is absolutely nothing wrong with Homer's heart." Except for the ether, Homer Wells knew there had been very little that was wrong with the heart of Wilbur Larch.

  To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn't (but who had in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were--if there ever were--Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.

  Author's Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader's search tools.

  (pp. 37-38) Anthony Trollope, who visited Portland, Maine, in 1861, and wrote about it in his North America, was mistaken--in the manner of Wilbur Larch's father--about the intended future of the Great Eastern.

  (p. 41) I am indebted to my grandfather Dr. Frederick C. Irving for this information regarding Dr. Ernst, the curve-ball pitcher--and for the particularly medical language in this chapter. My grandfather's books include The Expectant Mother's Handbook, A Textbook of Obstetrics, and Safe Deliverance. Dr. Ernst's studies of bacterial in
fections drew the attention of a Dr. Richardson of the Boston Lying-In Hospital, the maternity hospital where Wilbur Larch served an internship and later joined the staff. Dr. Richardson's article "The Use of Antiseptics in Obstetric Practice" would surely have caught the attention of that eager student of bacteriology, clap-sufferer Wilbur Larch.

  The interest in antiseptics among obstetricians was due to their effect in preventing the most deadly puerperal infection of that day, childbed fever. In 188_, in some maternity hospitals, the death rate among the mothers was about one in eight. In 189_, when Wilbur Larch was still at the Boston Lying-In, a mother's odds were better; the doctors and their patients were washed with a solution of bichloride of mercury. Before Larch would leave the Boston Lying-In, he would see the antiseptic technique advance to the aseptic--the latter meaning "free from bacteria," which meant that everything was sterilized (the sheets, the towels, the gowns, the gauze sponges); the instruments were boiled.

  (p. 42) On the use of ether: most historians of anesthesia agree with Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland that surgical anesthesia began at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846, when William Morton demonstrated the effectiveness of ether. Dr. Nuland writes: "Everything that led up to it was prologue, everything that was tangential to it was byplay, and everything that followed it was amplification."

  According to Dr. Nuland, ether in proper hands remains one of the safest inhalation agents known. At a concentration of only 1 to 2 percent it is a light, tasty vapor; in light concentration, even thirty years ago, hundreds of cases of cardiac surgery were done with light ether and partially awake (even talking) patients.