Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  Homer Wells, with his face pressed into Candy’s hair, lay dreaming that he was only now arriving at the white Cadillac’s original destination; he felt as if Wally were still driving him and Candy away from St. Cloud’s—as if Wally were still in charge; surely Wally was a true benefactor to have driven him safely to this resting place. The pulse in Candy’s temple, which lightly touched his own pulse, was as soothing to Homer as the tire hum when the great white Cadillac had rescued him from the prison into which he was born. There was a tear on Homer’s face; he would have thanked Wally, if he could.

  And if, in the darkness, he could have seen Candy’s face, he would have known that a part of her was still over Burma.

  They lay still for so long—the first mouse bold enough to run across their bare legs surprised them. Homer Wells jerked up to a kneeling position; a moment passed before he realized that he had left a whole prophylactic, and all those sperm inside Candy. It was number 4 on Wilbur Larch’s list of the COMMON MISUSES OF THE PROPHYLACTIC.

  “Oh-oh,” said Homer Wells, whose fingers were quick, and sensitive, and trained; he needed only the index and middle fingers of his right hand to retrieve the lost rubber; although he was very fast, he doubted he’d been fast enough.

  Despite the careful detail of Homer’s instructions to Candy, she cut him off. “I think I know how to douche myself, Homer,” she said.

  And so their first night of passion, which had been so slowly building between them, ended in the haste typical of the measures taken to avoid an unwanted pregnancy—the possible cause of which was fairly typical, too.

  “I love you,” Homer repeated, kissing her good night. There were both fervor and anger in Candy’s good-night kiss, both ferocity and resignation in the way she clutched his hands. Homer stood for a while in the parking lot behind the lobster pound; the only sound was the aeration device that circulated fresh oxygen through the water tank that kept the lobsters alive. The quality of the air in the parking lot was divided between brine and motor oil. The night’s heat was gone. A cool, damp fog rolled in from the sea; there was no more heat lightning to illuminate, however slightly, the view across the Atlantic.

  It seemed to Homer Wells that there had been so much waiting and seeing to his life, and now there was something else to wait and see about.

  Wilbur Larch, who was seventy-something and the grand master of Maine in the field of waiting and seeing, gazed once again upon the starry ceiling of the dispensary. One of ether’s pleasures was its occasional transportation of the inhaler to a position that afforded him a bird’s-eye view of himself; Wilbur Larch was thus permitted to smile from afar upon a vision of himself. It was the night that he blessed the adoption of young Copperfield, the lisper.

  “Let us be happy for young Copperfield,” Dr. Larch had said. “Young Copperfield has found a family. Good night, Copperfield!”

  Only this time, in ether’s memory, it was a joyous occasion. There was even unison in the responses, as if Larch conducted a choir of angels—all singing Copperfield merrily on his way. It hadn’t been like that. Copperfield had been especially popular with the littlest orphans; he was what Nurse Angela called a “binder”—in his good-natured, lisping presence, the spirits of the other orphans rose and held together. That night no one had joined Larch in wishing Copperfield good night and good-bye. But Copperfield’s departure had been especially hard for Dr. Larch, because with Copperfield’s passing there went from St. Cloud’s not only the last orphan to be named by Homer Wells but also the last orphan to have known Homer. With Copperfield’s leaving, a little more of Homer Wells left, too. Little Steerforth—second-born and second-named—had been adopted first.

  But good for ether! How it allowed Dr. Larch to revise his history. Perhaps it had been the ether, all along, that had provided Dr. Larch with the impulse to be a revisionist with Fuzzy Stone. And in Larch’s ether dreams he had many times rescued Wally Worthington—the exploding plane had reassembled itself and returned to the sky; the parachute had opened, and the gentle currents of the Burmese air had borne Wally all the way to China. Safely above the Japanese, above the tigers and the snakes, and above the dread diseases of Asia—how peacefully Wilbur Larch had seen Wally fly. And how the Chinese had been impressed with Wally’s noble good looks—with those patrician bones in that handsome face. In time, the Chinese would help Wally to find his base, and he would come home to his girlfriend—this was what Wilbur Larch wanted most: he wanted Wally back with Candy, for only then would there be any hope of Homer Wells returning to St. Cloud’s.

  Nearly three months after Wally’s plane was shot down, the harvest at Ocean View began and Candy Kendall knew she was pregnant. After all, she was familiar with the symptoms; so was Homer Wells.

  A ragtag crew of pickers mauled the orchards that year; there were housewives and war brides falling out of trees, and students dismissed from the local schools so that they might contribute to the harvest. Even the apple harvest in 194_ was considered a part of the war effort. Olive made Homer a crew boss of the high school kids, whose methods of bruising the fruit were so various that Homer was kept very busy.

  Candy worked in the mart; she told Olive that her frequent bouts of nausea were probably caused by the smell of diesel fuel and exhaust that was constant around the farm vehicles. Olive remarked that she thought the daughter of a mechanic and lobsterman would be less sensitive to strong odors, and when she suggested that Candy might be more comfortable working in the fields, Candy admitted that climbing trees also made her feel queasy.

  “I never knew you were so delicate,” Olive said. Olive had never been more active in a harvest, or more grateful for there being one. But the harvest that year reminded Homer Wells of learning to tread water; both Candy and Olive had taught him how. (“Swimming in place,” Olive had called it.)

  “I’m just swimming in place,” Homer told Candy. “We can’t leave Olive during the harvest.”

  “If I work as hard as I can,” Candy told him, “it’s possible that I’ll miscarry.”

  It was not very possible, Homer Wells knew.

  “What if I don’t want you to miscarry?” Homer asked her.

  “What if?” Candy asked.

  “What if I want you to marry me, and to have the baby?” Homer asked.

  They stood at one end of the conveyor belt in the packinghouse; Candy was at the head of the line of women who sized and sorted the apples—who either packaged them or banished them to cider. Candy was retching, even though she had chosen the head of the line because that put her nearest the open door.

  “We have to wait and see,” Candy said between retches.

  “We don’t have long to wait,” said Homer Wells. “We don’t have long to see.”

  “I shouldn’t marry you for a year, or more,” Candy said. “I really want to marry you, but what about Olive? We have to wait.”

  “The baby won’t wait,” Homer said.

  “We both know where to go—to not have the baby,” Candy said.

  “Or to have it,” said Homer Wells. “It’s my baby, too.”

  “How do I have a baby without anyone knowing I’ve had it?” Candy asked; she retched again, and Big Dot Taft came up the packing line to see what was the matter.

  “Homer, ain’t you got no better manners than to watch a young lady puke?” Big Dot asked him. She put her huge arm around Candy’s shoulder. “You get away from the door, darlin’,” Big Dot Taft said to Candy. “You come on and work down the line—there’s only apples to smell down there. The tractor exhaust comes in the door.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Homer mumbled, to both Candy and Big Dot.

  “No one likes to be sick around the opposite sex, Homer,” Big Dot informed him.

  “Right,” said Homer Wells, orphan and would-be father.

  In Maine, it is considered wiser just to know something than to talk about it; that no one said Candy Kendall was pregnant didn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t know she was. In Ma
ine, it is a given that any boy can get any girl in trouble. What they do about it is their business; if they want advice, they should ask.

  “If you were an orphan, what would you have?” Wilbur Larch once wrote in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “An orphan, or an abortion?”

  “An abortion, definitely,” Melony had said once, when Homer Wells had asked her. “How about you?”

  “I’d have the orphan,” Homer had said.

  “You’re just a dreamer, Sunshine,” Melony had told him.

  Now he supposed it was true; he was just a dreamer. He confused the high school kids with each other, and gave some of them credit for picking bushels that other kids had picked. He stopped two of the boys from throwing apples at each other, and felt that he had to make an example of them—in order to protect the fruit and establish his authority. But while he was driving the boys back to the apple mart, where he forced them to wait without getting in any trouble—and to miss a morning’s picking—a full-scale apple fight broke out among the other high school kids, and when Homer returned to the field, he interrupted a war. The crates that were already loaded on the flatbed were splattered with apple seeds, and the hot parts of the tractor gave off a burned-apple stench (someone must have tried to use the tractor for “cover”). Perhaps Vernon Lynch would have made a better foreman for the high school kids, Homer thought. All Homer wanted to do was to make things right with Candy.

  When they sat on Ray Kendall’s dock now, they sat close together, and they didn’t sit for long—it was getting cold. They sat huddled against one of the posts at the dock’s end, where Ray had seen Candy sit with Wally—so many times—and in somewhat the same position (although, Ray noted, Wally had always sat up straighter, as if he were already fastened to the pilot’s seat).

  Ray Kendall understood why it was necessary for them to brood about the process of falling in love, but he felt sorry for them; he knew that falling in love was never meant to be such a morose moment. Yet Ray had every respect for Olive, and it was for Olive, he knew, that Homer and Candy were forced to be mourners at their own love story. “You should just go away,” Ray said out the window to Homer and Candy; he spoke very softly and the window was closed.

  Homer was afraid that if he insisted to Candy that she marry him—insisted that she have their baby—that he would force her to reject him completely. He also knew that Candy was afraid of Olive; it was not that Candy was so eager to have a second abortion—Homer knew that Candy would marry him, and have their baby on the same day, if she thought she could avoid telling Olive the truth. Candy was not ashamed of Homer; she was not ashamed of being pregnant, either. Candy was ashamed that Olive would judge her harshly for her insufficient feelings for Wally—Candy’s faith (in Wally being alive) had not been as strong as Olive’s. It is not unusual for the mother of an only son and the young woman who is the son’s lover to envision themselves as competitors.

  More shocking (to Homer’s mind) was what he could gather of his own feelings. He already knew that he loved Candy, and wanted her; now he discovered that—more than wanting her—he wanted her child.

  They were just another trapped couple, more comfortable with their illusions than they were with the reality of their situation.

  “After the harvest,” Homer said to Candy, “we’ll go to Saint Cloud’s. I’ll say that they need me there. It’s probably true, anyway. And because of the war, no one else is paying attention to them. You could tell your dad it’s just another kind of war effort. We could both tell Olive that we feel an obligation—to be where we’re really needed; to be of more use.”

  “You want me to have the baby?” Candy asked him.

  “I want you to have our baby,” said Homer Wells. “And after the baby’s born, and you’re both recovered, we’ll come back here. We’ll tell your dad, and Olive—or we’ll write them—that we’ve fallen in love, and that we’ve gotten married.”

  “And that we conceived a child before we did any of that?” Candy asked.

  Homer Wells, who saw the real stars above the blackened coast of Maine—bright and cold—envisioned the whole story very clearly. “We’ll say the baby is adopted,” he said. “We’ll say we felt a further obligation—to the orphanage. I do feel that, in a way, anyway,” he added.

  “Our baby is adopted?” Candy asked. “So we have a baby who thinks it’s an orphan?”

  “No,” Homer said. “We have our own baby, and it knows it’s all ours. We just say it’s adopted—just for Olive’s sake, and just for a while.”

  “That’s lying,” Candy said.

  “Right,” said Homer Wells. “That’s lying for a while.”

  “Maybe—when we came back, with the baby—maybe we wouldn’t have to say it was adopted. Maybe we could tell the truth then,” Candy said.

  “Maybe,” Homer said. Maybe everything is waiting and seeing, he thought. He put his mouth on the back of her neck; he nuzzled into her hair.

  “If we thought that Olive could accept it, if we thought that she could accept—about Wally,” Candy added, “then we wouldn’t have to lie about the baby being adopted, would we?”

  “Right,” said Homer Wells. What is all this worrying about lying? he wondered, holding Candy tightly as she softly cried. Was it true that Wilbur Larch had no memory of Homer’s mother? Was it true that Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna had no memory of his mother, either? Maybe it was true, but Homer Wells would never have blamed them if they had lied; they would have lied only to protect him. And if they’d remembered his mother, and his mother was a monster, wasn’t it better that they’d lied? To orphans, not every truth is wanted.

  And if Homer had discovered that Wally had died in terrible pain or with prolonged suffering—if Wally had been tortured, or had burned to death, or had been eaten by an animal—Homer certainly would have lied about that. If Homer Wells had been an amateur historian, he would have been as much of a revisionist as Wilbur Larch—he would have tried to make everything come out all right in the end. Homer Wells, who always said to Wilbur Larch that he (Larch) was the doctor, was more of a doctor than he knew.

  The first night of cider making he shared the work of the press and grinder with Meany Hyde and Everett Taft; Big Dot and her kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, were the bottlers. Debra was sullen at the prospect of messy work; she complained about the slopping and the spilling, and her irritation was further enhanced by the presence of Homer Wells, to whom she had not been speaking—Debra’s understanding that Candy and Homer had become partners in a certain grief was markedly colored by her suspicion that Candy and Homer had become partners in a certain pleasure, too. At least Debra had not reacted generously to Homer’s suggestion that they just be friends. Homer was puzzled by Debra’s hostility, and assumed that his years in the orphanage had deprived him of some perfectly sensible explanation for her behavior. It seemed to Homer that Debra had always denied him access to anything more than her friendship. Why was she now incensed that he asked no more of her than that?

  Meany Hyde announced to Homer and Everett Taft that this would be his first and last night press of the harvest because he wanted to stay home with Florence—“Now that her time is approachin’,” Meany said.

  When Mr. Rose pressed cider, there was a very different feeling in the fermented air. For one thing, everything went more quickly; the pressing was a kind of contest. For another, there was a tension that Mr. Rose’s authority created—and the knowledge of those tired men asleep, or trying to sleep, in the next room, lent to the working of the grinder and the press a sense of hurry (and of perfection) that one feels only on the edge of exhaustion.

  Debra Pettigrew’s future heaviness grew more and more apparent the wetter she got; there was a matching slope in the sisters’ shoulders, and even a slackness in the backs of Debra’s arms that would one day yield the massive jiggles that shivered through Big Dot. In sisterly imitation, they wiped the sweat from their eyes with their biceps—not wanting to touch their faces with their cider-
sweet and sticky hands.

  After midnight, Olive brought them cold beer and hot coffee. When she had gone, Meany Hyde said, “That Missus Worthington is a thoughtful woman—here she is not only bringin’ us somethin’ but givin’ us a choice.”

  “And her with Wally gone,” said Everett Taft. “It’s a wonder she even thought of us.”

  Whatever is brought to me, whatever is coming, Homer thought, I will not move out of its way. Life was finally about to happen to him—the journey he proposed making, back to St. Cloud’s, was actually going to give him his freedom from St. Cloud’s. He would have a baby (if not a wife, too); he would need a job.

  Of course I’ll take the baby trees, and plant them, he was thinking—as if apple trees would satisfy St. Cloud’s, as if his planting them would satisfy what Wilbur Larch wanted from him.

  By the end of the harvest, the light grew grayer and the orchards were darker in the daytime, although more light passed through the empty trees. The picking crew’s inexperience was visible in the shriveled apples still clinging to the hard-to-reach limbs. The ground was already frozen in St. Cloud’s. Homer would have to make a special trip for the baby trees. He would plant them in the spring; it would be a spring baby.

  Homer and Candy worked only the night shifts at Cape Kenneth Hospital now. The days when Ray was building the torpedoes were the days Homer could spend with Candy, in her room above the lobster pound.

  There was a freedom about their lovemaking, now that Candy was already pregnant. Although she could not tell him—not yet—Candy loved making love to Homer Wells; she enjoyed herself much more than she had been able to with Wally. But she could not bring herself to say aloud that anything was better than with Wally; although making love was better with Homer, she doubted that this was Wally’s fault. She and Wally had never had the time to feel so free.

  “The girl and I are coming,” Homer wrote to Dr. Larch. “She’s going to have my baby—neither an abortion nor an orphan.”